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

by Darwin Porter

  THE LONG-AWAITED CLEOPATRA FINALLY OPENS

  In London, after Elizabeth sat anxiously through a private screening of Cleopatra, she later claimed “I rushed back to my hotel suite and vomited.”

  Cleopatra, at the time the costliest movie ever made, opened at the Rivoli Theater in New York City in June of 1963. It was also the longest, running four hours.

  Critics had a field day, John Coleman of The New Statesman asserting, “Miss Taylor is monotony in a slit skirt, a pre-Christian Elizabeth Arden with sequined eyelids.”

  Judith Crist, writing in The New York Herald Tribune, said that “The mountain of notoriety has produced a mouse.”

  Not all critics agreed that Taylor and Burton had produced electricity on the screen. “Elizabeth showed greater passion for Lassie than she did for Burton’s Marc Antony,” wrote one critic in Rome.

  In Hollywood, Elizabeth read daily reviews of the film. She called Peter Lawford. “How could the shits do this to me? This is the best work I’ve ever done.”

  “Then why did you vomit?” he asked.

  She slammed down the phone.

  David Susskind, a popular TV host of the day, saw Cleopatra and went on the air, claiming that Elizabeth was “overweight, overbosomed, overpaid, and undertalented. She sets the acting profession back a decade.”

  Time magazine was hardly kinder, claiming that “her screeching is like a ward healer’s wife at a block party.”

  Ironically, the usually very critical Bosley Crowther of The New York Times liked it, defining it as “a surpassing entertainment, one of the great epic films of our day.”

  Referred to as a “Hollywood Edsel,” Cleopatra, according to some sources, cost $45 million to make. Other accountants calculated the actual figure at $65 million. It would take years to recover the film’s initial cost.

  Even so, producers from all over the world wanted to immediately sign Elizabeth, with Burton, as the stars in other films.

  “We are the King and Queen of Hollywood,” Elizabeth told Burton.

  “I know, luv,” he said.

  “All you have to do is make up your mind: Do you want to sit on a throne with the Queen of Hollywood or bury yourself on some Swiss mountain with a devoted housewife?”

  “I truly understand the dilemma of to be or not to be,” he answered. “I know the question. But alas, what is the answer?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The Elusive Pursuit of Love

  After finishing Cleopatra, Elizabeth, with Burton, would embark on an illicit two-year relationship that lasted from 1962 to 1964, followed by a tumultuous marriage filled with grand passion and betrayal.

  “I am not prepared to go forward with just the armor of my love to protect me,” she told Burton.

  “Armor of love?” he asked. “Did I hear right? You’ve been around me for too long. That sounds like something I would say.”

  Before there was any possibility of marriage between them, they headed for a “honeymoon” on the Côte d’Azur, a favorite stamping ground for both of them.

  For one week, Burton and Elizabeth “disappeared from the radar screen,” according to Dick Hanley. “Of course, I knew where they were.” The romantic couple, pursued by the world press, was hiding out in a villa near Nice on the French Riviera. The German actor, Curt Jurgens, had lent them his vacation home.

  But after days of isolation, Burton got bored and seemed to miss the media attention. He asked Elizabeth to put on her diamonds and a black mink coat and go with him to Monte Carlo. She agreed, and called Princess Grace at the Grimaldi Palace to alert her of her coming. The Princess invited Burton and Elizabeth for five o’clock tea.

  That night at the Monte Carlo casino, Elizabeth made a spectacular entrance in a scarlet-colored Dior gown, mink, and diamonds. Suddenly the paparazzi knew where she and Burton were. When they left in the early morning hours, they caused a near riot, as all the press and photographers along the Riviera, and nearly half of the local citizenry, turned out to stare at them.

  After leaving Nice, Elizabeth and Burton headed northeast to Switzerland. She invited him to spend as much time as he could alone with her in her new home in Gstaad before he rendezvoused with Sybil.

  Elizabeth was all too aware that the Burtons’ alpine cottage at Céligny, with Sybil living there, was only eighty-five miles from Gstaad. At the speed he drove, he could be there in an hour.

  Even in seclusion in Switzerland, with no news coming out, Elizabeth and Burton were still a media event, their love affair being hailed as “the romance of the century.”

  Dick was put in charge of her mail, which arrived in bags from the local post office. “During that awful period,” he said, “she got only a few fan letters. Most of it fell into two categories—either hate mail or else solicitations for money. A mother from Wyoming, or some place, would write, ‘I have eight children and no husband and no money to feed them. Help me! Help me!’ A number of aspiring actors wrote to her with requests for dates when she returned to Hollywood. The really eager ones enclosed nudes of themselves, some of which were quite impressive.”

  Before their return to America, Elizabeth invited John Valva and Roddy to visit with her. During her first days in Gstaad, she was living with Burton before he returned to his own home in Switzerland, where Sybil and his two daughters were waiting for him.

  “Richard felt embarrassed to see us,” Roddy recalled. “We’d lived in Rome in that villa with Sybil and him. Now we were in Switzerland, and we were seeing him as a husband to Elizabeth. Richard knew how close John and I were to Sybil. He was so uncomfortable that he left the next day and drove to his own home for a family reunion. I think Elizabeth was sorry she’d invited us because it threatened her love nest.”

  At one point, Elizabeth became convinced that Burton would never get a divorce. When he drove to Gstaad to have lunch with her, five days later, followed by a session in bed, she made him an astounding offer. “If you won’t make me your wife, I’ll be your mistress.”

  After Roddy and John Valva concluded their long visit with Elizabeth in Gstaad, Roddy thanked her for her hospitality, with the understanding that the two lovers were returning to New York via Geneva.

  Later, she learned from Burton that Roddy and Valva had driven to his home at Céligny to stay with Sybil. “Those turncoats,” Elizabeth said. “I thought that at least Roddy was loyal to me.”

  “He loves both of you fine ladies,” Burton said.

  “I’ll never speak to the rat again.”

  Later, back in America, she heard that Valva had left Roddy and gone to live with Sybil as her lover on Staten Island. On hearing that, she called Roddy and made up with him because she had new common ground she shared with him. “Sybil turns out to have been competition for both of us,” Elizabeth said.

  [Sybil and Valva lived together for a while. When he grew tired of the relationship, he called Roddy and asked to be reinstated as his lover. Roddy refused to accept him back into his life, and Valva attempted suicide.]

  During her stay in Gstaad, Elizabeth invited Peter Lawford to visit her for a vacation. Burton was fond of Lawford and often “popped in,” in Elizabeth’s words, without an invitation from his base in Céligny. During such visits, he never spoke either of Sybil or of his daughters.

  One day, Elizabeth was checking out the designer boutiques in the center of Gstaad when she learned that Burton had arrived unexpectedly and unannounced at her house. When she returned home, she discovered a drunken Lawford giving a drunken Burton a blow-job. “Carry on, boys,” she said.

  But she got her revenge at dinner that night in the formal and very elegant dining room of the Gstaad Palace Hotel. She and Burton were already at table when Lawford entered the dining room. Raising her glass, she shouted, “Here’s to the cocksucker!”

  The next day, Burton left early to drive back home, and Lawford was still sleeping off his drunk of the night before at around eleven o’clock when Elizabeth received a surprise visitor. It was
Princess Grace, who also maintained a vacation home nearby at Gstaad. To Elizabeth’s amazement, she dropped in unannounced.

  Elizabeth later told Dick Hanley, “The bitch did it deliberately. I didn’t have make-up on, and she looked like she’d come straight from the hairdresser and a session with two make-up artists.”

  Years later, when Tennessee Williams came to visit Burton in Mexico, Burton reflected on his period of indecision and said, “I was trying to resist leaving my family for Elizabeth. I still loved Sybil. Yet I wasn’t trying all that hard. I was less than a man should be. But Elizabeth proved too great a temptation to turn my back on. Perhaps I was fooling myself, but I became convinced that she would commit suicide if I left her.”

  ***

  The weather was cold and foggy on the English Channel as a night ferry crossed over from France. Two of its passengers, arriving at Victoria Station, were the most famous couple since Romeo and Juliet.

  An armada of reporters and photographers had been alerted to their arrival. In separate cars and booked into separate suites, both of them headed for The Dorchester. They were to be married, but only on the screen in their upcoming movie, The V.I.P.s (1963).

  Although she, like Burton, had been born in Britain, he took delight in introducing her to “my England.” They attended rugby matches, drank at his favorite pubs, and watched the Oxford/Cambridge soccer match at Twickenham.

  He met with the acerbic literary critic, Kenneth Tynan, who told him about his dysfunctional romance with Marlon Brando. Burton also talked of his own romance. “You must not use sex alone as a lever, as a kind of moral, intellectual, psychic crutch to get away from your wife. You can’t say to her, ‘I’m terribly sorry, but I can’t sleep in the same bed with you any more because I simply have to run off with this infinitely fascinating girl.’”

  Elizabeth knew that by Christmas, Sybil would be back in residence in Hampstead, and she wouldn’t get to see Burton as much.

  When he dined alone with his long-time friend, Vivien Leigh, Burton confessed, “I love both of them and want both of them, but I know in time I must choose between them.”

  There were mishaps along the way. When Burton left for Wales to try to mend strained relationships with his family, he was attacked. While hailing a taxi in Cardiff, he was set upon by a group of bully “Teddy Boys,” one of whom stomped his boot into Burton’s eye. It was black for days. “Thank God that boot was not a winklepicker—or else I might be wearing a black patch for the rest of my days.”

  For Elizabeth’s thirty-first birthday, he gave her a $200,000 diamond necklace.

  She purchased Van Gogh’s Lunatic Asylum, St.-Rémy for 92,000 British pounds through the intervention of her father, Francis, who bid for it at a Sotheby’s auction. For some reason, thirty years later, she was in possession of the painting herself and failed to sell it at another auction. Her asking price was $20 million, a price higher than the market at the time would bear.

  ***

  Originally, Burton was to co-star with Sophia Loren in The V.I.P.s. Director Anthony Asquith had selected Loren for the female lead, as he remembered the box office success of her 1960 film, The Millionairess.

  However, when Elizabeth heard of his choice, she became enraged. “Burton is a tit man,” she told Roddy McDowall. “Loren has tits the size of mine, and I fear she’ll lure him away from me.” She went to Asquith and persuaded him to give her the role instead. “Let Sophia stay in Rome,” she said.

  The film was based on Vivien Leigh’s attempt to leave her husband, Laurence Olivier, for the Australian actor, Peter Finch. During the peak of the affair’s passion, Leigh and Finch made it as far as the London airport, which was fogged in, giving Olivier time to get there and talk Leigh out of leaving.

  Unlike Cleopatra, shooting of The V.I.P.s was modestly budgeted at only $3 million.

  Elizabeth was determined to complete the shooting of The V.I.P.s in just eight weeks. She claimed she was “pissed off” at Lloyds of London, which had refused to insure her.

  V.I.P.s outgrosses Cleopatra

  Top photo: Elizabeth with Burton middle photo: Oscar-winning Margaret Rutherford lower photo: Louis Jourdan with Elizabeth

  In London, filming of The V.I.P.s had already begun, and producer Anatole de Grunwald lived in constant dread that Elizabeth would get ill. But except for a knee problem, she made it on schedule through a movie that featured Louis Jourdan as her illicit lover. Orson Welles, Rod Taylor, Margaret Rutherford, and Maggie Smith were also among the illustrious cast. In smaller roles were the sexy bombshell Elsa Martinelli, TV broadcaster David Frost, and Linda Christian, who’d married Tyrone Power.

  The press still covered their every move, Time magazine writing that, “If Burton marries Taylor, he will become the fifth husband of the wife of Bath.”

  The British press became bored with the Taylor/Burton affair, and began writing of a torrid sexual tryst between Louis Jourdan and herself.

  At the time, Elizabeth denied this, “I hate having to do love scenes with Louis,” she told Asquith. “He always has bad breath.” Later, she was enigmatic about a supposed affair. “My diary will tell the complete story,” she said. “If anything is published, it will be only after both of us are dead. It’s less embarrassing that way.”

  The V.I.P.s was the second of many films in which Elizabeth would co-star with Burton: The Sandpiper (1965); Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966); The Taming of the Shrew (1966); Doctor Faustus (1967); The Comedians (1967); Boom! (1968); Anne of a Thousand Days (1969); Under Milkwood (1971); and Hammersmith Is Out (1972).

  Ironically, her last project with Burton would be entitled Divorce His, Divorce Hers (1973), which was made for ABC-TV as a two-part made-for-TV drama about the breakup of a 20-year-marriage.

  In time, Asquith became one of the most successful of British directors, ranking alongside Sir David Lean and Sir Carol Reed.

  One day at around noon, Burton asked Asquith to join Elizabeth and him for one of their “wet lunches.” Burton was already aware that Asquith had had a brief fling with Laurence Olivier during his 1934-35 filming of Moscow Nights.

  Glorious and profligate icons of the British Theatre:

  top photo: Laurence Olivier lower photo: Anthony Asquith

  Burton seemed to enjoy teasing Asquith. In front of Elizabeth, he said, “I understand that Larry has a nickname for you: Puffin.”

  “He calls me that,” Asquith said. “But the nickname actually came from my mother. She said I looked like a puffin to her.”

  “Larry also told me something else,” Burton said. “Forgive me for bringing this up, but he claimed I was better in bed than you were.”

  There was an awkward silence at the table until Elizabeth quickly changed the subject. “I’ve got a bone to pick with you. You need to make Jourdan act more masculine. I’ve seen the rushes. Many of his movements are effeminate. Please look into that. In contrast, Rod Taylor comes off as totally macho.”

  When it first opened, The V.I.P.s out-grossed Cleopatra, and Burton and Elizabeth took home a combined total of $3.5 million for their performances.

  Actually, it would be the rotund and double-chinned Margaret Rutherford who would walk off with an Oscar for her portrayal of the “eccentric and poor” Duchess of Brighton.

  ***

  Between films, Elizabeth made a TV special, Elizabeth Taylor in London, a tour of the British capital’s cultural landmarks. She was given $250,000, the highest salary ever paid up until then to a TV performer.

  One critic wrote, “Miss Taylor throughout the documentary was in competition with London—and she won!”

  Back at The Dorch, Burton was getting more lucrative movie offers than she was.

  Laurence Olivier had lobbied to play the lead in the film, Becket, but Burton eventually snared the role for himself.

  Peter O’Toole and Burton filmed Becket at the Shepperton Studios in Middlesex, outside London. On most days, unless she was too hung over, Elizabeth ordered
her chauffeur to drive her to the studio for lunch with Burton.

  A heavy drinker himself, O’Toole often joined them.

  “When O’Toole and Burton returned from lunch, they were often too drunk to appear on camera,” Dick Hanley said.

  Burton was said to have driven through the countryside of England and sometimes walked alone in its meadows. He slept at a bed and breakfast in the Cotswolds, where he woke up hearing the sounds of a meadow lark.

  By the time he’d driven back to London, he’d made up his mind. He was going to divorce Sybil. Whether he’d eventually marry Elizabeth remained an unanswered question.

  Hellraisers Acting Holy and establishing Burton’s precedent for roles as a frocked (or de-frocked) ecclesiastic

  Left photo: Richard Burton as Becket, and Right photo: Peter O’Toole as Henry II

  For several weeks, Burton had not visited Sybil and his daughters. In January of 1963, he was seen entering the Savoy Hotel in London and going upstairs to one of the suites. A room service waiter noticed him entering the quarters of Zsa Zsa Gabor.

  Three hours later, as he was making his way once again through the Savoy’s lobby, he had one of those chance encounters that happens too often in life. He encountered Sybil leaving the Savoy Grill. During their brief dialogue, he bluntly “bit the bullet,” as he later defined it, and asked her for a divorce.

  “We’ll let our attorneys handle it,” she said, before rushing out and into a taxi. He was prepared to be generous, offering a proposed settlement of around a million dollars, which was all the cash he had.

  After Burton left her, Sybil proved amazingly popular with tout London, and was seen dining with Princess Margaret and her husband, Lord Snowdon. Rex Harrison, although married, took her out dancing, as did gay actor Dirk Bogarde. Emlyn Williams was a frequent escort, as was actor Stanley Baker.