Furious Love

by Sam Kashner

  The Burtons returned to London in time to attend two great social events that would further test Richard’s tenuous grasp on sobriety. The first was the Proust Ball, given on December 2 by the Rothschilds at their splendid estate, the Château de Ferrières, Seineet-Marne, in which all the guests were asked to appear as characters from Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu. Touting it as “the Ball of the Century,” the engraved invitations requested that women wear jewels in their hair, as befitting la Belle Époque, so, of course, Elizabeth needed Alexandre de Paris to accompany her. She came as the Duchesse de Guermantes, one of the rulers of Parisian society in Proust’s novel, wearing borrowed jewels from Van Cleef & Arpels in addition to her emerald-and-diamond brooch from Bulgari, which Alexandre had skillfully woven into her elaborate coif. Among the glittering guests were the former French president Georges Pompidou, Princess Grace of Monaco, the Duchess of Windsor, Audrey Hepburn, Andy Warhol, the late President Kennedy’s press secretary Pierre Salinger, producer Sam Spiegel, and the celebrated photographer Cecil Beaton, who wandered the vast dining room taking photographs of the guests, including a stunning one of Elizabeth in costume, resplendent in diamonds and emeralds. There were so many jewels entwined in coiffures that dozens of French policemen stood guard outside the château.

  Richard, who was seated at dinner next to the sultry Anne-Marie Deschodt, ex-wife of French film director Louis Malle, and across the table from Andy Warhol, would attempt to get through the entire affair sober. Elizabeth, seated at the first table with Guy de Rothschild, Grace Kelly (Her Serene Highness Princess of Monaco), and the Duchess of Windsor (already “slightly gaga”), would have a grand time.

  The Burtons had traveled by car from Paris to the French countryside with Grace Kelly, and took possession of two guest bedrooms at the sumptuous estate. The two-hour drive, delayed by traffic and the inconvenience of having to pick up Grace at 32 Avenue Foch, was spent listening to Her Serene Highness extolling the virtues of the Shah of Iran. Richard, miner’s son by birth and aristocrat by talent, usually felt awkward around Princess Grace, whom he described as rather dull and in the class of people who are “in a somewhat false position and know it,” having ditched her Hollywood career to marry royalty.

  They were to descend from their guest rooms at nine ten for a nine thirty dinner, and Richard, ever punctual, found himself waiting for “my girls” to join him—“the Duchess of Windsor and the Princess of Monaco and of course my very own ‘girl,’” Elizabeth. But Elizabeth was, as usual, late (problems with Alexandre de Paris), so they didn’t descend until ten thirty p.m. As they were guests of honor, dinner was delayed for them.

  Once seated, Burton described “an hour or more of absolute agony” as he passed all the wines poured for him to his dinner partner, Mme. Malle, including champagne, a Lafite white wine, and a second white wine (Château d’Yquem). He found himself fascinated by the “cadaverous” man across the table from him, with snow-white hair but no visible eyelashes or eyebrows. The odd-looking man leaned across the table to Richard and asked, “Where’s my Elizabeth?” Richard nodded toward Guy de Rothschild’s table. The man sighed, clearly disappointed to be stuck with Richard and not Elizabeth. After all, the guest was Andy Warhol, who had burnished Elizabeth’s icon status with his stunning silk-screen portraits, who would one day declare that he would like to be reincarnated as a diamond on the hand of Elizabeth Taylor.

  Seated across the room, Elizabeth tried to stifle her hilarity at the Duchess of Windsor, who wore an outsized feather in her hair that kept dipping into the soup, the wine, the ice cream, and smacking her host in the face. The duke was apparently not well enough to attend the grand ball, but the duchess invited Elizabeth and Richard to come see him before they left for Gstaad.

  After the dinner, Guy de Rothschild asked Elizabeth to help him remove his glued-on mustache, which had become bothersome. They ducked into one of the many bathrooms near the dining hall, with a Rothschild servant standing guard, while guests wondered if Guy and Elizabeth were, in fact, “making out” in the powder room.

  Richard took great pride in noticing how the high-born and fabulously rich guests, as they reveled throughout the night, sneaked glances at Elizabeth and Princess Grace, surreptitiously gawking at their beauty. Curiously, Elizabeth didn’t consider herself—nor Grace Kelly, for that matter—truly beautiful. She felt that being too impeccable, too groomed, too studied—“so that you can feel the vanity behind it”—made beauty boring. Her ideals of feminine beauty were women like Lena Horne and Ava Gardner, earthier women ablaze with life and heart.

  The music finally stopped at seven in the morning, when the costumed revelers, many of them hungover, drifted to their cars and faced the morning traffic back to Paris.

  Four days later, the Burtons visited the Duke and Duchess of Windsor for a dinner party “with half a dozen of the most consummate bores in Paris,” as Burton later described them. He found the Windsors quite faded, the duke in ill health and walking with a cane, and the duchess’s memory flickering in and out. The most touching part of the evening was when the duke and duchess kept reminiscing how Edward had once been the king of England. The aging lovers who had risked all, had become world-famous, and had lost so much, were now seeing their shadow empire fade.

  The Burtons’ reign as Hollywood’s royalty was beginning to fade, as well. But there was always Europe.

  In January of the new year, 1972, Richard and Elizabeth flew to Budapest in their private jet and checked into the Presidential Suite of the Inter-Continental Hotel. Richard would begin work on his fortieth movie, Bluebeard, a black comedy-melodrama about a mythical Baron von Sepper, a serial murderer of seven women. As before, he waived his salary for a percentage of the profits (if any), but received $80,000 in living expenses. Elizabeth had fallen to the last place on the top ten box office list in 1968, and appeared neither on the list for 1969 nor on the one for 1970. Burton had begun accepting movie roles without even reading the scripts beforehand. Bluebeard fell into that category.

  Whenever the Burtons took up residence for a new film, they would rev up their bedtime exercises, to help get into shape for the work ahead and to establish a routine. For Richard, it was hard to keep a straight face watching Elizabeth solemnly go through her exercises, holding her breasts in each hand while she ran in place. (“[F]irm as they are,” Richard recorded, “really like a 30 yr old’s more than a nearly 40 year old’s, they are pretty big and the resultant wiggle-waggle would be pretty odd as well as bad for her. It’s a very fetching sight.”)

  Like his previous three films, Bluebeard was a cobbled-together affair, a European coproduction from four different countries, and it was directed by Edward Dmytryk, one of the “Hollywood Ten,” who had been blacklisted, had served six months in prison, and had been forced to recant in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee. The director once had a long, respectable career in Hollywood, having made song-and-dance man Dick Powell into hardboiled detective Philip Marlowe in Murder, My Sweet; directed Humphrey Bogart in The Caine Mutiny; and Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift in The Young Lions. He had directed Elizabeth and Clift in Raintree County in 1957, when he had been forced to shoot around the actor after the devastating accident that nearly destroyed his face. But after almost fifty years in the movie business, he was reduced to what would have been deemed B-pictures under the old studio system. Burton felt pity for the downward trajectory of Dmytryk’s career, but the director was in awe of Richard and Elizabeth.

  Bluebeard would have its own set of problems. First of all, Budapest in winter did not have the romantic, gypsy atmosphere the Burtons had expected; it was a grim, dark, cold, proletarian city. They were used to the warmth and light of the Mediterranean. Secondly—and more importantly—Burton played opposite a “cast of international beauties” appearing as his wives and mistresses, including the new sex symbol Raquel Welch, as well as Virna Lisi, Nathalie Delon, and even the kittenish Joey Heatherton, an unlikely Bur
ton costar. Elizabeth was on her guard. She was sure Richard had been faithful to her throughout the nine years of their relationship, and, in fact, he had. And not only because they were glued to each other’s sides, as they made sure to spend time on the sets and locations of each other’s movies when they weren’t acting in the same film. Elizabeth was possessive, and she accompanied Richard to his movie sets for the last two years because she didn’t want to lose him. She knew his effect on women (she sometimes sarcastically called him “Charlie Charm”). Philip Burton had noted that even as young as fifteen, Richard had been surrounded by girls, who hung around him “like cats after cream.” The stage actress Tammy Grimes, who had been smitten with Richard before the “Elizabethan era,” had described him as “a genius” who “makes women feel beautiful. His acting has such a tragic quality…he is a vodka man with a quicksilver mind and a violent temper. He’s moody, completely unpredictable, always fascinating, very frugal, extremely shrewd, a tremendous snob, and a beautiful man.”

  Burton’s lady-killer reputation made him particularly well suited to playing Baron von Sepper, literally a lady-killer. It was a campy role in a campy movie: the baron murders each of his wives in imaginative ways when they discover he’s impotent, and he keeps their frozen bodies in a secret refrigerated chamber of his villa. Burton knew the role had “to be done with immense tongue-in-cheek. I tried to remember how the master—whassisname—Vincent Price plays that kind of thing. Must be funny serious.” In the mock-gothic atmosphere of the movie, Burton “plays the organ, a falcon flies around, a kitten will be killed” (which upset Elizabeth). Vincent Price would have been quite at home. But no matter how bad the script was, Burton was always professional. “If he sold himself, he gave full money’s worth,” observed Dmytryk.

  The backers of the movie asked Dmytryk to introduce nudity into the film, to heighten its box office appeal, and he did so (trying to keep it “tasteful”). Many of the onscreen beauties bared their breasts, and even Richard was asked to disrobe, which he refused to do. For the first time since The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Elizabeth became intensely jealous of two of Richard’s costars—not the voluptuous Raquel Welch or the blond, gamine Joey Heatherton, but Sybil Danning, a Playboy model who played a half-naked prostitute in the movie. Elizabeth, who came to the set every day, was convinced that the former model played her love scene with Richard with too much enthusiasm. Elizabeth was so incensed that she reportedly reeled back and slapped Danning’s face after one such performance. But her real jealousy would be reserved for Nathalie Delon, the ex-wife of heartthrob French actor Alain Delon.

  As early as 1964, Elizabeth had recognized that she and Richard were “both mercurial, jealous people.” She admitted to being jealous of Richard’s past conquests—and they were legion—and she realized that Richard may not always be faithful to her, that even “in happy marriages, during a sort of middle-aged change of life, men do flit around with young, pretty girls.” She felt then that if—when—Richard began to stray, she would “have the guts and compassion” to do whatever was necessary to hold their marriage together. “I would love him enough to love the hurt he might give me,” she wrote rather masochistically, adding, “I really, profoundly believe that no such thing will ever happen.” But now, for the first time in their marriage, it was about to happen.

  Adding to Elizabeth’s insecurity, she would turn forty on February 27. The great English fashion photographer Norman Parkinson came to photograph Elizabeth for the cataclysmic event: the hitting of the wall for Hollywood actresses, the point of no return, the beginning of middle age with menopause in sight. For the legions of Elizabeth’s female fans, who had grown up with the beautiful child star, it meant a final farewell to youth. For Elizabeth, it meant a farewell to screen-goddess roles. Elizabeth had once said that she welcomed the lines and gray hairs of middle age, but now that it was on the horizon, there had to be some qualms about keeping her notoriously attractive and flirtatious husband by her side.

  When Richard pored through the photographic proofs, he was struck anew by Elizabeth’s beauty, remembering how he “fell in love with her at once…like the pull of gravity.” But he disliked his own appearance. “He didn’t make me look very fetching,” he wrote on Valentine’s Day, noting with distaste his thinning hair. “I’ve never been—at least not for 20 yrs or so—and am never likely to be the pin-up type.” Norman Parkinson’s photograph, published to commemorate Elizabeth’s fortieth birthday, showed Elizabeth and Richard in a somber mood, in matching black furs, Elizabeth’s Krupp diamond glinting dully on her finger, the ethereal lights of Budapest flickering behind them. It is indeed a wintry view of the couple, bundled against the cold, yet it’s haunting, and it remains one of Elizabeth’s favorite photographs, hanging in a glittering oval frame in her bedroom till this day.

  Burton was struggling hard to maintain his sobriety throughout the shoot, despite the gloom of the city, the banality of the script, the temptations of his costars, and Elizabeth’s vigilant jealousy on the set. He would be especially tested when he threw a lavish birthday party to celebrate Elizabeth’s turning forty.

  Like a repeat of the gala thrown in the Dorchester for the premiere of The Taming of the Shrew, Burton flew in the vast Jenkins clan from Wales. The invitation, sent out as a telegram under Elizabeth’s name, stated:

  We would love you to come to Budapest, as our guest, for the weekend of 26 and 27 February to help me celebrate my being 40 birthday STOP The hotel is very Hilton but there are some fun places to go STOP Dress slacks for Saturday night in some dark cellar and something gay and pretty for Sunday night STOP Dark glass for languorous in between STOP Lot of love Elizabeth and Richard STOP P.S. Could you RSVP as soon as possible to Inter-Continental Hotel Budapest so I know how many rooms to book.

  It went out to two hundred guests in Monaco, London, Paris, and Los Angeles, including Princess Grace; Ringo Starr and his wife, Barbara Bach; Michael Caine and his fiancée, Shakira Baksh; Joseph and Patricia Losey; the Cartiers; the Bulgaris; and Alexandre de Paris. Elizabeth’s ex-husband Michael Wilding and his new wife, actress Margaret Leighton, were invited, as was David Niven, and, to please Richard, the English poet Stephen Spender.

  Ambassadors from seven countries arrived to celebrate Elizabeth. Elizabeth’s mother, Sara, and brother, Howard, were flown in. Also present were Neville Coghill and Francis Warner, another Oxford don, who took the occasion to offer Richard an honorary fellowship to teach at St. Peter’s, Oxford. (Burton was thrilled: “It cld be a step toward a D.Litt., which is the only honour I really covet.”) The children were there—Chris Wilding and Liza and Maria, of course, but Michael Wilding Jr., who still rejected his parents’ conspicuous consumption, stayed away. As did six of the seven “Bluebeard broads,” whom Elizabeth disinvited when the guest list grew too long (Raquel Welch managed to show up anyway).

  The party was Richard’s way of renewing his vows to Elizabeth, and perhaps of assuring her that rumors of infidelity brewing on the set were just rumors. Others thought the extravagant event was Elizabeth’s way of reminding the world that she could still command international publicity, now that her film career had cooled. She took great delight in planning the gala, visiting private homes with the designer Larry Barcher, brought over from Paris, to get ideas on how to redecorate the InterContinental Hotel (The Duma), transforming it with borrowed paintings and silver into the kind of luxury dwelling in which her more distinguished guests would feel at home.

  Journalists flocked to Budapest. They came from everywhere—Japan, India, Sri Lanka, Europe, the States. Burton found it necessary to appease them with a press conference, which he did, showing off his new gift to Taylor: the 50-carat, heart-shaped “Taj Mahal” diamond, on a gold-and-ruby chain, bought for £350,000.

  Elizabeth knew what she was getting. She’d already fallen in love with the byzantine story behind the diamond necklace, which had been fashioned in 1627 and given as a gift to the Empress of the Mughal Empire, Nu
r Jahan, by her husband, Shah Jahangir, the Emperor of the Mughal Empire. She then gave it to his son, Shah Jahan, the emperor who built the Taj Mahal as a monument to Queen Mumtaz, his favorite wife. The yellow-tinted diamond bore an inscription in Parsi: “Love Is Everlasting.” Curiously, the jewel had been purchased in advance of Elizabeth’s birthday, during a layover at Kennedy Airport. Cartier accommodated the Burtons by bringing a king’s ransom of jewelry to the airport for them to consider while they waited for their next plane. The Taj Mahal necklace was among the selections. Richard further pleased Elizabeth by telling her that he would have bought her the Taj Mahal if there had been a way to transport it to Gstaad.

  At the press conference, which he attended alone, Richard playfully draped the jeweled necklace on his forehead; he later hung it around the neck of a Hungarian boy who had wandered into the press conference.

  The gala lasted two days. At the cocktail party the first night, Richard took great delight in introducing Maria, now a willowy eleven-year-old, to her Welsh aunts and uncles, all of whom were happily chattering away in Welsh. The relatives were struck by how much cherubic-faced Maria resembled Richard’s daughter, Kate. Richard had brought them in on a chartered British Airways Trident. Some of Burton’s relatives, like his brother Verdun, had never flown in an airplane before. They were bowled over by the flight, and by the view of the Danube from their hotel bedrooms, and by meeting Princess Grace. (The second night, Her Serene Highness led a conga line around the ballroom.) The Jenkins brothers brought with them a 16-mm reel of highlights of the British Lions, the Welsh rugby team’s victorious tour of New Zealand, which they all took turns watching and cheering, Burton among them (“by God, they’re really good…”).