Furious Love

by Sam Kashner

  But Burton refused to let Elizabeth bring Jessica out of the institution on Long Island, where she was being kept. For one thing, Sybil would not have allowed it. Jessica’s existence remained, possibly, the one hold she still had on Richard, Bozzacchi thought, and that may have been a reason why Sybil would not give her up. It may have been that Jessica was unable to live outside of an institution, but Elizabeth, tough and shrewd as she was, always had a soft spot for wounded things. And she knew that Burton suffered over Jessica’s fate and blamed himself for his inability to care for her, except financially.

  So Burton acted, made money, brooded, drank, and suffered bouts of depression. “The Black Dog—that’s very Welsh,” said the English actor Michael York, who is half-Welsh himself, recalling Burton when he knew him in the mid-1960s. (They would meet on the set of Franco Zeffirelli’s The Taming of the Shrew in February 1966.) “He was of a generation of actors, like Peter O’Toole, who were famous for self-destruction—it was part of their aura. They seemed to be hanging by a thread.” Burton used the Welsh word hiraeth, which he translated as “a longing for unnamable things,” to describe his black moods. Bragg described it as “a melancholy that was impenetrable…the Celtic gloom of many a grounded drunken poet,” like Burton’s hero, Dylan Thomas. Some of Burton’s friends, Bragg suggests, suspected “a chemical imbalance,” noting that Burton, besides hemophilia, also suffered from mild epilepsy. So the alcohol was, among other things, a form of self-medication that only deepened his depression.

  Perhaps as an effort to cheer him up, Elizabeth bought Burton thirty-seven tailored suits in Paris. It gave her pleasure to bestow gifts upon him.

  In January 1965, the couple moved back to London and took up residence at their favorite hotel, the Dorchester on Park Lane. They were greeted by Marjorie Lee, the hotel’s concierge, who became indispensable to the Burtons. She made the trains run on time, so to speak, while they were in London, getting them reservations at restaurants, helping to bring relatives in from Wales, making sure they had everything they wanted in their suites. She also made sure there were rooms available to the Burtons whenever they needed them, even if it meant kicking out royalty to accommodate the famous couple.

  Burton was to begin filming The Spy Who Came in from the Cold with his former costar and inamorata Claire Bloom, a situation Elizabeth was not at all happy about. She knew of their one-time affair; she must have known that he had been in love with the actress, and that this was the only relationship, pre-Elizabeth, that had threatened his marriage to Sybil.

  Like Elizabeth, Claire Bloom is a dark-haired beauty and a fine actress, but unlike Elizabeth, she made her reputation on the London stage. She first met Burton in 1949 at the audition for The Lady’s Not for Burning, which was conducted by John Gielgud on the stage of the Globe Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue in the heart of London’s West End. A young Burton auditioned with her, and he made a powerful impression just by sitting down. Bloom remembered her first sight of him forty-six years later, when she wrote her 1995 memoir, Leaving a Doll’s House: “…even today I can remember the way he sat in his chair,” she recalled, “his rather pockmarked skin, his green eyes. He was an extraordinarily beautiful man.” And, at twenty-three, a soon-to-be-married one. The play went on an eleven-week tour, and the two actors knew they were smitten, even after Burton’s brand-new marriage to Sybil, who occasionally showed up on the tour. “Long after the curtain had come down,” Bloom wrote,

  Burton, who had an encyclopedic memory for poetry, would recite poems to me late in the night. He would be seated in my room, very properly on a chair pulled away from the bed, on which I silently lay, fervently listening to the sound of his beautiful voice. We never touched each other, never physically shared more than the rather chaste kiss that I looked forward to every night on the stage; and yet we had unquestionably fallen deeply in love.

  Throughout the run of the play, they continued their chaste affair, and Burton stayed faithful to Sybil. A few years later, at the Old Vic on Waterloo Road, Bloom appeared in four Shakespearean productions with Burton, beginning with playing Ophelia to Burton’s Hamlet (he also played Philip the Bastard, Sir Toby Belch, Henry IV, Caliban, Othello, and Iago in a series of roles that by the age of twenty-seven established him as the preeminent actor of his generation). This time, their old feelings overwhelmed them, and they began their affair.

  By then, Richard had had his first stint in Hollywood and had returned with the reputation of a ladies’ man. They would meet in her mother’s home, with Burton sneaking in at night and leaving before dawn, or they would sometimes make love in their dressing rooms at the Old Vic between the matinee and evening performances. When Burton and Sybil left again for Hollywood, where Burton was to film My Cousin Rachel with Olivia de Havilland, they exchanged love letters, with Burton writing twice a day on some occasions. In one letter, he wrote, “I haven’t looked at another woman. This has never happened to me before. You have changed me so radically. I have almost grown up.” Bloom eventually burned most of his letters on the eve of her marriage to the actor Rod Steiger, another brilliant, rough-hewn actor given, like Burton, to bouts of depression.

  As a lover, “Richard was tender and considerate,” Bloom wrote, and their off-again, on-again romance lasted five years. Eventually, it was clear that Burton would never leave Sybil, and the necessary secrecy became too much for the young actress, still in her twenties, to bear. The affair ended, but Bloom later wrote that Burton was “the only man to whom I have fervently given all of myself. To feel so much pleasure from the body, mind, voice, mere presence of another is a gift I am profoundly grateful to have received.”

  However, her feelings would change when she and Burton were again cast opposite each other, this time in Tony Richardson’s film adaptation of John Osborne’s blistering, kitchen-sink drama Look Back in Anger, which ushered in a new kind of theater protesting the genteel drawing-room comedies and dramas that dominated the West End. Burton was cast as the quintessential “angry young man,” Jimmy Porter, and Bloom as his lover Helena. She thought she would resume her affair with Burton, only to walk in on him in the arms of a young Susan Strasberg, with whom he had had a brief affair when they appeared together in Time Remembered in New York in 1957. That finally ended it, as Bloom wrote that she castigated herself for being drawn in again by the still-married, and still-womanizing, Burton. They parted rather bitterly. (In her own autobiography, titled Time Remembered, after the play that launched her stage career, Susan Strasberg remembered hiding in that dressing room bathroom and watching Bloom and Burton embracing, a scene that sent the nineteen-year-old actress back to her hotel, shattered and humiliated.)

  Despite her disappointment, Bloom saw that Burton was brilliant in the role of Jimmy Porter—born to it, in fact.

  As Jimmy, he was able to draw on his own sense of social injustice, to remember the Great Depression, the poverty of his family, the illnesses suffered by his brothers from the years spent underground in the Welsh coal mines. Richard was always extremely aware of his own good fortune in escaping from such physical labor; however, I always thought that he suffered from a feeling of inadequacy in the face of his family’s stoic endurance; that he believed the life of an actor was “cushy,” and that he had been emasculated by his profession.

  Which may have been one reason for his incessant womanizing, until he met Elizabeth.

  They met for the fourth time in January 1965 to appear together in the screen adaptation of John Le Carré’s first best-selling novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, directed by the once blacklisted Martin Ritt. Filmed at the Shepperton Studios in London and on location in Dublin, it wasn’t a happy experience. In Bloom’s view, Burton was again transformed. By 1965, he was world-famous, at the top of his game, the highest-paid actor in the profession, and very much married to “one of the most beautiful women in the world.” But she felt that he had not fulfilled his earlier promise of greatness, and she told gossip columnist Sheilah Graham t
hat Burton “hadn’t changed at all, except physically. He was still drinking, still boasting, he was still late, still reciting the same poems and telling the same stories as when he was twenty-three…it was obvious that he was going to be a huge star, which is not the same as being a great actor. He has confused them.” Her opinion, however, would change after seeing his performance as the raincoated, world-weary Alec Leamas in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold—one she would call “brilliant.”

  After a lunch with Martin Ritt and Claire Bloom in London, Burton confided in the leather-bound diary he had begun keeping that year that Claire was “nervous, but all right.” The real problem would come not from Bloom but from Elizabeth Taylor’s jealousy. “Burton was in the ring with both of them and it was raw-knuckled stuff,” wrote Bragg. Bloom’s character’s name was even changed from “Liz” to “Nan” to avoid an unnecessary evocation of Burton’s famous wife. Early on, when the idea of having Elizabeth play Claire’s role came up, it was decided that she was just too grand a star to convincingly play a librarian—she would have thrown the whole production off-kilter.

  “Taylor was extremely upset by my reappearance in Richard’s life,” Bloom observed. “Subsequently, she was always on hand during our scenes together. Her commanding if unmusical call for ‘Richard!’ sent him scurrying to her side.” Elizabeth took to yelling Richard’s name throughout the shoot, and Claire took some delight in imitating that call for attention. She was, Bloom thought, “extremely uncomfortable having me around.” Elizabeth may have feared that the younger actress was still smitten with her one-time lover. Did she trust Burton?

  Bloom also observed that Burton’s drinking had begun to take its toll. “Like the spirit of the sturdy miner’s son I had known and loved, the muscle tone had vanished.” She noticed a tremor in his hand that was only cured by his midday drinks. She thought that his once-prodigious memory for poetry was not quite what it used to be, and he required cue cards to be placed strategically throughout the set. This last observation, however, was disputed by Frank Delaney, a writer who spent time with the Burtons during the making of Spy. He was impressed by Burton’s memory for great literature—“not just Shakespeare and the Welsh poets, you’d expect that, but ‘Tintern Abbey,’ I remember, reams of it, and Joyce, the opening of Ulysses, paragraph after paragraph, word-perfect.”

  Delaney also noticed that Burton in particular seemed oppressed by melancholy. Perhaps it was the role of Alec Leamas itself that infected Burton’s mood. The character is a disillusioned and joyless pawn in a Machiavellian game of espionage, a character written in stark contrast to the unrealistic glamour of James Bond. Or perhaps the tensions between Claire Bloom and Elizabeth were taking their toll. And there was always the crush of crowds and Richard’s realization that no matter how brilliant he was onscreen, Elizabeth was more famous than he. At a pub lunch with Le Carré (David Cornwall’s nom de plume), Burton was in a particularly self-pitying mood. He groused to the novelist, “I can’t go to a pub anymore. Elizabeth is more famous than the queen. I wish none of it had ever happened.” Le Carré observed: “They were living out their marriage in public. There were shouting matches in restaurants.”

  During a break in filming, Burton whisked Taylor off to Wales to reconnect with his roots, which usually lifted his spirits. They checked into the Queens Hotel, and at Cardiff Arms Park, Elizabeth donned the traditional Welsh color by wearing a red bowler. They cheered as the Welsh rugby team trounced England, then joined in a rousing chorus of the Welsh anthem, “Cwm Rhondda.” It was a glorious afternoon, until they returned to their hotel, where they were nearly trampled by an overly enthusiastic crowd of fans celebrating the Welsh victory. Graham Jenkins, who accompanied the couple, recalled, “It was without doubt one of the worst experiences of lack of crowd control that I have ever known. The crowd just wouldn’t let us get out.” The Burtons were used to mobs, but this was like a repeat of what had met them in Boston or outside the stage door during their Hamlet year. They were saved by a legendary Welsh rugby star, the tackler Haydn Mainwaring, who barreled into the hotel kitchen and cleared a path for the Burtons.

  In Port Talbot, Burton took special pride in showing off his voluptuous wife, parading her in front of the stalwart Welsh miners who thronged the pubs. One of them reached out and pinched Elizabeth’s derrière; she turned around and thwacked him on the jaw, which completely delighted Burton. It was all in good fun. She loved the Welsh people and felt at home among them. For someone as stateless as Elizabeth, this, and being in Puerto Vallarta, was as close as she would come to feeling at home.

  As usual, trips to Burton’s sisters were accompanied by lavish gifts. Elizabeth had gotten into the habit of sending them armfuls of her cast-off clothes—silk and sequined movie star gowns with labels from shops on Rodeo Drive, which they would wear to the market in Pontrhydyfen and Port Talbot. Burton’s sister Hilda Owens recalled, however, that it was often hard on them, and the village itself, when the Burtons came into town unannounced. “It was like a fair here” whenever the Burtons arrived in their Daimler. Aside from the press and the BBC, there were “busloads coming to see them,” she recalled, and “they were so hospitable they would invite many of them in. Even the chauffeur…. Even the press came in. That’s how we are in the village, we couldn’t keep them out.” Once at home, Burton relished playing hymns on the piano and speaking to his brothers and sisters only in Welsh. His sisters would make the traditional Welsh dishes that Burton so loved, lava bread and gooseberry tart.

  The trip so lifted his spirits that Burton even considered resettling in Britain, even if it meant paying the dreaded British taxes. He’d had it with living out of suitcases, traipsing from one hotel to another. But instead, he and Elizabeth flew to Dublin and immediately checked into the penthouse suite of the Gresham Hotel, to resume location shooting for The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Once again, they were thronged by crowds, stirred up in part by the fact that Cleopatra was being shown at a theater across the street from the Burtons’ hotel (they could see the giant marquee through their window).

  It was not a happy time for them. The weather was bleak, the theme and tone and look of the movie Burton was making was grim. Maria Burton came down with the measles. Bad things started to happen. Their faithful, stalwart chauffeur, Gaston Sanz, lost his sixteen-year-old son, killed in a shooting accident. Sanz, who had been with Elizabeth for twelve years, was a decorated war hero of the Free French Commandos, but it was Elizabeth who bolstered him, accompanying him to Paris for the inquest and funeral. (“I wouldn’t be here now if it wasn’t for her,” he later admitted.) In Paris, $50,000 worth of Elizabeth’s jewels were stolen from her hotel room. It got worse. Back in Dublin, Elizabeth was with Sanz when the chauffeur accidentally hit and killed a pedestrian. And then, on March 12, in Los Angeles, her father, Francis Taylor, suffered a stroke at the age of sixty-seven. Elizabeth flew to California and rushed to his bedside, staying a week to comfort her mother before returning to Dublin. Her father survived, though he would never fully recover. Elizabeth always rose to the occasion when disaster struck; it was when she was bored and feeling neglected that tensions arose.

  Burton resumed his heavy drinking on the set. “He had a bottle of scotch in his raincoat pocket,” observed John Le Carré, “possibly another in the other pocket.” Once, during a nighttime shoot in a Dublin street, dreary enough to substitute for a Berlin location, Elizabeth suddenly turned up on the set. “It was the biggest free show in Dublin—the fire brigade, the police, crowds,” Le Carré remembered, “but it was under control. When all of a sudden—the white Rolls-Royce appeared with Gaston…and Elizabeth, looking like a million dollars. She drove onto the set! The crowd was out of control and surged up to her.” Burton was upstaged and his concentration broken. He yelled at the crowd, “My God, there’s my little girl!” and then scrambled toward the car, insisting that Elizabeth leave the set. She did so, and Burton finished the night’s shooting. Still, she had made her point. �
��No one makes an entrance like Elizabeth Taylor,” Sammy Davis Jr. once said, and she would prove that time and again.

  Elizabeth and Claire met only once during the three months of filming, when the Burtons invited the actress and Le Carré to a dinner at their Gresham Hotel suite. It was a bit of a gunfight between two great raconteurs—Le Carré and Burton—taking turns topping each other’s stories. In the middle of dinner, Elizabeth rose from the table and went to her room. Shortly thereafter, her voice could be heard through an intercom, making loud and frequent summonses for Richard to come to bed. She finally appeared, furious at being ignored, and a shouting match ensued.

  It wasn’t the only time guests were treated to the sight of the Burtons in full battle armor. Earlier on, Le Carré had been summoned to the Burtons’ penthouse suite at an early hour because Elizabeth wanted to meet the author of the popular spy novel. He arrived to find Burton alone in a vast sitting room, a pile of books by his chair. As he entered the room, he heard the intercom crackling with Elizabeth’s voice.

  “Richard?”

  “Yes, darling?”

  “Who’s all here?”

  “The writer.”

  Burton disappeared into the bedroom to fetch Elizabeth and “they had a mother and a father of a row,” Le Carré recalled. “Sounds of slapping. All of that. And all coming through on this intercom! Eventually she arrived in this sort of fluffy wraparound dressing gown you send away for, barefooted, rather broad-arsed, but extremely cuddly, extraordinarily attractive—those beautiful eyes, far more beautiful off-screen than on. And she gave me one of those little-girl handshakes.”