by Sam Kashner
His death, Sally later said, “was a tragedy for us, but not for Richard. My feeling was that Richard had many lives in him, but not that of an old man.” In fact, if the final operation had saved Burton’s life, it would probably have left him paralyzed, wheelchair-bound, like his brother Ifor, and—even more terrifying—without the ability to speak. To Burton, who loved language above all else, that would have been intolerable. He had long been celebrated for his voice, described by one film critic as “chorded and powerful, yet also famously musical. It was the outer edge of his authority and his fears.” Burton himself had once described “the Welsh voice” as “the deep, dark answer from the valleys, to everybody.”
Back home in Céligny, Sally found next to Richard’s bed a few lines of Shakespearean verse he’d written down in red ink just before his cerebral hemorrhage:
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red….
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow…
Our revels now are ended….
And then an unfinished line: “Cap a pi…”
Bozzacchi is alone in his belief that Richard was beaten the night before his death. There is no police report, and to this day, John Hurt won’t talk about his last twenty-four hours with Richard Burton. In any event, he was gone.
Richard Burton’s death was announced and made headlines around the world, and Sally made plans for his burial. Her first problem was how to handle Elizabeth Taylor. Her mere presence at Burton’s funeral could turn the solemn event into a media circus, which Sally hoped to avoid. So Elizabeth was not invited.
By now, Elizabeth had left Gstaad and was back in Los Angeles. When she received the news of Richard’s death, she fainted. Later, she would say, “I was still madly in love with him the day he died. I think he still loved me, too. I thought he’d always be there, at the other end of the phone. Even if we weren’t together, I knew he was still in the world.” She realized that she “would never hear his voice again, or see his face, his eyes…if I hadn’t been to Betty Ford before his death, I don’t think I’d be around. I loved him for twenty-five years.”
Once she recovered, she called Sally, who told her to please stay away from the funeral in Céligny, where Richard was to be buried. Elizabeth did so, though their children attended the service: Michael, Christopher, Liza, Maria, Kate. They, too, had loved Richard and had called him father.
On August 11, 1984, a memorial service was held for Richard Burton in Pontrhydyfen. Again, Elizabeth was not invited. Five hundred people were in attendance, raising their voices in Welsh song. At the last minute, Sally relented and called Elizabeth to invite her to the memorial, but the invitation came within twenty-four hours of the service, so Elizabeth couldn’t make it in time.
When Elizabeth finally arrived in Céligny on August 14, to visit Burton’s grave, she found that Sally had been right all along—the paparazzi were lying in wait for her.
They were camped out at the gravesite, waiting for Elizabeth. She arrived at the ancient churchyard at dawn, with Liza and four bodyguards, in a gray Mercedes. She found her way to Richard’s grave, so quiet that she could hear the sounds of a mountain river nearby. Suddenly, a phalanx of reporters and photographers ran toward her from behind tombstones and burial plots, their flashbulbs popping like mad in the dismal morning light. Her bodyguards opened bright umbrellas to shield Elizabeth from the horde and to give her some privacy, as she knelt at Richard’s grave. The next morning, however, she managed to elude the press and return to the grave one more time. She would describe that visit “as one of the few occasions ever that Richard and I were alone.”
Two days later, Elizabeth went to Pontrhydyfen to visit Richard’s family. Richard would have been furious, because she was late. She arrived wearing the Krupp diamond, Richard’s gift to her. Graham Jenkins picked her up at the airport and drove her to Hilda and Dai Owens’ house. When she arrived, the family assembled at Hilda’s raised their voice in the Welsh song “We’ll Keep a Welcome in the Hillside.” Elizabeth was touched and told them all—Richard’s Welsh family—that she felt she had come home. That night she slept in Hilda’s humble front room, but she really felt like “the Princess of Pontrhydyfen,” as Richard had once called her. When she left the next morning, she’d asked for a memento of Richard, a painting by his brother Verdun of the house Richard had been born in. It was his last present to her.
There would be one more memorial service for Burton, and this one Taylor was invited to (though Sally objected to her being seated with the family). Organized and presided over by Robert Hardy for fourteen hundred of Richard’s friends, family, and colleagues, it was held at the St. Martin-in-the-Fields Church, Trafalgar Square in London, on August 30, 1984. When Elizabeth arrived for the magnificent service, dressed in black and wearing a black turban, all eyes were upon her as she took her place next to Cecilia, the woman who had been Richard’s sister and his mother, his adored “Cis,” the prototype for all the women he’d ever loved. Elizabeth, solemn and dignified, seemed to Hardy to be “a queen in mourning.”
“What to do about Elizabeth” had been the topic of discussion in Céligny and Wales after Richard’s death, but Elizabeth had always known what to do. She returned to Los Angeles, determined to get on with her life. She broke off her halfhearted engagement to Victor Luna. She turned down all offers to talk publicly about Richard Burton. The press had already written what they’d wanted about “Liz and Dick.” After all, the Burtons had once made marriage seem glamorous—even dangerous. Even Larry King, years later, couldn’t get Elizabeth Taylor to talk about Richard Burton. Elizabeth told the talk show host, “Those are my memories.”
She would write two more books, Elizabeth Takes Off (On Weight Gain, Weight Loss, Self-Image, and Self-Esteem), and Elizabeth Taylor, My Love Affair with Jewelry. Burton had always wanted to write and publish books, but except for a handful of published articles and two brief autobiographical works, no book was finished. He’d tried a novel, unfinished and unpublished, but it would turn out that the book he’d meant to write—the rich, deep, detailed story of his life—existed in his hundreds of pages of diary entries, notes for a novel never finished, but complete and revealing in themselves.
Elizabeth had starred in one more feature film before Richard’s death, an Agatha Christie mystery called The Mirror Crack’d, in 1980, appearing with a number of aging, former A-list Hollywood actors: Kim Novak, Tony Curtis, and her dear friend Rock Hudson. When Hudson died in 1985 from the mysterious illness that was plaguing gay men at the time, Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, Elizabeth mourned the wasting away of her once strapping costar in Giant. She was devastated by his death, and by the fact that he had tried to hide the nature of his illness, just as he had always had to hide his homosexuality in an era and a profession that wouldn’t allow him to be who he was. Furious about the way the Reagan administration and her own industry were ignoring the pandemic, Elizabeth was determined to confront the disease that so many were dying from. She became the public spokeswoman for AIDS research, raising millions of dollars to develop a cure and treatment, and to change the public attitude about the disease and toward homosexuality itself. By 1992, she had done more to raise awareness of AIDS than any other American. When people were afraid of being in the same room with AIDS patients, Elizabeth often visited them at a hospital in Los Angeles. During one such visit, she delighted the patients by climbing into bed with a man being treated for AIDS. She said to the astonished fellow, “It’s the perfect relationship! I don’t want to get married again, and you’re probably not interested in me.” They cheered and applauded her for that. Richard would have been proud of her, and, in fact, she later said that her interest in AIDS research sprang in part from his hemophilia, and his shame over his early same-sex dalliances.
In 1988, after a relapse of prescription drug abuse, she returned to the Betty Ford Clinic. There she met a fellow patient, a tall, good-looking construction worker and former trucker
named Larry Fortensky. Reader, she married him.
After fourteen years without a feature film, Elizabeth would next appear in a cameo role in the comedy The Flintstones, as Pearl Slaghoople, Fred Flintstone’s shrewish, bejeweled mother-in-law. She would do a number of movies for television, finally appearing in Tennessee Williams’s Sweet Bird of Youth in 1989 and in These Old Broads in 2001, mostly as a favor to her old friend and former “rival,” Debbie Reynolds. She would discover that she really did have a head for business, launching two perfumes—Passion and White Diamonds—which would earn her more money than she had ever made in her film career. At $200 per ounce, Elizabeth Taylor’s Passion was among the best-selling perfumes in America by the mid-1990s, making Elizabeth one of the richest women in the country.
Over the decades, many of her film performances have been reassessed, even those trapped in bad movies. The films of her European period bear a second look—she’s genuinely moving in Secret Ceremony, for example, as the haunted mother of a drowned child. Her performances in her best films—A Place in the Sun, Giant, BUtterfield 8, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Suddenly, Last Summer, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?—are now seen as exemplars of great movie acting. Burton knew what he was talking about when he called her “the greatest film actress in the world.”
In 1998, there was one small coda to Le Scandale brought about by the death of Elizabeth’s treasured friend, Roddy McDowall. The former child actor had known Elizabeth for fifty-six years, and had taken some of the most beautiful photographs of her. He had acted with Elizabeth in Lassie Come Home, he had acted with Richard in Camelot, and had been in Rome with Elizabeth and Richard in Cleopatra. As McDowall lay dying in his home in Studio City, California, sitting at his bedside were Elizabeth Taylor and Sybil Burton Christopher. He had been loyal to them both. Thirty-four years after Cleopatra, the old rivalry between the women no longer mattered.
In the 1980s, Elizabeth had famously befriended another cultural icon, the strangely boyish Michael Jackson. She felt a kinship with him, as both had been denied true childhoods, yet at the same time had been able to indulge their childish whims well into adulthood. She appreciated his genius as a performer, especially as she knew how shy and insecure he was at heart—not unlike Richard. And, like Richard, Michael Jackson scorned his physical appearance. Elizabeth was touched when the troubled star told her that his favorite role of Elizabeth’s had been Helen Burns, the little orphan in Jane Eyre whose long, beautiful hair is shorn by Brocklehurst, the sadistic head of the orphanage. “You know, of all of my films, that was Michael’s favorite,” she reminisced.
She married Larry Fortensky in 1991 at Jackson’s Neverland Ranch in California. But her marriage to Fortensky—her eighth, if you count Richard twice—lasted less than four years. She would later say, “After Richard, the men in my life were just there to hold the coat, to open the door. All the men after Richard were really just company.” Elizabeth always considered herself married to Burton and has never changed the stipulation in her will that she be buried beside him.
In 2007, Elizabeth made perhaps her last appearance in a play when she performed A. R. Gurney’s Love Letters with James Earl Jones at Paramount Studios. It was a charity performance to raise funds for mobile AIDS units, and when she was wheeled onstage, as she now often relies on a wheelchair, she was met by a standing ovation. Liz Smith was there, and she was as impressed as the audience was by Taylor’s moving performance in a play that chronicles a long, loving relationship through the exchange of letters. Liz Smith noticed that if the crowd cheered her on her entrance “for her history and courage,” by the end of the play, their standing ovation was for Elizabeth, the actress.
But then again, Elizabeth knew something about love letters. She received her last one in Bel Air. Richard had mailed it on August 2, 1984, so it arrived a few days after his death. It was waiting for Elizabeth when she returned from London, after attending Richard’s memorial service there. It was his final letter to her, the one he had slipped away to write in his study at Céligny, surrounded by his books. It was a love letter to Elizabeth, and in it he told her what he wanted. Home was where Elizabeth was, and he wanted to come home.
She’s kept that letter by her bedside ever since.
TWO POEMS BY RICHARD BURTON *
Sally Hay Burton discovered these two poems among Richard Burton’s papers after his death. The untitled poem is a nostalgic farewell to Wales, written in a style influenced by his friend and countryman Dylan Thomas. “Portrait of a Man Drowning” was apparently written in November of 1965, while Burton was filming the bleak, Cold-War era film, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Neither poem has been published before now.
The mountain earth feels damp against my hand;
Around me sway a thousand sap-filled stalks
Of tender grass; The cows browse drowsily
Below me in the fields, and silly sheep
Bleat so pathetically. Dusk descends
And makes the cool earth cooler; lovers slow
In Sunday best drift past like ghosts of laughs
And murmurings; and some go up and some
Go down the mountain.
I see the gamblers hide behind some hedge or shade,
And play silently between dexterity
Of toil’s blunt fingers shuffling dirty cards;
And panting greyhounds run a merry race around them
In the fading light.
There is no life stir now
There is no hub-bub of activity;
The rushing of the whispering waterfall
Breathes silence on the mad tormented valley.
The voices rise insidiously as is
The creeping dusk. “Abide with me,” they moan,
A hundred coal-fogged voices harmoniously
Goad up in an ecstasy of melancholy magic;
All is still.
And there were things that made me;
Grew around the core of my young soul,
But I have other worlds for whom to weep;
I shall return no more.
—RICHARD BURTON
“PORTRAIT OF A MAN DROWNING”
Who can he be
That man alone in the saloon bar’s corner?
Who can he be
That man alone, solitary, musing.
Remembering
What can he be?
The shoulders hunched.
The face pocked, rived and valleyed
With a lifetime’s small tragedies.
The slanting mirror on the wall
Emblemed in Coope and Alsop
Reflecting his receding hair,
His thick shoulders,
His silent simian hirsute hands.
What is, what was the weight that sloped
Those hunching shoulders?
That man alone, solitary musing. Thinking
Of what can he be.
Nothing?
Or does he live again the nightmare
Of all the same he suffered and made others to suffer,
The torn promise, the shattered word,
His red hand caught in the emotional till,
The things he had never done and never would do now,
Lost lovely things. The hopeless things long lost,
The hot blush of childhood lies,
Love and hate and fear and love again and hate
And the ultimate terrible ineluctable wrath of God.
Does he hear the silent howl of death?
Hunched, solitary, silent.
That man alone in the saloon bar’s corner