“Her veneer is bawdy. It’s sloppy. It’s slouchy, it’s snarly. But there are moments when the façade cracks and you see the vulnerability, the infinite pain of this woman inside whom, years ago, life almost died but is still flickering.”
It seems that the Burtons’ decision to bring Mike Nichols to Hollywood as the director of Virginia Woolf was a well-considered and, as it turned out, very shrewd one. By 1965, Nichols was the director in the Broadway theater. After a successful career as the partner of Elaine May writing and performing stand-up, he made his directing debut in 1963 in Neil Simon’s monster hit Barefoot in the Park, which ran for nearly four years and earned Nichols his first Tony Award. He followed the next year with Luv, another 258
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huge success, and another Tony. The Odd Couple was his third show, his third hit, and his third Tony—all in three short years. With Virginia Woolf, Nichols would become as much a fixture and a presence in films as he had been and would continue to be in the New York theater.
Elizabeth would be paid $1.1 million for the film, Richard
$750,000. She also received her now standard 10 percent of the profits. In the end, the Burtons cleared more than $6 million on this movie.
“Working together on the film was probably their best experience together in terms of their careers,” says Diane Stevens, who worked for John Springer on the West Coast as a consultant to his growing public relations business. Springer, based in New York, was Elizabeth’s very famous PR man who started working for them in early 1964. He’d represented luminaries like Judy Garland and Marilyn Monroe. “I spent many days on that set, and I can tell you that it was truly a collaborative effort between the Burtons, Nichols and writer-producer Ernest Lehman [who died in 2005]. It was Mike Nichols’s and Rich Burton’s idea, for instance, that
[Elizabeth] lower the key of her speaking voice for greater effect. She was eager to take direction from Burton, never felt insulted or in any way demeaned by him when he offered direction to her. Rich, Elizabeth, and Ernest worked out the slow disintegration of the characters and modulated the performances so that they could get the most out of them in terms of pacing and storytelling. I would see the three of them huddled together in a corner, working on ideas.
“To see Rich and Elizabeth create together, focused on their chosen professions, was always a fascinating experience because I was so used to seeing them drinking or fighting or having fun. Richard told me that they felt they had the most freedom with those two roles, to do with them what they wanted, to really throw caution to the wind, as he said, and ‘let ’er rip.’ ”
For Elizabeth, playing the role of the tormented Martha, a dowdy, blowzy character in her mid-forties, was a challenge unlike
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any other in her career. She gained twenty-five pounds for the part, which, she had to admit, was not difficult and, in fact,
“rather delightful.” The acerbic personality of the character, along with the combative relationship she had with her husband, probably wasn’t as much of a stretch for Elizabeth to convey as she said it was in press interviews. It was very true that the Burtons had begun playing aspects of their relationship on the screen, first in The Sandpiper, then in Virgina Woolf and, in the following year, The Taming of the Shrew. Though they would say publicly that their roles as battling spouses were a caricature of who they were to each other offscreen, it really wasn’t true. In fact, in their private lives the Burtons were not unaccustomed to the kinds of venomous exchanges in which George and Martha engaged on film. Diane Stevens recalled, “I walked in on a major row during a break in filming the movie. Just as I entered Rich’s dressing room, Elizabeth hurled a vase at him. He ducked, and it almost hit me. It crashed into pieces on the floor, and instead of apologizing, she reached for an empty pitcher and threw that at him, without even acknowledging that I had entered the room. ‘You bastard,’ she screamed at him. He ducked again. Then he picked up a fruit bowl and threw it at her. She ducked. I closed my eyes. I couldn’t bear to look at the scene. Then I realized that I was standing in the middle of a war zone with dishes and glasses flying about, and me with my eyes closed. So I got the hell out of there. Fifteen minutes later, they emerged holding hands.”
There are many memories of the Burtons during this time, some of which aren’t very complimentary:
Diane Stevens: “Rich was becoming more miserable, I think, by all of the drama of being the costar of the Elizabeth Taylor story. Cognac in the morning. Vodka and tonic in the afternoon. Scotch and vodka at night.”
James Bacon: “It was day and night, the drinking. It was bad. It brought out the worst in both of them, him more than her, I think.”
Liz Smith: “I saw him misbehaving to her and even misbehav-260 Elizabeth
ing to me. If you got him after lunch in the afternoon, he could really be quite mean.”
Stefan Verkaufen, Francis Taylor’s friend: “The family was concerned at this time that Elizabeth had found in Burton the alcoholic she had in her father, and they believed Burton’s on-set drinking on Virginia Woolf was inspiring her to drink more to keep up with him.”
Rose Marie Armocida, secretary to the Burtons’ publicist, John Springer: “One of the reasons it was a closed set was because Elizabeth and Richard were having so many quarrels, and we just didn’t want that out to the press. So they closed the set. It was just easier than taking a chance on the wrong people stumbling onto them in full fight mode.”
It wasn’t just alcohol that was a problem for Elizabeth, it was also her growing dependency on painkillers. She was in constant pain from her back problems, and there was no getting around it. She needed the drugs. Diane Stevens tells this story:
“I remember at one point sending a telegram at Elizabeth’s direction to Doctors Carl Goldman and Victor Ratner in London. It just said, ‘Urgent. Send pink pills at once. Elizabeth.’ She didn’t know the names of the pills she was taking, she only knew that she couldn’t survive without them. Later, Dr. Goldman called me to say, ‘Just for your information, the pink pills are Diconal, and they are on their way.’ At the time, he told me it was one of the most powerful painkillers in the world. She was in agony during Virginia Woolf.”
In the end, despite all of the melodrama that surrounded its making, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is considered a masterpiece by most film scholars. The film also proved a financial windfall for Warner Bros. It was nominated for thirteen Academy Awards, winning five, including a second one for Elizabeth Taylor. The film was also nominated, as was director Mike Nichols, writer Ernest Lehman, and Richard Burton, with all coming up empty. This slight to Nichols was rectified the following year when he took home the Best Director Oscar for The Graduate. Burton
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would turn in many Oscar-worthy performances for the remainder of his film career but would never win the statuette. What little hope one gets from staying with the film for all of its two hours and nine minutes is saved for the very last minutes, when with the guests gone and the dawn breaking, George gently massages Martha’s neck and shoulder, and beseeches her to come upstairs to bed. She touches his hand with hers as the camera moves in for a close-up of her hand on his and “The End” is superimposed on the shot. The relationship between the protagonists is never fully resolved and the viewer is left with a numbing sense of despair, almost certain that on some future Saturday night, George and Martha, and perhaps a couple of guests, will be going at it again tooth and nail.
Bad Movies, Great Riches,
and Another Oscar
A s the 1960s were drawing to a close and Elizabeth Taylor faced the relentless march of time, the inevitability of her approaching fourth decade suggested that her days as an ingénue were now a thing of the past. Leading-lady roles would give way to character parts, though starring character parts, to be sure. While she and Richard made movies together during these years, they also continued with th
eir individual careers. One of Richard’s films was Doctor Faustus, an odd movie in which Elizabeth played Helen of Troy in a practically, if not completely, nonspeaking role. Also at this time, Elizabeth filmed Re- flections in a Golden Eye, with Marlon Brando playing a part 262
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originally intended for Montgomery Clift. When the studio would not insure Clift because of his problems with drugs and alcohol, Elizabeth put up the insurance herself. However, Monty died at just forty-six from occlusive coronary artery disease before the movie went into production.
Elizabeth’s roles in Woolf, Shrew, and Reflections were pretty much the same kind of harridan character, just placed in three different time periods. Elizabeth as “shrew” Katharina—“Kate”—in The Taming of the Shrew was a sight to behold in her teased-out wig and cinched bodice, bitterly spewing her lines and going up against Burton’s Petruchio in much the way she would rail against the actor, her husband, in the privacy of their home. Not that they weren’t entertaining. Franco Zeffirelli recalled the following exchange while the Burtons were rehearsing a scene in which Richard had Elizabeth pinned down. “Here I am, with six inches of fused spine,” Elizabeth complained, “expected to push this baby elephant [Richard] off me.”
Actor Michael York made his debut in The Taming of the Shrew. He recalls, “On my first day, I remember thinking, ‘My God!
These are the kings and queens of Hollywood, and at the top of their profession.’ There was an overwhelming sense of glamour about them, intensified by the way they lived, you know, with their dressing rooms with dazzling white carpets and all of their butlers and maids, and so on . . . the Rolls-Royces, the jewels. They behaved like movie stars; old-fashioned movie stars. But I also found them to be enormously kind. There was also a sense of family. For instance, whenever her children were around, they were popped into costume, and then onto the set as extras.”
In retrospect, none of the films the Burtons made during this time did them much justice. Most were bad choices, as if their excessively bad personal habits had caused them to also have poor judgment when it came to choosing scripts. Moreover, Elizabeth had other reasons behind her wrong-minded career decisions. As demonstrated earlier in her profession, she had little sense of her self-worth, no doubt due to her lost childhood. She rarely realized
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her value as an actress and was therefore always prone to making bad career choices. Now that she was not under the creative thumb of a studio, as she had been at MGM as a young woman, and could do what she pleased, her decisions were still not good ones. Richard, for his part, just went along with his wife. Together they were like the proverbial blind leading the blind, right into mediocrity.
It was probably with Tennessee Williams’s Boom! that the Burtons hit their creative nadir. The plot concerned wealthy writer
“Sissy Goforth” (Elizabeth), who lives with servants and nurses on a Mediterranean island. Her days consist of dictating her autobiography and begging for injections. Burton plays the “Angel of Death” and, as such, recites such deathless lines from Samuel Taylor Coleridge as, “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan/A stately pleasuredome decree:/Where Alph, the sacred river, ran/Through caverns measureless to man/Down to a sunless sea.” As any high school student of English literature knows, the poem came to Coleridge in an opium-induced dream. One interesting fact about Boom! , however, is that Elizabeth’s brother, Howard, had a small walk-on role in it as the bearded skipper. As it happened, the actor who was supposed to play the role didn’t show up for work. Howard, Mara, and the children were visiting Elizabeth and Richard on location, and Elizabeth prevailed upon him to take the part as a lark. A few years later, in 1972, Elizabeth would make X, Y & Zee, a decidedly offbeat tragicomedy. The plot had something to do with a woman named Zee (Taylor) who finds out her husband (Michael Caine) is having an affair with a widow (Susannah York). When her husband leaves her, she attempts suicide. In the end, though, she somehow ends up in a lesbian complication with her husband’s girlfriend. Tom Gates happened to be in Rome just after the film was finished. He recalls, “John Springer had suggested that I try to say hello to Elizabeth, so I dropped off a letter at the Grand Hotel wishing her well. Later that afternoon there was a knock on my door by the old woman who ran the pensione telling me that “a 264
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Mrs. Burton” was on the phone for me. I rushed to the phone and, amazingly enough, it was Elizabeth. She said that she had just received my note and wanted to invite me to a small private screening of X, Y & Zee that very evening. I went, and she couldn’t have been nicer. The first thing she did was introduce me to the other people there—none of whom I knew except for Richard Burton—
and then she mussed my hair and said, ‘God, he has been such a pest in New York. He photographs my every move!’ I ended up sitting in the same row as the Burtons for the screening and was fascinated watching Elizabeth watching herself on the screen. Very often she would howl with laughter—sometimes putting her hands up to her face or whispering something to Richard. I found it so amazing that she would extend an invitation to such a private affair to someone who was basically a fan, always with camera in hand. But I think it may have been a sort of reward for not taking her picture. You see, some time earlier, I had my little Brownie Starflash camera ready to capture her exit from her limo in front of the Regency Hotel. But, much to my surprise, she emerged crying . . . very unhappy about something. I put my camera down, not wanting to snap her picture while she was so upset. Her chauffeur walked her inside and then returned to say, ‘Elizabeth asked me to thank you for not taking her picture when you saw how upset she was. She also said that it was awfully late for you to be out and asked me to drive you home.’ Naturally, I thought I was dreaming. But that scenario repeated itself many times over the years, me taking ‘good night’ photos of her as she returned to whatever hotel she was staying at after an evening out and Joe, her chauffeur, then driving me home. In the backseat was usually some little treasure that I was convinced she left for me; a theater program or monogrammed handkerchief, or even a pack of cigarettes. Wow, I’d think, Elizabeth Taylor smokes Salems. It was all a very puppy-love, high-school-crush sort of thing.”
The Burtons would also film an adaptation of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood (with Taylor in another very small role), and Hammersmith Is Out, a farce in which Burton plays the devil, who,
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to prove his powers, makes Elizabeth—a waitress—a movie star. They both look fairly blitzed in every shot of Hammersmith Is Out. Elizabeth would seem a lot more coherent in Ash Wednesday—
slim and beautiful, actually—but the plot, about an aging woman who has plastic surgery to hang on to her husband (played by Henry Fonda), is a bit hackneyed. However, despite the movie’s shortcomings, her performance in it is admirable and reminded a lot of people that she could still act. By this time (1973), Richard was, apparently, annoyed by his wife’s career and not willing to even be polite about it. “I sit here vulgarized by the idea that my wife is doing—violently against my taste—a fucking lousy nothing bloody film,” he wrote to two of his employees about Ash Wednesday. “ET’s singular acceptance of this film is because she wants to remain a famous film star. What the stupid [occasionally]
maniac doesn’t realize is that she is already immortalized [as a film person] forever.”
These movies, no matter how bad, generally turned a profit. The Burtons put up their own money for The Taming of the Shrew, deferring their salaries and making a huge, multimillion-dollar profit on box-office and distribution receipts. The couple had to make these films, actually, just to keep up their lifestyle. Such good fortune afforded the Burtons the wherewithal to continue living the Good Life, which for her consisted of wild shopping sprees, especially for precious jewels. Her favorite is still the Krupp diamond. “It had been owned by Vera Krupp,” she has explained, “of the famous munitions family whi
ch helped knock off millions of Jews. When it came up for auction in the late 1960s, I thought how perfect it would be if a nice Jewish girl like me were to own it.”
To see the Krupp up close—33.19 carats, for which Richard paid $305,000 when he bought it for his wife on May 16, 1968, from Parke-Bernet Galleries in New York—is to behold probably the most amazing diamond in the world. It shimmers as if it’s actually alive, with every color of the rainbow. It’s still Elizabeth’s most prized possession . . . her “baby,” as she calls it. As much as 266
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she treasures it, though, people who know her well have to laugh at the number of times she’s misplaced it. She’s left it on the sinks of ladies’ rooms all over the world. Luckily, she or someone else has always managed to retrieve it before it would be lost forever. Of course, during her years with Richard, Elizabeth received a great deal of eye-popping jewelry from him. Among the most famous of the lot was the Taylor-Burton diamond, formerly the Cartier diamond (69.42 carats), for which Richard would pay $1.1 million). So large was this stone, which had been discovered in the South African Premiere mine in 1966, Elizabeth eventually decided to stop wearing it as a ring. Instead, she had Cartier design a V-shaped necklace of graduated pear-shaped diamonds, mounted in platinum, from which it would gracefully dangle.
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