by Sam Kashner
The Only Game in Town came about because Frank Sinatra had wanted to know the name of a dog. Sinatra had called the Burtons to ask about the breed of O’Fie, because he wanted to buy a similar dog for his new wife, Mia Farrow. He got their agent, Hugh French, on the phone, and French was suddenly hit by the idea of pairing Elizabeth with Sinatra. They had, surprisingly, never appeared together in a movie. French found the screenplay for The Only Game in Town, set in Sinatra-friendly Las Vegas, and Elizabeth agreed to do it. The story is about a piano-playing compulsive gambler—Sinatra, of course—and his Las Vegas–dancer girlfriend, played by Elizabeth. Frank D. Gilroy (author of The Subject Was Roses) wrote the screenplay, adapted from his own Broadway play. Elizabeth’s first great director, George Stevens, who had catapulted her to true movie stardom in A Place in the Sun and Giant, was signed to direct. Though working with Stevens, particularly in Giant, had been hard on Elizabeth, she had never looked more luminous than in those films, and she trusted that he would again work his magic.
However, before filming began in Paris, Sinatra backed out, to be replaced by Warren Beatty, fresh from his stunning success as both producer and star of Bonnie and Clyde. But it wasn’t a good match. With his boyish good looks, Beatty seemed to belong to another generation, and the cinematic love affair between him and Taylor just wasn’t believable. He wasn’t convincing as a jaded Las Vegas denizen, and Elizabeth’s womanly figure wasn’t suited to the miniskirts and stretch pants of the era. Despite Beatty and Taylor’s on-camera mismatch, Burton became jealous of the actor—already well known as catnip to women—whom he described in his diary as “her young & attractive man who obviously adores her.” He dealt with his jealousy in the usual way—drinking heavily by five p.m., martinis this time. “I felt desperate all day long…I was so drunk & tired that I fell asleep almost before I’d managed to get my clothes off,” he confided in his diary. Richard knew it was important for Elizabeth to appear in her own films, but, he admitted, “I don’t like Elizabeth working without me.”
When Darryl Zanuck viewed the rushes for the two back-to-back films, he was convinced that the studio had two hits on their hands. But once again, both films would lose money. Buckets of it. The Only Game in Town lost $8 million, and Staircase lost $5.8 million. Zanuck, it appeared, was just as out of touch with what contemporary audiences wanted as the Burtons now appeared to be. The success of lower-budget films like Easy Rider and The Graduate—Mike Nichols’s second movie—would usher in a change in Hollywood, in a world where the Burtons increasingly seemed throwbacks to another era. Elizabeth now had three flops in a row, and she wouldn’t make another movie for two years.
The family business was in trouble.
To console himself, Burton found great comfort in tallying up their combined assets, with a mind toward possible retirement. “I have worked out that with average luck, we should, at the end of 1969, be worth about $12 million between us. About $3 million of that is in diamonds, emeralds, property, paintings, so our annual income will be in the region of $1.2 million. That is, God willing, and no wars, and no ’29.” Burton, however, was still bankable, because Where Eagles Dare would turn out to be the biggest money-maker of the year, earning $21 million domestically. But their next joint picture, Anne of the Thousand Days, would mark the beginning of the end of Elizabeth’s career as a leading lady.
While in Paris, the Burtons continued their round of socializing with the aristocracy, spending time with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, who visited Elizabeth on the set of The Only Game in Town, and Richard, a half mile away, on the set of Staircase. The Duke and Duchess were, in a way, the Burtons’ only equivalents. Before Le Scandale, theirs had been the most notorious, damaging, and publicized marriage of the century, which ended King Edward VIII’s reign so that he could marry the Baltimore divorcée Wallis Simpson. England wept at the king’s abdication, and the press excoriated the couple—particularly the stylish, aloof American for whom he had thrown over his kingdom. “The beating they took by the press,” Elizabeth later noted, “made us look like chopped chicken liver.” The duke saw himself exiled to Jamaica and ostracized by the royal family, as he and his bride reigned over a diminished shadow empire of millionaires, fashion plates, social climbers, playboys, and movie people. Their story had special poignancy for Richard, as the duke was also the Prince of Wales. To honor the connection, the duchess often wore her stunning “Prince of Wales” brooch—three feathers and a crown, the insignia of Wales in white and yellow diamonds. Over dinner at the duke and duchess’s house in Paris, the duchess told Elizabeth that it was one of the few pieces of jewelry that Lord Mountbatten had overlooked when he came to take back all of the royal jewels upon the duke’s abdication. (Elizabeth would end up owning the brooch after the duchess’s death in 1986, when she bid on it at a Sotheby’s auction the following year for an AIDS fund-raising event, paying $623,000. She had phoned in the bid sitting by her pool in Los Angeles. “All along I knew my friend the duchess wanted me to have it,” she believed.) Elizabeth loved spending time at their exquisite Paris house with its beautiful gardens that the duke had himself designed and had planted with his own hands.
Burton was less sanguine about spending time with “marred royalty.” He was bored at the duke and duchess’s soirees. He described the couple as resembling “Two tiny figures like Toto and Nanette that you keep on the mantelpiece. Chipped around the edges. Something you keep in the front room for Sundays only.” At one such soiree, on November 13, 1968, he picked up the duchess and swung her around the room “like a dancing singing dervish.” Elizabeth was horrified. Of course, it didn’t help that Richard was now, on occasion, capable of downing three bottles of vodka a day. Furious with him, Elizabeth locked him in the spare bedroom that night, at the Plaza Athénée. Richard tried to kick the door down, shattering the plaster, and had to spend the next morning picking up the pieces. He later expressed remorse in his diary when he wrote, “I’d better be off to work because I behaved with a fair amount of disgrace yesterday…it is not a good idea to drink so much. I shall miss all the marriages of all my various children…”
And, on November 15, they set off for a weekend getaway at the Château de Ferrières, the beautiful country house of Guy and Marie-Hélène Rothschild. Richard didn’t want to go. “I’d like to be alone with E. for about two hundred years but can’t even get two days,” he complained.
Elizabeth was still suffering back pain and still feeling weak after her hysterectomy. In October, she complained to Burton that she sometimes had no feeling in her feet and that she feared she might one day become crippled. “She asked if I would stop loving her if she had to spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair. I told her that I didn’t care if her legs, bum, and bosoms fell off, and her teeth turned yellow and she went bald. I love that woman so much sometimes that I cannot believe my luck. She has given me so much.” And then, in late November, Elizabeth again received sad news.
As it had with the death of Montgomery Clift, it fell to Richard to break the news of Elizabeth’s father’s passing away on November 20, 1968, a month shy of his seventy-first birthday. After Francis Taylor’s stroke three years earlier, his death wasn’t unexpected, but Elizabeth was devastated, in part, perhaps, because there had always been some distance between her and her father, unlike her extremely close relationship with her mother, Sara. She would never be close to him now.
Elizabeth was inconsolable in her grief; “like a wild animal,” Burton recorded. Though Francis Taylor had disliked his daughter’s childhood acting career, and Sara’s devotion to it had caused a rift in their marriage, he was, in some ways, responsible for bringing it about. First, he had made his wife abandon her successful stage career (though they were both from Arkansas City, Kansas, he had courted her when she was appearing in a play in London’s West End), so Sara had poured all of her frustrated theatrical impulses into Elizabeth. And when he was an air-raid warden in Los Angeles during World War II, he had crossed paths with
fellow air-raid warden Sam Marx. Then a story editor at MGM, Marx had told Elizabeth’s father that the studio was desperately looking for a little English girl to appear in a movie then in production, Lassie Come Home. Francis casually mentioned it to Sara that evening. The rest is history, and Francis didn’t like how it turned out. Elizabeth recalled, “He had made my mother quit the stage when she was twenty-nine, and she lived her life vicariously and very strongly through me, and of course, my dad resented that.” When Elizabeth started earning more money than her father, their idyllic family life ended. “That’s when it fell apart,” Elizabeth believed.
The Burtons flew back to Los Angeles to attend the funeral and to console Sara Taylor. Six days later, they were back in Paris, and Elizabeth, ever the trouper, returned to work.
In December 1968, Candy was released. As a favor to Marlon Brando, Burton had taken a small novelty role as a Dylan Thomas–like poet making the rounds of college campuses and seducing girls, so it couldn’t have been pleasant to read the lousy reviews. Variety was alone in lauding Burton for succeeding “by lampooning his own style. He gives an outstanding comedy performance.” Practically everywhere else, he was accused of having no gift for comedy. Despite its trainload of fascinating stars and personalities—Brando, John Huston, James Coburn, Walter Matthau, the French singer Charles Aznavour, Ringo Starr, even boxing champion Sugar Ray Robinson and ex–Rolling Stone girlfriend Anita Pallenberg—the spoof was dismissed by most critics as a “frenzied, formless, and almost entirely witless adaptation.” That’s what you get for hanging out with Marlon Brando and agreeing, while drunk, to appear in movies made by your friends.
In many respects, 1968 had been a terrible year. Though it had begun with filming Where Eagles Dare, giving Richard’s film career a needed jolt and changing its direction (from dramatic actor to action star), and it brought Elizabeth the fabulous and fabled Krupp diamond, it had ended with the death of Francis Taylor and had seen the paralyzing accident of Burton’s beloved brother Ifor.
Through it all, however, their grand passion continued. Burton wrote at the end of the year, “She is a wildly exciting love-mistress, she is shy and witty, she is nobody’s fool, she is a brilliant actress, she is beautiful beyond the dreams of pornography, she can be arrogant and willful, she is clement and loving…she tolerates my impossibilities and my drunkenness, she is an ache in the stomach when I am away from her, and she loves me!…And I’ll love her till I die.”
11
“RINGS AND FARTHINGALES”
“It’s just a present for Liz.”
—RICHARD BURTON, ON THE PURCHASE OF THE CARTIER DIAMOND FOR $1.1 MILLION
“Sometimes his joy was perverse and he would become dark.”
—ELIZABETH TAYLOR
In December 1968, Richard returned to London to complete filming on Staircase while Elizabeth stayed behind in Paris with her mother. Elizabeth grew even closer to Sara following her father’s death, cherishing her remaining parent. Even though 20th Century-Fox had given Elizabeth some time off to rest, her health had never fully improved after her hysterectomy. Her constant back pain troubled her, and she had to wear a brace just to get through a day of shooting. Richard worried that she might end up in a wheelchair. He was angry that she didn’t take better care of herself, and noted that the doctors had wanted her to remain in bed for at least a month. She didn’t do it. Richard thought it was odd that her doctors didn’t forbid her to drink while she was also taking powerful prescription painkillers. He had always distrusted doctors, blaming their “sheer neglect” for his mother’s death while she was giving birth to her thirteenth child. But he wished that Elizabeth would heed their advice. “So I’ll have my two favorite people in the world, E. and Ifor, tottering about on crutches,” Richard wrote gloomily. But he was actually fooling himself when it came to Ifor: there would be a slight improvement in his condition, allowing him to stand up on a few occasions and even swim, but he would remain paralyzed from the waist down, reduced to living in a motorized wheelchair.
On the last day of the year, Burton wrote,
My chief worry…is E.’s health. It is getting no better and she does maddingly little to help it…. I stayed in bed all day yesterday, for instance, while she spent the entire day until well after midnight sitting in the main room, gossiping, etc. And, of course, inevitably sipping away at the drinks. I dreaded at night when she has had her shots, etc.,…and is only semiarticulate…. What is more frightening is that she has become bored with everything in life. She never reads a book, at least not more than a couple of pages at a time…. I have always been a heavy drinker but now as a result of this half-life we’ve been leading I am drinking twice as much. The upshot will be that I’ll die of drink while she’ll go blithely on in her half-world.
The prescription drugs, combined with the alcohol Elizabeth continued to imbibe, had a terrible effect on her. Some days she went to bed in a “stoned daze,” totally disoriented and incoherent. It frightened Richard so much that he stopped drinking temporarily, though he considered alcohol one of life’s few pleasures in “a murderous world.” He saw his own behavior mirrored in Elizabeth, and he didn’t like what he saw.
In January 1969, the Burtons managed to fly to Las Vegas for the final ten days of filming The Only Game in Town. To help distract Elizabeth from her pain—and because it also captured his imagination—Burton bid on another fabled jewel at Sotheby’s. “La Peregrina” was an extraordinary, pear-shaped pearl that had been given to Mary Tudor, first daughter of Henry VIII, by King Philip of Spain in 1554. The pearl’s provenance was so distinguished it came with its own biography, beginning with its discovery by a slave in the Gulf of Panama (which won him his freedom). It made an appearance in two paintings by Velàzquez, the great painter of the Spanish court: worn as a brooch by Queen Margarita (the wife of Philip III), and suspended from a long necklace around the throat of her daughter-in-law, Queen Isabel. The next famous owners of La Peregrina were the Bonapartes in the early 1800s. Burton won his $37,000 bid at Sotheby’s, beating out Prince Alfonso de Bourbon Asturias, who had wanted to return the pearl to Spain, which many considered its rightful home. But La Peregrina continued to wander: Sotheby’s had the pearl couriered to Las Vegas, to the top floor of Caesars Palace, where the Burtons were then in residence.
When Elizabeth lifted the pearl out of its case, she gasped. She lovingly put it around her neck. She couldn’t stop touching it, “like a talisman,” and she walked through her hotel suite, “dreaming and glowing and wanting to scream with joy,” as she would later write. She wanted to share her joy with Richard, but she saw that he was in one of his Welsh moods. “Sometimes his joy was perverse and he would become dark.” She knew Richard, and she knew better than to throw herself at him and cover him with kisses, which was what she wanted to do. Incredibly, there was no one around to share her joy.
Suddenly, when she reached up to touch the pearl, she noticed it was gone. She was horrified—she ran into her bedroom and threw herself on the bed, where she screamed into the pillow. How could she have lost it? She got up and slowly retraced her steps, searching for the pearl before Richard learned that it was missing. Richard loved the pearl as much as she did, mostly for its unique, noble provenance—he loved anything historical. She even removed her shoes so she could feel it underfoot, and she got down on her hands and knees to search every inch of the carpet. It wasn’t there.
So she went into the living room, tiptoeing around Burton, pretending nonchalance while she continued to hunt for the pearl. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed their two Pekingese puppies at their feeding bowls. One of them was apparently gnawing on a bone, which was odd, because they never gave the puppies bones to chew on. When she investigated, she nearly shrieked with delight when she opened the puppy’s mouth to find La Peregrina—intact and unscratched. It would be at least a week before she could bring herself to tell Richard what had happened.
For Elizabeth, her pleasure in La Peregrina
was another expression of her almost mystical connection to jewels. It had arrived dangling on a lovely little pearl-and-platinum chain necklace, but, three years later, with the help of a designer from Cartier, Elizabeth created an exquisite design to showcase it, inspired by a sixteenth-century portrait of Mary, Queen of Scots, wearing the pearl. The new setting was a stunning double-stranded pearl-and-ruby choker, made with fifty-six “exquisitely matched oriental pearls.” And Richard was so inspired by its history that he planned to write a historical novel based on the peregrinations of the luminous pearl.
Their pleasure in La Peregrina did not last long, however. They had been fighting so much that by March, Richard wondered if they would be able to stay together. “The last six or eight months have been a nightmare,” Burton wrote. “I created one half and Elizabeth the other. We grated on each other to the point of separation.” Burton even contemplated running off to live alone in a shack in a tropical forest, and Elizabeth thought about going to live with her brother in Hawaii. “It is, of course, quite impossible. We are bound together. Whither thou goest…”
How fitting, perhaps, that a few months after giving Elizabeth La Peregrina, Richard himself would become Henry VIII, father of Mary I of England, in Hal Wallis’s film Anne of the Thousand Days. Elizabeth wanted desperately to play Anne Boleyn opposite Richard, but for once, the thing she most desired was denied her. Wallis informed her that at thirty-seven, she was just too old to play twenty-two-year-old Anne Boleyn. It was a bitter pill for Elizabeth, who had to watch the fresh, beautiful French-Canadian actress Geneviève Bujold pursued on camera by Richard in a role she felt should have belonged to her. Three years shy of forty—the age Joe Mankiewicz had warned all actresses about—she was still beautiful, still idolized by the public, but she had to confront what so many actresses face: the beginning of the end of their careers as “leading ladies.” After all, in an industry dominated by men, it was still considered business as usual to pair leading men in their forties and fifties with actresses in their twenties (as in Love in the Afternoon, with fifty-six-year-old Gary Cooper romantically paired with twenty-eight-year-old Audrey Hepburn).