Furious Love

by Sam Kashner

  In November 1972, the Burtons agreed to appear in another drama that would again resonate with their private lives: Divorce His Divorce Hers, a movie in two parts about the dissolution of a marriage. It would premiere on Harlech TV, produced by John Heyman and directed by a thirty-four-year-old Anglo-Indian director, Waris Hussein. Despite his relative youth, Hussein was among the top tier of British television directors at the time (he’d begun his career directing episodes of the popular science-fiction series Dr. Who). Being chosen to direct the Burtons was a coup, and he was thrilled to have the opportunity.

  Four years earlier, Burton had agreed to be placed on the board of directors of Lord Harlech’s nascent television station, the first to be set up in South Wales. Burton’s involvement virtually assured the success of the venture. When Harlech Television (HTV) debuted, their first program was an unveiling of the Krupp diamond. Burton contributed funds and agreed to appear in a drama for the fledgling enterprise, but had put it off until now. John Heyman had set up the production as a way of satisfying Burton’s obligation, while giving Elizabeth a costarring role. The film was funded mostly by Heyman himself and by the American Broadcasting Company in New York (ABC-TV), which put up more than $1 million. If Elizabeth’s and Richard’s films were no longer moneymakers, American television audiences had been eager to see the couple in 1970, as their stint on Here’s Lucy had proved. Perhaps that would still hold true.

  In a Rashômon-like fashion, Divorce His Divorce Hers chronicles a divorce from alternately the husband’s and then the wife’s point of view. Set in Rome, it would be filmed in Rome and Munich. (Richard had tried, unsuccessfully, to have the story set in Mexico or the south of France, where he’d have access to Casa Kimberly or the Kalizma.) Divorce His Divorce Hers is often described as another case of art imitating life, but in actuality, it was more like art predicting life, because at the time both Burtons were trying very hard to shore up their marriage.

  Burton was clinging to sobriety like a drowning man, and Elizabeth decided that the best way to breathe new life into their relationship was to adopt another child. She made inquiries at various Jewish adoption agencies, to no avail. She even asked Madame Broz, Marshal Tito’s formidable wife, to help find her an orphan in Yugoslavia to adopt, but Broz failed to find Elizabeth and Richard a suitable child. There was even talk of traveling to Vietnam to bring home one of the many war orphans born of American servicemen and Vietnamese women, offspring who were often shunned by their communities. That did not work out either.

  The first draft of the screenplay for Divorce His Divorce Hers was written by John Osborne, whose early play, Look Back in Anger, had helped make Burton a star when he’d appeared in the film adaptation, but when the Burtons declared that they hated the script, he was fired. The producers started over with another writer, the playwright-turned-television-dramatist John Hopkins. Hopkins was well known and well regarded in Britain for his literary approach to scriptwriting. He had done some celebrated work for British television, including Talking to a Stranger, another Rashômon-inspired drama, about an incident seen from the points of view of four different family members, and it starred a young Judi Dench.

  The Burtons were not all that enthusiastic about the production, but it was time for Richard to keep his promise to Lord Harlech. The TV station had been after Richard and Elizabeth to participate in a piece written especially for them, which could be shown in Britain on commercial television and then sold everywhere else. Divorce His Divorce Hers seemed just the project.

  Waris Hussein recalled that the drama was going to be done with four cameras, like traditional television, and they’d planned to film in Bristol—Harlech Television’s headquarters—near the romantic, medieval town of Bath, where the Burtons would be housed. HTV made arrangements with all the five-star hotels in Bath to empty out their best rooms to accommodate the Burtons and their entourage. Everything was set.

  But first of all, the Burtons wanted to meet their director, so Hussein was summoned to Squires Mount in Hampstead to meet Richard while Elizabeth was in London filming Night Watch. It was proving a difficult shoot for Elizabeth, as she had to watch Laurence Harvey slowly succumb to the cancer that would finally kill him. “She had this extraordinary fate in her life,” Hussein remembered thinking at the time, “to always be working with dying actors or people who get injured on film. There’s a whole side to Elizabeth that is very fatalistic.”

  When the director appeared at the Burtons’ front door in Hampstead, Richard was there to meet him. Hussein was struck by how “charming and sober” he was, and that he “made a great show of drinking Perrier.” The two men “got on like a house on fire,” Hussein recalled, “he being Welsh and me being Indian, both colonized by England.” That Hussein was a Cambridge man, and had directed The Six Wives of Henry VIII for BBC-TV, also impressed Burton.

  “What can I call you?” Richard had asked. It made it easier for Richard, naturally shy around strangers, if he could use a nickname. “Can I call you ‘Waristo’?”

  “If you want to.”

  “But don’t ever call me ‘Dick.’”

  Hussein agreed, and after that, he felt that Richard seemed to approve of him.

  His next task, however, would not be as easy. He was to see Elizabeth.

  John Heyman drove the director to the London studio where Elizabeth was still completing Night Watch, and he was quickly ushered into her dressing room, “a huge area with lots of lavender around,” he recalled. But Elizabeth wasn’t there and Hussein was kept waiting. “It was like being in a movie, because I’m sitting there terrified. All my faculties were on hold.”

  Suddenly he heard “that voice,” as he later characterized it, and it was not a cheerful one.

  “I don’t even know what’s it about!” the voice complained. “I haven’t read it. What’s he like?” the voice asked.

  The voice was getting closer, and the door opened, and Elizabeth appeared with a big smile on her face. She was wearing a caftan, Hussein recalled, and “looking very Elizabeth Taylor-y.”

  “Look,” she told the director, “I’ve only got a few minutes. Can you tell me what I’m doing and why I’m doing it?” Hussein began reciting the convoluted plot of Divorce His Divorce Hers, but he saw Elizabeth’s eyes beginning to glaze over. (“It’s a very complex piece,” Hussein recalled, “and if you’re going to try to explain it in five minutes, it begins to sound like a potential car crash.”)

  “Stop, stop, stop,” Elizabeth interrupted. “Where do I start in this? How old am I?”

  “In the script, you’re in your early and late twenties, and you go into your forties and fifties.”

  “Oh, right…Okay. Alexandre!”

  Suddenly, out of nowhere, the famous Parisian hairdresser appeared.

  “Alexandre, did you hear what the guy said? I’m supposed to be twenty. Now look, can you make me look like I did in A Place in the Sun?”

  Elizabeth went through her list of movies while Alexandre de Paris furiously took notes.

  “I have to go now,” she told Hussein, “but Alexandre can show you the kind of hairdos he’s been designing in your absence.” And then she swept out of the room.

  When Alexandre showed the director his sketches, they didn’t seem to have anything to do with the movie Hussein was about to direct. “They’re sort of elaborations of something you might wear to a ball,” he remembered. “I don’t think she understood a word of what I had said, apart from the fact that it took place over a number of years.” Hussein would have similar problems with the costumes designed by Elizabeth’s dear friend, Edith Head.

  When the immaculate costume designer, in her trademark crisp suits and dark-blue glasses, was hired for the shoot, she warned Hussein, “I’ll do the dresses you want, but you do know she has a veto on everything.” A week after Head’s designs were delivered to Elizabeth at the Dorchester, she took a red pencil and marked through everything she didn’t like, which was everything that had a hig
h neck, covering up the breasts that Richard so adored. She told her director that she would wear the dresses she wanted to wear, and the jewels, starting with La Peregrina pearl.

  When Hussein explained that her character wouldn’t be able to afford something like La Peregrina, Elizabeth answered simply, “Well, I’m going to wear it.” She told the director that she knew how the public wanted to see her, and that included the jewels. Hussein jokingly told her that every time she bent down to kiss her children in the movie, she was going to knock them out. She gave a short laugh, but the jewel would be worn.

  When Hussein told Elizabeth that they would be shooting the two-part drama in Bristol, “because that’s where Harlech TV is,” Elizabeth asked, “What do you mean, TV?” Hussein felt that by now the whole idea of fulfilling an obligation to Harlech was an imposition. She was doing it as a favor to Richard, but at the moment—after Nathalie Delon—she didn’t feel like doing Richard any favors.

  “And when are we doing this?” Elizabeth wanted to know. “Has anybody checked out how long I can stay in this country, for taxes? I can’t be here if it’s going to be getting into my tax area. I’m going to have to talk to somebody.” If she exceeded the limited amount of time they could spend in England each year, then she and Richard would owe the British government over £2 million in back taxes.

  A short time later, Hussein got a phone call from John Heyman. “We’re not going to be shooting in England. Elizabeth is not happy about the tax situation.”

  There were problems as well with the location shoot planned for Rome, where the estranged lovers meet in Hopkins’s drama. The only way that Heyman and his partners were able to get total financing was to make a deal with a German company, which meant filming exteriors in Rome but the rest of the movie would be shot in studios in Munich.

  So, in November of 1972, Richard arrived in Rome, alone, as Elizabeth was still finishing Night Watch. They shot for a week. Richard hadn’t touched a drink the entire time. He was, in Hussein’s words, “absolutely civil, very cooperative. He just wanted to know what he could do. I just thought he was wonderful, this man.”

  By the end of the week, they were filming at night along Via Condotti, which had many memories for the Burtons. Richard was supposed to walk down the street, now brilliantly lit for the night shoot, having just encountered his wife in the movie, and he was lost in thought about what had just happened. It wasn’t a difficult scene—just a walk down Via Condotti as the cameras whirred. Elizabeth wasn’t due for another couple of days.

  Suddenly, there was a commotion in the distance: a great deal of shouting and blaring horns as a crowd appeared, lights flashing. It was Elizabeth. She had arrived two days early. As usual, the paparazzi came out of nowhere, disrupting the shoot.

  “Now everybody is, like, ‘get a chair,’ ‘take her coat,’ ‘would you like a drink?’” Hussein recalled, “so that by the time we’ve settled down and got her comfortable, she says, ‘I’m so sorry to intrude. I just wanted to see how it was going.’”

  Hussein and his crew looked around. Where was Richard? He’d disappeared. Hussein sent the assistant director out to look for his actor, now missing in action.

  “Is there a problem?” Elizabeth asked.

  “We hope not.”

  “Okay, there’s no problem. It’s fine.” She sat in a chair provided for her, swaddled in her big fur coat, while they searched for Richard. Suddenly, they saw him. “He’s coming down the street,” Hussein remembered, “walking like a drunken man.”

  Hussein managed to get his shot and everyone went home, Richard and Elizabeth leaving together. “That was the beginning,” Hussein believed. “He just hit the bottle. I’m not going to say why, all I can say is that’s what happened. I can’t tell you the tragedy of his life, but talk about the Faustian pact!”

  Over the course of filming, the Burtons’ entourage seemed to break apart into two camps: Richard’s and Elizabeth’s. “They both had their hangers-on,” observed Hussein. “She had her hairdresser and her photographer. He had his hairdresser and his makeup guy, who, by the way, wanted to direct movies, and who used to report back to Richard.”

  One day, Richard complained to Hussein, “I hear I’m looking onscreen like a fucking volcano, that the marks on my face are like volcanic craters.”

  “What?”

  “In close-up.”

  “Richard, I don’t think so.” Hussein was convinced that the Burtons’ makeup man, Ron Berkeley, was telling him that.

  But far worse, Hussein felt that Elizabeth had made up her mind to sideline him right from the beginning. In retrospect, he realized he didn’t quite know how to treat Elizabeth. At one point during the shoot, he asked her, “Could you just give me some indication of a memory that you might have had?” And then he jokingly suggested, “Maybe you could stop and blow your nose or something.”

  “I’ve never blown my nose on screen in my life and I’m not going to do it now!” she answered.

  “I didn’t mean it, Elizabeth! Can you just give me some other thing?”

  So, on “Action,” Hussein recalled, Elizabeth walked toward the camera, flipped her scarf over her shoulder, kissed the camera lens, said “Bye-bye,” and left. “That was my first-day shoot with her, so I knew where I stood.”

  In retrospect, Hussein admitted he was probably too polite, too deferential, for Elizabeth’s tastes. He could tell that she liked “a raunchier, bigger personality” to contend with—a director like George Stevens or Joe Mankiewicz or John Huston—but this “Indian guy with an English accent,” as he described himself, was far too reticent for Elizabeth Taylor. “Or if I’d come on in full makeup and drag, it might’ve opened her up,” Hussein suggested, “but as it was, I was too buttoned-up.”

  Waris Hussein couldn’t help but notice how, during the one formal lunch he’d had with the Burtons, the words flashing between them now seemed to be dropped in boiling oil. He’d been summoned to lunch in a long, white dining area with white-gloved waiters serving a four-course meal with a selection of wines. He’d already discovered what other directors had had to deal with: most of the Burtons’ movie-set lunches could last from noon till three in the afternoon, and if a lot of drinking took place, no work could be done afterward. “Everybody would be waiting to get on with the shoot, and we couldn’t do it,” the director recalled.

  “If you were summoned to one of their lunches, it was like royalty. One day the phone rang on the set and it was, ‘Waris, the Burtons would like you to have lunch with them.’ So I dropped everything and went to this area where there was a guard. I had to show my ID, then go upstairs. They’re having this lunch at a very long table full of people, Elizabeth with her hair in a towel, looking ravishing.”

  Hussein, who genuinely admired Richard, sat beside him and told the nearly forty-seven-year-old actor how he had seen his Hamlet at the Old Vic. Richard suddenly put down his wineglass and asked, “You saw me?”

  “Yes, I did. And I walked around in a daze for a week because I thought you were so wonderful. I just hero-worshipped you.”

  “That is the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me.” Richard then started to tell a few familiar stories about acting at the Old Vic, about how he once drank so much before a performance that he had to relieve himself onstage, in his armor. But then he met Elizabeth’s eye and he stopped.

  “We shouldn’t be talking about this,” he said. “After all, we’re making a movie, and I’m indebted to that lady over there for what I am doing in the movies. This is my life. She’s taught me everything I know.” All eyes went to Elizabeth.

  “Oh, Richard, please, let’s not get too emotional about this,” she said sarcastically. “We know what a wonderful actor you were on stage.”

  “No, no,” said Richard. “We’re talking about making films.”

  “Yes, I know, but Waris just told you how wonderful you were as Hamlet. We don’t want to hear how I’ve taught you what to do on film.”

  From
there, recalled Hussein, “It’s George and Martha by now. Richard brought up the fact that they had adopted a child who’d been sick, the sickest child in the place. And how Elizabeth chose that child, nursed that child back to normality and health. And there were tears in his eyes. ‘She was the most wonderful person one could find,’ Richard said, ‘our daughter Maria.’ But it was clear he was talking about them both, about Elizabeth and her daughter,” trying to stitch this whole thing together that was in danger of coming apart.

  After the Nathalie Delon incident, Elizabeth seemed even more possessive of her husband. “I remember thinking,” Hussein said, “she just didn’t let him relax.” Richard was “all man, I mean he was a hunk in every way. Handsome, charismatic. Every woman in the world wanted him. And she’s got him. It had to have been difficult for her. I don’t see her as unsympathetic.” In one particular scene meant to take place in an Italian hotel, Richard’s character goes to the telephone, and right behind him is a group of women speaking English. Just before the scene could be shot, though, Hussein’s assistant told him that the women in the scene would have to go. According to Hussein, one of the girls had been invited up to Richard’s dressing room, where Elizabeth was hiding behind the sofa. She reportedly jumped up, brandished a broken vodka bottle, and chased the terrified girl out of the room. “There are going to be no more women on the set,” the director was told in no uncertain terms.

  For Hussein, who hero-worshipped Richard Burton, Richard’s drunkenness was nothing short of heartbreaking. Watching the dissolution of someone who was so charismatic, still in control of his gifts, had a deep effect on the director. Among other causes, Richard’s drinking had become an endless wake for Ifor. Richard once came on the set of Divorce His Divorce Hers incapable of sitting upright in a chair, swaying so much the camera operator could not follow him. On another occasion, during a long dialogue—the kind of scene Richard could do in his sleep—Elizabeth sat patiently waiting for her shot. All of a sudden, Richard let out with “the loudest, screaming, guttural-sounding voice. The whole set shook. The entire crew froze.” Richard had to be practically carried home, and he was heard shouting, “I could have been King Lear. I could’ve played Lear!” A terrified Hussein escaped to his office and stayed there the rest of the day.