Elizabeth

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  “Oh yeah? Well, guess what? They’re both my women,” Richard spouted back. He could barely stand, and the aroma of liquor surrounded him. He turned to Elizabeth, who seemed to be hiding a smile at this display. “Are you my woman?” he demanded to know.

  “Well, are you? If so, then come over here and stick your tongue down my throat and prove it.”

  The moment hung, as both men watched her, waiting for her next move. Guests present at the Fisher villa were uncomfortable, stunned to silence by the sheer audacity Burton displayed. Elizabeth stood motionless for a moment, her eyes locked on Richard. Then she began to move toward him, holding her glass of champagne. Some observers assumed that she was going to walk over and toss the drink on him. However, she surprised everyone, except perhaps Richard. He knew what Elizabeth would do. With all eyes on her, she leaned into this man who seemed to have a hypnotic effect on her, and she pressed her lips firmly against his. Humiliated in front of his guests, Eddie stepped past the kissing couple in the doorway and went outside the house. By this time, even the pianist had stopped playing and all eyes were on the passionate display that seemed almost scripted. Richard was the first to break. He turned to walk out, past Fisher. Richard halted a moment, turned to Eddie, and said almost politely, “Keep her warm for me, won’t you?” Then he was gone.

  Elizabeth, feeling the eyes on her, gathered herself a bit, then whirled around and glided toward a grand marble staircase. She tipped her champagne glass high, taking one last big American 190

  Elizabeth

  gulp before the mainly upper-crust Italian crowd in attendance. She plopped the empty glass on a butler’s tray and floated up the stairs.

  The next day, Elizabeth and Richard had scenes together on the set of Cleopatra. There was an odd tension in the air, and all on the set could feel it. Elizabeth avoided eye contact with Richard—some opined that her aversion to him was disdain, others that it was her building desire for her leading man that she couldn’t face. There were innumerable delays in shooting. Elizabeth claimed that she was ill, or exhausted, or simply menstruating (according to her contract, she didn’t have to appear for work during the first two days of her cycle).*

  Eddie Fisher felt very strongly at the time—and still does today—that Richard’s sole motivation in pursuing Elizabeth was to further his career. That’s too simple a conclusion. Even if he had planned to catapult himself to stardom with the help of a great star like Elizabeth, the sheer complexity of the couple’s dynamic didn’t seem like a simple means to an end for Burton. Inexplicably drawn to each other, the two began a dark journey where love and contempt were often interchangeable. He may have begun the odyssey with Elizabeth thinking of his own career, but once the two had created the enigmatic union, neither was truly captain of that ship. Elizabeth and Richard were led by something

  * Some reports have had it that this clause was the result of Elizabeth’s experience on the film A Place in the Sun as a teenager. Director George Stevens had made her jump into a freezing lake repeatedly, over her mother’s objections, while she was having her period. Sara Taylor, it was said, feared—perhaps somewhat unreasonably—that her daughter would not be able to bear children as a result of that shoot. She then had it written into her daughter’s contracts that she did not have to work for the first two days of menstruation, and the clause stayed in Elizabeth’s deals for about the next twenty years. However, upon closer inspection of the facts, it seems that Sara got the idea that Elizabeth should not have to work during her cycle from the earlier example of Irene Dunne, who was permitted to miss work during her period. In fact, Sara began to withhold Elizabeth from working during those troublesome days as early as 1946, when Elizabeth was fourteen and making Life with Father. Her Destiny

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  bigger than the both of them . . . their desire for pure, unadulterated drama. Elizabeth Attempts Suicide?

  E ddie Fisher made up his mind that the only thing he could do to salvage what little dignity he had left was to get as far away from Elizabeth and Richard as possible. He planned to take the green Rolls-Royce she had given him as a gift and drive to Milan, where he would sort out his jumbled thoughts and twisted emotions. However, before he would take his leave, he decided to have a little chat with Sybil Burton, Richard’s long-suffering wife. It was February 17, 1962.

  “You know, they are having an affair,” Eddie told Sybil. Of course, she already knew, and certainly didn’t need to be reminded. “I know,” she said simply.

  “What are you going to do about it?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “Richard has been having affairs for years, and he always comes back to me. This will be just like all of the others. He’ll be back. It will blow over. Trust me. I know my husband.”

  Eddie laughed in her face. “Clearly, you don’t know my wife,”

  he said bitterly. “We are talking about Elizabeth Taylor here, not some chippy from one of Burton’s pictures. She wants your husband, and I can tell you from experience that she’s a woman who always gets what she wants.” He delivered the lines as if he was starring in a bad movie, and, this being his first acting job in years, he took full advantage of the scene.

  “But . . .”

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  Elizabeth

  “Listen to me, sweetheart,” he said, playing the tough guy to the hilt. “Your marriage? It ain’t gonna recover. Trust me.”

  For a moment, the two stared at each other, a silence hanging between them. Previously, Sybil had said that she believed the affair would just blow over, and that she and Richard would “be a million dollars richer because of it.” Now she wasn’t so sure. It was as if a wave of recognition had suddenly swept over her. She began to sob, the tears flowing uncontrollably. She ran from the room. Eddie left the Burton villa, jumped into his Rolls, and took off for Milan. The problem, though, was that he was as obsessed with Elizabeth as she was with Richard, and there could be no clean break. He stopped three times along the way to call her, but couldn’t locate her. Finally he tracked her down at her secretary Richard Hanley’s apartment. Very upset with him, she told him that Sybil had appeared unannounced at the studio and confronted her and Richard. The argument turned so volatile that no one was even able to work after it. The production had to be canceled for the day, at a cost of half a million dollars to 20th CenturyFox. “And it’s all your fault,” Elizabeth said angrily. Then Richard grabbed the receiver.

  “What are you doing there?” Eddie asked

  “What do you think I’m doing here?” Richard shouted into the phone. “And I’m going to kill you for what you have done to Sybil.”

  “What I did to Sybil?” Eddie screamed back. “Are you crazy?”

  After he hung up, Richard, worn out by the juvenile exchange, told Elizabeth that it was over between them. It was too difficult for everyone concerned, he said. He told her that she should just go back to Eddie and he to Sybil. Besides, he said, Elizabeth was too combative a person. He was used to more passivity from a woman. After all, “Syb” had put up with a lot from him, he pointed out, and probably more than Elizabeth could ever tolerate in the future. It was better, he said, if he and Elizabeth now cut to what he called “the inevitable conclusion” of their brief but combative romance. Her Destiny

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  “But, Richard. No!” Elizabeth protested. Unfazed, Richard turned and walked out the door.

  By the next morning, everyone at Cinecitta had heard that Elizabeth had had some kind of a breakdown over Richard. Walter Wanger went to Villa Papa to see if he could be of any assistance, and also to gauge his star’s ability to continue working on the movie. When he arrived, Elizabeth was in her bedroom, being tended to by her physician, Dr. Rexford Kennamer. Dick Hanley told Walter that the star would greet him shortly. About an hour later, she appeared, looking distraught. “I feel dreadful about this whole thing,” she said, her hands trembling. She poured herself a brandy and sank into a chair. “I don’t know what to do,” she said, according to Wanger�
�s memory.

  She seemed out of it, slightly loopy. After a few minutes with him, she rose and excused herself. Wanger, Roddy McDowall, Dick Hanley, and Elizabeth’s hairdresser, Vivian Zavits, retired to a reception room where they could discuss Elizabeth’s condition privately. After some time, Wanger went upstairs to check on her.

  “I’m fine,” she said from the other side of a closed door. “I’ve taken some sleeping pills. But perhaps I should eat before I doze off,” she added weakly. Wanger then went back downstairs to see about her lunch. The meal was prepared. A maid took it to Elizabeth. Five minutes later, the maid’s screams reverberated throughout the household. “Miss Taylor has taken too many pills,” she cried out. “I can’t wake her!”

  Pandemonium erupted. An ambulance was called. A snitch in the household called the tip into a newspaper. By the time she got to Salvatore Mundi International Hospital, the paparazzi were present in full force. Elizabeth had her stomach pumped; she survived an overdose of sleeping pills. Maybe it was accidental. However, the reports were that she had swallowed thirty pills, so . . . maybe not. People in her circle were split as to what they believed. The studio issued a statement that said that she had suffered from a stomach ailment. The public bought it. How she could work herself into such a state over someone 194

  Elizabeth

  she’d only known for about six weeks, and try to take her life without, apparently, even considering her children, was very upsetting to everyone who knew her, even Richard. He was about as selfloathing as anyone he knew, but Elizabeth now proved to him what many in her circle had known about her for years: She was in a league all her own when it came to the cataclysmic. In retrospect, it seems impossible to reconcile the fact that in just a week, on February 27, 1962, she would turn only thirty. Just look at the punishing life she had lived up until this time!

  Her friends who believed it to be true were stunned that she had tried to commit suicide over Richard. However, it’s impossible to isolate Elizabeth’s behavior and choices from her apparent alcoholism and drug addictions. In reviewing her life and trying to understand it, it has to be remembered that it was, for the most part, played out in a haze of either depression or euphoria, both extremes having often been chemically induced.

  Also, just as one can’t isolate her vices from her life, the recognition of her celebrity as an important factor is key to understanding her. By thirty, she’d lived a life of entitlement for more than twenty years. She’d made thirty-three movies and was a major star who always got exactly what she wanted, a star who inspired awe everywhere she went and in whatever she did. On the sets of her films, she was treated with reverence and deference. In public, she was idolized by the masses. In private, her men gave her jewels, even when she truly didn’t deserve them. For instance, Eddie, for her thirtieth, would gift her with a ten-carat yellow diamond ring (for which, he said, he got “zip reaction”), and a folded mirror that opened into an emerald-studded serpent, which he’d had designed by Bulgari. It’s not as if she deserved such presents from him while she was cheating on him with Burton! While it may have been thrilling for her to live this way, it was also very corruptive. However, the notion that fame corrupts is not exactly revelatory.

  More important, by this time, Elizabeth Taylor had still not yet figured out how to extract any knowledge she may have gleaned Her Destiny

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  from past experiences to assimilate into her behavior in some meaningful way. Despite her life-altering moments, even facing death a couple of times, she hadn’t exactly become a pensive, deep-thinking woman. Her inner life remained undeveloped. Still her mother’s daughter, she also strove for perfection in everything she did and, especially in the case of her latest married suitor, against the greatest of odds. After Richard told her she couldn’t have what she wanted in that very moment— him—and it became clear to her that things would not, and might never be, ideal for her with him, she reacted in a terrible and self-destructive way. If the overdose was indeed intentional, it’s horrifying to think that she would do such a thing to herself and to her family. “Well, I believe that in that very second, she just didn’t want to live,” says someone who knew her very well back then. “It wasn’t rational, of course. But people who want to commit suicide are not rational in their darkest of moments, now are they?”

  “Le Scandale”

  O n April 2, 1962, it was announced that Elizabeth Taylor and Eddie Fisher were divorcing. By this time, just about everyone who cared about such things knew that Elizabeth was having an affair with her costar Richard Burton. There were photos of the two movie stars in bathing suits, taken by the legendary photographer Bert Stern, looking very much in love while sunning themselves on the deck of a boat—Elizabeth particularly fetching in a bikini—that had circulated around the world. It was the biggest story in the land, or, as Richard dubbed it, “Le Scandale.” Photographers hid in bushes and scaled walls as they followed their 196

  Elizabeth

  every move in public. A distant and grainy shot of the two lovebirds simply standing next to each other on the set of Cleopatra could guarantee a huge payday for the lucky paparazzo who managed to sneak the photo. “Photographers dressed up like priests used to come to the door,” Elizabeth has recalled, “or they’d get inside as workmen or plumbers. They were on the wall, climbing up with stepladders from the outside. The servants would come rushing out with brooms and rakes, and the kids would turn the hose on those maniacs.”

  One bodyguard of Elizabeth’s had the unusual job of literally beating the bushes with a police nightstick at regular intervals, in order to locate and then chase away photographers who might be hiding there. Some of Elizabeth’s guests, such as Audrey Hepburn, who’d just gotten the role in the film version of My Fair Lady and had gone to share the good news with Elizabeth, found it more than a little unnerving that a man was swatting the bushes behind her as she sipped her tea.

  Martin Landau, their costar in Cleopatra, recalls, “We were sitting having drinks waiting to do a scene, and there was a big wall behind us, and they were lighting this scene and when they turned the arcs on, the big lights, it revealed about thirty photographers hanging on to cliffs and scaffolds. If any of them had dropped, they would have fallen forty feet, up there with their long-lensed cameras, and I assure you they were not taking pictures of me.”

  Predictably, international headlines blasted Elizabeth for her

  “wanton” behavior. What she and Burton were now doing to Eddie Fisher and Sybil Burton promised to be even more sensational in the news cycle than what she and Eddie had done to Debbie Reynolds three years earlier. Some felt that Eddie finally got what he deserved when Elizabeth left him, especially after the way he had treated Debbie. It also seemed to a lot of people that Elizabeth always ended up on top, at the expense of anyone who got in her way. People wondered if there were any way she could be committed to any one person for a decent period of time. Did Her Destiny

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  she feel that there was always someone better for her just around the corner?

  Stephanie Wanger, who is Walter’s daughter and was on the set of Cleopatra for much of the filming, recalled, “The bottom line is they were deeply in love. It was the real thing. As a couple, they fit well together. They had a rapport, and all Rome seemed to be caught up in the romance. It became what Camelot ought to have been for Jack and Jackie Kennedy.” (When one considers that the Arthurian legends contain a story about a faithless wife, Guenevere, in love with her husband King Arthur’s favorite knight, Lancelot, it may have been a particularly apt analogy, given the misery that was Jackie Kennedy’s private life with the President’s unfaithful behavior in their marriage.)

  Stewart Wilson and Victor Zellman were the accountants working for Elizabeth whose task it was to iron out a settlement with Eddie. Wilson met with Elizabeth in Rome. Also at the meeting was Mike Todd Jr., who was the president of the Michael Todd Company, founded by his father. Elizabeth was the board chair
man. “She was exhausted when we met with her on April 2, the day the announcement was made,” he said, “but ready for business when we got to her dressing quarters.”

  Elizabeth came swirling into the room in a white caftan with matching turban, in full Cleopatra makeup, her violet eyes heavily etched with black liner, lids blushed with a pink color. Her lips were painted a deep crimson. She was in between scenes for the movie, smoking a cigarette from a diamond-encrusted cigarette holder. “So, boys, what do I have to do to end it with Eddie?” she said, getting to the point quickly.

  “Give him money,” said Stewart Wilson.

  “How much?”

  “A lot,” said Wilson. “We just met with him, and he’s saying he wants millions.”

  Elizabeth took a deep drag from her cigarette. “I can not believe that I have to pay this man money,” she said, now seeming upset.

  “How is it that the wife has to pay the husband? How did that ever 198

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  happen in this world? Eddie Fisher had a career long before I came along, did he not?”

  “He says his career was ruined because of you,” Todd Jr. explained.

  “Oh, that is such bullshit,” Elizabeth said. “It’s easy to blame Elizabeth Taylor for every goddamn thing that happens to every goddamn person in Hollywood, isn’t it?” She then decided that she would give Fisher a million dollars if he would just sign the divorce papers, and that would be the end of it. “Tell him that. And then when he gets up off the floor, have the papers ready for him to sign, and a check ready to give him,” she instructed.

  “But, Elizabeth—” Todd Jr. began.

  She held her hands up to stop him and said that she didn’t want to hear another word about it. “It’s worth it to me to end this,” she concluded. Then she extended her hand to shake theirs, thanked them, and told them that the meeting was over. Before she left the room, she embraced Mike Todd Jr. and whispered something in his ear that made him smile. With that, she left the room. The next day, Elizabeth’s attorney in Los Angeles, Mickey Rudin, called Eddie to present him with the offer. He turned it down. (Today, Eddie insists that no such offer was extended, or rejected.) Stewart and Victor had to go back to Elizabeth and give her the bad news. Again, they caught her between scenes. This time, Richard was with her.