by Sam Kashner
Burton goes on to describe how he was born to the class of those who “watched the train go by and lusted for London…I finally caught that train and never went back and never will.” Had he remained that “original boy,” he imagines that he’d be one of the baggage handlers that Elizabeth might have honored with a tip or a pat on the head. (“Let’s face it,” he writes. “She wouldn’t have tipped me. She would have arranged for one of her minions to do so.”) Instead, he has the privilege of sharing, with Elizabeth, the spoils of the world, even if it means being “doomed nomads,” unable to stay in any one place for more than three months at a time, shuttling among New York, London, Paris, Rome, San Francisco, Puerto Vallarta, Gstaad, Ireland, and that “rough country of my heart, Wales…”
The advantages of constant travel? The service (“porters and stewards and even stewardesses reward her with enormous over-attention and therefore I get a little on the side”). And the food! “We separate countries into foods,” Burton writes, in a comic discourse on how the national diet of various countries reflects the physiognomy of their citizens. At night, alone at last in their hotel bedroom—the Lancaster, the Dorchester, the Regency—they dream of the cuisines in countries left behind: hamburgers and egg-topped corned-beef hash from American delicatessens, dreamed of in Paris; or, in New York, memories of that Swiss bistro or Italian trattoria with “a turbulent red wine and salami and fava and a cheese that crumbles in the hand falling down its own face like a landslide.” He writes,
I will allow nobody but me to take Elizabeth, tardy as she is, to Evian or Austria or Aston Clinton or Tor Vaiannica or Le Coq Hardy or La Méditerranée or the Oak Room at the Plaza or the Top of the Mark or The Savoy Grill or the Terrace at the Dorchester or the Hotel de La Poste at Avallon or that delicatessen on Sixth Avenue where they serve beer in steins and where you can have split and grilled frankfurters with appalling French fries on the side, and Rumplemeyer’s for breakfast with a daughter around; or how would you like to stop your Phantom Rolls outside a fish-and-chips shop in Flask Lane, Hampstead, and munch greasily and happily away in the back of the car, watching television while waiting for the traffic to ease with two enchanting daughters and an enchanting wife beside you…?
The drawbacks? Besides waiting eternally for Elizabeth to show up at the last minute, they are, nearly three years past Le Scandale, still stalked by paparazzi and hordes of fans. Richard recalls when a shoe was stolen off of Elizabeth’s foot at an airport (in Puerto Vallarta), and another time when a photographer punched Elizabeth in the stomach. “How would you like to pass your small daughter,” he writes, “over the heads of the madding crowd to a friend, all of us shouting in a language we didn’t know?”
By now, Elizabeth was essentially stateless, a citizen of the world, who lived almost entirely in hotels; she had even considered renouncing her American citizenship after her rough treatment following the scandal. She had left her childhood home at the age of nine, had lived in Los Angeles, virtually residing at MGM until her first marriage, but you can’t put MGM on a passport. She owned a chalet in Gstaad and a villa in Puerto Vallarta, but while in the States or in England, she lived in hotels (mostly the Regency and the Dorchester). Not surprisingly, she was drawn to Burton’s deep connection to Wales and to his large, sprawling family. For Burton, the life of the world traveler was thrilling, but also exhausting. He, too, would soon miss the sense of belonging to a place, a permanent home.
Another obstacle to their peace of mind was Burton’s attention to their box-office rankings. Burton was well aware that Elizabeth still outdrew him and outearned him, and as any proud Welshman would, he dedicated himself to balancing the equation. It was beginning to happen. When the reviews came out for The Night of the Iguana in June of 1964, Burton’s performance as the louche Reverend Shannon was generally lauded, making him “the new Mr. Box Office.” Not surprisingly, perhaps, given the mixed reviews of Cleopatra and The V.I.P.s, and the two years she spent away from the camera, Elizabeth Taylor dropped from first place to seventh in box-office ratings. She didn’t care much. She was tired of being a movie star and was increasingly interested in just being with Richard. Let her coast for a while—she’d earned it.
Elizabeth’s surprisingly good performance reciting poetry onstage with Burton had been a glorious welcome home from the country she had come close to renouncing. As early as May of 1964, Burton was planning a stage production of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus in Oxford, with Elizabeth to make a brief appearance as Helen of Troy. But, finally, Elizabeth knew how fickle movie audiences could be: it was time to make another film, in America.
In 1964, her image was changing and hardening into a new incarnation: no longer the pampered ingénue or the world-conquering beauty, she was now the vixen, the vamp, the sexually dangerous woman of the world, the ultimate femme fatale. The role she’d hated, the good-time girl Gloria Wandrous in BUtterfield 8, had been a harbinger of things to come.
The Burtons plowed through legions of scripts and considered a number of projects: Elizabeth as Anne Boleyn and Richard as Henry VIII in Maxwell Anderson’s Anne of the Thousand Days (not to be, for Elizabeth); a film adaptation of This Property Is Condemned by Elizabeth’s favorite playwright, Tennessee Williams; and, among other possible productions, Carson McCullers’s novella Reflections in a Golden Eye, which she planned to star in with her dear, damaged friend, Montgomery Clift. Elizabeth even contemplated a Broadway run with Clift in The Owl and the Pussycat. She would, of course, play the prostitute.
Instead, they settled on making a picture titled The Flight of the Sandpiper for MGM-Filmways Studio, based on a story by the highly successful producer Martin Ransohoff, with a screenplay by Michael Wilson and the formerly blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo. (The film would be released as The Sandpiper.) Ransohoff had conceived of the story as a vehicle for Kim Novak, for whom he created the lead role of a free-spirited artist living in Big Sur. At the time, Novak was known in Hollywood for her bohemian ways and love of painting. She was also living in Big Sur, but when the relationship she’d had with Ransohoff soured, he offered the role to Elizabeth.
As usual, the Burtons made a shrewd bargain: Elizabeth received her $1 million salary, Richard was offered $500,000, and the couple’s production company would earn 20 percent of the gross, which would net them additional millions of dollars. Burton hated the script but reportedly said, “For the money, we will dance.”
Though The V.I.P.s had inspired a certain degree of critical scoffing, it had begun to enrich Burton at a level he had only dreamed of. With his wealth increasing exponentially, his brilliant reviews in New York for the most successful run of Hamlet in theater history—136 performances—Burton now set his cap for directing. He planned, among other films, to direct Elizabeth in a forthcoming production of Macbeth, and he’d hoped to make his directorial debut on The Sandpiper, but in the end—after turning down William Wyler—Elizabeth asked for and got Vincente Minnelli, who had directed her years earlier at MGM in Father of the Bride and Father’s Little Dividend. Now she would be back at her former studio, but not as chattel, but as a free agent loaned to the studio by the Burtons’ production company. Burton already planned to co-direct a stage production of Doctor Faustus as a kind of favor to his early Oxford mentor, Sir Nevill Coghill, who presided over the Oxford University Drama Society and who had given Burton his first Shakespearean role. (Coghill had deemed Burton one of only two “geniuses” he’d had the privilege to teach; the other was poet W. H. Auden.)
The Sandpiper was the perfect vehicle for the juggernaut that was now Burton-Taylor. One of the movie’s tag lines was: “From the Beginning, They Knew It Was Wrong. Nothing Could Keep Them Apart.” Whether it was pure exploitation of Le Scandale or Elizabeth’s canny understanding of what the public wanted—or both—The Sandpiper capitalized on the now-married lovers’ scandalous history, telling the tale of an adulterous headmaster (the Reverend Dr. Edward Hewitt, played by Burton), who falls madly in love wit
h a beautiful bohemian artist named Laura Reynolds (Taylor). Her nine-year-old illegitimate son was played by Morgan Mason, the son of actor James Mason and his wife, Pamela. In a curious footnote, Sammy Davis Jr. was under consideration to appear as “Cos,” a “beatnik artist” and former lover of Laura’s. Deciding, no doubt, that a mixed-race love affair was too much even for Elizabeth Taylor in 1964, the part went to a sinewy, rough-hewn Charles Bronson. Eva Marie Saint is poignant (and soignée) as Claire, Hewitt’s abandoned wife; in her respectable, blonde suitability, she might as well have been a stand-in for Sybil Burton. Burton played, yet again, a tortured man torn between duty and passion: his duty to his wife and children and to his calling as the headmster of an Episcopal school, and his passion for Laura/Elizabeth. It was the second, but not the last time, he would portray a defrocked man of the cloth.
Also featured prominently in the film is a nude sculpture of Elizabeth, carved out of a 2,200-pound redwood log by a sculptor named Edmund Kara. In the movie, it’s the work of the bohemian sculptor played by Bronson, and it’s the flashpoint for Dr. Hewitt’s (Burton’s) jealousy and passion. In real life, it was the closest the moviegoing public would ever get to seeing Elizabeth onscreen in glorious nudity, beyond the generous glimpses of thigh and cleavage in her bathing scene in Cleopatra and a nanosecond of Elizabeth’s partial nudity as her character, Laura, poses for the sculpture in The Sandpiper. Though Elizabeth crashed through the puritanical strictures of her day, becoming a vanguard of the sexual revolution in spite of herself, she was still a product of MGM’s morals code, at least onscreen. In 1965, other, younger actresses were beginning to bare their breasts on camera in mainstream films, but Edmund Kara’s rather demure nude sculpture would have to do, mostly, for Elizabeth. The sculpture serves the additional purpose of being fondled, disrobed, manhandled, and gawked at by the various ex-and would-be lovers that enter her seaside abode.
Shot in the spectacularly beautiful Carmel Highlands near Big Sur, MGM spent $35,000 constructing Laura’s glass-and-driftwood house overlooking the sea, a perfect setting to show off nature’s—and Elizabeth’s—spectacular scenery. (The entire production costs to MGM were reported at $5 million.) Mr. and Mrs. Burton (as she now preferred to be called) arrived in Carmel Heights with their usual large entourage—their four children (Michael, Christopher, Liza, and Maria), Burton’s trusted dresser, Bob Wilson, and his wife, a cook, and a staff of lawyers and secretaries.
The film writer Peter Bart visited the location and noticed that, unlike the frenzy their appearances created in Puerto Vallarta, Toronto, New York, and Boston, their impact on Carmel and Big Sur was rather negligible. Perhaps it was because the Monterey Jazz Festival was in full swing at the time, absorbing the attentions of a decidedly more mellow citizenry. The Burtons rented “one of the biggest homes in the area,” wrote Bart, and were able to visit the local shops, bars, and restaurants without incident.
On October 5, the Hollywood Reporter noted that MGM-Filmways prepared to leave for six weeks, to shoot the interiors for The Sandpiper in Paris. Two months later, they reported that the move overseas was made to protect Richard Burton’s growing fortune, as he “would have ended with less money than he began with if all of the film were made in its natural locale.” So the Burtons left on the Queen Elizabeth and checked into the Lancaster Hotel in Paris; they had by now truly become tax exiles, unable to stay in America or Britain for more than a few months at a time without becoming liable for whopping tax bills. Burton was taxed at the highest rate in Britain, but he could keep his British passport and considerably reduce his taxes as a “nonresident” if he didn’t stay in Britain more than ninety days a year. Taylor, with dual citizenship in England and America, had similar tax advantages if she kept moving.
Kara’s massive sculpture, incidentally, was shipped to Paris in a temperature-controlled stateroom on the Queen Mary and insured for $100,000 with Lloyds of London. It was treated like a religious icon, made the subject of a film short and “a special unveiling” for the Parisian press corps when it arrived safely in France.
When the film opened in July of 1965, it was not well received. The New Yorker called it “soggy, woolly, maundering, bumbling” and “a very silly movie” Life magazine sneered—hooted—at the Burtons’ second foray into showcasing their guilty passion onscreen. Some audiences reportedly laughed when Burton’s tortured headmaster utters the words, “I’ve lost all my sense of sin.” The Saturday Review derided “the mess of windy platitudes and stale stereotypes.” Trumbo, years later, would complain that his “nice, taut little drama” was derailed by the opulence of the Burtons (“twenty-two smashing costume changes” for Elizabeth and “an $85,000 bungalow”). But the beautifully photographed, lushly produced film does have its guilty pleasures, not least of which are Richard’s and Elizabeth’s presence onscreen, made more exciting by the whiff of scandal that still clung to them.
The film’s main problem, despite its gorgeous scenery, high production values, and good performances by the entire cast, is a certain lack of authenticity. There was already a small but burgeoning counterculture in Big Sur, and The Sandpiper tried to make use of the social phenomenon that was stirring in America—the subculture of beatniks, hippies, free-love advocates, jazz enthusiasts, pagans, naturalists, and all-around free-thinkers that would take center stage as the decade marched on. The problem with the movie, under Minnelli’s too-tasteful direction, is that he doesn’t quite get it right. On paper, the role of Laura Reynolds, an artist who defies social proprieties by refusing to marry her son’s father and by having affairs as she pleases, should have suited Elizabeth perfectly. But she seems miscast as an iconoclastic, proto-feminist artist: she is both too glamorous, too diva-like, and too angry, and her artist’s “shack” is far too Architectural Digest for a struggling painter (one that “any poor soul could probably buy for forty or fifty thousand dollars” in 1965 currency, as one reviewer wrote). By 1965, Elizabeth Taylor was just too famous to disappear into another character, and her lush, glossy beauty and increasingly voluptuous figure made her unsuited to play the newly emerging American woman who came into being in the “swinging 1960s”—sexually adventurous, guilt-free, sometimes androgynous, and full of a kind of joyful innocence—a spirit then embodied by younger actresses such as Julie Christie, Vanessa Redgrave, and Jane Fonda. Elizabeth may have helped usher in that seismic shift in the sexual landscape, but by the age of thirty-two, with five marriages, four children, thirty-one films, and world infamy behind her, she simply had too much history to play a “new woman.” She was a queen, and there would be few queenly roles for women in the next three decades.
Burton fared much better. Unhappy with the screenplay, he tinkered with lines, but it’s hard to know how much he contributed to the final script. However, when Dr. Hewitt confesses, “It was my betrayal of myself that began years ago,” the line carries a remembrance of Marc Antony’s “I from myself—the ultimate betrayal.” What Richard, perhaps, had not counted on was the psychic toll of reliving, onscreen, his abandonment of Sybil. He was awash with guilt—for turning his back on Sybil and his two girls, especially Jessica, the one who most needed him, and before that, for turning his back on his true father, and therefore the core of his Welsh identity. By now he was sending thousands of pounds to his brothers and sisters in Port Talbot and Pontrhydyfen, supporting their families with annual checks and Christmas bounty, as a kind of devotion, or reparation. He was rescuing his brothers from a life in the mines, but he was also assuaging his conscience for having been the one who had escaped. He had given work to his brother Graham as his movie stand-in; he had hired his worshipped elder brother Ifor as a kind of caretaker of his home in Céligny, which he retained after his divorce from Sybil. He would even take Brook Williams, the son of his early mentor, Emlyn Williams, into his entourage, but it wasn’t enough. And now to relive that guilt onscreen was a further torment, one that sex and money and fame and alcohol could assuage, up to a point.
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nbsp; As for Elizabeth’s psychic burden, she does have one speech in The Sandpiper that is revelatory, and she delivers it from the heart. When she tries to explain to Hewitt the source of her distrust of men, she confesses, “men have been staring at me and rubbing up against me since I was twelve…. I have been had by men,” she says, “but not loved.” No wonder she clung to Burton, as she had to Mike Todd, believing that of all the men she had known, only these two loved her in the way she wanted to be loved.
Despite the dismissive reviews (and some sniping about Elizabeth’s exposed cleavage and her weight, which fluctuated throughout the film), The Sandpiper was enormously profitable, earning $14 million and beating out MGM’s blockbuster for the year, The Unsinkable Molly Brown, starring Elizabeth’s former “rival” Debbie Reynolds and proving that sex trumps effervescence, at least at the box office. The public couldn’t stop reliving the drama of the couple’s world-shaking adultery.
While in Paris, the Burtons occupied two floors at the Lancaster, making room for their gypsy children—the wild Wilding boys, Michael and Christopher; Liza Todd; and four-year-old Maria Burton, still enduring hip operations. The tutor who had accompanied them in Puerto Vallarta, Paul Neshamkin, was also in residence, and he expressed concern that the children were being overlooked by their parents, relegated to the care of “an elderly governess.” When they did look in on the children, it was more like “a royal visit.” Burton felt that the boys would be better off in a boarding school than traipsing around the globe with their itinerant parents, but Elizabeth wanted her family around her.
According to Gianni Bozzacchi, who would become the Burtons’ friend and in-house photographer throughout the next decade, Elizabeth wanted Burton to bring Jessica into their household, where she could be looked after by a hired nurse. After all, they were already surrounded by an entourage that now included Dick Hanley and his companion, John Lee; Burton’s dresser, Bob Wilson, and his wife; Elizabeth’s makeup man, Ron Berkeley; a bodyguard and ex-boxer named Bobby LaSalle; Gaston, the French chauffeur; and, of course, the tutor, the governess, and a live-in nurse for Maria. The Burtons could afford it. They set up two companies, which brought in an estimated $50 million a year in royalties and salaries—equivalent to approximately $350 million in today’s dollars.