Furious Love

by Sam Kashner

  Elizabeth was horrified to see what was happening to Richard. She left for Los Angeles as soon as the news story of the $450 ring appeared in the press, after spending only a week on location. Ironically, Richard later credited Lee Marvin with saving his life. “I wouldn’t have survived without Marvin,” he told the actor and writer Michael Munn. “I would have drunk a hell of a lot more a whole lot quicker and wound up dead a whole lot sooner.” Lee Marvin saw that Richard “was drinking not for the pleasure of it but because he had a great need, and I doubt he knew what that was himself. Maybe it was for Elizabeth. But whatever it was, he was in pain, and he drank to kill that pain. I used to do it, too.”

  The director, Terence Young, was also appalled to see what was happening to Burton. Young had directed two James Bond movies, and at one point Burton had been under consideration to play the secret agent, but now he had days when he couldn’t “get a single line right. He tried again and again,” Young remembered, “but it just wouldn’t come out right. He was so desperate. It was painful to see this great actor disintegrating before all our eyes.” Toward the end of filming, Young had one more scene to shoot with Richard: his character’s death scene. When the director saw him lying on the set, he turned to Ron Berkeley, Richard’s makeup man, and told him, “You’ve done a great job with Richard.”

  “I haven’t touched him,” the makeup artist answered.

  That did it. The director finally shut down the production and brought in a doctor to examine Burton. His verdict: “This man is dying.”

  Burton was rushed to St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica. Richard’s doctors told him he would be dead in two weeks if he didn’t detoxify. He had a temperature of 104 degrees, his kidneys were on the point of collapse, and he was suffering from influenza and tracheo-bronchitis. He was given emergency blood transfusions to cleanse his body of alcohol. Richard would remain there for six weeks, hallucinating and near death for the first several days. He often dreamed of his brother Ifor, standing whole and upright before him, challenging him to make up his mind: live or die. Later, as he slowly began to recover, he ran into Susan Strasberg on the hospital grounds, the dark-haired young actress with whom he had had an affair seventeen years earlier. She barely recognized him. His hands shook violently, his face was ashen, his body was frail. He was not yet fifty.

  Elizabeth stayed in touch by phone, but she couldn’t stand it anymore. She flew to Gstaad, where she quietly filed for divorce. On April 25, 1974, they publicly announced their plans to divorce, and Richard let it be known he would give Elizabeth everything she wanted—possession of the Kalizma, Casa Kimberly in Puerto Vallarta, $7 million worth of jewelry, all the priceless art they had acquired over the years. She was also awarded custody of Maria, the much-loved daughter they had adopted in 1964, who bore his name. He seemed to want to divest himself of his entire life, though he made sure that his immediate family in Wales—his twenty-nine sisters, brothers, in-laws, nieces, and nephews—would continue to be provided for. He wanted Elizabeth and all their children to be safe and well looked-after. That was his role now, to provide for the extended family, which had grown huge, to be the father he had never had—because Dic Jenkins had provided for no one.

  On June 26, 1974, citing irreconcilable differences, Elizabeth was granted her divorce in a small, wooden-frame courtroom in the Swiss town of Saarinen. Richard was still too ill to attend the proceedings, and was represented by a doctor’s certificate. The judge asked the inevitable question he was required to ask: “Is it true that to live with your husband became intolerable?”

  “Yes, life with Richard became intolerable,” Elizabeth answered softly, dressed in a brown silk suit and wearing dark sunglasses. It had been so much more complicated than that—in fact, it had been the greatest adventure of their lives, but their ten-year marriage was now reduced to a line of stock dialogue. She told the judge that she had tried everything to keep their marriage together, but now it was over. Not her love for Richard, but their life together.

  Twenty minutes later, she called Richard and asked, “Do you think we’ve done the right thing?” But for Richard, who couldn’t imagine living without Elizabeth but who couldn’t seem to stay sober when they were together, “the adventure of a lifetime” was over. Or so he thought. On June 27, Richard, now recovered and in recovery, sailed for Europe on the SS France.

  Henry Wynberg joined Elizabeth on the Kalizma to cruise the Mediterranean, and Elizabeth, ever the survivor, attempted to recreate the life she had led with Burton, dining in Monaco with Prince Rainier and Princess Grace, spending time at her chalet in Gstaad. Wynberg tried to fill Richard’s shoes, taking Elizabeth to soccer matches in Munich (instead of rugby matches in Wales), and bringing her home to meet his parents in Amsterdam (a replacement for Burton’s sprawling family in the hilly dales of Pontrhydyfen and Port Talbot). And then there were the jewels: the $2,400 coral necklace (not quite the $1.1 million Cartier diamond that now bore Elizabeth’s name). Wynberg had pleaded with the Beverly Hills jeweler to “make it bigger.”

  In August, Richard went back to work. Sophia Loren, ever solicitous of her troubled friend, got him hired to replace the actor Robert Shaw in a television adaptation of Noël Coward’s Brief Encounter. Shaw had been released from the Carlo Ponti production to play the salty shark-hunter on Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (a role, incidentally, that would have well suited Richard, and would have rejuvenated his film career, bringing him to the attention of a new generation of moviegoers). But Richard no longer had the stamina for such a role, had he even been considered for it. Instead, he played the romantic lead in a slightly creaky production of a World War II–era romantic drama. Burton looked frail and thin in the television film, and Sophia Loren was too beautiful to play the ordinary middle-class housewife the role called for, so the production was not particularly well received. Still recovering from his medical ordeal, Burton now found himself in a phase where he could only act with his sonorous voice: hence the historical figures he would continue to play, where he could stand still and declaim great speeches.

  Elizabeth, meanwhile, returned to Los Angeles, where she tried living with a smaller entourage. “She was down to a secretary, a chauffeur, a butler, and Henry,” noticed her old friend, the journalist and liberal columnist Max Lerner. She leased an Italianate villa in Bel Air, where she and Wynberg decided to launch a number of business ventures—a diamond-selling enterprise and a cosmetics company. It was an exciting new prospect for Elizabeth—a world she had yet to conquer—and many around her thought that Wynberg (though a prodigious lover in his own right) had become more of a business partner than a paramour. Liz Smith later noticed, when she visited them, that Elizabeth didn’t have any pet names for him, such as “darling,” or “sweetnose,” or “dearest,” or “fuckface,” all endearments she’d used with Richard Burton. And she made no attempt to hide her frequent phone calls to Richard.

  If Elizabeth tried to replace Burton with Henry Wynberg in a road-show version of their fabled life, Richard quickly became engaged to another Elizabeth—the thirty-eight-year-old Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia, recently separated from her merchant banker husband, Neil Balfour. A celebrated beauty, she was rumored to have been romantically linked to President Kennedy. Six years earlier, Princess Elizabeth had visited the Burtons on their movie sets in Paris. Burton had described her then as “pretty but impertinent,” too quick to laugh when Rex Harrison blew a line, too pleased to go out with Warren Beatty when he asked her. But if you were going to follow up the most famous movie star in the world, a Yugoslav princess wasn’t a bad place to land. And Richard wanted—needed—to be married, to have a sense of family around him, to even consider fathering children again. He was still depressed enough about losing Elizabeth that there were attempts to keep newspapers from him while he was filming Brief Encounter, because the tabloids were rife with stories about Elizabeth and Henry and the possibility that they might marry.

  So, barely four months after his
divorce, Richard announced his engagement. When Elizabeth received the news, she immediately suffered severe back spasms and had to be put in traction. She insisted that it had nothing to do with Richard’s engagement, but it was part of her pattern to react to stress and setbacks in her life by becoming injured or ill. A hospital bed was moved into her Bel Air mansion.

  Richard and Princess Elizabeth celebrated their engagement by touring the casbahs of Morocco, where Burton was surprised to hear himself greeted by turbaned old men as “St. Becket” or “Major Smith,” his character from Where Eagles Dare, which, he discovered, had been a huge success in the cinemas of Tangier.

  Due to her place in aristocracy, Princess Elizabeth introduced Burton to Lady Churchill, Sir Winston Churchill’s widow. That October, he had begun filming a ninety-minute biopic, playing the great man in “A Walk with Destiny,” a Hallmark Hall of Fame coproduction of the BBC and NBC (titled “The Gathering Storm” in the States). As he had for Brief Encounter, Burton was now only receiving $200,000 salary, plus salaries for two secretaries and the use of a Rolls-Royce during production. Still, it was a far cry from his former $1-million-plus-percentage salary, and he now realized how relatively broke he was, post-divorce.

  By December of 1974, Richard’s engagement to Princess Elizabeth had ended. While on location in the Riviera, filming Jackpot, a film that was never finished for lack of production funds, Richard had reunited with a beautiful African-American actress and model named Jean Bell. She was, in fact, the first black model to appear on the cover of Playboy magazine. Though she didn’t have a part in the film, the actress had first met Richard on location for The Klansman. When Princess Elizabeth saw in an English newspaper a photograph of Richard and Jean Bell strolling arm-in-arm on the Riviera, all bets were off. Burton moved back into his house in Céligny, with Jean Bell beside him.

  Elizabeth Taylor, meanwhile, was offered another film. In January 1975, she brought Wynberg with her to Leningrad, where she’d agreed to appear in the first Soviet-American coproduction, The Blue Bird, for a greatly diminished salary of $3,000 a week, plus a percentage of the gross. She ended up paying $8,000 of her own money to have her costumes redesigned. It was directed by seventy-six-year-old George Cukor, nearing the end of his long career (he immediately fell in love with a young Hungarian boy and lost interest in the movie), and it costarred another trio of beauties: Ava Gardner, Jane Fonda, and Cicely Tyson. Elizabeth played four different allegorical roles in the film: Mother, Light, Maternal Love, and Witch. Elizabeth and Wynberg (hired as a still photographer on the set) checked into the Leningrad Hotel, where Elizabeth promptly came down with amoebic dysentery from contaminated ice cubes and rapidly lost eighteen pounds. (“I never looked so good,” she told Rex Reed, “but what a hell of a way to diet…”) Wynberg nursed her and waited on her, and the couple had rashers of bacon flown in from London’s Fortnum & Mason. When she got the news of Richard’s broken engagement, Elizabeth immediately called him. They spoke for hours on the phone, Henry discreetly stepping aside.

  Richard and Elizabeth had spent the past fourteen months in their parallel universes, appearing in films that would go bankrupt or fail at the box office, traveling with their new consorts, and speaking frequently with each other on the telephone. Now they agreed to meet in Lausanne, in neutral Switzerland, a place where they’d reunited once before at the height of Le Scandale. She flew to Gstaad, with Wynberg, while Burton remained in Céligny, with Jean and her thirteen-year-old son, Troy, whom Burton had enrolled in an exclusive Swiss school. Jean tried to keep Burton from returning to alcohol. He was mostly abstaining, but his hands still trembled, and he still suffered from gout, arthritis, and sciatica.

  By August of 1975, Elizabeth ended her romantic relationship with Wynberg, though, almost as a going-away present, she entered into a partnership with him, leasing rights to use her image to publicize and sell cosmetics (their business partnership was eventually dissolved). She and Richard arranged to meet at her Swiss lawyer’s office in Lausanne, ostensibly to discuss their financial settlement. But when he saw Elizabeth, he was struck by how beautiful she looked, newly slimmed down. And Richard, no longer bloated by alcohol, looked wonderful to Elizabeth. They fell into each other’s arms, tears streaming. On August 21, their publicist, John Springer, announced that they were again in love.

  Jean Bell left Céligny; Henry Wynberg flew back to London. Neither could compete with the star power of those they had, temporarily, replaced. And it wasn’t just star power: Elizabeth and Richard had lived such extraordinary lives that there was no one else who could match them in their experiences and memories. They were the only two people who could even begin to understand what they had lived through. Like the handful of men who had touched down on the moon, they had no peers, and no one else with whom they could share the details of their mad, extravagant lives together.

  Elizabeth had never stopped being in love with Richard. Maybe now, with “Liz and Dick” on the wane—their joint movie career was certainly over, and their separate careers were foundering—there would be a chance for Elizabeth and Richard. But, they soon discovered, “Liz and Dick” still caused near riots when they appeared in public. Elizabeth pressed Richard to remarry, but he was reluctant to go down that road again.

  Nonetheless, the newly reunited couple flew to Israel on a grand tour to lend their somewhat tarnished glamour to a number of worthy causes. At a benefit concert in Israel, Elizabeth read the Story of Ruth, and Richard read the Twenty-third Psalm. Whenever they left the King David Hotel, they were mobbed by unruly crowds, mad to get a glimpse of the infamous couple. It was so bad that Henry Kissinger, then U.S. Secretary of State, who was staying at the hotel with his wife, Nancy, offered them use of his own security detail (seventy U.S. Marines and nearly a thousand Israeli troops). They declined, but the Kissingers were so starstruck that the Secretary of State threw a party for the couple.

  After a week in Israel, they returned to Gstaad and made plans to attend a celebrity tennis tournament in Johannesburg, South Africa, another charity event to raise funds for a hospital. (Burton wrote to Kate the morning before leaving, “Tonight…we fly to Johannesburg…Everybody is terrified that superbly sober as I am, I may yet start sounding off on ‘Apartheid.’”) Throughout it all, Elizabeth kept leaving Richard little love notes, saying she would leave it up to him to decide what to do. She clearly wanted to remarry. Burton resisted, until Elizabeth went into the hospital to investigate an intestinal complaint. An X-ray revealed a spot on her lungs that her doctor thought might indicate cancer. For twenty-four hours, she was terrified. She would later write about the incident in a seventeen-page document, handwritten in ink in schoolgirl penmanship (and later published in the Ladies’ Home Journal), “I thought all through the night…it’s funny when you think you don’t have long to live how many things you want to do, and see, and smell, and touch. How really simple they are.” When she got the report that the shadow on her lung was caused by old scar tissue from having had a mild case of tuberculosis as a child, she was ecstatic. She wrote, “I gave him a Valium—he whispered poetry—we kissed…Happiness! I have my life back. I mean you, Richard.”

  That’s when Richard got down on one knee and proposed remarriage. “I think I brought it up and he shied away sweetly,” Elizabeth wrote. Richard gallantly asked, “Will you marry me?” Of course, she accepted. She later recalled, “[W]e sent everyone out of the room, including the children, and we got stoned.” All their old habits were waiting for them, which is what, perhaps, Richard had wanted to avoid.

  He went out that night and got drunk.

  On October 10, 1975, Elizabeth and Richard—or was it Liz and Dick?—celebrated their remarriage with a ceremony on the banks of the Chobe River in the Chobe Game Reserve in Botswana, South Africa. “That’s where I would like to be mated again,” Elizabeth had written. “In the bush, around our kind.” It’s interesting that they chose Botswana as the site of their reunion. Besides being a place where
they could walk in public unmolested by gawkers and photographers, Africa is often the place, symbolically, as the psychiatrist and writer Kay Redfield Jamison has noted, where people go to revivify their lives—its vibrant beauty has the power to heal old wounds. The night before the wedding, Elizabeth found herself as sleepless and full of anticipation as a young girl.

  An African district commissioner from the Tswana tribe performed the twenty-minute ceremony, in which they were asked if they “understood the consequence of marriage.” There was perhaps no other couple on earth who better understood the consequences of marriage. The ceremony was “witnessed by two hippos” who emerged from the Chobe River, Elizabeth recalled. Richard wore a red silk turtleneck sweater and white slacks. The bride wore a long green dress ribbed with beads and bird feathers, which had been a gift from Ifor and Gwen Jenkins just four Christmases ago. This was the first time she had worn it, and she did so for Richard, to commemorate Ifor’s memory, though it was not a memory Richard wished to revisit.

  The only fly in the ointment was Richard’s condition. He had woken up pink-eyed and slightly hung over the morning of their wedding. She made light of it in her Ladies’ Home Journal article about the wedding, but what she failed to realize was that Richard could not stay sober and still be with her. Alcohol was the fuel that propelled their life together, and unless Elizabeth stopped drinking, Richard could not stay sober. The difference was, Elizabeth could handle alcohol, but it was killing Richard.

  Elizabeth was not happy about finding her newly minted husband in this condition, but she wrote that, despite his flaws, “I love him, deeply and truly and forever,” adding: “he has the most remarkable recuperative powers I’ve ever seen, which is probably why he is still alive. Thank God!”