by Sam Kashner
By now, Burton was drinking more than ever—Bloody Marys before noon, straight vodka for lunch. As one of Burton’s biographers observed, “the boozing was prodigious, but, for reasons which escaped the doctors who checked him out at the time, he seemed to be walking through the furnace of alcohol unscathed. The system took everything he threw at it.” And he wasn’t the only one. “The drink was the problem,” Medak believed, “with both of them. I remember Elizabeth in the dressing room, sitting in a makeup chair, and she’d be drinking a glass of water. And she’d say, ‘Can you fill this up?’ And I’d put some water in it, and she’d say, ‘No, I didn’t mean water. I meant vodka.’”
But then, almost everyone on the set was drinking. After all, it was 1963, but in essence it was still the 1950s, in terms of the complete acceptance of alcohol and cigarettes as relatively benign, grown-up pleasures. In fact, it was a sign of character—certainly of masculinity—to drink. Teetotalers were looked upon with suspicion, as health food faddists, or moralists or namby-pambies or goody-goodies or, worse than all of that, as bores.
Elizabeth would accompany Richard on pub crawls through London, where he would introduce her to his old theater and rugby chums—those who were still talking to him, like his Oxford friends, which included Hardy and writers Terence Rattigan, Robert Bolt (who wrote A Man for All Seasons), and John Morgan, a journalist and intellectual. She kept Burton’s “Welsh hours,” devoting herself to Richard as Sybil had done before her, impressing him with how well she fit into his world. She could drink and swear and sing bawdy limericks with the best of them. That always won them over.
And she could also make fun of herself with Burton’s crowd. At one point, she’d sat silent during a long discussion of the theater. Finally, in a melodramatic gesture, she threw her head back and declaimed, “I know nothing about the theater. But I don’t need to. I’m a star!”
Rod Taylor, the strapping Australian actor best known for his roles in H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine and Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, was cast in The V.I.P.s to play an Aussie businessman, head of a tractor company who writes a bad check to save his company from a hostile takeover. He recalled, “Everybody was extremely thirsty on the set. It wasn’t like going to Hollywood lunches and having iced tea. I mean, the bar inside the studio was constantly packed. You definitely did not get through lunch without a bottle of wine…And, of course, Dickie [Burton was called by a number of names by his friends and family: Dick, Dickie, Rich, and—by Elizabeth—the more dignified Richard] would say, ‘Have a tot of brandy,’ and this would be ten thirty in the morning. Which seemed perfectly normal to everybody.” Medak remembered Burton coming back to the set after lunch completely drunk, and very much the worse for wear. He’d rip into Asquith, demanding, “What kind of fucking shot is this? This is ridiculous!” Asquith, a gentlemanly, upper-class fellow who hated confrontation, would visibly crumble. “Puffin was very slight,” Medak recalled, “and when Burton was yelling at him, he would just cringe until he practically disappeared into himself. There was nothing he could do, because the guy was absolutely out-of-his-mind drunk. So Asquith decided to handle it by barely saying anything as long as he got [Burton and Taylor] in the frame and let them say their lines. Burton wasn’t always like that, though—just when he was drunk. We all knew that after lunch—look out!”
It didn’t help the equanimity of the set that Elizabeth enjoyed Richard’s alcoholic outbursts and encouraged them whenever she could. She loved passion and drama; as one brought up on fawning compliments, she needed the bracing reality of a good fight. It made her feel alive. “Richard loses his temper with true enjoyment. It’s beautiful to watch,” she once said. “Our fights are delightful screaming matches, and Richard is rather like a small atom bomb going off.” They fought explosively off set and on.
“I think the effect Burton had on her was beyond even that of Mike Todd,” Eddie Fisher—now out of the picture—wrote in retrospect. “Her relationship with Mike had been animalistic—she had never met a man like him. It was a great love affair. Mike was very clever, very shrewd, and very strong and possessive. But Burton went far beyond that. Burton was crazy. She needed his approval as an actress and as a woman, and by withholding it, he made her need him desperately.” Fisher was right about one thing. “Mike [Todd] was a bit of a madman,” Elizabeth admitted, “and, in his way, so was Richard Burton. I truly believe I can be content only with a man who’s a bit crazy.”
Richard and Elizabeth seemed to particularly enjoy having an audience, and they enjoyed heaping insults upon each other. Burton was fond of calling Elizabeth “my little Jewish tart” (because she had converted to Judaism to marry Mike Todd); Elizabeth trumped that by ridiculing his pockmarked skin. “I think they had fights for the glory of making up,” Rod Taylor believed. “It was foreplay to them.” Their reconciliation would sometimes take the form of extravagant gifts, including a Van Gogh Elizabeth had bought at Sotheby’s for $257,000 (a mere $1.8 million in today’s dollars), which she lugged up the Dorchester elevator, kicked off her shoes, and hammering a nail into the wall, hung the painting over Burton’s penthouse fireplace herself.
Elizabeth was proud of the fact that she could keep up with Richard—even drink him under the table. She was truly a man’s woman, and she could drink, belch, and swear with the best of them. It was, for her, an important antidote to her staggering beauty and hothouse upbringing. It made her human. It kept her real.
Despite the amount of vodka she was consuming, and the fact that she loved food and would easily put on excess weight, she was still stunning on film. The camera, as they say, adored her. “You couldn’t have been more beautiful or a bigger movie star than she was then,” Medak believed. “When I saw her at six in the morning, when she used to come in for makeup, I often wondered, what was the point of making her up? She was breathtaking in some of those outfits, fantastic in that fur-lined coat and hat.” Even so, Medak recalled, “everything had to be incredibly lit, which took forever. That’s why we never did that many shots. We had a wonderful cameraman, Jack Hildyard, and the way he photographed her, he must have been in love with her. But I remember, even then, her weight went up and down. One week she was chubby, and the next week she was thin. You can almost see it in the film.”
Finally, after five weeks of shooting at the Pinewood Studios, where a giant replica of Heathrow’s new, modernist Terminal 5 had been constructed, complete with massive staircase and modern décor, Burton made up his mind. In January, he asked Sybil for a divorce, and she agreed.
He would throw his lot in with the gods of fame—or infamy. It did not seem to bring him peace of mind, however; throughout the film, torment is visibly stamped on his boxer-poet’s face.
In later scenes, that baleful stare may have also been the result of a sound drubbing he received at the hands of some London hooligans. It was a Saturday. He had slipped into Cardiff to see a rugby match with Ifor Jenkins, his beloved older brother, and when he returned to London’s Paddington Station, he was set upon by thugs. “I was caught off-balance and felt my feet giving way,” he later wrote about the incident. “I was damned helpless…lying on the snow unable to move…They just kicked and kicked me.” The street toughs nearly forced his eye from its socket, and injured Richard’s neck and back. He was rescued by a taxi driver, but he refused to be taken to the hospital. The thugs who beat him probably didn’t recognize the actor, but the taxi driver who drove him back to the Dorchester did, asking en route, “Are we in a film?” Once again, at that moment, life and artifice had become interchangeable.
Burton had to wear an eye patch for several days, and his neck injuries would plague him in later years. Of great interest to Medak, Burton contacted the notorious Kray brothers, brutal twin gangsters from East London, and asked them to hunt down his attackers. They lurked around the set for several days, keenly interested in the whole motion-picture business. Whether they succeeded in finding Burton’s attackers is unknown, but Medak was impress
ed enough to make a celebrated film about the twins in 1990, The Krays.
In April of 1963, Life magazine put its imprimatur on the adulterous couple, in a stunning cover photograph of the two—Burton brooding into the camera, Taylor in dramatic profile against a black backdrop—to accompany the feature, “CLEOPATRA, Most Talked About Movie Ever Made.” The apotheosis was complete. Elizabeth had won her dangerous game of courting the press and the paparazzi, of grabbing with both hands what she most desired. “Burton and Taylor in their public adultery,” Burton’s biographer Melvyn Bragg reflected, “seemed to be saying, ‘We love each other, we know we are destroying marriages and disrupting families, but love is all you need and all that counts. And we are not going to hide it. Furthermore, folks, we don’t give a damn.’”
When Cleopatra opened at last, on June 11, 1963, the trade press and the New York Times gave it mixed reviews, though Brendan Gill, writing in the New Yorker, loved the film’s spectacle. His review is virtually an effusive love letter to Elizabeth Taylor, describing her as
less an actress than a great natural wonder, like Niagara or the Alps, and it was right of the director to deal with her as the thing she has become—the most famous woman of her time, and probably of all time, who…is set pacing from bed to bath and from Caesar to Mark Antony not as the embodiment of a dead ancient queen but as, quite literally, a living doll, at once so sexy and so modest that her historical predecessor, seeing her, might easily have died not from the sting of an asp but from the sting of envy.
Several critics offered up howls of disdain. Judith Crist, in the Herald Tribune, jeered, “The mountain of notoriety has produced a mouse.” Time magazine complained, “When [Elizabeth] plays Cleopatra as a political animal, she screeches like a ward heeler’s wife at a block party.” But the most damning verdict of all was delivered by Elizabeth Taylor herself after an advance screening in London. Upon viewing the film, Elizabeth rushed back to her penthouse suite at the Dorchester Hotel and promptly threw up.
But audiences loved it. They lined up around the block to see the picture, and, in fact, it made $15.7 million domestically—the top-grossing film of 1963, though not enough to earn a profit. That would take three more years, when, in 1966, Fox was paid $5 million [$35 million today] by ABC for two television-network showings. And in the forty-eight years since it was made, Cleopatra has grown in stature. In retrospect, there is much to admire in the movie’s lush production values, its passionate performances, its rich language and ambitious storytelling. It’s truly a feast for the senses, and the Burton-Taylor affair adds another layer of cultural history to the various interwoven versions of the story (Pliny’s, Suetonius’s, Shakespeare’s, Shaw’s, Mankiewicz’s). And though Rex Harrison is a superbly poised and cunning Caesar, you can’t take your eyes off Burton and Taylor. They smolder and ignite; their fatal beauty infuses their self-wrought tragedy. They are, truly, comets unleashed.
Some of Elizabeth’s biographers have noted the almost eerie way in which her films often mirrored her private life as she was living it, often blurring the boundaries between what was real and what was imagined. It’s true that she had learned from MGM how to choose scripts that reflected the life she was living, but she was also swept away by the intense make-believe of whatever role she found herself playing. It was a kind of reverse method acting, in which she drew on her theatrical roles to provide direction and add luster to her life. Mankiewicz saw it. He commented: “She was the reverse of most other stars…For her, living life was a kind of acting.” Bragg observed that as Mankiewicz wrote the script by night while Le Scandale exploded all around him, he “wisely tried to ride it and was accused of putting in lines which were deliberately ambiguous.” Elizabeth’s anger when Cleopatra slashed Antony’s clothes after hearing of his marriage to Octavian’s sister is often cited as a moment when real life intersected the opulent fantasy of the movie: Elizabeth was heard to cry out “Sybil!” and she accidentally cut herself in her fury.
“These were larger-than-life humans,” Mankiewicz said about his fated heroes, but he may just as well have been describing Burton and Taylor themselves. “They lived against larger-than-human backgrounds…I meant to focus interest upon the foreground, where those humans destroyed themselves in the end, or were destroyed, because it turned out that they were all-too-human after all.”
But if Mankiewicz was, consciously or unconsciously, weaving the threads of their affair into his screenplay, he could not have known how closely Cleopatra would anticipate the arc of Elizabeth and Richard’s thirteen-year love affair, begun on that Roman soundstage. It’s all there, like a blueprint: their unstoppable lust, which deepens into love. Antony’s jealous supplanting of Caesar, as he rips Caesar’s necklace of gold coins from Cleopatra’s throat, demanding, “Has it been his name you cry out in the dark?” (Richard resented the many framed photographs of Mike Todd in Elizabeth’s villa, and saw the ghost of Todd—not Eddie Fisher—as his true rival. He noticed, too, that Elizabeth still wore Todd’s wedding ring on her finger, a memento mori blackened and twisted from Todd’s fatal air crash.) The opulence of Cleopatra’s palace would pale next to the extravagance of Burton-Taylor’s life together, with its yacht, its jewels, its furs, its entourages, its champagne and caviar, the five-star hotels, the Van Goghs and Matisses and Pissarros. And just as Antony and Cleopatra had plotted to rule together a third of the Roman empire, Burton and Taylor would form a company to produce movies that would capitalize on their notoriety, becoming—for a time—Hollywood’s royalty. Antony is introduced in the film as a man redolent of wine; as his world collapses, he feeds his despair with more and more alcohol. Just so, Burton. When Cleopatra reproaches him and slaps his face, Antony knocks her to the ground. Elizabeth was already familiar with this apache dance.
Indeed, Mankiewicz created for Burton, in the role of Antony, the prototype for what would endure as the actor’s greatest theatrical persona: his embodiment of self-pitying despair. The director saw Antony as essentially weak, a man “who stood always in Caesar’s footsteps—right up to and into Cleopatra’s bed.” In an interview for Life magazine, Mankiewicz described Antony as “a masculine façade, constantly threatened by Caesar, the all-powerful father figure. His love for Cleopatra was, in the beginning, as guilt-ridden and frightening as that of a son in love with his father’s mistress.” Burton embraced that vision of Antony, explaining to the English drama critic Kenneth Tynan that the director/screenwriter had fashioned a man “who talks incessantly to excuse his own failure to become a great man…. The fury is there and the sense of failure is there, but sometimes all that comes out is a series of splendid words without any particular meaning.”
After Antony abandons his soldiers to follow Cleopatra’s departing barge at the disastrous Battle of Actium, all he has left is his shame. When his remnant of an army finally deserts him and he and Cleopatra are defeated by Octavian, Antony can find no one to dispatch him with an honorable death. He cries out, “The ultimate desertion? I from myself! Is that what I aimed for all my life? Will you finish me now?”
In art and in life, Burton would often feel he had made the ultimate desertion: “I from myself.”
Perhaps Mankiewicz could sense the arc of their grand passion, and the current of injurious self-censure that lay within Burton. At one point, when Antony has foolishly dismissed his closest lieutenants before the Battle of Actium, Cleopatra realizes that something fateful has just occurred.
“Antony, what has happened?” she demands of him.
To which he replies, “To me? You have happened to me.”
Once he made up his mind to be with Elizabeth, two years would pass before Richard would see his children, Kate and Jessica. And Sybil, whom he once cherished, would never speak to him again, not ever, not for the rest of his life.
3
A YEAR IN THE SUN
“My father would never say he drank a lot.
He’d say he was a man of vast drinking habits.”
&nb
sp; —RICHARD BURTON
“Ever since I’d been ten, I’d been a child star with no privacy.”
—ELIZABETH TAYLOR
Elizabeth Taylor was born to an upper-middle-class family with doting parents and an adored older brother, and was raised on an estate in Hampstead Heath, where she had her own pony and wanted for nothing. Originally from Arkansas City, Kansas, Francis Taylor—a shy but dapper man with a good eye for paintings—had moved to England to buy Old Masters for his wealthy uncle, an art dealer named Howard Young. It was Young who had launched Francis in the business, setting him up in one of his galleries in New York before sending him abroad. Francis Taylor opened his own gallery in London’s Old Bond Street. Francis and Sara’s two children, Howard and Elizabeth, were thus Americans born in England.
For a while, the Taylors lived well—some would say well beyond their means—partly on the generosity of others. Howard Young kept an eye out for his nephew (and his own vested interests), and Sara and Francis were invited to make use of a spacious, sixteenth-century cottage on an estate in Kent belonging to Victor Cazalet, a wealthy art collector and well-liked Conservative Member of Parliament, who had bought paintings from Francis Taylor. Cazalet and Sara were both keen believers in Christian Science.
Elizabeth lived a fairy-tale life, given her own horse at the age of five, sent to the same ballet school as Princess Elizabeth and her sister Princess Margaret. She was fussed over not only by her mother but by Cazalet himself. It was rumored that his generosity to the Taylors stemmed from an affair he was having with Sara, and it was also rumored that the bachelor MP was having an affair with Francis; either scenario would have added to the unreality of Elizabeth’s storybook childhood.