by Sam Kashner
A canny businesswoman, who had learned early at the feet of masters—including Louis B. Mayer, Mike Todd, and her own mother—Taylor had formed her own company, Taylor Productions, Inc., which then lent Elizabeth’s services to MGM for $500,000, with an additional $50,000 per week over the shooting schedule, plus per diem. Budgeted at $3.3 million, the production would end up paying Burton $500,000—which was $300,000 more than the combined salaries of all the other players. Burton—who had feared that Le Scandale had ruined his career—now saw his Cleopatra salary doubled (as Eddie Fisher had predicted). Elizabeth left her children in Switzerland, where they were in boarding schools, and joined Richard in London.
The couple would play Paul and Frances Andros, a powerful shipping magnate and his about-to-be-unfaithful trophy wife. During the twenty-four hours they are trapped at Heathrow, Elizabeth/Frances nearly runs off with her gigolo lover, played by Louis Jourdan. Once Burton and Taylor agreed to star in the film, Rattigan set about adapting his screenplay to take advantage of their notoriety. The V.I.P.s would be a disguised film version of their lives, this time with the emphasis on Elizabeth Taylor’s penchant for eye-popping jewelry. In the film, we first see the couple descending from the heavens, like gods, in their private helicopter. On the way to the airport terminal in their Rolls-Royce, Richard/Paul gives Elizabeth/Frances an exquisite diamond bracelet. Already Burton was fulfilling one of Taylor’s basic requirements in a lover: a willingness and the ability to drape her in stupendous jewelry. She had learned early how to extract gifts from her directors and producers, like tributes paid to royalty by their subjects. Queens are meant to accept tribute, and, having already become the first actress in history to be given a million-dollar-plus salary for her services, she was the closest thing America had to royalty. She had become accustomed to deference. Even her name befitted a queen. Her love of jewelry—diamonds especially—would be a leitmotif running throughout her life, apotheosized in the publication of Elizabeth Taylor, My Love Affair with Jewelry, a coffee-table book replete with vivid photographs of her most famous jewels and the circumstances surrounding them. One of Elizabeth’s early chroniclers, the literary biographer Brenda Maddox, speculated that Elizabeth’s attraction to diamonds was a kind of atavistic need to deflect the rapt gaze of her admirers. Her penchant for jewels was not lost on Andy Warhol, who believed that women live longer than men because they wear diamonds, which—because of the mystical powers of crystals—intensify and protect the life force. Perhaps he was on to something: Elizabeth has so far outlived four of her seven husbands, despite her often perilous health.
One of her few pleasures in Rome, besides falling in love with Richard on the set of Cleopatra, had been Elizabeth’s discovery of the Italian jeweler Bulgari’s “nice little shop” on Via Condotti. “I used to visit Gianni Bulgari in the afternoons,” she later recalled, “and we’d sit in what he called the ‘money room’ and swap stories.” One day, when they’d managed to evade the paparazzi, Richard told Elizabeth, “I feel like buying you a present!” Off they went to Bulgari’s back room, where Richard announced his intention to buy a gift, but it had to be under $100,000. Gianni showed them a pair of lovely but rather small earrings. Richard and Elizabeth exchanged glances—by now he knew her tastes. “Try again,” he told the jeweler.
By the end of the afternoon, they departed with a stunning, emerald-and-diamond necklace with a pendant that could be detached and worn as a brooch. The diamonds surrounding the pendant were 10 carats each, and the necklace cost well over $100,000, but Elizabeth pointed out to Richard that with the detachable pendant, “it’s really like getting two pieces for the price of one.” She would later complete the set (or, rather, Richard would) with a matching emerald-and-diamond ring, pendant earrings, and a beautiful bracelet—all part of what Bulgari described as “the Grand Duchess Vladimir Suite.”
Elizabeth would later have a little fight with Anthony “Puffin” Asquith, the director of The V.I.P.s, over wearing the brooch as part of her Givenchy-designed costume. The producer, who had accepted the uninsurable Elizabeth Taylor, would now have to insure the fabulous jewel. However, the quick-thinking director persuaded her to allow a copy to be made for filming.
After Burton’s and Taylor’s work was done on Cleopatra, the real power struggle began. Horrified over the movie’s tremendous cost, which had forced Skouras to sell off 260 acres of 20th Century-Fox’s back lot to the real estate developer William Zeckendorf (turning the vast acreage into present-day Century City), the studio’s founder, Darryl F. Zanuck, swooped in to save his company from destruction. In a stockholders’ takeover, he forced out Skouras, reclaimed his former title as studio head, and fired Cleopatra’s producer, Walter Wanger. After being ignominiously fired, Wanger would never produce another film. Zanuck then turned his attention to Mankiewicz.
Burdened with twenty-six hours of film, the director had planned to bring out two parallel movies: Caesar and Cleopatra and Antony and Cleopatra, and he set about editing the two epics. Zanuck, however, hated the idea. First, it was not yet clear how the worldwide publicity surrounding Taylor’s adulterous affair with Burton would play out at the box office. Hedging his predecessors’ bets and trying to salvage what he could, Zanuck fired Mankiewicz and took over editing the film himself. While Mankiewicz had been wrestling with the myriad disasters of Cleopatra, Zanuck had smoothly overseen production of The Longest Day, flying in Richard Burton from Rome, with none of the Sturm und Drang. Zanuck took over the final edit and produced one four-hour epic, served up with an intermission. Its final price tag, including distribution costs: $62 million ($434 million today), the most ever spent on a Hollywood movie at that time. The final cut ran slightly over four hours, making it the longest film ever released. It was not just the longest, it was also the heaviest: each print of Cleopatra weighed six hundred pounds. Even the publicity kit weighed more than ten pounds. Finally, when all was said and done, Wanger sued 20th Century-Fox for breach of contract, and the studio sued their two stars for $50,000, claiming that the bad publicity of their “scandalous conduct” had harmed the value of the film. They countersued, and the lawsuit was eventually dropped.
Mankiewicz was heartbroken. With the film taken from his hands and drastically cut, he felt that some of his finest work was sacrificed, and that the final product—though it had its spectacular moments, such as Cleopatra’s grand entrance into Rome—lacked cohesion. Elizabeth, too, felt that the truncated version did Richard a disservice, leaving some of his best scenes unseen. Instead of portraying a strong character who gradually gives in to his weaknesses, Elizabeth complained, “they cut the film so that all you see is him drunk and shouting all the time, and you never know what in his character led up to that. He just looks like a drunken sot.”
It was a disappointment that would haunt Mankiewicz the rest of his life, eventually turning him into a rather bitter recluse, nursing his grudges in a baronial country house in Bedford, New York, being trotted out to various film festivals toward the end of his life to receive honors for movies he’d made decades earlier. Elizabeth, in later years, was very much aware that Mankiewicz blamed the demise of his career on her and Burton’s “indulgences,” though she would speak graciously about her former director whenever she had the opportunity.
Signed by de Grunwald and free of the onerous work of Cleopatra, Burton and Taylor arrived in London on a cold morning in December of 1962. The hoopla that had surrounded the couple in Rome continued, but now it was mostly excited fans hounding them. They were mobbed at Victoria Station and fled in separate cars (Elizabeth in a blue Jaguar and Richard in a blue station wagon). When they arrived at the Dorchester Hotel on Park Lane, where they had taken adjoining penthouse suites, the lobby was awash with journalists and photographers. (Elizabeth had always stayed at the luxurious Dorchester, beginning with her days as a child actress. It was home to her.) Other actors signed to the film, including Rod Taylor, Linda Christian, and even Orson Welles, checked into the hotel v
irtually ignored by the press, which continued to swarm around Burton and Taylor.
Burton was still married to Sybil and he agonized over his dilemma. There was no doubt that he was infatuated with Elizabeth. What had begun as a conquest quickly became an obsession—Elizabeth’s body was a marvel to him, the eighth wonder of the world. He reveled in her voluptuousness. And Elizabeth was in thrall to him sexually as well—his rough skin, his intense, blue-green eyes, his voice, his smell, his “arrogant hair” all delighted her senses. “Imagine having Richard Burton’s voice in your ear while you are making love,” Elizabeth later recalled. “It drowned out the troubles, the sorrows, everything just melted away.” She found Richard “an incredibly sexy man. I was the happy recipient of his reputation as a man who knew how to please a woman. Being unfaithful to Richard was as impossible as not being in love with him.” In short, they made love everywhere they could—in boats, in dressing rooms, once in a catamaran, once in a photographer’s studio. Burton was phenomenal in that way. Alcohol didn’t seem to tamp his ardor or his gifts as a lover, at least in the beginning of their grand affair.
And she had already catapulted him into a higher sphere of fame, opportunity, and wealth. He was heady with the sheer dazzle of the life they had begun together, unreal as it seemed to one who might have otherwise entered the Welsh mines. Sir Laurence Olivier, whom Burton greatly admired, had earlier sent him a telegram, demanding, “Make up your mind—do you want to be a great actor or a household word?” To which Burton famously replied, “Both.” Now, it seemed as if both fates were within his grasp. But could he sacrifice Sybil—and his two beloved young daughters, Kate and Jessica—on the altar of his ambition?
It turned out that he could, though, in the words of his friend, the actor Robert “Tim” Hardy, “it left him with an incurable wound.”
Burton had met Sybil Williams in 1949 on the set of The Last Days of Dolwyn, Emlyn Williams’s movie about Welsh villagers under threat of being bought out and relocated to England so their valley can be flooded to bring drinking water to London. Like the 1986 movie Local Hero, the film has a moral dilemma at its heart: should the Welsh villagers give up their valley, their way of life, their centuries-old homes, their birthright, in exchange for modern flats in a big city and a little pocket money? Burton plays an earnest young villager who’s desperate to improve his English in order to impress the daughter of the English landowner. (Burton himself—when he was still known as Rich Jenkins—had fallen in love with the English tongue and the opportunities it offered a poor Welsh lad; he had practiced his diction as much as eight hours a day, reciting reams of poetry and speeches from Shakespeare’s plays.) The villagers, led by Burton’s adoptive mother in the film, played by Dame Edith Evans, resist the lure of easy money and cling to their beloved valley, until an accidental murder seals their fate. Burton is heartbreaking in the film—a poetic, virile youth full of hope and idealism, a country swain in love with a woman above his station, reciting his English verses to the wind, whose right action brings about a wrong result.
Sybil Williams had been hired as an extra to play one of the Welsh villager girls. Though not a beauty, she was lively and intelligent. Robert Hardy, who capped his distinguished stage and film career by playing the irascible Siegfried in the long-running BBC adaptation of All Creatures Great and Small and is known to a new generation of fans as Cornelius Fudge in the Harry Potter movies, knew and admired Sybil. “She came from the valleys, but her brother was quite a smart lawyer. As a family and financial stratum, they were above [the Jenkinses].” Her father had been an official at the mines where Burton’s father, and all of his brothers, save one, had toiled. She was nineteen when she married the twenty-three-year-old Burton, and because she was Welsh, she kept Burton grounded in his Welsh life throughout his meteoric rise in the London theater and their more modestly successful jaunt in Hollywood. Burton’s huge family loved her, especially Burton’s idolized older brother, Ifor Jenkins. Indeed, everyone who knew her loved her, and despite Burton’s dalliances (including an intense love affair begun with Claire Bloom), Burton and Sybil seemed devoted to each other. “It was admirable, that marriage,” recalls Hardy, who used to visit the couple in their Hampstead home.
Sybil adored Burton, but she must have known about his constant philandering. She allowed him his flings with actresses high and low, as long as he returned to her in the end. It wasn’t that she was masochistic, necessarily; she was realistic. His fame, attractions, and gifts were prodigious in an era when men drank and played hard and ruled the roost and got away with it all—at least for a time. A certain amount of tomfoolery was tolerated—even expected—as long as the paterfamilias supported his family and stayed devoted to his wife and children. That was the Welsh—and not only the Welsh—code of behavior. And, for a time, it worked.
Now Burton agonized over the decision staring him in the face. “One just hoped he would come back to Sybil,” Hardy recalled. “Then it became bit by bit obvious that he wouldn’t and that was just awful.” Burton’s prodigious capacity for drink seemed to double.
Two weeks after Burton’s arrival in London, Sybil brought her two daughters to their cottage in Hampstead, inviting Burton’s beloved older brother, Ifor, and his wife, Gwen, to stay with them. Sybil was sure her Lothario husband would tire of his new paramour, as he had of past lovers, and return once again to his family. So, for a time, Burton was trapped between two households: the adjoining penthouses he and Elizabeth shared in the Dorchester Hotel while making The V.I.P.s, and the Hampstead cottage to which he would slink when Elizabeth was occupied elsewhere. He usually spent days, when he wasn’t needed on the set, in Hampstead, but his nights were spent with Elizabeth.
Occasionally, Sybil would show up on the set of The V.I.P.s, throwing everyone in a tizzy. Peter Medak, the Hungarian director of later acclaimed films The Ruling Class, The Krays, and Romeo Is Bleeding, was a twenty-five-year-old assistant director on The V.I.P.s at the time. He recalled that Burton would “show up for wardrobe fittings with Sybil, and the next day he’d suddenly show up with Elizabeth. I don’t know how he did it. Sybil would say, ‘No, you can’t wear those trousers—it doesn’t look right.’ And Elizabeth would appear and she would countermand it.” As comic as this might seem—the two women trying to dress their man according to their own tastes—it was devastating to all parties. Burton called it his period of “suspended animation,” but it was more dramatic than that. Ifor—the man among men whose masculinity and good character Burton most admired—was furious with his brother for putting Sybil through the public horrors of his affair. Ifor spent time with Sybil at the Hampstead cottage, and at one point the two men found themselves in a shouting match, screaming through the mail slot of the cottage’s white door.
Disheartened, Burton returned to London and promptly drank himself into a stupor. His old friend and fellow Welshman, the actor Stanley Baker, found him passed out and plied him with three pots of black coffee to bring him around. Graham Jenkins, Burton’s youngest brother, who would often serve as his stand-in on movie sets, beginning with The V.I.P.s, worried that Burton was close to a complete breakdown, drinking suicidal amounts of alcohol.
Sybil, for her part, was not unmoved by her husband’s suffering, and she accompanied Burton to an intimate dinner party given by Stanley Baker and his wife. During the course of the evening, Elizabeth pestered the Baker residence with constant phone calls, interrupting their dinner and reminding Burton of her own vulnerability. “He was one haunted boy-o,” Baker said about his friend. Adding to his burdens was the disapproval of his entire Welsh family, who adored Sybil.
“The family wasn’t happy about the affair,” recalled Graham. “He was ordered to come down to Wales to face them. We were Welsh Baptists. Divorce was not in our vocabulary.” But Burton refused, claiming that his shooting schedule on The V.I.P.s made a visit impossible. That’s when Graham offered to stand in for him, launching his occasional work as Burton’s stand-in: “We lo
oked quite a bit alike, except he was five feet ten and a half inches and I was five feet eight and a half inches. I’m in several of the long shots, and not even my wife, Hilary, could tell us apart in the movie.”
Ifor tried to persuade Burton that his obligation was to his family. Ifor was the closest Burton had to a father figure, replacing Dadi Ni, his feckless, whiskey-sodden father, but even he couldn’t persuade Burton once he’d resolved to divorce Sybil and marry Elizabeth. “If Ifor couldn’t get him back,” recalled Graham, “no one could. But I do think that if he could, he would have been married to both women.” Needless to say, he couldn’t.
So, Elizabeth sent Richard to Hampstead to ask Sybil for a divorce. When he arrived at Sybil’s door, however, all his resolve melted. Sybil asked him if he planned to stay, and he answered, “Yes,” and he probably meant it at the time. When he was with Sybil, he vowed to stay with Sybil. When he was with Elizabeth—well, she was an unstoppable force, a force of nature, a gale-force wind. Nothing, no one, could resist her once she’d made up her mind. Robert Hardy himself, though devoted to Sybil, felt Elizabeth’s immense charm and power when Burton first introduced them. “At her best, she was immensely impressive,” he recalled. “The color of her eyes was enough to turn a saint into a devil, and I wouldn’t say that Richard was a saint.”