Furious Love (30 page)

Besides that, the sensual delights of her time with Burton were much more enjoyable than mere moviemaking. “Creating a life with him,” she later wrote, “was far more interesting than interpreting somebody else's life on the screen, but then I've always lived my life with too much relish to be a mere interpreter of dreams.”

Despite being enamored of the Burtons, Losey later complained that it was a struggle working with Elizabeth, who was “belligerent” and didn't understand what he was after. “My working relationship with Elizabeth had begun with absolute hell.” Taylor didn't like her clothes, couldn't sleep, shooting was delayed by three days, Losey had to shoot her first scene thirteen times, unusual for “Quicktake.” She “was belligerent with me from the start…she didn't know what I was doing and it was a struggle.”

But Noël Coward loved working with Elizabeth in their scenes together. When Coward, then sixty-eight and an inveterate traveler, first arrived in Sardinia, Burton thought he looked “very old and slightly sloshed and proceeded to get more sloshed.” With his heavy-lidded eyes, Coward was fond of calling himself “the oldest Chinese character actor in the world.” Burton wrote, “He embraced us both and lavished compliments on E. about her beauty and her brilliance as an actress. Occasionally he threw a bone to me.” The next day, he wrote, “E. and N. Coward are madly in love with each other, particularly
he with her. He thinks her most beautiful, which she is, and a magnificent actress, which she also is.” Burton had known Coward since 1951; like the Burtons, Coward owned a home in Switzerland, and, in fact, the two men had once invested money in the film of Harold Pinter's
The Caretaker.
As the oldest and most experienced member of the cast and crew of
Boom!
, Coward admired Elizabeth's professionalism, the way she “never lost his eye” in their scenes together, and just how considerate she was, for Coward was not in the best of health at the time. In fact, he would have only five more years to live. He saw how her cheerfulness lifted the spirits of the cast and crew, especially during the long night shoots. Elizabeth would stay up half the night with Coward for deep-dish gossip sessions.

While on location, Coward asked the Burtons to think about starring in his signature play, the bittersweet comedy
Private Lives
, as the once-married couple now wedded to other partners, who meet on their honeymoons and discover they are still in love with each other. Coward said cryptically that they should play those roles “before it's too late,” but the Burtons were not ready for those roles, often taken by stars at the end of their careers, as a sentimental journey or a last comeback. (He astonished Burton, the aspiring writer, by mentioning that he dashed off
Blithe Spirit
in five days,
Hay Fever
in six, but
Private Lives
took an entire week.)

Burton found it hard to clamber on the steep crags surrounding the villa, overlooking a deep, two-hundred-foot plunge into the Mediterranean below. “I'm supposed to leap up there on that parapet with the wind tugging at my kimono and walk along it,” he told Losey and the film crew. “I can't. It's no good. What's the name of the phobia I suffer from? Acrophobia? I'll look it up in my little book later on.” After such harrowing scenes, Richard would calm his shaky nerves with whiskey and a game of dominoes.

When their scenes were over, the Burtons would meet for drinks at the bar in Capo Cacchio. But on one occasion, Richard failed to show up. As in Dahomey, kidnappings were frequent in Sardinia at
the time, so everyone was especially concerned. Alarmed, Elizabeth contacted the police and had all the hospitals searched. Hours later, he was found in a small, seedy bar described by the chief of police as “a den of thieves,” where Burton had gotten up on a table to declaim Shakespeare. He'd promised a round of drinks to anyone present who could name the speech he recited from
Titus Andronicus.
His valet, Bob Wilson, was with him, and he'd pleaded with Burton to get down off the table. The police chief and Wilson managed to return Richard to the hotel and to Elizabeth.

It wasn't just the press and the public who were obsessed with the Burtons—the Burtons were obsessed with the Burtons. Despite their continued public squabbling—sometimes playful, sometimes explosive—they were still obviously in love and in lust with each other. Burton was driven wild by Taylor that summer. She was “looking infinitely sexy” in white mesh leotards and “the shortest miniskirt I've ever seen,” Richard wrote in his diary. “It barely, and when she moved it didn't, covered her crotch.”

He noticed that she was also driving the local boys wild, the young men loitering on the beach, who, Richard thought, appeared to be stoned. When she and Richard left the beach, the young men shouted “sundry offers of fornication” at her, hungry as the ragamuffin boys circling her in
Suddenly, Last Summer.

Filming completed, Richard felt that
Boom!
would prove a financial success, and he looked forward to the release of
The Comedians
, which he thought would bring them critical esteem, given the subject matter and the pedigree of the film.

That, however, was not to be.

Filming
Boom!
in Sardinia in the summer of 1967 had brought many pleasures. One of them was the Burtons' decision to buy the
Odysseia
and turn it into their floating home, now that they were too famous to live on land.

Richard and Elizabeth rechristened the 130-foot, sixty-year-old yacht
Kalizma
, an amalgam of Kate's, Liza's, and Maria's names. Eliz
abeth had fallen in love with it. It boasted seven bedrooms and three bathrooms, with the capacity to sleep fourteen passengers. A crew of eight—including a maid and a waiter—was required to keep it afloat, and Burton estimated it was going to take close to $30,000 a year to run it. “Not too bad,” he wrote in his diary, “when one considers our last house (rented) costs ten thousand a month plus approx. one thousand dollars a week for food and staff, etc.! Then, if we can use it as much as possible instead of hotels, we can actually save money.” The provenance of the yacht appealed to Burton's dramatic sense: the previous owner loved to head out into the stormiest seas where he would proceed to play Bach on the organ he'd had installed. Nonetheless, Burton had the instrument removed and replaced Bach with a bar.

They bought the boat for $192,000 that summer and spent another $200,000 to refurbish it. Elizabeth hired a designer named Arthur Barbosa to refit the interior with Chippendale mirrors, Louis XIV chairs, English tapestries, Regency sofas, transforming it into what one observer described as an Edwardian palace, albeit one with a movie screen. (Barbosa had decorated Rex Harrison's Portofino home, and the Burtons had admired the décor.) They brought in an enormous, hand-carved bed for the master suite, painted the walls “canary, and not mustard,” and had bookshelves built in for Burton's ever-expanding, floating library. He loved the fact that he could now have his beloved books with him when he traveled. The yacht was fitted with radar equipment, and Graham Jenkins thought that the sound system they had installed cost more than his house. Elizabeth would end up spending nearly $1,000 every six months to replace the Super Peerless Wilton carpeting, spoiled by her menagerie of untrained cats and dogs, who relieved themselves all over the rugs.

This is how they lived: on the world stage. By 1967, the private marriage of Richard and Elizabeth was increasingly held hostage to the public marriage of “Liz and Dick.” Theirs was the first reality show, a marriage with an audience, and, to escape that, they spent months aboard the
Kalizma
as the world's richest vagabonds, where
they would cruise the fashionable Mediterranean ports, making their way to the Riviera and then to Paris. The mad premiere of
Doctor Faustus
in Paris had reminded them of how popular they were in the City of Lights, how they were practically held captive by French aristocrats. The Rothschilds, Guy and Marie-Hélène, were the Burtons' great friends and hosts in Paris. Their favorite house in all their travels was Ferrières, the Rothschilds' country estate outside Paris. Their vagabond life in the summer and early autumn of 1967 became a blur of barons and baronesses: “We are lunching with somebody called Alex or Alexis who is Baron de Redee. There must have been a hundred people for the lunch. I had a Madame Debreu, American, on my right, and Marie-Hélène Rothschild on my left, and a Count de something or other, and a Monsieur de X and astonishingly a lady with a distinct London-Provincial accent…. Two devastating wars & crippling taxes, and the moneyed Aristocracy still live like Aristos,” Burton confided in his diary. Despite his wealth, Richard was still very much the working-class hero among the “Aristos,” the only one who drained his glass of wine before leaving the table, the man who would go on to play Leon Trotsky for Joseph Losey.

Elizabeth loved him for that. She was never impressed by titles. She was the biggest and most famous movie star in the world, and she and Richard were Hollywood royalty. It was the barons and dukes, the lords and ladies who wanted to meet
them
, to bask, if only for an evening, in the blinding light of the Burtons' celebrity.

At the Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe, walking from the paddock to the loge with the Rothschilds, Richard watched as thousands of people applauded Elizabeth on her way to her seat to watch the race. “Not bad for an old woman of thirty-six,” Richard wrote admiringly. “I am always pleased and surprised by that sort of thing. We have been expecting it to stop for years but it hasn't.” Afterward, a party at the French equivalent of the Kentucky Derby, with the Rothschilds and “La Callas”—Maria Callas, the tempestuous soprano from Queens, New York, who had conquered the Metropolitan Opera House and
La Scala and the world with her brilliance and personality. “And possibly Ari Onassis. Aren't we posh.”

The Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis was a kind of bête noir for Richard. He prided himself on spending more money on Elizabeth than Onassis spent on Callas, his inamorata for many years, pulling up alongside the Onassis yacht with the
Kalizma
and, later, outbidding him on important jewels. The Burtons were in Paris when headlines began appearing throughout the world that Jacqueline Kennedy would marry Onassis. At sixty-nine, he was twice the age of the former first lady, who had lost her husband to an assassin's bullet just five years earlier. Elizabeth and Richard consoled Maria Callas, who had been unceremoniously thrown over for the grieving American widow.

Elizabeth and Richard had been through that before—the abandonment of so-called friends, the harsh words and long knives. Richard embraced the Divine Callas, as her legions of devoted opera lovers called her, and whispered in her ear that Ari was a son of a bitch. Richard later told Elizabeth that it wasn't out of some moral indignation over Ari's desertion of his long-time mistress, but because of the way she learned about his engagement to Jacqueline Kennedy—through the newspapers. What was even more unforgivable to the generous Burtons was that, despite all of his millions, Onassis had left Callas, then at the end of her career, without a cent. After ten years together, he had left her completely broke.

Callas was grateful to them for their moral support. The Burtons, however, could be harsh in private, even about the people they publicly supported and whose work they admired. When Callas told Richard over dinner one night “how beautiful his eyes were” and that they revealed a good soul, Elizabeth's ears perked up. She had unerring antennae for women playing up to her husband (“eyes in the back of her bum,” Richard liked to say, and “ears on stalks”). And when Callas shyly mentioned to Richard that she'd read in the newspapers that he and Elizabeth were planning to make a film version of
Mac
beth
, she asked Richard if she might play Lady Macbeth. “I suppose she thought you were going to play Macduff,” he told Elizabeth later. They would poke gentle fun at her afterward. “A silly woman, but one can still feel sorry for her,” Burton wrote in his diary.

When Elizabeth discovered that Onassis had presented Mrs. Kennedy with “half a million pounds worth of rubies surrounded by diamonds,” keeping up with the Onassises became a mild obsession. “Now the battle of the Rubies is on,” Richard noted, “I wonder who'll win. It will be a long war, and the idea has already been implanted that I shouldn't let myself be outdone by a bloody Greek. I can be just as vulgar as he can…. Well, now to get the money.”

Which meant, of course, more movies, which meant more travel, which meant more of their wandering, extravagant life—Dior nightgowns, Savile Row suits, Lafite Rothschild for lunch. It was no different from how many of their friends, such as Noël Coward, liked to live, but the public remained obsessed with how the Burtons were spending their money and their time. It even entered the language in the mid-to late 1960s: “Spending money like the Burtons.” They continued to buy extravagant gifts for each other: matching mink coats, a Picasso for him, a Monet for her. (But old habits die hard, and Richard the miner's son would sometimes wander around their chalet at Gstaad, turning off the lights to cut down on the electric bill. Elizabeth teased him about ordering the cheapest wine while admiring the $65,000 sapphire brooch glittering on her dress, his gift to her.) They were the most generous of couples, spending tens of thousands of dollars on people who were virtually strangers but whose personal tales of woe moved them. But to keep this extravagance going, Richard felt he had to keep working, no matter what was being offered. His life with Elizabeth required it.

Such conspicuous consumption was beginning to be suspect in the nascent age of the commune, the blue jeans, the Johnson Administration's War on Poverty. It became harder not to care about where the money was going. As generous as they were, the Burtons were in
danger of being seen as out of touch in their spending habits, as they would soon be seen in their choice of film roles. A new generation was gaining on them. While their poodles and Pekingese roamed the luxurious cabins of their yacht, the world was changing. As one of the Burtons' traveling companions would later characterize this period in their life, “
Cleopatra
seemed like ancient history.” The Burtons were unaware of the real price they were paying to play Dick and Liz.