“Richard knew everything there was to know about jewelry,” Elizabeth says. “The more he learned about the background and history of a piece, the more fascinated he became with it. He actually appreciated fine jewelry every bit as much as I did. It gave him such joy to see the expression on my face when he would present me with something he had spent hours selecting just for me.”
Another of the fantastic gifts was the La Peregrina pearl, which Richard would acquire at an auction at Parke-Bernet Galleries for
$37,000. It has a remarkable backstory. A slave discovered it in the Gulf of Panama in the 1500s and gave it to his master in exchange for his freedom. Eventually it somehow found itself a part of the Spanish royal jewels; Spain’s Prince Philip II presented it to Mary Tudor of England as a gift to commemorate their engagement. It was later owned by Spanish queens Margaret and Isabella, and also belonged to the Bonaparte family in the early 1800s. Then, as was the case with many a rare gem, it ended up in Elizabeth’s vast collection, courtesy of Richard’s largesse. It’s one of the world’s best examples of a classic pear-shaped pearl; there truly is nothing quite like it. Tom Gates observes, “There have always been rumors that Elizabeth used the pearl as a dog toy, and that it actually has teeth marks on it! But when it was on exhibit at New York’s Museum of Natural History, I asked someone at the mu-“Liz and Dick”
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seum about the story and together we examined it and: no teeth marks. Another Taylor rumor put to rest!”
Later, for a birthday, Elizabeth would receive another generous gift from Richard: a Persian necklace made in 1627 for Nur Jahan, wife of the emperor Jahangir (who was the father of Shah Jahan). Richard said he’d wanted to buy her the Taj Mahal, but it was too big to squeeze into their chalet in Gstaad. The Burtons first saw the antique necklace during a layover at Kennedy Airport. Elizabeth says that in order to help them bide their time during the wait, “Cartier kindly managed to bring some jewelry out to the airport to show us while we waited for our connection.”
Many decades later, Elizabeth Taylor would look back on this time with a sense of appreciation. “When I think about the sixties,” she says, “I’m glad that I knew the wildness, glamour, and excitement when I was in my prime: the parties, the yachts, and the private jets and the jewelry. It was a great time to be young, alive and attractive and to have all those goodies. I enjoyed it.”
Probably the biggest regret of this time for Elizabeth Taylor was the 1967 Oscar disappointment of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? —and not that the Burtons both lost when nominated, because, as it happened, one of them won! Because of Richard’s vast insecurity, however, neither he nor Elizabeth attended the awards ceremony.*
Elizabeth had been nominated four times in the past— Raintree County; Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; Suddenly, Last Summer; and Butter- field 8—and won once, for Butterfield 8. Richard had been nominated four times— My Cousin Rachel, The Robe, Becket, and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold—losing each time. When both were nominated for Woolf, he refused to attend the ceremony, he said, because he couldn’t bear to be passed up a fifth time. Eliza* Virginia Woolf remains the only film in Academy history to be nominated in every eligible category: thirteen eligible categories/thirteen nominations: Picture, Actor, Actress, Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress, Director, Adapted Screenplay, Art Direction/Set Decoration (B&W), Cinematography (B&W), Sound, Costume Design (B&W), Music Score, and Film Editing. 268
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beth was ambivalent. She was of a mind not to attend. However, when her friends urged her to go, she relented. She had Dior design a gown for the occasion and she planned to attend alone. Days before the ceremony, though, Burton began drinking heavily in London, where the couple was staying at the time, sinking ever deeper into depression. Finally, just hours before Elizabeth was scheduled to leave for Los Angeles, he asked her not to go. He said he’d had a nightmare that her plane crashed and she died. He was in such a desperate condition, she grudgingly agreed to stay with him. She then sent her regrets to the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. “We’ve almost never been separated,” Elizabeth explained. “He gets into a terrible state when I’m away, especially when he gets tanked up. And he’s my husband. How can I leave him if he wants me to stay?” Jack Warner sent her a cable back: “Do not burn the bridges you have built.”
Warner’s cable didn’t mean much to Elizabeth, and in fact it annoyed her. She’d been in show business for many years and certainly didn’t need his advice about “burning bridges.” She was Elizabeth Taylor, after all—not some new starlet who needed to be concerned about studio politics. The more she thought about it, as she recalled it later, the more she realized she was right to not attend. Between herself and Burton, she was the bigger star, and she knew it. She didn’t need to advertise it to the world by showing up alone. Besides, Richard became more distraught with each passing day about possibly being overlooked by the Academy. The more he dwelled on it, the deeper he fell into a state of depression, or, as Elizabeth once defined his dark moods, “like a whirlpool of black molasses, carrying him down, down, down.”
“Look, there’s no guarantee she will win anyway,” Richard said, in a somewhat hollow justification for his behavior. “She could fly all the way, and then lose.”
Of course, as fate would have it, Elizabeth did win the Oscar; Anne Bancroft accepted on her behalf. Richard lost; the Best Actor winner was Paul Scofield. No doubt, had the couple attended and the circumstances unfolded as they did, it would have
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been a dreadful night for Richard. Years earlier, he and Scofield had been friends in London. It was Scofield’s first nomination, and the fact that he won would have most certainly sent Richard over the edge. Still, it was a shame that Elizabeth, who deserved much acclaim for her performance, could not be present to accept her second Academy Award just because her husband couldn’t handle losing one. Instead, that evening the Burtons had a few friends over for dinner, never even mentioning the Oscars. In fact, Elizabeth didn’t even know she had won until the next morning.
“Francis L. Taylor—
All Our Love—1897–1968”
O n November 20, 1968, Richard Burton took an emotional telephone call from Sara Taylor, telling him that Elizabeth’s father, Francis, had died in his sleep. He was seventy-two. He’d not been in good health for some time; he had suffered a stroke in 1965 and another in 1967.
Though Francis had a difficult, challenging life, he had gotten through it with the greatest of dignity. He would leave very few people, if indeed any at all, who would have an unkind observation to make about him, and what greater legacy is there than that? True, he had not always been the ideal father. However, it wasn’t because he didn’t care, and it wasn’t because he hadn’t tried. On some level, Elizabeth and Howard seemed to understand, even if they’d both been disappointed in him from time to time. In more recent decades, however, Francis was always at his daughter’s side when she most needed support: when she lost Mike 270
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Todd in the plane crash, when she had her tracheotomy, and, truly, in the midst of seemingly countless other times of melodrama. Though she felt neglected as a child, certainly as an adult she must have known that Francis tried to be a good father. Still, their communication was always strained and never quite what either of them truly wanted for each other. But there was always more time—or at least that’s how it seemed. Shortly before her father’s death, Elizabeth had planned a family reunion aboard the Burtons’ yacht, Kalizma. Her plan was that everyone would be there to spend the Christmas holidays of 1968. It wasn’t to be. Elizabeth and Richard immediately made plans to fly to Hollywood for the funeral. At this time, Elizabeth was in a weakened state due to a recent operation that had been most difficult for her. She’d been forced to undergo a partial hysterectomy in September due to medical conditions that had developed after the birth of her last child, Liza. She already knew
that she and Richard could not have children due to the tubal ligation she’d undergone after that birth, but still she couldn’t help but hope, as she would tell it, that something might be able to be done for her. Now, with this new surgery, she was sure never again to have children, and this time she knew there was no chance of the situation ever being reversed. It was difficult for her to accept—she referred to the surgery as “the destruction of my womanhood.” Since she was already so emotionally taxed from this event, Francis’s death felt to her, as she would recall it, like more than she could bear. Though she had been prepared for his passing for some time, the news still took her by surprise. She had a complete breakdown, or, as Richard put it,
“She was like a wild animal.”
Still, Elizabeth showed surprising strength and composure during the flight to Los Angeles and then during the simple funeral service conducted by a Christian Science reader at Westwood Village Mortuary. With Richard beside her whispering that she must remain strong for her mother, Elizabeth was able to turn her attention to her deeply grieving parent. On the short limousine ride to Francis’s gravesite, Elizabeth and
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her mother sat mostly without speaking. At the service, they were pensive, until Elizabeth broke the silence, according to Marshall Baldrige, Francis’s trusted friend from London, who was, of course, at the service.
“I should have spent more time with him,” Elizabeth announced. Sara said, “He would have liked that.”
Those few words seemed to affect Elizabeth deeply; her strength and resolve began to crumble. She began to cry. Her mother looked at her. “But I’m not crying, dear,” Sara said plainly.
Elizabeth wasn’t sure what she meant by her comment. Sara continued, “If a man’s widow isn’t crying it isn’t good form for others to do so. It makes me seem unfeeling.”
“This late in Sara’s life, she was still considering public opinion of paramount concern,” observed Baldrige.
Francis was buried in the Sanctuary of Peace section of Westwood Memorial Park. The small golden plaque on the site reads:
“Francis L. Taylor—All Our Love—1897–1968.”
At the gravesite, Baldrige saw firsthand Sara’s cool composure, and Elizabeth’s attempts to keep her own in check. “I went to speak to Elizabeth, and she grabbed both of my hands very urgently and said, ‘You knew him so well. Do you think he was happy? Do you think he lived a good life?’ She seemed anxious to try to tie up loose ends where Francis was concerned. ‘I know he loved you very much,’ I told her. ‘He always wanted the best for you.’ Listening to this, she was emotional, very upset. ‘Oh, how I wish we had more time,’ she said.
“I wanted to say more to her, but Sara came and took her by the arm. ‘There are a lot of people here you need to see,’ she told Elizabeth, pulling her from me. It was there, for the first time in all of those years, I realized that Sara didn’t much like me. She realized that I knew a lot about the inner workings of her family, and she didn’t think that was appropriate.
“ ‘I’m so sorry about Francis,’ I told Sara as she was walking 272
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away with Elizabeth. She turned to me and said, ‘Yes, I’m sure you are.’ It was chilly and upsetting. Then, as Elizabeth walked away on the arm of her mother, she turned to me and mouthed the words, ‘Thank you.’ ”
“Learning from Each Other”
B y the end of the 1960s, it was clear that Elizabeth and Richard had truly begun to plummet to the depths of alcoholism, even if they didn’t recognize it at the time. Their drinking continued in a way that can only be described as out of control. Moreover, they continued to make career choices based on codependent decisions. For instance, in The Comedians, Elizabeth took a small role because Richard had told her that Sophia Loren might play the part. Elizabeth wasn’t keen on the idea of Sophia having romantic scenes with her husband—plus, she just wanted to be with Richard. She also couldn’t bear to be away from him when he filmed Staircase in Europe. She therefore asked that her movie The Only Game in Town (with Warren Beatty) be mostly filmed in Paris, despite its Las Vegas setting. The studio reluctantly agreed and, doing so, had to beef up the budget to re-create American streetscapes, casinos, apartments, and supermarkets in Paris. In the end (after eighty-six shooting days in Paris), the company moved to Las Vegas for ten final days of shooting at Caesar’s Palace.
She managed to complete The Only Game in Town, but only while wrenched with unbearable back pain. Everything possible was being done to support her damaged spine—corset braces, tape
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bindings, therapy—but it seemed as if nothing worked. The pain was unrelenting and she would just have to learn to live with it. In the third week of May 1969, the Burtons left Puerto Vallarta for London for the filming of Anne of the Thousand Days. For many weeks, Richard was supposed to have been preparing for this historical potboiler in which he was to play King Henry VIII. Every day in Puerto Vallarta, Elizabeth would retrieve the 144-page script, place it in front of him, and say, “Now read this, and learn it.” He would spend ten minutes on it and toss it aside. Though he didn’t want to do the movie, and regretted ever having signed on for it, Elizabeth didn’t want to hear about it. “You signed a contract and we’re going to England in one week,” she had said. “I am going to stay on your ass until you learn this goddamn script.”
(Elizabeth took an uncredited bit part as a courtesan just to keep an eye on Richard, a part for which she was paid forty-seven dollars!) Richard suffered from insomnia for the entire shoot and started taking sleeping pills (“Junkie Burton has finally arrived,” he wrote in his diary on May 22). During some weeks, he drank to excess, staying up all night and then arriving late at the studio for work. In other weeks, he stopped and, during these times, couldn’t even stand the smell of vodka. With Burton it was one extreme or the other. There was no moderation where he was concerned. It was always all . . . or nothing.
Richard explained that the reason he drank so much while making movies was “to burn up the flatness—the stale empty flat, dull, deadness one feels after a scene.” If alcohol intake was key to a role’s characterization, the more the better. For instance, in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, he played Alec Leamas, a man with a drinking problem. He told a female reporter on the set, “I have lived the life of Alec Leamas most of my life and, I must say, it’s very livable. I think I broke all of my own admirable records the other day on the set. I had to knock back a large whiskey, and we did forty-seven takes of that scene. Imagine it, luv, forty-seven whiskeys! Does it get better than that?” He joked that in Mexico, 274
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the local bartenders had a drink called the Richard Burton cocktail. “First, you take twenty-one shots of tequila,” he joked in describing it. During filming of The Comedians, Richard followed the custom he had established on the set of The Sandpiper. He ordered sixteen bottles of champagne to be always on ice. If he drank a couple and later opened the refrigerator and saw a mere fourteen ready and waiting, he’d raise what he called a “bloody row.”
On a more serious note, Richard remarked that the Burtons found their high-profile lifestyle troubling. “Elizabeth and I both suffer from feelings of insecurity,” he noted. “We feel particularly unsure of ourselves when we are at a party because no one really wants to know us. They simply stare as if we are prize animals. What we do when we go to parties is drink to kill the icy isolation.”
Still, despite the complexities of their private lives, there was a great advantage to the couple’s working together at this time: They grew to truly appreciate each other’s work. Richard clearly hated the Hollywood ethos that Elizabeth represented as one of its biggest stars. In turn, she wasn’t thrilled about his snobbish attitude about it. Yet they still learned from each other. From her, he learned about the technique of film acting. As he explained it, “She taught me subtleties in filmmaking that I
never knew existed, such as the value of absolute stillness and also that my penetrating voice need not be pitched louder than a telephone conversation. But chiefly she taught me to regard the making of a film as exacting and as serious as playing Shakespeare on the stage. I suppose the major change in my film-acting technique has been affected by Elizabeth. She’s the consummate cinematic technician.”
He further observed, “Elizabeth is one of the most remarkably talented actresses I’ve ever worked with. She surprises the devil out of you. If you don’t know her and you watch her rehearse, you say, ‘Oh dear, here comes nothing.’ She goes through rehearsals sort of like a sleepwalker. But when the camera starts whirring, she turns it on, the magic, and you simply can’t believe your eyes. She has great power and an uncanny instinct for the right thing.”
Elizabeth felt the same about Richard. “Working with Richard
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is working with the absolute pro,” she said. “He gives you the feeling of antennae—a quivering, positive contact. He can turn emotion on and off in seconds, having it under complete control, yet you sense the latent power all the time, like a volcano about to erupt. Nerves are the nemesis of all actors and Richard will do anything at his own expense to put other actors at their ease, even to flubbing his own line or knocking something over—anything so the cut in the film will be his fault. Furthermore,” she added, “I know of no other film actor who knows the whole script, everybody’s lines, the day before he starts working. I think he’s one of the greatest actors, without question, who has ever worked on the screen or in the theater. Unlike so many actors, he’s not a stone wall. He gives so much. He has electricity. He speaks verse like prose and his prose sounds like poetry.”
In another interview, Elizabeth said of him, “Richard is just like a well: There’s no plumbing the depths. You can’t describe a volcano erupting. You can’t describe the sound of the wind in the trees when there is no wind.” In somewhat less poetic words, what she may have been expressing was that he had a volatile temper, and, as anyone who knew them would attest, she was capable of matching it, and on a daily basis.
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