Furious Love

by Sam Kashner

  As Hussein later observed, the shoot was already fragmenting. But despite the deep troubles on the set, Hussein had compassion for both Elizabeth and Richard. He was aware of the physical pain she had experienced in her life, how often she was surrounded by death, and how her level of fame isolated her. Yet, despite their bickering and Richard’s drinking, the sexual energy between them was still evident.

  Richard seemed possessed of superhuman stamina. Their love life appeared to flourish in a pool of alcohol. A flash of Elizabeth’s leg peeking out of the blanket in “that blue nightie he loved” while she read a book in bed would mean the door would be slammed shut and the two of them would make “lovely love,” as he called it. It made them feel like the forbidden lovers they had once been, when they’d lived that “wonderfully nourishing sense of defiance which had given them such outlaw energy in the 1960s.”

  But they were no longer outlaws, no longer, as one writer described it, “pirates on the main taking booty from the great galleons of studios and governments.” Had Richard at last become tired of picking up after the dogs in his $1,000 suits, of being jealously watched, of being called “Mr. Elizabeth Taylor,” as Gianni Bozzacchi had once observed? Had Elizabeth finally had enough of Richard’s Welsh hours, his alcoholic binges, and the meanness they sometimes unleashed?

  And yet, they were still in erotic thrall to each other, as revealed by a handwritten letter from Burton to Taylor, thanking her for the Christmas gift of a fountain pen at the end of that year.

  December 27

  Continued with the same gifted pen. It’s no use pretending that you are an ordinary woman. Quite clearly, like this pen, you are not. I don’t mean, for a second, that you are in any way comparable with a pen. And yet you are, like this divine pen you are heavy and light at the same time…there is nothing like you. You are heavy like the pen—your ass, your tits, the smooth (sublimity) of your back, bewitch. But they are heavy. Pendulumed [sic] like an infinitely desirable clock…. How [to] watch the puritanical face relax into slow lust? How to watch that watch catch its breath and, for a speck of a speck of a millionth of a second, become the animal that all men seek for in their women? And since we’re talking of pens and you, how [to] watch the ink splurge out of the pen…reach[ing] out from the inner depth of the divine body. Will you, incidentally, permit me to fuck you this afternoon? Yours truly (you have just come into the room), R.B.

  Divorce His Divorce Hers was barely finished when John Heyman sold it to ABC Television without a single shot being seen. Even though reduced to the small screen, the Burtons still had it, and people still wanted to see them together, or so the executives at ABC-TV thought. But when Barry Diller, then at ABC, finally viewed the finished product, according to Waris Hussein, “he hated it.”

  Meanwhile, Heyman also picked up the Burtons’ hotel bill. The damages at the Four Seasons, recalled Heyman, were “astronomical…the damage to the carpets, the furniture, mirrors, the clean-up from the animal excrement. It was like a dog’s house.” The Four Seasons staff celebrated after the Burtons left, toasting the couple’s departure at a small party in the basement. “They were so happy when they left. It had been such a strain catering to their every whim,” Heyman said.

  When Divorce His Divorce Hers was finally aired in America on February 6 and 7, 1973, “the critics were waiting with their knives out.” The reviews, said Hussein, “were the worst you have ever read in your life.” Time magazine called the two-part drama “a matched pair of thudding disasters” the Hollywood Reporter described it as “a boring, tedious study of the crumbling marriage of two shallow people” and Variety, usually kind to the Burtons, wrote that viewing the drama “holds all the joy of standing by at an autopsy.”

  It’s hard to assess the drama today, because the available prints suffer from low sound quality, as if Divorce His Divorce Hers were a foreign film poorly dubbed. It seems as if the writer, Hopkins, like so many before him, had set out to incorporate facts of the Burtons’ lives into his screenplay. Taylor’s character, Jane Reynolds, complains of their gypsy life, and how Burton (Martin Reynolds) travels so much “he’s never more than ten minutes in the same place.” And he complains, “One of my daughters doesn’t want to see me.” At one point, he says, “Of course, I travel with an enormous entourage.” This parallel universe had once been a recipe for box office success; now it was coming dangerously close to parody.

  Oddly, given Hussein’s admiration of Burton and his difficulties with Taylor, their performances are the opposite of what one would expect. Burton, his voice thickened by drink, walks through the film like a zombie, his back now so stiffened from his old afflictions that he again seems like an automaton. But Elizabeth is the emotional center of the film, making sense out of her melodramatic lines, evoking sympathy for the beautiful, though ordinary, woman she portrays. Through the horrible ordeals of that year, she managed to not only be professional, but genuinely moving as well. And she is still beautiful—as is La Peregrina, resting on her sloping décolletage.

  As for Waris Hussein, who had fled to Los Angeles to hide out with friends, his career “just went down the tubes. I couldn’t get a job if I’d gone and stood on Sunset Boulevard with my hat out. Divorce His Divorce Hers was like a bomb going off, and I was the one who got killed; no one else did.” In actuality, Hussein recovered and would go on to a successful career directing movies for television, including the mini-series Edward and Mrs. Simpson in 1978; Little Gloria…Happy at Last in 1982; Princess Daisy in 1983; Onassis, the Richest Man in the World in 1988, and, in 1998, Life of the Party: The Pamela Harriman Story. But working with the Burtons had been an ordeal.

  “Years later,” he remembered, “I met with Roddy McDowall. He said, ‘You mustn’t hold this against them.’ I said, ‘But she never liked me.’ And Roddy said, ‘No, no, you’re wrong. If you were to see her again, it would all be different. You were just caught in the middle of two people who were falling apart.’”

  Divorce His Divorce Hers had been the Burtons’ eleventh film made as a couple. It was also their last. “If there is one thing for a movie actor worse than failing at the box office, it is failing on television,” wrote Brenda Maddox. Failure on TV doomed the Burtons as a couple on the big screen. They would continue to get offers to star alone in mostly European productions—especially Richard—but “The Liz and Dick Show” would now take a backseat to Elizabeth and Richard’s struggling marriage.

  In January 1973, before the release of Divorce His Divorce Hers, the Burtons were in the Eternal City, with Richard signed to play a German SS officer in Massacre in Rome, a film produced by Carlo Ponti. Richard was superstitious about Rome, feeling that bad things often happened there—yet it’s where he had fallen in love with Elizabeth, and the couple had reclaimed their affection for the city while making The Taming of the Shrew.

  Playing a Nazi officer, Burton was challenged to humanize his character, Lieutenant Colonel Herbert Kappler, as Marlon Brando had done with his 1958 role of a German officer in The Young Lions. His portrayal would later garner good reviews—increasingly rare—but not for two more years, as the film’s release was delayed until 1975.

  In May, Elizabeth took on the role of Barbara Sawyer in Ash Wednesday, a wealthy, fiftyish woman who undergoes plastic surgery to keep her husband, played by Henry Fonda, from divorcing her. An actual face-lift performed on an Elizabeth Taylor look-alike is shown in the film. Having turned forty-one that year, Elizabeth was still too beautiful to play a woman in need of a face-lift, but to make her dilemma believable, heavy makeup was applied to her face to age her, in a process that took two hours to apply and, later, two hours to remove. The makeup was so masklike that she felt compelled to take out a $1 million insurance policy against damage to her famous face.

  Produced by Dominick Dunne, Ash Wednesday was filmed in Cortina d’Ampezzo, a ski resort in the Italian Alps, and the Burtons were given a spacious ten rooms in the Miramonti Hotel. Dunne recalled later that he had been �
�spellbound by the couple, even when I was being driven crazy by them.” Elizabeth and Richard continued to draw huge, cheering crowds whenever they appeared in public. Dunne, staying on a different floor of the Miramonti, saw Elizabeth every day during the shoot and felt that she was “at the peak of her great beauty.” When he met her for the first time on New Year’s Eve, he did what he’d promised himself he would not do: he gasped. “Her beauty was even more breathtaking in person than on the screen,” he would later write.

  But since Burton was not working, he was, as usual, miserable, and he hung around the hotel, reading and drinking. In Dunne’s words, he “seethed on the sidelines.” At their first meeting at the Burtons’ New Year’s Eve party, Dunne noticed Burton, dressed in a green velvet dinner jacket, on his hands and knees, picking up with a Kleenex dog droppings left by one of the un-housebroken shih tzus that scampered freely throughout the ten-room suite. He also couldn’t help but notice that the Burtons were still surrounded by an enormous entourage, chief among them Elizabeth’s Swiss-born secretary Raymond Vignale, who appeared on New Year’s Eve in a white mink coat with jeweled buttons and Cartier watch. It was like having Oscar Wilde as a personal secretary. Vignale, who could be charming and campy in five languages, made the trains run on time as the Burtons traveled from hotel to hotel, managing their thirty trunks, Elizabeth’s jewels, and even, when necessary, hiding her pills.

  Elizabeth’s intake of alcohol and prescription pain medication was by now alarming, but she seldom showed any signs of inebriation. The movie’s director, Larry Peerce (son of the great Metropolitan Opera star Jan Peerce), noticed that she “drank champagne by the magnum,” but, unlike Richard, she never lost her appetite for food. She wasn’t looking to kill herself on the installment plan, and the food absorbed the excess alcohol in her system. Though her weight would vary from week to week, she was able to drink without becoming drunk.

  Burton again turned his hand to writing magazine pieces and took to referring to himself as a writer, not an actor. He not only resented Elizabeth working while he was idle, he loathed the kind of movie she was making, which was the kind of movie they had both appeared in together: the dilemmas of the rich (The V.I.P.s, Boom!, Divorce His Divorce Hers).

  Richard had rediscovered his working-class roots to the extent that he railed against Ash Wednesday, telling Elizabeth, “I don’t like the thought of you doing that kind of thing, because it represents the worst kind of people.” He told Brook Williams, “I really don’t like the jet set, you know. They offend me”—ironic, coming from a man who, with Elizabeth, had embodied what it meant to be a member of the jet set in the second half of the twentieth century. What had all those fabulous shopping sprees been about—competing with Onassis for the largest jewels, buying a jet and a yacht and furs and houses? He had done it because he could, because it was a lark for a working-class boy, because it kept Elizabeth happy in the way she was used to being happy. It was part of the adventure of being Liz and Dick, perhaps their greatest roles. But now his old Welsh sentiments surfaced, and he was sheepish about the way he had lived his life for the past ten years.

  Gianni Bozzacchi had seen this in Burton. “Richard Jenkins, Richard Burton—they were two people. ‘If I had remained Richard Jenkins, I would have done everything different’—that’s what Richard would say. I could see that sometimes Richard just needed to be himself, not the person he had become,” but the person he was born to be.

  When Zeffirelli met with the couple in Rome that year, their former director was surprised at how Richard seemed to chafe at Elizabeth’s jealousy. Burton’s romp with Nathalie Delon had apparently increased her possessiveness. Now, when she playfully punched him in the arm, it was a punch he could feel, and when Burton was too engrossed in talking with an attractive woman, Elizabeth would yell “Richard!” in a loud voice from across the room. Zeffirelli had worked with the Burtons at the height of their film success, and at the height of their love for each other—their true honeymoon—and six years later, the dissolution of their relationship was painful to witness.

  Dunne believed that Elizabeth was still crazy about Richard, but “they fell out of love” during the making of Ash Wednesday. It began with an excruciating, jealous row when Richard accused Elizabeth of having an affair with one of her costars, the handsome Helmut Berger, who played her young lover in the film. Dunne and Peerce were often called in to witness their fights. Elizabeth was in despair, and on at least one occasion Vignale cradled her, weeping, in his arms, trying to console her. When she showed up two hours late for a scene with Henry Fonda, the director tried to reason with her. When she failed to show up at all on another occasion, and then lost a week to the German measles, he feared that Ash Wednesday was becoming “a mini-Cleopatra,” but instead of Richard and Elizabeth coming together, they were breaking apart.

  Elizabeth flew to New York when filming was over. This time, Richard did not go with her. He made his way to Los Angeles and checked into the Beverly Hills Hotel, where he wrote Elizabeth a drunken, heartfelt letter on June 25, 1973, marked “Very Private and Personal”:

  So My Lumps,

  You’re off, by God! I can barely believe it since I am so unaccustomed to anybody leaving me. But reflectively I wonder why nobody did so before. All I care about—honest to God—is that you are happy and I don’t much care who you’ll find happiness with. I mean as long as he’s a friendly bloke and treats you nice and kind. If he doesn’t I’ll come at him with a hammer and clinker. God’s eye may be on the sparrow but my eye will always be on you.

  Never forget your strange virtues. Never forget that underneath that veneer of raucous language is a remarkable and puritanical LADY. I am a smashing bore and why you’ve stuck by me so long is an indication of your loyalty. I shall miss you with passion and wild regret.

  You know, of course, my angelic one, that everything I (we) have is yours, so you should be fairly comfortable. Don’t, however, let your next inamorata [sic] use it, otherwise I might become a trifle testy. I do not like the human race. I do not like his ugly face. And if he takes my former wife and turns her into stress and strife, I’ll smash him bash him, laugh or crash him slash him trash him etc. Christ, I am possessed by language. Mostly bad. (Sloshed, d’yer think?) So now, have a good time.

  …

  You may rest assured that I will not have affairs with any other female. Anybody after you is going to be disinteresting [sic]. I shall gloom a lot and stare morosely into unimaginable distances and act a bit—probably on the stage—to keep me in booze and butter, but chiefly and above all I shall write. Not about you, I hasten to add. No Millerinski Me, with a double M. There are many other and ludicrous and human comedies to constitute my shroud.

  I’ll leave it to you to announce the parting of the ways while I shall never say or write one word except this valedictory note to you. Try and look after yourself. Much love.

  Don’t forget that you are probably the greatest actress in the world. “At this point in time,” as they never boringly stop saying on the “Watergate” things, you are the best there can be. I wish I could borrow a minute portion of your passion and commitment, but there you are—cold is cold as ice is ice…

  …

  A few days later, Richard holed up in Aaron Frosch’s guest cottage in Quogue, Long Island, about seventy-five miles from New York City. Richard felt safe there. Before he worked for the Burtons as a couple, Frosch had been Richard’s lawyer, when he was still married to Sybil in the era before Elizabeth. It had been Frosch who’d had the sad duty of depositing a million dollars into Sybil Burton’s Swiss bank account, and arranging for her to receive $500,000 annually for ten years, when Richard finally made the decision to divorce her and marry Elizabeth. “They were like brothers,” Elizabeth felt. “He was our lawyer forever and took such great care of Richard and me.” Now his Long Island house was where Richard was hiding out while he came to terms with their separation.

  Still drinking, Richard telephoned
Elizabeth and ordered her to meet him there, in one last attempt to patch things up and go on as before. He met her plane at Kennedy Airport, but as soon as she got into the limousine next to her husband, she could tell he was smashed. At one point on the long drive to Frosch’s house, he turned to her and said, “Why did you ever bother to come back?” By the time they reached Quogue, they had quarreled so furiously about his drinking that she ordered the limo to take her back to New York. She checked into the Regency Hotel on Park Avenue, where they had once been so happy during their triumphant Hamlet year.

  Back in New York, she took Richard’s suggestion to “announce the parting of the ways,” writing a personal statement about separating from Richard that would be issued to the press. That was her training, after all. She belonged as much to the public as she did to herself and to Richard, and she owed them an explanation. She had always understood publicity. On July 4, 1973, Elizabeth issued the following, handwritten statement: