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

by Darwin Porter

  Elizabeth agreed to follow “my man” to Toronto for rehearsals of Hamlet. Gielgud, who had seduced Burton when he was a very young man, had finally contracted to direct him.

  Burton feared Gielgud would be patronizing and condescending, partly because the aging director believed, with some justification, that he himself had executed “the definitive Hamlet” already. [Gielgud had performed in six acclaimed productions and more than 500 spectacular performances of the Danish Prince on the stage and for British radio beginning in the late 1930s. No stranger to theatrical controversy, and highly opinionated, Gielgud had famously detested Laurence Olivier’s film interpretation of the same role in 1948.]

  Burton, with Elizabeth, checked into their five-room lodging (“the Viceregal Suite”) at Toronto’s King Edward Hotel on January 28, 1964. They were charged sixty-five dollars a night. Their suite had been occupied in years past by both Presidents, Eisenhower and Kennedy.

  Immediately upon entering the hotel, they passed an evangelist minister who whipped out a prominent sign whose slogan was specifically, it seemed, directed at them: DRINK NOT THE WINE OF ADULTERY.

  During rehearsals at Toronto’s O’Keefe Theatre, whereas Gielgud passionately wanted Shakespeare’s poetry to carry the play, Burton was “more interested in discovering the Bard’s meaning.”

  As Graham Jenkins, one of Burton’s brothers, wrote: “The result was an undisciplined and unpredictable Hamlet who, at times, had the rest of the cast running around in circles.”

  “The one thing that surprised me about them was that Elizabeth called Richard ‘Fred’ and he called her ‘Agatha,’” said Gielgud.

  Elizabeth noted that during trial runs, Burton wasn’t clicking with the audience. She placed an emergency call to Philip Burton, an authority on Shakespeare and Richard’s longtime mentor, and persuaded him to come to Toronto for additional coaching.

  The appearance of this “second director” on the scene infuriated Gielgud. But Philip’s magic seemed to work, and Burton delivered a more dynamic performance after his coaching. Philip had previously supplied behind-the-scenes direction to his star pupil at the Old Vic in London during the 1950s.

  Whereas Burton may have believed that Elizabeth’s legs were too short, like Errol Flynn, he didn’t like the way his own legs appeared in tights, or in doublet and hose. “In tights, my legs look like a pair of stockings idly thrown over a bed rail,” he told Gielgud.

  In a wry and campy mood, Gielgud responded “Yes, but they’d look great wrapped around my head.”

  It was therefore agreed that Hamlet was to be performed in modern dress, and Burton subsequently appeared at every performance in a black V-neck sweater and black trousers.

  Of course, during the run of Hamlet, as was to be expected, some members of the audience were put off by Shakespearean characters sipping martinis and puffing on cigars.

  February of 1964 was a big month for Elizabeth, who was celebrating her thirty-second birthday and expecting jewelry from Burton. The month also saw the opening of Burton’s stage version of Hamlet in Toronto.

  Attending opening night, an elegantly dressed Elizabeth was booed viciously by the audience. This delayed the curtain for nearly half an hour.

  Taking her seat, she sat with her head erect and her back straight, refusing to be intimidated by the hostile response to her presence. To those hissing her, Elizabeth had obviously become the femme fatale of the 20th Century. She represented vamp, vixen, she-wolf man eater, slut, tart, the devil incarnate in women’s clothing, the Serpent of the Nile.

  “My God, they viewed me as Gloria Wandrous in Butterfield 8,” she said, “the role I hated.”

  One night in Toronto, Burton played Hamlet as a homosexual, as Olivier had done in London on occasion. “I inserted a few lines from Marlowe, and no one noticed.”

  The Toronto Star called Burton “artistically impotent,” but The Toronto Telegram hailed his performance as a masterpiece. During its entire run in Toronto, Hamlet sold out at every performance.

  The production was interrupted when Elizabeth and Burton finally decided to fly away to get married.

  ***

  Inconveniently, the province of Ontario, in which Toronto is located, did not recognize Mexican divorces as legally valid. Consequently, in the wake of her (Mexican) divorce from Fisher, Elizabeth flew with Burton to Montréal, in the more permissive French-speaking province of Québec, which did. It would be her fifth trip down the aisle of marriage.

  Aboard a morning flight on a chartered Lockheed Jet, the couple was accompanied by America’s most famous publicist, John Springer. En route, Burton revealed to Springer how he’d proposed to Elizabeth during the filming of Becket the previous summer.

  “I proposed in front of Peter O’Toole at this pub in Berkshire near Windsor Castle. I looked straight into Elizabeth’s eyes and said—‘I want to marry Elizabeth, and I will marry her.”

  She responded, “You’ve said it, Richard.”

  Before 10am, aboard the flight to Montréal, Burton was already drinking heavily. “Why are you so nervous?” she asked him in front of Dick Hanley. “After all, you’ve been sleeping with me for two years.”

  In Montréal, she was married in two separate ceremonies on the same day, first in the Consulate of Mexico, for legal reasons, and again as part of a religious ceremony within the Royal Suite at the Ritz-Carlton Montréal.

  As his best man, Burton made an unusual choice in Robert Wilson, his African-American dresser.

  Elizabeth wanted to be married by a rabbi, but none was available. Other members of the clergy also turned down this request from “this wanton woman and home wrecker.” Finally, the Rev. Leonard Mason, from the Unitarian Church of the Messiah, agreed to perform the ceremony at the Ritz-Carlton.

  Based on a costume she’d worn during her first scene with Burton in Cleopatra, Elizabeth arrived looking stunning in a canary yellow chiffon Irene Sharaff gown with lots of décolletage. Her hairdo was spectacular. Her own hair had been augmented by thirty-four falls priced collectively at $600. Hyacinths were woven into the resulting hairdo to create the effect of an elaborate diadem, halo, or circle of light, depending on who was looking at it.

  The Burton/Taylor wedding in Montréal

  Harry Winston would have been proud of her jewelry, which included a diamond necklace and matching diamond-and-emerald ear drop earrings, a gift from Burton.

  After the first ceremony, Burton said, “It’s a fairytale. The ‘Boy from Nowhere’ has just married the world’s most celebrated beauty.”

  Back at the Ritz-Carlton, Elizabeth stayed in her bedroom preparing herself again and redoing her make-up. The minister, Burton, and the other guests waited for her.

  “Isn’t that fat little tart here yet?” Burton asked Dick Hanley. “I swear to you she’ll be late for the Last Bloody Judgment.”

  Partly because of its dysfunctional timing, the second segment of the wedding in Montréal was a curious anticlimax to what had been one of the 20th century’s most publicized romances.

  A wedding party of ten, including her parents, had been flown in, as had Burton’s agent, Hugh French. The actor Hume Cronyn, who had been cast as Polonius in Hamlet, was also a guest.

  From afar, Elizabeth’s longtime friend, Oscar Levant, who was not at the wedding, delivered the best quip—“Elizabeth is always a bride, never a bridesmaid.”

  Other commentators tried to match Levant’s humor: “Imagine!” wrote Walter Winchell. “Marrying every husband you meet.” Bob Hope quipped, “Want a steady job, gals? Try out for flower girl at Liz Taylor’s weddings.”

  Before their departure from Montréal, Burton announced, “Elizabeth is like a mirage of beauty of the ages, irresistible, like the pull of gravity. She has everything I want in a woman. She is quite unlike any woman I have ever known. She makes men not want to know any other woman, believe me, sincerely. I think of her morning, noon, and night. I dream of her. She will be my greatest happiness—forever, of cours
e.”

  Back in Toronto, Burton discovered his dressing room filled with gifts, mainly kitchen utensils. He picked up two rolling pins and turned to Dick. “These might come in handy if I have to beat the wench if she gets out of hand.”

  On the first night after his return from Montréal, just before another Toronto performance of Hamlet, Burton came out on stage to make an announcement: “Some of you have come to see Alfred Drake; some have come to see Eileen Herlie, some have come to see Hume Cronyn, and some have come to see Elizabeth Taylor.” [Elizabeth virtually had to be pushed out from the wings at this point.]

  Instead of boos and hissing this time, she received deafening applause.

  Burton later referred to it as “orgiastic cheering.”

  At the end of that night’s performance, Burton received six curtain calls. After the first three, he stepped in front of the curtain. “I would like to quote from the play,” he said to the audience. “Act Three, Scene One. ‘We will have no more marriages.’”

  That comment produced another round of standing ovations.

  ***

  From Toronto, Elizabeth and Burton headed to Boston with Gielgud’s production of Hamlet. She told him that “Bostonians are more reserved than the more provincial Canadians. I don’t think we’ll attract such hysteria.”

  She was wrong. Never again in their lives would they be faced with such a massive onslaught of hundreds of fans. It became impossible for them to get off the plane. After waiting an hour, the pilot got permission to steer the plane into a hangar so he could unload his passengers.

  Safely in the back seat of a limousine, Burton and Elizabeth were driven to the Copley Plaza Hotel. But as they entered the lobby, a mob of some one thousand unruly fans assaulted them. The police, hotel security, and private security guards could not control the screaming throng.

  At one point, Elizabeth became surrounded by the mob. Someone shouted, “See if it’s a wig!” A burly woman yanked out a hunk of Elizabeth’s hair, while another tore at her diamond earring. Not succeeding at unfastening it, she nonetheless caused Elizabeth to bleed.

  Burton fought his way back to her. With the help of two policemen, he managed to clear a pathway for her to the elevator. She’d been knocked down, falling against a wall, which dislocated her shoulder. In great pain, she was put to bed, and a doctor summoned.

  The next morning, Burton was seen in a gun shop in Roxbury, outside Boston, purchasing a .22 caliber pistol and ample amounts of ammunition.

  Burton was so furious, he even called Ted Kennedy, complaining, “Elizabeth was almost killed. You’d better talk to the Boston police.” Kennedy obviously had some influence, especially on his “home turf” of Massachusetts. When the Burtons arrived that night at the Schubert Theater, a “police curtain” quickly materialized around them.

  In Boston, Sammy Davis, Jr. came to see them and convinced her that Burton’s wardrobe was not “mod” enough. She commissioned his tailor, Cy Devore, to design an entirely new wardrobe for him. “My aim is to have him known as ‘the Sinatra of Shakespeare,’” a reference to Sinatra’s stylish way of dressing.

  While Elizabeth and Burton were still in Boston, before their invasion of Broadway, there were rumblings from Washington, D.C., attacking them.

  Michael Feighan, a Roman Catholic Democratic congressman from Ohio, representing Cleveland, formally demanded that the State Department revoke Burton’s visa and refuse his re-entrance into the United States. The request was denied. When Feighan learned that Burton would be bringing Hamlet to Broadway, he requested that the play be shut down because it was “immoral.” When that initiative failed, he asked that all the lights on Broadway be dimmed on the play’s opening night as a protest against its content. That final request was not honored, either.

  ***

  In Manhattan, the Taylor/Burton brood was camped out in the Regency Hotel on Park Avenue at 61st Street, wrecking two separate suites.

  By now, Elizabeth in particular was known for trashing every suite she occupied and paying damages. First, she allowed her dogs to run wild without being walked. The carpets ended up smelling like urine. Her children were often out of control. Draperies were ripped, and mattresses always had to be replaced because of the many drinks spilled over them. And for some reason, perhaps the result of drunken arguments, mirrors were often broken or cracked.

  At Hamlet’s opening at Broadway’s Lunt-Fontanne Theater in April of 1964, masses turned out to catch a glimpse of Elizabeth and her latest husband. New York’s finest were summoned to block off the street, as thousands of fans and onlookers flooded the streets around Times Square in ways that evoked the crowds of New Year’s Eve.

  “I left Broadway as King of Camelot, and I have returned as Prince of Denmark,” Burton told the press.

  On opening night, the biggest insult to Burton came from the famous Broadway producer, Harold Clurman, who got up and walked out in the middle of an important scene being performed by Burton as Hamlet. In the lobby of the theater, Clurman told a reporter, “Burton is the story of an actor who has lost interest in his profession.”

  But Walter Kerr of The New York Herald Tribune was kinder, claiming that Burton is “one of the most magnificently equipped actors living.” Others used words such as “electric” and “virile” to describe his performance.

  Burton himself defined his performance to critic Kenneth Tynan with irony and a touch of self-satirization: “I played it myself—that is, Richard Burton playing Richard Burton playing Hamlet.”

  Elizabeth had not seen Monty Clift in many months, and invited him to Burton’s opening night on Broadway. Backstage, she masked the shock on her own face when she saw his ravaged face. He’d aged at least ten years since she’d seen him. “Oh, Bessie Mae,” he said, falling into her arms and weeping.

  She invited him to join her at the after-the-show party that Hamlet’s producer Alexander Cohen was staging in the Rainbow Room at Rockefeller Center.

  Newsweek reported that the party at the Rainbow Room, sixty-five stories above Manhattan’s street level, “was the scarcest ticket in New York.” Among the invited guests were Michael Wilding and Margaret Leighton. Wilding presented Leighton to Elizabeth with the words, “I have found renewed happiness with her. The old pain has gone.”

  In the Rainbow Room, Burton was seen dancing with Princess Lee Radziwill, sister of Jacqueline Kennedy. Even the Gish sisters, Dorothy and Lillian, showed up as ghostly reminders of the vanished heyday of silent films.

  The next day, Elizabeth went to have drinks with Monty at his Manhattan brownstone, a building he had recently purchased. It had been almost four years since he’d faced the cameras, because no company would insure him. She asked him what he thought of Burton’s Hamlet. “He’s nothing but a reciter, a total phony running around the stage.”

  In spite of the insult, she was eager to put him back to work. She came up with the odd suggestion that they perform The Owl and the Pussycat together on stage. “A comedy together,” she said. “It will be a sell-out.” (Ironically, although after her experience with Butterfield 8, Elizabeth had vowed that she’d never again appear on screen as a prostitute, the female character she wanted to play in The Owl and the Pussycat was that of a hooker.)

  She was convinced that if Monty didn’t find work, he would die. Tennessee Williams had given her a copy of a novel written by a close friend of his. It was Reflections in a Golden Eye, written by Carson McCullers. The producer, Ray Stark, wanted to spearhead a film version, even though it clearly defined the leading male character as a latent homosexual.

  Elizabeth told Stark she’d post a million dollars to insure Monty and herself.

  For two full years, they continued to discuss and plot their dreams for Reflections, but Monty died on July 23, 1966. In the aftermath of Monty’s death, Marlon Brando agreed to interpret the role of the homosexual, opposite Elizabeth, and the movie was finally released in 1967 by Warner Brothers, with John Huston called in to direct.


  Burton suggested that Elizabeth, Monty, and himself remake the 1947 The Macumber Affair, which had starred Gregory Peck, Joan Bennett, and Robert Preston. Although such a film could have meant good box office, no studio expressed an interest.

  Frank Sinatra came to see Hamlet one night, although he dozed off a bit. He came backstage, too, with kisses for both Burton and Elizabeth. “Even in my heyday with the bobbysoxers during the war, I didn’t get crowds like you guys are getting. Keep wearing those sparklers, Liz.”

  Truman Capote also visited backstage and told them he was amazed at the masses gathering every night on Broadway at Forty-Sixth Street.

  “That’s because we’re sex maniacs,” Elizabeth said. “They’re coming to see a pair of sinful freaks.”

  Capote put a different spin on it. He said, “It’s the allure of wealth, diamonds, minks, exotic perfume— intoxicating !”

  “During the run of Hamlet, Richard’s drinking capacity continued to amaze,” claimed Graham Jenkins in his memoirs, Richard Burton, My Brother. “When I was with him, he always managed three or four powerful martinis before going on stage, and these were just a top-up of the day’s intake. Nonetheless, he was there, on time, for every performance.”

  Actor Stanley Baker, an old friend, came to visit them at the Regency after placing at least twenty calls, finding it impossible to get either of them on the phone. Finally, he reached Burton, who invited him to come up to their suite.

  Baker had a film proposal for an upcoming movie entitled Sands of Kalahari, a drama about five men and one woman stranded in the Kalahari Desert. He told them what they already knew: They were the most gold-plated couple in the history of show business. “Now is the time to capitalize on it.”

  Even though Elizabeth and Burton liked the script, and wanted to be part of it, they could not agree on terms. “Liz wanted a million dollars; Richard half a million, but they also asked a higher percentage of the gross than we could afford,” Baker said. “Too damn bad.”