Furious Love (18 page)

Or perhaps Burton identified with George's lacerating secret, his source of shame, cruelly betrayed by Martha when she reveals that as a boy George had accidentally shot his mother and later killed his father in an automobile accident. Again, Burton is sublime in a role full of self-contempt, and in his two revelatory monologues, or “arias,” in which he reveals his past, Burton gives perhaps the most affecting performance of his long, extraordinary career. We see a man gripped by both the best and the worst memories of his youth—a day of innocent camaraderie at a roadhouse, when he childishly mispronounces “bergin and soda,” to the delight of his friends, and the tragic day, not long after, when, with his driver's permit in his pocket, he accidentally kills his father by swerving to avoid a porcupine on the road. This is a shattering revelation, and Burton is mesmerizing in his delivery of those sacred memories. If you see Burton's repudiation of his father as a kind of metaphorical murder, then Burton
is
George, in a performance that would surely win him his long-delayed recognition from The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Though Elizabeth still managed to look sexy under her troweled-on makeup, extra pounds, and wig (Nichols had wanted to put putty under her eyes to look like bags, but she refused), she completely nailed the role of Martha. She's terrifying in her diatribes against her husband; screamingly funny in her inventive insults (“I am the Earth
Mother and all men are flops!”); touching when she and George cuddle and he rebuffs her attempt to make love to him; and heartbreaking when she's finally stripped of her illusions and left facing her own loneliness and regret. She has one declaration in which her own personality seems to shine through Albee's words: “I'm loud,” she yells at George at the height of their battle, in the parking lot of a roadhouse. “And I'm vulgar. And I wear the pants in the family because somebody has to. But I am not a monster.”

In that scene, the parking lot's harsh neon light shines pitilessly on the couple, like a prison searchlight examining every hidden corner of their marriage, sparing no one.

 

Cast and crew arrived in late August 1965 at Smith College in Northampton (Sylvia Plath's alma mater, incidentally). The college president, Thomas C. Mendenhall, was at first reluctant to turn his campus over to the movie crew, given the unflattering picture of academic life in Albee's play (“Musical beds is the faculty sport here”), but Warner Bros.'s offer of $150,000 went a long way to overcome his reluctance. Smith College, however, preferred not to be mentioned in the film's final credits.

The studio hired seventy security guards, instead of the usual five, to protect the Burtons and maintain privacy during filming, but it didn't help. Despite a torrential rainstorm, four hundred people clamoring for autographs flocked to the lakeside house rented for the Burtons, turning the quiet, woodsy town into Via Veneto. It just wouldn't do—there was no way they could secure their temporary quarters. Elizabeth trotted around to the Victorian homes rented for Lehman and Nichols, and finally decided that Nichols's splendid quarters would suit them perfectly. Nichols, always the gentleman, packed up, and the Burtons moved in for the four-week duration of the shoot.

Filming was done entirely at night, in keeping with the real-time experience of the movie, which begins at night and ends at sunrise.
Even so, villagers stood around the movie set all night, held back by security guards, trying to get a glimpse of the famous couple. It was emotionally draining—working in the dark, unleashing Albee's ravaging dialogue, dodging the inevitable press of fans lurking on the perimeter. One rainy night on a soggy Northampton lawn, as Burton rehearsed his lines, he reminisced about an early review he'd received for his professional debut stage role in
The Druid's Rest
, twenty-two years earlier, when he was just eighteen. “In a wretched part,” the critic for the
New Statesman
had written, “Richard Burton showed exceptional ability.” Perhaps it was his role as George that brought about another round of regret for the life not lived, as Burton complained, “I would have become a preacher, a poet, a playwright, a scholar, a lawyer or something,” had it not been for that favorable review. “I would never have become this strange thing, an actor, sitting in a remote corner of the universe called Northampton, drinking a vodka and tonic and waiting to learn the next line. He's got a bloody lot to answer for, that man.”

But the rainy, difficult shoot brought the Burtons even closer together. “I never had a better time in my life,” Elizabeth later said about making
Virginia Woolf.
On September 23, the crew returned to Los Angeles to finish five months of filming.

Back in California, Burton turned forty and was treated to a grand celebration on the Warner Bros. soundstage. The stage doors swung open, and there, wrapped in a huge red ribbon, was Elizabeth's gift to her husband: a white Oldsmobile Toronado. He was less happy with his director's playful gift of a puppy, yet another mewling mouth to feed among their growing menagerie. He retaliated by later giving Nichols four mice in a cage, representing George, Martha, Nick, and Honey.

After filming at Studio 8 was finally completed on December 13, 1965, Nichols presented Taylor with a pair of ruby-and-diamond earrings. Extravagant gifts were exchanged all around: the Burtons gave their director a pair of gold David Webb cuff links, and they gave
Lehman a 1633 first edition of Francis Bacon's
The Advancement of Learning.
Their greatest gift to their producer, however, was not charging him overages for the additional two weeks of shooting that had been required, which would have come to more than a million dollars. They knew, perhaps, that in making
Virginia Woolf
they had done something important, and, as Elizabeth had joked earlier, she would have done it for nothing.

Earlier in the shoot—practically from day one—Elizabeth had let it be known that she'd already picked out an $80,000 brooch that she expected from Jack Warner, and a piece of David Webb jewelry that she expected from Lehman. But both men had demurred. Warner had groused, “I'm paying her a million, one hundred thousand, plus 10 percent of the gross. Let her buy her own brooch.” And Lehman—who tended to be a bit fussy and timorous in any case—let it be known that his wife would divorce him if he bought Elizabeth Taylor an expensive piece of jewelry. “I did tell her that I had thought of buying her a baby wolf. She squealed with delight,” Lehman wrote in his diary. But Burton was put out with him.

“You son of a bitch. You'll say anything to get out of giving Elizabeth a present,” he told his nervous producer. What followed was a not-too-subtle bid on Elizabeth's part to remind Lehman what was expected of him. She showed up one day wearing a double rope of 9
¹
/2-millimeter pearls given to her by Martin Ransohoff, “because
The Sandpiper
was doing so well at the box office.” But Lehman would not budge.

Meanwhile, not only Elizabeth had gained extra weight. Sandy Dennis had put on about twenty pounds, and finally revealed that she was pregnant. Lehman worried about how that would affect filming, but when he finally saw the dailies on December 1, 1965, all his fears vanished.

Twelve days later, Lehman presented Elizabeth with a pendant. “She was absolutely thrilled with it,” Lehman recorded. But nineteen days later, Sandy Dennis suffered a miscarriage and lost her baby.

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
premiered on June 22, 1966, in Hollywood and opened in New York's Criterion theater with a performance benefiting two of the Burtons' charities: the Richard Burton Fund of the National Hemophilia Foundation and Philip Burton's American Musical and Dramatic Academy. At $7.5 million, it was the most expensive black-and-white film yet made in Hollywood, and its shocking, explicit language flew in the face of Hollywood's decency code. Jack Warner struggled to find a way to open the film despite the complaints of the National Catholic Office of Motion Pictures over language and sexual content. He had come up with the policy that “no one under the age of eighteen will be admitted to a viewing unless accompanied by his parent. Adults also must be advised that the theme of
Virginia Woolf
may prove to be confusing and its language offensive to the casual filmgoer.” Exhibitors had to sign a contract agreeing to the policy, and it's been noted that Warner's solution dismantled the old, censorial Production Code and paved the way for the more flexible rating system put into effect soon after.

The film opened to mostly glorious reviews, the Burtons nominated for British Film Academy Awards. Elizabeth also won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress. Though it was widely noted that Elizabeth gave the best performance of her career, it was Richard who garnered the most praise from reviewers.
Newsweek
hailed Burton's performance as “a marvel of disciplined compassion…With the self-contained authority of a great actor, he plays the part as if no one in the world had ever heard of Richard Burton.” The
Village Voice
described his work as possessing “heroic calm,” which other actors could use for a textbook. “Burton simply soars…with inscrutable ironies flickering across his beautifully ravaged face. Without Burton, the film would have been an intolerably cold experience.”

Elizabeth, Richard, George Segal, and Sandy Dennis were all nominated for Academy Awards. Elizabeth's performance scorches the paint off the walls and puts to rest any doubt about her as not just a “movie star” but a serious, first-class film actress. For once, Richard and Elizabeth seemed to have switched places in terms of their onscreen technique: Elizabeth is operatic as Martha, whereas Richard holds back, underplaying George. His reticence was a way of spotlighting Elizabeth and setting the pace for her. In short, it was his gift to his wife.

The public continued its mad adoration of the Burtons. Crowds met them whenever they traveled, sometimes turning dangerous in their infatuation. Elizabeth, as usual, could handle it, but Richard was finding it increasingly intolerable. He was, at heart, a deeply private man who preferred hours spent reading, and now writing in his diary, which occupied him more and more, and trying his hand at a short story and a novel. He traveled with a trunk filled with the complete plays of Shakespeare. He couldn't bear the sound of the telephone and rarely answered it. Elizabeth reminded him that it would be more troublesome if the crowds
stopped
coming, auguring the end of their popularity, but that didn't make the experience any less uncomfortable for Richard.

 

To fulfill (and continue to stoke) the public's interest, Elizabeth was paid $250,000 for a memoir titled
Elizabeth by Elizabeth
, written with the biographer Richard Meryman, published by Harper & Row
in November 1965, and generously excerpted in
Ladies' Home Journal
magazine the same month. Bert Stern's
LHJ
cover photograph of the Burtons, still in their first year of marriage and the third year of their grand passion, show a contentedly smiling Elizabeth in Cleopatra eye makeup with her arms protectively and possessively wrapped around Richard. Her stunning engagement ring and diamond-studded wedding band—Burton's gifts, of course—are also dazzlingly on display. Burton's rugged face is impassive, unreadable.

The book would be criticized as thin, but the
LHJ
excerpt is charming, breezy, self-deprecating, and immensely likeable. It showcases Elizabeth's willingness to stand up for her unconventional choices and admit to her many youthful mistakes and misjudgments. It's impossible not to like her, especially as it was written—or spoken, with Meryman committing her thoughts to print—during the heady months after her marriage to Burton and his triumphant conquering of Broadway in
Hamlet
. How could she not be sublimely happy? After all, she had won the publicity wars, had lived down public outrage at her marriage to Eddie Fisher, the negative reviews for
Cleopatra
, the condemnations from the Vatican and the House of Representatives, the invasive paparazzi, the “Liz and Dick” tabloid stories. With Burton at her side, she had prevailed. What she does reveal is her joie de vivre, her fighting spirit, and above all, her gratitude.

She is surprisingly candid about a number of things—how after the birth of her two children with Michael Wilding, her “career had become only a way of making money. It was very hard to take any great interest in a career of playing the perennial ingénue.” A few revelations were omitted from the published book—Eddie Fisher standing over her with a gun at the height of the
Cleopatra
madness, for example, and Burton telling her when they first began their affair that he was tired of acting onstage, that all the excitement of live performance had left him. Elizabeth omitted that because she felt it was an indictment of Sybil's failure to inspire him, and she wanted to spare Sybil. And she edited out of the published book what she'd
written about Debbie Reynolds going along with the MGM publicity machine, playing up her role as the wronged wife, when all three had known that the Fisher-Reynolds marriage was, for the most part, a studio-arranged mirage.

Elizabeth does air her misgivings about the gypsy life she and Burton were living. (“We've got to stop moving around so the kids can have one school, one set of friends, a pony and all their dogs and cats. I'm dying to unpack so I can hang all my paintings, so Richard can put out all his books—so I can have a house to take care of.”) She also admits to worrying that her movie-star status has been detrimental to her children (“No, we're terribly proud of you” is their answer, Elizabeth tells us).