by Sam Kashner
Warner’s first marriage to the heiress Catherine Mellon had made Warner rich (his father-in-law had sided with him in the divorce, agreeing that women couldn’t handle money). His father-in-law had also, arguably, helped bring Warner an appointment as secretary of the navy in President Gerald Ford’s administration.
Warner was a tall, distinguished, politically well-connected country squire, who owned Atoka, a 25,000-acre farm in the horse country of Middleburg, Virginia. He had courtly good manners, and, curiously, bore a strong physical resemblance to both Richard Burton and Mike Todd—the large, squarish head, the rough but handsome features, as if he had been fashioned out of good earth. They began seeing each other.
When she got news of Richard’s marriage to Suzy Hunt, Elizabeth was in Vienna, having taken the offer of a role in A Little Night Music, an adaptation of a Stephen Sondheim musical. She actually had to sing in the part, and, of all things, that heartbreaker, “Send in the Clowns,” which she did gamely and self-deprecatingly. She cabled her congratulations to Richard, and she asked Warner to join her in Vienna. He did.
They were married on December 4, 1976. Soon after, Warner tested the waters for a run for the U.S. Senate, with Elizabeth’s star power as his not-so-secret weapon. He eventually won his place in the Senate—by default, when his triumphant opponent in the Republican primary, Richard Obenshain, died in a private-plane crash. After winning his bid and becoming a U.S. senator from Virginia, Warner now had everything he wanted, and, like a good Republican husband who felt that a woman’s place should be in the home, he asked Elizabeth to give up her career. She did—which didn’t seem like a sacrifice after reading the scorching reviews of A Little Night Music.
Once the exhilaration of campaigning for Warner was over, there was little for Elizabeth to do. She noticed that her self-esteem was plummeting—her identity as a senator’s wife was not enough for this world-famous, sophisticated, and brilliant woman. Richard had never treated her as just a wife, or a sex object, or a broad—he had always respected her intelligence and she had always been a full partner. But with Senator Warner, who spent most of his time in Washington, leaving her alone on their vast estate, she felt “redundant.” She later reflected, “[L]ike so many Washington wives and like so many other women…I had nothing to do.” The coup de grâce came when a contingent of Republican ladies took her aside and told her she could no longer wear purple—her signature color—because it was “too passionate.” For a while she complied, putting aside her Halston outfits and adopting “sedate little Republican ensembles,” as she put her passion in mothballs and played the role of the senator’s wife.
Bored and feeling useless, Elizabeth consoled herself with eating and drinking to excess. So, with little to do in the Virginia countryside, she saw her weight balloon from 130 to 180-plus pounds. “Eating filled the lonely hours, and I ate and drank with abandon,” she later admitted, as Halston designed larger and larger pantsuits for her to wear, in any color but purple. “During the early 1960s,” she mused, “the Burtons’ ‘profane’ romance vied with the ‘sacred’ one [the Kennedys’] in Washington, DC. The same papers that had given priority to the first photographs of Richard Burton and me on a beach over pictures of the Kennedys in the White House, now featured my new and unflattering measurements.” For the first time in her life, she became the butt of cruel jokes—not about her many marriages, as in Oscar Levant’s quip, “Always a bride, never a bridesmaid”—but about her appearance. Joan Rivers started it all on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, and the jokes didn’t stop for years. The only person who didn’t join in the laughter was Richard Burton. It was all right for Richard to tease her, calling her “my fat Jewish tart” or “Twiddle-twaddle,” but not the rest of the world. Elizabeth later showed real class by sending Joan Rivers flowers and a note of condolence when her husband, Edgar Rosenberg, committed suicide.
Elizabeth made other sacrifices in her marriage, besides her career and her wardrobe, including selling her famous Taylor-Burton diamond to New York jeweler Henry Lambert to help out with their expenses (and to exorcise the lingering ghost of Richard in their marriage, perhaps). “It represented a different phase in my life,” she explained. “The fun phase.” Lambert paid her $3 million, twice what Burton had spent for it.
Elizabeth was used to a fabulous social life, but Warner preferred to live quietly. “John and I never had people in,” she recalled, “and we hardly ever went out. Most evenings he’d say, ‘Why don’t you go upstairs and watch TV, Pooters?’” (He also called her his “Little Heifer.”) Finally, she’d had enough. Elizabeth took her purple Halston pantsuit out of mothballs and wore it for a Republican ladies luncheon held in her honor. She knew she had to change her life.
When Elizabeth finally confronted herself, staring at her unflattering weight gain in the three-way mirror in the home she shared with Warner in Georgetown, she resolved to do something about it. She drew on her memories of Richard—their incredible, rollercoaster life together, their obsessive love—and those memories gave her “the strength to recreate a new dream.” That dream would involve Richard, and it would bring them both back to the stage.
The idea may have been planted by a cocktail party conversation with Burt Reynolds, who told Elizabeth that as his film offers began to dry up, he started a dinner theater in Jupiter, Florida. He’d asked if she’d be interested appearing with him in a revival of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? She declined the offer, but Elizabeth had always wanted to return to the stage after appearing as Helen of Troy in Doctor Faustus. She’d loved the risk and adrenaline rush of appearing before a live audience, but she knew she didn’t have the training for the stage, and she certainly didn’t have the voice. But she felt that that was something she could work on, just as she could work on slimming down.
Meanwhile, Richard was having his own problems. On March 29, 1978, he made his last trip to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles as a nominee for Best Actor for Equus—his seventh nomination. When the words “And the winner is—Richard…” rang out, Burton started to rise from his seat. At last, the award was his! Then the presenter continued, “…Dreyfuss!” A look of pain and disbelief crossed his face. Thirty-year-old Richard Dreyfuss had won the Oscar for his comedic role in Neil Simon’s The Goodbye Girl, and Burton was once again left unrecognized by the Academy for the part that had virtually saved his diminishing acting career. (He would, however, win a Golden Globe for his performance.) Perhaps it was true, after all, that Hollywood had never embraced him, and had collectively sided with Elizabeth in the divorce. And Burton had spent all those years making films in Europe, taking Elizabeth with him, away from Hollywood, for a decade. In a way, they never forgave him for marrying her, and they never forgave him for divorcing her.
After that, there would be a slew of bad-to-middling films: The Medusa Touch, The Wild Geese, Absolution, Breakthrough, the unfortunate Circle of Two, with sixteen-year-old Tatum O’Neal, and Lovespell (a film adaptation of Tristan and Iseult). He still hoped to play King Lear, the great Shakespearean role, and made plans with Alexander Cohen for the production. However, he didn’t have the stamina for the eight-week run necessary to make a profit, so the production was canceled.
Through it all, Burton stayed sober, with Suzy Hunt watching over him, though at times he felt she watched over him too much, even to the point of reading his scripts and deciding which films he should make. She made some terrible choices, fueling the widely held belief that Burton had sold out his talent just to make a few bucks: The Medusa Touch, Absolution, Breakthrough, Circle of Two. Suzy fussed over Richard, combing and recombing his hair; she made sure the entourage stayed away; and she took over their duties, one by one, further isolating him. John Springer, Ron Berkeley, even his new agent Robbie Lantz found themselves out in the cold. Richard felt hemmed in, treated like an old man, something Elizabeth would have never done. Suzy was unhappy, too, whenever she ran up against the many reminders of Richard’s former life with
Elizabeth. While making Absolution in 1980, they vacationed in Puerto Vallarta, which had by now become a bustling resort town. They ended up buying a villa, even though the reminders of Elizabeth were everywhere, such as a welcoming sign proclaiming THE MOST BEAUTIFUL PLACE IN THE WORLD, WHERE ONE OF THE MOST FAMOUS COUPLES FOUND LOVE.
In July of 1980, Burton was asked to appear in a revival of Camelot, for $60,000 a week, in a twelve-month American tour. It was a sentimental journey, not only for Richard but for the audiences that flocked to see him, still fascinated by the actor’s past and his fabled marriage to Elizabeth. The play began its run in Toronto before coming to New York. When Suzy saw a picture of Elizabeth and Richard together, smiling, in a souvenir program being sold in Toronto’s O’Keefe Center, she became incensed. “I want it out!” she said, so a small army of theater employees stayed up all night cutting the offending photograph out of the program. Another strain on the couple was that Suzy didn’t know any of the boldface names who came to see Richard in the play and toasted him afterward. At a party thrown by the Kissingers, Richard had to explain to Suzy, sotto voce, who each of the notables were—that’s Joe Alsop, famous political writer, that’s William F. Buckley, that’s Happy Rockefeller, Nelson’s wife (“and very un-happy,” he noted, after her husband died in the arms of another woman).
In New York for the opening of Camelot, Suzy was bothered wherever they went, as they were stared at and scrutinized. Basically a shy woman, Suzy couldn’t get used to strangers examining her hair, her jewelry, her makeup, even following her into public restrooms to try to get a more intimate look. She didn’t have Elizabeth’s ability to remain private—to lower the veil—in public.
A pinched nerve in Richard’s neck, and his old, persistent injuries, began to cause him considerable pain once the tour began. He found he couldn’t use his right arm, and Suzy had to do all his packing for him, which he considered emasculating. King Arthur was a particularly strenuous role to begin with, in which he had to project to audiences in the thousands in giant amphitheaters, brandish a sword, and sing. He longed for “the panacea of a drink” (“A double ice-cold vodka martini, the glass fogged with condensation, straight up and then straight down and the warm food of painkiller hitting the stomach and then the brain and an hour of sweetly melancholy euphoria. I shall have a Tab instead. Disgusting,” he complained.) He took painkillers for the pinched nerve, which made him nauseous, sometimes having to run backstage between scenes to vomit.
Shortly after opening night in New York, Richard seemed to lurch around the stage. Someone suddenly yelled from the audience, “Give him another drink!” The curtain was brought down and an understudy replaced Burton; hundreds of audience members angrily walked out of the theater. But Richard had not been drunk. He had taken a glass or two of wine with his old friend Richard Harris, who’d replaced him years ago in the film adaptation of Camelot when Richard had declined the role. The wine had mixed badly with the prescription painkiller he was taking.
Perhaps as a way to reassure the public that he was still very much in control of his faculties, Burton appeared on The Dick Cavett Show on four successive nights, where indeed he was witty, looked well, and comported himself with dignity and charm. For the rest of the tour, his performances were met with standing ovations. In fact, certain songs affected the public in strange and powerful ways. One man in the audience offered the cast $1,000 if they would just reprise the last scene of the play. When he sang “How to Handle a Woman,” there wasn’t a dry eye in the house, as audiences assumed he was, in his heart, dedicating the song to Elizabeth. In fact, there were rumors that she was in the audience during the show’s run in New Orleans, and that Richard had, indeed, sung the song to her.
But the pain was finally too much for him, exacerbated by doing eight performances a week. He was down to 140 pounds, from 175. When the tour reached the West Coast, he collapsed after a show and was once again taken to St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, on March 26, 1981, the very place that had saved his life seven years earlier, detoxifying him from alcohol. There, he underwent a risky surgery, a cervical laminectomy, on his neck. He was warned that the operation could leave him in even more pain. He was so desperate, however, that he took the risk. But the warning proved true: he was left in worse condition, in continuous pain. Richard had to drop out of the rest of the run of Camelot, and, as before, Richard Harris replaced him as King Arthur.
Suzy tried to nurse him back to health, but it wasn’t pretty. Richard was hospitalized again on October 7, for a perforated ulcer. He was a bitter invalid, in constant pain, and abusive to Suzy. He hated his own behavior but could do nothing about it. She finally left, and on February 20, 1982, they announced their separation. In the ensuing divorce settlement, she ended up with the house in Puerto Vallarta and $1 million. He didn’t blame her; it had all been too much for Suzy. But Elizabeth could have handled it.
In 1982, Burton took on the last of his “great men” roles, playing the august German composer Richard Wagner for an eight-hour television series directed by Tony Palmer and filmed in Vienna. Burton was not in good shape, smoking four to five packs of cigarettes a day, and beginning to drink heavily again. The mild epilepsy that had once been kept at bay, ironically, by alcohol, had now returned, and he suffered occasional seizures. For Wagner, he reunited with three of the greatest actors of the English stage—his heroes, his friends, and his bêtes noires Sir John Gielgud, Sir Ralph Richardson, and Sir Laurence Olivier. John, Ralph, and Larry. The only one at the table without a knighthood was Richard. He was supposed to have been their heir, “the greatest stage actor of his generation,” but now Burton no longer had the stamina to play the tormented king of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy; he wondered if he would have the physical strength to carry Cordelia across the stage in her death scene.
Each of the four veteran actors took turns hosting dinner parties for the cast. Burton’s was the last, given at the famous Palais Schwarzenberg in Vienna. Also present were director Tony Palmer and the great cinematographer Vittorio Storaro. It was a splendid evening of storytelling and mimicry and good humor, with Richard avoiding the wine sitting in front of him. Finally, he reached for a glass, and started drinking. The transformation was like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Richard turned on the “three knights” with uncharacteristic viciousness, Tony Palmer recalled. He called Olivier “a grotesque exaggeration of an actor. All technique. No true emotion.” Gielgud was next, and Burton made snide remarks about his homosexuality (a sad and curious insult to the man with whom he had probably had an affair thirty-two years earlier). And he told Sir Ralph that his fabled timing was really just a result of poor memory, a “darting about” to read his lines from cue cards. The three old actors stared at him in silence. Despite shaking their heads over him throughout the years, as Burton had reeled from one terrible movie after another, they had always admired, even loved him. Afterward, Palmer recalled, Richard berated himself, moaning, “Oh, God, oh, God, I’ve gone too far!”
In December 1981, Elizabeth separated from John Warner, and Richard would finalize his separation from Suzy Hunt three months later. Those two marriages, Liz Smith believed, had been “big ‘fuckyous’ to each other. Suzy Hunt was everything Elizabeth was not—tall, thin, and blond. And John Warner was this handsome, sober, distinguished, ex-navy secretary who became a senator. It was a continuous game of one-upmanship.” But those marriages had been necessary. Burton had needed someone to help keep him sober and return him to a quieter life. Elizabeth’s four years with Warner, in which she had relished living in a country estate and helping to get him elected to office, ended up showing her what she had always needed: a chance to perform, and an audience who could not get enough of her. The republic of her fans had never been a burden to Elizabeth—she had always connected with them, and like true royalty, she reigned because of their devotion.
Rumors of a possible reunion started flying again when Taylor came to London with The Little Foxes and Burton flew in fr
om Vienna on a break from filming Wagner, to appear onstage in a reading of Under Milk Wood. Liz Smith thought at the time, “she’ll have to get him back, because Richard couldn’t resist the allure of Elizabeth.”
Nine months earlier, on May 7, 1981, The Little Foxes had opened in New York for six months of sold-out performances, then toured New Orleans, Los Angeles, and now London. It was the first time the play had been performed on Broadway since Tallulah Bankhead had starred as the scheming, duplicitous Southern lady, Regina Giddens, in 1939. (The play’s author, Lillian Hellman, had a fit when she learned that Elizabeth—whom she insisted on calling “Lizzie”—would take on the juicy role.) Despite a two-week bronchial infection, Elizabeth managed to perform in 123 sold-out performances. Mike Nichols had been concerned that she didn’t have the vocal equipment to project onstage, but she proved everybody wrong. Though some critics sniffed, Elizabeth was nominated for a Tony Award.
So, on February 27, 1982, Elizabeth celebrated her fiftieth birthday in a gala celebration at London’s Legends nightclub, hosted by Zev Bufman, a fifty-two-year-old Israeli producer who coproduced The Little Foxes with Elizabeth, and with whom she’d formed a theatrical production company, The Elizabeth Theatre Group. The guest list numbered 120, including international celebrities like Rudolf Nureyev as well as Elizabeth’s children, Liza and newly married Maria Burton Carson, and Senator Warner’s two daughters, Mary and Virginia. That night, Elizabeth looked wonderfully well—slim, triumphant.