Elizabeth has a memory of a night she, Eddie, Richard, Sybil, and Roddy McDowall went to dinner after a long day at the studio. Richard sat across the table from her. At about 9:30, Eddie decided that it was time for them to leave since Elizabeth had to be on the set early the next day. She protested, asking if they could stay just a while longer. She didn’t want to leave. Elizabeth, never one to be vague about her feelings when it came to something she did not want to do, began protesting loudly. “I don’t want to go,”
she said. “We’re having so much fun. Please, Eddie.”
“No, we should leave now,” Eddie said, reaching for her wrap. At the time, he was being paid $1,500 a week to keep Elizabeth away from alcohol and get her home and into bed at a reasonable hour . . . then back to the set the next day on time. However, as far as Elizabeth was concerned, he might as well have been just another insolent employee.
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Richard began talking busily to Eddie, obviously trying to prolong the evening. “So, chap, what are your plans for the future?”
he wanted to know. “Any movies on the horizon? Television, perhaps? Theater?”
As Eddie answered his questions, Richard took Elizabeth’s empty glass of wine and exchanged it stealthily for his full one. The two shared a conspiratorial look. Roddy McDowall took it all in with a disapproving eye. Before the group knew it, they were all involved in another conversation. Twenty minutes later, Richard again swapped his full glass of wine with Elizabeth’s empty one. The two winked at one another. This went on for about another two hours.
Everyone knew that Eddie didn’t want Elizabeth to have more than one glass of wine at dinner if she were going to be able to properly perform the next day. However, he did nothing to stop Richard. Though Richard may have thought he was being clever about exchanging the wineglasses, how surreptitious could he have been with only five of them sitting at the table? Finally it was Roddy who said, “We have to go.” When Elizabeth started protesting again, he was firm. “That’s it,” he said. “We are going. Now.”
As the small party rose to leave the restaurant, Elizabeth and Richard were so tipsy that they had to hang on to each other just to walk. “Oh, we’re all a bloody mess now, aren’t we?” she said with a cackle of a laugh. “See, Eddie? It’s all your fault. You should have made us leave sooner.”
Elizabeth’s reaction to Richard that night: “I absolutely adore this man.”
January 22, 1962, was the first day that Elizabeth, then thirty, and Richard, thirty-six, would work together in front of the camera on Cleopatra. In many ways, the events of that memorable day would foreshadow some of the dysfunction in their relationship, with Richard showing up for rehearsal so hungover from the previous night’s drinking binge that he could barely walk. In fact, as Elizabeth would recall it, she had never before seen a man so com-Her Destiny 181
pletely debilitated from alcohol consumption. “He was kind of quivering from head to foot,” she recalled, “and there were grog blossoms [blemishes]—you know, from booze—all over his face.”
“Oh Christ, I need a cup of coffee,” Burton said, trembling. When someone handed him a cup, Elizabeth observed that Richard was so jittery he couldn’t even raise it to his mouth without spilling the coffee all over himself. “Oh, you poor dear,” she said as she helped him steady his hand. “Let me help you.” As she held the cup for him, he gingerly sipped from it. “Thank you, my dear,” he said weakly.
One may have thought that Elizabeth would have been aghast that a costar would show up for work on the first day of such an important film in seemingly no condition to perform. Certainly in the past she would never have allowed such an unprofessional display on the set of one of her films without making a big issue of it. However, such was not the case on this morning with Richard. Rather, she was drawn to him because of what she immediately perceived as a tantalizing conflict in his personality. He was a strong man, very much unlike her father. Yet he had an extreme vulnerability—very much like her father. “That just endeared him so to me,” she would recall of the moment she helped him drink his coffee. “I thought, well, he really is human. He was so vulnerable and sweet and shaky and terribly giggly that with my heart I cwtched him.” (That’s Welsh for “hugged” him.) Others more critical of Richard may have viewed him in a very different light. However, Joseph Mankiewicz probably said it best when he observed, “It’s in one’s first perception of another—
skewed though it may be—that love, in all of its mystery, unfolds, isn’t it?”
In their first moment onscreen together, Elizabeth, as Cleopatra, whispers urgently to Richard’s Mark Antony, “To have waited so long, to know so suddenly. Without you, this is not a world I want to live in.”
“Everything that I want to hold or love or have or be is here with me now,” Burton, in character, responded.
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When the two then embraced and kissed, the electricity was almost palpable. Eddie was not on the set that day, which was probably for the best. They filmed the scene a few times. The final time, they held the kiss so long that some observers actually began to feel a little uncomfortable. “Cut!” Joseph Mankiewicz said. They continued kissing. “I said, cut!” he repeated. “Don’t the two of you have any interest at all in eating lunch?”
They broke their embrace and, after a few self-conscious moments, walked their separate ways, Richard with his few handlers and Elizabeth with her coterie of hairdressers, makeup artists, and others who were always fussing over her.
About a week after they finally began working together, Richard and Elizabeth were on a beach in Torre Astura, where an elaborate replica of the royal palace had been built. The day began at noon, as was the custom in Italy, and the weather was not making production easy on anyone, especially the frustrated Joe Mankiewicz. His son, Chris, was responsible for keeping the mercurial Taylor in line as a threatening storm ground production to a crawl. They would shoot for two minutes of sunshine, then the clouds would roll in and everything would stop. At one point, Taylor and Burton were called to the set, extras were being placed, and cameras were about to roll, when a tremendous clap of thunder shook the ground, a torrential downpour fell, and everyone scattered. Richard grabbed Elizabeth’s hand and pulled her toward the plaster façade of a palace wall. Entering a tremendous door, they closed it behind them before the director’s son spotted them. Hank Lustig, a jeweler from London, had flown in to present some pieces to Mankiewicz and Taylor for the production, and had sought shelter in the same spot. Above their heads were about six stories of scaffolding with leaky wooden planks—probably not the best place to stay dry.
“Have you lost your mind?” Elizabeth asked Richard. “We’ll get drenched here. They call them façades for a reason, numbskull.”
Richard climbed a painter’s ladder and reached into a bucket. From it he retrieved an open bottle of wine.
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“Do you know how long it takes to get this makeup done if it gets wet?” Elizabeth continued complaining.
“Well, it’s already wet, isn’t it?” Burton said as he took a swig and handed the bottle to her. In the distance, an umbrella-toting Chris Mankiewicz joined a chorus of production assistants calling Elizabeth’s name in increasingly panicked voices. “Have a nip,”
Burton prodded. “Who’s the boss here?” She looked at him blankly as he continued: “Besides me, I mean?”
Elizabeth spotted Hank Lustig, huddling in a relatively dry spot. “You there!”
“Me?”
She yanked the bottle from Burton’s grasp and brandished it.
“Did you bring this here?”
“Certainly not!” Lustig responded.
“Good. This man is not to be drinking on duty,” she said quite seriously of Richard. “By order of the Queen.”
Lustig was unsure how to respond as the two stars watched him for his reaction, then burst into spo
ntaneous laughter. He backed away a bit, slipping behind a piece of equipment as Elizabeth and Richard passed the bottle back and forth. He recalls, “They spent about the next twenty minutes or so peering through cracks in the façade, or peeking out the door. They laughed almost the entire time, or at least mostly she did, from things he would whisper to her. It was like they were children hiding from their parents.”
At one point, a suspicious silence led Lustig to check if the two had left. They hadn’t. They were passionately kissing. The silence was broken in a strange, less-than-romantic way.
“Ouch!” Elizabeth shouted.
“What the hell is it?” Richard asked.
“There are hairpins in this,” she shouted. “You can’t just take it off like a hat!”
“You scared the daylights out of me.”
“Well, you’re pulling my hair out!”
The two continued bickering until, again, silence fell. Lustig knew they were back at it, and didn’t need to spy this time. 184
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When the rain subsided, the calls for the two stars had built to near pandemonium. It was decided that it would be best for Elizabeth to depart first, so that they wouldn’t be seen leaving together. She fluffed her wardrobe away from her damp skin and gathered herself to go. She started out, then turned back to Richard. “You truly are a horrible, horrible man.”
“If I was twice as awful,” he said, returning the volley, “I’d be perfect for you.”
She smirked a bit before stepping back into the real world. Richard pressed his face close to the crack in the door and watched her go. “You still with us?” he then bellowed. Hank Lustig leaned out from his hiding spot. “You know, if you weren’t here that might have ended differently,” Richard said.
“I’m sorry . . .”
“No. You did me a favor. You see, once you screw her, she makes you marry her.”
Lustig was stunned to silence.
“I’m still weighing my options,” Richard Burton quipped. As he headed off he said, “Stay dry, chum. And mum’s the word.”
Elizabeth Confesses to
Eddie about Richard
B y the end of the third week of January 1962, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton had worked together for about five days on the set of Cleopatra. One morning, Richard walked into the makeup trailer at Cinecitta and made a startling announcement. Chris Mankiewicz happened to be present. “Gentlemen,” he said Her Destiny
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in those stentorian tones of his, “last night, I screwed Miss Elizabeth Taylor in the backseat of my Cadillac.” His proclamation was met with awkward silence. One wonders if he expected applause?
“The sense of it from everyone was, ‘Uh-oh, here we go,’ ” Chris recalls. “Richard was famous for having sex with his leading ladies in almost every movie. Some on the crew had joked about having a betting pool on how long it would be before he and Elizabeth would have become involved. But, you know, Italians can be very sex-obsessed anyway, at least certainly in those days. There was a lot of sexual badinage, people making jokes about one another as well, not just about the stars.
“Elizabeth was infinitely more prudish than Richard, even though she’d had already a number of husbands. She wasn’t as easy as people thought. I remember, years later, my father said, ‘I could have had an affair with Elizabeth, but what people don’t know about her is that she won’t just sleep with you, she’ll make you promise to then marry her.’ At some point, I think he tried to go to bed with her. But she said, not unless you marry me, and he walked away from that. But I remember he always used to say, she’ll have you but you’ve got to marry her.”
One might want to imagine that the consummation of such an important, life-changing relationship in the lives of two worldly people like Elizabeth and Richard would have occurred in some ceremonial fashion, perhaps in an exotic and wildly romantic location. However, from all accounts, it does indeed seem that the love affair of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor was consummated when he had his way with her in the backseat of his Cadillac. It’s not likely she got a promise of marriage out of him, either. For Richard, she would, apparently, make an exception to that rule . . .
Joseph Mankiewicz talked the situation over with producer Walter Wanger. “I’ve been sitting on a volcano all alone for too long,” he told him, “and I want to give you some facts you ought to know. Liz and Burton are not just playing Cleopatra and Antony.”
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Chris Mankiewicz recalls, “To be honest, my father encouraged, to some degree, the affair, or at least he didn’t try to stop it. He had his reasons. He felt that Richard was, as a British-trained actor, more disciplined than Elizabeth. He and Rex Harrison were theater people. You didn’t have a second take with him. They were used to doing it in one take, on a stage, in front of an audience. So making movies with them was a bit easier. The feeling was that Elizabeth was often not so well prepared. By having the two of them spending the evenings together, there would be, he hoped, opportunities for them to rehearse. He also hoped that there would be opportunities for her to get into the habit of being more disciplined, of rehearsing her lines with him, memorizing her script and being more prepared for the following day’s work.”
It didn’t take long before Louella O. Parsons, the Hearst newspapers’ Hollywood reporter, was reporting that Elizabeth’s marriage was in trouble, and that the ever-tempestuous actress was in the midst of yet another torrid affair that could possibly lead to the dissolution of not only her marriage but someone else’s as well. More than a thousand reporters swarmed onto the Cleopatra location, a veritable army of media, all after the big story that Elizabeth was involved in a romance, maybe with her costar Richard Burton. The widowed Mankiewicz tried to downplay the rumors by joking that Elizabeth’s affair was actually with him. It didn’t work. The media was on to a story, and would not let it go until it was confirmed. When Joe went to Walter Wanger and told him that it was possible that their Cleopatra and Mark Antony were carrying on away from the camera’s view, Wanger’s biggest concern was whether such a thing would help or hurt the movie. During a meeting with Richard, he asked what was going on with Elizabeth. Richard downplayed the significance of any pairing, though he did not deny it. “Actually, it might just be a once-overlightly,” he said. The story got to Eddie, who was in New York at the time on business, within days. He telephoned Elizabeth to ask her to hold a press conference and deny any kind of romance with Richard Her Destiny
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Burton. “It needs to stop, all this talk,” he told her. “And you’re the only one who can do that.”
“I’m sorry, Eddie, but I can’t,” she told him.
“Why?”
“It’s just not the right time,” she said, being guarded.
“Thanks a lot,” Eddie said, before slamming down the telephone. By the time Eddie got back to Rome a few days later, it seemed as if everyone on the set of Cleopatra knew what had been going on behind his back. He couldn’t help but notice the way people averted their eyes when he walked into a room.
That night, Eddie and Elizabeth had a quiet meal and some uneasy conversation before retiring for the evening. As they lay next to each other, Elizabeth drifted off almost immediately. Suddenly, the phone rang. Eddie picked it up quickly, so as not to have it awaken her. It was Bob Abrams, a friend of his who had come to Rome to visit him. “There’s something you need to know,” Bob said, according to a later recollection. “Elizabeth and Richard are having an affair.”
Coming from Bob, Eddie knew it was true. Just as he hung up the phone, Elizabeth stirred. “A friend just called me to tell me that you and Richard Burton are having an affair,” he said. “Is it true?”
Elizabeth exhaled deeply, as if to suggest an imminent confession. “It’s true,” she said, her voice nearly a whisper. The two then lay in bed, side by side, staring at the ceiling and not saying another word about it.
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Unadulterated Drama
O nce it was clear on the set of Cleopatra that Elizabeth and Richard were involved, there was simply no way for it to be concealed from the press. It quickly erupted into a worldwide news event, even though the two stars continued to deny it. Of course, just about anything Elizabeth Taylor did in those days made international headlines, so an affair with a handsome, married costar was sure to generate its share of sensational copy. It wasn’t her first affair, after all, and considering that she was still blamed by many for breaking up Eddie Fisher’s marriage to Debbie Reynolds, it seemed to her critics that she was just a wanton woman who simply didn’t give a damn about anyone other than herself. She wasn’t perceived as a person trying to take hold of any small bits of happiness a troubled life offered, that’s for sure, even if it was true. The headlines were horrendous, the scandal bigger than anything Elizabeth had created in her life up until that time—and that’s saying a lot.
Finally, after about a week of indecision as to how to handle things, Elizabeth made a choice. “I had to be with Richard,” she said many years later. “I knew it was wrong. I knew it would hurt people. I knew. I knew. But I also knew what I had to do. God help me, I had to be with Richard.”
“With the obvious becoming even more so, it was decided by Joe [Mankiewicz], Walter [Wanger], and Roddy [McDowall] that someone had to do something about Sybil,” a friend of Burton’s in London recalled. “They liked her very much and felt it was wrong for her to not know what was going on with Richard. Roddy, it was decided, would be the bearer of bad news. He screwed up his courage, flew to London, and told Sybil that Richard was having an affair with Elizabeth. She reacted by slapping him heartily across the face.”
Once the Burton-Taylor romance was out in the open, Richard seemed to suddenly feel he had license to behave as inappropri-Her Destiny 189
ately in public as he liked where Elizabeth was concerned, and she was—or at least she seemed to be—a willing participant in the torture he inflicted upon Eddie Fisher. It certainly seemed to be the case the night Burton showed up unexpectedly at a dinner party at the Fishers’ villa in Rome, as Eddie recalled it. When confronted by Eddie, Richard became belligerent. “Why don’t you just go home to your own wife?” Eddie shouted at him. He seemed on the verge of strangling him with his bare hands. “She’s your woman, not Elizabeth. Elizabeth is mine.”
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