Furious Love (36 page)

At least Richard was back acting with the great pros of his past—Anthony Quayle appearing as Cardinal Wolsey and Michael Hordern as Anne Boleyn's father (whom he described as “no rubbish and cunning as snakes”). He still had enough respect for acting to be knocked out by their tricks and cunning, the pieces of business that Quayle, with his measured precision, and Hordern, in his sly way, brought to their roles. “They have every shrug, nod, beck, sideways glance and shifting of eyes ever invented,” Burton observed. All Michael Hordern
had to say was “Yes, Your Grace,” and those three words uttered in Hordern's unmistakable way became “slightly longer than Hamlet,” Burton thought. But he was bored with his own performance. One day during filming he'd asked, “What's the shot?” and was told it was just going to be a close-up. So he kept his street clothes on—his chinos and loafers—and just showed up with the top half of his costume. To the surprise of the director, cameraman, and the rest of the crew, he played Henry VIII in the clothes he had just worn in the pub across from Shepperton Studios earlier that day.

Unfortunately for Elizabeth, Geneviève Bujold—who is miraculous in the role—summoned up the green-eyed monster, the jealousy that occasionally took both Burtons by surprise. This was the first film since
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
in which Burton played opposite a love interest other than Elizabeth—and there had been reason to be wary of Claire Bloom. When Richard playfully christened Geneviève with the nickname “Gin,” something that, back in his salad days, he did only with actresses he had bedded, Elizabeth suspected the worst. The British press got into the act, speculating that Burton and Bujold were indeed having an affair.

Throughout the shoot, the Burtons were having a rough time of it. About to make love one afternoon, Elizabeth began bleeding profusely, from a recurrence of the unglamorous affliction of hemorrhoids. Richard tried reassuring her, but their afternoon idyll was ruined, and it made the presence of the petite young “Anne” more of a thorn in their side than she might otherwise have been. Elizabeth was already angry that Richard had compared Bujold to Vivien Leigh, an actress that Elizabeth had often been compared to, and whom she had replaced in
Elephant Walk
over a decade earlier because of their physical resemblance. Was she going to be replaced by a younger version of herself, as so many women approaching middle age had been, by straying husbands?

Burton seemed oblivious to Elizabeth's fears. He spent his long drives back to London trying to make the role interesting to himself.
He decided to play Henry as “a demonic charmer…capable of stupendous outbursts of rage all co–mixed up with a brilliant cynical intelligence.” He does so—compellingly—but there's a lot of Richard in the part as well, at least the Richard who bedded every woman he could, before meeting Elizabeth. “When I've wanted them, I've had them. When I've had them, I've been cured of them,” Henry barks to a courtier in the film. And later, while listening to one of his poems set to music, Henry declares, “true verse and music grow from suffering,” a variation of an idea Burton had once expressed to Ernie Lehman on the set of
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
As art continues to imitate life, we watch the great king, the philanderer, wounded and bested—at least temporarily—by a woman he cannot help but love. Through it all, Henry suffers magnificently, because he knows he has transgressed. Though at times monstrous, he manages to inspire our pity.

Although Bujold more than holds her own against the bullying Henry, Richard can't stop thinking of “how marvelous E. would be and how much better.” Richard suffered from insomnia while filming
Anne of the Thousand Days.
Concerns about Elizabeth's health kept him up late, and when he did finally sleep, he had nightmares about her, about the blood, about her well-being. Though it deeply troubled him, according to many around the Burtons, Elizabeth's health crises usually brought out the best in Richard. That's when they were often closest—when their fights cooled, when the world went away, when he could nurse her back to health in the intimate privacy of her bedroom.

For his part, Burton nursed a kind of generalized jealousy of Elizabeth, as if their mutual jealousy was a sign of their love for each other. “I am very jealous of E.,” Burton confessed in his diary. “I'm even jealous of her affection for Dick Hanley, a sixty-year-old homosexual, and anybody she has lunch with. Girls, dogs—I'm even jealous of her kitten because her adoration of it is so paramount. They'll all die before me, though, so I'll win in the end.”

With Elizabeth left out of
Anne of the Thousand Days
, both Burtons were unhappy about the state of their careers. Elizabeth's last two films had been torture to complete, given her hysterectomy and ongoing back pain. They had both been beaten up by negative—even scornful—reviews. Calling in their lawyer, Aaron Frosch, they discussed whether they could afford to retire from the movies. By 1969, Frosch was struggling with the onset of multiple sclerosis, but nonetheless he flew to their side to advise them. He told Richard that he had nearly $5 million, and Elizabeth a little less than that, in ready cash, not including their homes in Mexico and Switzerland and the paintings and jewelry and the
Kalizma
, which came to another $4 million. If they stopped acting and kept their assets invested, Frosch told them they would have at least a half a million dollars a year, in interest, to live on. But they would have to “make do” with half that amount, after continuing to pay the salaries of Dick Hanley, Bob Wilson, Richard's secretary Jim Benton, plus supporting “all the godsons, goddaughters, nephews, nieces,” as well as Sara Taylor, and gifts to Elizabeth's brother, Howard. But, Frosch reassured them, because they paid next to no taxes due to their peripatetic lives, they actually had a greater annual gross income than their friends the Rothschilds.

Again, Burton warmed to the idea of retiring, as he often expressed boredom with acting. “There is no question,” he writes in his notebook, “but that I must stop acting…It is all so perfectly boring. Anybody can play Henry the 8th.” He felt that he and Elizabeth were at the zenith of their careers, and that before the critics “start tearing us apart again” (which had already begun), perhaps they should take their final bows. “If E. and I have the strength of mind to give up being famous,” he later wrote, “we can at least live in more than lavish comfort. I might even be able to buy her the odd jewel or two.”

Elizabeth, after forty-two films and the insult of being passed over for
Anne of the Thousand Days
, seemed eager to “pack it in.” Perhaps she feared a future in which Richard continued to work while she
became increasingly marginalized—the wife of the internationally sought-after actor. So they imagined a different kind of life together, dividing their time among their homes in Gstaad and Puerto Vallarta, and the
Kalizma
. Burton mused in his diary, “We'll nip over to Paris occasionally and give a party for the Rothschilds. We'll take the Trans-Siberian Express across Russia from Moscow to Vladivostok. We'll go to the hill stations in Kashmir. We'll muck around the Greek islands…. We'll revisit Dahomey again,” where they could walk down the dusty lanes unrecognized and unmolested, “and look at the washing on the line at the [presidential] palace.” Now he warmed to the idea of a life of continuous travel, a future in which he would finally become the full-time writer he wanted to be:

After all, what would they lose by retiring from movie-making altogether, giving up “Dick and Liz” for “Richard and Elizabeth”? The point was brought home by Liza Todd, who was curious, perhaps for the first time, about her parents' profession. She had recently watched
Becket
and now asked them about their other movies. Were they all as good? Elizabeth was never a movie star to her children. They never begrudged their parents the status of the most famous couple in the world and the fact that they made movies for a living. They forgave them for it. But Liza's question—“were they all as good?”—made the grown-ups think about their long list of films, made together and apart.

Richard told his stepdaughter that most of their movies were “rubbish and not even worth seeing,” and that Liza was better off reading a book. But Elizabeth said some of them she was damned proud of.
And so it was Elizabeth's idea for her and Richard to sit down, like children taking a test, and write down what they thought their best work in the movies had been. It was overdue, this taking stock, and with Aaron Frosch having just been there to tell them how they might live without working constantly, it made them take a deep breath and evaluate what they'd been doing these last six years of nearly constant work, on top of the decades of films made before they'd even set eyes on each other.

When finished, Elizabeth handed her paper to Professor Burton: the list began with
National Velvet
, followed by
A Place in the Sun
,
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
,
BUtterfield 8
(which she had hated while filming and for a long time after),
Suddenly, Last Summer
,
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
,
Boom!
,
Secret Ceremony
,
The Taming of the Shrew
, and
Doctor Faustus.
Burton's list led with
Becket
, followed by
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
,
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
,
The Taming of the Shrew
,
Boom!
,
The Night of the Iguana
,
Doctor Faustus
, and the yet-to-be-released
Staircase.

It dawned on them how their best films were made outside the studios to which they had belonged—MGM for Elizabeth, and 20th Century-Fox and Warner Bros. for Richard. He typed up their lists and pasted them into his diary, commenting, “not a bad record for two people who happen to be in love, and compete with each other…I think we should revert to being splendid amateurs.”

The list they made opened their eyes to something—the fun and daring of it all had gone out of the work. Somehow it had been better when they were out to prove themselves, when they wanted to show the world that their artistry would sanctify the scandal of their love affair. Elizabeth and Richard were the artists, and “Liz and Dick” the movie stars, and their best films were made when Elizabeth and Richard made them. The sad truth was that they would not be given too many more chances to act together onscreen. After her brief appearance as an extra in
Anne of the Thousand Days
, Elizabeth would not work again for two years.

Their only true pleasure, it seemed, was on the
Kalizma
, after filming was done for the day. Burton described the river “imitating a blue-gray ghost” in the evenings, with all the houses along the Thames looking as if they were asleep. Watching over Elizabeth, he wrote, “No woman sleeps with such childish beauty as my adorable difficult fractious intolerant wife.”

But their tempers continued to flare up out of this tranquil setting—Elizabeth's jealousy of Bujold, Burton's own unfounded jealousies and his unhappiness with himself, their drinking and the furies unleashed when the cork came out of the bottle. Columnist Liz Smith, who had visited the Burtons in Paris the previous year, knew that their fights had always been a big part of their relationship. “They fought right from the beginning,” Smith recalled. “I think Elizabeth associated it with what love and marriage were all about. Look, if you're a movie star, there's an element of exhibitionism, and I think that was there in her. And her man's attentions—whether it was giving her presents or abuse—was proof of her being. Come in and see how much we're connected—we're fighting—look at this.”

After a week of their “running rows,” after he insulted Elizabeth and then mumbled a few apologies and started in on her again, it hit him like a bolt of lightning: “I am so much my father's son that I give myself occasional creeps.” He remembered how his father had “the same gift for damaging with the tongue…the same tipping over into ‘violence'” the same fidelity to his mother that Richard had to Elizabeth, the same “smattering of scholarship,” the same tendency to attack the innocent when ridden by guilt. He wrote in his journal that if he was so much like his father while sober, he would simply return to the bottle until it killed him. But then, it was when he was drunk that he was most like Dic Jenkins, père. As Liz Smith observed, “the drinking fed the jealousy, the jealousy fed the drinking. I learned early on that if I was on a movie set with them, I'd better get what I wanted in the morning because after lunch, he, in particular, could just be so mean.”

With
Anne of the Thousand Days
nearly completed, Richard and Elizabeth took time off to visit Ifor, Richard clinging to the idea that his brother was improving, regaining some mobility in his limbs. They checked into The Bell Inn, near Aston Clinton, where Ifor was being looked after. Elizabeth bought dozens of the most expensive bedsheets and towels for Ifor's room, but when they were delivered, Richard suddenly became enraged. Elizabeth leaped at Richard and started striking his head with her ringed fingers. He threw her off, stomped out of the hotel, and went for a long walk through some of the neighboring farms. “If any man had done that I would have killed him…” he wrote later. “I had sufficient sense to stop myself or I most surely would have put her in hospital for a long long time or even into the synagogue cemetery for an even longer time.” The tirade was probably brought on by his own sense of guilt at the sight of Ifor in a wheelchair, unable to move. After all, he had brought Ifor into
his
world, had brought him to Céligny. Just as Henry VIII described Queen Katharine's stillborn sons as God's punishment, was this Richard's punishment for divorcing Sybil and seizing for himself “the most beautiful woman in the world”?