Furious Love (31 page)

As they were constantly on the move, it became hard to have the children continuously with them, which would have been their preference. Michael and Christopher attended a school in Gstaad, when they were not staying in Hawaii with Elizabeth's brother, Howard, his wife, Mara, and their five children. When Kate joined the Burtons on the
Kalizma
, she and Elizabeth would spend pleasant days shopping together in port, but it would be all too brief, as their itinerant life provided no consistent way to raise their combined family. To make matters worse, there were frequent kidnapping threats against the children, and the Burtons had to hire bodyguards to protect each one of them.

So they drifted around the Mediterranean on their fabulous floating island, spending a week in Portofino, then on to Monte Carlo, where Orson Welles was waiting to dine with them. Welles had appeared with the Burtons as the tax-exile, Hungarian director Max Buda in
The V.I.P.s.
Over a sumptuous dinner, Welles complained that he never made any real money from any of his films—if anything, they had cost
him
money. He'd had to dig into his own pocket for the $75,000 to finish
Chimes at Midnight
, his great Falstaff movie. Though it took him a long time to rise from the table, he left the Burtons with the bill. When Welles was safely out of the room, Richard turned to Elizabeth and marveled at Welles's size. “How can he possibly make love?” he wondered.

Then they would fly to Gstaad, to pick up Michael and Christopher from their boarding school. Christopher, the younger boy, was flourishing, but Michael was having a harder time, so the Burtons flew to London on their private jet to try to get Michael into Millfield,
another private school. There, the Burtons ran into Ava Gardner. She was with her companion, visiting his nineteen-year-old son, who had yet to graduate from the boarding school.

On a commercial flight back to Sicily to return to the
Kalizma
, the Burtons ran into Peter O'Toole and his wife, Sian. Richard proceeded to get magnificently drunk with his former
Becket
costar, just as they had five years earlier.

“How many nominations have you had?” O'Toole asked Burton.

“Five. And you?”

O'Toole proudly held up four fingers. But he exaggerated—he'd had only two nominations, as Burton knew—Burton kept track of these things.

The yacht was a kind of refuge that kept Richard and Elizabeth from prying eyes, and it brought them both great happiness. For one thing, both Burtons hated to fly. They would stay up till early morning hours walking the deck and wandering its corridors, they were so thrilled with their new purchase. They couldn't stop “touching it and staring at it as if it were a beautiful baby.” They took great pride in showing off their sea-borne treasures to guests. It wasn't just Burton's books that they traveled with—the great art went with them, too. The Monet hung in the salon, the Picasso and the Van Gogh hung side by side in the dining room. The Vlaminck was hung in the stairway to the children's cabins (though Burton wanted to rehang it when the rest of the artwork arrived). The Jason Epstein bust of Churchill brooded over it all.

They continued to host a wide array of celebrities—vintage and newly minted—from different phases of their lives. Sir John Gielgud came aboard the
Kalizma
and was surprised to find, instead of quiet and solitude on a boat in the middle of the Mediterranean, the usual whirlwind. “When I got there,” he said later, “there were fourteen Portuguese sailors looking after them, and terrible tourists passing by on boats.” A tour guide shouted out, “Captain Cook's graveyard on our
right, and [there's] Richard Burton's yacht…” Burton started swearing, but Elizabeth, always aware of her obligation to her fans, said, “Oh, no, blow them kisses.” Gielgud saw that Burton was already in a foul mood, as he had brought along income tax advisors. Elizabeth locked herself in her cabin till lunchtime, when Ringo Starr and his then-wife, Maureen, came aboard the
Kalizma
. “I don't think they'd ever heard of me,” Gielgud recalled, “and I'd never heard of them!” That was one lunch aboard the yacht when the sap did not flow.

Sometimes their peripatetic life just got to be too much. When Howard and Mara Taylor and their children spent time with the Burtons, just moving around the extended menagerie required military planning. Like during all family trips—whether on a yacht or in a Winnebago—tempers flared. “A terrible day, frantically disorganized, thousands of bags all over the place, nine children, six adults all on one plane, Howard and Mara's incessant screaming, my and E.'s pre-film nerves,” Burton wrote in his diary. To add to the chaos, their chauffeur, Gaston, had fallen in love with Christopher's girlfriend's mother, and they were stranded at the airport, crammed into a tiny room, waiting for the
Kalizma
to be ready for them. By the time they made it to a hotel until they could board the yacht, Richard had had enough. In the middle of the hotel lobby, in that famously mellifluous voice of his, Burton screamed
“Fuck!”
at the top of his lungs. It “was the only possible way to mete the justice of the day,” he later wrote.

Still, their love affair smoldered, despite the pressures of their chaotic lives. Burton continued to write in his diaries, which he saw as sketches for an autobiography. Moored in Portofino harbor one evening, Elizabeth challenged him to write a publishable book by Christmas, of at least a hundred pages, wagering $900 (and her makeup expert, Ron Berkeley, came in for $100). She also asked him to sketch her in prose, which he obliged with the following playful, contrary portrait of everything Elizabeth was not, which he read to her aloud:

She loved it.

 

The Comedians
was released in Hollywood on October 9, 1967, six days before the Oxford premiere of
Doctor Faustus
. Both films would prove bellwethers for the now increasingly cynical reception that would meet the Burtons' films.

The reviews for
The Comedians
were mixed. The
London Daily Express
wrote, “The Burtons seem to revel in togetherness as they earn their daily crust…they both give faultless performances….Burton kisses Taylor with such passion and devotion that it is easy to imagine a less contented wife complaining that she doesn't get that sort of treatment at home…. I'd say these two have something very special going for them to have such a successful life both in public and privately.” But the
London Evening Standard
found it “amazing how a couple like the Burtons seldom manage to generate a spark of credible passion when together on the screen.”

Even though the movie's trailer would tout Elizabeth as “the world's symbol of ultimate beauty,” Graham Greene had thought that Elizabeth was miscast as Madame Pineda, the adulterous wife of the ambassador played by Peter Ustinov, and the movie bears that out. Her German accent is understated and good, though it slips a bit on the upper registers—something her critics loved to point out, especially since it was the first time Elizabeth had taken on a foreign accent for a role.

Whether it was Alexandre de Paris's dowdy, overteased coiffure or the matronly clothes that didn't flatter her figure, Elizabeth's beauty didn't translate fully to the screen. She was always more beautiful off
the set, in no makeup, her hair loose, than coiffured and couturiered in designer outfits, and it was especially true in
The Comedians
. In an MGM behind-the-scenes publicity reel, she looks youthful and radiant as she clowns and makes faces at the camera, dressed casually in slacks, but that sexy insouciance, for once, just didn't come through on film. It didn't help that, in 1967, Elizabeth was being bested by younger, slimmer, trendier stars such as Vanessa Redgrave and Anouk Aimée, whom she vanquished for the Academy Award, yes, but who embodied the new, bony, androgynous look that Elizabeth would never have. The voluptuous woman as the ultimate film goddess was on her way out.

But Richard—surprising, perhaps, given his high alcohol intake—is again mesmerizing on film. His voice, in fact, is so plangent, you hardly notice James Earl Jones's golden tones in their scenes together. Burton looks soulful, but also virile and unharmed by drink; he more than holds his own with scene-stealers like Alec Guinness, especially in powerful and intimate dialogue in a hillside cemetery where both men pour out the secrets of their souls. As a character who has “lost faith in faith,” Burton is playing a familiar role. In a love scene with Elizabeth, Martha playfully calls him a “defrocked priest”—a phrase from
The Night of the Iguana
, and a role he identified with.

Graham Greene was not particularly happy with the movie, but he took the blame for the lackluster reviews. He felt the script he'd written was at fault, and, in fact, it would be the last time Greene adapted one of his own novels for the screen. But he saw that he had hit his target in Duvalier's response to the film. Papa Doc declared war on
The Comedians
, threatened Greene with death, and had his ambassador to the United States condemn the movie as “a character assassination of an entire nation.” He also condemned the Burtons, who had lent their star power to the film, making death threats against them as well. He complained through his ambassador that the film portrayed Haiti as “a country of voodoo worshippers and killers,” yet he reportedly engaged a voodoo priest to bring harm to the Burtons.

Whether it was the curse of the voodoo priest, or the fact that
The Comedians
was overly long and too somber, or that the Burtons failed to sizzle onscreen, the movie did not make a profit for the first time in the Burtons' entwined careers.

 

Doctor Faustus
was released in Oxford on October 15, 1967, and the Burtons traveled there for the premiere. Upon their arrival, Coghill joined them in an interview with David Lewin, a journalist known for asking provocative questions. The Burtons were both dressed conservatively for the occasion—Richard in a suit and tie, his hair neatly combed, and Elizabeth in a sleeveless black knit dress with a stunning diamond brooch in the shape of a dragon, the symbol of Wales.

Lewin turned to Burton and rather pompously challenged him, “You must at some time have faced the question of whether you should have continued as an imposing and even—in the view of some—great stage actor, or moved into the realm of films, which is perhaps more commercially rewarding, but not as rewarding artistically. Any regrets?”

At that point, Elizabeth jumped in. “Oh, excuse me, Richard, that makes me so angry! Because he has
not
left the stage! That's absolute, bloody rubbish!” She leveled a steely gaze at Lewin. “Last year he just got finished doing a play for Oxford on the stage. The year before that—what was he doing on Broadway? That was the stage! How can you say he left the stage?”

Lewin sniffed, “That is not a
continuous
career,” like Paul Scofield's or Laurence Olivier's.

Elizabeth, still fuming, answered that Olivier's career is “not continuous either, on the stage. He does film appearances—for
money
! And so does Paul Scofield!”

When Lewin asked if Burton identified with Faustus, Elizabeth was further incensed. With the camera rolling, she let him have it. (Martha would have been proud.) “You bastard, David! I knew you'd ask that. Would
I
be ‘selling out' if I deserted film for the stage?”

She knew what he was driving at: if Richard was Faust, then who was she, and the life she'd made possible for him?

Through it all, Burton sat impassively while Elizabeth defended him. Why wasn't it enough that he and Elizabeth had so vibrantly brought Shakespeare to the screen just nine months earlier? They had waited almost a year before releasing
Doctor Faustus
, not wanting to flood the market with Burton-Taylor films. But Lewin's provocative interview set the stage for what would bring Richard and Elizabeth the worst reviews of their lives and another financial disappointment. The film grossed only $610,000 worldwide (a mere $110,000 from the United States and Canada) against Burton's million-dollar investment.

After the film's New York premiere, Renata Adler, writing in the
New York Times
, sneered, “
Doctor Faustus
is of an awfulness that bends the mind. The Burtons…are clearly having a lovely time; at moments one has the feeling that
Faustus
was shot mainly as a home movie…” Pauline Kael griped in the
New Yorker
, “
Doctor Faustus
becomes the dullest episode yet in the great-lovers-of-history series that started with
Cleopatra
…it is clear that Faustus and Helen of Troy are not characters from Marlowe or actors playing them; they are Liz and Dick, Dick and Liz—the king and queen of a porny comic strip.” The viciousness of that review reveals how in certain quarters critics were licking their chops for the chance to skewer the Burtons, as much for the ostentatious way they were living now as for their artistic overreaching. Instead of seeing the film as a charity production—which is essentially what it was—they saw it as an indulgence.

In one of the few favorable reviews, the
Los Angeles Times
commends Burton's voice as “absolutely the right organ on which to play Marlowe's mighty lines, and Burton runs through all the changes from quavery whisper to stentorian roar.” But he describes “Mrs. Burton” as the film's principal weakness, not for her performance but because by now, her presence overwhelms the part. “Her vivid personal imagery—solo and in tandem with Richard” distorts the mood of the film. The Burtons, not the roles they were playing, were now the main characters
under review. It was so bad that Elizabeth's private secretary, Raymond Vignale, would rise early, collect all the newspapers, and weed out the worst of the reviews.