Richard Marries . . .
Someone Else
R ichard Burton and Sally Hay went to Las Vegas and were married on Sunday, July 3, 1983. Afterward, he telephoned his brother Graham Jenkins and told him the good news. Graham, 366
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not realizing that Burton had not yet told Elizabeth, called friends at the BBC to pass the news on to the media.
On Monday morning, the Fourth of July, Elizabeth opened her newspaper to find that Richard had officially declared his independence from her, again, by marrying someone else. That she had to read about it in the newspaper rather than hear about it from him was, for her, a dagger in the heart. She couldn’t believe his cruelty. The fact that he was making about $75,000 a week because of something she had generated for him, whether he appreciated the work or not, made her feel that he should have had at least a modicum of consideration for her.
In many ways, Richard’s sudden marriage to Sally was his final act of domination over Elizabeth. He had long known that she wanted him back, and he had refused to give in to her. So he had won that round, and even topped his win by introducing a new woman into the emotional hurricane—a younger one at that!
Then he had wanted out of the play in order to do something he viewed as much more deserving of his time as an actor, and she had refused to allow it. Round two to Elizabeth. Now, in round three, he would prove himself the victor again. Just as all the eyes of the world were on him and Elizabeth because of her play, Private Lives, he would humiliate her by marrying Sally. Patrick McMahon, who was still working for Burton at this time as an assistant, recalled of Elizabeth, “She called me and was very upset. For her to have called me meant she was telephoning everyone she knew because I was way down on the list of people she had anything to do with during Private Lives. Richard had his camp and she had hers. I was in Richard’s. I don’t think I’d had more than two conversations with her.”
“Does he hate me so much that he wants to see me dead?” Elizabeth asked. “Doesn’t he know how this would affect me? Doesn’t he even care?”
“I’ll tell Richard to call you, Elizabeth,” McMahon said, not able to offer much more.
“Oh, don’t bother!” she snapped. “He could have waited, you Coming to Terms
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know,” she concluded. Then, in a voice that was hardly audible, she added, “He owed me at least that much.” With that, she hung up.
The fact that Elizabeth was making the rounds with hurt and angry telephone calls soon got back to Richard. He called his brother and gave him a piece of his mind for having gone to the BBC. “How could you do that?” he asked angrily. “You gave me no time to call Elizabeth, and she should have been the first to know.”
Of course, Richard had had plenty of time to inform Elizabeth of his decision, if he had really wanted her to know about it. But apparently he felt the need to vent his ire on someone, Graham being the handiest.
To save face, Elizabeth issued a statement saying that she was
“thrilled and delighted” for the newlyweds. Soon after, so as not to be outdone, she announced her own engagement to Victor Luna—though, in retrospect, it would seem that she had no real intention of marrying him.
During the course of the Broadway run, Elizabeth would be unable to appear more than a dozen times due to her “laryngitis.”
The play’s audiences attended faithfully, though, and responded enthusiastically. But word gets around pretty quickly on Times Square and attendance soon dwindled. It closed on July 17 after sixty-three performances and twelve previews, almost a month earlier than it was scheduled to end. It hardly mattered: A fourweek booking into the Forrest Theatre in Philadelphia began immediately, on July 20. The couple’s agent, Robert Lantz, recalls, “It was while we were in Philadelphia that a meal was planned for the newlyweds—
Richard and Sally—and the newly engaged couple—Elizabeth and Victor. Chen Sam, Elizabeth’s publicist, said, “After the show tonight, we shall all dine and get to know each other.’ Good Lord, I knew that was not a good idea.”
Lantz sat between Elizabeth and Richard, wisely keeping them separated. On Elizabeth’s left was Luna. On Richard’s right, Hay.
“Look at my ring, Robbie,” Elizabeth said, holding out her 368
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hand. “From my sweetheart, Victor. Oh, Robbie, we are just so happy,” she added, really putting it on, obviously trying to vex Richard.
“Why, it’s quite nice,” Lantz said as Elizabeth extended her hand in front of him.
Richard inspected the ring as well. “Hmmm. One carat, I see,”
he said dryly. “You are on a diet, aren’t you, luv?”
Everyone laughed nervously. Everyone, that is, but Elizabeth. Robert Lantz recalls, “Actually, the show they were doing off- stage was much more entertaining, I thought, than the one they were doing onstage.”
Elizabeth continued to have trouble during the run of Private Lives as she balanced the anxiety of working on a stage in front of a live audience with the stress of her private relationship with Burton—or what little there was left of it because he had set it up so that they were never alone together. His new wife was always present. Worse for Elizabeth—though undoubtedly best for Richard—he was not drinking. In her mind, he was never any fun sober, and his teetotalling only served to remind her that she was not doing the same, making her feel worse about herself. She also speculated that Sally was influencing him to stay sober for the run of the show. In Elizabeth’s mind, how dare Sally take better care of him than she herself might have in the same situation? The frustration and unhappiness ate away at her.
Robert Lantz recalls, “On a couple of nights in Philadelphia, Elizabeth was ill and an understudy went on in her place. It didn’t work. People wouldn’t even come to the theater when they heard Elizabeth was not going to appear. They had tickets, but didn’t show. Richard, who had not played to a half-empty house in living memory, was not happy to be put in this position, I can tell you that much. He was the theater star, not her. She was a movie star, yet she was the one they were coming to see in the theater . . . not him. It took a toll on him.”
“She was clearly putting him in his place,” says Patrick McMahon. “She was saying, ‘Look, you can go off and marry anyone Coming to Terms
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you want. You can humiliate me till the cows come home. But let it be known that I am still the bigger star . . . and if you aren’t convinced, take a look out into the audience when I’m not standing next to you on that stage, and tell me just how many empty seats you count.’ It was a psychodrama, all right.”
After stops in Washington and Chicago (where Elizabeth missed the opening night), Private Lives arrived with a big fanfare at the Wilshire Theatre in Los Angeles, where it began a ten-week run in October. “The minute the curtain went down, Jack Daniel’s was waiting in the wings,” Elizabeth would later recall. “It didn’t matter that we didn’t get good reviews. We still played to packed houses. No one was coming to see the English drawing room comedy anyway. Everyone bought tickets to watch high-camp ‘Liz and Dick.’ And we gave them what they wanted. I wanted to stop, to put an end to this torture, but the contract had to be fulfilled.”
The Private Lives tour finally ended in Los Angeles, in November 1983. The present author sat in the audience of their final performance. A memorable moment was one during which Elizabeth was to hit Richard with a pillow. She hit him so hard you could hear his grunt loud and clear, and it sounded painful. The audience laughed heartily, but there was something disquieting about it to anyone aware of Burton’s physical frailty at this time. The show went off without a hitch until the third act, when Elizabeth began throwing biscuits at someone in the first row, as if sharing a private joke with that person. From that point on, it seemed as if all bets were off as Elizabeth followed Richard’s lead of not sticking to the script. The two started making up dialogue as they went along. One would have thought they were doing a ske
tch for The Carol Burnett Show. It was as if they’d decided they’d had enough of Noël Coward’s nonsense and wanted to toss it aside in order to have some fun for the first time in months. The audience ate up their antics, as if finally being given entrée to the private lives of two celebrities whose public fame and notoriety had kept them on tenterhooks for almost a quarter of a century. When the stars took their bows, the crowd seemed not to want to let them go. As Eliz-370 Elizabeth
abeth and Richard stood at the edge of the stage clasping hands, there was a sense that this would be the last time they would ever be seen in public together. Elizabeth’s face was inscrutable. Who knew what was going through her mind? Still, the moment felt nostalgic before it had even passed.
Backstage, after that final performance of Private Lives, there was no heartfelt farewell between old lovers, no significant moment that Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton might take with them and remember for the rest of their lives. As much as Elizabeth’s life and times often seemed to reflect the pathos and melodrama of the best cinema, the truth of it was sometimes a bit less satisfying. In this situation, the reality was that after twenty-three years of loving one another while at the same time waging war on each other, she and Richard had simply worn themselves out. Earlier, she had given him a photograph of the two of them, set in a heart-shaped picture frame upon which had been engraved, “For Private Lives. To My Dearest Dickie. From ‘your second time’ in life.” Now there was nothing more for either of them to say or do or give to the other. Though Elizabeth at fifty-one, and Richard, fifty-seven, had each made in excess of a million dollars during the play’s run, both were left to wonder if it had been worth it. After the final performance, Elizabeth went to her dressing room and greeted the usual smattering of VIPs, thanking them for coming to the performance. When they had all been shuttled out, a wardrobe assistant came to fetch her glittering stage costume. She knocked on the door, and Elizabeth called her into the dressing room. Taylor was sitting in the room staring into a mirror, occasionally tipping back a glass of whiskey. Still wearing her wardrobe, she said, “No need to have this cleaned. It will be burned in a few hours.”
The assistant laughed awkwardly and told Elizabeth how honored she was to have worked with her. Taylor was gracious enough, but kept their exchange brief.
Before going, the wardrobe girl asked, “Is there anything I can do for you?”
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Only the sound of clinking ice cubes was heard for a moment. Then, without moving, Elizabeth said, “I’m just going to stay here a while. Sometimes miracles happen.”
No one knows if she was waiting for Richard to come say his good-byes, or whether she hoped for some other “miracle.” However, as it would happen, after that final show, Richard immediately went his own way with his new wife, back to Europe where the two would, at least he hoped, live a good and long life together. After waiting for about an hour, Elizabeth had little choice but to go her way as well . . . only alone.
Intervention
B y December 1983, Elizabeth Taylor’s friends and family were truly afraid for her life. “You would be talking to her and suddenly you would realize that she had passed out with her eyes open,” one intimate recalled. “She would appear to be dead, her breathing so light. You would call an ambulance. They would rush her to Cedars [hospital], sirens blazing. They would save her.
“The next day she would be released, drinking from a flask and taking pills in the car on the way home, thanks to all of her enablers, the kiss-asses who surrounded her and refused to tell her no. She’d spend hours on the phone, talking to anyone who would listen. It was always about Richard and how he had hurt her but how she would take him back again if he wanted her; about Victor, and why he meant nothing to her; and she would go all the way back to Eddie Fisher and what a jerk he had been to try to get money out of her when they divorced. Then, again, another scare and back to the hospital, sirens blazing.”
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Then, home the next day for more liquor, more pills—days and nights blending together in a haze of alcohol and drugs and misery. Watching her old movies on TV, passed out in front of the set, it was a slow descent into a Norma Desmond–like madness. She thought that she had come to terms with her life and her past when married to Senator John Warner and living in Virginia. However, what she’d actually done was something comparable to poking around at her deepest wounds and causing them to bleed profusely without then caring for them. Within just a few years, she was worse off than she’d been in Virginia. Now, as she would tell it, she was “awash with self-pity and self-disgust.”
During one of her hospitalizations—this one for colitis—on Monday, December 5, she awakened to a room full of visitors. Her brother, Howard, was present, having just flown in from New Mexico, as were three of her children, Christopher and Michael Wilding and Liza Todd, who had come from New York. Also present was her good friend Roddy McDowall, and her doctor. At first she was surprised that they had all come to visit at the same time.
“How nice,” she thought. She was happy to see them. However, that feeling didn’t last long. Each took a folding chair and put it at her bedside, encircling her. Each then began telling her that they couldn’t bear to see what she was doing to herself. They wanted her to get help, they said, and they would not leave until she agreed to it. Then each of them read from a prepared paper, a litany of transgressions, how she had hurt them, how she had embarrassed them, how she had humiliated herself. She would later say that she didn’t even remember half of the incidents they’d pointed out to her. They each ended by saying that if she didn’t get off of drugs, they were certain that she would soon kill herself. Howard in particular was choked up and barely able to get the words out. It was clear that he hated seeing his sister, of whom he had been so proud, destroy herself.
Of course, this was a so-called intervention, and she knew it right away. When she looked up at them from her sickbed, all she could see was the pain in their eyes. It hit her hard that she was Coming to Terms
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the cause of it. Howard said that they wanted to take her to a
“clinic,” as he called it, to help her reconcile not only her drinking and drug habits, but also her emotional problems. “Well, I need time to think about it,” Elizabeth said, unsure how to proceed. “I need two hours,” she decided.
“No, we have a car downstairs and we are going now,” Liza said.
“Listen, stop being so bossy,” Elizabeth told her, now being firm. “This has to be my decision.”
After they left her room, she began to ruminate on what they’d just told her. She’d always thought of herself as the one to make decisions about her future, and now she was being told that she must do something she wasn’t sure she wanted to do. However, she also couldn’t imagine living another day in such despair and, worse yet, inflicting it upon her loved ones. She knew that the decision would have to be hers, though . . . or she would never follow through with it. She also knew, as she would later explain, that she must have really hit rock bottom or her friends and family would never have gone to such great lengths. When they were gone, she thought about every word her friends and family had said to her, and she knew that they were right. After all, she did have a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in her hospital room, didn’t she? And she was mixing the drink with Demerol. She was killing herself—only she was so high, she didn’t realize it—and she didn’t want to die, that much she knew. How many times had she willed herself back from the brink . . . only to now end up at a possible point of no return?
In two hours, everyone returned to her room. Elizabeth told them that she would go with them. They dressed her, checked her out of the hospital, put her into a car, and drove her two hours from Los Angeles to Rancho Mirage, a suburb of Palm Springs. There Elizabeth Taylor would check into the Betty Ford Center, where she would begin the next chapter of her life. 374
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/> Betty Ford Center
E lizabeth Taylor didn’t know what to expect of the Betty Ford Center when she was driven to its front entrance on Monday night, December 5, 1983. At that time, the Center was not as widely known as it would become in later years, having only recently been founded in October 1982 by former First Lady Betty Ford. Like Elizabeth’s intervention conducted by her family in her hospital room, President Gerald Ford and the four Ford children had confronted Mrs. Ford with her own addiction to alcohol and prescription drugs. After Mrs. Ford was treated for her own alcohol and chemical dependency at the United States Naval Hospital in Long Beach, she sought to establish a treatment center that was, at first, to be targeted to women’s needs. The Betty Ford Center is comprised of nine complexes alongside a man-made pond called Lake Hope in the middle of a desert oasis. Surrounded by rolling sand dunes and verdant hillsides, it soon became a facility for men and women, with half of its space devoted to each, the quarters always separate. Elizabeth put the Center in the news by being the first major celebrity to seek treatment there. After her highly publicized treatment, many dozens of celebrities would follow her example—Liza Minnelli (whose sister, Lorna Luft, would organize an intervention and bring Liza to the Betty Ford Center just a month after Elizabeth), Mary Tyler Moore, Johnny Cash, Robert Downey Jr., Tony Curtis, Don Johnson, and even Eddie Fisher. But in December 1983, Elizabeth was the first. (Her longtime friend and fellow MGM contract player Peter Lawford was there at the same time. Later Elizabeth said, sadly, “He didn’t make it.” He died of liver and kidney disease a year later.) Her friend the columnist Liz Smith recalls, “It’s hard to remember that the reaction to it was such shock. Now when stars go into the Betty Ford Center, it’s a big yawn. But back then, it was really startling. It wasn’t her style to be too secretive, though. She’s very frank and up-front. I suppose she felt that if she had the Coming to Terms
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