Furious Love

by Sam Kashner

  So, both Burtons associated Huston with Mexico and their passion for each other. And Huston repaid the compliment by praising Elizabeth’s theatrical gifts, describing her in his memoir as a “supremely fine actress.” Always impressed with physical courage, Huston marveled at Elizabeth’s horsemanship. In spite of nearly constant back pain, she rode a white stallion in the film, and rode it well.

  Over the next decade, the Burtons would earn approximately $88 million (about $616 million today), and spend three-fourths of it on furs, diamonds, paintings, designer clothes, travel, food, liquor, a yacht, and a jet. The production company they’d formed to produce The Taming of the Shrew, named Taybur (for Taylor-Burton), became the holding company for their wealth, though Shrew would be the first and last film they produced. When the Burtons contemplated taking a three-month hiatus from making films, the movie industry shuddered, because, as one observer noticed, “nearly half of the U.S. film industry’s income…came from pictures starring one or both of them.” The year 1967 alone would see the release of three Burton-Taylor films: The Taming of the Shrew, Doctor Faustus, and The Comedians—and, for Elizabeth, the release of Reflections in a Golden Eye. “They say we generate more business activity than one of the smaller African nations,” Burton admitted, shaking his head in wonder.

  They invested $50,000 in the Vicky Tiel Boutique in Paris, bought a ten-passenger, twin-engine de Havilland jet for $1 million (named Elizabeth) and paintings by Utrillo, Monet, Picasso, Van Gogh, Renoir, Rouault, Pissarro, Degas, Augustus John, and Rembrandt (Elizabeth very much her father’s daughter in her eye for ever-appreciating works of art). They bought a fleet of Rolls-Royces and invested in real estate: 685 acres on Tenerife in the Canary Islands (where they grew bananas), 10 acres of land in County Wicklow, Ireland (where they bred horses), in addition to Casa Kimberly in Mexico, with its spectacular view of the Banderas Bay, replete with pre-Columbian art given to them by the Mexican government (for putting Puerto Vallarta on the map as a tourist destination). And, of course, they held on to their three homes—his in Céligny and Hampshire, and hers in Gstaad.

  Despite their vast real estate holdings, they continued to live mostly in hotels, booking entire floors to house their entourage and their children. When they ordered room service, they often ordered it from another country: in Rome, it was chili flown in from Chasen’s in Los Angeles; in Paris, pork sausages flown in from Fortnum & Mason in London.

  And then there was the entourage they supported. One of them, Emlyn Williams’s son Brook, estimated that Burton was supporting forty-two people at one time, including his brothers and sisters, whose houses and cars he bought and whose retirement pensions he funded. And they kept bodyguards on the payroll for each of their five children—Michael, Christopher, Liza, Maria, and, ever more frequently, nine-year-old Kate Burton, who began spending more time with her father and Elizabeth. Jessica, whom Richard rarely saw, was still institutionalized. Richard paid for that, too. But Richard and Elizabeth loved having Kate around. Now that Sybil was remarried and the mother of a son, Kate was allowed to spend more time in the Burtons’ fantastical menagerie.

  “Kate came to stay with us from London, with Ifor and Gwen as guardians,” Burton wrote in his diary on September 27, 1966. “She looked bonny and long-legged and freckled and slightly pigeon-toed. She is so far physically so like us that she takes my breath away. There’s no sign of Syb in her at all…” Richard was pleased to see how Kate took to Elizabeth. (“[S]he is loving and quite clearly loves E., and E. her.”) When both Kate and Elizabeth came down with the flu, they spent the day recovering in bed together, gossiping and taking each other’s temperatures. Richard carried Kate to her bed when she fell asleep, “because cunningly, she thought, perhaps, that she could sleep the whole night with E…. but I was firm and took her away.”

  As their entourage grew, Elizabeth and especially Richard became increasingly isolated from their old friends. Just to get past security, guests would often have to wear badges before being ushered into the Burtons’ presence on movie sets. The Burtons often sat, isolated in their luxurious hotel suite, wondering why they never heard from anyone. Robert Hardy had watched this happen, as it became increasingly impossible for him to see his old friend from their Oxford days.

  John Gielgud recalled that the Burtons never carried any money, like the royal family, so they relied upon members of their entourage to take care of everything. He remembered having lunch with Richard in a New York City restaurant during the run of Hamlet. Gielgud was pleased to see that Richard had apparently slipped out of the clutch of his handlers and assistants, but when it came time to pay the bill, Burton waved his hand and said, “Oh don’t worry. They’ll pay.” Gielgud looked around and realized that all the neighboring tables were taken by the Burton entourage, like extras on a set, waiting to be summoned.

  By the end of 1966, despite their tremendous wealth, the Burtons’ expenses were so high that at times they found themselves short of funds. Besides their constant travel and gift-giving, Burton was sending big annual Christmas checks to his many brothers and sisters. That’s one reason they agreed to appear in MGM’s screen version of The Comedians, Graham Greene’s jaded political drama set in François “Papa Doc” Duvalier’s Haiti: they needed the money. For the first time, Richard’s salary ($750,000) eclipsed Elizabeth’s ($500,000), and, also for the first time, Richard Burton was given top billing over Elizabeth Taylor. Peter Glenville, the film’s producer and director, had not especially wanted Elizabeth to play Richard’s love interest in the movie—the ambassador’s wife, Martha Pineda—but Burton insisted. She reportedly accepted the role just to accompany Richard to Africa. “I’m just a broad, but Richard is a great actor,” she told Glenville, and that’s why she’d asked for only half of her usual salary.

  Expectations were high for the film, which combined an important political cause, a top-flight cast and crew, and a renowned writer. Burton, who was in awe of writers, greatly admired Graham Greene, who was adapting The Comedians for the screen even before the book was published. The Burtons also admired Glenville, who had so ably directed Burton in Becket, and their fellow cast members, especially Sir Alec Guinness, who played the bogus commando Major Jones. They were also fond of Peter Ustinov (Burton thought Ustinov one of the best conversationalists he’d ever met), appearing as the ambassador in the film. The cast was rounded out by silent-screen actress Lillian Gish, veteran comedic actor Paul Ford, and some of the most notable black actors of the day, including James Earl Jones, Roscoe Lee Browne, Raymond St. Jacques, and a young Cicely Tyson in her second film appearance. (The year before, Tyson had debuted in A Man Called Adam with the Burtons’ good friend Sammy Davis Jr.)

  Guinness was apprehensive about seeing Burton again, because over the last few years he had made several calls on the Burtons, leaving unanswered messages at the Dorchester, and had even sent gifts that had been returned. Richard was surprised to hear that—he’d had no idea. Apparently, their entourage was doing more than just keeping their household safe and functioning; they were keeping the Burtons from their oldest friends.

  During the filming of The Comedians, the Burtons added another person to their entourage: Gianni Bozzacchi, a photographer and retoucher still in his teens, whom Elizabeth hired to make sure all the photographs of her that went out into the world were as beautiful as humanly possible. “I used to be considered the number one retoucher in Italy,” Bozzacchi recalled, “and not only in Italy, because they used to send me stuff to retouch from the United States.” He learned his skills from his father, Bruno Bozzacchi, a famous restorer of priceless manuscripts and photographs in Italy at a kind of “hospital for books,” called Patologia del Libro. (Among other things, Gianni’s father worked on such treasures as the letters of Machiavelli and Leonardo da Vinci.) But Gianni decided early on that he did not want to live his life in a darkroom. He now works primarily as a film producer and photographer. (“I don’t have to retouch anymore,” he says, “becau
se I know how to retouch with light.”)

  Elizabeth had approval of any pictures published of her, so when the film company decamped to Africa, Glenville hired the famous photographer Pierluigi Praturlon, for whom Bozzacchi worked at the time, to fly to Dahomey with their portable lab. (Pierluigi was both Frank Sinatra’s and Federico Fellini’s favorite photographer.) “Richard was not that vain,” Bozzacchi recalled, and he didn’t require the approval that Elizabeth insisted upon. After all, her face truly was her fortune, and she knew that she had to look beautiful from every angle.

  Elizabeth was at first angry when Bozzacchi took candid photographs of her when the production company moved to Nice. She summoned him and said, “You’re really good, Gianni, but you’re an asshole to have taken these pictures without my consent.” But she liked the shots so much that she invited him to join their moveable feast and chronicle their adventures in photographs. She appreciated the fact that he could do so unobtrusively. “When I take pictures of people, I disappear,” Bozzacchi says. “They don’t feel the camera. Even Elizabeth, and she’s such an expert. For Elizabeth, it’s important the dress is right, and the makeup is right, and that she looks wonderful. As a photographer, you are basically the curator of her image. And the relationship to the camera, you see—if the makeup doesn’t work, the hair doesn’t work, you see all that. You establish that relationship in communication, you don’t even have to talk. And that is a special relationship.”

  Bozzacchi, like Peter Medak before him on the set of The V.I.P.s, noticed that Elizabeth was even more beautiful in person than on camera. “That’s what the world sees: the beauty, the dress, the makeup—but without makeup she glows! With makeup she doesn’t. I photographed her without makeup—my God! There’s a sensuality always present.” He was struck by the fact that her left and right profiles were equally symmetrical, and he later wrote about her, “If Botticelli were living today, he would be inspired by Elizabeth.”

  The tall, curly-haired teenager didn’t yet speak English. He felt young and ignorant, and he stayed away from Richard, who could be intimidating. Just seeing the good-looking youth hovering around Elizabeth, taking her pictures, made Richard jealous. “When you get injected into that world, it’s a little bit scary. I’d do my work and that was it,” he recalled. But the Burtons treated him like family. He would stay with the couple as their friend and official photographer for seven years. In fact, he met his first wife through the Burtons. Claudye Ettori was working for Elizabeth as her hairdresser on the set of The Comedians. Richard would be the best man and Elizabeth the matron of honor at Gianni and Claudye’s June 1968 wedding, which was held at the country home of Alexandre de Paris, Elizabeth’s exalted hairdresser (who also counted among his clients the Queen of England; Farah Diba Pahlavi, the wife of the Shah of Iran; and Grace Kelly, Princess of Monaco). Because of the Burtons, at least a hundred photographers surrounded the estate, waiting to photograph the wedding party.

  Another gifted photographer was Elizabeth’s close friend Roddy McDowall, who photographed her over the decades of their friendship. McDowall remembered that he had been so struck by her beauty when they were child stars appearing together in Lassie Come Home that at his first sight of her, he burst out laughing. (That had been Burton’s response when he first saw her at Stewart Granger’s house, reading a book by the pool.) He thought she was “perfect, an exquisite little doll…the most perfectly beautiful creature I ever saw.” Throughout their friendship, McDowall was always on hand to prop up her ego when she needed it. He believed that “being beautiful” was an art form in itself—great beauties were great artists, in their way. He told Elizabeth, “Some beautiful people don’t know how to carry it, and so they shrug away from it. Others”—like Elizabeth—“wear their beauty with enormous ease.” McDowall long marveled at Elizabeth’s composure, which he considered a necessary element of true beauty. As someone who photographed her often, and had acted with her in front of the camera, McDowall saw her ability to be absolutely still as the secret to her iconic image.

  They began filming The Comedians, their seventh movie together, in January 1967, soon after completing The Taming of the Shrew and Doctor Faustus in Rome. MGM and Peter Glenville had planned to make the film in Haiti before the book was even released, before Duvalier and his murderous enforcers known as the Tonton Macoutes could take their revenge, but they feared word would leak out before the film was completed. Instead, the entire cast and 115-member crew were flown into Dahomey (now Benin), on the West African coast, which would stand in for Haiti, the capital city of Cotonou, a close fit for Port-au-Prince. Dahomey had a historical, cultural, and geographical resemblance to Haiti—the newly independent country had been colonized by the French and had a history of slavery. In fact, the Dahomeans were the descendants of Africans who were enslaved and sent to the Caribbean, and many of the cultural elements had remained the same, including ritual voodoo. When a voodoo priest was brought in from Haiti for a scene in which voodoo rites were shown for the first time on camera, the Dahomean locals, hired as extras in the film, didn’t need to be instructed in the rituals.

  There were rumors that Duvalier had voodoo witch doctors place a hex on the entire production. Indeed, accidents plagued the shoot—several near drownings, various illnesses that required leaving the country for treatment, and, incredibly, a mysterious rash in the shape of Africa that appeared on Alec Guinness’s chest for four days. (“I was glad to leave Dahomey,” Guinness wrote from Africa to a friend when filming was over. “I couldn’t help feeling it was sinister…ideas of voodoo are never absent from one’s mind there. Peter Glenville, an intimate friend, very nearly drowned under my eyes.”)

  The Burtons arrived in Africa with their entourage, including Alexandre de Paris; the ever-faithful Bob Wilson, Burton’s right-hand man; and Dick Hanley and John Lee. Three hundred people greeted the Burtons when they arrived in Cotonou. Actors are often well-received when they arrive on location to make a film, but the Burtons were met by President Soglo and given use of the presidential compound at Cotonou. Richard and Elizabeth were led through the presidential palace by the former general, who had helped win his country’s independence from the French ten years earlier. The palace could barely hold a candle, however, to the luxurious hotels the Burtons were used to. When “Mon Général” showed them his wife’s clothes closet with great fanfare, Elizabeth was touched to see “a perfectly ordinary rack of shoes.” When Elizabeth was invited to step onto a mat that automatically switched on a couple of lights, she feigned delight. Outside the sprawling palace, the Burtons noticed washing hanging on lines strung up in the presidential courtyards. It was not lost on them that their considerable assets were in excess of many African countries’ annual gross national product, certainly including Dahomey’s.

  The Burtons were enchanted with the country and with the Dahomeans, especially the children who flocked to the sets. For the first time since Cleopatra, they were able to walk into a restaurant without being gawked at. One local journalist popped up to interview Richard, but didn’t recognize Elizabeth, mistaking her for Burton’s assistant. That delighted her. Another local newspaperman mistook Burton for a cameraman, further endearing the Dahomeans to the couple. That they were treated more as curiosities than as royalty was a needed change. Glenville noticed that the lack of outside stress helped them relax in front of the camera, and Burton particularly gives a believable and affecting performance in the role of a troubled hotel proprietor who tries to stay politically neutral, a kind of Rick in Casablanca who finds his conscience at the end of the film, deciding to lead an insurgence against the corrupt regime.

  LOOK magazine covered the shoot, putting the Burtons on the cover of their June 27, 1967 issue. “On Location with Richard and Liz: Why They’re Never Dull.” The public still could not get enough of the Burtons, and they’re beautifully photographed in color by Otto Storch, looking vibrant and relaxed, strolling along the beach or surrounded by African children. “Elizab
eth and I love children,” Burton told LOOK. “We would adore having some together, but the doctor said Elizabeth can’t have any more.” Clearly the idea of having a child of their own was still very much with them after Elizabeth’s hospitalization in Rome. They look genuinely happy surrounded by a half dozen children, Richard kissing a small boy he’s holding in his arms. Children, at least, did not know or care who the Burtons were, and they did not fawn over them or judge them.

  They spent their evenings reading, Taylor discovering a genuine interest in poetry under Burton’s influence, and Burton absorbed in Alex Haley’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X. But the relentless African heat, and both Richard’s and Elizabeth’s prodigious alcohol intake, soon took their toll. On some days, the temperature reached as high as 110 degrees. “You took your life in your hands if you went out in the midday sun,” Burton said, evoking Noël Coward’s song “Only Mad Dogs and Englishmen (go out in the midday sun).” Richard discovered that under the movie lights, the temperature reached 138 degrees. So everyone did what they could to reduce the number of takes required—never a problem for “Quicktake” Elizabeth, or Lillian Gish, then seventy-four years old, who was particularly bothered by the heat.

  Despite the heat—or because of it—Burton’s drinking seemed to increase exponentially. Graham Greene, also known for his high capacity for alcohol, noticed, “[W]hen they are both off, they knock it down in their little trailer—he beer and she pastis. How can [they], in this heat…”