Elizabeth

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

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  courage to say she was an alcoholic we should all have the courage to accept it and treat it respectfully. It was an enormous sort of scandal at the time. Now it just seems like she did the right thing.”

  Elizabeth was dropped off at the front door of the Betty Ford Center, her friends and family not permitted to enter with her or spend a great deal of time saying good-bye. The coddling of a superstar was to end immediately. A nurse’s aid met her at the door and walked her to a sparse room with two beds—which cost about

  $150 per night. She had no makeup and no clothes, except for those on her back. “I thought, well at least there’ll be tea in the room,” she later told Helen Gurley Brown. “Forget it, darling. Nothing!”

  For the next seven weeks, Elizabeth would wear jeans and sweaters, or athletic wear. She would rise at 6:30 a.m. for breakfast at seven. She would keep a regimented schedule, eat in the cafeteria with the others, do daily chores, and attend meetings similar to those of Alcoholics Anonymous. Though there are no bars on the windows, no locks on the front doors (“It’s your honor that keeps you there,” she would later explain), on that first night she was scared, more terrified, she would admit, than she’d ever been in the past.

  The first week was spent detoxifying. She went through terrible episodes of withdrawal, as one can imagine given the amount of time she’d depended upon alcohol and drugs. It didn’t make matters any easier for her when she began to feel what she would call “an unauthorized presence at the clinic.” She called Betty Ford—and it’s probably a safe bet to say that none of the other patients were able to call Mrs. Ford personally, but Betty was Elizabeth’s sponsor—to tell her that she had a feeling that she was being watched by paparazzi. After so many years of being scrutinized, she had a sixth sense about such things. Of course, she was right. Days later, pictures of her in her robe sitting on a patio, taken by a camera’s telephoto lens, would find their way to the front pages of tabloids around the world. By that time, though, 376

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  Elizabeth and Betty had made an announcement about her treatment to beat the media to the punch with the story. Four days into her treatment, she would begin to keep a journal about her treatment for alcoholism and drug addiction. All of the patients were instructed to do so; hers was in a blue notebook. On Friday, December 9, she wrote:

  “I’ve been here since Monday night, one of the strangest and most frightening nights of my life. Not to mention lonely. But I am not alone. There are people here just like me, who are suffering just like me, who hurt inside and out, just like me, people I’ve learned to love. It’s an experience unlike any other I’ve known. Nobody wants anything from anybody else, except to share and help. It’s probably the first time since I was nine that nobody’s wanted to exploit me. Now, the bad news. I feel like hell. I’m going through withdrawal. My heart feels big and pounding. I can feel the blood rush through my body. I can almost see it, running like red water over the boulders in my pain filled neck and shoulders, then through my ears and into my pounding head. My eyelids flutter. Oh God, I am so, so tired.”

  It would take a week before she would be able to say the words that would mark her first step toward recovery: “Hello. My name is Elizabeth, and I’m an alcoholic and a drug addict.”

  It was in group therapy that Elizabeth was finally forced to face the truth about herself. It wasn’t easy for her to speak about her personal problems in front of strangers. After all, she’s not just a mere celebrity, she is one of the most famous women on the planet, arguably a cultural icon. Everyone knew they were in the presence of a so-called “living legend,” and they knew all about her, or at least they thought they knew about her, based on what they’d read in the media. Therefore, it was difficult for her to be candid. She didn’t have the cloak of anonymity that gave the others the freedom to be open about their lives and mistakes without having to worry about being harshly, and personally, judged. However, she had always been set apart from others, hadn’t she? It had been her story since childhood. She’d married and divorced in the Coming to Terms

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  public eye. She’d had her children in the public eye. She’d mourned a husband and other friends in the public eye. If she’d done all of that with the world watching, surely, she figured, she could come to terms with it in the presence of just eleven strangers.

  One woman who attended many sessions of group therapy with Elizabeth recalls, “She was completely without artifice, totally unpretentious, so much so that when she would casually drop a sentence such as, ‘You know, that reminds me of the time Eddie and I fought about Debbie,’ or ‘I just remembered a huge fight I had with Richard,’ it was a little jarring because you knew exactly who she was talking about. These were people we had grown up with, seen as celebrities. But, to her, they were just people who’d passed through her life. If it took her a few beats to adjust, I can tell you that it took many of us equal time to do the same thing. It’s not every day you sit in a room with Elizabeth Taylor and have her cleanse her soul about something she and Richard Burton fought about while making Cleopatra.”

  Another complication for Elizabeth had to do with accepting that she would be challenged by the others in her group. She had long been accustomed to people simply agreeing with her, never denying her anything. She certainly wasn’t used to being contradicted, except, perhaps, by Richard Burton. Indeed, one of the reasons she’d been able to indulge herself with all of the alcohol and drugs she could consume was because she was an entitled person living an entitled life . . . no questions asked. “But in group therapy, you’re up for grabs,” she would later observe. “People call you on everything. You can tell when somebody is hiding behind lies. After a while, all of your gimmicks and tricks are stripped away. You’re raw, defenseless. That’s when it starts being constructive.”

  “Again she was entirely able to adjust from being a grand diva to being just one of us,” said the woman from her group therapy.

  “She actually appreciated being put in her place. Once, she told an emotional story about her father, the details of which I would 378

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  never reveal. Anyway, when she finished I just thought she was full of it. ‘That’s a load of baloney,’ I told her. Everyone held their breaths for her reaction, and she just laughed and said, ‘Jesus Christ! You’re right! It is! I’m so used to telling that story that way, I have almost forgotten what really happened. Now, here’s what really happened . . .’ And then she told the story again, and this time honestly.

  “I thought she was an amazing woman, far more complex and thoughtful than I ever would have imagined based on her public persona. At first, everyone was pulling for her to get sober so she could continue living the fabulous life we all believed she’d been living up until that time. But after many weeks of getting to know her, we started wanting her to live a new life, a better life, because we grew to love and appreciate her. At that point, it was time for all of us, not just her, to let go of the fantasy of Elizabeth Taylor’s world and begin to deal with the reality of it.”

  Of course, Elizabeth faced problems the others in her group could never truly understand, try as they might. She’d been a star since childhood, her life often mirroring and, just as often, contradicting the film roles in which she’d immersed herself. Her world was built on illusion, on pretense. Going back to her first marriage with the abusive Nicky Hilton, she didn’t know anything about love and romance other than how it had been scripted for her in Father of the Bride. It was a rude awakening, then, when she discovered that there could be a dark and abusive side to marriage. Similar disappointments would follow as she and others around her endeavored to separate her true self and her true experiences from the mythology of who she played on the screen. It’s easy for outsiders to judge a movie star’s identity crisis by saying of her work, “Oh, please! That’s just make-believe. Get over it.”

  However, for a woman who’s lived in a place of unreality for
the better part of her years, it was often difficult for her to separate her personality from that of the characters she’d portrayed in front of a camera.

  Also, the fact that Elizabeth never had a “real” childhood was Coming to Terms

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  something that had bothered her for years, but she said she didn’t realize how much an issue it was for her until it came up during therapy at the Betty Ford Center.

  “She had been working since the age of nine,” said a friend of hers who has talked at length with her about her recovery.

  “Frankly, she felt cheated. She felt, somehow, wronged. But she didn’t feel she could complain about it because, after all, who would listen? ‘Who was going to feel sorry for Elizabeth Taylor?’

  she told me. ‘I felt silly being upset about it, as if my feelings had to be suppressed.’ In fact, she blamed her parents. Why couldn’t her father have tempered her mother’s ambition so that she could have had a more normal lifestyle? She had to work through it to come to terms with the fact that even though her life was not the norm, it was what it was . . . and she became who she was and had the privileged life she’d had partially as a result of her mother’s persistence and determination. ‘It certainly wasn’t Mother’s fault that I drank and ate and took pills once I became a star,’ she told me. That was her choice. It was how she had decided to reconcile her fame, the pressures of her lifestyle and public image versus her private self. ‘And, by God, I’m not going to spend another minute punishing my poor mother for my mistakes,’ she told me.”

  As well as trying to discern her true identity as a woman, Elizabeth obviously had to come to terms with many years of selfabuse with alcohol and drugs—that was the primary reason, after all, why she was at the Betty Ford Center. She admitted that for the last thirty-five years she was not able to drop off into a good night’s slumber unless she took at least two sleeping pills. When asked to sit down and actually count, she tallied at least twenty major operations over the recent years, so it was no wonder that drugs had become such a crutch to her. She confessed that she didn’t only take medication when she was in pain, though. She would take pills to feel comfortable in social situations. Percodan had become her drug of choice, which she would always take with a couple of drinks.

  Through therapy, she began to clarify in her mind that most of 380

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  her actions regarding not only Richard but also her other husbands were made while either drinking or coming out of an alcoholic haze. Combined with all of the drugs she was taking, is it any wonder that her marriages were always filled with such confusion and hostility? It was difficult for her—as she would later tell it—

  to reconcile that she’d made so many life-altering decisions while under the influence of alcohol and drugs. However, it was the truth, and there was no escaping it. She’d apparently even tried to kill herself, and maybe even twice! Now it was impossible for her to fathom that she’d ever thought life was not worth living. The only thing she could do was forgive herself and everyone else, go forth with her life of sobriety . . . and pray for the best. Perhaps the most important element of her treatment at the Betty Ford Center had to do with the cultivation of an inner life. Prior to being admitted to the Center, the most time Elizabeth Taylor had ever spent analyzing her years on this planet was when she was married to John Warner and found herself in self-imposed semiretirement as his wife. She’d come to certain significant decisions at that time, most having to do with her loss of identity and her need to lose weight in order to once again feel a sense of pride about herself. However, unguided by professional mental health care workers, any true dissection of her life and times usually led to heavy drinking and the taking of medications to dull the pain of bad memories as they came flooding back to her. At the Betty Ford Center, therapists were present to guide her through her tumultuous history and to assist her in coming to terms with it. It soon became clear to her that her unsupervised evaluations of the past were largely responsible for her having become so reattached and even obsessed with Richard Burton. In wondering if things could have been different with him, in trying to figure out why she was still so confused about her marriages to him, she felt compelled to revisit the past by bringing it into her present. Thus all of the unfortunate business with Burton during her fiftieth birthday party in London and then the subsequent nightmare with him in Private Lives.

  Coming to Terms

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  Though it was a difficult seven weeks, the time would have a great impact on her and inform who she would now be as a woman who no longer depended on alcohol and drugs. Of course, it was less than two months. It had taken her probably more than thirty years to get to the point where she would finally admit that she needed help. During the next year, Elizabeth would return to the Center for periodic outpatient therapy sessions to gauge her progress. After all, the Betty Ford Center does not offer its patients a quick fix, but rather the tools to use to maintain their sobriety in the outside world. Still, it’s just a few months, or even a few years in some cases, in a person’s life, certainly not enough to guarantee any kind of results considering the complicated psychology of addiction. Indeed, when a sober Elizabeth Taylor was finally released from the Betty Ford Center on January 20, 1984, she realized that the real work of her lifetime was still ahead of her. Richard Burton Dies

  E lizabeth Taylor was at home with her daughter Maria in Bel Air, California, on August 6, 1984, when the call came from her publicist, Chen Sam. Richard Burton’s longtime associate, Valerie Douglas, had just phoned Chen to give her the most dreadful news, and now she had the terrible task of passing it on to Elizabeth: Richard Burton was dead. Chen tried to fill Elizabeth in on the details: A day and a half earlier, on August 4, Richard had complained of a headache. His wife of thirteen months, Sally, thinking it nothing serious, gave him a couple of aspirins. Burton and John Hurt, with whom he’d just finished the movie 1984 (based on 382

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  George Orwell’s book), had gone out drinking the night before, and Sally assumed that Richard simply had a hangover. That evening, he went to bed early in order to read and make some notes in his journal, as he often did before retiring. Sally joined him shortly thereafter. The next morning when she awoke, she found her husband’s breathing labored and she had trouble awakening him. She called for an ambulance, which took him to a local hospital, where it was determined that the problem was serious. Apparently, he’d had a brain hemorrhage. Richard was transported to a hospital in Geneva. Once there, he underwent surgery. Sally went back to the Burton chalet in Céligny to make some calls, but she had no sooner gotten there than she was summoned back to the hospital. Richard had died. If he had pulled through the surgery, Sally was told, he probably would have been wheelchair-bound and unable to speak. All who knew Richard believed he wouldn’t have wanted to live that way. Without the ability to communicate, life would have been torturous for him. So, in keeping with his no-nonsense approach to living, at fiftyeight, with no foreshadowing that his bombastic life was coming to a close, it had. His final entry in his journal: “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow . . . Our revels now are ended.”

  Richard and his brother Graham Jenkins had had a conversation about Elizabeth three weeks before Richard died. Richard had said that he missed Elizabeth “all the time,” but he had come to the realization that he was too old and ill for her to be able to take care of him. His life with her certainly hadn’t worked out as he’d hoped. He had imagined that they would grow old together and live in peace with one another, though he couldn’t fathom why he felt that way since it had never been like that between them. In the end, he was glad that he’d found Sally. “She knows how to take care of an old man,” he said wistfully. Before they parted, as he embraced his brother, his greatest love was still on his mind.

  “You know, Elizabeth and I never really split up,” he told Graham.

  “And we never will.” It reminded Graham of a recent visit to Eliz
abeth’s home. In every room and in every hallway, he would re-Coming to Terms 383

  call, there were framed photographs of Richard. “He’s where I can keep an eye on him,” she explained with a smile. “And he’d better believe it.”

  Elizabeth was, as one would expect, crushed by the news of Richard’s death, as was, of course, Maria—Burton was the only father she’d ever known. Elizabeth fainted. When revived, she called Victor Luna and asked him to be with her. He wasn’t exactly helpful. “I knew she would be devastated, shattered,” Luna said, “but I didn’t expect her to become completely hysterical. I could not get her to stop crying. She was completely out of control. I realized then how deeply she was tied to this man, how vital a role he had played in her life. And I realized I could never have that special place in her heart she keeps for Burton. For me, the romance was over, and I told Elizabeth that.” One can only hope that he waited to deliver that bit of news. In truth, she was over him anyway, and would not have put up much of a fight. He had given her a sixteen-and-a-half-carat sapphire-and-diamond engagement ring from Cartier, worth almost $300,000. It was one ring she happily returned.

  For the next few days after Richard’s death, Elizabeth sat in front of the television, numb and unaware of the passing of time. Diane Stevens called; the two hadn’t spoken in some time since Stevens had moved to Paris to be with her ill mother. She said that when she called, Elizabeth told her she was looking through a scrapbook of photos of her and Richard. “I’m so sorry about Rich,” Diane told her via long-distance telephone. “I know how much you loved him.”

  “You were there for so much of it so, yes, I think you do know how we felt about each other,” Elizabeth said. “Most people, I’m afraid, don’t get it.”

  “Would you like me to fly in and be with you?” Diane asked her.

  “I’ll be fine,” Elizabeth said. “My God, the trouble we caused each other,” she said with a small chuckle as she apparently thumbed through the photographs before her. She mentioned that she’d been afraid to feel anything at all for the last couple of days 384