“I Sometimes Curse
the Day . . .”
B y the beginning of the 1970s, it had gotten worse between Elizabeth and Richard—the drinking, the insecurities, the fighting . . . all of it. Many of their more public arguments have been 276
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chronicled over the years in newspapers, magazines, and books. It would take a volume just to recount them all—and what a tedious volume it would be because, basically, the disagreements were always along the same lines: Both would have too much to drink. One would demand something of the other, not get it, and then throw a fit, maybe a fist, and, at the very least, a glass of liquor. As the months turned into years, the terrible and usually unpredictable temper tantrums between them would leave feelings of resentment that even the passing of time would not be able to erase. Elizabeth would lash out at him physically. Finally, he started hitting her back, at one point damaging her eardrum with a fist to the side of her head.
To be fair, despite their problems it’s clear that the Burtons really did love each other and were committed to their relationship, such as it was. Sometimes they were able to see the light. In March 1970, for instance, they were having dinner with friends when the subject of their drinking came up, as it often did in conversation. The couple was not intoxicated . . . at least not yet. Richard pointed to Elizabeth and said, “Now, there’s someone who could never give up a drink.”
Who knows why his statement touched a nerve? Certainly Richard had said a lot worse about Elizabeth over the years. But for some reason, her temper boiled over. She snapped at him, “You know what? I hate your guts.”
“Good God, woman,” he said. “I can smell the liquor on your breath all the way over here.” He was about six feet away. “You’ve had too much to drink, tubby,” he said. “So bugger off.”
Elizabeth turned to their friends and said, “You know what? I wish to Christ he’d just get out of my life.”
From there, the scene got worse. By the time it ended, all of the guests at the party had gotten an earful, and it is doubtful they ever forgot a word of it.
Richard later said that he and Elizabeth had often said such things privately to each other when they’d had too much to drink. Never had he imagined it would come to this: “The eyes ablaze
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with genuine hatred,” as he wrote in his diary, “her lovely face becoming ugly with loathing,” and all of it in front of friends. The next day, she felt anguish over the breach.
“We’re not very nice people, are we?” she asked Richard in front of Dick Hanley and other staff members.
“No, we’re not,” Richard agreed sadly.
Elizabeth approached him and embraced him tightly. “I only know that without you I would have been dead years ago,” she said, now trying to soothe him. “I do love you, honey.” She melted into his embrace; he kissed her fully on the lips. In the midst of their mutual despair, the Burtons had to act cheerful for an appearance on Lucille Ball’s sitcom The Lucy Show, taped in May 1970. At that time, of course, movie stars like Taylor and Burton did not normally show up on sitcoms like Ball’s, but they hoped it would help in the latter’s bid for an Oscar for Anne of the Thousand Days. Still, Richard made it clear in his diaries that he hated the experience. He was critical of Lucy, demeaning her nineteen years on television as a waste of time for her. He displayed a lack of understanding of the kind of discipline necessary to make a comedy show such as Ball’s, in its many incarnations, for so long a time. He didn’t understand it, so he ridiculed it. However, it’s because of entries like the ones criticizing Lucy that one has to approach Richard’s diaries with a certain amount of trepidation, because the truth is that it was actually Richard’s idea to do the show. He and Elizabeth had met Lucy and her husband, Gary Morton, at a reception for David Frost at the British consulate. “I adore your show,” Richard told the redheaded actress in front of witnesses, including Cecil Smith of the Los An- geles Times. “I want to do it.” Lucy was speechless. “It’s true,” confirmed Elizabeth. “He keeps yelling that he wants to do it. Please let him. It’s the only way to shut him up.” That night, the Burtons hosted the Mortons in their Bungalow 3 at the Beverly Hills Hotel. When the Mortons arrived, the place was swarming with police officers. Lucy actually thought someone had stolen the Krupp diamond! In fact, one of the Burton dogs had gotten lost, 278
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and the hotel had called the police to find the mutt. Such was the Burtons’ lifestyle. Six weeks later, they appeared on The Lucy Show—the numbskull plot being that Lucy tries on Elizabeth’s Krupp diamond but then can’t get it off her finger. (It was the real thing, too; it cost Ball $1,500 a day to insure the diamond.) Outwardly, Richard had nothing but praise for Lucy the entire time.
“She’s bloody marvelous,” he told Cecil Smith, also present at the taping. So for him to be so critical of the experience in his diary—
and he really was mean about it—seems a little disingenuous. In truth, there were so many levels of psychological chaos at work within Richard Burton causing him to drink that he would have had to have been married to a psychiatrist, not a movie star, in order to have been fully understood. Or, as Elizabeth put it to Look magazine in 1963, he was “a snake pit of ramifications.”
For instance, Richard still felt tremendous guilt about leaving Sybil and his daughters for Elizabeth, even after all this time. He was also torn about his career, angry about the way it had thus far unfolded for him. Though Anne of the Thousand Days had earned eight Oscar nominations, including Picture, Actor (Burton), and Actress (Geneviève Bujold), he was again overlooked on awards night. It had been his sixth nomination and his sixth loss. The movie won only for Costume Design. After Richard’s loss, Elizabeth walked onto the stage to give the Best Picture award looking extremely unhappy. She was probably also despairing because she knew what it was going to be like back in their hotel suite later. It would have meant a lot to Burton to have that one Oscar, especially since he was married to a woman who had two. He could have used the validation. People who knew him well think that he never felt he was as good as everyone else believed. He felt like a fraud and would never have been able to live up to Olivier’s expectations, anyway. It’s a common problem for celebrities to feel they are masquerading as pros when really they’re amateurs, and this was one of Richard’s issues. What a shame, too, especially considering that he gave some of his best performances while married to Elizabeth, yet he didn’t seem to know it. Look at the list:
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Becket, The Night of the Iguana, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? , Staircase, and Anne of the Thousand Days.
Some close to the couple also felt that it was really all over for Elizabeth, in terms of her marriage, when Richard lost the Oscar for Anne of the Thousand Days. It could be overstating it, but it’s definitely true that the loss didn’t make things any easier for them. Of course, Richard had his hands full with Elizabeth, too. She was prone to selfishness. Her trenchant tongue could cut any man to size. Her tantrums were the stuff of legend. As is the habit of many child stars, she continued to abdicate all responsibility for her actions, instead blaming her behavior on her youthful fame and on never having had the opportunity to live a “real” life. Her drinking and pill-taking was a real problem, even for Richard. Michelle Griffin, who was a close friend of Dick Hanley’s, recalls what she remembers as “a rare but welcome moment of clarity” for Elizabeth. She was with the Burtons at Frank Sinatra’s home in Palm Springs, in May 1970. “Elizabeth had to have a hemorrhoidectomy, which she decided to have at the Palm Springs Desert Hospital rather than in Los Angeles,” says Griffin. “It was in an effort to keep it out of the news because she thought it was just too personal to have publicized. The pain was absolutely intolerable, both before and after the surgery. She was miserable. Frank Sinatra had been gracious enough to host the Burtons earlier in the
year, and so they asked if they could stay at his compound while she recovered. He said yes, and also flew in her proctologist [Dr. Hyman Swerdlow] from Beverly Hills in the Sinatra private jet, and put him up at the estate as well. [Sinatra was in the Mediterranean at the time, vacationing.] It was me, Dick, Elizabeth, Richard, Dr. Swerdlow, and Elizabeth’s mother, Sara.”
The surgery was completed successfully—but, as was often the case after an invasive surgical procedure, Taylor spiraled into a deep depression. Her periods of healing were often difficult, both for her and for those around her. A pall fell over the sunny Palm 280
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Springs estate, as all present waited for the day that Elizabeth would awaken renewed. Nearly a week passed with Elizabeth doing little more than summoning her mother for assistance: a request for medication to ease her pain, a plate of scrambled eggs, a bottle of ginger ale. Sara was there for her daughter, always with a smile, never allowing anyone to see how concerned she was about Elizabeth’s condition—mainly her emotional state. One morning, Elizabeth emerged from her room and attempted a lighthearted tone. “Come with me, dear,” she told Michelle.
“Let’s have a spot of tea with my mother.” Michelle, relieved that Elizabeth might finally be on the road to recovery, followed her into the kitchen and sat down with Sara, who was delighted that her daughter was up and about. Yet it was clear that Elizabeth wasn’t truly out of the woods. While her physical healing may have been going well, she stared into her cup of tea and fell silent.
“I am always so depressed during the springtime,” she said. “The weather is beautiful, yet I feel so unhappy inside.”
Griffin did not know how to respond. Her relationship with Elizabeth wasn’t such that she felt she could be frank with her. Still, Elizabeth seemed to want to talk, so she responded, “You are doing the best you can,” she said, taking a safe route.
“Oh, bullshit,” Elizabeth said abruptly. “Richard and I have totally botched things up. And we know it. That’s the maddening part.” With that, her blue eyes filled with tears and she made a quick exit from the kitchen, leaving Michelle alone with Sara. After Sara Taylor, who was now seventy-two, watched her daughter flee from the room, she turned to Michelle and said,
“You know, I sometimes curse the day I brought my family to America.” Her hands shook as she sipped her tea.
“But you are responsible for Elizabeth’s success,” an incredulous Michelle told the Taylor matriarch. “Just look at what you two have achieved. Why, she’s Elizabeth Taylor!”
Sara sighed deeply, seemingly at a loss for words. After an uncomfortable silence, Michelle rose. She patted the elderly woman on the shoulder sympathetically, and then left her to her tea.
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“Pray for Us”
W hen Elizabeth Taylor turned forty in February 1972, she tried to be optimistic about the future during star-studded birthday festivities in Budapest (where Burton was filming Bluebeard).
“I love my life and everything is going so well,” she told the press. A photo of her and Burton taken by Norman Parkinson in Hungary is quite haunting: Both are in luxurious black furs—she with a fur hood and wearing the magnificent Krupp diamond ring. He has his smoldering eyes fixed upon her because she is the only woman for him, no matter the cost to his ego or his emotional well-being. She returns his gaze with an equal measure of affection, but yet with a distant, faraway look that conveys both great love and tremendous sadness. By the time they began work on a two-part TV movie called Divorce His, Divorce Hers—their last film together—it was clear to anyone paying attention that the subject matter was more than a tad prophetic.
On July 4, 1973, she released the following statement:
“I am convinced that it would be a good and constructive idea if Richard and I are separated for a while. Maybe we loved each other too much—I never believed such a thing was possible.” It’s interesting to note that Elizabeth had a romantic view of why her marriage was in tatters: They had loved each other too much. If she viewed that relationship as loving, it certainly says a lot about her state of mind at that time, and about her criteria for a happy marriage.
“But we have been in each other’s pockets constantly,” the statement went on, “never being apart but for matters of life and death, and I believe it’s caused a temporary breakdown of communication. I believe with all my heart that the separation will ultimately bring us back to where we should be—and that’s together. I think in a few days’ time I shall return to California, because my mother is there, and I have old and true friends there, too. Friends are there to help each other, aren’t they? Isn’t that what it’s all sup-282 Elizabeth
posed to be about? Wish us well during this difficult time.” She ended her statement with a simple plea: “Pray for us.”
And What of the Children?
T hough the Burtons had their share of personal problems, they also had a brood of children to consider: her four, Michael, Christopher, Liza, and Maria; and Richard’s daughter, Kate. His other daughter, Jessica, was still in a sanitarium. Somehow, they managed to give them as much of their time as possible. The children adored them, and the feeling was mutual. However, the fact of the matter was that Elizabeth and Richard were so consumed by their own lives and careers, their mutual depressions and assorted problems, is it any wonder they had trouble being good parents? Richard simply didn’t have the patience or the selfless temperament it takes to raise children. Somehow, though, Elizabeth did have the ability to be a good, though perhaps not very strict—and certainly not always available—mother. There’s no point in trying to paint her as the ideal mother. That’s just not the way it was; however, she did try to make sure that any time spent with the children was quality time.
Elizabeth’s firstborn, Michael—son of Michael Wilding—was a teenager now and having trouble with his grades in the boarding school he was attending. He kept getting kicked out of one after another, so much so that the Burtons seemed to be running out of educational options for him. Concerned about Michael’s scholastic future, Richard spent hours lecturing the teenager about his future. However, Michael just wasn’t interested in discussing his schooling with his stepfather. “Let’s face it,” Burton decided. “Our
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son is a hippie. His hair lies on his shoulders and we can’t keep him in school. I tell Elizabeth that we should do either one of two things—ignore him or kick the living daylights out of him. It bothers Elizabeth, too, but she goes around sermonizing, ‘He has the right to wear his hair any length he wants, it’s his right as an individual.’ We argue all the time and amazingly, the only one who sides with me is Mike Wilding [Michael’s father]. He approves me taking stern measures.”
Burton noted that the entire time Michael and Christopher were in Puerto Vallarta, the only reading they did was of comic books. “But they do have street smarts,” he said at the time, “and that is important.” He wasn’t going to fret if they refused to read literature. However, he definitely did not approve of their smoking while away at school. Elizabeth was not much help. “They’re only young once,” she decided, repeating a favorite mantra. She said she wasn’t going to ruin their spring vacation by “getting on their backs about stuff that they see us do here every day.”
In October 1970, Michael—then seventeen—married nineteenyear-old Beth Clutter. Burton was unhappy about it. “The kid has no high school diploma,” he raged. “He’s got no job. What is he going to do, live off of us for the rest of his life?”
“He’s our son,” Elizabeth said. “We have to support him.”
“For the rest of his life?” Richard said.
“I meant support his decision,” Elizabeth countered. “But if he needs money, then, yes, we shall support him for the rest of his life. That’s what parents do.”
Burton was Michael’s best man. The expression on his face when he saw what long-haired Michael was wearin
g to his wedding—a maroon caftan—must have been priceless. Elizabeth gave the newlyweds a Jaguar and a $70,000 London townhouse as a wedding gift. She also arranged for the couple to receive a monthly stipend, which was fine with Burton, but he would just as soon have seen Michael get a good job. One of the reasons the Burtons’ marriage lasted as long as it did, at least to hear people who knew them well tell it, is that Eliz-284 Elizabeth
abeth wanted some stability in the lives of their children. “He was definitely a stabilizing force,” one Taylor aficionado said of Burton, “and as much as Elizabeth sometimes fought it, that’s how much she appreciated it. I think it was important that the children saw a strong man in the household, especially the daughters. Burton was that kind of male influence—unforgettable and consistent. Maria and Liza knew no other man as their father, really. Just Richard Burton.”
It was clear from his actions that Michael wanted to start his own life as soon as he possibly could, and be away from Elizabeth and Richard. The marriage, predictably, would not last long, though the couple would have a child in July, named Leyla, making Elizabeth a grandmother at the age of thirty-nine. She could not have been more thrilled about it. By that time, she and Beth had bonded; Elizabeth showed her nothing but kindness and warmth. To celebrate the birth, Richard bought Elizabeth a set of diamond earrings in gold and a matching choker in the center of which was a lion sculpted out of, again, diamonds and gold. In the lion’s mouth hung two golden rings. Both stunning pieces were by Van Cleef & Arpels. “You look so amazing,” Richard told her when she modeled the jewelry for him, “no one in his right mind would ever believe you were a grandmother.”
At this time, Liza, the daughter of Elizabeth and Mike Todd, was having trouble with her studies, but she was a hard worker and determined to pull through. She and Richard were very close. They loved pulling pranks on Elizabeth. One Christmas, after all of the presents were opened, Liza approached her mother with a small box. “Daddy says that you forgot this box in your stocking,”
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