by Sam Kashner
As far as Le Carré was concerned, some of the wind had gone out of Richard Burton’s sails. “I had the impression that it wasn’t much fun anymore—it had been fun—fighting and fucking his way up, but now it just wasn’t anymore.” Burton had been Ritt’s choice for Alec Leamas all along, but Le Carré had hoped that James Mason or Trevor Howard might fit the bill, because, in his view, they looked more world-weary. But when Le Carré saw Burton a few months later on the beach at Scheveningen in Holland, he was stunned to see how “deteriorated” Burton looked. The case can be made that Burton’s dissipated appearance reflected how much he had taken on the role of the beaten-down Alec Leamas. Intended or not, it served him well. And it would serve him even better for his next role, arguably his greatest: the henpecked, eternally disappointed George in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
In March, near the end of filming, Elizabeth was back in the hospital. Her delicate health and frequent injuries often brought them closer together. He loved taking care of her, being depended upon, and she luxuriated in his attentions. She was grateful, in fact, knowing how much the sickroom terrified Richard. He wrote in his leather-bound journal, his notebooks, “nervous all day worrying about her,” and confided how much he wanted to have a child with Elizabeth. A spinal injury that required the fusing of two discs when she was first married to Mike Todd, and complications with her earlier pregnancies, made it inadvisable for her to bear another child, but they apparently hoped another surgery would make a full-term pregnancy possible.
Filming finally behind them, they took their leave of the chronic tensions of the shoot and decamped to the Riviera with their four children. Away from the public and the rigors of filmmaking, it was a blissful time for all of them, as Burton recorded in his notebooks: “Went tramping with Michael, Christopher, Liza, after having watched them at the riding school. Liza and Mike splendid but Christopher started to show panic, and with my usual hatred of watching others humiliated, I left with Maria for a stroll to the river.” Elizabeth joined Richard and Maria outside the riding school, not wanting to make Christopher self-conscious. Richard seemed to find genuine solace and pleasure in the company of the children, playing board games for hours, going on long walks. He was delighted to have adopted Maria, to have given her his name, and he felt a special bond with both Maria and Liza. For once, he didn’t have to be the brilliant raconteur, the endless entertainer, dazzling with his erudition and wit. He could be himself. Richard, the former rugby player, was equally at home roughhousing with the children and acting out scenes from Shakespearean plays, which they loved.
Elizabeth, too, was grateful for her children’s bonding with Richard. Michael and Christopher had inherited their mother’s deep blue eyes and dark lashes. Christopher played the flute and looked like the English singer and guitarist Nick Drake. He had begun by being hostile to Richard, but eventually he would “throw himself into Richard’s arms and kiss him,” Elizabeth remembered. Maria, who would grow into a tall, athletic, and graceful young woman, was particularly close to Richard. Liza, who had her father’s stubborn chin and shrewd eyes, shared Elizabeth’s love of animals and affinity for horses. Elizabeth called her “an independent tornado” who loved to “take charge of Richard.” Though she never knew her father, as she was seven months old when Mike Todd was killed, Liza was very much like him in “her mannerisms, the way she uses her hands, the way she shrugs her shoulders—and the larceny and con of her mind,” Elizabeth observed. She would later become an artist known for her sculptures of horses.
In one of the undated notes he wrote to Elizabeth while she slept in the next room, Richard described the blissful evening he’d just spent with Elizabeth and “that lovely and loving Liza of ours,” making her “giggle almost…to the point of hysterics (which you asked me to do).” He went on to describe massaging Elizabeth’s foot, adding, “It’s equally extraordinary what ugly but nonetheless lovable feet you both have! Don’t hit me, but the only beautiful feet are babies’…” He ended his note, “The greatest invention I know is a marvelous collection of superbly confected brilliance called E. T. Burton. What great God invented her?” He signed it, “Rich. (In every way.)” Burton’s genuine love for Elizabeth’s children was one of their deepest bonds.
In April of 1965, Burton was nominated for an Academy Award for his work in Becket the previous year. It was his third nomination, but he would lose the Oscar to Rex Harrison for My Fair Lady, Marc Antony overshadowed once again by Julius Caesar. Disappointing, but there were more heights to scale as he confronted his looming fortieth birthday. He had already surpassed Elizabeth at the box office, though she remained more famous—more beloved—than he could ever hope to be. Now the unasked question was, did their alliance help or hinder his career? His best and most rewarding film work—Becket, The Night of the Iguana, and now The Spy Who Came in from the Cold—were all made without Elizabeth costarring. In fact, the dramatic climax of Spy can be read as emblematic of where Burton was, psychically, in his relationship with Elizabeth. As his character, Leamas, scales the Berlin Wall in his final dash for safety, he reaches back to help his lover, Nan, over the wall. Suddenly, she’s shot by a German soldier. Burton hesitates for a long moment, his rough face caught in the glare of the East German searchlight: should he leave her behind and make his escape into freedom, or try to rescue his beloved, thus sealing his own doom?
Leamas—Burton—climbs back down the wall.
6
WHO’S AFRAID OF ELIZABETH TAYLOR?
“I am George.”
—RICHARD BURTON
“Let’s face it—a lot of my life has lacked dignity.”
—ELIZABETH TAYLOR
Burton reacted with good grace to losing his third Academy Award, for Becket. After all, he had been nominated for his work in My Cousin Rachel and The Robe, and he was likely to be nominated as well for The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. With his unrivaled success as Hamlet on Broadway, and toning down his film-acting technique, how could he not be nominated again—and win? He would bide his time.
Burton had mixed emotions, however, when he got word in June of 1965 that Sybil Burton, at thirty-six, had married the twenty-four-year-old rock musician Jordan Christopher. He was pleased to see Sybil moving on with her life, but it was a blow to his ego—to be supplanted in the marriage bed by a twenty-four-year-old rocker was unsettling. Burton himself was fond of pointing out that the Welsh were among the most brilliant tribes in the world, but they possessed a talent for everything except being middle-aged. He was turning forty. His youthful roguish charm had been replaced by a kind of gravitas, a heaviness that sometimes made him seem haunted by ghosts from his past, an inability to enjoy the enormous personal and professional successes he had torn out of the world.
For her part, Sybil was having a renaissance. She opened a nightclub in Manhattan called Arthur (the name inspired by an ad-libbed line in A Hard Day’s Night, when Ringo tells a clueless reporter that he calls his haircut “Arthur”). The group Jordan Christopher fronted, The Wild Ones, was the house band. It became the most popular discotheque in New York in the 1960s. Andy Warhol described it as “all dark brightness. It was Sybil Burton Christopher’s club, of course, and Sybil was an upbeat, outgoing woman—everything was fun! witty! a ball!—the energetic English type that wants everybody to have fun. I met so many stars at Arthur—Sophia Loren, Bette Davis—everybody but Liz Taylor Burton.” (Warhol was an early worshipper of Elizabeth—he’d been enamored of her since his sickly childhood in Pittsburgh, reading movie magazines in bed. He would write her fan letters, and his early silk screens made in The Factory in 1962 further apotheosized Elizabeth, from giant blow-ups of the “Eddie Fisher–Elizabeth Taylor Break-Up” headline to the gorgeous silk screens of Elizabeth at the height of her youthful beauty.)
So Sybil had survived the humiliation of her public breakup with Burton, after all. She not only survived, she flourished, once she’d moved to Manhattan and the Hamptons and remar
ried. She had always had a gift for friendship. Sybil had maintained the loyalty of many of Burton’s old pals—Robert Hardy, Emlyn Williams, Philip Burton, the Stanley Bakers, Rex Harrison, and friends such as Dirk Bogarde, Lord Snowdon, Princess Margaret, and even Elizabeth Taylor’s childhood friend Roddy McDowall. Burton, in contrast, was becoming increasingly cut off from his former friends as the Taylor entourage became more and more difficult to penetrate. Robert Hardy remembered being unable to break through in the years following The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, sending messages that never reached Burton, as his once close friend became increasingly isolated in his gilded life. “A terrifying position, isn’t it, to be totally, helplessly in love with this amazing star,” he acknowledged.
Of course, he drifted, to some extent, away from most of his friends. Because, from the Elizabeth time onward, he traveled round with a court. It was very difficult. He always rang me up when he came to London and said, “come around the Dorchester tomorrow.” I would always say, “How many people are going to be there?” There was going to be a big party on Wednesday, and on Thursday, but on Friday…“alright, come on Friday, just the family.” There were 150 people there! And more caviar than you can imagine.
His male vanity notwithstanding, Burton was pleased that he would no longer be paying Sybil alimony, and—more important—he felt he would be able to spend more time with his adored eldest daughter, Kate. Jessica, meanwhile, was being cared for in an institution on Long Island, visited rarely—if ever—by Burton, who still carried grief and guilt over her condition.
In 1965, thirty-two-year-old Elizabeth was still stunningly beautiful, but her much-commented-upon weight fluctuations sometimes gave her a matronly look. She did not carry weight well. Tiny in stature—barely five foot two—with short legs and a bosomy hourglass figure, she had a hard time finding clothes that fit her well and flattered her Gibson Girl figure, especially when 1960s fashion got into full sway and favored the young, the long-legged, and the small-breasted. This new look was embodied by London’s Carnaby Street models such as Twiggy, Jean Shrimpton, and Penelope Tree, miniskirted gamines ten to fifteen years younger than Elizabeth. By 1965, stars who had become household names in the 1950s—Elizabeth Taylor, Sophia Loren, Doris Day—were being supplanted by younger actresses: John Schlesinger’s Darling won Julie Christie an Academy Award in 1963; Richard Lester’s A Hard Day’s Night the following year introduced a bevy of teenage mod chicks led by Pattie Boyd; a young, tomboyish Jane Fonda dazzled in Cat Ballou in 1965.
It wasn’t meant to change so quickly. Just two years earlier, Warhol noticed how “the girls…in Brooklyn looked really great. It was the summer of the Liz-Taylor-in-Cleopatra-look—long, straight, dark, shiny hair with bangs and Egyptian-looking eye makeup.” The V.I.P.s that same year had been launched with a fashion tie-in with Pierre Cardin, which popularized the white mink hat Taylor had worn so fetchingly in the film. But by 1965, Elizabeth would no longer launch fashion trends. She just wasn’t convincing as a bohemian artist in The Sandpiper despite her Irene Sharaff poncho. Her look was becoming passé to a younger audience, though older women still admired and envied her, and the public maintained its insatiable curiosity about all things relating to the Burtons.
It was a kind of genius that instead of trying to compete with her younger, more nubile competition, Elizabeth appeared in her next role as the blowsy, middle-aged, overripe faculty spouse, Martha, in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, a scathing drama about a self-destructive academic couple at a small New England college. Instead of dieting, she added twenty-five pounds to her diminutive frame, and she covered her black glossy hair with a salt-and-pepper wig. She took a liability and turned it into a virtue, even appearing on the cover of Life magazine in her middle-age guise, throwing down the gauntlet to all who questioned her devotion to her craft. She was Mrs. Richard Burton, yes, but she was still, after all, an actress.
If Elizabeth was losing a younger generation of moviegoers, she endeared herself even more to her lifelong fans, especially the women who had loved her as Velvet Brown and had grown up with her. As Martha in Edward Albee’s blistering drama, she would play a forty-five-year-old woman entering menopause, graying, overweight, and full of regrets. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? would shake to the core women in their thirties, forties, and fifties who had grown up with National Velvet and Father of the Bride. Here was Elizabeth, suddenly older, heavier, disappointed, disillusioned, and drunk. Elizabeth herself would later observe that women identified with her in a way they did not identify with that other larger-than-life movie star, Marilyn Monroe, because Marilyn never went through menopause. Marilyn had died two years earlier, in 1963, at the age of thirty-six, still beautiful and young. She’d never had children. She seemed to have had no attachments, no family around her; she seemed always in need of someone to take care of her. Elizabeth was someone her fans knew as a girl, as an ingénue, as a young wife, and now, as Martha, as a grown woman fighting the gravities of middle age, trapped in a disappointing marriage, her angers unleashed by too much alcohol. “She’s discontent,” her character says in Act I of the drama, a line with which many suburban housewives in the mid-1960s could identify.
Ernest Lehman had already made a big reputation for himself in Hollywood as a preeminent screenwriter specializing in adapting Broadway hits for the movies, such as The Sound of Music and West Side Story. He had written North by Northwest for Alfred Hitchcock, having earlier launched his career by writing, with help from the great Clifford Odets, the adaptation of Lehman’s own novella (or “novelette”), Sweet Smell of Success.
Lehman had first approached Elizabeth while she was filming interiors in Paris for The Sandpiper, to ask if she’d be interested in playing Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Albee’s play had won five Tony Awards and was a succès de scandale on Broadway, given its blistering vocabulary and frank sexual content. Lehman was writing the adaptation as well as producing the movie for Warner Bros. He wanted Elizabeth to play Martha, the harridan who goads two unwitting guests into helping her humiliate George, her long-suffering husband, in a night of raucous drinking. Uta Hagen and Arthur Hill had embodied the roles on Broadway, and Albee himself wanted Bette Davis and James Mason to play George and Martha onscreen. Patricia Neal was also seriously considered for the role, but, as Lehman later recalled, “When I saw the lines around the block for [The] Night of the Iguana, which was just Burton, I thought to myself, ‘Imagine the lines around the block in every city of the world if Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were to star together.’”
No one else in Hollywood could see the glamorous star in the role of a middle-aged, gone-to-seed Martha. At first, not even Elizabeth, who had “taken an abiding dislike” to the shrewish character when she first read the play. However, Burton was impressed with the language of Albee’s tragicomedy. “You’ve only to read the first lines and you know this is a great play,” he said. Richard agreed that Elizabeth was too young and too beautiful for the part, but they both sensed that this could be her Hamlet. He told Elizabeth, “You’d better play it to stop anyone else from doing it and causing a sensation.”
Curiously, given Lehman’s appreciation of Burton’s box-office draw, he wasn’t the producer’s first choice to play George. Names were bandied about—Peter O’Toole and Arthur Hill (who had originated the role). Lehman had offered the part to Jack Lemmon and Glenn Ford, who passed on it, because they felt the role of the henpecked, emasculated college professor would ruin their images. When Taylor nudged Lehman toward Burton, the producer at first turned him down with a compliment, saying Burton was too masculine for the role. But Elizabeth made it clear that Richard was her first choice as costar, and Lehman gave him a screen test. After looking at the results, he still wasn’t sure the actor was right for the part. He told Burton that, just as he feared, he “looked all wrong; much too strong…As I told him later, he looked as if he had four balls….”
Burton shot back, “Only
four?”
Lehman concluded that they were “going to have to do a lot of work on him.” Nonetheless, the producer conferred with his boss Jack Warner, the tyrannical head of Warner Bros., and they made the deal: $1.1 million and 10 percent of the gross for Taylor, plus director approval, and a flat fee of $750,000 for Burton. By now, Elizabeth had so warmed to the idea of playing Martha—especially with Richard as her costar—that she told Lehman, “Ernie, I’d have done this role for nothing, you know. But Hugh French [her agent] told me to say a million wasn’t enough. We took you, we really took you!” she said with a delicious cackle.
The role of Nick, the young biology professor Martha seduces, was first offered to Robert Redford, who turned it down. George Segal and Sandy Dennis, two acclaimed Broadway actors, were then cast as Nick and Honey, the mismatched couple trapped in a night of fun and games, whose own shaky union, like a comic subplot, reflects the lies and illusions of George and Martha’s marriage.
While still in Paris filming interiors for The Sandpiper, Taylor, Burton, and Lehman had discussed possible directors over dinner at La Méditerranée. Fred Zinnemann’s name came up, but Lehman said he had already declined, choosing instead to direct Paul Scofield in A Man for All Seasons. Burton next suggested Henri-Georges Clouzot, noted for suspense films like The Wages of Fear with Yves Montand and Diabolique with Simone Signoret.