by Sam Kashner
Philip was pleased to have a new protégé. He had earlier on nurtured the career of another young Welsh actor, Thomas Owen Jones, who had won a scholarship to the prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (RADA), but had become a fighter pilot in the Second World War and died in the Battle of Britain. In a sense, Rich Jenkins would replace the lost Thomas Owen Jones, and, if anything, young Jenkins, now fifteen, seemed even more gifted. As Graham noted, “he had the rough good looks of a warrior, a stubborn jaw and compelling blue eyes. He was strong and intelligent and he could act.” (Richard’s eyes would variously be described as blue or green.)
Philip wanted Rich to have extra tutoring, but Cis and Elfred couldn’t afford it. There was no other way; Philip suggested that Rich move into his lodging house in Port Talbot, essentially sharing his rented rooms, while the older man continued to mentor him.
Cis had prayed for such an opportunity for her gifted brother—but there were unspoken concerns. It wasn’t lost on the other Jenkins men that Philip was a fortyish bachelor, and they wondered what other interest he might have in the fifteen-year-old, but the fact that Burton’s new lodgings in Connaught Street were part of a respectable household consisting of a widow and her two daughters put everyone’s mind at ease. And so Rich moved in with Burton and the great project began, Philip drilling Rich on his English for hours a day, teaching him Shakespeare and elocution and theater. He smoothed Rich’s rough manners and dressed him, at his own expense, better than he had ever dressed himself.
Rich knew this was a way to stay out of the mines forever, if he could only pass his exams and apply to RADA, as his predecessor had done. In later years, he would say that it was he who had adopted Philip Burton, and not the other way around, though Rich surely must have known that his benefactor was in love with him. It would remain, apparently, an unrequited love.
Philip made plans to adopt his protégé, but was technically too close to Rich in age to legally do so. But he could make the young man his ward, so Philip Burton approached the Jenkinses about becoming Rich’s legal guardian, which, he explained, would smooth his way academically and professionally. He had already realized that he could put Rich up for a Royal Air Force (RAF) officer’s training program, which would include a six-month stint at Exeter College, Oxford. Oxford! The son of a coal miner could only dream of such an opportunity, but the ward of a teacher, writer, and director just might pull it off. But permission was needed from Rich’s true father, Dic Jenkins, for the legal guardianship to go forward.
Rich would have to repudiate his family name and take Philip Burton’s name as his own.
But there was a problem. “However often the advantages of the Burton connection were explained to him,” Graham recalled, Dadi Ni “could never quite reconcile himself to Rich assuming another name. To him, it was a renunciation of a birthright. And the Welsh miners of the old school were very strong on birthright.” Indeed, in his whole life, his name was the only thing Jenkins had been able to give his seven sons. It was all he had.
So, when the time came to meet with Philip Burton at Hilda’s cottage in Pontrhydyfen to finalize the arrangements, Dadi Ni just didn’t show up. He’d stopped in at the Miners Arms and got drunk, his own, time-tested way of avoiding what must have seemed like a repudiation. So Richard Walter Jenkins became Richard Burton that December in 1943, and from then on would refer to Philip Burton as his father. Years later, in a documentary about Burton titled In from the Cold, directed by Tony Palmer, Joe Mankiewicz commented on Burton’s abandonment of his father’s name. “Burton’s tragedy,” he explained, “was that he couldn’t go beyond Philip Burton to access his true ancestry.” It would seem that the only thing he would inherit from his scrappy, original father was his alcoholism.
The devil’s bargain paid off. In 1951, the influential London drama critic Ken Tynan wrote of Burton, “…a shrewd Welsh boy shines out with greatness” as Prince Hal in Henry IV, Part I.
“Before I met her,” Burton confessed to Tynan in a Playboy interview, “I was making any kind of film in sight, just to get rich. Then Liz made me see what kind of rubbish I was doing. She made me do the film Becket when I didn’t want to—and it was a turning point in my career. She also made me do Hamlet.” It was to Elizabeth’s credit that she wanted to see Richard in prestigious roles, not just Hollywood money-makers. Cast as Thomas Becket in Hal Wallis’s screen version of Jean Anouilh’s play, opposite his good friend Peter O’Toole as the swaggering young Henry II, Burton found himself not just in the company of esteemed theatrical talents—including Sir John Gielgud and Pamela Brown—but in the company of a fellow actor with a capacity for drink that matched his own. Though Burton refrained from imbibing on the set, he and O’Toole would usually knock off around noon and begin their consumption—wine and champagne at lunch, then, after work, they’d go pub-hopping where Burton switched to hard liquor with beer chasers.
Taylor joined them on these merry jaunts and made sure Burton returned home safely each night to the Oliver Messel Suite at the Dorchester, where they had taken up semipermanent residence after completing The V.I.P.s. The director, Peter Glenville, was mostly tolerant, in part because his lead actors’ carousing was in keeping with the debauched bonhomie of the two characters depicted onscreen. Beyond that, Becket would admirably illustrate just what Richard had learned from Elizabeth about film acting. In contrast to the theatrical, scenery-chewing O’Toole, Burton radiates cool control onscreen. He had learned, from Elizabeth, how to underplay and how to be still, and indeed his performance is hard, brilliant, powerful. Where O’Toole is acting, Burton is being. The gemlike performance endures as one of Burton’s best. It’s all there—the voice, the control, the depth of feeling, the ease with which Anouilh’s and screenwriter Edward Anhalt’s rich dialogue falls from his tongue, his effortless, graceful masculinity. Richard was entering his great period of screen acting, beginning with Cleopatra and Becket and continuing through his next several films.
If Taylor influenced Burton’s screen acting, she, too, was influenced by her now-famous paramour. Oddly enough, the rough-hewn son of a miner was having a civilizing influence on the coddled daughter of privilege. She began to adopt a British accent. Though she was born in England of American parents, her slight English accent had been something she could put on or take off, like a designer gown; under Burton’s influence, her plummier tones returned. And, though Burton loved her earthiness, he was not overly fond of her sailor’s vocabulary, and he wanted her to tone it down. That was harder to do: since early years, Elizabeth had felt liberated by uttering four-letter words—it was her spell-breaking rebellion against the imprisonment of praise. Her newly dusted-off English accent was on display in Elizabeth Taylor in London, a CBS special for which she served as tour guide while Burton was busy filming Becket. Another record broken: she had been paid $500,000 to do it. It had also strengthened her ties to the country of her birth. Burton would seek to strengthen his ties, but not to England. To Wales.
After filming was completed, Burton returned to Port Talbot and Pontrhydyfen, with Elizabeth by his side. It was an act of boldness: he knew that his entire family—including Philip Burton and Cis—had taken Sybil’s side. Sybil was one of their own, and they loved her. But if they were baffled by Burton’s taking up with this notorious Hollywood princess, this “third-rate chorus girl,” in Emlyn Williams’s words, they were too proud to show it. Let her speak for herself seemed to have been the prevailing attitude. The couple arrived in mid-June, driving from London in a Rolls-Royce, and headed straight for a large, two-story house Burton had bought for Cis and Elfred James in the town of Aberavon. Cis kept a bedroom on the main floor available for Burton’s rare return visits to Wales.
For the grand couple’s arrival, Cis had prepared Burton’s favorite meal of scrambled eggs, hot tea, and lava bread. They ate enthusiastically, then Burton left the two women together while he met his old cronies at a local pub. The two women, surprisingly, bonded immediately. For all
their differences in upbringing and circumstance, Elizabeth had genuine warmth, and when she wanted to please, she dazzled. She got Cis to regale her with stories about Burton’s childhood, his boyhood triumphs on the rugby field, his scholastic successes. When Burton returned, he whisked Elizabeth off to the pub to meet his pals, where she was even more of a success. The hard-bitten miners sitting in those dark pubs knew royalty when they saw it, but didn’t she drink with the rest of them, and laugh at their stories, and fit right in! Later, Burton bought Elizabeth supper (beef and kidney pie), and treated her to a sixpence ride on a carousel. She was in heaven. For a woman who had been raised on a country estate surrounded by art and antiques, and who, since the age of ten, had never experienced a normal life, this was the one thing her fame, her beauty, and her wealth could not provide. This was real.
Exhausted by Cleopatra and happy to stop working for a while to enjoy being with Burton, Taylor put her own career on hold for two years. She watched with immense pride as his film career began to soar. His next movie would provide him with another great role and another occasion for a powerful performance: Tennessee Williams’s The Night of the Iguana, directed in Mexico by John Huston with a challenging cast that included a middle-aged and still beautiful Ava Gardner, the refined English actress Deborah Kerr, and a young Sue Lyon, following up her debut performance in Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita the year before.
The movie business had noticeably changed in the five years since Elizabeth appeared as Maggie the Cat in Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, when Production Code censors dogged the set. “It’s hard to believe how strictly we were supervised in those days when it came to anything involving sex. It wasn’t just homosexuality that was concealed; heterosexual behavior was subject to almost as many restrictions,” Elizabeth recalled about the experience. One day when she was on camera for a wardrobe test, the “inspectors” showed up. “When a BI (that’s a Bust Inspector, if you can believe it) appeared, he took one look at me and called for a stepladder. He climbed up, peered down, and announced that I needed a higher-cut dress, too much breast was exposed.” The costume designer, Helen Rose, had to pin Elizabeth’s bodice with a brooch, but as soon as the “BI” left, she pulled the pin off. She knew what looked good on camera—and off.
The Night of the Iguana would be more sexually explicit than Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, involving a man-hungry hotelier cavorting with her cabana boys and an alcoholic priest being tempted by a seductive teenager. Burton plays the desolate, defrocked priest who sinks deeper and deeper into alcoholic disgrace, till he’s redeemed by the ministrations of two women: one spiritual (Deborah Kerr) and the other sensual (Ava Gardner). It’s pure Tennessee Williams—intensely lyrical, sharply insightful, and full of bitch-wit, all brought to bloom under the Mexican sun and the canny direction of John Huston (who wickedly outfitted his volatile cast with gold-plated derringers and a handful of bullets that bore the name of each key member of the cast). Elizabeth had no role in the film, though she would have given Ava Gardner a good run for her money as the sex-starved, big-hearted earth goddess who runs the tourist hotel where most of the action unfolds. Nonetheless, she accompanied Burton to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. Some speculated that it was to keep an eye on Burton, surrounded as he was by three kinds of female beauty: the nubile (Lyon), the refined (Kerr), and the lushly ripe (Gardner). Added to that was the sensuality of the place itself.
Huston’s friend and assistant on the shoot, the actress Eloise Hardt, described it as being “like Never Never Land. Everyone was on edge from the heat and the sickness. Scorpions and iguanas hopping in your bed. You never knew if you were going to be bitten by something or stranded by a storm. There were all these emotions and egos…It got to be ridiculous. If you wanted to get in a sexy mood, just go to the Malecón and listen to the waves. Even if you didn’t want it, your body felt it, the atmosphere was so primeval.”
It was Ava Gardner, in fact, with her bold, sensuous beauty, her strong sexuality, and her ability to drink like a man, who posed the greatest threat to Elizabeth. They were uniquely alike, Ava and Elizabeth: both hothouse flowers raised by Hollywood studios, both known for their many marriages and love affairs, both “made equally unfit for normal life,” as Gardner’s latest biographer has noted, by their unreal upbringing. Indeed, the cast and crew noticed a certain mutual attraction between Richard and Ava, how Ava seemed to come alive in Richard’s presence, how they seemed to exchange meaningful glances. The press were not just covering a congregation of some of the world’s greatest talents and personalities in a remote Mexican village, they were waiting—hoping?—that Burton and Taylor’s vaunted love affair might founder on Ava Gardner’s dangerous shoulders. So Elizabeth was especially present on the set during Richard’s steamy scenes with Ava, standing just out of the camera’s range, dressed to kill in clingy blouses, tight slacks, and—of course—dazzling jewels.
But Richard’s brother Graham felt that Elizabeth went to Mexico for other reasons.
“She wanted to be with Rich,” Graham Jenkins recalled, “but also by showing that his career came first, she hoped to overcome his sense of inferiority. Elizabeth knew well enough how Rich smarted at the cheap jibes. In public he joked about his junior status in the partnership…but in private his anger at journalists who called him Mr. Cleopatra was terrible to behold.” Sometimes he’d turn his fury against Elizabeth, making fun of her “MGM education” and challenging her to give him any line from Shakespeare, so that he could roll out the rest of the speech it came from. Of course, she couldn’t, beyond “To be or not to be.” Elizabeth usually enjoyed the spectacle of his rages, but not always. Jenkins describes one such scene that ended with Elizabeth getting up and leaving the room, pausing to warn Richard, “You should be more careful, love. One day you might harm more than yourself.”
“When she left the room,” Jenkins noticed, “Richard was close to tears.”
Their Mexican hiatus, despite their loudly escalating spats, would prove to be a golden time for Richard and Elizabeth, one in which their volatile love affair deepened into something far richer. As Jenkins observed,
In Mexico…Richard discovered how much he really needed her…His surrender to Elizabeth was total. Once he came to terms with this, the sheer joy of knowing spilled over into every other part of his life. There were still rows, of course. With two such mercurial people, it could not have been otherwise. But taking a wider view, I could see that in his love for Elizabeth, Rich was at last beginning to understand his own character, which in turn gave him a sense of contentment he had never known before.
Contributing to this deepening of their bond was, no doubt, the enchantment of the place itself. At the time Puerto Vallarta was a sleepy fishing village on the Banderas Bay, surrounded by steep, green mountains and long, empty beaches. It has since become a thriving tourist town—in no small part due to Elizabeth and Richard’s presence—but if they expected the remoteness of the area to make it a safe haven from paparazzi and prying eyes, they were disappointed. When they first flew into Mexico City on September 22, 1963, they were met by a swarming crowd.
Having placed Elizabeth’s two sons in a boarding school in California, and leaving Maria temporarily in London to undergo further operations on her malformed hip, they arrived with seven-year-old Liza Todd amid the usual chaos that continued to surround them wherever they traveled. Elizabeth panicked when she saw the mob awaiting her, and when a man in a sombrero with pistols on his hip attempted to corral them through the crowd, they both panicked. “Get this maniac off the plane or I’ll kill him,” Richard reportedly yelled, before realizing the man, a volatile actor, filmmaker, and local character named Emilio “El Indio” Fernández, had been hired by John Huston to usher the famous couple to safety. In a Beatlemania-like frenzy, the crowd surged around them; they passed Liza over their heads to whisk her to safety. Elizabeth lost her shoes and her purse in the fracas before making it through the crowd. But the ordeal continued.
W
hen they finally arrived in the overgrown jungle that would be the location for The Night of the Iguana, “there were more reporters on the site than iguanas,” recalled John Huston in his 1980 memoir. They came from all over the world, hanging around the sleepy fishing village, just waiting for “the great day when the derringers were pulled out and the shooting started.” Of course, they were really there for the continuing drama of Burton and Taylor’s romance. After all, they were infamously cohabiting, still technically married to other people. In 1963, that was still a shocking state of affairs, but the public couldn’t get enough of it.
Back in New York where Sybil had relocated, she at last gave up any hope of reconciliation when Richard declined to visit her and his two children before decamping to Mexico. He had already consulted Aaron Frosch, Elizabeth’s attorney, about possible settlements, including $1 million to be deposited in Sybil’s Swiss bank account, plus an annual $500,000 for ten years. Burton’s divorce from Sybil was finally announced on December 5, 1963, on the grounds of “abandonment and cruel and inhumane treatment.” Burton was at last free to marry Elizabeth, who considered his divorce from Sybil “the best Christmas present” she had ever received. But Elizabeth was still not free.
Eddie Fisher was dragging his feet over signing the final divorce papers, holding out for a better settlement. She wanted to keep the chalet in Gstaad, which Fisher had actually bought for her for $350,000, and she wanted to keep all the jewelry he had given her, as well as a dark green Rolls-Royce she had given him as a birthday present. To complicate their financial matters, Elizabeth and Fisher had formed a production company, MCL Films, for the purpose of freeing her from MGM servitude by lending her services to 20th Century-Fox for Cleopatra. She had insisted on keeping all the profits from MCL Films.