Furious Love (38 page)

Besides giving them both enormous pleasure, the Taylor-Burton diamond would prove to be a wise investment. Even careful Aaron Frosch, and Richard's secretary Jim Benton, saw that the wealthy everywhere were protecting their fortunes in the late 1960s by investing in “durables.” Maddox, writing in 1977, noted, “The Cartier diamond alone has increased in value to $2.5 million since Burton bought it.” She also hypothesized that Elizabeth was attracted to large, fabled jewels because they “ensured that just as through her entire life, all eyes instantly and instinctively turned to her when she entered a room.” At this point in their careers, the jewels were a way to continue to shine brilliantly on the world stage.

Though the year had virtually begun and ended with the acquisition of two fabulous jewels, and it had brought Richard his beloved, completed Everyman Library, it had been a grim year in many respects. So, the December 10, 1969, release of
Anne of the Thousand Days
must have warmed Richard's heart, with critics praising his performance as Henry VIII as superior to Scofield's turn as Thomas More in that other costume drama,
A Man for All Seasons
, two years earlier. (That was high praise indeed, as Scofield had sitting on his mantelpiece the
Oscar that might have gone to Richard for
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
) Richard's Welsh mood lifted—for a moment, anyway—when he received a cable from Hollywood that he had just received his sixth Academy Award nomination, for appearing in that “mediocre piece of rubbish” during those sleepless summer months. No one was happier for him than Elizabeth, and no one wanted him to win more than she did. Unlike Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth had kept her head.

T
hank God it was over. In many ways, 1969 had been a dreadful year—the fighting, the drinking, the ill health, the trials of making
Anne of the Thousand Days.
After nine years of being together in the public eye, and six years of marriage, the Burtons desperately wanted to get off the merry-go-round. The stress fractures were beginning to widen, with Richard's increased drinking and Elizabeth's continued health woes. With the new year, Richard was thinking more and more about retirement—and what would be better than to retire after finally winning his Academy Award? Elizabeth had two Oscars, and though his career seemed to be marching along while hers was in limbo, he needed to catch up before calling it quits. He loved her, he needed her, but he still, at times, felt competitive with her.

They retreated to Puerto Vallarta, where Burton turned his thoughts to writing, mining his diaries to begin work on an autobiographical novel, writing two or three hours each day. He had been
offered a teaching position as a don at St. Peter's, Oxford—a long-cherished dream of Burton's. (“How funny it will be to be lecturing at Oxford without a degree!” he confided in his diary.) And there was talk that Queen Elizabeth—the
other
Queen Elizabeth—might bestow upon him the honor of a knighthood, as she had upon Sir John Gielgud and Sir Laurence Olivier. While he and Elizabeth continued their dance of drinking, fighting, and lavishly making up, Burton remained hopeful about a different kind of future, one in which he wrote and taught and led a much quieter life. He carried his portable typewriter with him throughout Casa Kimberly, from the lower of the two tiled, whitewashed villas, up to the top balcony, back to the main house, which looked out over the ocean and the mountains that soared above it. After many fits and starts, he managed to write twenty thousand words toward his novel.

Eager to keep his connection to Oxford, the Burtons hired John David Morley, a former student of Neville Coghill, as a tutor for Liza and Maria. Morley noticed how Elizabeth loved to play with her children as if she were one of them, and how the Burtons relished being together as a family in Puerto Vallarta, relieved that some of the madness around them as a couple had finally abated. If they now occasionally bored each other—Elizabeth with her detailed descriptions of her ailments and her surgeries, Richard often retelling his favorite stories of his Welsh youth again and again—they found renewed strength in being a family. “None of the children think of him as their stepfather,” Elizabeth told a visiting journalist, “he is their
father
. He's great with all of them.”

But by March, Elizabeth was concerned about Richard's continual drinking, and she tried to get him to see a doctor—something Richard had always refused to do. He simply hated doctors, and it was hard enough on him when Elizabeth underwent so many treatments at the hands of a profession he considered deadly. “If you're a bad actor,” he was fond of saying, “you don't get hired. But if you're a bad doctor, you can still practice medicine.” Nonetheless, Elizabeth insisted that he
check into Presbyterian Hospital in Hollywood for some tests, so they flew to Los Angeles. They were met at the hospital by one of Elizabeth's old friends and trusted doctors, Rex Kenemer, who, a lifetime ago, had been the one to inform her of Mike Todd's death.

Dr. Kenemer examined Richard and could tell just by touch that his liver was enlarged. He checked him into the hospital for further tests, which meant an overnight stay—agonizing for Richard, who couldn't bear the cold, clinical rooms and the monotony of waiting. Elizabeth took the room next to his.

The following day, Dr. Kenemer informed Burton that it was a matter of life or death: he had to stop drinking. He informed his patient that he would have cirrhosis of the liver within five years, and by then his liver would continue to deteriorate whether or not he continued to drink. He had to stop, now.

When Kenemer gave him the news, Burton replied, “Very well. I shall stop drinking. Totally.”

They returned to Puerto Vallarta, where Burton managed to stop drinking for two weeks, the longest time he'd been on the wagon since starring in
Camelot.
He found he could stay sober if he took Valium, though he wished he could “break the back of this old pitpony”—his drinking—without it. In the mornings, he'd pull on his khaki slacks, slip into a V-neck sweater and Italian loafers, and don a sombrero to keep the brutal sun off his face. Climbing to the top balcony of Casa Kimberly, he'd sit for two or three hours and pound away at his typewriter. Unfortunately for Elizabeth, his withdrawal from alcohol brought on his Welsh moods. “The sun is bright,” he wrote on March 28, 1970, “the people around me in the house are all engaging, but today at least I don't want to see any of them.” Without alcohol, Burton fell into a funk, losing his usual conviviality, his love of storytelling. Sober, he could be cynical and silent, but at least, he reflected, he spared Elizabeth the endless retelling of his stories. But she preferred his stories to his brooding silences. And there was something more basic she missed about Burton now that he'd stopped
drinking—his sexual energy. While sober, Richard lost all desire to make love to his wife.

This was a great concern to a legendary lover like Richard, and very frustrating to Elizabeth, who complained to her close friend, Norma Heyman, when she visited, “[H]e hasn't fucked me for weeks!”

When Norma showed up for lunch one day, the Burtons fell into a nasty spat. Norma had split from John Heyman during the making of
Boom!
(John had taken up with Joanna Shimkus shortly after), but had remained close to Elizabeth.

It was a compliment that started it all. When Richard told her that he'd stopped drinking and thus had lost some weight, Norma gushed, “You look marvelous!”

Richard then pointed across the table at Elizabeth and said, “There's someone who could never give up drink.”

That's when Norma blurted out, “She hates your guts, I'm afraid.” And like some misguided marriage counselor, Norma turned to Elizabeth and said, “But you do love him, don't you?”

“No. And I wish to Christ he'd get out of my life!” Elizabeth declared. And to Richard, “Piss off out of my sight.”

Burton got up and left the table, and later recorded the whole incident in his diary. For Richard, this was a watershed in the relationship. They had exchanged those kinds of words before—but never while sober, and never in front of close friends. “I have to face the fact that E. may be going to take off one of these days, and perhaps sooner than I expect. I've known it deep down for some time…. a good shouting match is sometimes good for the soul, cathartic, emetic, but I can't be bothered to shout back when I'm sober.”

Elizabeth missed the shouting back, just as she missed the old passion. “When he stopped drinking and strangely, for a while, stopped making love to me,” she later confessed, “I complained bitterly. I shouldn't have. He needed to find a way out, and I wasn't making things easier for him. We got through it. And we found each other again. Our bed was where the fighting stopped.”

It had been Elizabeth who'd insisted that Richard see Dr. Kenemer, but now she found it hard to adjust to a sober husband. Their drinking had been a kind of third partner in their marriage, and when Burton gave it up, even for just a couple of weeks, a gaping hole appeared. Drinking with Richard had kept them in the same house of the spirits, cocooned from the sometimes unbearable pressures of their celebrity. It was, quite simply, something they could do together. And it was a strange kind of comfort during months of idleness; when they weren't working, the day could be built around the drinking. Of course, Richard had seen the light when Dr. Kenemer told him that he had to stop if he wanted to go on living. But by then it was harder for Elizabeth to apply the brakes to her own alcohol consumption. Richard, sober, now had to deal with Elizabeth's drinking, and looming ahead of them was Hollywood during the Academy Awards, when the town would be awash in champagne. For Richard, walking across the lobby of the Beverly Hills Hotel would be like crossing a minefield.

As Oscar night drew closer, they vowed to stop quarreling and finding fault with each other. They both desperately wanted Richard to win his Oscar, and they knew they'd have to present a united front to campaign for the award.

One of Elizabeth's gifts to Richard had always been her stardom. Now, she would summon up her greatest role—Movie Star—if it would help him win the award for Best Actor in
Anne of the Thousand Days.
They would campaign for it all together: Elizabeth, Richard, and the Taylor-Burton diamond, all on display.

Hollywood couldn't resist that much glamour, that much talent, that much money. If Richard's artistry couldn't carry the day, as perhaps it should have, Elizabeth's incomparable star power would dazzle the statuette into Richard's hands, where it belonged. And the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences still liked Elizabeth, though she'd chosen not to appear when she'd won for
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
In fact, the Academy had asked her to be one of the main presenters at the Awards.

Burton prepared for his reemergence at the ceremony—for his sixth nomination—by going on a health regimen. Besides giving up alcohol, he went on a low-carbohydrate diet and lost eighteen pounds in two weeks, losing the puffiness in his face that he thought made him look like a bored Mandarin. He would look good for the Oscars. And Elizabeth called on her friend, the prolific costume designer Edith Head, to design her gown for the Oscar night.

They had first met in the fitting room for
A Place in the Sun
, where the legendary designer created Taylor's costumes for the film, influencing fashion with the strapless white-chiffon party dress with its white daisy–embroidered bodice, which Elizabeth wore as the young socialite Angela Vickers. Knockoffs of that gown became the favorite prom dress for teenage girls all over America. The two women wouldn't work again professionally until 1972, but they maintained a close friendship throughout the years. Edith Head “was like a second mother to me,” Elizabeth later recalled about their four-decade-long friendship. “Whenever I was in trouble, whenever I wanted a place to hide out and avoid socializing, I would go to Edith Head's house.” Edith and her husband, Bill, were childless and they treated Elizabeth like a daughter. Given how hard it had been to be with Richard lately, and the pressure building up over his Oscar nomination, Elizabeth needed some extra looking after.

The diminutive costume designer was known for her short bangs, tightly pulled-back bun, and trademark dark glasses—the blue-tinted lenses helped her see how her creations would look on camera. She always wore a necklace that Elizabeth admired, made up of gold-and-ivory Victorian theater tickets. Edith Head would later leave that necklace to Elizabeth in her will.

On April 3, 1970, the Burtons returned to Los Angeles to attend the Academy Awards ceremony on April 7. Frank Sinatra flew them in from Puerto Vallarta in his Gulfstream jet, in a smooth ride that took them only two and a half hours. They checked into their favorite bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. But they were in for a
shock—while they were working and playing among the titled heads of Europe, Hollywood had changed.

MGM, Elizabeth's old studio, was on the auction block, selling off props from its three thousand movies—Johnny Weissmuller's loincloth, Judy Garland's ruby slippers, Gene Kelly's umbrella. Meanwhile, 20th Century-Fox (which
Cleopatra
had nearly torpedoed) had cut its overhead by 40 percent. The year that Richard was making the tony, literate
Anne of the Thousand Days
, a twenty-two-year-old California State University student named Steven Spielberg was making his first film, a short that would win him a contract with Universal. The old movie moguls were being replaced by young businessmen, as conglomerates took over the studios, forcing out the streetwise studio chiefs who had made decisions by their gut instincts. Twenty percent of the population was now under thirty, and that group made up 73 percent of the moviegoing public. For the first time, the actors onscreen were beginning to look more like the people sitting in the audience. Expensive epics were out. It was the low-budget movies by new kids on the block that were making money:
Bonnie and Clyde
,
The Graduate
,
Midnight Cowboy
,
Easy Rider.
Unconventionally attractive “ethnic” actors like Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, and Elliott Gould were playing romantic leads—a far cry from the old swoon-inducers like David Niven, Cary Grant, Burt Lancaster, or Stewart Granger. Despite Warren Beatty as Elizabeth's youthful costar,
The Only Game in Town
had “a musty feel to it,” and Beatty's young fans stayed far away; the movie grossed less than $2 million.

The very idea of the movie star was changing. “We can't make a picture with Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr groping each other anymore,” MGM's chief executive James Aubrey remarked at the time. “Thank God,” thought Elizabeth, “he didn't mention us.” No one seemed safe, though. The scythe of youth seemed to be cutting the movie industry into ribbons. Faye Dunaway, Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Jack Nicholson, Dennis Hopper, and Jane Fonda replaced the more familiar faces that the Burtons knew
from their three decades of moviemaking. For the first time at Hollywood parties and restaurants like Chasen's, Richard and Elizabeth did not recognize everyone in the room. Perhaps they had stayed away too long, making movies in Europe and England and living on the
Kalizma
.

“The world has changed,” Burton wrote in his diary. “I mean our world. Nobody but
nobody
will pay us a million dollars a picture again for a long time. I've had two financial disasters,
Staircase
and
Boom!
, and Elizabeth,
Boom!
and
Secret Ceremony….
I'm afraid we are temporarily out in the cold, and fallen stars. What is remarkable is that we have stayed up there for so long.”