Furious Love

by Sam Kashner

  In reality, however, Elizabeth and Richard had entered into their marriage knowing that Elizabeth would be unable to conceive a fourth time. Her deeply held desire to have a child with Richard would remain unfulfilled, which is one reason why they had been so intent on adopting and raising Maria Burton. But they wanted to give Maria another sibling, and they would later try again for another adoption. A confidante of Elizabeth’s observed, “If she could have, Elizabeth would have been like Josephine Baker with her ‘rainbow tribe.’” (The celebrated cabaret performer adopted twelve multi-ethnic orphans.) The loving glance from frolicking children to Richard’s face was a true reflection of her emotional state, and hopes for the future, at the time.

  After the scene was completed, Elizabeth suffered another health crisis. Burton wrote in his diary on April 6: “E. very ill from that bloody bleeding. We have sent for a doctor from London. I went to bed in a huge depression and nightmares of her dying.” Though he doesn’t describe the cause of her spontaneous bleeding in his published diary, it was probably bleeding hemorrhoids, an affliction that would recur over the next few years and would require repeated hospitalizations. The amount of blood loss was horrifying to Richard. On April 8, he wrote, “E. has blood pressure of 90—very low apparently, from loss of blood.” Four days later: “E. to go into hosp. tomorrow for curettage. Came to lunch with me and felt sick and faint. On arriving home, bled. [Dr.] Price flying in from London to knock her out. Poor little thing. I shouted and bawled at her for being ‘unfit’ for lack of discipline, for taking too much booze. I think I was talking about myself—out of fear for her.” On April 13, “Then the blower [telephone] blew and joy of joys, it was herself on the other end and the operation was over, and she was in pain but alive and will live to be shouted at another day.”

  Burton finished work that afternoon, removed his makeup and showered, fixed himself a vodka and tonic, and was driven to the hospital. On the way home, he had his driver, Mario, stop at St. Peter’s Basilica. Burton stared at “the whole huge thing” and muttered a prayer of thanks under his breath.

  8

  SEDUCED BY FAUST

  “I am madly in love with her at the moment, as distinct from always loving her, and want to make love to her every minute…”

  —RICHARD BURTON

  “I’m just a broad, but Richard is a great actor.”

  —ELIZABETH TAYLOR

  The Burtons’ $2 million investment in The Taming of the Shrew would net a handsome profit of $12 million, but one of the real rewards for Burton was that he was able to reconcile his two worlds: the Shakespeare he loved and many felt he was born for, and the movies he made with Elizabeth. He was now prouder of his film successes—Becket, Iguana, Spy, Woolf—than his stage triumphs, but he had never meant to turn his back entirely on his theatrical roots. In this, Elizabeth was his fiercest supporter. After making thirty-six films, she hoped to do the impossible—play second fiddle to Richard’s career. And so: Doctor Faustus, which would reduce Taylor to a nonspeaking role in a production dear to Burton’s heart.

  It seemed like a good idea at the time.

  Before filming The Taming of the Shrew in Rome, the Burtons had traveled to Oxford in February 1966 to pay homage to Nevill Coghill, Richard’s former mentor during the six months he was in residence at Exeter College in Oxford, as part of his RAF training. Coghill, like Richard’s previous mentor, Philip Burton, was probably in love with his former protégé. “This boy…will be a great actor. He is outstandingly handsome and robust,” Coghill had written on Richard’s report card when the latter was his drama student twenty years earlier; he’s “very masculine and with deep inward fire…” Coghill invited Sir John Gielgud, Noël Coward’s producer Hugh “Binkie” Beaumont, and other luminaries of British theater to take their measure of his new discovery, men who would smooth Richard’s way to his theatrical career in London.

  In 1944, Coghill had directed Burton in his first Shakespearean role, Angelo in Measure for Measure, and had famously said about his former pupil, “I have had many students of very great gifts, and many of very little. But I have had only two men of genius to teach—W. H. Auden and Richard Burton. When they happen, one cannot mistake them.” Those now-idealized six months at Oxford had begun roughly for Burton. As a Welshman, older and not of the same class as most of the undergraduates, Burton had had to “bloody a few noses.” He recalled, “I was fairly ruthless when I arrived at Oxford, fresh from South Wales, with a powerful Welsh accent, and determined to play the leading part in whatever Oxford University Dramatic Society (OUDS) production was coming up.” But Coghill and Robert Hardy, Richard’s classmate and fellow RAF trainee, were struck by Burton’s sheer presence and force of personality.

  “When he came to Oxford as an undergraduate in 1944,” Hardy recalled, “he had an astounding beauty—a blend of classic Greek serenity and smoldering Celtic fires, emanating from mysteries and humor. And above all, the fires of enormous laughter. His laughs have always been infectious, outrageous, and terrifying. Behind it all, there is an element of Welsh magic or mystery.”

  Burton agreed to take the starring role in an OUDS production of Christopher Marlowe’s sixteenth-century play The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, for a charity performance that would raise nearly $40,000 to build the Oxford University Theatre. Elizabeth would appear briefly as—who else?—Helen of Troy. They looked forward to their Oxford hiatus, what life might have offered had they not stepped through the looking glass of world fame.

  It was a sentimental return. Richard indulged in a fantasy of becoming an Oxford don—the road not taken, or even offered—with Elizabeth at his side, serving undergraduates cake in a low-cut dress. Elizabeth sensed in her husband a need to go back and replenish that part of his life, and she, too, fantasized about buying a house in Oxfordshire, raising show horses while Burton taught poetry and she, perhaps, taught a course on Tennessee Williams—one of her many fleeting dreams of what a “normal” life might be like.

  The Burtons checked into the Randolph Hotel, a stone’s throw from the Oxford Playhouse, for a three-week stay—ten days of rehearsal and a week of performances. They held court at their hotel for the student actors, who were thrilled with the Burtons’ presence in Oxford and with how friendly and down-to-earth the two mega-stars were. While Elizabeth made drinks for the eager drama students, Burton regaled them with stories about his days at the Old Vic and gossip about Gielgud and Olivier and Coghill, when he first knew the latter twenty-two years ago. Coghill, in his final year as a Merton College Professor at Oxford, immediately warmed to Elizabeth, and to Burton’s dresser, Bob Wilson. The tall, slim, distinguished-looking, African-American was always waiting just offstage with a glass of scotch to hand to Burton when he exited a scene, to the delight of the student actors.

  For Burton, Doctor Faustus was a very personal play. He first read it at the age of twelve and had fallen in love with Marlowe’s thrilling speeches. Now he had a chance to play the quintessential role of the scholar who sells his soul to the devil—for knowledge, for wealth, and for the world’s most beautiful woman. Burton identified with Faustus on all three counts, and he attacked the role as if it were an exorcism. It was a gargantuan role, and Burton was, perhaps, asking too much of himself to perform it after only ten days of rehearsals. But it was something he needed to do.

  During rehearsals, Coghill and the student actors were impressed with Burton’s performance. “I remember the shock of thrill that went through the entire cast when for the first time he let us hear the voice and see the gesture of his ‘Earth, GAPE!’ in the play’s final scene. So the performance grew gradually through a fortnight to something tremendous in the old sense of that word—something that makes you tremble.” The show, not surprisingly, sold out, with students standing in long lines in the freezing rain to see the play. Coghill noted the hush that descended on the audience when Elizabeth appeared in her brief, nonspeaking role of Helen of Troy and made “her slow walk around the sta
ge.”

  Sadly, despite Coghill’s assessment and Burton’s good intentions, most of the critics thoroughly panned the student production. When Coghill saw how they had come down upon them “with thunder and slaughter,” he felt he should have been forewarned. The critics were already in a bad mood: to raise as much money as possible, OUDS had limited the number of tickets to reviewers (one apiece) and did not give them a chance to meet the stars. The London Times called the production “a sad example of university drama at its worst. Mr. Burton seems to be walking through the part,” cruelly complaining that Burton’s performance was “as embarrassing as those of the undergraduate actors.”

  A few of the Oxford dons, however, loyally praised the production, such as Professor of Poetry Edmund Blunden, who wrote in his review in the undergraduate student newspaper, Cherwell: “To praise most cordially all whom we watch would be just. The gusto and swiftness of the performance was one of the finest efforts that an amateur company, even assisted by two actors of genius, could ever make.” Wolf Mankowitz, in a letter to the Guardian, praised the Burtons for their artistic philanthropy and called for the queen to reward Burton with, at the very least, a Cross of the British Empire. (But then, Mankowitz had written the adaptation of the Marlowe play for Coghill’s production.)

  As soon as Doctor Faustus’s brief run was over, the Burtons left for the De Laurentiis Studio in Rome. After the five-month shoot was completed for The Taming of the Shrew, Richard brought the student cast of Doctor Faustus to Rome to film the play, coaxed Columbia Pictures to produce and distribute the film, and invested $1 million of his own funds in the production. He and Elizabeth agreed to be paid just the union minimum of $45 per week for their appearances in the film to be codirected by Burton and Coghill. It was almost as if they wanted to throw down the gauntlet to the reviewers who had gleefully panned the Oxford performance.

  And then, of course, there was Burton’s obsession with the Faust legend. Years later, Mike Nichols would say, “Richard seemed to be the prisoner of a fantasy of having sold his soul to the devil,” always keenly aware of what his former rivals and companions were accomplishing on the stage. Whether it was a fantasy or not, it was part of the story Richard told himself about his extraordinary life and the opportunities he had seized for himself, and the ones Elizabeth had made possible. “Why me?” he would ask later—“why me?”

  Elizabeth must have known what a risk it was to lend their names to what was virtually a student production of a noncommercial work, but she went along with it as a gift to Richard, and to give him another opportunity he had wanted for some time: to direct. She knew her happiness depended upon Richard’s happiness.

  In October 1966, also in Rome, Elizabeth began work with director John Huston on Reflections in a Golden Eye, with Marlon Brando replacing Montgomery Clift. It was an ironic replacement, perhaps, because the two men had had a special bond as rivals and fellow acolytes of Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio, the New York school of method acting (which Burton, and many other British actors, disdained).

  The film would be shot mostly in Italy, despite the fact that the movie was set on an army base in the American South. Warner Bros.–Seven Arts settled on Rome as an accommodation to Elizabeth, though it wasn’t lost on Jack Warner that the Italian crew would mean far lower production costs. So the De Laurentiis studio in Rome would again play host to the Burtons. Richard would be there, but it was now his turn to be idle, much as Elizabeth was during the making of The Night of the Iguana. He didn’t like it; though he had declined to play Major Penderton, this was the first time since their affair and marriage that Elizabeth was making a movie without him.

  His crankiness, perhaps, was vented on Kenneth Tynan, when the drama critic showed up at the spacious villa they’d rented in Rome to interview Burton for BBC TV. Tynan later noted in his published diaries that Burton had polished off about five bottles of wine during the day. Burton then invited Tynan to join him, Elizabeth, and a number of other guests to dine that night at the villa.

  More libations were poured at dinner. Afterward, lingering in the villa’s grand hall, Burton turned to him and, with a “wolfish grin,” asked, “How do you think Elizabeth is looking, Ken?”

  “Fine,” he answered, immediately on his guard.

  “How would you like to go to bed with her?” he goaded.

  At this point, Tynan didn’t know how to answer. If he said yes, that would betray lusting after the host’s wife. If he demurred, was that not insulting to Elizabeth’s allure? He answered, diplomatically, “To be quite candid, Richard, I doubt whether I’d be capable of making it with Elizabeth.”

  “You mean you couldn’t get it up?”

  “Something like that.”

  At which point, Richard shouted across the room to Elizabeth that Ken “doesn’t think he’d be able to get it up for you in bed.”

  Elizabeth’s eyes blazed, Tynan recalled. “That is the most insulting thing that has ever been said to me. Leave my house!”

  But after throwing him out, Elizabeth called the unfortunate critic the next morning to offer a “hungover apology.” She also had flowers delivered to his hotel room, realizing no doubt that not everyone shared the Burtons’ sense of humor.

  But one who did was Marlon Brando.

  Reflections gave Brando the chance to spend more time with Elizabeth and Richard. Often during the ten-week shoot, Richard would come to the studio to pick up his wife and the three would set out for dinner. As a kind of mute tribute, Richard would sometimes appear early enough to watch Marlon in a scene. It didn’t take long before rumors appeared in print, particularly in movie magazines in the States, that Richard was showing up to “keep an eye on Elizabeth,” that he was jealous of Brando, both personally and professionally, and that this “would be a repeat of Cleopatra” only with Richard in the Eddie Fisher role.

  But that was ridiculous. It was just “feeding time for the press,” Elizabeth said. The public’s appetite for scandal had only deepened over the last six years.

  Burton, as astute about human nature as ever, wrote in his diary on November 3, 1966, “Marlon’s immorality, his attitude to it, is honest and clean. He is a genuinely good man, I suspect, and he is intelligent. He has depth. It’s no accident he is such a compelling actor. He puts on acts, of course, and pretends to be vaguer than he is. Very little misses him, as I’ve noticed.”

  Brando’s biographer Peter Manso observed a “tacit connection between Burton and Brando. Both men had been criticized for their choice of film material, and both had been criticized for abandoning the stage for movies, which Brando had been more guilty of than Burton.” Richard, Manso noted, “had heard that song before, and would never, not even when they were drinking together, would ever bring it up to Brando. The plaint had been used on him too often, he had been goaded by that question too often to turn around and torture a fellow actor with it, especially an actor with such remarkable gifts as Marlon’s.” They spent a great deal of time together, often joined by Christian Marquand, a charming, jovial Frenchman who was making his way as a producer and director. Marquand was Brando’s friend from the early 1950s, and they were both out to seduce Richard into appearing in Candy, Marquand’s doomed-to-disaster film adaptation of Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg’s underground classic, which was an exercise in sexual reassignment of Voltaire’s Candide. Their Saturday evenings together, “everybody became sloshed to the gills…A thoroughly forgettable time was had by all,” Richard wrote in his diary, but forgettable in the sense that no one could remember, afterward, what happened. And indeed, the small role Burton would take in Candy the following autumn as a favor to Brando would prove forgettable as well.

  The Burtons enjoyed Brando’s playfulness, and Richard especially enjoyed Brando’s eclectic knowledge (Native American history, the biology of electric eels). They would have good-natured arguments about what was the easiest language to learn—Richard insisted that it was English, while Marlon insisted that Spanish
was unquestionably easier. Most of these dorm-room jaw sessions took place over vodkas before and after dinner, Marlon wondering how many “misguided people” would be waiting for him outside his hotel room. Brando actually felt sorry for his fans. He felt they were wasting their lives. Elizabeth was far less gloomy about the whole thing. She saw her fans as a part of her job; she didn’t live for their approval—hardly!—but she didn’t pity them either. It could be worse, she told them. “We could be the Beatles.”

  Burton wrote in his diary that he didn’t find Brando boring or pretentious, qualities that Richard loathed, and that he often fretted he had been guilty of himself. That’s one reason for the drink, the stories, all those anecdotes that flooded out of him, because he felt he had to be “interesting.” Some people, like their lawyer, Aaron Frosch, always felt badly around Richard, no matter how much Elizabeth tried reassuring them (“Richard likes you, he thinks you’re absolutely brilliant.”). Frosch worried that Richard was bored with his company. “What do you have to do to be friends with him,” Frosch asked Dick Hanley, “memorize poetry?”

  John Huston himself was trying to make a comeback after directing a string of flops, including The Bible, which Richard and Elizabeth had first seen together in Rome (Richard saying that his favorite part was “Creation”). Huston was an important director to Burton. It was in The Night of the Iguana that Richard began to take film acting with the same kind of seriousness as Elizabeth. And it was in Puerto Vallarta, a place Huston loved as well, that Richard and Elizabeth had felt relaxed, comfortable enough to completely indulge their sexual desire for each other. It had been a powerful combination, acting under Huston’s direction and spending nights with Elizabeth. Richard thought that sex with Elizabeth had brought him even greater strength as an actor, and he had marveled that he could be that enthralled by one woman over such a long period of time. For someone who prided himself on moving on, acquiring “another notch on his gun belt,” in Elizabeth’s words, this was seemingly the last notch. It surprised him and delighted her. He admitted to Huston (himself a notorious womanizer) that Elizabeth was the only woman he thought he could kill someone over, out of jealousy. Her body still excited him, and when she was ill, he counted the days before they could be together again.