How to Be a Movie Star (56 page)

Apparently their appeal knew no bounds. "With Elizabeth around," Burton said by way of explanation, "you always get that sort of excitement."

"Oh, Modesty Blaise," his wife said, throwing him a look, "I hardly know you."

She made that kind of noise often, insisting that the crowds came to see Richard as much as they did her. But her husband was right. It was Mrs. Burton, in her elegant furs and sparkling jewels and daring miniskirts—then all the rage—who really drew the attention. Still, the two of them together provided the glamorous traveling road show that the press covered so eagerly and the public devoured so greedily. As media stars, their only peers were Jackie Kennedy and Aristotle Onassis, but Jackie and Ari, for all their wealth, were never so deliciously conspicuous as the Burtons.

"We get a great giggle out of all our things," Elizabeth said. "The yacht, the Rolls, a sable fur coat." Of course she quickly assured the reporter that she and Richard were "totally unblasé" about it all. Indeed, it was her very enjoyment of extravagance—her sheer, undisguised elation—that made Elizabeth and her lifestyle so appealing. "Some people believe it is vulgar to show their possessions," she said, "but we show ours. In Gstaad, it is fun to look at everything we've collected over the years." And she insisted with utter conviction that she loved the little straw donkey a bartender had given her years before in Rome with as much fervor as she loved the sapphires and emeralds.

She was probably being just a tiny bit disingenuous. Her love of jewels seemed to grow exponentially with every month she stayed away from moviemaking. She had finally achieved what she had always wanted: She could stay home, luxuriate in her bath, play with her animals, and eat chicken straight out of the deep fryer. She was the little girl she'd always wanted to be. And sparkly jewels were her favorite toys.

"What are you doing, Lumpy?" Richard called to her, waiting for her in bed, in a moment he preserved for posterity in his diary.

"Playing with my jewels," she called back cheerfully.

She liked pretty clothes, too. "I'm much more broad-minded about clothes now," she tried telling one reporter. "I used to only go to Dior. Now it's
all
the good French designers." She laughed, aware of the press coverage the Parisians gave her. "I
sort
of try to live on a budget. Richard says I'm the reason for communism in France."

But she
needed
new clothes: Her figure was filling out. By 1968 she was no longer the slim-hipped siren of
Cleopatra
and
The Sandpiper.
It was almost as if she'd taken a look at Martha's padding and extra poundage and not really minded what she saw all that much. To stay slim meant that she couldn't "pig out," an activity at least as enjoyable as playing with her jewels, with her favorite meal consisting of fried chicken, mashed potatoes with "lots of gravy," corn on the cob with "lots of butter," and "something chocolatey for dessert." For all her partiality to Europe, it was common American food that Elizabeth craved most.

"The lazy little bugger ought to lose a few pounds or so to look at her absolute best," Richard wrote in his diary around this time. Looking at her as critically as he could, he saw few signs of aging except for a few gray hairs; the breasts, "despite their largeness and considerable weight," sagged no more than they had when he first met her. "She needs weight off her stomach," he declared, "not so much out of vanity but because all the medical men say it will ease her bad back if she has less weight to carry for'ard."

But still the paparazzi aimed their telephoto lenses at the Burtons' new yacht, a 279-ton, 130-meter vessel christened the
Kalizma
—for Richard's daughter Kate and Elizabeth's daughters Liza and Maria. With six cabins and two staterooms, the
Kalizma
could sleep fourteen and required a crew of five. Columnist Earl Wilson called it a "floating palace." Elizabeth adored the freedom that the
Kalizma
gave them. The yacht meant they could live anywhere, go anywhere. Lounging on its deck of polished Edwardian mahogany and chrome, she could be a citizen of no place, completely on her own, answerable to no one but herself. It was her lifelong dream.

"Hi, Lumpy," Richard called as she arrived onshore from the
Kalizma
by motorboat. They'd moored the yacht off the coast of Sardinia, and Elizabeth was meeting her husband and Earl Wilson for lunch at the Hotel Capo Caccia, perched atop a rocky promontory and surrounded by the crystal blue sea. She wore pink trousers, a white shirt, blue cap, and dark sunglasses, and carried under her arm a spotlessly white poodle named O Fie (one of her favorite oaths from
The Taming of the Shrew).
From her left pinky sparkled a twenty-nine-carat diamond ring, a gift from Mike Todd, and from her wrist an opal-faced, diamond-encircled wristwatch, which came from Burton. But it was mostly emeralds that her husband had been giving her of late, she told Wilson.

Settling down for a quick conversation, Elizabeth was anxious to get back to the yacht. Onboard, John Lee was frying six chickens for the kids. Maybe she was hoping to snag a drumstick. A walkie-talkie kept her in touch with the crew. Throughout the meeting with Wilson, she let Richard do most of the talking. When the columnist observed that they seemed "the happiest, richest husband-and-wife team in show business," Burton quipped, "It's because I happen to have in my wife a remarkable star."

Elizabeth smiled, her eyes dancing in the Mediterranean sun. Then the remarkable star stood, replacing her sunglasses and bidding the men a good afternoon. Trooping down the cliff, she headed back out to the
Kalizma.

Finally she was going to coast for a while.

She'd earned the right.

Epilogue

How to Stay a Movie Star

A
FTER
1968 E
LIZABETH
T
AYLOR
didn't need movies to be famous anymore. Other things worked just as well.

Diamonds, for instance.

As the world watched, a diamond the size and shape of a small pear was put up for auction at the Parke-Bernet Galleries in New York. At 69.42 carats, one and a half inches long, and an inch deep, the diamond, discovered a few years earlier in a South African mine, was considered flawless. Cut and mounted into a platinum ring by famed New York jeweler Harry Winston, the gem was owned by Harriet Annenberg Ames, sister of Walter Annenberg, the billionaire publisher and current ambassador to the Court of St. James's. The announcement that Mrs. Ames was putting her rock on the block sent diamond lovers around the world into paroxysms of lust and longing. On October 23, 1969, nearly eight hundred dealers, agents, and socialites jammed into the velvet-curtained auction room at Madison Avenue and Seventy-sixth Street. Bidding was frantic. Everyone knew that Al Yugler of Frank Pollack & Sons was representing Elizabeth Taylor Burton, and it was suspected that Robert Kenmore, bidding for Cartier, was working on behalf of Aristotle Onassis. As the bids climbed, people leapt from their chairs, swinging their gazes from Yugler to Kenmore. When Yugler stopped bidding at $1 million—then an unprecedented sum for a precious stone—Cartier acquired the diamond for $1,050,000. "Wowee," said Mrs. Robert Scull, wife of the well-known art collector. "That was something, wasn't it?"

But that wasn't the end of it. Calling from London, Richard Burton was furious. He ordered Aaron Frosch to get on the line with Cartier. In less than twenty-four hours, the Cartier diamond had become the Taylor-Burton diamond. "It's just a present for my wife," Burton told reporters when they reached him on the phone.

Elizabeth never asked what he had to pay to get the ring, but it would be reported that he paid $1.1 million, providing Cartier a profit of $50,000. For the next several days the diamond was displayed in a breakproof glass case at Cartier's Fifth Avenue store, flanked by two armed security guards. Ten thousand people filed past to see "Liz Taylor's gem," the one they knew her husband had bought for her as a little gift because she'd been disappointed she hadn't gotten it at auction.

"I missed lunch to see this," said Mary Jane Mildenberger, a clerk-typist. "If I had a couple of million I'd spend one of them on a diamond like that, too."

This was now the crux of Elizabeth's fame, not the disappointing box office of her last few pictures or the excruciating reviews for
Boom!,
a wild, psychedelic, ahead-of-its-time film that she'd made with Burton for the director Joseph Losey. Dry attendance totals and pompous reviews tucked away on an inside page of the newspaper didn't count. The shiny Taylor-Burton diamond was smack-dab on the front page, and on
The Ed Sullivan Show,
and on display on Fifth Avenue and later in Chicago, available to thousands to gawk at and sigh over. More people saw the diamond than saw
Boom!
What they were looking at was irrelevant; all that mattered was that they were still looking.

And the Cartier diamond wasn't the only sparkler to grab the public's attention. It came on the heels of Burton's acquisition the year before of yet another oversized stone, the Krupp diamond. Once owned by a German armaments manufacturer, the Krupp prompted Elizabeth's famous quip about how nice it was that the ring should end up on "the nice little Jewish finger" of a girl like her.

Some society matrons sniffed, calling it all just too gaudy. "Nobody I know wants a diamond," said Mrs. Archie Preissman, wife of the Beverly Hills real estate magnate. "They don't look right with the beading on dresses and the jeweled necklines." Mrs. Preissman said that she wasn't wearing her diamonds anymore.

But Elizabeth Taylor was. At a reception with Princess Margaret not long afterward, aware that Her Royal Highness had called the Krupp the most vulgar thing she'd ever seen, Elizabeth asked if she'd liked to try it on. Once the ring had changed hands, its owner asked the princess brightly, "Doesn't look so vulgar now, does it?"

Mrs. Preissman and Princess Margaret were in the minority. Most people were like Mary Jane Mildenberger, gushing in awe. Even at thirty-seven years old, Elizabeth Taylor was still living a fairy tale for the world to follow. Just getting the Krupp from New York to the
Kalizma
in the south of France had provided good copy for the tabloids. Since the diamond wasn't insured between the time it left the auction house and the moment it was slipped onto Elizabeth's hand, Aaron Frosch arranged for five men to leave New York all at the same time with identical boxes. Each arrived in France on different planes. When they finally stood face-to-face with Elizabeth, the men handed her their boxes. One by one, she found them all empty. Richard let out a laugh as he saw his wife's jaw drop. Then Aaron Frosch pulled the ring out of his pocket and presented it to her. There weren't four decoys; there were five. Frosch had had the ring all along.

Elizabeth liked to say that she was merely a temporary "custodian" of her jewels. "You can't own a thing of such rare beauty," she said, flashing the Krupp on her finger to Helen Gurley Brown, "and I take good care of it." But Brown pointed out that when she'd walked through the kitchen earlier that day, she had seen the ring sitting by the sink. "There were people there!" Elizabeth declared defensively.

With stories like these, who needed movies? The films that Elizabeth made after 1968 were almost all made reluctantly. It had been Richard's idea to do
Boom!,
and he'd encouraged her to make
Secret Ceremony,
another flop. Elizabeth was miserable. Even a reunion with George Stevens on
The Only Game in Town,
which she shot in Las Vegas in the spring of 1969, turned out badly. She'd expected to play opposite Frank Sinatra and had little chemistry with his replacement, Warren Beatty. Worst still was Stevens, well past his prime and unable to shape the material. The result was a sorry end to a collaboration that had once produced such magic.

In some ways, Elizabeth was a casualty of the changing times. In the United States, attendance at the movies had plummeted from 38 million in 1966—the last year of Elizabeth's box-office reign—to 18 million a year later. The old generation of moviegoers—those who had first discovered Elizabeth Taylor and turned her into a star—were staying home, replaced by hippies and college kids revved up by pictures like
Midnight Cowboy
and
Easy Rider
and auteurs like Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola. Never again would one of Elizabeth's pictures break the top twenty.

Richard remained profitable enough if paired with a leading lady younger than his wife, like Geneviève Bujold in
Anne of the Thousand Days.
It was a cold hard fact that every actress of a certain age eventually faces. No matter how good Elizabeth looked in her miniskirts, she was no longer the youngest chick in town. And in Hollywood, growing old is a sin second only to flopping at the box office.

So it wasn't surprising that, at the age of forty, she trudged with terrible reluctance onto a soundstage in Munich to make a film called
Divorce His, Divorce Hers.
It was the autumn of 1972. She would have much preferred staying on the
Kalizma,
moored off Corsica, but Richard had arranged that they make the picture as a favor to Harlech Television, a Welsh station in which he held stock. "It was if by now stardom was a sword of Damocles that hung over her head," observed Waris Hussein, the director of
Divorce His, Divorce Hers.
After thirty years she had lost interest in moviemaking and would have preferred doing almost anything but. She asked no questions about the script; she sent her stand-in to rehearsals with the other actors. But she was still enough of a pro—enough of a movie star—that when she showed up for the actual shoot, she hit all her marks perfectly, even without any rehearsal.

"Movie stardom, real movie stardom, is something that never goes away," said Gavin Lambert, who knew and wrote about many great stars. "Once you have it, you carry it with you all your life, even if you're not making any movies at all."