Furious Love

by Sam Kashner

  On March 5, 1964, two years after falling in love with Richard, Elizabeth was finally granted her divorce from Eddie Fisher on the grounds of abandonment. Ten days later, Elizabeth and Richard chartered a Viscount turbo-prop airliner to Montreal, where they were met by three limousines. The couple and a few members of their entourage—including their publicist John Springer, their lawyer and tax specialist Aaron Frosch, and Burton’s dresser Robert Wilson and his wife—were then whisked to Montreal’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel, where Elizabeth and Richard registered under the name of “Smith.” That Sunday afternoon, they were married in a private ceremony.

  Though Elizabeth now considered herself Jewish, they were married by a Unitarian minister who agreed to take on the much-divorced couple. It was a hurried ceremony. The bride wore a yellow chiffon dress designed by Irene Sharaff, who had fashioned her stunning costumes for Cleopatra. She wore hyacinths and lily of the valley in her coiled hair, and the $150,000 emerald-and-diamond necklace Burton had given her, and matching earrings as his wedding gift. Newsmen were barred from the hotel; the only official statement given was Richard’s: “Elizabeth Burton and I are very happy.”

  It was Richard’s second marriage; it was Elizabeth’s fifth.

  They returned to Toronto the following day and Burton resumed his role as the Prince of Denmark. When the performance was over, after his curtain calls, Burton held his hand out as Elizabeth joined him onstage. In his thrilling Welsh voice, he reprised Hamlet’s line to Ophelia: “I say, we will have no more marriages.” The audience cheered.

  Their triumph was complete.

  On March 22, the production company flew to Boston for out-of-town tryouts at the Shubert Theater. “We thought there was going to be less commotion in Boston,” Sterne recalled about their landing at Logan Airport. “There’s a picture of Richard and Elizabeth getting off the plane. They were the first ones to come out; someone had presented them with flowers, and then this huge crowd of several thousand people broke through the Cyclone fences. They broke them down and ran out onto the airfield, so the Burtons had to get back on the plane.” The plane had to be towed into a hangar, but the fans had overrun the police barriers and rushed the plane. Two limousines were quickly brought into the hangar to whisk the Burtons to their hotel (one was a decoy).

  An even bigger mob of fans became unruly when Elizabeth and Richard checked into the Copley Plaza Hotel. If their adulterous affair had made the couple notorious, their marriage, announced in headlines around the world, had made them idols. A thousand “shouting, clawing admirers” poured into the hotel lobby. What had been mere hysteria was now frenzy, as fans grabbed at the couple’s clothing and tore hair from Elizabeth’s head. An eyewitness reported that Elizabeth “was being pulled in opposite directions at the same time. People were tugging at each arm and even crushed her face against the wall when she attempted to free herself.” Burton had to fight his way through the crowd to rescue Taylor and safely usher her into the hotel elevator. Near collapse, Elizabeth broke down in sobs. A doctor was summoned. Elizabeth was treated for back and arm injuries and given a sedative before being put to bed in the first-class suite that had formerly been used by Presidents Kennedy and Eisenhower.

  Burton was furious. “My wife was almost killed,” he roared, and he threatened to lodge a complaint with the Boston police commissioner. “I’ve never seen anything like this before. It’s outrageous. We had crowds like this in Toronto, but the police gave us adequate protection,” he complained. Elizabeth, recovering from the crowd’s attack, agreed that even she had “encountered mobs all over the world, but never anything to this extent.”

  Burton sufficiently recovered to give a brilliant performance at the Shubert two days later. The production was hailed by drama critic Elliot Norton as “a theatrical experience of much power and excitement, frequently tender, sometimes deeply moving, often wildly and honestly passionate.” Norton wrote, “Richard Burton…has moments of greatness.” Elinor Hughes of the Boston Herald noted that Burton had “poetry and passion in his bones, and in his voice…he gave us the music, the meaning, and the passion of this extraordinary role.”

  The Canadian-born character actor Hume Cronyn had been with Burton and Taylor in Rome, playing Cleopatra’s tutor and prime minister, Sosigenes (“an Egyptian Polonius,” in Mankiewicz’s phrase). Cronyn played Polonius in Gielgud’s Hamlet, where he saw more of Elizabeth and Richard, close-up, than he had on the set of Cleopatra. He remained impressed—even awed—by Burton’s gifts as an actor. Cronyn had seen all of the great Hamlets of the first half of the twentieth century—John Barrymore’s, Maurice Evans’s, John Gielgud’s, Laurence Olivier’s—so he was in a unique position to judge Burton’s performance. He was “one of the very few actors I’ve known,” Cronyn recalled later, “who was truly touched by the finger of God: his appearance, despite the pockmarked face; his quick intelligence, beautiful voice, and, above all, a Welsh lyricism of spirit that only money, notoriety, and an overweening ambition to be a film star could waste.” But he knew that audiences were not lined up to see Hamlet just to see Burton; the entire production “was enveloped in the mystique of the Burton-Taylor romance.” He had seen the hysteria play out two years earlier in Rome—the photographers hiding in the trees, the paparazzi on Vespas buzzing up and down Via Veneto. “Poor old Shakespeare didn’t stand a chance” against the “Dickenliz” hoopla, a term first used by the Toronto newspapers when the production came to town.

  On April 9, 1964, the play opened at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, where it would become the longest-running production of Hamlet— and the most profitable—ever staged in New York. Burton, who received six curtain calls on opening night, would perform the role 136 times. Taylor would attend 40 performances. The entire block surrounding the theater—46th Street from Eighth Avenue to Broadway—was thronged every night after the show with fans trying to get a glimpse of the famous couple. Barricades were set up, and policemen on horseback kept the crowds at bay. Sterne recalled having to wait until the Burtons left the theater before anyone else in the cast or crew could venture out.

  Some weeks into the run, Hamlet invited Polonius to lunch. Cronyn and his wife, the acclaimed actress Jessica Tandy, joined the Burtons for a meal between the matinee and evening performances. Leaving the theater alley and turning onto West 45th, they had to run a gauntlet of over two thousand people waiting to see the Burtons. When they appeared, “a great roar” went up, as Cronyn recalled. Traffic came to a complete stop, and police on horseback had to open a passage for the two couples, just to cross the alley and enter a waiting limousine. Hands snatched at them, as people in the crowd cheered and waved autograph books in the air. Some even jeered. “Liz is a bad, bad girl!” someone called out. Cronyn felt that if they had stopped to sign one autograph, they would have been trampled to death by the crowd. It was as bad as anything the Beatles had to endure when they arrived in New York for the first time, to tape The Ed Sullivan Show. But it didn’t end there. Once in the limousine, with Elizabeth and Richard tucked safely into the backseat, Cronyn saw that a couple of teenage fans had thrown themselves onto the roof of the car and were hanging upside down, peering into the limousine’s windows. With fans hanging off the roof, the limousine pulled out into the street and slowly made its way through the mob. “It was the only time in my life,” Cronyn recalled, “that I remember being frightened by a crowd.” As the limousine picked up speed, Elizabeth sweetly smiled and waved to the crowd like royalty—all the while silently mouthing the words “Fuck you—and you—and you, dear!” She’d simply had it—it was worse than Rome—and her usual patience had been tried beyond bearing. “There came a point,” Cronyn recalled, “when ‘Dickenliz’ would have sold their souls for a couple of days of peace, quiet, and solitude.”

  The production was widely praised by reviewers, though Walter Kerr groused in the New York Herald Tribune, “Mr. Burton is without feeling…” and Time magazine faulted Burton for being “more heroic than tragic.” But
elsewhere, Burton’s energy, irony, and mastery of the stage were praised. “Burton…leaps to action with a tigerish snarl,” wrote Life magazine’s reviewer. “I do not recall a Hamlet of such tempestuous manliness…full of pride and wit and mettle,” wrote Howard Taubman in the New York Times. And the New York Post’s theater critic, Richard Watts, praised Burton as “a very fine Hamlet, indeed. His Prince of Denmark is forceful, direct, unpretentiously eloquent, more thoughtfully introspective than darkly melancholy, with the glint of ironic humor, and decidedly a man of action and feeling.” All words, indeed, that could have been written about Burton himself, in the thirty-ninth year of his life, at the peak of his powers, the world spread out before him like a glittering jewel.

  And yet—despite the recognition of Burton’s superb performance, he did not get nominated for a Tony Award. Cronyn would win his first and only Tony for Polonius, but Richard was, apparently, still being punished—deserved prizes withheld—for daring to snatch fire from the gods.

  During one matinee performance, something unsettling happened. Sterne remembered, “We could tell something was wrong because Burton wasn’t really concentrating on the words. He got into the third scene, and he left the stage. The curtain came down, and [the producer] Alexander Cohen was there for that performance. He came out and made an announcement that Richard was indisposed and couldn’t go on, and that they were sending on his understudy, Robert Burr. Anybody who wanted a refund, he would gladly give it to them.” Burton would later blame it on arthritis, made worse by the attack he suffered at the hands of thugs in Paddington Station while filming The V.I.P.s.

  In an interview the following year, Burton recalled, “I was tearing along, waving my arms and ripping out the lines when the arthritis struck me. I stopped absolutely rigid in mid-flight, one arm raised above my head. You can’t imagine the pain…I shuffled off stage sideways like an old man.” He also blamed “the weak Jenkins bones,” but after being tended to by a doctor Elizabeth found for him, he forgot about the incident. He didn’t know then that his affliction—little helped by his high intake of alcohol—would return to bedevil him.

  And then, one night, during a performance, a man in the audience stood up and booed Richard Burton. He had never been booed before, and it shook him to the core. He reportedly stopped the play, stepped out of character, and announced to the audience, “We have been playing this production in public for over eighty performances. Some have liked it, some have not. But I can assure you, we have never before been booed!” After the performance ended and Richard returned to their suite in the Regency, he vented his anger on Elizabeth, who was coolly watching television. In his fury, Burton kicked in the television screen, slicing his toe to the bone. It set off an enormous row between the newly married couple—not the first, and decidedly not the last.

  Sterne was present on one of those occasions, when he had dropped by their hotel to interview Burton for a book he was writing about the production. “I had been asking him to do it ever since the opening of the show. He always said yes. He promised he would do it, but he couldn’t come up with a time. Finally, the last week, he told me to come up to the Regency Hotel where they were staying. I arrived there with my tape recorder. Richard and Elizabeth were having the most tremendous row you could imagine; they were yelling and screaming at each other. Their lawyer was there, Aaron Frosch and his secretary, and Bob Wilson. Finally, he said, ‘Well, look, we’re going to have to go off into another room here if we’re going to do this interview.’”

  When the interview was half-over, Bob Wilson stuck his head in the door and said, “Richard, we’ve got to leave; we’ve got to get to the theater. It’s almost time to do the show.” So they finished the interview in the back of a limousine on their way to the theater.

  “As we were pulling around 46th Street,” Sterne recalled, “these small street children—three or four little boys, rather ragamuffin and dirty—ran up to the car window. One of them held up a nickel and I said, ‘Hey, Rich.’” Burton became morose and told the boy, “I don’t have any money; I never carry any money.” In that moment, Burton looked into the face of his past—the kind of boy he had once been, rough and dirty and scrambling for money. What had happened to that boy, Rich Jenkins, now that he had become Richard Burton, the most famous actor in the world?

  By the end of his long run in Hamlet, Burton had apparently grown bored with the role. He’d try out different interpretations—not just reciting a speech in German but playing Hamlet as a homosexual one night, or substituting lines from Christopher Marlowe to entertain himself and to see if anyone noticed. As Melvyn Bragg observed, “It was always hard for him to sustain an interest once he had cracked a problem. He went out to conquer, did so, and was then often indifferent. Elizabeth and money and writing—they were the infinitely interesting matters.” So when Philip Burton confessed that his American Music and Dramatic Academy was facing a financial setback, Burton agreed to give a special performance to raise money for the school. But not of Hamlet—this would be a poetry reading, and Elizabeth Taylor would join in, making her theatrical debut alongside him.

  It was an extraordinary event, and the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre glittered with boldfaced names—Mayor Lindsay, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, Montgomery Clift, Carol Channing. Elizabeth had made an effort to bring Burton’s Welsh friend and mentor Emlyn Williams back into the fold, and he, too, was there. Nervous about appearing live onstage, Elizabeth had asked Philip to coach her through a handful of canonical poems by Robert Frost and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, as well as her favorite poem, Thomas Hardy’s “The Ruined Maid.” Burton answered her with Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” and D. H. Lawrence’s “The Snake.” They traded lines in English and Welsh. Elizabeth dazzled in a Grecian gown and diamonds, and her readings were convincing enough that one wag in the audience quipped, “If she doesn’t get bad pretty soon, people are going to start leaving.” In act two, appearing in another splendid gown, Elizabeth muffed the first line of the Twenty-third Psalm, then blurted out, “Sorry. Let me begin again. I sure screwed that one up.” She knew they were gunning for her. But when the evening ended, the couple were rewarded with a standing ovation. She had done it. She had entered Burton’s world and had held her own. They could be equals now. Within a week of the event, Richard and Elizabeth received more than half a millon dollars’ worth of offers to give poetry readings. Poetry!

  Afterward, Elizabeth and Richard got magnificently drunk and retired to their suite at the Regency, where they reverted to their favorite pastimes, fighting and having sex. Or having sex and fighting.

  Soon after, in the middle of an argument, Eddie Fisher turned up. He later described, with some bitterness, what he saw there: “Her makeup smeared, her voice loud and shrill, Elizabeth was furious about something, and I thought, I was married to that woman, that wild thing. Burton was trying to soothe her and as I watched him walk around her suite, apologizing, straightening up, retrieving things she had dropped, I saw myself…. He was doing the same things I had done, the same things Mike [Todd] had done. The battle was over and they both got what they wanted. Burton was a superstar. And Elizabeth had someone else to pick up after her.”

  Two years later, when Sterne saw the Burtons in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, he “was reminded of that time up in the hotel room when they were having their row. It seemed like the film was a replay of what I had seen over in the hotel.” And yet, Sterne believed, “I had this feeling that they really, deeply loved each other.”

  5

  IN FROM THE COLD

  “I love not being me, not being Elizabeth Taylor, but being Richard Burton’s wife.”

  —ELIZABETH TAYLOR

  “How would you like to travel from Paris to Geneva with two nannies, four children, five dogs, two secretaries, a budgerigar, and a turtle…and a wildcat, and 140 bags…?”

  —RICHARD BURTON

  If part of Richard’s job description was to pick up after Elizabeth, it was worth
it, at least in the passionate weeks and months and early years of their marriage. Their life together was shaping into one lived in constant travel, the fate of “professional itinerants”—in Burton’s phrase—spent in five-star hotels, fawned over by their own expanding entourage and by hoteliers, wine stewards, and porters. For Elizabeth, it was only her due: a continuation of the life she had lived since the age of ten, fussed over by MGM publicists, hairdressers, makeup people, and various handlers. She knew no other way to be. Hotel security also afforded them a measure of protection from the crowds of fans (and not all fans) that still dogged their every move.

  In Vogue magazine, Burton recalled what it was like to travel with Elizabeth (“Travelling with Elizabeth, by Her Husband Who Loves Her in Spite of It”). He opens and closes his article with the mock cri de coeur, “Gawd ’elp me!”

  Travelling with Elizabeth is a kind of exquisite pain. Let me explain why this is: I am ferociously overpunctual whereas Elizabeth is indolently the opposite. I love Elizabeth to the point of idolatry but—let’s repeat that “but”—she will unquestionably be…late for the last bloody judgment. And, infuriatingly, she is always breathtakingly on time. She actually misses no train or plane or boat, but, of course, misses the fact that her husband has had several minor heart attacks waiting for her while he shifts a shivering scotch from his trembling hand to his quivering mouth to his abandoned liver, waiting, waiting, waiting for her to come out of the lavatory…. there is my stupendously serene lady, firmly believing that time waits for no man but will wait for her.