by Sam Kashner
At some point during the three-day bacchanal, Elizabeth agreed to star in Boom! as long as Richard would be cast opposite her as Chris Flanders. Elizabeth was much too young and gorgeous to play the seventy-three-year-old dying millionairess, and Richard was too old to play the gigolo-poet, in a love duet similar to the December-May romances of Tennessee’s Orpheus Descending and Sweet Bird of Youth. No matter. The roles would be changed to accommodate the Burtons. Losey was pleased, because it meant he could now raise the money, although once Richard and Elizabeth came onboard, the budget jumped to $4.5 million, which included $1.25 million for each of them.
There was another slight problem—or not so slight. Losey thought both of his stars had put on too much weight. He managed to sneak in an expensive French salt substitute into the meals for his “overweight stars.” It worked, or perhaps it was Elizabeth’s tendency to “bloom in hot climates,” because she is, again, stunning on film. Dressed mostly in white caftans, she seems to catch the light, which gives her skin a preternatural glow. Burton, too, looks golden, dashing about in Goforth’s dead husband’s samurai robe, though a tad world-weary to play the young gigolo.
The Goforth villa was built entirely on location, with blindingly whitewashed walls, a vast terrace, and open archways where pale muslin curtains lifted seductively on the breeze. The travertine marble used to construct the $500,000 set came from the same quarry that had been used for the Colosseum in AD 80. Stark and stunning, the villa looks both ancient and futuristic, surrounded by Easter Island heads. It took fifty-six workmen to bring up the travertine and cement to construct the set. (After work, covered in cement dust and plaster, the workmen would dive into the Mediterranean to wash themselves clean.) In the middle of filming, a huge gale came out of the sea and wreaked havoc, nearly destroying the white villa, which had to be rebuilt.
Despite the remoteness of the setting, the international press flocked to Sardinia to cover the shoot. The public was still hungry for any news of the Burtons, even in their third year of marriage. Their status as worldwide celebrities—“superstars”—showed no signs of abating. Any distinction between their on-and off-screen love life didn’t exist; they had become who they were portraying. That was part of their power, but it would also prove dangerous. They could no longer disappear into their characters: they overwhelmed them. Elizabeth, after all, had already been dubbed too spectacular to play the quiet librarian in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Audiences were finding it too difficult to suspend disbelief, unless she played a character as larger-than-life as she was. Or played herself.
Right from the opening scene of Boom!, we’re in that strange territory where art imitates life, as Burton/Chris Flanders jumps into a boat hired by journalists circling Cissy Goforth’s island. (The boat, incidentally, is piloted by Elizabeth’s brother, Howard Taylor.) Inside her villa, Goforth’s wealth is conveyed in the film by a huge entourage—servants, two Indian musicians playing sitars, guards, a masseuse, a manicurist, a hairdresser, a personal physician, and “Blackie,” a private secretary engaged to help her write her memoirs. As she dictates her book, we learn she’s had six husbands (to Elizabeth’s five), the last of whom died horribly in a tragic accident (as had Mike Todd). Playing “the richest woman in the world,” in one scene, Elizabeth wears a Kabuki-style robe that weighed forty-two pounds and was festooned with over 21,000 beads hand-stitched by Italian seamstresses. She also wears some of her own jewels in the film, most notably, the spectacular, 29.4-carat diamond ring given to her by Todd (which she liked to call her “ice-skating rink”). Like Elizabeth, Cissy Goforth suffers from debilitating back pain, for which she receives injections and massages. And the Burtons’ real-life friend, Noël Coward, plays Goforth’s friend, “The Witch of Capri,” an artiste who is first seen being carried aloft on a chair up the craggy rocks to Goforth’s villa, for a dinner-à-deux. When he arrives, Cissy Goforth—bedecked in a shimmering white caftan and a Las-Vegas-showgirl-style headdress—serves him a monstrous baked fish that repulses him. It was an added attraction for Elizabeth to work with Noël Coward, and between scenes, they gossiped wickedly about the other actors.
The parallel universe of the movie, not surprisingly, was made much of in the promotional materials for the film, circulated to theater managers by Universal–World Film Services. “SHE OUTLIVED SIX RICH MEN,” it proclaimed in boldface. “…HE WAS A TAKER ALL HIS LIFE…they do things you’ve never seen before!” More modestly, however, the promotional booklet reveals, “Elizabeth Taylor is seriously considering going into semiretirement within a few years. The superstar…at the zenith of her career, declares that she would be quite content simply as Mrs. Richard Burton.” After all, this was her third Tennessee Williams film adaptation, her eighth movie with Burton, and the fortieth movie of her long career. She’d had enough, and her private life was now far more interesting to her than her film career—that is, if she could separate them. “Once you’re up there on that last rung, you can only go down,” she’s quoted as saying. “I don’t want to be pushed off. I want to walk down with all the dignity I can summon—and not with crutches.”
The Witch of Capri was originally written as a female character. In fact, Losey had first asked Katharine Hepburn if she wanted the role; far from being interested, she was insulted (by the role’s campiness or its brevity?) and she turned him down. He then offered it to Dirk Bogarde, who had costarred in Losey’s The Servant and Modesty Blaise. “No thank you,” he said. But Coward, the witty, insouciant playwright, actor, and entertainer, was delighted by the opportunity to work with his friends the Burtons, and in that beautiful setting. He loved the hotel he was housed in, the Capo Cacchio, which was perched high above “a picture-postcard sea.” When he wasn’t filming a scene, he investigated the little coves and beaches nearby, baking under the hot sun, then plunging into the bracing waters of the Mediterranean. And he had been flattered when Tennessee Williams left a note for him at his hotel: “[P]lease feel completely free to alter any part of the dialogue you see fit,” a profound compliment from one great writer to another.
Rounding out the cast is Joanna Shimkus, a lovely, lithe former cover girl making her film debut as Goforth’s secretary, and Michael Dunn, the diminutive actor who had been nominated for an Academy Award for his supporting role in Ship of Fools, playing the sadistic guard of Goforth Island, the keeper of the dogs who attack Burton/Chris when he arrives on the island.
Sardinia’s natural setting—the blazing blue sky, the hot sun, the baked cliffs—was so starkly beautiful the Burtons thought about buying land there. In fact, their $250,000 investment in Tenerife two years earlier had already doubled in value. They invited Losey to come in on a land deal with them, but, ultimately, nothing ever came of it. The Burtons’ yacht was moored in the rocks just under the constructed villa, and they didn’t need the money.
Losey loved the Burtons’ spectacular wealth and high consumption—he loved the drinking, the rows, the delight they took in their food. He noticed that each morning, when they arrived with their entourage, they began their day with large Bloody Marys. One morning during filming, the Burtons’ trailer tipped over and tumbled down the steep hillside. Losey was aghast to see red liquid oozing over the rocks, until he discovered it was the tomato juice for their Bloody Marys.
Elizabeth would be the first to admit that she adored food and drink. “Our credo might have been ‘Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we report to work,’” she wrote in her 1987 memoir-cum-diet-book, Elizabeth Takes Off. But for Elizabeth, that kind of indulgence was dangerous to her profession. While Richard seldom gained an ounce, nor did his prodigious alcohol intake seem to damage his amazing memory, Elizabeth gained weight easily and had to work at taking it off—and she hated exercise. Even as early as 1959, when, at twenty-seven, she appeared in that revealing white bathing suit in Suddenly, Last Summer, Joe Mankiewicz had told her to lose weight and “tighten up those muscles. It looks like you’ve got bags of dead mice under your arms.
” It seems hard to believe that someone whose reputation and livelihood depended on flawless beauty would risk it all by sheer overindulgence. Yet it’s possible that Elizabeth had a love-hate relationship with her beauty: it was part of her identity and a source of her enormous success, but it was also what had stolen her childhood and imprisoned her in an unreal life. She was a freak of nature, constantly being gawked at, lusted after, envied, and subjected to extreme scrutiny. It’s not surprising that a part of her would want to destroy it. So she would eat and eat and eat—pâté de foie gras, heaping helpings of chili, fried chicken and mashed potatoes with gravy, hamburgers and French fries, malted milkshakes—and still she was beautiful. She would drink to excess—Bloody Marys for breakfast, straight vodka, beer, and champagne—and still she was beautiful. She purposely gained twenty-five pounds to play Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and appeared on camera in too-tight clothes and graying hair—and still she was beautiful.
Besides that, the sensual delights of her time with Burton were much more enjoyable than mere moviemaking. “Creating a life with him,” she later wrote, “was far more interesting than interpreting somebody else’s life on the screen, but then I’ve always lived my life with too much relish to be a mere interpreter of dreams.”
Despite being enamored of the Burtons, Losey later complained that it was a struggle working with Elizabeth, who was “belligerent” and didn’t understand what he was after. “My working relationship with Elizabeth had begun with absolute hell.” Taylor didn’t like her clothes, couldn’t sleep, shooting was delayed by three days, Losey had to shoot her first scene thirteen times, unusual for “Quicktake.” She “was belligerent with me from the start…she didn’t know what I was doing and it was a struggle.”
But Noël Coward loved working with Elizabeth in their scenes together. When Coward, then sixty-eight and an inveterate traveler, first arrived in Sardinia, Burton thought he looked “very old and slightly sloshed and proceeded to get more sloshed.” With his heavy-lidded eyes, Coward was fond of calling himself “the oldest Chinese character actor in the world.” Burton wrote, “He embraced us both and lavished compliments on E. about her beauty and her brilliance as an actress. Occasionally he threw a bone to me.” The next day, he wrote, “E. and N. Coward are madly in love with each other, particularly he with her. He thinks her most beautiful, which she is, and a magnificent actress, which she also is.” Burton had known Coward since 1951; like the Burtons, Coward owned a home in Switzerland, and, in fact, the two men had once invested money in the film of Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker. As the oldest and most experienced member of the cast and crew of Boom!, Coward admired Elizabeth’s professionalism, the way she “never lost his eye” in their scenes together, and just how considerate she was, for Coward was not in the best of health at the time. In fact, he would have only five more years to live. He saw how her cheerfulness lifted the spirits of the cast and crew, especially during the long night shoots. Elizabeth would stay up half the night with Coward for deep-dish gossip sessions.
While on location, Coward asked the Burtons to think about starring in his signature play, the bittersweet comedy Private Lives, as the once-married couple now wedded to other partners, who meet on their honeymoons and discover they are still in love with each other. Coward said cryptically that they should play those roles “before it’s too late,” but the Burtons were not ready for those roles, often taken by stars at the end of their careers, as a sentimental journey or a last comeback. (He astonished Burton, the aspiring writer, by mentioning that he dashed off Blithe Spirit in five days, Hay Fever in six, but Private Lives took an entire week.)
Burton found it hard to clamber on the steep crags surrounding the villa, overlooking a deep, two-hundred-foot plunge into the Mediterranean below. “I’m supposed to leap up there on that parapet with the wind tugging at my kimono and walk along it,” he told Losey and the film crew. “I can’t. It’s no good. What’s the name of the phobia I suffer from? Acrophobia? I’ll look it up in my little book later on.” After such harrowing scenes, Richard would calm his shaky nerves with whiskey and a game of dominoes.
When their scenes were over, the Burtons would meet for drinks at the bar in Capo Cacchio. But on one occasion, Richard failed to show up. As in Dahomey, kidnappings were frequent in Sardinia at the time, so everyone was especially concerned. Alarmed, Elizabeth contacted the police and had all the hospitals searched. Hours later, he was found in a small, seedy bar described by the chief of police as “a den of thieves,” where Burton had gotten up on a table to declaim Shakespeare. He’d promised a round of drinks to anyone present who could name the speech he recited from Titus Andronicus. His valet, Bob Wilson, was with him, and he’d pleaded with Burton to get down off the table. The police chief and Wilson managed to return Richard to the hotel and to Elizabeth.
It wasn’t just the press and the public who were obsessed with the Burtons—the Burtons were obsessed with the Burtons. Despite their continued public squabbling—sometimes playful, sometimes explosive—they were still obviously in love and in lust with each other. Burton was driven wild by Taylor that summer. She was “looking infinitely sexy” in white mesh leotards and “the shortest miniskirt I’ve ever seen,” Richard wrote in his diary. “It barely, and when she moved it didn’t, covered her crotch.”
He noticed that she was also driving the local boys wild, the young men loitering on the beach, who, Richard thought, appeared to be stoned. When she and Richard left the beach, the young men shouted “sundry offers of fornication” at her, hungry as the ragamuffin boys circling her in Suddenly, Last Summer.
Filming completed, Richard felt that Boom! would prove a financial success, and he looked forward to the release of The Comedians, which he thought would bring them critical esteem, given the subject matter and the pedigree of the film.
That, however, was not to be.
Filming Boom! in Sardinia in the summer of 1967 had brought many pleasures. One of them was the Burtons’ decision to buy the Odysseia and turn it into their floating home, now that they were too famous to live on land.
Richard and Elizabeth rechristened the 130-foot, sixty-year-old yacht Kalizma, an amalgam of Kate’s, Liza’s, and Maria’s names. Elizabeth had fallen in love with it. It boasted seven bedrooms and three bathrooms, with the capacity to sleep fourteen passengers. A crew of eight—including a maid and a waiter—was required to keep it afloat, and Burton estimated it was going to take close to $30,000 a year to run it. “Not too bad,” he wrote in his diary, “when one considers our last house (rented) costs ten thousand a month plus approx. one thousand dollars a week for food and staff, etc.! Then, if we can use it as much as possible instead of hotels, we can actually save money.” The provenance of the yacht appealed to Burton’s dramatic sense: the previous owner loved to head out into the stormiest seas where he would proceed to play Bach on the organ he’d had installed. Nonetheless, Burton had the instrument removed and replaced Bach with a bar.
They bought the boat for $192,000 that summer and spent another $200,000 to refurbish it. Elizabeth hired a designer named Arthur Barbosa to refit the interior with Chippendale mirrors, Louis XIV chairs, English tapestries, Regency sofas, transforming it into what one observer described as an Edwardian palace, albeit one with a movie screen. (Barbosa had decorated Rex Harrison’s Portofino home, and the Burtons had admired the décor.) They brought in an enormous, hand-carved bed for the master suite, painted the walls “canary, and not mustard,” and had bookshelves built in for Burton’s ever-expanding, floating library. He loved the fact that he could now have his beloved books with him when he traveled. The yacht was fitted with radar equipment, and Graham Jenkins thought that the sound system they had installed cost more than his house. Elizabeth would end up spending nearly $1,000 every six months to replace the Super Peerless Wilton carpeting, spoiled by her menagerie of untrained cats and dogs, who relieved themselves all over the rugs.
This is how they lived: on t
he world stage. By 1967, the private marriage of Richard and Elizabeth was increasingly held hostage to the public marriage of “Liz and Dick.” Theirs was the first reality show, a marriage with an audience, and, to escape that, they spent months aboard the Kalizma as the world’s richest vagabonds, where they would cruise the fashionable Mediterranean ports, making their way to the Riviera and then to Paris. The mad premiere of Doctor Faustus in Paris had reminded them of how popular they were in the City of Lights, how they were practically held captive by French aristocrats. The Rothschilds, Guy and Marie-Hélène, were the Burtons’ great friends and hosts in Paris. Their favorite house in all their travels was Ferrières, the Rothschilds’ country estate outside Paris. Their vagabond life in the summer and early autumn of 1967 became a blur of barons and baronesses: “We are lunching with somebody called Alex or Alexis who is Baron de Redee. There must have been a hundred people for the lunch. I had a Madame Debreu, American, on my right, and Marie-Hélène Rothschild on my left, and a Count de something or other, and a Monsieur de X and astonishingly a lady with a distinct London-Provincial accent…. Two devastating wars & crippling taxes, and the moneyed Aristocracy still live like Aristos,” Burton confided in his diary. Despite his wealth, Richard was still very much the working-class hero among the “Aristos,” the only one who drained his glass of wine before leaving the table, the man who would go on to play Leon Trotsky for Joseph Losey.