by Sam Kashner
Elizabeth loved him for that. She was never impressed by titles. She was the biggest and most famous movie star in the world, and she and Richard were Hollywood royalty. It was the barons and dukes, the lords and ladies who wanted to meet them, to bask, if only for an evening, in the blinding light of the Burtons’ celebrity.
At the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe, walking from the paddock to the loge with the Rothschilds, Richard watched as thousands of people applauded Elizabeth on her way to her seat to watch the race. “Not bad for an old woman of thirty-six,” Richard wrote admiringly. “I am always pleased and surprised by that sort of thing. We have been expecting it to stop for years but it hasn’t.” Afterward, a party at the French equivalent of the Kentucky Derby, with the Rothschilds and “La Callas”—Maria Callas, the tempestuous soprano from Queens, New York, who had conquered the Metropolitan Opera House and La Scala and the world with her brilliance and personality. “And possibly Ari Onassis. Aren’t we posh.”
The Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis was a kind of bête noir for Richard. He prided himself on spending more money on Elizabeth than Onassis spent on Callas, his inamorata for many years, pulling up alongside the Onassis yacht with the Kalizma and, later, outbidding him on important jewels. The Burtons were in Paris when headlines began appearing throughout the world that Jacqueline Kennedy would marry Onassis. At sixty-nine, he was twice the age of the former first lady, who had lost her husband to an assassin’s bullet just five years earlier. Elizabeth and Richard consoled Maria Callas, who had been unceremoniously thrown over for the grieving American widow.
Elizabeth and Richard had been through that before—the abandonment of so-called friends, the harsh words and long knives. Richard embraced the Divine Callas, as her legions of devoted opera lovers called her, and whispered in her ear that Ari was a son of a bitch. Richard later told Elizabeth that it wasn’t out of some moral indignation over Ari’s desertion of his long-time mistress, but because of the way she learned about his engagement to Jacqueline Kennedy—through the newspapers. What was even more unforgivable to the generous Burtons was that, despite all of his millions, Onassis had left Callas, then at the end of her career, without a cent. After ten years together, he had left her completely broke.
Callas was grateful to them for their moral support. The Burtons, however, could be harsh in private, even about the people they publicly supported and whose work they admired. When Callas told Richard over dinner one night “how beautiful his eyes were” and that they revealed a good soul, Elizabeth’s ears perked up. She had unerring antennae for women playing up to her husband (“eyes in the back of her bum,” Richard liked to say, and “ears on stalks”). And when Callas shyly mentioned to Richard that she’d read in the newspapers that he and Elizabeth were planning to make a film version of Macbeth, she asked Richard if she might play Lady Macbeth. “I suppose she thought you were going to play Macduff,” he told Elizabeth later. They would poke gentle fun at her afterward. “A silly woman, but one can still feel sorry for her,” Burton wrote in his diary.
When Elizabeth discovered that Onassis had presented Mrs. Kennedy with “half a million pounds worth of rubies surrounded by diamonds,” keeping up with the Onassises became a mild obsession. “Now the battle of the Rubies is on,” Richard noted, “I wonder who’ll win. It will be a long war, and the idea has already been implanted that I shouldn’t let myself be outdone by a bloody Greek. I can be just as vulgar as he can…. Well, now to get the money.”
Which meant, of course, more movies, which meant more travel, which meant more of their wandering, extravagant life—Dior nightgowns, Savile Row suits, Lafite Rothschild for lunch. It was no different from how many of their friends, such as Noël Coward, liked to live, but the public remained obsessed with how the Burtons were spending their money and their time. It even entered the language in the mid-to late 1960s: “Spending money like the Burtons.” They continued to buy extravagant gifts for each other: matching mink coats, a Picasso for him, a Monet for her. (But old habits die hard, and Richard the miner’s son would sometimes wander around their chalet at Gstaad, turning off the lights to cut down on the electric bill. Elizabeth teased him about ordering the cheapest wine while admiring the $65,000 sapphire brooch glittering on her dress, his gift to her.) They were the most generous of couples, spending tens of thousands of dollars on people who were virtually strangers but whose personal tales of woe moved them. But to keep this extravagance going, Richard felt he had to keep working, no matter what was being offered. His life with Elizabeth required it.
Such conspicuous consumption was beginning to be suspect in the nascent age of the commune, the blue jeans, the Johnson Administration’s War on Poverty. It became harder not to care about where the money was going. As generous as they were, the Burtons were in danger of being seen as out of touch in their spending habits, as they would soon be seen in their choice of film roles. A new generation was gaining on them. While their poodles and Pekingese roamed the luxurious cabins of their yacht, the world was changing. As one of the Burtons’ traveling companions would later characterize this period in their life, “Cleopatra seemed like ancient history.” The Burtons were unaware of the real price they were paying to play Dick and Liz.
As they were constantly on the move, it became hard to have the children continuously with them, which would have been their preference. Michael and Christopher attended a school in Gstaad, when they were not staying in Hawaii with Elizabeth’s brother, Howard, his wife, Mara, and their five children. When Kate joined the Burtons on the Kalizma, she and Elizabeth would spend pleasant days shopping together in port, but it would be all too brief, as their itinerant life provided no consistent way to raise their combined family. To make matters worse, there were frequent kidnapping threats against the children, and the Burtons had to hire bodyguards to protect each one of them.
So they drifted around the Mediterranean on their fabulous floating island, spending a week in Portofino, then on to Monte Carlo, where Orson Welles was waiting to dine with them. Welles had appeared with the Burtons as the tax-exile, Hungarian director Max Buda in The V.I.P.s. Over a sumptuous dinner, Welles complained that he never made any real money from any of his films—if anything, they had cost him money. He’d had to dig into his own pocket for the $75,000 to finish Chimes at Midnight, his great Falstaff movie. Though it took him a long time to rise from the table, he left the Burtons with the bill. When Welles was safely out of the room, Richard turned to Elizabeth and marveled at Welles’s size. “How can he possibly make love?” he wondered.
Then they would fly to Gstaad, to pick up Michael and Christopher from their boarding school. Christopher, the younger boy, was flourishing, but Michael was having a harder time, so the Burtons flew to London on their private jet to try to get Michael into Millfield, another private school. There, the Burtons ran into Ava Gardner. She was with her companion, visiting his nineteen-year-old son, who had yet to graduate from the boarding school.
On a commercial flight back to Sicily to return to the Kalizma, the Burtons ran into Peter O’Toole and his wife, Sian. Richard proceeded to get magnificently drunk with his former Becket costar, just as they had five years earlier.
“How many nominations have you had?” O’Toole asked Burton.
“Five. And you?”
O’Toole proudly held up four fingers. But he exaggerated—he’d had only two nominations, as Burton knew—Burton kept track of these things.
The yacht was a kind of refuge that kept Richard and Elizabeth from prying eyes, and it brought them both great happiness. For one thing, both Burtons hated to fly. They would stay up till early morning hours walking the deck and wandering its corridors, they were so thrilled with their new purchase. They couldn’t stop “touching it and staring at it as if it were a beautiful baby.” They took great pride in showing off their sea-borne treasures to guests. It wasn’t just Burton’s books that they traveled with—the great art went with them, too. The Monet hung in
the salon, the Picasso and the Van Gogh hung side by side in the dining room. The Vlaminck was hung in the stairway to the children’s cabins (though Burton wanted to rehang it when the rest of the artwork arrived). The Jason Epstein bust of Churchill brooded over it all.
They continued to host a wide array of celebrities—vintage and newly minted—from different phases of their lives. Sir John Gielgud came aboard the Kalizma and was surprised to find, instead of quiet and solitude on a boat in the middle of the Mediterranean, the usual whirlwind. “When I got there,” he said later, “there were fourteen Portuguese sailors looking after them, and terrible tourists passing by on boats.” A tour guide shouted out, “Captain Cook’s graveyard on our right, and [there’s] Richard Burton’s yacht…” Burton started swearing, but Elizabeth, always aware of her obligation to her fans, said, “Oh, no, blow them kisses.” Gielgud saw that Burton was already in a foul mood, as he had brought along income tax advisors. Elizabeth locked herself in her cabin till lunchtime, when Ringo Starr and his then-wife, Maureen, came aboard the Kalizma. “I don’t think they’d ever heard of me,” Gielgud recalled, “and I’d never heard of them!” That was one lunch aboard the yacht when the sap did not flow.
Sometimes their peripatetic life just got to be too much. When Howard and Mara Taylor and their children spent time with the Burtons, just moving around the extended menagerie required military planning. Like during all family trips—whether on a yacht or in a Winnebago—tempers flared. “A terrible day, frantically disorganized, thousands of bags all over the place, nine children, six adults all on one plane, Howard and Mara’s incessant screaming, my and E.’s pre-film nerves,” Burton wrote in his diary. To add to the chaos, their chauffeur, Gaston, had fallen in love with Christopher’s girlfriend’s mother, and they were stranded at the airport, crammed into a tiny room, waiting for the Kalizma to be ready for them. By the time they made it to a hotel until they could board the yacht, Richard had had enough. In the middle of the hotel lobby, in that famously mellifluous voice of his, Burton screamed “Fuck!” at the top of his lungs. It “was the only possible way to mete the justice of the day,” he later wrote.
Still, their love affair smoldered, despite the pressures of their chaotic lives. Burton continued to write in his diaries, which he saw as sketches for an autobiography. Moored in Portofino harbor one evening, Elizabeth challenged him to write a publishable book by Christmas, of at least a hundred pages, wagering $900 (and her makeup expert, Ron Berkeley, came in for $100). She also asked him to sketch her in prose, which he obliged with the following playful, contrary portrait of everything Elizabeth was not, which he read to her aloud:
She is a nice fat girl who loves mosquitoes and hates pustular carbuncular Welshmen, loathes boats, and loves planes, has tiny blackcurrant eyes and minute breasts and has no sense of humor. She is prudish, priggish, and painfully self-conscious.
She loved it.
The Comedians was released in Hollywood on October 9, 1967, six days before the Oxford premiere of Doctor Faustus. Both films would prove bellwethers for the now increasingly cynical reception that would meet the Burtons’ films.
The reviews for The Comedians were mixed. The London Daily Express wrote, “The Burtons seem to revel in togetherness as they earn their daily crust…they both give faultless performances….Burton kisses Taylor with such passion and devotion that it is easy to imagine a less contented wife complaining that she doesn’t get that sort of treatment at home…. I’d say these two have something very special going for them to have such a successful life both in public and privately.” But the London Evening Standard found it “amazing how a couple like the Burtons seldom manage to generate a spark of credible passion when together on the screen.”
Even though the movie’s trailer would tout Elizabeth as “the world’s symbol of ultimate beauty,” Graham Greene had thought that Elizabeth was miscast as Madame Pineda, the adulterous wife of the ambassador played by Peter Ustinov, and the movie bears that out. Her German accent is understated and good, though it slips a bit on the upper registers—something her critics loved to point out, especially since it was the first time Elizabeth had taken on a foreign accent for a role.
Whether it was Alexandre de Paris’s dowdy, overteased coiffure or the matronly clothes that didn’t flatter her figure, Elizabeth’s beauty didn’t translate fully to the screen. She was always more beautiful off the set, in no makeup, her hair loose, than coiffured and couturiered in designer outfits, and it was especially true in The Comedians. In an MGM behind-the-scenes publicity reel, she looks youthful and radiant as she clowns and makes faces at the camera, dressed casually in slacks, but that sexy insouciance, for once, just didn’t come through on film. It didn’t help that, in 1967, Elizabeth was being bested by younger, slimmer, trendier stars such as Vanessa Redgrave and Anouk Aimée, whom she vanquished for the Academy Award, yes, but who embodied the new, bony, androgynous look that Elizabeth would never have. The voluptuous woman as the ultimate film goddess was on her way out.
But Richard—surprising, perhaps, given his high alcohol intake—is again mesmerizing on film. His voice, in fact, is so plangent, you hardly notice James Earl Jones’s golden tones in their scenes together. Burton looks soulful, but also virile and unharmed by drink; he more than holds his own with scene-stealers like Alec Guinness, especially in powerful and intimate dialogue in a hillside cemetery where both men pour out the secrets of their souls. As a character who has “lost faith in faith,” Burton is playing a familiar role. In a love scene with Elizabeth, Martha playfully calls him a “defrocked priest”—a phrase from The Night of the Iguana, and a role he identified with.
Graham Greene was not particularly happy with the movie, but he took the blame for the lackluster reviews. He felt the script he’d written was at fault, and, in fact, it would be the last time Greene adapted one of his own novels for the screen. But he saw that he had hit his target in Duvalier’s response to the film. Papa Doc declared war on The Comedians, threatened Greene with death, and had his ambassador to the United States condemn the movie as “a character assassination of an entire nation.” He also condemned the Burtons, who had lent their star power to the film, making death threats against them as well. He complained through his ambassador that the film portrayed Haiti as “a country of voodoo worshippers and killers,” yet he reportedly engaged a voodoo priest to bring harm to the Burtons.
Whether it was the curse of the voodoo priest, or the fact that The Comedians was overly long and too somber, or that the Burtons failed to sizzle onscreen, the movie did not make a profit for the first time in the Burtons’ entwined careers.
Doctor Faustus was released in Oxford on October 15, 1967, and the Burtons traveled there for the premiere. Upon their arrival, Coghill joined them in an interview with David Lewin, a journalist known for asking provocative questions. The Burtons were both dressed conservatively for the occasion—Richard in a suit and tie, his hair neatly combed, and Elizabeth in a sleeveless black knit dress with a stunning diamond brooch in the shape of a dragon, the symbol of Wales.
Lewin turned to Burton and rather pompously challenged him, “You must at some time have faced the question of whether you should have continued as an imposing and even—in the view of some—great stage actor, or moved into the realm of films, which is perhaps more commercially rewarding, but not as rewarding artistically. Any regrets?”
At that point, Elizabeth jumped in. “Oh, excuse me, Richard, that makes me so angry! Because he has not left the stage! That’s absolute, bloody rubbish!” She leveled a steely gaze at Lewin. “Last year he just got finished doing a play for Oxford on the stage. The year before that—what was he doing on Broadway? That was the stage! How can you say he left the stage?”
Lewin sniffed, “That is not a continuous career,” like Paul Scofield’s or Laurence Olivier’s.
Elizabeth, still fuming, answered that Olivier’s career is “not continuous either, on the stage. He does film appearances—for
money! And so does Paul Scofield!”
When Lewin asked if Burton identified with Faustus, Elizabeth was further incensed. With the camera rolling, she let him have it. (Martha would have been proud.) “You bastard, David! I knew you’d ask that. Would I be ‘selling out’ if I deserted film for the stage?”
She knew what he was driving at: if Richard was Faust, then who was she, and the life she’d made possible for him?
Through it all, Burton sat impassively while Elizabeth defended him. Why wasn’t it enough that he and Elizabeth had so vibrantly brought Shakespeare to the screen just nine months earlier? They had waited almost a year before releasing Doctor Faustus, not wanting to flood the market with Burton-Taylor films. But Lewin’s provocative interview set the stage for what would bring Richard and Elizabeth the worst reviews of their lives and another financial disappointment. The film grossed only $610,000 worldwide (a mere $110,000 from the United States and Canada) against Burton’s million-dollar investment.
After the film’s New York premiere, Renata Adler, writing in the New York Times, sneered, “Doctor Faustus is of an awfulness that bends the mind. The Burtons…are clearly having a lovely time; at moments one has the feeling that Faustus was shot mainly as a home movie…” Pauline Kael griped in the New Yorker, “Doctor Faustus becomes the dullest episode yet in the great-lovers-of-history series that started with Cleopatra…it is clear that Faustus and Helen of Troy are not characters from Marlowe or actors playing them; they are Liz and Dick, Dick and Liz—the king and queen of a porny comic strip.” The viciousness of that review reveals how in certain quarters critics were licking their chops for the chance to skewer the Burtons, as much for the ostentatious way they were living now as for their artistic overreaching. Instead of seeing the film as a charity production—which is essentially what it was—they saw it as an indulgence.