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

by Darwin Porter

  During the run of the stage performance of Hamlet, the film version of The Night of the Iguana opened in New York. Ava Gardner, that onetime barefoot Tarheel girl from Grabtown, North Carolina, received the best notices. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times attacked Burton’s performance as the defrocked priest. “He is spectacularly gross, a figure of wild disarrangement, but without a shred of real sincerity.”

  “He was impossible to live with for a week,” Elizabeth told Dick Hanley. “I went one entire week without getting fucked.”

  Iguana, in spite of some attacks, turned out to be a blockbuster success. “If I ever run into that Crowther, I’ll stick my Welsh fist up his ass,” Burton said. “I’ve got the Midas touch at the box office.”

  In June of 1964, Elizabeth agreed to make her stage debut on Broadway at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater, the site of Burton’s ongoing performances of Hamlet. She and Burton, as coached and rehearsed by Philip Burton, were commissioned to read poetry-and-prose selections for the $100-per ticket fund-raiser, World Enough and Time, a title inspired by the poetry of Andrew Marvell (“To His Coy Mistress”). It was understood that profits generated by the event would be donated to Philip Burton’s nearly bankrupt school, the American Musical and Dramatic Academy.

  Among the famous guests were Dina Merrill, Myrna Loy, Lee Remick, Kitty Carlisle Hart, Patricia Kennedy Lawford, Lauren Bacall, Anita Loos, Alan Jay Lerner, and Adolf Green. Drunk and drugged, Monty also showed up. Elizabeth believed that “the cream of the cream was turning out to see me fall on my face.”

  The event also attracted New York’s handsome mayor, John Lindsay. Elizabeth told Dick Hanley, “I’ve always had a crush on this guy.” She demonstrated that after her performance, when the Mayor came backstage to congratulate her. “She gave him a sloppy wet one,” Dick said.

  Burton read from a mélange of Shakespeare, D.H. Lawrence, and even “words of wisdom” from John Lennon. Also included was a rendering of the Twenty-Third Psalm, in Welsh (by Burton) and in English (by Elizabeth). Appearing in a Grecian gown with diamonds and emeralds, Elizabeth recited “Three Bushes” by William Butler Yeats, and “How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count the Ways,” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. She fumbled several lines during her recitation of Thomas Hardy’s The Ruined Maid, a poem selected as a means of poking fun at the Burtons’ public image.

  “And now you’ve gay bracelets and bright feathers three!

  ‘Yes, that’s how we dress when we’re ruined,’ said she.”

  “This is getting even funnier than Hamlet,” Burton said.

  Sitting behind Bea Lillie (Lady Peel), Emlyn Williams heard Lillie say to Carol Channing, “If she doesn’t get bad pretty soon, I’m leaving.”

  But Elizabeth recovered quickly from her fumble and finished the show with style. Later, the New York Herald Tribune said that Elizabeth “giggled her way through a series of bungled lines.”

  One night, she had the flu and remained in her suite at The Regency. That night, as Burton was delivering one of Hamlet’s soliloquies, a heckler booed him, the first time that had ever occurred to him as a performer. He was furious. By the time the curtain went down, he was enraged. That led him to join two cast members in a heavy round of drinking. By the time he returned to his suite at The Regency, he was totally intoxicated and very belligerent.

  When he walked into the living room, he found Elizabeth entranced by a Peter Sellers movie, I’m All Right, Jack (1959), the first one she’d ever seen with the actor.

  “Cut off that fucking TV,” Burton yelled at her. “I was booed tonight.”

  “It happens to all stage actors,” she said. “Get over it.”

  “I said cut off that bloody TV!” he said.

  He stormed into the bedroom and came out about fifteen minutes later, barefoot and clad only in his jockey shorts. He was infuriated to discover that she was still watching that Sellers movie. He gave the TV a kick, knocking it over, but cut his foot on the broken glass. Elizabeth was horrified when he couldn’t stop bleeding.

  That’s when he revealed to her that he suffered from hemophilia. “It is the disease of kings,” he told her, referring to the many inbred royal families of Europe who suffered from the same disease.

  An ambulance rushed him to the hospital where he told her that he came from a family of “bleeders.” Four of his brothers also suffered from the same disease.

  At the hospital, Burton received a dozen stitches to stop the bleeding and he was forced to limp through Hamlet for the next two weeks.

  Five nights after his hospital emergency, Burton encountered Eddie Fisher in a Manhattan restaurant, and graciously invited him to The Regency for a drink.

  Fisher later wrote, “I arrived in the middle of an argument. Elizabeth’s make-up was smeared, her voice loud and shrill. She was furious about something, and I thought, ‘I was married to that woman, this wild thing,’ Burton was trying to soothe her, as I watched him walk around their suite, apologizing, straightening up, retrieving things she dropped. I said to myself, ‘There once went I.’”

  “We agreed to bury the hatchet,” Fisher said, “but there was no love lost.” He was eager to let Elizabeth know that he had a new “high-class girlfriend” in Pamela Turnure, who was at the time press secretary to Jacqueline Kennedy. “But Pamela has made one big mistake in our affair. She’s fallen in love with me. As for Jackie, I’ve met her several times. She’s told the world that the public would lose respect for her if she ran off with Eddie Fisher. She may not run off with me, but I can tell she has the hots for me. The last time Pamela, Jackie, and I had dinner together, Jackie couldn’t keep her hands off me.”

  Five nights later, the Burtons came together with Fisher and Turnure in Manhattan at the Copacabana for the nightclub act of Sammy Davis, Jr. Fisher’s party included the Chicago gangster, Sam Giancana; producer Walter Wanger of Cleopatra; Mike Todd, Jr., and Jennie Grossinger. Fisher was still romantically linked to Turnure.

  That night, Burton told Elizabeth, “Hamlet is coming to an end, and we should return to making films for big money. We’ll co-star together in a movie called The Sandpiper.”

  Burton’s New York run of Hamlet was the most successful run of that play in theatrical history, with 136 performances. Ironically, it surpassed the previous Broadway record of performances, 132 in all, that Gielgud had chalked up in any of his single runs.

  Burton became so carried away with the Bard that he contemplated directing Elizabeth as Lady Macbeth in some vaguely defined future enterprise.

  His Hamlet played to standing room only for every performance for seventeen weeks on Broadway, grossing more that $6 million, of which he received fifteen percent.

  “Deodorants come and go, but there’s only one deodorant that works in this town. It’s called Success.” Elizabeth said.

  ***

  The Sandpiper (1965), some of which would be shot at Big Sur along the coast of central California at the end of 1964, would be the third film to star Elizabeth and Richard Burton, who was now her husband.

  For the film, Elizabeth demanded her usual million dollars. “I always call it my ‘giggly million’ because I always giggle when I get a check with all those zeroes. It makes Richard happy, too, because he says he wants to be ‘rich, rich, rich.’”

  Burton drew a salary of $750,000, which he told director Vincente Minnelli “pisses me off. I want a cool million like Liz. After all, my dick is bigger than hers. Besides, let the record speak for itself. I am the world’s leading box office attraction.”

  He exaggerated. Although listed among the top ten, he was not number one.

  Elizabeth’s contract had granted her director approval and she had chosen Minnelli, who had helmed her in Father of the Bride and Father’s Little Dividend, Burton wasn’t thrilled with the choice of Minnelli. “Maybe he’ll turn The Sandpiper into a musical and insist I do a soft-shoe.”

  She had known Minnelli during the course of his marriage to Judy Garland, and she also knew his yo
ung daughter, Liza Minnelli. But she immediately clashed with him by demanding that Sammy Davis, Jr., play her other love interest in the movie.

  “I’m about the most liberal guy in Hollywood, but there was no way I could cast a black guy in 1964 to play love scenes with Elizabeth,” Minnelli said. “She staged a bitter battle, but we had to give the role to Charles Bronson.”

  In his memoir, Hollywood in a Suitcase, Davis claimed that he had signed a contract to do the film, but had to withdraw because of an early opening of Golden Boy on Broadway. This does not appear to be the case. “The racial issue was paramount,” Minnelli claimed.

  Vincente Minnelli with his infant daughter, Liza Minnelli

  The Sandpiper had actually been conceived as a vehicle for Kim Novak, who in many ways would have been far better suited to the role than Elizabeth.

  Originally, the producer and the scriptwriter, Martin Ransohoff, had wanted to film The Sandpiper eight months earlier, based on a screenplay that would have starred Elizabeth with Marlon Brando. [Ransohoff was the producer who had given the world The Beverly Hillbillies beginning in 1962.] Production was delayed, he claimed, “because Elizabeth wanted to hold Burton’s hand during Hamlet and during the filming of Iguana in Mexico.”

  Minnelli privately told his friends that casting Brando and Novak might have generated more on-screen chemistry than Elizabeth and Burton. “If Sammy Davis, Jr., had also been cast as the second lover, that ebony-on-porcelain chemistry of the lavender blonde and the little boy from Harlem would have been something to see. After all, Sammy and Kim were rumored to have been lovers off the screen.”

  Minnelli also said he found the story “ludicrous and dated” and compared it to a watered-down version of W. Somerset Maugham’s Rain which introduced the character of prostitute Sadie Thompson.

  Dalton Trumbo, one of the original members of the Hollywood Ten accused of spreading communist propaganda to the American populace through the entertainment industry, worked on the script but didn’t bring his usual magic to it. He said, “I didn’t want to add an interracial romance to an already over-burdened story,” referring, of course, to Elizabeth’s original insistence on casting Sammy Davis, Jr.

  Exterior shots were filmed at Big Sur along the central California coast, but Burton and Elizabeth, for tax reasons, insisted that the rest of the film be shot outside Paris.

  Frocked in Becket, defrocked in The Night of the Iguana, Burton was playing yet another ecclesiastic in The Sandpiper. He’s willing to remove his “dog collar” with fewer reservations this time around as he surrenders to Elizabeth, a nature-loving unmarried mother living in a sea-fronting house near a coven of Bohemian artists at Big Sur.

  In the film, the character of Elizabeth’s illegitimate nine-year-old son, Danny Reynolds, was played by Morgan Mason, who was actually the son of James Mason. Minnelli had wanted to cast one of the Wilding teenagers [ i.e., one of Elizabeth’s sons] in the role, but Elizabeth, perhaps for artistic reasons, refused.

  Eva Marie Saint played the third lead. Cast as Burton’s castoff wife in the film, “she was the stand-in for Sybil Burton,” according to Minnelli. “The screenplay in some way and in some lines paralleled the real life drama of Burton and Taylor.”

  Burton and Minnelli did not get along and conflicted over the interpretation of several scenes. “The film was a bore,” Burton said. “Minnelli had once been a good director, but he was past his prime. I didn’t like the part, and it bored me, but as I told Minnelli, who wore lipstick every day, ‘For the money, Liz and I will dance.’”

  In the script, Charles Bronson portrays a bohemian sculptor who carves a life-sized nude of Elizabeth au naturel. Edmund Kara was commissioned to produce a voluptuous and anatomically correct nude of Elizabeth, but she refused to pose for it. He found a model whose body resembled Elizabeth’s. As a means of replicating Elizabeth’s face, Kara used a life mask. It took three months to transform a block of redwood into a nude replica of Elizabeth.

  “I don’t know what Elizabeth thought of my statue,” Kara said, “but Burton had praise for it.”

  “Bravo!” Burton said. “Kara, you’ve even captured the dimples on her ass.”

  “I think nude scenes are absurd,” Elizabeth said, “and I think it’s really strange the way women, respectable women, will strip for magazines. The ones who don’t need the money—it can only be a narcissistic complex, a vanity of the body so profound that they must show it.”

  When the filming was over, Kara got his sculpture returned from the prop room of MGM, although they demanded half the proceeds if he ever sold it. Instead of selling it, he decapitated the head to display as a work of art in its own right.

  He then planned to use the block of redwood as the raw material for other sculptures. As he told author C. David Heymann, “I brought in a friend with a saw to decapitate it. He took off the head straight across the shoulders and then cut away the arms. He was holding the chain saw rather suggestively in front of his crotch. The blade protruded like a giant phallus. So I said to him, ‘Go ahead, give it to her!’ He plunged the blade deep into her vagina and ripped her. When he completed the cut, thousands of big army ants came marching out. They had been living inside the wooden love goddess’s uterus for months.”

  It was the 60s, and everyone went to Big Sur... Two views of Elizabeth Taylor as a bohemian precursor of the hippies

  Graham Jenkins, Burton’s brother, said, “Allowed a free choice, I believe Rich would have turned down The Sandpiper. He knew from the beginning that it was a bad film.”

  Elizabeth got along with Minnelli much better than Burton, and she noted he still had a sexual interest in Tom Drake, who had a supporting role in the movie.

  In Raintree County, Drake had played her brother. “To get a job in films, poor Tom is still having to drop trou for Vincente, just like he did when he played The Boy Next Door,” Elizabeth said. “For god’s sake, Tom was born in 1918.”

  The Boy Next Door reference was to his role opposite Judy Garland in the 1944 Meet Me in St. Louis. Minnelli had directed him in that, and had become sexually involved with the handsome young boy.

  Elizabeth also confessed to Dick Hanley that “Tom and I were both in love with Peter Lawford at the same time.”

  ***

  Although Elizabeth and Burton had recently married, they had previously lived together for two years, which caused him to refer to her as “my old lady.” Sometimes, in the British fashion, he referred to her as “old girl.”

  “I may be married,” he told Minnelli, “but I’m not dead. I don’t see much chance for me to knock off an extra piece. On this picture, I hear that Eva Marie Saint lives up to her last name.”

  At that point in his life, Elizabeth seemed to be fulfilling his heterosexual needs. But, as a bisexual, he had an eye out for a handsome, charismatic male. He found such a person in a talented architect, interior designer and decorator, Edward (Eduardo) Tirella, who had been hired to work on the movie’s sets at Big Sur.

  Born in Dover, New Jersey, Tirella was tall, charming, smart, athletic, and very good-looking. Growing up in an Italian family, he secretly wanted to be a singer. When he sang in clubs, his velvety voice evoked Mel Tormé.

  Ransohoff had hired Tirella to design the bohemian artist’s “shack” which Elizabeth’s character would occupy as her oceanfront home in the movie. Tirella also made a brief appearance onscreen in a beach setting with Elizabeth and Bronson.

  Ransohoff praised Tirella’s artistic talent, claiming that “anything he touches can turn into something beautiful. He has hands of gold.”

  Like Burton, Tirella was a bisexual, and had lent both his professional and private talents to both Peggy Lee and the very closeted Alan Ladd.

  As a hat designer at Saks Fifth Avenue, he had sold some of his more extravagant creations to Hedda Hopper, Elizabeth’s friend and sometimes ally of long ago, and Mae West.

  Soon after his work on The Sandpiper, he would begin a destructive and event
ually fatal relationship with Doris Duke, the richest woman in the world.

  Duke’s biographer, Stephanie Mansfield, wrote: “A striking figure in his turtlenecks and in his sporty convertible car, Tirella was known as promiscuous in the homosexual world. But he never had any lasting relationships. They were only one-night stands.”

  Tirella got a weekend singing gig in San Francisco, and he invited Burton to drive with him there for the weekend, not only to hear him sing, but to see more of the city, of which he had only a passing acquaintance.

  Technically, Elizabeth had been invited, too, but she told Dick Hanley, “I really think Tirella, and Richard, too, views me as so much extra baggage.”

  Actually, Elizabeth had a very good reason for not wanting to go. Deborah Kerr’s husband, the sophisticated scriptwriter and novelist, Peter Viertel, was slipping into Monterey, close to the set of Sandpiper, and he wanted Elizabeth to come and visit him at his hotel suite.

  “I adore the man,” she told Dick. “We had such a grand time in your apartment in Puerto Vallarta…I’d like to see him again. Of course, we’ll be very discreet.”

  While Tirella was away in San Francisco with Burton, Elizabeth had a secret rendezvous with Viertel.

  During their short time together at Big Sur filming The Sandpiper, Tirella and Burton became “bonded at the hip.

  This caused some jealous tension between Burton and Minnelli,” Dick later said. “Minnelli soon tired of Tom Drake and wanted Tirella for himself. When Burton went off for a second weekend with Tirella to San Francisco, Minnelli seemed furious, but repressed his anger.”

  Dick later emphasized that during Burton’s time away from her, Elizabeth did not embrace a self-image as an abandoned wife or lonely widow. During the second weekend that Burton was in San Francisco with Tirella, Jose Balaños showed up for a dalliance with her at a hotel/resort outside Monterey.

  “He was still hoping that Elizabeth might jump-start a film career for him,” Dick said, “but she was more interested in replicating the pleasures that Jose had managed to provide for Marilyn Monroe. She also wanted to gossip about the circumstances associated with the weeks prior to her death.”