Furious Love (29 page)

Elizabeth wanted to attend the awards ceremony, and Jack Warner, head of Warner Bros., wanted her there. He had even sent a telegram to her in Nice, begging, “Do not burn the bridges you have built.” Elizabeth, of course, had already won her Oscar for
BUtterfield 8
, but she held out hope that there would be a double win for husband and wife—a first in the history of the award.

Elizabeth was urged to attend, knowing it would be a great triumph for her. She was a sure bet to beat out her competition: Vanessa Redgrave in a small but scintillating role in
Morgan
, Lynn Redgrave in
Georgy Girl
, Anouk Aimée in the very adult
A Man and a Woman
, and the older Russian actress Ida Kaminska for
The Shop on Main Street.
Richard, some felt, couldn't bear the fact that Elizabeth might win and he might lose. He decided not to attend.

Perhaps in a bid to dissuade her from attending, Richard told Elizabeth that he had dreamed her plane had crashed returning to California, and that it was he who found her body. So Elizabeth stepped out of her hotel bedroom in Nice and announced to her entourage that she had decided to stay with Richard. Her official excuse was that Richard was still shooting
The Comedians
, so neither one of them could leave. Just the idea that Richard might lose—and lose in front of 150 million people—was more than either one of them could bear.

And, in fact, Richard did lose. Paul Scofield won, as did his director, Fred Zinnemann, as did
A Man for All Seasons
, taking the Oscar for Best Picture. To deepen the loss, Scofield—whom Burton liked
and admired—was often pointed out to him as the Shakespearean actor who did
not
abandon the stage for movies. Scofield had made but a handful of films—
A Man for All Seasons
was only his fourth—but his performance had earned him a Golden Globe as well as the New York Film Critics Circle Award. Of the two roles—the sainted, historical figure, Sir Thomas More, versus Albee's wounded and cuckolded history professor, George—there was no contest for sentimental favorite. It didn't matter that Scofield had ably and nobly recreated his stage role for film, whereas Burton had created George wholly from his own psyche, a more emotionally challenging feat. If Shirley MacLaine had lost her Academy Award to a tracheotomy back in 1961, then Richard Burton had lost to a saint.

Mike Nichols—who lost his Best Director nomination to Fred Zinnemann—understood how Burton felt. “He was always very aware of what the other guys were doing that he wasn't,” he later said. “The plays of Olivier, the plays of Scofield—what he felt he should be doing, and what he feared he was doing instead.”

Although Burton sent Scofield a congratulatory telegram (and Scofield sent an appeasing cable to Burton), Richard wrote in his diary, “…we heard that E. had won the Oscar and I hadn't! Bloody cheek. But P. Scofield won, so that's alright.” Indeed, he was proud of Elizabeth's much-deserved win, and he was gentlemanly and almost cavalier about his loss, but it hurt him. As for Elizabeth, it probably hurt her in Hollywood that she'd chosen not to show up for their most important ceremony. She had been their darling, and this was her fourth nomination and her second win, and the Hollywood community was really behind her this time—this wasn't a sympathy win. She had earned the award. It wasn't a good thing that she'd stayed away.

Sammy Davis Jr. had known Elizabeth since her
National Velvet
days and was often Elizabeth's guest when Richard was onstage in
Hamlet
, seeing it fifteen times “and never tiring of it.” Davis had even
been in Rome with his then-wife May Britt when
Le Scandale
broke. He knew that “Richard's name was mud with 20th Century-Fox” in 1963, because the studio saw the love affair as a threat to their multimillion-dollar investment in Elizabeth Taylor. “Richard has to be accepted back in the fold,” Sammy Davis Jr. would later write; “he needs the respect of his peers. He needs that Oscar.”

Burton handled his disappointments by continuing to drink, and he confided in his diary the ill effects that alcohol was having on him. “I drank steadily all day long yesterday,” he wrote on May 10, 1967. “Today I shall not drink at all while working. I don't know why I drink so much. I'm not unhappy and I really don't like it very much—I mean the booze itself.” Elizabeth tried valiantly to bring him out of his dark mood. “Elizabeth joined us for lunch,” he wrote on May 30. “She was gay and sweet but nothing could drag me out of my tantrum.”

In June of that year, Burton had taken part in a race at Maria's grade school. They were concerned that Maria, after numerous operations, might feel vulnerable competing with her schoolmates in physical contests, such as beanbag throwing, sack races, and obstacle races. Burton signed up for “the father's race,” but after having consumed three Bloody Marys, he came in twentieth. It bothered him enough that he described it in his diary, vowing to go into training for it the next time. Richard loved his and Elizabeth's children. They were truly a family now, and when Eddie Fisher made one last-ditch effort to win custody of Liza Todd later that year, Burton threw down the gauntlet. “Over my dead body,” he roared, and Fisher backed off.

Four months later, Richard went on the wagon for a while, but Elizabeth continued to drink, making it more difficult for him to remain sober. By November, a few days before his forty-first birthday, Burton went on a two-day bender. He insulted Bob Wilson, and made a pass at Maria's nurse, Karen. He immediately felt guilty and apologized profusely to Elizabeth the next morning. She laughed it off, more concerned that it had embarrassed the nurse than that it was a sign that Burton's eye was beginning to wander.

Despite these gathering clouds, the Burtons had had a spectacular five years that saw the release of six money-making films, four Academy Award nominations, and Elizabeth's win for
Virginia Woolf
. When Richard had told the
LOOK
reporter that he thought American tastes were changing in their acceptance of more difficult, challenging films, he could take credit for helping to bring about that change. But the tide was beginning to turn on the Burton-Taylor juggernaut, just as Richard was losing control of his deadly dance with alcohol.
Doctor Faustus
,
The Comedians
, and now
Reflections in a Golden Eye—
three ambitious and grown-up films—would be sent packing by the critics and the general public. Little did they know what lay in store for them: a roadside bomb called
Boom!
, which would dramatically alter the landscape.

S
oaring high on the accolades heaped upon them for
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
, the Burtons next took on another artistic, and therefore risky, project—
Boom!
, based on Tennessee Williams's play
The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore
. It would be directed by Joseph Losey and filmed on a craggy mountaintop set in Sardinia, surrounded by the sparkling Mediterranean, from a screenplay adaptation written by Tennessee himself. It was to the Burtons' credit that they used their star power to make literary, not especially commercial, films—
The Taming of the Shrew
,
Doctor Faustus
,
Reflections in a Golden Eye
—and now a somewhat cryptic, highly eccentric movie based on a Broadway play that had flopped twice—first with Hermione Baddeley, then with Tallulah Bankhead in the lead role. But given Elizabeth's unforgettable performances in
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
and
Suddenly, Last Summer
, and Richard's in
The Night of the Iguana
, the Burtons had always had great luck with Tennessee Williams.

However, it took a little persuasion on all sides. Tennessee had wanted Simone Signoret to play Flora “Cissy” Goforth, the ailing, seventy-three-year-old reclusive millionaire who's buried six husbands and who rules an island in the Mediterranean, and Sean Connery to play Chris Flanders, the poetry-spouting “Angelo del Morte” (played previously by Tab Hunter on Broadway), known to seduce and dispatch elderly ladies.

Losey wanted to pair Ingrid Bergman with the English actor James Fox, but Bergman had turned down the role as too vulgar (“I can't say the word ‘bugger' without blushing,” she'd told the director). Losey needed the Burtons because he needed the money.

An American expatriate living abroad after being blacklisted in the States in the 1950s, Losey had refashioned a career in Europe as the auteur of psychologically brooding films. Losey had directed several well-regarded movies, such as
The Boy with Green Hair
in 1948,
The Servant
in 1963, and the pop-art, spy parody
Modesty Blaise
in 1966, but he was having trouble raising the $1.4 million he needed to make
Boom!

The Burtons were already spending the summer in the Mediterranean aboard a chartered luxury yacht, the
Odysseia.
In port, they visited frequently with Rex Harrison and his Welsh wife, Rachel Roberts, at the Harrisons' home in Portofino, where Richard and Elizabeth had once hidden away during the height of
Le Scandale
. The Burtons' involvement in
Boom!
was born at the Harrisons' home, and later, over drinks and dinner at La Gritta Bar in Santa Margherita Ligure with their agent Hugh French and producer John Heyman. Heyman also advised the Burtons on tax shelters; and his wife, Norma, would become one of Elizabeth's closest friends.

Losey flew to Portofino to meet with the Burtons, but, to his chagrin, he was sitting on his hotel balcony having breakfast when he saw the
Odysseia
leave port. He finally caught up with them aboard their yacht, where Losey was immediately ushered to the bar. Richard showed off a check he'd received for $1.25 million, the Burtons' first
quarter profit from
The Taming of the Shrew
, which he'd plucked out of a script. He was using it as a bookmark.

Losey next showed up at the Harrisons' villa, bemoaning the fact that he was unable to raise the funds to make
The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore
, as it was still being called at the time. Later, at dinner portside, Tennessee Williams arrived with his companion Billy Barnes, very drunk and fresh from a recent suicide attempt, his words an angry blur. Elizabeth begged Tennessee to lower his voice, as people were beginning to stare. “Call me Tom,” he insisted, suddenly requiring everyone to call him by his given name, which he had abandoned decades ago.

The next night they moved their traveling feast to the yacht's bar, where Rachel Roberts became “stupendously drunk” and “uncontrollable.” It would turn out to be an evening that even Tennessee Williams would have had a hard time imagining. When she began abusing her husband, Rex Harrison—“sexually, morally, physically, and in every other way,” Burton recorded—Tennessee, certainly no prude, asked to leave.

Suddenly, Rachel dropped to the floor of the bar and started barking like a dog, exciting the real dogs—Elizabeth's Pekingese and Rachel's basset hound. Thoroughly drunk, Rachel began masturbating her dog, “a lovely, sloppy old dog called Omar,” Burton wrote. (Every living thing seemed to be in a high state of arousal that summer in Sardinia, as Burton noted in his diary that their two dogs “have been making love now since last Sunday, at least three times a day. Who would have thought that dogs in heat went on so long?…O'Fie's penis is beginning to look the worse for wear.”) Elizabeth and Richard tried talking sense to the intoxicated woman; she answered them by again turning on her husband and cursing his three former wives.

At some point during the three-day bacchanal, Elizabeth agreed to star in
Boom!
as long as Richard would be cast opposite her as Chris Flanders. Elizabeth was much too young and gorgeous to play the
seventy-three-year-old dying millionairess, and Richard was too old to play the gigolo-poet, in a love duet similar to the December-May romances of Tennessee's
Orpheus Descending
and
Sweet Bird of Youth.
No matter. The roles would be changed to accommodate the Burtons. Losey was pleased, because it meant he could now raise the money, although once Richard and Elizabeth came onboard, the budget jumped to $4.5 million, which included $1.25 million for each of them.

There was another slight problem—or not so slight. Losey thought both of his stars had put on too much weight. He managed to sneak in an expensive French salt substitute into the meals for his “overweight stars.” It worked, or perhaps it was Elizabeth's tendency to “bloom in hot climates,” because she is, again, stunning on film. Dressed mostly in white caftans, she seems to catch the light, which gives her skin a preternatural glow. Burton, too, looks golden, dashing about in Goforth's dead husband's samurai robe, though a tad world-weary to play the young gigolo.

The Goforth villa was built entirely on location, with blindingly whitewashed walls, a vast terrace, and open archways where pale muslin curtains lifted seductively on the breeze. The travertine marble used to construct the $500,000 set came from the same quarry that had been used for the Colosseum in
AD
80. Stark and stunning, the villa looks both ancient and futuristic, surrounded by Easter Island heads. It took fifty-six workmen to bring up the travertine and cement to construct the set. (After work, covered in cement dust and plaster, the workmen would dive into the Mediterranean to wash themselves clean.) In the middle of filming, a huge gale came out of the sea and wreaked havoc, nearly destroying the white villa, which had to be rebuilt.

Despite the remoteness of the setting, the international press flocked to Sardinia to cover the shoot. The public was still hungry for any news of the Burtons, even in their third year of marriage. Their status as worldwide celebrities—“superstars”—showed no signs of abating. Any distinction between their on-and off-screen love life
didn't exist; they had become who they were portraying. That was part of their power, but it would also prove dangerous. They could no longer disappear into their characters: they
overwhelmed
them. Elizabeth, after all, had already been dubbed too spectacular to play the quiet librarian in
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
. Audiences were finding it too difficult to suspend disbelief, unless she played a character as larger-than-life as she was. Or played herself.

Right from the opening scene of
Boom!
, we're in that strange territory where art imitates life, as Burton/Chris Flanders jumps into a boat hired by journalists circling Cissy Goforth's island. (The boat, incidentally, is piloted by Elizabeth's brother, Howard Taylor.) Inside her villa, Goforth's wealth is conveyed in the film by a huge entourage—servants, two Indian musicians playing sitars, guards, a masseuse, a manicurist, a hairdresser, a personal physician, and “Blackie,” a private secretary engaged to help her write her memoirs. As she dictates her book, we learn she's had six husbands (to Elizabeth's five), the last of whom died horribly in a tragic accident (as had Mike Todd). Playing “the richest woman in the world,” in one scene, Elizabeth wears a Kabuki-style robe that weighed forty-two pounds and was festooned with over 21,000 beads hand-stitched by Italian seamstresses. She also wears some of her own jewels in the film, most notably, the spectacular, 29.4-carat diamond ring given to her by Todd (which she liked to call her “ice-skating rink”). Like Elizabeth, Cissy Goforth suffers from debilitating back pain, for which she receives injections and massages. And the Burtons' real-life friend, Noël Coward, plays Goforth's friend, “The Witch of Capri,” an
artiste
who is first seen being carried aloft on a chair up the craggy rocks to Goforth's villa, for a
dinner-à-deux
. When he arrives, Cissy Goforth—bedecked in a shimmering white caftan and a Las-Vegas-showgirl-style headdress—serves him a monstrous baked fish that repulses him. It was an added attraction for Elizabeth to work with Noël Coward, and between scenes, they gossiped wickedly about the other actors.

The parallel universe of the movie, not surprisingly, was made
much of in the promotional materials for the film, circulated to theater managers by Universal–World Film Services. “SHE OUTLIVED SIX RICH MEN,” it proclaimed in boldface. “…HE WAS A TAKER ALL HIS LIFE…
they do things you've never seen before!
” More modestly, however, the promotional booklet reveals, “Elizabeth Taylor is seriously considering going into semiretirement within a few years. The superstar…at the zenith of her career, declares that she would be quite content simply as Mrs. Richard Burton.” After all, this was her third Tennessee Williams film adaptation, her eighth movie with Burton, and the fortieth movie of her long career. She'd had enough, and her private life was now far more interesting to her than her film career—that is, if she could separate them. “Once you're up there on that last rung, you can only go down,” she's quoted as saying. “I don't want to be pushed off. I want to walk down with all the dignity I can summon—and not with crutches.”

The Witch of Capri was originally written as a female character. In fact, Losey had first asked Katharine Hepburn if she wanted the role; far from being interested, she was insulted (by the role's campiness or its brevity?) and she turned him down. He then offered it to Dirk Bogarde, who had costarred in Losey's
The Servant
and
Modesty Blaise.
“No thank you,” he said. But Coward, the witty, insouciant playwright, actor, and entertainer, was delighted by the opportunity to work with his friends the Burtons, and in that beautiful setting. He loved the hotel he was housed in, the Capo Cacchio, which was perched high above “a picture-postcard sea.” When he wasn't filming a scene, he investigated the little coves and beaches nearby, baking under the hot sun, then plunging into the bracing waters of the Mediterranean. And he had been flattered when Tennessee Williams left a note for him at his hotel: “[P]lease feel completely free to alter any part of the dialogue you see fit,” a profound compliment from one great writer to another.

Rounding out the cast is Joanna Shimkus, a lovely, lithe former cover girl making her film debut as Goforth's secretary, and Michael Dunn, the diminutive actor who had been nominated for an Academy
Award for his supporting role in
Ship of Fools
, playing the sadistic guard of Goforth Island, the keeper of the dogs who attack Burton/Chris when he arrives on the island.

Sardinia's natural setting—the blazing blue sky, the hot sun, the baked cliffs—was so starkly beautiful the Burtons thought about buying land there. In fact, their $250,000 investment in Tenerife two years earlier had already doubled in value. They invited Losey to come in on a land deal with them, but, ultimately, nothing ever came of it. The Burtons' yacht was moored in the rocks just under the constructed villa, and they didn't need the money.

Losey loved the Burtons' spectacular wealth and high consumption—he loved the drinking, the rows, the delight they took in their food. He noticed that each morning, when they arrived with their entourage, they began their day with large Bloody Marys. One morning during filming, the Burtons' trailer tipped over and tumbled down the steep hillside. Losey was aghast to see red liquid oozing over the rocks, until he discovered it was the tomato juice for their Bloody Marys.

Elizabeth would be the first to admit that she adored food and drink. “Our credo might have been ‘Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we report to work,'” she wrote in her 1987 memoir-cum-diet-book,
Elizabeth Takes Off
. But for Elizabeth, that kind of indulgence was dangerous to her profession. While Richard seldom gained an ounce, nor did his prodigious alcohol intake seem to damage his amazing memory, Elizabeth gained weight easily and had to work at taking it off—and she hated exercise. Even as early as 1959, when, at twenty-seven, she appeared in that revealing white bathing suit in
Suddenly, Last Summer
, Joe Mankiewicz had told her to lose weight and “tighten up those muscles. It looks like you've got bags of dead mice under your arms.” It seems hard to believe that someone whose reputation and livelihood depended on flawless beauty would risk it all by sheer overindulgence. Yet it's possible that Elizabeth had a love-hate relationship with her beauty: it was part of her identity and a source of her enormous success, but it was also what had stolen
her childhood and imprisoned her in an unreal life. She was a freak of nature, constantly being gawked at, lusted after, envied, and subjected to extreme scrutiny. It's not surprising that a part of her would want to destroy it. So she would eat and eat and eat—pâté de foie gras, heaping helpings of chili, fried chicken and mashed potatoes with gravy, hamburgers and French fries, malted milkshakes—and still she was beautiful. She would drink to excess—Bloody Marys for breakfast, straight vodka, beer, and champagne—and still she was beautiful. She purposely gained twenty-five pounds to play Martha in
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
and appeared on camera in too-tight clothes and graying hair—and still she was beautiful.