Furious Love (39 page)

As if to protect them from the cold, Richard bought Elizabeth a fur coat for $125,000. The coat was made from the fur of forty-two specially bred Kojah minks, each one three times the girth of an ordinary mink. It was with this coat that
LOOK
magazine—which had in the past published adoring articles and glamorous photographs of the Burtons—ran them into the ground. Describing the mink as “the world's costliest coat for a fading movie queen who has much and wants more,”
LOOK
ran a photograph of Elizabeth wearing her new fur over a bikini, the Pacific Ocean sparkling like diamonds behind her. Their skewering further harmed the Burtons' image, in a town where the hottest stars now wore blue jeans instead of Bulgari.

Oscar week began at the Golden Globe Awards, where Richard heard Geneviève Bujold accept her Best Actress award for the role of Anne Boleyn by saying she “owed her performance to Richard Burton. He was generous, kind, helpful, and witty. And generosity was the one great quality.” (Bujold was also nominated for, but did not win, an Academy Award for Best Actress, and
Anne of the Thousand Days
was nominated for, but did not win, the Best Picture Award.) If that made Elizabeth uncomfortable—after all, Bujold had made love to her husband onscreen and had bested her for the role Elizabeth had wanted—at least there was hope that Bujold's award prefigured an Oscar for Richard. But he didn't think about it much, distracting
himself by watching golf on television, by trying to perfect his billiard game, even by trying to learn Spanish. It was an effort to stay away from the bottle. Surviving nights without drinking became the only thing that took his mind off the Oscar.

“The whole world makes fun of it,” Richard wrote, “but every actor wants to win.” With his Welsh sense of the looming grave, he noted, “it's the thing that gets mentioned in every actor's obituary…the summit of their achievements.” For someone who was trying not to brood about his chances, Richard examined the field of nominees like a man in a betting parlor. He knew John Wayne was the sentimental favorite, for his role as a crusty, washed-up gunslinger in
True Grit.
Also vying for Best Actor were Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman for
Midnight Cowboy
and Peter O'Toole for
Goodbye
,
Mr. Chips
. He knew that sentimentality played a big role in the Academy's final decision, noting that Liza Minnelli would probably win for
The Sterile Cuckoo
because her mother, the legendary Judy Garland, had died the previous year. “My only chance is that I am a Kennedy–Adlai Stevenson associate and a ‘Dove,'” he wrote, “while Wayne is a Republican, ‘My country right or wrong' Birchite Hawk, and the ‘artistic' Hollywood fraternity is usually very liberal.” The Burtons' trusted publicist, John Springer, kept his ear to the ground, reporting back that it could well go Richard's way because so many people thought Richard was robbed when he'd lost to Paul Scofield.

Finally, the day arrived.

When they showed up at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Richard looked sleek at 169 pounds in his dinner jacket with its brocaded waistcoat, Elizabeth beside him in her Edith Head gown—a deep blue-violet chiffon dress with a plunging neckline and a ruffled, slit skirt. The ceremony dragged on in its usual way, saving Best Actor for the next-to-last announcement. While the names of the nominees were finally read out loud, Burton slouched in his seat, studying a piece of paper, silently moving his lips as he read. Those seated around him thought that perhaps he was keeping score of
Anne of the Thousand
Days
' wins, or memorizing his acceptance speech, when, in fact, he was trying to memorize a list of Spanish irregular verbs.

And then John Wayne's name was called.

Wayne had won his first Oscar after forty-two years in the movie business. In Hollywood that night, a drunken, one-eyed cowboy had bested the king of England. Four years earlier, another cowboy with a drinking problem had defeated Richard at the Oscars, when he'd lost his bid for Best Actor in
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
to Lee Marvin in
Cat Ballou.

To make the evening more excruciating for the Burtons, Elizabeth had to follow Richard's defeat by appearing onstage to present the award for Best Picture. You can see the disappointment in her face, her genuine heartache when she came out, to great applause, to present the award to
Midnight Cowboy
, just the kind of antiheroic movie that represented how much Hollywood and the movie business had changed since
Cleopatra
. (It was also the first Hollywood film with an X rating to win the Best Picture Award.)

Now the rounds of post-Oscar parties would have to be endured, and the Burtons would have to put on their best game faces. Burton found that he could abstain from drinking if he could substitute Valium for alcohol. At one party, Elizabeth and Richard sat with the grown-ups—director George Cukor, the Gregory Pecks, and the Otis Chandlers, who owned the
Los Angeles Times
. Since he couldn't wash away his disappointment with a stiff drink, Richard turned to Elizabeth and asked her for some of her “pink pills,” the Seconals she often took for back pain, which he tossed back at dinner. It seemed to do the trick, getting him through the toughest part of the evening. (Richard later wrote, “They certainly eased the boredom. I shall try them again instead of Valium when I'm surrounded by drunks.”)

And then the atmosphere in the room changed. It lit up with flashbulbs as scores of photographers surrounded the Burtons, snapping them, and Elizabeth's diamond, from every angle. Even Richard was impressed with the attention, secretly delighted with how the eve
ning's big winners were being virtually ignored. “Barbra Streisand who fancies herself a big star was completely eclipsed.” Hundreds of people made their way to the Burtons' table to gawk at Elizabeth and commiserate with Richard that he had been “robbed.”

Elizabeth whispered into Richard's ear that with all these people coming by to say they voted for him, “Who the hell voted for Wayne?”

When the night finally came to a close, it was nearly impossible for them to leave the room. They had to pay their respects to the winners and run a gauntlet of photographers who wanted one last image of the Burtons. Their stardom, their fame, their glamour, their fabled history seemed to wash away the taint of losing the Oscar race. The winners' circle seemed to be wherever the Burtons were. Their movie stardom had won back the night for them.

Nonetheless, losing the Oscar had been a bitter disappointment. “In some ways,
Anne of the Thousand Days
was the final blow,” columnist Liz Smith believed. “They both came to Hollywood, they worked the circuit, they attended the Golden Globes luncheon. Elizabeth has her new big ring. They did everything possible to campaign to get him that Award. They attended the Oscars. She agreed to be a presenter for Best Picture. Edith Head dresses her. But what happens? John Wayne is the winner. And she has to go up after that and give the Best Picture Award to
Midnight Cowboy.
You could just see that not only was she furious, God knows what waited for her back in the hotel suite.”

At the Beverly Hills Hotel, their bungalow began filling up with friends and well-wishers. Brook Williams was there, of course, and Norma Heyman, who showed up in tears because she said everyone had left without her. Even John Wayne made an appearance at the Burtons' bungalow, showing up drunk and offering an apology to Richard for besting him. “You son of a bitch, you should have this, not me,” he said, shoving the Oscar under Richard's nose. Burton, who had fought the urge to drink all evening, gagged at the smell of alcohol on Wayne's breath. They couldn't wait for him to leave.

“I lost again,” Burton later wrote in his notebook, “and am now the most nominated leading actor in the history of the Academy Awards who has never won.” Richard sourly wrote that he at least will be known for something, having carved his own niche in the history of the Academy Awards. As Liz Smith observed, “If he had won the Oscar that year, there would have been some parity in his mind, and hers. She would have been able to relax and say, ‘Okay, he's got his Oscar now. I've done my duty.' I've always felt that that night, she knew it was the end of her marriage.”

 

The Burtons were now caught in the middle of a great generational shift. The older, more established citizens of the film community in Hollywood—the same people who had rewarded John Wayne—still resented the black eye that Elizabeth and Richard had given to Hollywood from as far away as Rome, during
Cleopatra
.
Le Scandale
had, in fact, scandalized Hollywood as well as the rest of the country. For Old Hollywood, Richard Burton was still tainted by that escapade in Rome, no matter that they had married and had made a go of it, and that between 1962 and 1966, the seven films they'd appeared in had grossed over $200 million. Nonetheless, Richard and Elizabeth had broken up two marriages, and their antics during the making of
Cleopatra
had nearly sunk 20th Century-Fox. These were unpardonable sins to the old guard. And to the younger members of the Academy, the Burtons just didn't seem to matter that much. Their conspicuous consumption seemed suspect in the hippie era. The way the Burtons lived and dressed reminded them of their parents. Hadn't Charlie Chaplin's son Michael just written a book called
I Couldn't Smoke the Grass on My Father's Lawn
? Old Hollywood was unforgiving, and new Hollywood didn't seem to care. No wonder a newspaper headline would say, “The Million-Dollar Era for the Fabulous Burtons Is Over.”

Perhaps as a way to connect with the new crop of Hollywood players, Elizabeth shrewdly decided to throw a party for the Oscar losers. After all, she told Richard, there were “more of them than us.”
He always liked her sense of humor, how it cut through so much of the bullshit—the reverence of the press, and the nastiness of the press. So they would all come—no winners allowed. It was a gala night, and everyone but Richard was drinking. Jane Fonda arrived and made a beeline for the Burtons, talking to them for over an hour about Eldridge Cleaver, Bobby Seale, and the Black Panthers and coming away with a donation of $6,000. It was close to eleven in the evening when Richard and Elizabeth finally made it back to their pink-and-yellow bungalow beneath the giant palmettos bowing in the early spring air. But the quiet would not last for long.

Elizabeth had been drinking since the party began. She had also been feuding with her mother over the telephone and was not in the mood to be told what to do by Richard, who discouraged her from speaking with her mother after the party. Through the bungalow's walls, Richard could hear Elizabeth arguing with Sara Taylor, and then the usual follow-up phone call, which meant reconciliation was not far off.

Suddenly, Elizabeth began bleeding again. She insisted that Dr. Kenemer come to the hotel, and so the good doctor came shuffling into the Burtons' bungalow in the middle of the night, but by then most of the bleeding had subsided. Nonetheless, Kenemer “put a bandage around her arse, stayed for half an hour,” wrote Burton in his journal. But Richard's tender concern for Elizabeth was missing that night. Something had indeed changed. Elizabeth's medical crises, which were very real and often very serious, were garnering less sympathy from her husband. Richard was upset with himself that Elizabeth's cries for his attention seemed to leave him by turns either frightened or frustrated. They were entering dangerous territory as a couple. And because Elizabeth's many illnesses and injuries had become so public, Richard became concerned that she would become unemployable.

Richard was in another kind of pain, the pain of seeing in Elizabeth a kind of mirror image of himself while drunk. He was still on
the wagon, but Elizabeth did not join him in his sobriety. For now, he was there all by himself. They couldn't wait to get back to Puerto Vallarta, where they could have a semblance of a normal life. Richard and Elizabeth were still paying the price for being “Liz and Dick,” and that legend was burying them. Nothing would make the point more obvious than their next public venture, on an episode of
Here's Lucy
.

On May 10, 1970, the Burtons flew back to Los Angeles to rehearse Lucille Ball's television show. The episode's premise was to take advantage of the flurry of eye-popping purchases that had made recent headlines—the Krupp and Taylor-Burton diamonds. Burton was actually excited about appearing on the comedy show, turning over in his mind the idea that doing episodic television might be a safe and good way to make a living, now that they weren't being offered million-dollar salaries to make movies anymore. And if it meant lampooning their “Liz and Dick” image, so be it. Richard was, however, apprehensive about working with the driven, monomaniacal comedienne. By now, Burton had been sober for ten weeks, and this would be the first time he'd worked without a drink since the age of sixteen. Smoking furiously—as much as a hundred cigarettes a day—Richard had dropped down to 160 pounds. He was so thin that Elizabeth jokingly called him “Mia,” saying that sleeping with him was like sleeping with Mia Farrow.

Elizabeth went along with the plan, though she was still in pain and had scheduled surgery on her hemorrhoids for May 18.

The simple plot was to have Richard escape a crush of fans by posing as a plumber. Lucy, unaware of the disguise, gets him to fix her faucet. When she finds him out after he's left his plumbing coverall behind, she discovers the Krupp diamond in a pocket. Lucy tries on the ring, but because she is Lucy, the ring gets stuck on her finger and she can't remove it. Burton returns and discovers her plight, just before Elizabeth is supposed to show off the ring at a press conference that evening. When the ring can't be removed, Elizabeth ends up making her appearance with Lucy standing behind her, behind a
curtain, thrusting her hand out to the admiring journalists. Taking advantage of the Burtons' star power, the press conference was stocked with real members of the Hollywood press corps, including veterans Army Archerd, James Bacon (who had visited them on location in Puerto Vallarta), and Joyce Haber.