Furious Love

by Sam Kashner

  A few days later, the headlines read, “Richard Burton Marries.”

  Richard had flown to Las Vegas with his young assistant, Sally Hay, checking into the $1,000-a-night bridal suite of the Frontier Hotel. On July 3, 1983, he married Sally—a thirty-four-year-old Australian woman he’d met in Vienna on the set of Wagner. She had been the continuity girl on the production, and the two had become close during the seven-month shoot. She was slim, light-haired, intelligent, and gentle in manner—more like Sybil than Elizabeth. She even bore a noticeable physical resemblance to Sybil and to Kate. She was able to provide for Richard what he most needed at the time—companionship and attention to his health and comfort. She even traveled with a spoonlike instrument in her handbag that could be slipped into Richard’s mouth to prevent him from biting his tongue during the epileptic seizures that occasionally recurred.

  “She can do everything,” Richard confided in Brook Williams, who was now with him constantly. “She can cook, type, do shorthand, there’s nothing she can’t do. She looks after me so well. Thank God I found her, Brookie.” In his diaries, though, he would refer to her as “lovely Sally” or “sexy Sally” or “undo-without-able Sally,” so the relationship wasn’t merely one of care and comfort.

  So Sally had stayed on after Wagner, and had moved in with Richard, and had accompanied him to New York. Elizabeth was not happy about it, but when he disappeared for three days and came back married to Sally, she was incensed.

  “I think Richard really tried to get out of that contract then,” Cullum recalled. “He just didn’t like to be in a show that wasn’t working.” Cullum, too, tried to get out of his contract. In one scene with Elizabeth, Cullum realized that nobody in the audience was watching him. “I would look at the audience, and I could see they were just riveted to her. They couldn’t believe that they were really up there—icons who had become alive. Richard was so powerful onstage, he could hold the stage with anyone. But he didn’t really care—it bothered him that he had to work for her and she was the boss. At least that’s the impression I got.”

  Elizabeth put on a brave face and even hosted a party, in Philadelphia, for the newly married couple. But after Burton’s marriage to Sally, Elizabeth didn’t seem to care anymore. “I began to crack,” she later admitted. “My worst habits surfaced. I began overeating, drinking, and taking pills. The minute the curtain went down, Jack Daniel’s was waiting for me in the wings.”

  Her weight gain was noticeable and many critics gleefully pointed it out. It was painful for Kathryn Walker, playing Sibyl, to see Elizabeth looking at herself in the mirror before going on and asking, “Do I really look fat?” She was “hurt, very hurt,” Kathryn recalled, “and now they’re throwing her to the lions, the way she’s being directed. I don’t know why she can’t stand up to them.”

  But she did stand up to their director, Milton Katselas, who was brought in from Los Angeles, where he was an acting teacher and something of a guru. Cullum, who had worked with him years earlier, remembered that the director “came in almost professorial, talking about ‘the humor and the comedy of Noël Coward.’ It didn’t take long for even me to figure out that he had just discovered him, and he was talking to Richard and Elizabeth, who knew Noël Coward and had spent a lot of time with him.” Katselas was sent packing and was replaced with another director.

  In private moments during rehearsals, Elizabeth had whispered to Richard how lonely she was, despite the attentions of her coproducer Zev Bufman, and Victor Gonzales Luna, a courtly, divorced Mexican lawyer and father of four, whom Elizabeth had met the previous year. Stung by Burton’s defection after all the speculations in the press about a reunion, Elizabeth announced her sudden engagement to Luna. A photograph ran in the Post of the two couples at a party at the Café Royal in Philadelphia: Richard and Sally, Victor and Elizabeth, who gamely showed off her 16.5-carat engagement ring from Luna.

  But all the joy had gone out of the tour for Elizabeth. “It became a twenty-four-hour nightmare,” she later said. “It didn’t matter that we didn’t get good reviews. We still played to packed houses. No one was coming to see the English drawing-room comedy anyway. Everyone bought tickets to watch high-camp ‘Liz and Dick.’ And we gave them what they wanted.” Elizabeth desperately wanted to stop the show, “to put an end to this torture,” but they had contracts to fulfill.

  Richard had had enough as well. While he was in Boston, he had received a phone call from John Huston, who wanted him to play the alcoholic but eloquent consul in Malcolm Lowry’s powerful novel, Under the Volcano. It was a role especially well suited to Burton, that of a brilliant mind unraveling as his marriage falls apart. But Burton knew immediately that he would not be able to get out of his contract, and the part ultimately revived the flagging career of another great actor from the United Kingdom, Albert Finney.

  Elyot was also proving a physically demanding role for the fifty-seven-year-old actor. Sally noticed with alarm that Richard was taking a beating during the playful pillow fight and love-play onstage. “She would just grab at him or throw her whole weight on him,” Sally observed. “I could see the spasms of pain as he braced himself—just where he had that terrible operation.” Some nights he would come offstage bleeding and Sally would have to reapply his makeup. While she cleaned him up, Richard would say, “That’s our girl. She’ll surprise us all.”

  The production limped to its conclusion in Los Angeles. Liz Smith reported on one of the last performances there, in the Wilshire Theatre, before it closed on November 6. She wrote, “The Liz ’n’ Dick Show…known officially as Private Lives, is now mercifully just a memory. And what a memory!” By now, however, Elizabeth had pulled out all the stops. “They stepped on each other’s lines,” the columnist wrote. “They stepped on each other’s feet. They camped, cornballed and generally carried on like mad things. Miz Liz…really let loose—winking, mugging, tossing breakfast rolls across the footlights. Needless to say, the audience LOVED her!”

  What Liz Smith had seen, perhaps, and the other critics had not, was that Elizabeth had finally embraced her new role of queen of camp. She had always loved the big show—Mike Todd had taught her that—the spectacular entrance, the opulent furs, the eye-popping diamonds, fabulousness for the sake of fabulousness. She loved it, she celebrated it, she understood it. And perhaps the biggest reason why she and Burton could no longer be together onstage, was that, by now, Richard was tragedy and Elizabeth was comedy. Elizabeth realized it herself, saying at the time, “When we were able to be Richard and Elizabeth, the marriage worked beautifully. It’s Liz and Dick that didn’t work, because they were two people who didn’t really exist.” But now it was all they had left.

  Privately, Elizabeth was not doing well. Audiences were surprised when they saw how much weight she’d put back on. She was taking so much medication, and drinking so heavily, that even her old friend and physician, Dr. Kenemer, refused to treat her any longer. In December, the ordeal of Private Lives finally over, she collapsed and was rushed to Cedars-Sinai hospital in Los Angeles, in physical pain from colitis but mostly “awash in self-pity and self-disgust,” chasing down painkillers with Jack Daniel’s. Victor Luna visited her in the hospital, but it was clear that their marriage plans weren’t going anywhere.

  Her old friend Roddy McDowall, along with her brother Howard and three of her grown children, Michael, Christopher, and Liza, all confronted her in the hospital. On December 5, 1983, they checked her into the Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage, near Palm Springs, for detoxification from drugs and alcohol. She shocked the world as the first celebrity to openly check into the now-famous treatment center, and Betty Ford herself, the former first lady and the clinic’s founder, was Elizabeth’s personal sponsor. Elizabeth announced that she had sought treatment for addiction, beating the tabloids to the punch. Burton would fight most of his life against admitting his alcoholism, yet Elizabeth, far more able to face hard truths, told the world.

  After seven weeks of therapy
and spartan living, Elizabeth emerged from the clinic, sober and eleven pounds lighter. When Burton, back in Céligny with Sally, saw a photograph of Elizabeth, newly transformed and looking radiant, he called to tell her how great she looked. He wanted to see her again. She was still his greatest pleasure, Burton admitted to his brother Graham Jenkins one evening in July at the Dorchester, when he was in London filming 1984, his last movie. “We’ve never really split up,” he told Graham, “and I guess we never will.” Elizabeth, still with Victor Luna, began dividing her time between a new home she’d purchased in Bel Air and her beloved chalet in Gstaad. At one point, they met up with Richard and Sally in a London pub, and Richard was gob-smacked at how preternaturally beautiful Elizabeth looked—uncommonly slim and radiant. But mostly they kept in touch through frequent phone calls. For a man who spent his whole life avoiding the telephone, he loved it when it was Elizabeth’s voice at the other end. Sometimes they would discuss new projects they could do together, or tease each other, or revisit the past. “The bond between them seemed to defy all efforts, including their own, to make a clean break,” Graham believed.

  Then, in one long phone call from Céligny late in the summer of 1984, Richard did something he had never done before in his talks with Elizabeth. After hoping to meet again, either in London or in Gstaad or in Céligny, he uncharacteristically ended his call with, “Good-bye, love.”

  For Elizabeth, it had an eerie sound of finality to it, though neither she nor Richard knew that they would never see each other again.

  EPILOGUE

  “Richard and I lived life to the fullest, but we also paid our dues.”

  —ELIZABETH TAYLOR

  “You never get to be a great actor until you’re dead.”

  —RICHARD BURTON

  He was like an old wounded lion,” the director Michael Radford recalled about filming Richard Burton in his adaptation of George Orwell’s political novel 1984. Burton was fifty-eight at the time, but he appeared to Radford “an old man. I got the impression that he just couldn’t wait to die, that life had seeped out of him in some kind of strange way. What was important for him in his life had gone. I thought that he was dying while he was making the film.”

  He had not been their first choice to play O’Brien, the coldblooded party official who tortures Winston Smith in Orwell’s novel. Unlike his time with Elizabeth, when he was everyone’s first choice, when movies like The V.I.P.s were created specially for them, Burton was fourth on the list. The producers had first offered the role to his old rival Paul Scofield, but Scofield had broken his leg before filming began. They then offered the part to another ghost of Richard’s past, the powerful actor Rod Steiger, a one-time husband of Claire Bloom, whom Richard had once loved. But Steiger had just had a face-lift, and it had not gone well. “We got a telegram from his agent,” Radford recalled, “saying ‘Mr. Steiger’s face-lift has fallen.’” So they next offered $80,000 to Marlon Brando, but his agent told them, “Mr. Brando does not get out of bed for less than $1 million.”

  “Our producer, Simon Perry, said, ‘He’s given up serious acting then, has he?’ That was the end of Marlon Brando,” Radford remembered. They had to begin the fourteen-week shoot without an O’Brien, wary about hiring Burton, because they’d heard he was still drinking. Desperate, they finally approached him with the offer, sending the script by helicopter to Haiti, where he and Sally had bought property, just as he had with Suzy Hunt a few years before. He felt it was the only place he could live where he wasn’t recognized on the street.

  “He said yes, he loved the script, he got on a plane, he came to the set, and he said to me, ‘I know I’m not the first choice, Michael, but I’ll do my best.’” Radford was surprised that Richard and Sally turned up without an entourage, except for Brook Williams. And he was surprised to find Burton completely sober.

  “He didn’t drink at all during the making of 1984,” recalled Radford. “He really didn’t.” But Radford had his suspicions about Brook Williams, whom he described as having a “drinker’s complexion. You know, purple nose and the cheeks with veins in them. He would be on set all the time, and he would bring these cans of Diet Coke, already opened, to Richard. Inevitably, there was an air of suspicion around the set that they were laced with vodka.” Richard would often ask his director, “Would you like a drink, Michael?” Radford would take a little sip to see if it had any vodka in it. “That was the unwritten pantomime that went on, but Richard was absolutely sober, as was John Hurt,” the intense English actor who played Winston Smith in the film, who also, at the time, had a reputation for heavy drinking.

  Part of what made Burton seem so frail was the fact that he no longer had full use of his arms. One hand shook so much that Radford had to employ an extra just to grip Burton’s hand and to help him lift up his arms. Whether it was the result of the beating he’d received years ago at Paddington Station, or the unsuccessful operation he’d had on his neck, or alcohol-deadened nerves, he was now like Faustus at the end of Marlowe’s play, unable to lift his arms in prayer as Mephistopheles and Lucifer hold them down at his side.

  “The other thing is,” Radford believed, “his famous memory was actually gone. So, he was like a real old rep actor. And he had some long speeches to do. Suddenly, he’d go, ‘I’m sorry, did somebody speak?’” Radford thought he might even have suffered a small stroke.

  And yet, Burton gave one of the most powerful performances of his life in the brief but intense role of O’Brien, Winston’s inquisitor and tormentor. Radford thought Burton was actually the most amazing actor he’d ever worked with. “Richard had that thing which Al Pacino has,” Radford noticed, “which is that some way or another, he brings up the standard of everybody around him. He had a phenomenal presence on the set. He wasn’t really interested in the psychology of the character. He was hopeless with props—none of this Marlon Brando stuff. He had this physical presence, but he also had this amazing voice. That was what held you.”

  His body of little use to him now, Burton was acting entirely with his eyes and his voice. It was as if his lifetime of triumphs and excesses, of joy and grief, had been distilled into a pure, pitiless performance. Like King Lear, the part that finally eluded him, the only thing left was self-knowledge. “It was gripping, really,” Radford reminisced. “I’m so pleased that he was the guy I chose in the end. What I tried to do was get a sort of intimate performance out of him. I think I did.”

  Throughout filming, in an odd way, Elizabeth Taylor still haunted Richard’s life. Three women turned up at the gates of the studio, all claiming to be Elizabeth—none of them looking remotely like her—and asking to see Richard Burton. Radford noticed that Richard and Sally seemed devoted to each other, but Richard often talked about Elizabeth in front of his wife in a way that must have been painful for her.

  After 1984, there would be one more role for Richard, in a television mini-series called Ellis Island, about the lives of European immigrants at the turn of the century. It was fitting that his last role would be as a father, as Burton took the part just so he could appear with his daughter Kate, now twenty-six and a successful actress. It was a last chance for a kind of reconciliation with the daughter he felt he had neglected, and who had once stood up to him, saying she would never see him again if he didn’t stop drinking. Now he was sober. Two weeks after finishing 1984, he was on a soundstage with Kate, where he watched her scenes with immense pride. Kate never felt closer to her father. At lunches on the set, or in Burton’s trailer between scenes, he talked to her, she recalled, “about his childhood, his shame about some of the parts he’d been in, his shame over the drinking.” They even discussed doing another film project together sometime in the future, but neither knew that for Burton, the future was now only a matter of weeks.

  In Céligny, Richard’s twilight life was decidedly quiet. He and Sally would rise around nine a.m., have tea, go into town for shopping and to have lunch. “He discussed many things with me,” Sally later recalled.
Once, when they were talking about his life with Elizabeth, he turned to her and said, “Did I really do all that? Did I really do the jewelry, the yacht, the plane? Did I do that?”

  In early August, they got word that John Hurt was in Switzerland, working on another film. He drove from Geneva to Céligny to have dinner with the Burtons. He stayed in the guest cottage, and the next morning they sat talking for a few hours. Burton seemed world-weary. John Hurt remembered thinking that Richard was still in the grip of an obsession with Elizabeth, and that it would never be over. Burton whispered to Hurt, sotto voce so Sally wouldn’t overhear, “She still fascinates, you know.” He had said the same thing to his brother Graham Jenkins on a visit three weeks earlier in London, at the Dorchester, during the filming of Ellis Island.

  Burton had been sober for a long time now, but on Friday, August 3, 1984, the two friends went out drinking. Sally wasn’t there—she had gone to the Café de la Gare that night. They found a comfortable bar with a soccer game on the television. Gianni Bozzacchi, the photographer who grew to love Richard Burton, tells a strange tale of what happened that night. According to Bozzacchi, Burton had words with another drinking patron. No one remembers what was said, but Richard was pushed and his head hit the floor. In the Swiss summer darkness, the scuffle spilled out into the street, but Richard couldn’t lift up his arms to defend himself, just as his father couldn’t defend himself, years ago, when his burned arms were strapped to his side and he was beaten bloody outside of the Miners Arms.

  Bystanders wanted to take Richard to the hospital, but he refused. He was too used to having his every move reported, photographed, and broadcast around the world. He would go home instead, he insisted upon it.

  The next day, August 4, Sally drove John Hurt back to his hotel in Geneva. Brook Williams was absent as well. When Sally returned, Richard complained of an excruciating headache, so she gave him some aspirin and he took to his bed around ten p.m. The next morning, Sally found him breathing with difficulty. She called the doctor, who arrived in twenty minutes, but didn’t find anything particularly alarming. Nonetheless, Sally had him taken to the local hospital in Nyon, where they discovered something was terribly wrong. They sped him to Geneva, where doctors found that Burton had suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage. Though they worked furiously to try to save him, Richard Burton died on the operating table. He was fifty-eight.