Furious Love

by Sam Kashner

  The firing would mark the beginning of a series of disasters that began the summer of 1968. It harmed Burton’s relationship with the former stage director, though the ill feelings were mostly on Burton’s part. Richardson would ask Burton to appear in a film adaptation of Robert Graves’s I, Claudius, and, later, would ask him to play opposite Vanessa Redgrave in a new film of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. Burton, still nursing his wounds, turned down both offers. “One would think,” Richard told Elizabeth, “that he’d be scared to even ask me to play Scrabble. But not our Tony.” The taste of ashes in Burton’s mouth would deprive the world of two performances that might have been wonderful: imagine Richard as the stuttering, reluctant Roman emperor Claudius, and Richard as Shakespeare’s Antony.

  Richard was shaken by the firing, and his nerves were on edge from continual drinking. He sought to calm his nerves and his mind by faithfully writing in his diary. Nerves were never Elizabeth’s problem. She wasn’t one to keep things inside. She spoke her mind and didn’t require the secret self of a journal. She didn’t require confession. Richard admired her candor in the world—he nearly envied her for it. They had both been through so much. The movie-making part of their life had taken them to Africa, London, France, Italy, Sardinia, New York, Austria, and back to London all within a year. Their nomadic life and the social whirl that went with it—to say nothing of their grueling work schedule—finally caught up with them. They had been in England long enough; another few weeks and Britain would slap them with taxes on income for the entire year. Richard was keenly aware of that, but mostly it was Elizabeth who concerned him. Something was terribly wrong. She was, in fact, often in severe pain, and Richard was worried about her.

  Her pain went deep and it frightened both of them. Tamping down his own health fears, Richard was terrified that he might lose Elizabeth. He was outwardly tough and rough-hewn, but emotionally, Richard was sensitive, even shy, with the easily wounded soul of a poet. Elizabeth, on the other hand, looked delicate—and her health was delicate—but she was made of very strong stuff. She would have to be, to get through the howling reviews of Boom! and to work with Losey again, and endure her now-constant pain.

  In Secret Ceremony, a disturbing psychological drama about incest and obsession, Elizabeth would be working with Losey again, but this time without Burton. In hopes of capitalizing on the recent success of Rosemary’s Baby, no doubt, Losey cast Mia Farrow as Elizabeth’s costar, and the gruff, sleepy-eyed Robert Mitchum as Albert, a louche professor in love with his stepdaughter. Elizabeth plays Leonora, a woman fallen on hard times, including prostitution, whose only child drowned years earlier due to her own negligence. Farrow’s character, Cenci, a disturbed young woman being pursued by her besotted stepfather, takes Leonora into her home because she resembles her recently deceased mother. It’s a Harold Pinteresque movie of brooding silences, cryptic dialogue, shocking revelations, and an all-too-believable performance by Mia Farrow as a young woman traumatized back into childhood.

  The movie flirts with lesbianism (by now a trendy theme in European films) in a scene in which both women share a bath. It brought out an uncharacteristic shyness in Elizabeth. When it came time to film the scene, she emerged from her dressing room and stood just out of range of the glaring studio lights. There were too many stagehands on the set and all of them seemed to be looking at her—at Elizabeth Taylor, at Gloria Wandrous, at Maggie the Cat, at Cleopatra, at Helen of Troy—as she was about to slip into her bath. With all those eyes upon her, Elizabeth suddenly froze. Losey approached her and whispered something in her ear, and with a wave of his hand behind Elizabeth’s back, he gestured for everyone to clear the floor.

  When Burton heard about the shoot and Losey’s uncharacteristic solicitude, he found himself jealous. “My wife and Joe Losey are having a professional love affair,” he told a visiting journalist from the Evening Standard. It didn’t really threaten them as a couple, but they were both still capable of feeling left out. (Later, Elizabeth would send Losey’s wife armfuls of flowers and a Mexican dress from Puerto Vallarta, to remind Richard that Losey was happily married.) Perhaps to keep an eye on Losey, and because he didn’t like being parted from his wife, Burton started spending a lot of time on the set at Elstree Studios. When Mitchum expressed displeasure with his role in the film—he’d taken the distasteful part just for the money ($150,000 for two weeks of shooting)—Burton approached Losey and offered to replace Mitchum when the production moved to Noordwijk, a seaside town in Holland, for a week of location shooting. Despite its unsavory quality, the role of the louche, tweedy professor would have suited Richard. But it didn’t happen, which was perhaps just as well, as the movie already contained conscious or unconscious reminders of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (including an imaginary pregnancy).

  Losey sometimes photographed Elizabeth in poses reminiscent of Suddenly, Last Summer and The Sandpiper—her dark, loosened hair framing her face and shoulders, camera angles that showed off her lush cleavage—even more lush, now, in 1968, as Elizabeth had noticeably gained weight, a fact not lost on her director. He parodied it, in an earlier scene in which she greedily wolfs down a meal and then belches. Later, looking at herself in the mirror in what might have been an ad-libbed moment, she exclaims, “I’m getting so fat!” Elizabeth was nothing if not a game gal.

  Back in London, the Burtons stayed at the Dorchester, their usual haunt, where Mitchum was also in residence. Curiously, given their similar, hardscrabble backgrounds, the two men did not forge a bond. Both had lost a parent at an early age, both had known poverty, both were legendary lovers of drink and women, and both had literary aspirations. Both men loved poetry and had a love-hate relationship with their profession. Neither considered acting a manly pursuit. But they seemed to have little to say to each other—perhaps they were too much alike, or were beyond the age of forging new friendships. Or Burton may simply have been jealous of the macho actor’s proximity to Elizabeth, another reason for making himself present on the shoot. He was just the kind of rough, masculine character that Elizabeth liked, and neither one of them was above sexual possessiveness—Burton in particular, ever self-conscious about his ravaged skin.

  Halfway through filming, Elizabeth could no longer work through her constant visceral pain. After a series of tests, Elizabeth was admitted to a London hospital for a hysterectomy. “Elizabeth had her uterus removed on Sunday morning. The operation began at 9:30 and ended at 1:00,” Burton wrote in his diary, marking some of the most awful days of his life. He read Michael Holroyd’s Life of Lytton Strachey to distract himself during the hours of surgery, and afterward admitted that he didn’t remember having read a single word. “There was nothing before,” he wrote when she was finally out of danger and recovering at home, “no shame inflicted or received, no injustice done to me, no disappointment professional or private that I could not think away…But this is the first time where I’ve seen a loved one in screaming agony for two days, hallucinated by drugs, sometimes knowing who I was and sometimes not, a virago one minute, an angel the next, and felt completely helpless.”

  He took the hospital room next to hers to stay overnight after the surgery, but it turned out to be Walpurgis Nacht. Through paper-thin walls, he heard her groaning until dawn. There were complications, and, to ease the pain, Elizabeth was given drugs that unnerved Richard with their side effects: “lurid hallucinations” alternating with moments of “extraordinary shafts of clarity,” as he described them. Richard had seen mightily drunken men in his day—including his own father—but nothing that filled him with terror like this. “She thinks she is on the Kalizma,” he recorded, “and when flowers arrive in her hospital room she demands that they be put downstairs in Liza’s room.” Richard tried to distract her with a book by Muriel Spark, but Elizabeth suddenly looked up from its pages and admonished Richard for shouting at the steward on their yacht. “Hush, he’ll hear you,” she said, putting her fingers to her lips. She imagined that Doctor Faustus wa
s playing on the turned-off television set.

  The ordeal brought out the George and Martha in them both. When she suddenly left her bed, Richard tried leading her back to her room, calling her “a naughty girl” for disobeying her doctor’s orders. She told him to “fuck off.” When he offered to sit with her in her room, she commanded him to sit in a chair in the hall as she couldn’t stand the sight of his face. But five minutes later, she cried out for him. To make matters worse, the press filled the hospital lobby, crowding out patients in the emergency room. Elizabeth’s hospitalization was headline news every day, and each day more lurid. In her drugged state, Elizabeth wondered if Richard was still with her in the hospital, or if he’d abandoned her.

  “She is still asleep and it’s half past midday. I’m longing to see her,” Richard wrote in his journal. But what haunted him was what the drugs did to her, how they affected the way she acted toward him—those baleful, malevolent looks, her invective. At least he hadn’t lost her, though it hit them both when they left the hospital that, now, they would never have their own child.

  This was the final verdict. “A child with Richard. I would have wanted that above everything in the world,” Elizabeth would later say. That door had closed. But they still had their fabulous life together, and their family. And they had each other. That had been the most important thing. To give birth to “Elizabeth and Richard”—“Liz and Dick”—had been no easy task. They couldn’t take another loss. But another loss would come.

  When Secret Ceremony was released at the end of 1968, the reviews were, again, so bad that Elizabeth slipped from sixth place to tenth place in box office rankings. A mere two years before, in 1966, she had been ranked third, behind Julie Andrews and Sean Connery. Even her hospitalization and hysterectomy—though it restored her slimmer, more youthful figure—didn’t lift the fortunes of this film, as her illnesses had on previous occasions. Judith Crist decried the film as “truly terrible” and Rex Reed lamented, “Her disintegration is a very sad thing to stand by helplessly and watch, but something ghastly has happened over the course of her last four or five films…Taylor has become a hideous parody of herself.”

  In retrospect, Elizabeth is quite convincing in Secret Ceremony, and is genuinely moving as the grieving mother who hopes for a chance to replace the child she lost. The Guardian’s critic, practically alone among reviewers, described the movie as “quite beautifully made.” But the fact that she was willing to play the vulgarian, and to stand by while Mitchum, as Albert, heaps insults upon her, calling her a cow “famous for her mammalia,” tilted the movie into parody.

  Despite the bad reviews for her two Losey films, and the fact that they both lost money, it was to Elizabeth’s credit that she was willing to take on edgier fare. She saw a new direction for her career in European art-house films. She was willing to age gracefully, to become a figure like Jeanne Moreau or Simone Signoret. Unfortunately, Elizabeth was now too famous to disappear into the roles she was playing, a dilemma for any serious actress. There was now more public interest in her private life and her extravagances than in her films. The paparazzi seemed more eager to photograph Elizabeth in unflattering poses, looking heavy, or eating and drinking. Her friend and in-house photographer, Gianni Bozzacchi, noticed this unfortunate trend. “The paparazzi were now getting more money for bad shots of Elizabeth than for beautiful ones,” he said. They lay in wait to surprise her looking at her worst.

  Elizabeth’s hysterectomy in July was followed by more bad news. Two days after Elizabeth’s operation, Andrew Besançon, Richard’s longtime gardener at Pays de Galle, his Swiss home in Céligny, was found dead in the estate’s garage. He had hanged himself. Burton made plans to fly to Geneva for the funeral, bringing with him Kate and Liza, his brother and sister-in-law Ifor and Gwen, and Brook Williams, by now an ever-present member of Burton’s entourage. Elizabeth didn’t want him to go, but relented if Richard promised to stay in her chalet in Gstaad rather than in the house in Céligny, which had been closed up for two years.

  “I remember that he had suffered from a nervous breakdown some twelve or thirteen years ago after the death of his wife,” Burton confided in his diary about the death of his gardener. He had known the man since 1957—eleven years—and Besançon was apparently about to go into a nursing home the night before he committed suicide. “He killed himself last night. I feel such a bloody fool for not even suspecting it.”

  Burton hadn’t set foot in the house in Céligny for two years, and it still seemed haunted by its former life, and now by Besançon’s suicide. Nonetheless, they decided to spend the night there rather than drive back to Gstaad. Once in Céligny, the three men—Richard, Ifor, and Brook—stopped in at Café de la Gare, situated on a railway bridge just across the tracks from Burton’s house. While rain poured outside, the three Welshmen dined on fish and drank heavily, polishing off thirty-seven half-liters of white wine. Around three in the morning, Ifor left the café to go and open up the house, little used since Burton’s divorce from Sybil five years earlier.

  Stumbling around in the dark, searching for the switch to turn on the outside light, Ifor apparently slipped on a grill or a boot-scrape and fell against a windowsill, breaking his neck. “He literally missed his footing in the dark,” recalled Brook Williams. “It left him completely paralyzed.”

  Richard was shattered.

  He had once told his younger brother, Graham, “After Cis, I loved Ifor the best. He was the nearest to a father to me.” Indeed, Richard had hero-worshipped his robust and stalwart brother since he was a boy. Ifor used to carry him piggy-back, running over the hills of Pontrhydyfen. Later Ifor would cheer Rich in swimming contests as he fought the rough waves, or kicking up enormous clouds of dust playing Welsh rugby. Ifor was his “hero, brother, father, confessor, and best friend.” Once, after Burton’s early success, when he brought Ifor out to Hollywood, he was delighted when his towering brother had lifted Humphrey Bogart off the floor by his lapels, angry over some remark at a party, as if the famous actor were nothing more than a drunk in a Welsh pub. When Ifor had protested Richard’s treatment of Sybil, it was a blow greater than all the condemnation Richard had received from the Vatican and the international press. Now, this man among men—this force of nature—would be confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life, paralyzed from the neck down. It was more than Richard could bear, and—as he always had—he blamed himself.

  In September, the couple flew to Paris and checked into the Plaza Athénée, so Burton could begin filming an unconventional movie called Staircase, directed by Stanley Donen. In this movie, Burton and his good friend Rex Harrison played a pair of aging homosexuals. It seemed an unusual choice to take on such challenging fare, after the twin horrors of Ifor’s paralysis and Elizabeth’s hysterectomy, and he found himself having to explain it to the press. Like a man going through customs, Richard had to publicly declare that he wasn’t homosexual—“I tried it once,” he admitted with remarkable candor at the time.

  When he was sixteen, Richard had been taken by Emlyn Williams to a party where he quickly noticed that all the guests were gay men, some of whom made passes at him. “What could I say? What could I do? I mean, these were some of the greatest actors in the English theater. I wasn’t gay, but it was hard to say no,” he wrote about the incident. Later, when he was receiving his six-month course of Royal Air Force (RAF) training at Exeter College, Oxford, he was the only RAF officer trainee who finagled a single room for himself, possibly arranged by Philip Burton (who, as commanding officer of Port Talbot Squadron 499, had gotten Burton the opportunity to begin with). One day, when the RAF trainees were parading in formation on the Oxford grounds, Richard was commanded to step forward. He was pulled out of line and reprimanded for “entertaining an officer in his room.” That he wasn’t drummed out of the corps was probably due to the influence of his commanding officer—Philip Burton—but Richard recalled it as a particularly humiliating incident, especially for the son of a Welsh miner.


  Elizabeth, though, had helped him overcome any shame he might have still harbored. Now, here was a chance to portray the pathos of a gay man living in England at a time when homosexuality was considered a crime. It also offered him a chance to confront his past, and Elizabeth gave him the courage to do so.

  Burton announced to the press that he’d accepted the part because Rex Harrison had said, “I will if you will.” Elizabeth had urged him to take on the role, given her affection for her many gay friends—Roddy McDowall, Dick Hanley, John Lee, Montgomery Clift, Rock Hudson, Vincente Minnelli, Franco Zeffirelli—and her belief in the film’s affirmation of the healing power of love, no matter the orientation. With Elizabeth’s help, Richard had become more able to accept his early sexual experiences, and appearing as a gay barber—although sometimes slipping into parody—reflected that self-acceptance. One would have a hard time imagining other actors of his stature at the time—John Wayne, Frank Sinatra, Paul Newman, George C. Scott—taking on an overtly gay role.

  Even after a string of poorly performing films, the Burtons still had the clout to demand their highest salaries to date—$1.25 million each—for Burton to appear in Staircase and, for Elizabeth, The Only Game in Town, both for 20th Century-Fox. (“They must be out of their tiny Chinese minds,” Elizabeth had quipped when the producers agreed to their demands.) They also asked that they not be made to work more than an hour’s distance apart when they weren’t working together, which is why both films were shot in Paris, instead of on location in London’s East End or in Las Vegas, where the stories were set. (They had had the same arrangement on their last two films, Where Eagles Dare and Secret Ceremony, both filmed at Elstree Studios.) Elaborate sets had to be constructed at the Boulogne-sur-Seine studio, but 20th Century-Fox was convinced that the Burton magic was still viable enough to recoup their huge salaries.