The Most Beautiful Woman in the World (32 page)

As their passion for each other diminished, they attempted to compensate by cornering the world’s diamond market. For $305,000, Richard acquired the 33.19-carat Krupp diamond, purchasing it through Sotheby’s Parke Bernet in New York. The previous owner, Vera Krupp, had been the wife of a convicted Nazi munitions manufacturer, but Elizabeth took the curse off it by quipping, “It’s fitting . . . that a nice little Jewish girl like me has ended up with the Baron’s rock.” Richard also gave her La Peregrina Pearl (The Wanderer), which he acquired for $37,000. Bored with acting, he briefly considered writing a nonfiction book about La Peregrina. Philip, King of Spain, had given the gem to Mary Tudor in 1554. In Richard’s proposed book, the pearl’s peregrinations would be traced through all its owners. “Do I have the intellectual stamina to sustain such a big undertaking,” he wondered, “and is my writing good enough?” He decided to seek Nevill Coghill’s advice, but nothing came of the project. It would have been more practical and profitable for him simply to write his memoirs, but he feared being accused of exploiting Elizabeth, as if that wasn’t what he’d been doing all along. The $37,000 tab for La Peregrina was a drop in the bucket compared with what the gem ended up costing him; Elizabeth required a $100,000 Oriental pearl-diamond-and-ruby necklace to attach La Peregrina to. She placed her jewels in red leather boxes, eventually amassing an $8 million collection. Her total wealth at the time, according to Richard, was $20 million; his, $10 million.
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They could well afford to be generous to their staff of thirty. “The people who worked for them worshipped them,” Dominick Dunne revealed in 1999.
²⁹

When Princess Margaret first beheld the Krupp, she asked Elizabeth, “Is that the famous diamond? It’s so large. How very vulgar.”

“Yes,” Elizabeth said, “ain’t it great!”

The Princess then asked, “Would you mind if I tried it on?”

“Not at all,” Elizabeth said, slipping it on HRH’s finger. She seemed to be in no hurry to take it off, holding it up to catch the light and admire it on her hand. “It’s not so vulgar now, is it?” Elizabeth said.

One day she screamed that her Pekinese had swallowed La Peregrina. She was working on a film set at the time, and shooting was delayed as everyone searched for the gem, which ultimately turned up, though not in her dog.
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The parenting of Elizabeth’s boys continued to pose a daunting responsibility for Richard. They had been through four fathers, and he found it impossible to undo the damage of his predecessors, who’d supplied no discipline. Cooped up at the Dorch, Mike and Chris misbehaved, and Richard complained of stereo blasts at 2:30 a.m. and cigarette burns on sheets and curtains.
³¹

Elizabeth was in no condition to help. Before completing
Secret Ceremony
, she began hemorrhaging and was advised she needed a partial hysterectomy. She finished the film in a surgical corset due to sciatica and disc troubles, and her pain led to a frightening buildup of prescription drugs. Physical frailty in others terrified Richard, and he no longer knew how to deal with her. On July 23, 1968, after being fired from his picture,
Laughter in the Dark
—he’d arrived on the set thirty minutes late, with Liza Todd in tow—he spent what he called “the two most horrible days of my adult life.” Elizabeth went into the hospital at 9:30 a.m. Sunday to have her uterus removed. The operation lasted until 1 p.m., and she came to screaming in agony. A powerful drug was administered, and soon she started hallucinating and yelling. Richard tried to help but she told him to fuck off, regarding him with “a malevolence that made a basilisk look like a bloodhound,” he related. “That kind of stuff was a lot easier for Richard to tolerate when he was boxed,” said a friend.
³²

It got worse. On July 24, 1968, news arrived from Le Pays de Galles in Celigny that the gardener-caretaker, a Burton employee since 1957, had hanged himself. Over Elizabeth’s objections, Richard left for the funeral with Liza; Kate; his favorite brother Ifor and his wife, Gwen; and his best friend Brook Williams, son of Emlyn Williams. Le Pays de Galles was inextricably associated in Elizabeth’s mind with Sybil Burton. Consumed with irrational jealousy, she begged Richard to stay at her home, Chalet Ariel, instead. He refused, they fought, and later on, in Celigny, he went on a binge with Ifor, which ended tragically when Ifor slipped and broke his neck. Richard was disconsolate, feeling responsible. He’d always thought his rugged, coal-mining older brother invincible, but now Ifor was paralyzed from the neck down for the rest of his life. Richard never forgave himself.
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The battered Burtons resumed working in 1968, shooting separate films in Paris, Richard playing a gay man in
Staircase
with Rex Harrison and Elizabeth costarring with Warren Beatty in the Fox production
The Only Game in Town
, produced by Fred Kohlmar and directed by George Stevens. Based on a flop play by Frank Gilroy that had starred Tammy Grimes and Barry Nelson on Broadway,
Game
brought her $1.4 million but the film lost $5.8 million. Though the story was set in Las Vegas, Elizabeth insisted on shooting it in Paris to avoid ruinous taxes, and it ended up looking like a low-budget potboiler filmed on a Poverty Row sound stage. The sixty-four-year-old producer succumbed to a heart attack, and someone at Fox quipped that Kohlmar had died upon viewing the rushes. Richard’s film,
Staircase
, was set in the East End of London but also had to be filmed in Paris for tax reasons. He earned $1.25 million but 20th Century–Fox lost $8 million. Stanley Donen, Elizabeth’s old boyfriend, was Richard’s director.

Tense and short-fused in Paris, Richard confessed that he was “ridiculously . . . jealous” because Elizabeth was working with Beatty, “a young and attractive man who obviously adores her.” She tried to assure Richard that she looked on her costar “like a younger brother,” and that Richard was “a fool” to distrust her. “Ah,” Burton replied, “but there have been cases of incest. They have been known. Oh, yes.” There was little Elizabeth could do to make him feel secure about his sexuality, since he was playing a homosexual in
Staircase
, the bottom man at that, and it stirred up all his homo-erotic impulses and anxieties. As his daughter Kate said in the
Daily Mail
, “Dadda could not live with himself.” For years he’d also been in denial about his alcoholism, but at last he told Mel Gussow of the
New York Times
, “From 1968 to 1972 I was pretty hopeless. I was fairly sloshed for five years. I hit the bottle. I was up there with Jack Barrymore and Robert Newton. The ghosts of them were looking over my shoulder.”

Elizabeth could not have been pleased to overhear him say, “The only thing in life is language, not love, not anything else.” To regain his love she attempted to satisfy his desire for social acceptance at the highest level of European society. For the collier’s son, that was the ultimate accolade.

Chapter 9
The Jet Set

According to Alexandre, Elizabeth was the only Hollywood star ever to succeed in French aristocracy entirely on her own. Rita Hayworth had been accepted as Princess Aly Khan and Grace Kelly as Princess Grace de Monaco, but Elizabeth attained social status in Paris by virtue of being, as Alexandre put it, the “star of stars.” She had known the Rothschilds for some years, and Marie-Hélène, the leader of
tout Paris
, provided Elizabeth with wide access to the usually insular French beau monde.

On October 6, 1968, the Burtons lunched with Baron Alexis de Rede, whom Richard referred to as “de Redee.” One hundred guests dined on fish, partridge, and ice cream with nuts and cake blended in (“magnificent,” Richard pronounced), accompanied by three excellent wines and brandy. Elizabeth was seated between Maria Callas and Baron Guy de Rothschild. Next to Richard, Marie-Hélène, Guy’s wife, observed that de Rede’s huge house was the best in Paris, but Richard said his favorite was Ferrières, the Rothschilds’ château. The estate was such a source of worry to Guy, Marie-Hélène complained; he couldn’t decide whether to leave Ferrières to his children, give it to the medical profession, or turn it into an art museum. “Give it to us,” said Elizabeth, and Richard thought, “Cheek.” Marie-Hélène was “quite an ugly woman with a large hooked nose and an almost negroid mouth but very beautiful blind eyes,” Richard recalled, “and the vivacity of her manner and her machine-gun delivery in both languages makes her very attractive.”

Callas made a bold play for Richard after confiding to him that she and Aristotle Onassis were finished. She’d once told director Franco Zeffirelli that Ari was the first man who’d made her feel like a woman, who’d brought her to life as a sexual being. As Elizabeth eavesdropped, Callas said her life with Ari in the jet set—discos, drinking, and late-night partying—had destroyed her voice. Suddenly, she began to flatter Richard, telling him his eyes were “beautiful,” signifying “a good soul.” She asked if she could play opposite him as Lady Macbeth. “I suppose she thought Elizabeth was going to play Macduff or Donalbain,” Richard reflected. The stage, Callas insisted, and not grand opera, was now her “first love,” and she saw Richard as her ticket to fame as a straight actress. Uncomfortably aware that Elizabeth had “eyes in the back of her bum and ears on stalks,” Richard promised nothing.

Afterward, the Burtons attended a running of the Grand Prix d’Arc de Triomphe, the French version of Ascot and Derby day, as guests of the Rothschilds. They were permitted to go into the ring, which was usually restricted to owners. When Elizabeth walked from the paddock to the loge between Guy and Marie-Hélène, thousands of startled spectators recognized her and broke into cheers. “Not bad for an old woman of thirty-six,” Richard said.

The Burtons were in Paris to complete their movie commitments. Elizabeth was still filming
The Only Game in Town
with Warren Beatty at the old Boulogne Studios on the outskirts of the city. Richard was naturally suspicious that she was romancing Beatty, whose fame as a Lothario exceeded even his own. On October 9 he felt “desperate all day long,” hating it when Elizabeth left him to work at the studio. He drank himself to sleep long before she got home. On October 12, they both had to work, but they were hoping to flee Paris for the weekend. On Richard’s set, Rex developed a case of flu and was sent home early. Richard completed some close-ups and left his set at the Boulogne Studios at 6:45 p.m., driving over to Elizabeth’s set to collect her and their guests for the weekend. While waiting for her, he talked with Beatty, who offered him a drink. Elizabeth was “remarkably beautiful,” Warren said, adding that she was “a great film actress.” Elizabeth thought “similarly” of him, said Richard, somewhat stiffly, letting Warren pour him another martini. Elizabeth appeared, and the Burtons made the hour-and-a-quarter flight to Nice in their twin jet for a sail on the
Kalizma
with friends of Elizabeth’s from her childhood in England, Sheran Cazalet Hornby and her husband Sir Simon, chairman of W. H. Smith, the publishing company. They drank all the way to the Riviera, boarding the
Kalizma
in St. Jean Cap Ferrat. For the Burtons, still tense from filming, the yacht was heaven. They went to bed at 3:30 a.m.

The next morning they relaxed on the poop deck and drank Salty Dogs—vodka and canned grapefruit juice with salt around the rim of the glass. “It is as quiet as prayers with hardly a stir on the waters,” Richard wrote. Their guests were soft-spoken, well-read, and intelligent. Life seemed perfect as the Burtons strolled the deck, Richard running his hand appreciatively over the smooth walnut railings. In the salon, they admired their Monet and an Epstein bust of Churchill. Going into the dining room, they gazed lovingly at a Van Gogh and a Picasso, then moved on to the stairwell to the children’s cabins, gazing at a Vlaminck. Back on deck, they enjoyed a lively conversation about books with the Horn-bys. Sir Simon was even more erudite than Richard. The day would have been sublime had Richard not gotten sloshed and started repeating himself.

He asked Elizabeth when he sobered up the next day whether he’d offended anyone, but she had more important things to think about than his blackout. Her feet had no feeling in them, and she was afraid of becoming permanently handicapped. Would he still adore her if she had to spend the rest of her days in a wheelchair as “a cripple”? she asked. He said he “didn’t care if her legs, bum and bosoms fell off and her teeth turned yellow.” Then, in an eerie foreshadowing of 1997, he added that he didn’t even care if she went bald. He would love her always, he swore, because she had given him her all. At such moments, he seemed the ideal lover she’d always dreamed of.

Back in Paris, he returned from a difficult day on the
Staircase
set grumbling that his entire body had been smeared with makeup for a nude scene with Rex Harrison. With infinite care, Elizabeth washed the greasy mess off him, not unlike a miner’s wife scrubbing her husband’s back after a hard day in the mines. On another evening, Richard was studying his script at home, trying to memorize his lines for the next day, when Elizabeth suddenly appeared before him in a see-through nightgown, one of the shoulder straps already dangling on her arm. “I went back to bed for ten minutes,” Richard related. “I was unquestionably seduced and I teased her about it for the rest of the day . . . After all these years the girl can still blush.” In time he came to rate her the best lover he’d ever known. “She is a wildly exciting lover-mistress,” he wrote; “she can tolerate my impossibilities and my drunkenness . . . I’ll love her till I die.”
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Their happiness came in rare periods of sobriety, and Elizabeth would always treasure them, she told Barbara Walters in 1999.