Furious Love (25 page)

Elizabeth on location in Big Sur, California, for
The Sandpiper.
The Vincente Minnelli–directed film capitalized on their adulterous love affair. [© Photos 12/Alamy]

The most photographed couple in the world. On location for
The Sandpiper,
1964. [MGM/courtesy of Neal Peters Collection]

Liza, Christopher, and Michael pretending to escape over a Berlin Wall built on location in Dublin, where Richard was filming
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.
In real life, the Burtons tried to protect their children from the public glare. [© Henry Grossman]

Richard, Elizabeth, and first-time film director Mike Nichols clowning on the set of
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
in 1966. It was their finest and most challenging film, earning Elizabeth her second Academy Award and Richard his sixth nomination. [© Bettmann/Corbis]

As George and Martha, being directed by Mike Nichols. By now, the Burtons' off-screen battles were reflected in their film roles. [The Everett Collection]

On January 1, 1966, the Burtons were the first guests on
The Sammy Davis, Jr., Show
. [Photofest]

In Gstaad in 1966, near Elizabeth's Chalet Ariel—a tax haven that became a refuge, as did Richard's home in Celigny, Switzerland. A bearded Richard gets ready for his next role, Petruchio in
The Taming of the Shrew.
[Corbis]

The Burtons watching Cassius Clay knock out Henry Cooper in London in
1966. Elizabeth shared Richard's love of sports, especially rugby and boxing. Sugar Ray Robinson's boxing gloves hang in her office to this day. [Mirrorpix]

Their off-screen fights were lustily parodied in Franco Zeffirelli's rollicking adaptation of Shakespeare's
The Taming of the Shrew.
[Pictorial Press Ltd./Alamy]

When the reviews came out for
The Taming of the Shrew
, there was some caviling about Zeffirelli's commedia dell'arte treatment of the Bard and the cutting and transposing of Shakespeare's dialogue. But most reviewers noticed how well-suited the material was for the famous couple, a theme picked by the movie's trailer, which announced, “Elizabeth Taylor. Richard Burton. Need we say more?…The world's most celebrated movie couple in the movie they were made for.” A certain grudging respect was given to Elizabeth for acquitting herself well as Katharina. Hollis Alpert, who would publish a biography of Burton in 1986, wrote in
Time
magazine, “In one of her better performances, Taylor makes Kate seem the ideal bawd of Avon—a creature of beauty with a voice shrieking howls and imprecations.” Burton, he writes, “catches the cadences of iambic pentameter with inborn ease…An inspired chase across the rooftops and into piles of fleece establishe[s] him as a kind of King Leer, the supreme embodiment of a raffish comic hero.”

Indeed, that “leer” was genuine. There's a delicious sexiness to their rooftop chase, in which they begin in her parlor, continue through a wine cellar, leap over the roof tiles, fall through a trap door, and collapse into a bed of fleece, where Elizabeth all but bursts out of her low-cut bodice. She then bonks Richard on the head with a board—her own embellishment on the script—before he plants “his first whiskery kiss” on her reluctant lips. The scene in which Petruchio and Kate start to undress on their wedding night is also provocative, Kate shyly disrobing and getting into bed, only to fend off Petruchio's oafish approach by striking him with a copper bed-warmer. But in real life, Elizabeth recalled the five-month shoot as “one long honeymoon.”

The final scene of reconciliation, in which Petruchio presents his tamed wife to Paduan society, was directed by Richard Burton, because Zeffirelli had left to stage a production at New York's new Metropolitan Opera. Under Richard's direction, Elizabeth gives Kate's speech glorifying female subservience:

That sentiment does not go down well with modern women, but Elizabeth truly believed those words. Zeffirelli noted that most actresses deliver that speech with a wink at the audience, but Elizabeth “played it straight.” Though her actions had arguably helped usher in the sexual revolution, though she would always be more famous, more powerful, and richer than her husbands, she still wanted the kind of marriage that Kate comes to prize at the conclusion of
The Taming of the Shrew.

After the speech was given and the cameras stopped rolling, Elizabeth looked around the crowded banquet set, then at Richard, who was “deeply moved” by her delivery of Shakespeare's speech, telling her, “All right, my girl, I wish you'd put that into practice.”

Elizabeth responded, “I can't say it in words like that, but my heart is there.”

In that transformative scene, Kate/Elizabeth embellishes the lines with loving glances at a knot of children playing with a dog under the banquet table, followed by a meaningful look at Petruchio, as if to say, it's the presence of children that make a true marriage. As if to say, we will bring children into the world. Following the speech, Kate and Petruchio finally indulge in a long, deep kiss, then Petruchio's line, “Come, Kate, we'll to bed”—as if the entire film were foreplay to that moment.

In reality, however, Elizabeth and Richard had entered into their marriage knowing that Elizabeth would be unable to conceive a fourth time. Her deeply held desire to have a child with Richard
would remain unfulfilled, which is one reason why they had been so intent on adopting and raising Maria Burton. But they wanted to give Maria another sibling, and they would later try again for another adoption. A confidante of Elizabeth's observed, “If she could have, Elizabeth would have been like Josephine Baker with her ‘rainbow tribe.'” (The celebrated cabaret performer adopted twelve multi-ethnic orphans.) The loving glance from frolicking children to Richard's face was a true reflection of her emotional state, and hopes for the future, at the time.