How to Be a Movie Star

by William J. Mann

  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."

  For Divorce His, Divorce Hers, Hussein saw Elizabeth's character as a tasteful East Coast intellectual from old money; and he asked legendary costume designer Edith Head to create Elizabeth's wardrobe for the film with this in mind. Head listened to his description, then arched an eyebrow at him. "You haven't met Elizabeth yet, have you?" she asked. At that point, Hussein had not. Head agreed to design the clothes as he described, but she made no guarantee of his star's approval. Sure enough, when Hussein got the costume sketches back from Elizabeth, she had circled every neckline with a bold red pen and drawn an arrow to indicate that they should drop lower.

  Elizabeth Taylor knew how she should appear on the screen. No young upstart director was going to tell her otherwise. Getting ready to shoot one scene, she emerged from her dressing room wearing another famous bauble that Burton had bought for her: La Peregrina, a pearl once owned by King Philip II of Spain, who had given it to his wife, Mary Tudor of England; later it adorned the necks of several Spanish queens. To get it, Richard had had to outbid Prince Alfonso de Bourbon Asturias, who'd hoped to bring La Peregrina back into the family and present it to the aging and exiled Queen Victoria Eugenia. Now Elizabeth appeared on the set with the famous pearl gleaming against her throat. Hussein told her that it was completely out of character. "Who the hell cares?" she snapped. "People want to see Elizabeth Taylor in jewels!" And so they did.

  Divorce His, Divorce Hers, of course, could have been the Burtons' own story. The director watched as his stars' marriage disintegrated a little more every day. Shooting a street scene with Richard one night, the filmmakers were suddenly interrupted by "all sorts of sirens and police cars." It could mean only one thing: Mrs. Burton was arriving ahead of schedule. In the midst of all the flashing lights and the commotion of police escorts and frantic reporters, Hussein looked around and saw that Richard was gone. He'd bolted, unable to face the traveling circus that followed his wife wherever she went. Hussein later found him drunk at a bar.

  The battles between the Burtons had only gotten worse. On the set of Boom!, they'd arrived drunk and screaming at each other. "Absolute hell," Joseph Losey said, but in the morning, their schizophrenic relationship became all "sweetness and light." The Burtons' friend and photographer Gianni Bozzacchi said that the fights between Elizabeth and Richard at the end were very much like those between Martha and George in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?—cruel, unrelenting, way below the belt. When he got drunk, Richard got terribly mean, and he was drunk much of the time now. Elizabeth responded the only way she knew how: like a child. She lashed back.

  But it broke her heart. "You see, she didn't care about being a star," Bozzacchi said. "She cared about living a certain way. It was what she was used to. And she lived that grand life with Burton and thought they'd have it forever. That's what was most important to her: to have a great companion in her great life. With Burton she felt she'd found her soul mate. It was all about being with him. That's all that really mattered."

  Yet for Richard, it went far, far deeper. Elizabeth was indeed his great love; but she was also the world's greatest movie star and that meant he was forever caught in the crosshairs of her fame. More and more, he felt that he'd given up his great literary potential in order to play in soap operas for the masses. "In the beginning," Bozzacchi said, "Richard was fascinated by the whole thing. He liked being part of the big love story of all time. But then it became terribly distracting to what he was all about."

  And so the bottle. On the set of Divorce His, Divorce Hers, he was drunk and swaying so much that the cameraman couldn't focus. Hussein stopped shooting. He kindly asked Richard what he could do to help. Richard just glared at him. Suddenly he bellowed, "Fuck off! I am Lear! I could play Lear!"

  Certainly he was as tragic. "That's what destroyed him," said Mike Nichols. "The thing about Richard was that he was so much more generous to others than he was to himself. He beat himself up over what he thought was his failure as an actor. When he married Elizabeth and became a superstar, he saw himself in a much more cruel way than others did. I think he saw himself as having made the devil's bargain, and you only make the devil's bargain if that's how you think of yourself. He wasn't pleased with himself for the way he ended up as part of an international marriage scandal that was perpetual ... And so the drinking took over and that was sad and awful to see."

  The battles raged. The separations made headlines. The reconciliations did too, though they were increasingly seen as merely delaying the inevitable. Richard was acting out, womanizing, making Elizabeth look bad. Finally they divorced on June 26, 1974, after a decade of marriage. But the long saga of Liz and Dick wasn't over. Largely through Elizabeth's machinations, they remarried on October 10, 1975, in Botswana on the Chobe River with two hippopotamuses as witnesses. But this time the marriage lasted just nine and a half months. The Burtons divorced for the second and final time on August 1, 1976.

  When Elizabeth had stepped out of her dressing room in her Martha makeup on the set of Virginia Woolf, Richard had looked over at her "quite adoringly." With great
affection, he told his wife that he couldn't wait for her to really be forty-eight years old; he'd love her just as much as he did right then. "He was looking forward so eagerly to what she would be like in salt-and-pepper gray hair," said Ernest Lehman, who had witnessed the moment. Burton wistfully told Elizabeth that he'd be fifty-four when she was forty-eight. "That is," he said with a smile, "if I can make it to then." He'd be fifty when they divorced for the second time, fifty-eight when he died.

  Without Richard, there were fewer old reliables around Elizabeth. Her father had died in 1968, and her children had become adults, leading lives as far outside their mother's orbit as they could. Michael joined a commune for a time, and when his wife gave birth to a little girl in 1971, he turned the thirty-nine-year-old Elizabeth into the "world's most glamorous grandmother." But in many ways the greatest upheaval in Elizabeth's life was the death of Dick Hanley from a massive heart attack on New Year's Day 1971. No one could run the ship quite like Dick.

  To fill the void there came a striking, deep-voiced Egyptian woman who proved that she was Hanley, Kurt Frings, and John Springer all rolled into one. Elizabeth first laid eyes on Chenina Samin when she and Burton were in Botswana, right before their second marriage, when Richard had come down with malaria. Samin, a London-educated pharmacologist working for the Botswana Ministry of Health, arrived by helicopter to save the day. Her dark, knee-length hair swinging from side to side, she kept a raving Burton from ripping out his saline drip. As he came around, Richard's eyes focused on the exotic beauty tending to him with such efficient solicitude, and he was enchanted. "Richard persuaded me that I should drop medicine and become his personal publicist," Samin said—an unlikely switch, but Richard Burton was a very persuasive man.

  Yet not so persuasive that Samin didn't side with Elizabeth in the divorce. "We're like sisters," she told the press—the sister and best girlfriend Elizabeth never had. Until now, all of her best chums had been men. Samin changed that, becoming aide, confidante, nurse, and champion. "Don't call me a secretary," she snapped at a reporter. Shortening her name to Chen Sam, she styled clothes, did makeup, organized Elizabeth's calendar, and pumped out press releases that New York magazine said "shrewdly [kept] Elizabeth Taylor in the spotlight long after the last big movie, whatever that was."

  The throaty Egyptian who'd grown up wearing a burka took the media by storm. Swifty Lazar expected "a little Chinese man" when Chen called his secretary to make an appointment. In walked a gorgeous woman instead, throwing out ideas left and right as if she'd been a publicist for decades, and the veteran Hollywood agent was floored. In 1976 Chen helped spearhead a radically new direction for Elizabeth's public life and image: the Elizabeth Taylor Diamond Corporation. It was a much-lower-key effort than her later jewelry businesses, but it still gave clerk-typists the chance to wear gems like Liz. The diamonds started at $124, loose or mounted, and were sold in department stores in tasteful brushed aluminum cases.

  More than one columnist observed that Elizabeth's celebrity was becoming more business than show business. She still made the occasional movie, but they were, as critic David Thomson said, "increasingly imprecise and unnecessary." She showed more excitement for the presents she might net on a picture than any acting challenges in the script. "Miss Taylor liked to find gifts in little robin's-egg-blue boxes in her dressing room every morning," said Mart Crowley, the writer of her film There Must Be a Pony.

  None of her theatrical films went anywhere at the box office; the television films were a mixed bag, some pulling in high ratings, others being ignored. Mostly they served to remind the public that Elizabeth Taylor, even a little plump, still looked fabulous in diamonds and furs. Magazines like Ladies' Home Journal and Woman's Day knew they could still get a bump in newsstand sales if they splashed her violet eyes on their covers. Elizabeth had successfully parlayed her movie stardom into a post-movie-star life. And in 1978 that stardom would be used to promote a campaign with loftier ambitions than the sale of diamonds in brushed aluminum cases.

  A few months after learning of Richard's remarriage to a leggy blond model many years her junior, Elizabeth herself tied the knot for the seventh time. The latest husband was an aristocratic Virginian farmer by the name of John Warner, the former husband of millionaire heiress Catherine Mellon. Washington insiders whispered that Warner had been looking around for the right woman to give his political ambitions a boost. Before meeting Elizabeth, he'd reportedly told the newscaster Barbara Walters, "You are such a terrific woman, you could make me a Senator." Walters demurred, but Elizabeth offered "more positive results," wrote the New Republic. The magazine dubbed Warner "the Senator from Elizabeth Taylor."

  But where most observers clearly saw what Warner was getting from Elizabeth, only a few really understood what she expected out of the deal. Esquire picked up on some of it, calling the marriage "Liz Taylor's latest race for the big prize." What Warner was offering was the kind of life she'd been hankering after ever since Mike Todd had first dangled it in front of her twenty years earlier—a life she'd enjoyed all too briefly before Richard's drinking had knocked it all off-kilter. "I thought we would get married, live on the farm, raise horses," Elizabeth admitted. "I thought it would be all very sort of farmish ... horsey, and I could have animals. I would go out and brand the cattle." She laughed at the memory of it. "Shit, man. It was going to be my dream."

  If there were any fears that her Hollywood lifestyle and marital exploits would hurt Warner in the conservative hills and hollows of his state, they were quickly put to rest by the enthusiastic crowds that turned out to greet the couple on campaign stops. "I'm looking forward to a good life here," Elizabeth said, winning over doubters. "John's farm is beautiful. The houses he has remind me of the countryside in England." What she didn't share was the fact that she'd installed a disco in the farmhouse so she could entertain pals from Studio 54 like Andy Warhol and Liza Minnelli and Bianca Jagger.

  The stage management of the marriage sometimes seemed obvious. Talking to the writer Aaron Latham, Elizabeth insisted that Warner had proposed to her with a bottle of wine and some caviar. "We didn't have any caviar," Warner corrected her, apparently worried that it might sound too elitist on the campaign trail. Elizabeth laughed. "Too rich for the Republican stomach?" she asked. Ignoring her husband, she told Latham that the caviar had been a gift from Ardeshir Zahedi, an Iranian diplomat she'd once dated briefly. "That's a terrible story," her husband said, even more uncomfortable after the mention of the Iranian. "I have no recollection of any caviar," he insisted.

  "Okay," Elizabeth said, her eyes dancing with mischief, "we went up with some ground groundhog meat. A little moonshine. Oh, that's illegal. What do you call that really cheap wine? Oh, a bottle of muscatel. Virginia muscatel. Virginia ham. Anyway, they were all Virginia products." She laughed, as did Latham, but Warner was poker-faced. "Virginia caviar," Elizabeth added. "It's wonderful." Burton had enjoyed such badinage with his wife, but Warner didn't have Richard's wit. Tucked away in the rolling green hills of Virginia, Elizabeth missed her old sparring partner very much. She would never stop loving him, no matter how fondly she smiled at Warner for the cameras.

  But she was a trouper. She crisscrossed the Commonwealth with her husband for ten months, putting her shoulder to the wheel of Warner's senate campaign. In one three-day marathon, she shook more than sixteen hundred hands. Elizabeth enjoyed it all, eating fried chicken and ribs at campaign stops, hurling cream pies at charity events, needling her husband in front of the press for not supporting the Equal Rights Amendment. Warner, a Republican, admitted that his wife "leaned left," though, as a British citizen, she couldn't even vote for him. What official Washington didn't know was that, even before giving up her U.S. citizenship, Elizabeth had never been a voter; she had "rooted" for candidates, she said in court depositions, but had never actually voted in any election. All Warner's supporters knew was that their candidate had promised that his wife would become a citizen. "Virginia needs her!" they cried.<
br />
  By all accounts, Elizabeth was a hit on the stump. Once again, it was Chen Sam who orchestrated many of these campaign events. Warner had insisted that John Springer be ousted as Elizabeth's publicist. "John [Warner] wanted very understated work," Chen explained. "No Hollywood types." So she moved into a high-rise apartment complex in Washington to be near her boss. It wasn't long before the Capital learned what Los Angeles and New York already knew, that Chen was a canny architect and fierce protector of Elizabeth's image. She was called "Genghis Khan," said one press agent, "a real barracuda." But all those great shots that she engineered of Elizabeth smiling broadly and kissing babies and wolfing down Virginia ham hocks would pay off nicely.

  Warner won the election on November 7, 1978. Almost immediately, however, Elizabeth began to realize that her husband had gotten a far better deal than she had. Once all the inaugural festivities were over, she found herself terribly lonely in Washington, rattling around Warner's drafty Georgetown house in her caftans. She wasn't used to living in cold weather. She missed friends like Roddy McDowall. She had nothing in common with the other senators' wives. "I think they [Washington] thought I was a freak, which is probably true," she said. To pass the time, she ate, drank, and ate some more.

  "She was eating and drinking a lot," said one of her assistants from that period. "She'd order cases of Clyde's chili [from the popular Georgetown restaurant] and keep them in a refrigerator in her bedroom. That way she'd only need to take a few steps out of her bed to grab another bowl. She'd take the chili back with her to bed and pull the sheets up over her as she'd give us our marching orders for the day."