Burton gave her the La Peregrina pearl. Five hundred years old, it had been painted by Velázquez while worn by Spanish royalty—on a chain, over heavy velvets or armor.
Taylor, by way of contrast, wore it in Monaco, with a light silk dress cut down to here. On her, its size and shape looked not regal but obscene—a teaspoon of hardening pearlescence dropleted on her breastbone. “She wanted it [to hang] in a very special place on her body,” Al Durante, of Cartier, explained, having been commissioned to craft an ostentatious necklace for La Peregrina to hang off. Almost forty years later, he still blushed at the memory. “I’m not going to go any further than that.”
Still, as she was with her beauty, so she was with her jewelry—enliveningly careless and casual with it, treating it as an endlessly renewable resource, which, to be fair, to her, given her wealth, it essentially was. She took her beauty out in the sun; she ate and drank and denied herself nothing: she did not confine her beauty to a desultory circuit of gymnasium, beautician, and spa. Likewise, she was equally relaxed and abandoned with her jewelry.
“For fun, she’d wear something in the pool,” Minnelli said. That “something,” as the following footage showed, wasn’t a verruca sock. It meant Taylor—golden, freckled, carefree, astonishing at thirty-three—in the pool with rubies at her throat, ears, wrist, and fingers. You wondered, idly, how many times she and Burton, hammered on gin, saw in the dawn jumping into pools, diving for stray emeralds.
The day after Burton bought her the Taylor-Burton Diamond, Taylor wore it to visit Burton’s hometown in South Wales.
“They went to a working men’s club and plonked a chair in the middle of the floor. Elizabeth sat in it, like a queen,” the diamond’s bodyguard, from Christie’s, recalled. “And then she let every woman in that room try on the ring.”
Imagine the Taylor-Burton Diamond handed around a room full of gleeful shopgirls, factory workers, and farmers’ wives, joyously protesting the weight of it (“It’s like a bloody pork chop!”) as Burton, half in his cups, looked on at his wife, beaming.
Taylor’s winningly slatternly way made all other jewelry-owning attitudes look loveless and dull. Drinking with Princess Margaret, Taylor saw her eyeing up the Taylor-Burton.
“That’s so vulgar,” the princess commented. “Do you want to try it on?” Taylor asked. Princess Margaret slipped it onto her finger. One can imagine the slight shortening of breath—the admiring, lost quarter turn of the wrist.
“Not so vulgar now, is it?” Taylor yelped, in calm triumph. Margaret’s sister—quiet and dutiful, the only woman in the world with a collection to rival Taylor’s—kept her jewels in the Tower of London, cold and unworn save in abbeys.
Taylor, meanwhile, took her jewels to parties; threw them in the pool; left them carelessly on her bed, for weeks on end. Her dog, we were told, once ate La Peregrina—then vomited it back up.
And this was, surely, the true glory of the Elizabeth Taylor Collection. As we watched it being auctioned off, a piece at a time—the emerald necklace Burton had bought her, as green as his jealousy; the sad, yellow diamond teardrop earrings Eddie Fisher gave her, even as she cuckolded him—it looked like a collection of jewelry that had had a jolly good time, all in all.
Where would we rather have one of the biggest diamonds in the world? In a bank vault in Geneva? Or on Elizabeth Taylor’s “fat little fingers,” as she put it.
“I don’t think [Taylor’s jewelry] was a compensatory mechanism for something lacking in her life,” Joan Collins surmised, with a knowing smile. “On the contrary. For her, it was just . . . the icing on the cake.”
Taylor was a violet-eyed dragon, coiled on her hoard. Magpie-blooded. The best jewelry display case the world has had.
The Frumious Cumberbatch
Readers of Moranthology will recall that fully a quarter of that book was taken up with various awestruck, howlingly lustful encomiums to the wonder that is Benedict Cumberbatch, and his face-acting skills. Oh, how my keyboard enjoyed letting rip on a bit of Cumberbatch description! How I would rollick and roll through chronicling the rise of his deathless beauty! “The Frumious Cumberbatch!” “I would do him until Security pulled me off—then wank at him from behind a door!” “DEDUCE THIS, SEXLOCK HOLMES!”
It was all fun and games until someone got hurt. Or, to be more precise, until the person breathlessly pornographizing him—me—actually met him, and had to look him in the eye, and treat him like a normal human being.
Amazingly—and this is all credit to Cumberbatch’s upbringing and manners—he didn’t treat me like a jailable sex case he needed to ward off with an electric cattle prod. Instead, he was gracious and funny and friendly and charming, and we ended up getting on like a house on fire. Of all the “journeys” I’ve been on, it’s been one of the most unlikely. And, as you will see here, part of that journey involved almost accidentally breaking into Kate Moss’s house, and then getting very, very drunk, and making Benedict pretend to be a dragon.
I can’t pretend it’s not, on occasion, a great life.
I don’t know if you remember, but sometime last summer—between the end of the Olympics and the return of The X Factor—it briefly became the thing to have a go at Benedict Cumberbatch for being “a posho.”
However many times Cumberbatch tried to explain that he was “just middle class, really,” a sum kept being done, over and over: “Harrow education” + “called Benedict Cumberbatch” = “A man who wipes his bum on castles.” There were a series of catty columns about it, with headlines like “Posh off to America!” and “Poor posh boy.”
The underlying presumption seemed to be that Cumberbatch was some dilettante princeling—stealing roles like Sherlock Holmes in Sherlock, and the painfully repressed landowner Christopher Tietjens in Tom Stoppard’s Parade’s End, that would otherwise have gone to working-class actors such as Danny Dyer or Shane Richie from EastEnders, instead, and that this was all a great pity.
Of course, as with all these things, it blew over quite quickly—not least because it was superseded by the news that Cumberbatch had been cast in the new Star Trek movie, and was, therefore, about to become one of the most successful British actors of the last ten years. But I am reminded of it all today, in the back of a cab, leafing through a pile of cuttings on Cumberbatch.
“What a load of balls that was,” I muse. “The whole posh thing. What a load of old balls. What a funny old world.”
It’s a beautiful Sunday afternoon, and I have been invited to lunch with Benedict at his parents’ house, in Gloucestershire. Star Trek is now about to open, and this is the only day Benedict has free to talk. I have made the great sacrifice, and taken a train to Swindon.
The cab driver drops me outside the house.
“Here you go,” he says.
I climb out of the car, and stare at a gigantic, honey-colored mansion, with immaculately tended lawns. Parked in the driveway are a black London taxicab and a vintage silver Rolls-Royce.
Last night, Benedict had offered to pick me up from the station, saying he has a “loooooooooovely car.”
“Yes—you have, haven’t you, Benedict?” I think to myself, staring. “You’ve got a lovely pair.”
I crunch up the drive, carrying a massive bunch of flowers and a bottle of wine, and shout through the letterbox.
“Hello! I’m from London! I’ve come on holiday, to the countryside, by accident!”
Silence. I circle the house. The place is so big I can’t work out where the actual front door is.
After a full three minutes of trying to break in, I decide to go and ask a neighbor for advice on how to penetrate the Cumberbatch estate. I head towards a nearby crofter’s cottage.
Benedict Cumberbatch is standing in the doorway of the tiny cottage, in a pair of knackered navy corduroy slippers, watching my progress across the lawn—lavishly strewn with hyacinths—with some curiosity.
“What were you doing at Kate Moss’s house?” he asks, mildly.
&nbs
p; Ah. Kate Moss. The working-class girl from Croydon made good. That mansion is her house.
The “posh” Cumberbatches, by way of contrast, live next door: three small rooms downstairs, three small rooms upstairs—the kitchen in old orange pine. There are bits of odd carpet laid over the actual carpet, to protect it, and every available surface is covered in books, family photographs, or owls.
“Come in, come in,” Benedict says—tilting his head slightly to get through the low door. Even in slippers, he’s six feet, and not built for a seventeenth-century cottage. “Thank you for coming.”
The Guinness Book of Records does not yet carry this category, but Benedict Cumberbatch is in the running for the “Fastest Ascent to Fame Ever Recorded.”
At 8:59 p.m. on July 25, 2010, Cumberbatch was merely a well-regarded actor who had played—to enthusiastic reviews, but little public notice—Stephen Hawking in Hawking, and van Gogh in Van Gogh: Painted with Words. If you were a casting director, or a writer, you would be delighted to take his call, but otherwise, Cumberbatch lived a life unburdened by excess attention.
Sherlock began broadcasting at nine p.m. By 9:20 p.m., his name was trending worldwide on Twitter. A trending fueled by a mass outbreak of spontaneous hysteria—the fandom was instant, and visceral.
His Holmes was one of those once-in-a-generation big entrances. Written by Doctor Who’s Steven Moffat and The League of Gentlemen’s Mark Gatiss, this Sherlock was fast, dark, and insanely charismatic—he kicked the door in off its hinges, and didn’t stop for the next ninety minutes. His first scene had him thrashing a corpse with a whip. The second had him making illative leaps in much the same way Superman flies. Looping, and high.
“I love a serial killer!” he cried, at one point, at full gallop. “There’s always something to look forward to!”
On top of this, with his blond hair newly dyed black and lolling across his forehead, Cumberbatch’s appearance took on an otherworldly hotness. Pale enough to have never seen sunlight, when he launched into his bullet-train monologues, he did it with the intensity of Paganini or Nick Cave, with one black boot up on the monitor. There was a definite rock star element to this Holmes.
And, so, by transference, to Cumberbatch. By the end of the week, his private life was tabloid fodder. The coat he wore—a £1,000 Belstaff—a waiting-list bestseller. When the second series of Sherlock premiered at the BFI, a year later, fans queued outside from six a.m., in the bitter cold. When he arrived, they screamed. By then, he’d been on the cover of pretty much every major magazine in Britain—Spielberg had signed him up for War Horse, and he was shooting Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
Looking down his subsequent list of nominations—BAFTA, Olivier, Emmy, Golden Globe—he’s won more than he’s been nominated for: 17 vs. 15, an astonishing strike rate for someone who is still only thirty-six. And now, The Hobbit and Star Trek. And now, Hollywood.
And now: lunch.
The Ventham-Carlton-Cumberbatches are an incredibly hospitable crew.
Benedict’s father’s first words, on coming in from the garden—earth still on his knees—are, “Would you like a large drink?” He pours a cripplingly strong gin, which is exactly the right thing to do.
Benedict’s mother, Wanda, meanwhile, manages to combine “cooking a Sunday roast” with “emitting the background radiation of someone scorchingly hot in the 1960s, and who could still clearly reduce a room to rubble now, if she flashed her eyes.”
Benedict is second-generation pretendy: Google shows Wanda Ventham and Timothy Carlton in Doctor Who, Carry On Up the Khyber, The Scarlet Pimpernel, The Saint.
As there are, now, websites dedicated to young, swooning fan-love for Benedict—written by the self-proclaimed “Cumberbitches”—so there are for Wanda and Timothy, written by the generation before.
“Is Wanda Ventham a beautiful, remarkably sensual woman? You bet!” one writes. Another describes Timothy, in The Scarlet Pimpernel, as “wearing the green coat of sex.”
As Timothy and Wanda move around each other in the kitchen, preparing lunch—Wanda spars with her husband as if he were still a young suitor, even as he sits down with an involuntary “Ooof!” It’s rather touching to watch—Benedict takes me on a tour of the house. If we weren’t dallying, it would take less than a minute—it’s so small.
Benedict, however, is an inveterate dallier, and so it takes a good twenty.
“They bought this house when I was twelve,” he says. “Look. There’s me, off for my first day at Harrow.”
He points at a junk-shop painting of a young Fauntleroy type, skipping off to school in a huge sailor’s hat.
“So posh,” I say.
“So posh,” he laughs.
All up the stairs are pictures of Benedict as a child. Benedict running, Benedict as a toddler. Benedict aged ten—white-blond, skinny, in tiny swimming trunks, on a rocky beach in Greece. One of the pictures shows Wanda pulling his trunks down, and kissing his bottom.
“That is a picture of my mother kissing my arse,” he confirms.
This was around the age he was learning to play the trumpet—the event he credits with shaping his much-commented-upon mouth.
“Playing a trumpet wounds you,” he explains, gleefully. “That’s how this happened.” He presses his finger into his generous lower lip. “I have trumpet mouth.”
We look around Benedict’s bedroom, which is small and floral, with a well-thumbed Alan Bennett by the bed.
On the chintzy dressing table is a small china pot, with “I Feel Pretty & Witty” painted on the lid, in curlicue script.
I’m just asking Benedict if this is his morning affirmation—“Well, I do feel quite pretty,” he’s saying, thoughtfully—when his mother comes upstairs, and interrupts in the way that is the birthright of all mothers. She addresses me with some urgency:
“Can you just . . . find him a bird?” she asks. “You must be able to find him a bird. There must be someone in London who’s suitable. I want grandchildren. Please—find my son a bird.”
It is interesting—watching Sherlock Holmes being berated by his mother for still being single. Especially as, where we are standing, we are surrounded by Wanda’s collection of stuffed barn owls (“Mum’s obsessed with owls”), which are all staring at Benedict with pretty much the same gimlet expression as his mother.
“I’m doing all right,” he pleads—body language now that of an awkward teenager.
“I can’t wait much longer,” she rejoins, firmly. “Get a bird. Anyway it’s time for lunch. Come and have another drink.”
Wanda is, much like her owl collection, a hoot. Over a long lunch, she tells a series of anecdotes—including the day Benedict took her and Timothy onto the set of Star Trek.
“. . . and they did take after take,” Wanda says, in her cut-glass finishing school accent, serving up the pudding, “reset after reset. It went on all day. Just to get Ben in this bloody spaceship. At one point, I said to them, ‘You know, when I was doing UFO [the 1970s Gerry Anderson sci-fi series], it only took me three takes to get to the moon!’”
The Ventham-Carltons never really wanted their son to be an actor—they knew how precarious it was as a lifestyle; it’s why they scraped together the money to send him to Harrow, for a “proper education.” He certainly needed something to fill his days—Wanda describes Benedict, even as a baby, as “a whirlwind—he never stopped.”
“I had a very fast metabolism,” Benedict says.
“He was skeletal!” Wanda rejoins. “And we did feed him, we really did.”
“They worried that I had a thyroid problem. I would arrive on the school steps drenched in sweat, because I would run there. I never stopped.”
However, it became obvious, early on, only one thing provided enough distraction for Benedict.
“I was a pain in the arse. Show-off,” he says, pouring more wine. “Not malevolent—just disruptive. They tried to see if I could put all my energy to good, rather than just disrupting yet another lesson
doing a silly voice.”
He was given his first role, in a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
“And we all remember Benedict’s Bottom,” Timothy says, with perfectly timed lugubriousness.
“And I got Half a Sixpence!” Benedict cries. “I played Ann, long-suffering wife of Arthur Kipps.”
He launches into “I Don’t Believe a Word of It”—a thirty-six-year-old man doing an impression of his ten-year-old self, playing a role popularized by Julia Foster when she was twenty-four. It’s actually brilliant: funny, indignant. He dances from one side of the room to another.
Still, the Carlton-Venthams could kid themselves acting might just be a hobby for Benedict, until Wanda took him to see Timothy, who was on in the West End at the time.
As they stood in the wings, watching, Benedict suddenly started saying, loudly, almost wildly: “I want to go on. I want to go on!”
“We had to stop him from running onstage,” Wanda says, clearing the plates.
“But why wouldn’t you?” Benedict asks, appealing to me, now. “What kid wouldn’t? Have you ever been backstage? All the sets, with the name of the production on the back, with weights on the bottom of them, to hold them steady. And in the wings, you see all that. But then you walk onstage—and you walk into a real world, for the people who are watching it. It’s amazing.”
There is more wine, and seconds of the roast, and pudding, and seconds of pudding. Benedict picks at leftover roast parsnips—“I’m not supposed to. I’m on the 5:2 diet. You have to, for Sherlock.”
And then, finally, an hour after I was supposed to leave, and woozy with red wine, we go into the other room, to do the interview.
Here’s what it’s like interviewing Benedict Cumberbatch: a bit like interviewing a waterfall. It won’t really answer any of your questions, but it’s fabulous to watch. It’s not that it’s trying to ignore or avoid your questions—God, no. It is endlessly, eagerly forthcoming, and shows a touching courtesy towards the whole notion of being interviewed. It will tell you a story about being stung on the penis by a sea anemone in the same breath as discussing the panic of entering the library in Harrow for the first time: “Because I thought, I probably won’t have a lifetime long enough to read the first shelf—let alone the first room, let alone the whole fucking library. I’ve always been after the idea of betterment—to know exactly everything about that wine, and tell you about the birdsong I can hear, and to understand the world around me.”
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