by Sam Kashner
Elizabeth finally agreed to release some of the profits in exchange for an agreement with Fisher to refrain from “embarrassing her publicly” (she had been incensed by his “Cleo, the Nympho of the Nile” specialty number developed for his nightclub act). He agreed, and that was one reason he didn’t publish his first memoir until 1981. There was also the issue of Fisher’s name on Maria’s adoption papers. Taylor hoped to replace his name with Burton’s, and Fisher agreed only after insisting that he maintain legal ties to Liza Todd, as his only remaining connection to his lost friend and mentor, Mike Todd. Elizabeth got her way: she managed to convince the German authorities that Eddie had never been Maria’s adoptive father in the first place (though he had signed the adoption papers), and that she had always been the sole adoptive parent. But then, who could deny Elizabeth anything?
Michael Wilding, Taylor’s second husband and father of her two sons, accompanied her to Puerto Vallarta as Richard’s agent. It was perhaps a tribute to Wilding’s geniality and their amicable divorce that he was able to work for his ex-wife’s current paramour.
Delighted with the dazzling, white-hot sun and the turquoise-green of the sea, they first rented and then bought a four-story white stucco villa called Casa Kimberly, with access to ten acres of beach. “There is no more delectable place on the face of the earth, but don’t come because you’ll spoil it,” is how Burton described their newly discovered paradise. For the first time, perhaps, since her early childhood in England, Elizabeth felt at home. She loved the heat, the verdant green of the jungle, the brightly colored macaws that flew across her balcony in the mornings. She bought a blue launch named Taffy to cross the Banderas Bay to the film set, precariously built on a perch overlooking the bay. She also flew in her secretary, her chauffeur, and her cook, and hired two maids from the village and a retired slot-machine repairman to serve as Burton’s masseur. She was so happily ensconced in Puerto Vallarta, and so ubiquitous on the set, she was practically part of the crew. In order to keep for himself a shred of privacy so he could continue his habit of voracious reading, Burton bought a second villa and had a bridge built to connect them, modeled on the Venetian Bridge of Sighs.
In addition to Liza Todd, Maria soon joined the family in Puerto Vallarta. Liza—an extraordinarily beautiful child—had been virtually raised without formal education, and at seven was still unable to read. Elizabeth tried to teach her with the use of primers she had bought, but without much success, given her devotion to Richard and the amount of time she spent with him on the set and in various bars. So they hired a live-in tutor, a twenty-two-year-old named Paul Neshamkin. “I used to spend all day with the kids, and then I would spend the evening entertaining the Burtons…I drank with them every night, until about four in the morning,” Neshamkin told Kitty Kelley for her 1981 biography Elizabeth Taylor: The Last Star. “We’d start drinking and talking and reciting poetry,” he recalled, “and, of course, debating Jews versus Protestants.” On school holidays, Michael and Christopher joined the family, and Richard and Elizabeth could be seen dining en famille in a village restaurant.
With or without Elizabeth’s children in tow, Richard continued his dangerous dance with alcohol, drinking enough to cause even the hard-drinking John Huston to shake his head. Elizabeth continued to serve as his drinking companion. After one such five-hour bout of drinking, Elizabeth told a reporter, “Richard lives each of his roles. In this film, he’s an alcoholic and an unshaven bum, so that explains his appearance and liquid intake.”
Budd Schulberg, the author of the Hollywood novel What Makes Sammy Run? and the screenplays On the Waterfront and The Harder They Fall, was also on the set, spending time with his good friend Ava Gardner. A steady stream of friends, former and current lovers, and personalities flocked to Mismaloya, including Deborah Kerr’s new husband, the screenwriter Peter Viertel, who had once been involved with Gardner during the making of The Sun Also Rises and was the author of White Hunter Black Heart, a thinly disguised, unflattering portrait of John Huston. (Viertel had also been married to Budd Schulberg’s ex-wife.) Tennessee Williams arrived with his lover of the moment, soon joined by his longtime companion Frank Merlo (whom the playwright affectionately called “The Little Horse”), and his poodle, Gigi. The randy but genteel Southern playwright spent much of his time donning a bathing cap and swimming with Burton and Taylor, bobbing like a wet seal in a cove just below the set that had been hastily constructed on a bluff overlooking the bay. It was an extraordinary collection of actors, writers, filmmakers, hangers-on, and heavy drinkers.
“Everyone was drinking quite a bit,” Schulberg recalled. “Richard hit it very hard and Huston always did. And Ava—yes, she was pretty good, too. I stayed out with Richard Burton several nights. It would be past three in the morning, and he would be in his cups and want to talk about Dylan Thomas or—he was a big fight fan. We’d be yakking about the fights. And Elizabeth would come storming out in her bathrobe looking for him, giving him hell—‘What do you think you’re doing, you’ve got to work in the morning!’ They were all having a good time. It was a happy company. You couldn’t believe they were making a movie.”
The veteran Hollywood reporter James Bacon was among the many journalists covering the movie shoot. Free to roam the set, Bacon spent time with Richard and Elizabeth, often accompanying them on their long afternoons of drinking. “She can outdrink any man I’ve known, including Burton,” Bacon reported about Elizabeth, with a certain respectful amazement. He recalled one night when, oddly, Burton remained sober until Taylor taunted him with, “Richard, take a drink. You are so goddamned dull when you’re not drinking.” She had apparently touched a nerve—Burton lived in fear of “boring the piss out of everyone. Without alcohol, when I’m stone-cold sober, I feel I belong in a university town somewhere teaching literature and drama to grubby little boys.” Bacon remembered that that was the night he watched Burton down twenty-three straight shots of tequila, “with a few bottles of Carta Blanca beer as chasers.”
If the American press were mostly fawning, interested in every bit of minutia about the famous couple, the Mexican press expressed outrage. In an editorial, the Siempre called for the ousting of the whole Iguana cast and crew, complaining about the “sex, drinks, drugs, vice, and carnal bestiality by the garbage of the United States.” The local Catholic convent broke their vow of silence to protest Elizabeth Taylor’s presence in Puerto Vallarta, as she was “living in sin” with Richard Burton.
But by now the couple was impervious to the pronouncements of the press. Elizabeth fussed over Richard on the set, combing and recombing his hair. (At one point, exasperated with her constant ministrations, Burton poured a pitcher of beer over his head.) When she wasn’t on set or bar-hopping with Burton, Elizabeth lolled on the beach, clad in a bikini, a green-and-white Mexican shift, and gold-and-turquoise-beaded sandals. On another occasion, she showed up in a bikini bottom and sheer top, wearing a stunning pearl-and-ruby ring given to her, she said, by the king of Indonesia. Burton was thoroughly delighted, taking the occasion to mischievously describe her as looking like “a French tart.” Her outrageous displays of bounty—gifts of nature and of men—only made her more desirable in his eyes, more extraordinary, more loved. No wonder he called her “Ocean,” to describe her deep, overpowering presence.
In 1971, Burton recalled his Mexican hiatus in an article titled “Dauntless Travelers” for Vogue magazine, capturing the euphoria of that time. By then married to Elizabeth, he wrote in his typically lavish style,
…the street we live on is a bewitchment invented by a genius with taste, endlessly fascinating, pastelled in blues and terra-cottas, blazing whites and duns, and there are laden burros and men from the hills going home asleep on walking horses and I could sit here forever as long as someone feeds me from time to time and plies me with drinks and if one’s wife hangs around for another forty years or so and God knows none of us have long to live.
He describes a day on which a traveling circu
s trailed in over the “Bridge of a Hundred Days,” led by a baby elephant. Burton first glimpsed it from Casa Kimberly’s balcony, mistrusting his own eyes, till he heard “the thrilling still music blast[ing] out, and children [weeping] with delight.” Though it was an unusually hot day even for Puerto Vallarta, Elizabeth wanted to go, and of course Burton couldn’t deny her. Once they assembled in the dusty town square to watch the circus acts (all but the high-wire artist—Burton had a morbid dread of heights), the master of ceremonies noticed their presence among the villagers. He called out, “Tenemous sta noche los muy famosas actors del mondo,” Burton wrote in a kind of pidgin Spanish. “What can you do? My wife undulated exquisitely into the arena without any apparent qualm and addressed herself to the task of having scimitars thrown at her by a Mexican man she’d never met.” The daggers were thrown within a hair’s breadth of Elizabeth’s famous face. Like a brave soul staring down a firing squad, she barely blinked. By now, she was used to the spectacle of having daggers thrown at her in public. When it was Burton’s turn to be pinned to the board, they turned him sideways and stuck a balloon in his mouth and in each hand. The “dagger man,” Alejandro Fuentes, successfully punctured the balloons, sparing Burton’s profile, amid roars from the crowd. “I looked, in short, like an idiot,” Burton wrote, “as the daggers went true to their targets—three for the balloons and one each side of my head…”
Later that evening, Richard and Elizabeth sat on their balcony with their neighbors, the American actor Phil Ober and his wife, Jane, looking over their humble, resplendent town. “We must have been out of our minds,” Elizabeth said about the day’s events, and, later, in bed before dousing the light, “Ah well, another day, another drama.” It had been a curious metaphor for their circus life together: on display, cheered by crowds, while a professional knife-thrower hurled stilettos at them, missing them by inches.
The day before Richard Burton turned thirty-eight, he started celebrating early by drinking with Ava Gardner, who had presented him with a fifth of bourbon. It was nine thirty in the morning, and the heat in Mismaloya was already crushing. Burton held forth in his costar’s dressing room, reciting poetry and then reminiscing about his father—his first father, the miner who sired him. Elizabeth had yet to arrive at the set.
“My father would never say he drank a lot,” Burton told the sultry actress and Joseph Roddy, a visiting journalist who later described the occasion. “He’d say he was a man of vast drinking habits.” He laughed. He described how his father would come up out of the coal mines on paydays—“days of decision,” he called them—trying to decide if he should first head for the dog track or the tavern. He would reappear days later to apologize to his eleven surviving offspring, saying, in Burton’s spirited telling, “I…am…pro-foundahleeee…sawree…For one torn second a week before Friday last, I nearly came home directly.” Burton loved to tell that story, making a fine joke out of his father’s fecklessness.
He then regaled his audience with another favorite tale about the night Dadi Ni, with dreams of making a killing on the dog races, came home leading an ancient, toothless, winded dog on the end of a leash. “Boys,” he said, pointing to the panting wreck, “our troubles are over!” But what was curiously revealed during Burton’s raucous birthday celebration was another side of Dic Jenkins, and a hint of the high regard Burton still carried for his broken father, who had nonetheless managed to make it to the age of eighty-one. He had often joked that his father rarely saw his films because “there were too many pubs between the house and the cinema.” Yet he knew that his love of poetry—and of the English tongue itself—came to him through his father.
“My father could give bad verse a ring of great quality,” he told Ava Gardner, then launched into several stanzas of verse to illustrate the point.
“So do you,” she replied.
“Ah, love, but you should have heard my father do it.”
“I’m sure that I just did.”
For father and son, alcohol opened up the floodgates of poetry. Burton described how he would bring home books from school that his father would ravenously pore over, memorizing the English poetry he found there. “He was never the man to use a short word when there was a long one that would do,” Burton recalled, explaining that the first time his father talked to him about the sun, it was to explain the “dichotomies between the Copernican and heliocentric cosmologies.” He related a conversation he’d had with his father over who was the most courageous poet of World War I, “after he had worked out the answer at the pub. ‘Not Alan Seeger. Not Rupert Brooke. Not Wilfred Owen. No, my boy, no one of them. The most courageous poet of that war was Mister Thomas Stearns Eliot in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. At the bloody height of the whole bloody battle, Mr. Eliot wrote that he had measured out his life in coffee spoons. Now that took what I call courage.’”
It had long been assumed that Richard’s adoptive father, Philip Burton, had introduced Burton to poetry—English and Welsh—and had encouraged that talent. But it had been a paternal inheritance all along—poetry and storytelling and drinking, and as Burton grew older and his father’s memory hardened into a series of tragicomic anecdotes, the residue of that original gift—or debt—survived.
Despite the torrid heat, the abundance of reporters and scorpions, the chiggers that left painful bites all over Elizabeth’s feet because she went everywhere in her gold-strapped sandals, their time in Puerto Vallarta had been deeply happy. A pattern had emerged. Elizabeth would use her star power to help Richard achieve the world acclaim she knew he deserved. And she would be sure that he appeared only in the best vehicles: Becket, The Night of the Iguana—because it was by Tennessee Williams, America’s greatest living playwright—and then a Broadway production of Hamlet. They would show the world that they were not tarnished celluloid adulterers, but artists of the highest order, and they belonged in a realm where ordinary codes of behavior no longer applied. They were beyond bourgeois morality now.
They would no longer let each other out of their sight, if they could help it. They’d both suffered too much to let their embattled love slip away, and their passion for each other showed no signs of abating. Elizabeth knew that Richard “loved my shape—my body appealed to him. He teased me, but I knew he loved my body. I loved being admired by Richard. It was the kind of admiration that mattered to me. I felt adored, worshipped.”
And her power over Burton made him tremble. “Bewitched” is how he would describe it, “bewitched by her cunt and her cunning.” He would be drunk when he said it, but as his closest friends knew, he only lied when he was sober. In letters home, Burton wrote to his brother Graham about his happiness and the close bond he felt with Elizabeth.
“Where I was wrong,” Jenkins recalled in his memoir, “was in believing it would last.”
4
NO MORE MARRIAGES
“You’re the one they’ve come to see.
You’re the Frank Sinatra of Shakespeare.”
—TAYLOR TO BURTON
“I say we will have no more marriages.”
—BURTON QUOTING SHAKESPEARE
Elizabeth was supremely happy to step back and let Richard take center stage. It wouldn’t be the first time she’d announced her plans to be a wife first, an actress second. She’d resented being the principal breadwinner in her marriage to Michael Wilding. With Todd, she’d informed her public, “Mike and I hope to have many children. I think it’s much more important for a woman to be a mother than an actress.” She had wanted to consecrate her marriage to Eddie Fisher by adopting a child. Now, above all, she wanted to make Richard happy. She could see that he chafed at being occasionally referred to as “Mr. Taylor,” or even worse, “Mr. Cleopatra.” There were still critics who loudly lamented Burton’s defection from legitimate theater, where Olivier and Gielgud’s laurels waited to be permanently attached to Burton’s brow, and she knew there were critics who blamed her. They had to be silenced.
Plans to produce a new
Hamlet with Burton in the title role and Gielgud directing had been discussed as early as 1963, when Burton had appeared with Sir John in Becket. Burton had played Hamlet before, in Edinburgh and at the Old Vic Company in 1953–1954, among some complaints that he had rushed his lines and thrown away the poetry of the Bard—surprising, for one as devoted to poetry as Burton. Gielgud’s own Hamlet, performed in London’s Old Vic, had been, in Burton’s eyes, the greatest in his lifetime, and to be directed by Gielgud in the quintessential actor’s role was truly a passing of the baton. After all, it was Gielgud who had helped launch Burton’s stage career, casting and directing him in three plays by Christopher Fry—The Lady’s Not for Burning, The Boy with a Cart, and A Phoenix Too Frequent—which garnered Burton early enthusiastic reviews. Gielgud himself said about Burton’s performance in The Boy with a Cart, “He was simply splendid…It was a wonderful succés d’estime.” In a 1967 interview with Kenneth Tynan, Burton remarked, “I can never repay him for the debt of casting me in The Lady’s Not for Burning and The Boy with a Cart. He made me into what is casually known as a leading man.”
The only problem was, Burton didn’t particularly want to go back onstage. It helped that both he and Gielgud agreed that the play would be mounted with minimal sets and in modern dress, “so the beauty of the language and imagery may shine through unencumbered,” as Gielgud explained in a program note. The idea was that the performance take the form of a last rehearsal, before the actors donned their costumes and sets were rolled into place. Burton would wear black trousers and a black sweater for the role. Nonetheless, he was reluctant. He was, in fact, terrified.