Bio - 199 - Elizabeth Taylor: There Is Nothing Like a Dame

by Darwin Porter

  Elizabeth eventually ended her affair with Lerner when he published a column comparing her to Marilyn Monroe, after Monroe’s death in 1962. In it, he asserted that whereas Elizabeth was a living legend, Monroe was a myth. Elizabeth called him the next day. “How in bloody hell is Marilyn a myth and I’m just a fucking legend?”

  “She’s a myth because she’s dead.”

  “I don’t give a god damn about that. She couldn’t hold a candle to me when the bitch was alive.”

  One Sunday afternoon, Winters met with Elizabeth for a private lunch where they could catch up on all the gossip about Hollywood and New York.

  Winters said that before she left New York, she’d seen their mutual friend Roddy Mc-Dowall performing in Camelot on Broadway with Richard Burton and Robert Goulet.

  Camelot Richard Burton (left) and Roddy McDowall on Broadway in 1963

  “I went backstage to kiss Roddy and to visit with Burton,” she said. “When I came into Burton’s dressing room, he locked the door and invited me for a drink. After he’d had a couple, he put his hand up my dress and played with my pussy.”

  “How quaint!” Elizabeth said. “His antics don’t amuse me. In Manhattan some time ago, Tyrone Power invited me to his apartment. I went with Roddy. Burton was there.”

  “Roddy asked me if I knew that Burton was fucking Ty,” Elizabeth said. “I told him I wasn’t jealous because I’d already had Ty. My affair with Ty didn’t work out because I lacked the right sexual equipment. Burton was such a show-off. He amused us by giving these devastating impressions of John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier. As I was leaving, he was singing bawdy songs while Oscar Levant accompanied him on the piano.”

  The producer of Cleopatra, Walter Wanger, visited Elizabeth at The Dorchester, telling her that Fox was having its doubts about casting Peter Finch as Julius Caesar and Stephen Boyd as Marc Antony. “Personally, I think Laurence Olivier would make the best Caesar, and Richard Burton would be perfect as Antony.”

  “Of course, Larry would be great in the role, but I have my doubts about Mr. Burton,” she said.

  He also informed her that the casting department at Fox wanted Cary Grant as Julius Caesar and Burt Lancaster as Antony.” What Wanger didn’t tell her was that the people at casting wanted either Susan Hayward or Jennifer Jones to play Cleopatra.

  Actually, Mankiewicz secretly preferred Marlon Brando in the role of Antony. “He had been so good as Antony in Julius Caesar in 1951, but he was all tied up making Mutiny on the Bounty.”

  For a brief period, the director of Cleopatra, Rouben Mamoulian, had promoted the unorthodox casting of the African-American actress, Dorothy Dandridge, in the lead role. “This idea caused heart attacks at Fox,” said Wanger. “Remember, this was 1960.”

  It was the last day of August when Elizabeth in London began work on the ill-fated Cleopatra. She suddenly got into a battle with the unionized hair-dressers of Britain when she demanded that her favorite hairdresser, Sidney Guilaroff, be employed.

  WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN...

  Peter Finch (left photo) as Julius Caesar, Dorothy Dandridge as Cleopatra, and Stephen Boyd (right) as Marc Antony

  That was not the only problem caused by Elizabeth. Right from the beginning, she came down with a virus infection and a high fever, accelerated by the unseasonably cold and bitter weather in London that September. Near the end of October, Fox was already out two million dollars for a picture that had originally been budgeted at that exact amount.

  On the night of November 13, 1960, Elizabeth’s condition worsened, and Lord Evans, the personal physician of Queen Elizabeth, was called to The Dorchester. After a brief examination, he phoned an ambulance and had Elizabeth delivered to the privately run London Clinic. There, she was examined by Dr. Carl Goldman, who spoke to Dr. Rex Kennamer, her private doctor in Los Angeles. He immediately flew to London to be by her side.

  She suffered from meningitis, an inflammation of the protective membranes covering the brain and spinal cord.

  She recovered in a week, but so far had not done one day’s work on Cleopatra in three entire months. Lloyds of London, which held the insurance policies on Cleopatra, asked Fox to replace her with Kim Novak, Marilyn Monroe, or Shirley MacLaine. Why Lloyds would select Monroe remains a mystery, as she was known for holding up production more than any other actress in Hollywood.

  Upon Elizabeth’s release from the clinic, she and Fisher flew back to California, where she underwent a period of rest and recuperation at Palm Springs.

  In the wake of Elizabeth’s illness, during her recuperation, Fox shut down production at Pinewood.

  Under threat of getting fired, Mamoulian, from London, placed an urgent call to Elizabeth in California. During that dialogue and in the aftermath that followed, she double-crossed him by advising him to resign “until the heat blows over.” She then made a commitment that she would refuse to work on the picture unless Fox re-hired him as its director. Mamoulian subsequently resigned.

  Rouben Mamoulian

  Spyros Skouras

  But the very next day, Elizabeth called Spyros Skouras at Fox and told him that unless he hired Joseph L. Mankiewicz, she wouldn’t make the picture.

  Mamoulian never forgave her for her betrayal.

  Skouras phoned Mankiewicz in The Bahamas, where he was staying with Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy.

  Mankiewicz came to Fox demanding (and getting) hard terms. In addition to his other compensations, the studio had to pay three million dollars to buy him out of a previous commitment he’d made to direct Lawrence Durrell’s Justine for Figaro Films.

  Elizabeth and Fisher were back in London at The Dorchester in time to attend Walter Wanger’s New Year’s bash at the elegant Caprice Restaurant, where they welcomed in 1961.

  She wore a Dior gown that was the color of her eyes. She showed so much décollétage that a Peeping Tom waiter accidentally spilled hot coffee on her, eliciting a scream.

  During the first week of January, 1961, Mankiewicz arrived at Pinewood to take over the direction of Cleopatra. Once in London to direct Elizabeth again, as he had done in Suddenly, Last Summer, he learned that only ten minutes of completed film had been shot “and all of it is unusable. The sets are a disaster, and the fucking script is unshootable.”

  Mankiewicz wanted Finch and Boyd replaced and a new production launched “from scratch,” as he said.

  He called Elizabeth with his grand scheme. “I want to make two motion pictures, one starring you and Rex Harrison in Caesar and Cleopatra, and the other starring Richard Burton and you in Antony and Cleopatra.”

  ***

  Rex Harrison was free and willing to sign on for the role of Julius Caesar. Getting Burton to play Marc Antony would be far more difficult and costly.

  Burton was pleased with the casting of his friend, Harrison, in the role. “Larry [a reference to Laurence Olivier] would have hammed it up too much.”

  Spyros personally disliked Burton—“I can’t understand Welsh,” he said. “Not a word he says.”

  When Burton heard that, he said, “Anything that comes out of Spyros’ mouth is Greek to me.”

  At the time, Burton was appearing on Broadway in Camelot, co-starring with Julie Andrews, Roddy McDowall, and Robert Goulet.

  Wanger and Mankiewicz persuaded Burton to sign for $250,000. Fox also paid $50,000 to buy Burton out of the Broadway production of Camelot. The understanding at the time was that he would be paid that initial fee for what was to have been three months of work on Cleopatra. But, in his own words, “I would make a fortune in overtime when Cleo ran months behind in production.”

  Burton had one condition that he insisted upon. He wanted his current lover, Roddy McDowall, to be cast in Cleopatra in the role of Octavian. That meant that Roddy would also have to leave the Broadway production of Camelot. Even before flying to Rome, Roddy and Burton agreed that he would play Octavian as “campy and sexually ambiguous.”

  Dick Hanley told Elizabeth that “Marc Antony, so
I hear, is pounding the ass of your boy Roddy every night.”

  “You’re just jealous, you bitch,” she responded, mocking him. “I bet you wish Burton was pounding you.”

  “You got me there,” Dick said.

  During the run of Camelot, “Richard was more Lancelot that Arthur toward women,” said co-star Robert Goulet. “As a bisexual, he had double the choices than the rest of us regular guys.”

  His dressing room at Broadway’s Majestic Theater, where Camelot was playing, became known as “Burton’s Bar,” drawing the likes of Mike Nichols, who would later direct him in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? along with Tammy Grimes, Jason Robards, Jr., Robert Preston, Alec Guinness, Lauren Ba-call, and Burton’s co-star in Camelot, Julie Andrews.

  When he arrived in Rome, he would “reopen” Burton’s Bar in his dressing room near the sound stages of Cleopatra.

  He was known for romancing his leading ladies, including Susan Strasberg, Jean Simmons, and Claire Bloom, but he told Roddy, “Elizabeth Taylor leaves me cold, like yesterday’s poached egg.”

  When he spoke to Goulet, Burton had a different point of view. “I’ll have Taylor within two days of my arrival in Rome. That’s guaranteed.”

  In New York, between telling his entourage Rabelaisian tales, he revealed that he’d met “the fat little tart” before, at Stewart Granger’s house in Hollywood. He added, “that was before she married that busboy,” a reference, of course, to Eddie Fisher.

  Sometimes, when select members of the Camelot audience came backstage, Burton entertained them with a perfect mimicry of Elizabeth’s voice. When he impersonated her, his speech was riddled with obscenities.

  Roddy warned him, “You just might fall for her.”

  “No, she’s too dark for me,” he said. “I also heard she has to shave all that black hair that covers her body. On my women, I like hair on her head and in only one other place.”

  In New York, preparing for his departure for Rome, Burton told a reporter, “I guess I’ve got to don my breastplate once more, this time to play opposite Miss Tits.”

  Before accepting the role of Antony, he had been trying to establish himself as a serious actor, winning the 1961 Tony for Best Actor on Broadway for his role as King Arthur in Camelot. He was tired of being labeled as “Britain’s Brando” or “the Poor Man’s Laurence Olivier.”

  He’d married a Welsh actress, Sybil Williams, in 1949, but was never faithful to her. He often preferred sex with actresses, his list of seductions including everyone from Lana Turner and Zsa Zsa Gabor to Barbra Streisand.

  Even though married to Sybil for more than twelve years, on Broadway, Burton was also romancing Pat Tunder, a beautiful blonde chorus girl who was only twenty-two.

  Joan Collins, who had been his co-star in Sea Wife (1956), a British drama shot in Jamaica about the survivors from a torpedoed British refugee ship during World War II, found Burton’s greenish-blue eyes “piercingly hypnotic.” But she was turned off by other aspects of his physicality. “His back and shoulders were deeply pitted and rutted with pimples, blackheads, and what looked like small craters.’

  From 1944 to 1947, he had served in the Royal Air Force as a Navigator. “Near the end of the closing months of the war, soldiers fucked each other a lot,” Burton said. “Blokes who might die tomorrow didn’t care where they put it.”

  Biographer Melvyn Bragg asserted that Burton had sex with many men in the RAF [Royal Air Force] during World War II, “when hundreds of thousands of men fumbled for comfort and release in the male warrior bondings of the war.”

  Before meeting Burton to work with him, Elizabeth read a profile of him by Barbara Gelb in The New York Times : “A tug of war began in him at the age of two after the loss of his mother, and the two sides of his nature have never been reconciled. He appears to be at once self-possessed and uneasy with himself, unsure where the caustic Welsh clay stops and the silken veneer begins. He is simultaneously the dark and self-destructive Celt and the glossy ideal of classical actor, circumspect and disciplined. In his bemusement over which of these selves to champion, he often takes refuge in a third and safer self—the little boy lost.”

  Richard Burton and his wife Sybil Williams Burton in 1962

  Both Burton and Roddy were well aware the night then-Senator from Massachusetts John F. Kennedy and his beautiful and elegant wife, Jackie, came to see Camelot. Backstage, the Kennedys greeted Burton and congratulated him, although he later heard that the future president found the music boring. Jackie, however, found the legend of Camelot fascinating. The world would realize the degree to which she was intrigued after the assassination of her husband in Dallas in 1963.

  Whereas Senator Kennedy planned an immediate return to Washington, Jackie planned to remain in New York for two days of shopping.

  “I asked her if I could call on her at the Carlyle and discuss the legend of Camelot with her,” Burton later confided to Roddy. “To my amazement, she agreed.”

  The following night, Roddy was eager to learn all the details of Burton’s visit to the suite of the future First Lady. “Over drinks, we spent an hour talking about Camelot,” Burton said. “We had more than one drink. She’s a fabulous dame, really fabulous. If I had a dame like Jackie full time, I swear I’d never have to cheat on her.”

  “I know, I know,” said an impatient Roddy. “The question is, did you score?”

  “A bull’s eye,” he bragged. “She’s prim and proper, but once you get her panties off, she’s a tigress.’

  ***

  In February of 1961, while Mankiewicz was working almost around the clock to complete the script of Cleopatra, Elizabeth and Fisher flew to Paris, where they boarded the Orient Express to Munich.

  She wanted to experience Munich’s version of Fasching, an annual pre-Lenten carnival, with its masked balls, one of which she planned to attend dressed as Marie Antoinette. But instead of impersonating Louis XVI, Fisher, wearing silk breeches, was to be attired as her footman.

  Very Famous People who become fascinated with Other Very Famous People: Richard Burton and Jacqueline Kennedy

  Once in her hotel suite, she seemed to be relying to an increasing degree on pain killers which were far more potent than her usual sedatives. Partly as a means of understanding her condition better, and perhaps partly as a recreational experiment, Fisher swallowed one of her capsules. As he remembered it, “In a few minutes, the entire suite was moving in front of my eyes, the furniture doing a naughty jitterbug. I collapsed on the sofa in the living room and woke up at noon the following day. I didn’t know how she could take such strong medicine.”

  Later that day, he tried to talk to her. “I was giving up my life for the thankless task of standing by watching the woman I loved self-destruct,” he recalled.

  Challenged by him, she fought back, and their fight escalated. She hurled vases at him, one glass object hitting him in the forehead, causing him to bleed.

  “I made a terrible mistake,” he recalled afterward. “I threatened to fly back to New York in the morning, abandoning her to her own survival not only in Munich but in London.”

  She looked at him in disbelief. She appeared in a state of shock, as if she had not heard him correctly. “Okay, Buster,” she said in a voice that would emerge from a future film, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. “You might be leaving in the morning, but I’m departing from the world right now.” Then she ran into the bathroom and locked the door.

  He knew what she was doing. He called hotel security guards to break down the door and summoned the house doctor, an elderly but efficient Berliner who may have been Jewish, having survived Hitler’s gas chambers. “I don’t know exactly what he did in her bedroom,” Fisher said. “But two interns came with equipment. Perhaps her stomach was pumped. I know I heard the sound of vomiting. The doctor sedated her.”

  Hoping the press wouldn’t find out, Fisher gave the doctor the equivalent of two thousand dollars in Deutschmarks.

  When Elizabeth woke up
the following morning, she called for him, “Oh, Eddie, darling, come to me. Don’t ever say you’ll leave me again. I’d die if you ever left me!”

  By the time he got her back to London, he noticed that she was suffering from exhaustion. He checked her into a hospital. Then he did a strange thing. Needing a rest himself, he also checked himself into a hospital, pretending he was suffering from appendicitis. Actually, he wasn’t. He allowed his appendix to be removed, even though it was a healthy organ.

  “I had to get away,” he later said, “I had to have someone take care of me and wait on me for a change.”

  On March 4, 1961, illness struck again, as Elizabeth came down with a severe case of Asian flu.

  Fisher wanted the best care for her, and summoned Lord Evans, the personal physician of Queen Elizabeth. He ordered an oxygen tent for her. Not only that, but he sent over a portable toilet, the same one used by Her Majesty when she traveled to remote corners of the Commonwealth.

  Fisher also ordered around-the-clock nurses for her. In the early morning hours, a night nurse noticed that Elizabeth’s face was turning blue, and she was gasping for breath. She called the desk and shouted for them to get a doctor quick.

  In a touch of irony, some doctors were having a late-night reception at The Dorchester. Among them was Dr. J. Middleton Price, one of the best anesthesiologists in the British Isles. He was rushed to Elizabeth’s suite. “She had turned blue as the sea,” he said, “and was unconscious. I estimated that if I had not gotten there, she would have died in fifteen minutes.”

  The doctor picked her up by the heels and tried to make her lose some of the congestion in her chest. That did not succeed. Next, he stuck his finger down her throat, hoping to make her gag and breathe again. Still, nothing happened. He then pounded her chest,

  “So the doctor started gouging at my eyes,” Elizabeth related in her memoirs. “He gouged like mad and I opened my eyes…I took a deep breath, which kept me alive.”