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Still, as much as she cared for Michael and Christopher Wilding, Liza Todd Fisher, and Maria Taylor, they were obviously affected by their mother’s indiscretions and bad publicity; there was little Elizabeth could do to protect them from gossip and innuendo. It’s not as if she were unaware of the ramifications. “I’ve been married too many times,” she admitted in 1965 when speaking of the life she had given her children. “How terrible to change children’s affiliations, their affections—to give them the insecurity of placing their trust in someone when maybe that someone won’t be there next year. I was terrified that they would stop giving themselves to any [partner].”
Indeed, one day, Eddie Fisher was present in their lives. The next day, he was gone, replaced by someone the children had just met, and who they now knew as “Uncle Dick.” Little Liza, who was about five, once asked one of Elizabeth’s friends, “Did you see Around the World in 80 Days? My first daddy made that. My second daddy made a movie, also. And Richard, maybe my next daddy, makes movies too, lots of them, as does my only mommy.”
Richard never wanted Liza to call him Daddy, even after he and Elizabeth married. He wanted her to know that her father was Michael Todd, “and he was a very wonderful man, and don’t you ever forget it.” As youngsters, the Taylor children were welladjusted and, for the most part, had fun, considering their circumstances. In the end, though, all of them would grow up to be distrustful of the people in their lives, afraid that their stability would be rocked by the abandonment of someone important to them.
“My children are remarkable people,” Elizabeth once said. “My life should have been murder for them. We lived like gypsies and, well, there’s the obvious fact that I’ve been married too many times. They loved Mike. They loved Eddie as a friend, but when Eddie left they didn’t even ask where he’d gone.”
On the day the youngsters first met Richard, he was followed to the villa by excited men with cameras. They watched as Burton’s chauffeur grabbed a broom and chased them away. Later, Elizabeth Her Destiny
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rushed the three children out of the villa—the baby, Maria, stayed behind with a governess—and all of them then climbed into a car with Richard and sped off into the dark night. The paparazzi, some on motor scooters and others in cars, chased after them. For the kids, it was probably like a game of cops and robbers, with the chauffeur driving at a dangerously high speed, trying to evade the photographers, and with the added attraction of their mother screaming, hollering, and cursing all the way. Once they reached their destination, Torvainica, they ate at a restaurant called Corsetti’s—seafood cocktail, lobster, salad, potatoes, and an ice-cream dessert, all under the watchful eye of the paparazzi. Before the children could finish their dessert, Elizabeth gathered them up and rushed them out a back door into a small decoy car, while Richard took the other back to the villa. The diversion did not work. The photographers just split into two camps, one to follow each car back to the villa. When not on the road traveling to or from work on a film, Elizabeth would spend her days acting in front of the camera, doing press interviews, or having meetings about her career. At night, the children would usually be able to catch a quick glimpse of her as she got dressed to go out, usually to a club. When she was home for a longer period of time, she couldn’t help but be distracted by the ongoing drama of her personal life, jumping up to answer the ringing phone, speaking in anxious tones, slamming the phone back down with a “How dare you” . . . and then, after a moment of furious reflection, calling back to give someone a piece of her mind.
Sometimes Elizabeth’s children would meet her for lunch at the studio; she loved those times most of all. They watched wide-eyed as she filmed some of her scenes in the colorful Cleopatra garb. A break in filming gave them an hour together. They would have a light meal and, as they ate, laugh and talk about whatever interested them at the time. Then Michael, Chris, and Liza would return to the villa with their governess, while Elizabeth went back to work in front of the cameras. “I try to get as much time with 210
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them as I can,” Elizabeth has explained in an interview. “I know I am doing a lousy job, but as God is my witness, I am trying to be as good a mother as Elizabeth Taylor can be.”
Elizabeth’s world presented so many challenges to her, there wasn’t much time for her to do anything but battle her way through them one at a time, as best she could. There always seemed to be another problem just around the bend from the last one. In the end, as much as she loved them, her children—like the offspring of many celebrities—would have to learn to fend for themselves, and find attributes of their mother to be proud of wherever they could, such as in her work ethic and in the tenacity and determination she daily demonstrated in her life and career. Also, it’s interesting that Elizabeth did not end up treating her children the way that her mother, Sara, had treated her in terms of being critical and judgmental. It was as if she’d made a firm decision to be much more accepting of their faults than Sara had ever been of hers. In fact, many people in her life felt that she might have been a little too permissive. However, no one has ever heard of any of Elizabeth’s children complaining about her treatment of them; there have been no Mommie Dearest or My Mother’s Keeper stories to tell, so far. Perhaps she didn’t do as poor a job at mothering as it may have seemed—or maybe her children learned to look to her life as an example of the strength and perseverance it would take to get through their own.
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Nightmare in
Porto Santo Stefano
I t was during their Easter break in 1962 that Elizabeth Taylor learned about a side of Richard Burton she’d hadn’t seen in a man since her first marriage to Nicky Hilton: his violent side. (There have been many stories over the years about Mike Todd having roughed up Elizabeth, but she certainly has not confirmed that Todd was violent with her as she has Hilton.) During a three-day break, Elizabeth and Richard decided to drive to Porto Santo Stefano, about a hundred miles north of Rome. Though the weekend started off pleasant enough, it soon took a tragic turn.
According to Richard Burton’s diary entry, he rented a small, two-seat Fiat sports car so that he and Elizabeth could make the drive. Once in Porto Santo Stefano, they stumbled upon a small piano bar and thought they had finally escaped public scrutiny. Richard recalled there being only “a couple of people” present in the establishment, “a boy and a dog and a waiter.” However, one of the gentlemen present happened to be a newspaperman who, when he spotted the world’s “hottest and most scandalous couple,”
as Richard put it, phoned the tip in to his paper. Within minutes, they were under siege from the media.
Undaunted, Burton and Taylor left the bar and continued on to their small villa on the beach, completely isolated—or so they thought. Once there, they frolicked on the beach, drinking and having fun, thinking that they had ducked the photographers and were alone. Or so they later claimed. It’s difficult to believe they didn’t know there were photographers present as they ate oranges and gazed out over the lovely Tyrrhenian Sea. However, as Richard recalled it, “We found out soon enough that every bush—
and there were hundreds of them—contained a paparazzo. “We were well and thoroughly trapped.”
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He wrote that, at that point, the weekend was ruined for them. Feeling like caged animals, they took out their frustration by drinking “to the point of stupefaction and idiocy.” The more they drank, the more paranoid they began to feel about their isolation. They tried to read, but couldn’t focus. Instead, they had wild sex, or as Richard put it, “made a desperate kind of love.” Afterward they played gin rummy; the competitive Elizabeth won game after game, much to Richard’s consternation.
Somehow, Richard could not recall exactly how or why, the two began talking about love and death, and Elizabeth, in a dramatic moment, said that she was prepared to kill herself for him.
Elizabeth left the room and appeared a moment later with a bottle of sleeping pills. “I’ll do it,” she said. “I’ll do it now, for you.” Again, Richard laughed her off, thinking, he would later say, that she was threatening to off herself with vitamin C pills. By now, he knew that she had a flair for the dramatic. “The sad truth is that I can’t live without you anyway,” she said, “so if it’s as over between us, as you said it was back in Rome, then I may as well do myself in.”
“Don’t be ridiculous! Good Lord,” Richard flamed, “I left a perfectly good woman to be with a lunatic!” With that statement Elizabeth’s almost Shakespearean threat turned from melodrama to deadly serious. She had known he was tormented by his decision to end it with “Syb.” He felt tremendous guilt about breaking up his family, especially about his youngest child with autism. He couldn’t escape what he called his homeland’s inescapable truth: “The Welsh do not divorce easily.” Though Her Destiny
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he said he was now in love with Elizabeth, he felt a strong loyalty to Sybil. He continued to telephone her after she returned to London, trying in some way to hang on, seeming to want to prolong everyone’s torture. Now that he was free to have Elizabeth, it was as if he wanted to punish her for ruining his marriage. Yet now, in this foggy hotel room, the echoes of that word,
“lunatic,” were met with Elizabeth’s silent desperation. With it, he seemed to dare her to prove the trade he had made was worth it. She reached to open the bottle of pills. Richard swatted the container from her hand, sending it flying across the room. When she went to retrieve it, he lost control. “It didn’t begin as a barroom brawl, but it certainly ended as one,” he later told a friend. That night Richard’s fury overtook him. A brutal altercation fueled by his seemingly bottomless rage took place; yet the last he seemed to recall of the event itself was that it began.
His hazy memory of that night resumes hours later, when he came to and staggered into the bedroom. There he found Elizabeth sprawled on the bed, her head hanging off the side of the mattress, her mouth agape. She was out cold. He shook her repeatedly, but couldn’t awaken her. The sight of the empty pill bottle from earlier that night sobered him up quickly. “I wasn’t even sure she had taken them at the time,” he shared later. “It would have been just like her to flush them down the loo and wait for me to find her.” He couldn’t take that chance, though. He loaded her into a car for a hair-raising drive to Rome and back to Salvatore Mundi Hospital. The doctors, after pumping her stomach, told him she had taken a large dose of sedatives. For the second time in four months, Elizabeth Taylor had apparently decided that life was not worth living. “By God, what if she had died?” Burton asked in his writings. “Worse, what if she’d lived with an impaired brain?”
When she awakened, Elizabeth had two black eyes. Her face was swollen almost beyond recognition. Three weeks would pass 214
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before it would finally return to its natural beauty. During that time, she was unable to work on Cleopatra. Even heavy makeup was not concealing enough when it came to the results of Burton’s temper. The studio said she was injured when the chauffeur had to stop her limousine unexpectedly.
While doctors advised her not to look in a mirror, she convinced Richard that she had to see herself. He retrieved a heavy wooden hand mirror from her satchel and handed it to her. When she got up the courage to view her lover’s handiwork, she was stunned. “Well, now at least I look exactly the way I feel.” She stared at him. “I suppose I should thank you for that.”
Finishing Cleopatra
F inally, it was over. On June 23, 1962, Elizabeth Taylor filmed her final moments in Cleopatra on the stunningly beautiful island of Ischia, in the Bay of Naples. In the last scene, Cleopatra stands in all of her regal glory on a gold barge as it sails in front of thousands of admirers and arrives at Tarsus (which was actually Ischia Ponte). It’s an elaborate scene; thirty-five handmaidens on the barge toss coins to swimmers in the river. Forty others scatter flowers into the water. Clouds of smoke create an ethereal atmosphere. The rigging of the barge is festooned with exotic flowers. The entire scene cost half a million dollars to film. The production had seemed to drag on endlessly: 632 days had passed since it began at Pinewood.
It’s been famously reported that in order for 20th Century-Fox to be able to afford to make Cleopatra—with so many delays due, at least in part, to Elizabeth’s debilitating illnesses—Darryl F. Her Destiny
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Zanuck sold off most of the studio’s back lot to a real estate developer.* Though it was obviously costly and epic in size (and, at more than four hours, in length as well), the general consensus about Cleopatra, when it was finally released a year later, on June 12, 1963, in New York, was that it’s not a very good movie. While it’s photographed beautifully, it’s a big brute of a film that in the end topples over under its own weight. Still, as much as some hate it, that’s how much others love it. Brad Geagley says, “People call it the Eisenhower of movies for a reason; the farther away you get from it, the better it looks.”
Part of the problem is that the movie wasn’t well-written, which is understandable because the script was being constructed by Joseph Mankiewicz at the same time it was being filmed. At one point it was even suggested that the studio issue it in two parts—part one with Caesar and part two with Antony—at a suggested seven hours! (But, then, did that mean everyone had to be paid again? The answer being yes put an end to that folly.) The studio did the best it could in editing, but important moments were ultimately left on the cutting-room floor, scenes that might have explained certain of the characters’ motivations. As it stands, there seems to be no reason for some of the choices that remain in the film’s final cut.
Ultimately, the only reason to watch Cleopatra is to see just how stunning Elizabeth looks in it in her many lavish costumes. She’s a regal vision, her eyes heavily made up, her complexion flawless. From this point on in her career, the Elizabeth Taylor the
* This is only partly true; the deal was already in place by the time Cleopatra was in production because the studio had lost so much on previous films. However, the losses of Cleopatra coaxed Zanuck into finalizing matters. That property is, today, Century City: 176 acres of high-rise office buildings, a sprawling shopping mall, and residential condominiums, just west of Beverly Hills and about ten miles from Hollywood. Century City remains an important business center in the entertainment community; many law firms and executives, particularly those with ties to the film and television industries, have offices there. Twentieth Century-Fox is also still headquartered in the area. 216
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public saw was exactly the one she wanted them to see. She had final authority over all of her costumes, hairstyles, and makeup. She also had final say-so over all publicity stills that were released to the media. She had a keen sense of her image in photographs, and she wanted to make certain that her public only saw her best side, at least in pictures. Also, no doubt as a result of her mass popularity at this time, she was now guaranteed certain other important perks. Never again, for instance, would she have to fight over directors and scripts. She would for the remainder of her career have absolute authority over the director chosen by the film’s producer, as well as the right to veto the script if she didn’t like it. However, her acting in Cleopatra seems inexpressive and dull, especially in comparison to the brilliance of some of her performances up until this time. For Cleopatra, she received the worst reviews of her career, so vicious that
they are not even worth memorializing here. “When Elizabeth read them [the reviews], she had an attack of the vapors and retired to her bed at the Dorchester [where she was staying at the time, in London], for an indefinite period,” recalled Hal Wallis, producer of Richard Burton’s film Becket. “Her phone calls from bed to [the Becket] set were many, and interfered with Richard’s work. He told me one morning, ‘If you’ve got a picture for Elizabeth, I think you could get her today for $25,000.’ ”
Another reason to watch the movie is to see Elizabeth and Richard work together for the first time, in hopes of perhaps discerning some sense of magic between them. Surprisingly enough, considering what was going on in their private lives and the intensity of their first scenes together, they actually have little chemistry on the screen. In fact, the two act as if they’ve never even met; their characters’ scenes of passion fall terribly flat. Perhaps because there was such sexual tension between them offstage, they had to work to suppress their true emotions at work and in doing so ended up muting their performances. Also, in all fairness to Richard, some of his best scenes failed to make the final Her Destiny
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cut, much to his and Elizabeth’s dismay, and Mankiewicz’s also, who felt that Richard was done a great injustice by the studio. In the end, Cleopatra—which had been budgeted at $2 million—would cost almost $50 million to make (about $150 million in today’s currency). It is still considered the most expensive movie ever made. However, it has had a long life, and it did manage to break even in 1966. With $430 million in earnings in today’s money, Cleopatra now rests at an impressive number 37 in the list of all-time box-office moneymakers, a position that was aided by the film’s sale to television and its release, first on VHS, then a special fortieth anniversary DVD edition in 2003. The movie was nominated for nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Actor (Rex Harrison)—but not Best Actress. It would go on to win four Oscars, for Costume Design (Color), Cinematography (Color), Art Direction/Set Decoration (Color), and Special Visual Effects.
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