Furious Love (7 page)

Sybil Williams had been hired as an extra to play one of the Welsh villager girls. Though not a beauty, she was lively and intelligent. Robert Hardy, who capped his distinguished stage and film career by playing the irascible Siegfried in the long-running BBC adaptation of
All Creatures Great and Small
and is known to a new generation of fans as Cornelius Fudge in the Harry Potter movies, knew and admired Sybil. “She came from the valleys, but her brother was quite a smart lawyer. As a family and financial stratum, they were above [the Jenkinses].” Her father had been an official at the mines where Burton's father, and all of his brothers, save one, had toiled. She was nineteen when she married the twenty-three-year-old Burton, and because she was Welsh, she kept Burton grounded in his Welsh life throughout his meteoric rise in the London theater and their more modestly successful jaunt in Hollywood. Burton's huge family loved her, especially Burton's idolized older brother, Ifor Jenkins. Indeed, everyone who knew her loved her, and despite Burton's dalliances (including an intense love affair begun with Claire Bloom), Burton and Sybil seemed devoted to each other. “It was admirable, that marriage,” recalls Hardy, who used to visit the couple in their Hampstead home.

Sybil adored Burton, but she must have known about his constant philandering. She allowed him his flings with actresses high and
low, as long as he returned to her in the end. It wasn't that she was masochistic, necessarily; she was realistic. His fame, attractions, and gifts were prodigious in an era when men drank and played hard and ruled the roost and got away with it all—at least for a time. A certain amount of tomfoolery was tolerated—even expected—as long as the paterfamilias supported his family and stayed devoted to his wife and children. That was the Welsh—and not only the Welsh—code of behavior. And, for a time, it worked.

Now Burton agonized over the decision staring him in the face. “One just hoped he would come back to Sybil,” Hardy recalled. “Then it became bit by bit obvious that he wouldn't and that was just awful.” Burton's prodigious capacity for drink seemed to double.

Two weeks after Burton's arrival in London, Sybil brought her two daughters to their cottage in Hampstead, inviting Burton's beloved older brother, Ifor, and his wife, Gwen, to stay with them. Sybil was sure her Lothario husband would tire of his new paramour, as he had of past lovers, and return once again to his family. So, for a time, Burton was trapped between two households: the adjoining penthouses he and Elizabeth shared in the Dorchester Hotel while making
The V.I.P.s
, and the Hampstead cottage to which he would slink when Elizabeth was occupied elsewhere. He usually spent days, when he wasn't needed on the set, in Hampstead, but his nights were spent with Elizabeth.

Occasionally, Sybil would show up on the set of
The V.I.P.s
, throwing everyone in a tizzy. Peter Medak, the Hungarian director of later acclaimed films
The Ruling Class
,
The Krays
, and
Romeo Is Bleeding
, was a twenty-five-year-old assistant director on
The V.I.P.s
at the time. He recalled that Burton would “show up for wardrobe fittings with Sybil, and the next day he'd suddenly show up with Elizabeth. I don't know how he did it. Sybil would say, ‘No, you can't wear those trousers—it doesn't look right.' And Elizabeth would appear and she would countermand it.” As comic as this might seem—the two women trying to dress their man according to their own tastes—it
was devastating to all parties. Burton called it his period of “suspended animation,” but it was more dramatic than that. Ifor—the man among men whose masculinity and good character Burton most admired—was furious with his brother for putting Sybil through the public horrors of his affair. Ifor spent time with Sybil at the Hampstead cottage, and at one point the two men found themselves in a shouting match, screaming through the mail slot of the cottage's white door.

Disheartened, Burton returned to London and promptly drank himself into a stupor. His old friend and fellow Welshman, the actor Stanley Baker, found him passed out and plied him with three pots of black coffee to bring him around. Graham Jenkins, Burton's youngest brother, who would often serve as his stand-in on movie sets, beginning with
The V.I.P.s
, worried that Burton was close to a complete breakdown, drinking suicidal amounts of alcohol.

Sybil, for her part, was not unmoved by her husband's suffering, and she accompanied Burton to an intimate dinner party given by Stanley Baker and his wife. During the course of the evening, Elizabeth pestered the Baker residence with constant phone calls, interrupting their dinner and reminding Burton of her own vulnerability. “He was one haunted boy-o,” Baker said about his friend. Adding to his burdens was the disapproval of his entire Welsh family, who adored Sybil.

“The family wasn't happy about the affair,” recalled Graham. “He was ordered to come down to Wales to face them. We were Welsh Baptists. Divorce was not in our vocabulary.” But Burton refused, claiming that his shooting schedule on
The V.I.P.s
made a visit impossible. That's when Graham offered to stand in for him, launching his occasional work as Burton's stand-in: “We looked quite a bit alike, except he was five feet ten and a half inches and I was five feet eight and a half inches. I'm in several of the long shots, and not even my wife, Hilary, could tell us apart in the movie.”

Ifor tried to persuade Burton that his obligation was to his family. Ifor was the closest Burton had to a father figure, replacing Dadi Ni, his feckless, whiskey-sodden father, but even he couldn't persuade
Burton once he'd resolved to divorce Sybil and marry Elizabeth. “If Ifor couldn't get him back,” recalled Graham, “no one could. But I do think that if he could, he would have been married to both women.” Needless to say, he couldn't.

So, Elizabeth sent Richard to Hampstead to ask Sybil for a divorce. When he arrived at Sybil's door, however, all his resolve melted. Sybil asked him if he planned to stay, and he answered, “Yes,” and he probably meant it at the time. When he was with Sybil, he vowed to stay with Sybil. When he was with Elizabeth—well, she was an unstoppable force, a force of nature, a gale-force wind. Nothing, no one, could resist her once she'd made up her mind. Robert Hardy himself, though devoted to Sybil, felt Elizabeth's immense charm and power when Burton first introduced them. “At her best, she was immensely impressive,” he recalled. “The color of her eyes was enough to turn a saint into a devil, and I wouldn't say that Richard was a saint.”

By now, Burton was drinking more than ever—Bloody Marys before noon, straight vodka for lunch. As one of Burton's biographers observed, “the boozing was prodigious, but, for reasons which escaped the doctors who checked him out at the time, he seemed to be walking through the furnace of alcohol unscathed. The system took everything he threw at it.” And he wasn't the only one. “The drink was the problem,” Medak believed, “with both of them. I remember Elizabeth in the dressing room, sitting in a makeup chair, and she'd be drinking a glass of water. And she'd say, ‘Can you fill this up?' And I'd put some water in it, and she'd say, ‘No, I didn't mean water. I meant vodka.'”

But then, almost everyone on the set was drinking. After all, it was 1963, but in essence it was still the 1950s, in terms of the complete acceptance of alcohol and cigarettes as relatively benign, grown-up pleasures. In fact, it was a sign of character—certainly of masculinity—
to
drink. Teetotalers were looked upon with suspicion, as health food faddists, or moralists or namby-pambies or goody-goodies or, worse than all of that, as
bores.

Elizabeth would accompany Richard on pub crawls through London, where he would introduce her to his old theater and rugby chums—those who were still talking to him, like his Oxford friends, which included Hardy and writers Terence Rattigan, Robert Bolt (who wrote
A Man for All Seasons
), and John Morgan, a journalist and intellectual. She kept Burton's “Welsh hours,” devoting herself to Richard as Sybil had done before her, impressing him with how well she fit into his world. She could drink and swear and sing bawdy limericks with the best of them. That always won them over.

And she could also make fun of herself with Burton's crowd. At one point, she'd sat silent during a long discussion of the theater. Finally, in a melodramatic gesture, she threw her head back and declaimed, “I know nothing about the theater. But I don't need to. I'm a star!”

Rod Taylor, the strapping Australian actor best known for his roles in H. G. Wells's
The Time Machine
and Alfred Hitchcock's
The Birds
, was cast in
The V.I.P.s
to play an Aussie businessman, head of a tractor company who writes a bad check to save his company from a hostile takeover. He recalled, “Everybody was extremely thirsty on the set. It wasn't like going to Hollywood lunches and having iced tea. I mean, the bar inside the studio was constantly packed. You definitely did not get through lunch without a bottle of wine…And, of course, Dickie [Burton was called by a number of names by his friends and family: Dick, Dickie, Rich, and—by Elizabeth—the more dignified Richard] would say, ‘Have a tot of brandy,' and this would be ten thirty in the morning. Which seemed perfectly normal to everybody.” Medak remembered Burton coming back to the set after lunch completely drunk, and very much the worse for wear. He'd rip into Asquith, demanding, “What kind of fucking shot is this? This is ridiculous!” Asquith, a gentlemanly, upper-class fellow who hated confrontation, would visibly crumble. “Puffin was very slight,” Medak recalled, “and when Burton was yelling at him, he would just cringe until he practically disappeared into himself. There was nothing he could do,
because the guy was absolutely out-of-his-mind drunk. So Asquith decided to handle it by barely saying anything as long as he got [Burton and Taylor] in the frame and let them say their lines. Burton wasn't always like that, though—just when he was drunk. We all knew that after lunch—look out!”

It didn't help the equanimity of the set that Elizabeth enjoyed Richard's alcoholic outbursts and encouraged them whenever she could. She loved passion and drama; as one brought up on fawning compliments, she needed the bracing reality of a good fight. It made her feel alive. “Richard loses his temper with true enjoyment. It's beautiful to watch,” she once said. “Our fights are delightful screaming matches, and Richard is rather like a small atom bomb going off.” They fought explosively off set and on.

“I think the effect Burton had on her was beyond even that of Mike Todd,” Eddie Fisher—now out of the picture—wrote in retrospect. “Her relationship with Mike had been animalistic—she had never met a man like him. It was a great love affair. Mike was very clever, very shrewd, and very strong and possessive. But Burton went far beyond that. Burton was crazy. She needed his approval as an actress and as a woman, and by withholding it, he made her need him desperately.” Fisher was right about one thing. “Mike [Todd] was a bit of a madman,” Elizabeth admitted, “and, in his way, so was Richard Burton. I truly believe I can be content only with a man who's a bit crazy.”

Richard and Elizabeth seemed to particularly enjoy having an audience, and they enjoyed heaping insults upon each other. Burton was fond of calling Elizabeth “my little Jewish tart” (because she had converted to Judaism to marry Mike Todd); Elizabeth trumped that by ridiculing his pockmarked skin. “I think they had fights for the glory of making up,” Rod Taylor believed. “It was foreplay to them.” Their reconciliation would sometimes take the form of extravagant gifts, including a Van Gogh Elizabeth had bought at Sotheby's for $257,000 (a mere $1.8 million in today's dollars), which she lugged
up the Dorchester elevator, kicked off her shoes, and hammering a nail into the wall, hung the painting over Burton's penthouse fireplace herself.

Elizabeth was proud of the fact that she could keep up with Richard—even drink him under the table. She was truly a man's woman, and she could drink, belch, and swear with the best of them. It was, for her, an important antidote to her staggering beauty and hothouse upbringing. It made her human. It kept her
real
.

Despite the amount of vodka she was consuming, and the fact that she loved food and would easily put on excess weight, she was still stunning on film. The camera, as they say, adored her. “You couldn't have been more beautiful or a bigger movie star than she was then,” Medak believed. “When I saw her at six in the morning, when she used to come in for makeup, I often wondered, what was the point of making her up? She was breathtaking in some of those outfits, fantastic in that fur-lined coat and hat.” Even so, Medak recalled, “everything had to be incredibly lit, which took forever. That's why we never did that many shots. We had a wonderful cameraman, Jack Hildyard, and the way he photographed her, he must have been in love with her. But I remember, even then, her weight went up and down. One week she was chubby, and the next week she was thin. You can almost see it in the film.”

Finally, after five weeks of shooting at the Pinewood Studios, where a giant replica of Heathrow's new, modernist Terminal 5 had been constructed, complete with massive staircase and modern décor, Burton made up his mind. In January, he asked Sybil for a divorce, and she agreed.

He would throw his lot in with the gods of fame—or infamy. It did not seem to bring him peace of mind, however; throughout the film, torment is visibly stamped on his boxer-poet's face.

In later scenes, that baleful stare may have also been the result of a sound drubbing he received at the hands of some London hooligans. It was a Saturday. He had slipped into Cardiff to see a rugby match
with Ifor Jenkins, his beloved older brother, and when he returned to London's Paddington Station, he was set upon by thugs. “I was caught off-balance and felt my feet giving way,” he later wrote about the incident. “I was damned helpless…lying on the snow unable to move…They just kicked and kicked me.” The street toughs nearly forced his eye from its socket, and injured Richard's neck and back. He was rescued by a taxi driver, but he refused to be taken to the hospital. The thugs who beat him probably didn't recognize the actor, but the taxi driver who drove him back to the Dorchester did, asking en route, “Are we in a film?” Once again, at that moment, life and artifice had become interchangeable.