Furious Love (5 page)

Wanger and Mankiewicz had come for lunch to Villa Pappa and found Elizabeth being tended to by a physician, Dr. Coen. She seemed unusually pale, Wanger thought, and after lunch she confided how terrible she felt about hurting Sybil. “I feel dreadful,” she'd said. “Sybil is such a wonderful woman.” Wanger had tried to comfort her by talking about how difficult it was to swim against the tides of life. “How funny you should say that,” Elizabeth said. “Richard calls me ‘Ocean.'” She then retired to her bedroom and slipped into a pale gray Christian Dior nightgown, claiming exhaustion. A few minutes later, when he checked on her, he was told that she took some sleeping pills. That's when one of her entourage called an ambulance, and word got out to the press that Elizabeth had attempted suicide.

Wanger tried to make light of the event, asking Brodsky and Weiss to make up a story of food poisoning to avert the bad publicity already dogging the star-crossed production. Wanger had put the blame on “a tin of bully beef” they had shared for lunch at the villa, then on a handful of Seconals Elizabeth had taken to help her sleep. Their cover-up seemed to have worked, but it really didn't matter: a few days later, the Burton-Taylor affair resumed.

In April, Sybil flew back to Rome from New York, once again forcing the issue. When Richard received word of his wife's imminent arrival in the Eternal City, he and Elizabeth drove from Rome to their beach hideaway in a small, two-seater Fiat, leaving early in the morning to escape the paparazzi. It was the Easter weekend, and their beachside town was half-deserted. They enjoyed caffe lattes and cognac in a small bar-café, but their idyllic weekend quickly turned into a nightmare when they wandered into the small café, deserted except for a sleeping dog, a bored waiter, and a few idle customers. It seemed the perfect haven for a couple hounded by the world, but as it happened, one of the idle customers was, in fact, a local newspaper reporter, there to cover the arrival of a minor member of the Dutch royal family. He quickly recognized the two most famous people in the world. They finished their cognacs and drove to their isolated, half-finished villa with its glorious view of the Mediterranean. There they played in the surf, made love, clambered over the rocks as if they were any pair of lovers delighting in each other's company.

Suddenly, they looked around and discovered that the paparazzi had found them out and were hiding in the bushes and among the rocks. The newspaperman had notified the press of Richard and Elizabeth's whereabouts. They escaped back to their small villa, trapped in their guilty paradise, where there was nothing to do but drink, play gin rummy, and wait for the paparazzi to go away.

Burton later recalled that weekend in his notebooks:

Burton at first didn't believe she had swallowed sleeping pills—he thought Elizabeth had probably just taken a handful of vitamin C. But when she went to sleep, Burton couldn't wake her. That's when he realized she had not been acting. He managed to drag her into the car and sped back to Rome, where, for a second time, she had her stomach pumped at Salvator Mundi. Burton then slunk back to his villa, ironically named “Beautiful Solitude,” and then on to Paris, where he was shooting a scene for Darryl Zanuck's World War II epic,
The Longest Day
.

Still hoping to deflect rumors of the affair, Wanger warned Burton to stay away. “I think Burton had finally begun to understand the consequence of being with Elizabeth,” Wanger later wrote about the incident. “He had complained when the reporters hounded him in Paris, ‘It's like fucking Khrushchev. I've had affairs before—how did I know the woman was so fucking famous?'”

When Elizabeth was again released from the hospital, her face was bruised and she couldn't appear on camera for several days. Other accounts suggest that Elizabeth was hospitalized for a bloody nose, caused by being thrown forward in the Fiat when the car suddenly stopped short. Given that Wanger was putting out cover stories, Burton's diary entry is probably the most reliable account. Years later, Elizabeth would ruefully admit to the suicide attempt, saying that at the time, “I was a very sick girl,” in agony over what to do, unwilling to relive the kind of public shaming she had received over her breakup of Eddie Fisher's marriage, and equally unwilling—and unable—to give up Richard. “Everyone's unhappiness,” she later said, “had reached a point of no return.”

 

Meanwhile, Fisher was deep in denial. It took a column by Louella Parsons, one of the two leading gossip columnists in Hollywood, and headlines such as the
Los Angeles Examiner
's “Row Over Actor Ends Liz, Eddie Marriage,” to force Fisher to finally act, though by now he must have known his marriage was over.

“I knew it before she did,” he later confessed. “Elizabeth desperately needed excitement, and our relationship had settled into a marriage. Comfort wasn't enough for her. She was addicted to drama, to the fights and making up, to breaking down doors. There was no possible way she could have given up what she'd found in Burton.”

Nonetheless, Fisher and Taylor continued to deny the rumors (“LIZ, EDDY DENY SPLIT”). He left for New York, heartbroken and humiliated, and landed in the arms of Dr. Jacobson, who kept him supplied with drugs. In one attempt to put the swirling rumors to rest, he agreed to appear as a mystery guest on the popular quiz show
What's My Line?
, ostensibly to publicize
Cleopatra-
inspired cosmetics that the studio was marketing. It didn't help. The gossip columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, a regular panel member on the show, had already written a damning story about the affair. To add to his humiliation, Fisher wound up predicting that “Elizabeth Taylor Fisher” would win an Academy Award for her role in
Cleopatra
. “I was lost,” he later wrote, devastated by Elizabeth's betrayal. He wound up in a small private hospital in New York, having overdosed on vodka and amphetamines. The rumor mill went overboard, announcing that he was locked up in a psychiatric ward, so when he was released, he held a press conference to show that he wasn't confined to a padded cell.

Fortified with a shot of methamphetamine, he strolled into a feeding frenzy at the Sapphire Room of the Pierre Hotel on Fifth Avenue, where reporters were practically hanging from the rafters. The press conference was his last-ditch ploy to persuade the public that his marriage was still intact. He'd even asked Elizabeth to speak to the press by telephone from Rome, believing that she still wanted to deny the rumors of their breakup. But that was not to be.

Fisher was called into the hotel manager's office, where Elizabeth delivered the news—with reporters listening in on the call—that she would no longer participate in the fiction of their marriage. It was over. Instead of a reconciliation, he was treated to a headline: “Eddie Fisher Dumped.”

Deep down, Fisher had known all along that Burton had what Elizabeth wanted: “[t]hat marvelous voice, his knowledge of acting, and his ability to teach her. I also believed she mistook his weaknesses, his alcoholism, his bitterness, and the anger that led to violence, for independence and self-confidence. She thought he was a hero.” In his desperation, Fisher at one point bought a gun, ostensibly to protect the family because of a deluge of threatening letters they were receiving. Years later, Elizabeth would reveal things she had left out of her memoir because she felt they were too hurtful. One of them was that she had awoken in the villa one night to find Eddie watching over her, pointing the gun at her head. “Don't worry, Elizabeth,” she heard him say. “I'm not going to kill you. You're too beautiful.”

That's when she fled. She gathered up her children and took them to Dick Hanley's place and never went back.

Their divorce was handled by the influential lawyer Louis Nizer, but it would take years to untangle their financial dealings—the chalet in Gstaad, their expensive cars and Elizabeth's jewels, their business enterprises. Meanwhile, Fisher attempted to salvage his career by making a number of nightclub appearances, opening his new act with the song “Arrivederci, Roma.” He later appeared in New York's Winter Garden Theater with the South African dancer Juliet Prowse, who slithered onstage as Cleopatra, singing “I'm Cleo, the Nympho of the Nile.” But his once-fabulous career, like his once-famous marriage, never recovered. The former singing sensation would be remembered by the public as Elizabeth Taylor's fourth husband, the one between Todd and Burton. And yet, for a brief time, they had been happy together.

In mid-June, 20th Century-Fox sent cast and crew to the southern Italian island of Ischia, in the Bay of Naples, to film the Battle of
Actium. Richard and Elizabeth arrived by helicopter, and once there, hired a yacht. They were, of course, surrounded by the paparazzi, who trained their telephoto lenses on the couple from a flotilla of small boats. A photographer, Pat Morin, shot a now-famous picture of the two kissing on the bow of their rented yacht, published in the Italian newspaper
Oggi
. It was the shot seen around the world: she's in a striped one-piece bathing suit, her dark hair tumbled over the dazzling white of the yacht; he's lying beside her, kissing her, their two packs of cigarettes (one of them Marlboro) resting near their naked feet. They are lost in each other, moored, hiding in plain sight.

The grainy, black-and-white photograph ushered in a brave new world of invasive publicity, the forerunner and prototype of photographs of Diana, Princess of Wales, and Dodi Fayed; Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, having her toes sucked by a boyfriend.

“Le Scandale”
—Burton's term—was born.

E
lizabeth and Richard's grand passion launched a new industry: celebrity culture on a scale never before seen. Suddenly, their images—usually costumed as Cleopatra and Marc Antony—appeared on the covers of countless newspapers and magazines. The Burton-Taylor affair was so famous that even Jacqueline Kennedy asked the publicist Warren Cowan, “Warren, do you think Elizabeth Taylor will marry Richard Burton?” One chronicler wrote, “They had moved off the show biz pages and into the hard news. They were up there with Kennedy and Khrushchev and the Cuban missiles.” Louella Parsons wrote that the massive amount of publicity “ought to have killed them.”

Quickly written paperback books were published, such as
Cleopatra in Mink
by entertainment writer Cy Rice and
Richard Burton
,
His Intimate Story
by Ruth Waterbury; even Walter Wanger got into the act by publishing his production diary,
My Life with Cleopatra
(“FOR THE FIRST TIME! The complete, true, behind-the-scenes story of
the most talked-about movie of our time by the man who produced it!”). Wanger wrote in those pages: “Tried again to get Elizabeth to make some kind of statement to counteract the bad press she has been receiving.
Paris Match
,
Life
,
News of the World
,
France Soir
, and many other European papers are violently attacking her,” and noted how the “paparazzi, that raffish group of photographers so well portrayed in Fellini's
La Dolce Vita
, have been the bane of our existence since we came to Rome.”

Il Tempo
, the
Los Angeles Times
, the
Herald Examiner
,
Hollywood Reporter
, and
Variety
all weighed in, as did the Vatican, which published a reader's letter in the Vatican weekly
Osservatore della Domenica
, denouncing Elizabeth Taylor's “erotic vagrancy” and calling into question Elizabeth and “her fourth ex-husband's” fitness to adopt Maria, the German infant. In America, a U.S. congresswoman from Georgia named Iris Faircloth Blitch called on Congress to make “Miss Taylor and Mr. Burton…ineligible for reentry into the United States on the grounds of undesirability.” Congressmen in New York and North Carolina joined the fray, blaming the nation's “moral slide” on the Taylor-Burton affair.

Wanger was afraid that the bad publicity would destroy
Cleopatra
, causing audiences to boycott the picture. He sent in nine plain-clothed policemen to keep the paparazzi from sneaking onto the set. But “Liz and Dick” had had enough. They told their producer that they were “sick of being chased by the paparazzi” and they were going to turn the tables. So, one night, Burton and Taylor—who was chicly dressed in a leopard-skin coat and cloche hat—strolled hand-in-hand down Via Veneto, while the paparazzi went wild. They kissed publicly, flaunting their affair and letting the frenzy go on around them. They met their friend Mike Nichols, then known for his satiric comedy routines with Elaine May, at a Via Veneto nightclub.

An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May
had run on Broadway next to Burton's
Camelot
, and Nichols had befriended both Richard and Elizabeth. (Though he would appear with the model
Suzy Parker in a series of Richard Avedon's photographs spoofing Burton and Taylor's newfound notoriety, in fact, Nichols was at the beginning of a long and fulfilling friendship with Elizabeth that would change the direction of his career.)

Another close friend during the feeding frenzy was Roddy McDowall, who had had an important supporting role in
Cleopatra
as Octavian, the wily third member of the Roman triumvirate who outwits and ultimately defeats Antony. He had an important supporting role in Elizabeth's life as well—one of the gay actors, like Montgomery Clift and Rock Hudson, whom she would rely upon and count among her dearest friends. Elizabeth was well ahead of her time in her complete acceptance and love for her gay friends. When McDowall returned to New York at the end of that summer and regaled Monty Clift with stories of
Le Scandale
, Clift was amazed. “It's lunatic. Bessie Mae [his pet name for her] is now the most famous woman in the world!” He believed that Burton was the driving force behind the scandalous headlines: “Richard wants to be famous at any cost,” he complained.

But it was Elizabeth, more than Richard, who could handle the press and the paparazzi—she was practically born to it, and she'd learned from Todd the importance of always being in the public's eye. It wasn't so for Burton, who still had a bookish sense of privacy, and though he had often basked in the adulation of theater audiences, he wasn't used to this kind of constant public attention. At first, it was intoxicating. “In a few weeks,” Fisher noted, “Burton had been transformed from a well-respected British actor to a world-renowned celebrity—and he loved it. Suddenly he couldn't walk down the street without being recognized…. What he didn't yet understand,” Fisher wrote years after the fact, “was that he couldn't turn off this fame when it was convenient to him.”

After her marriages to the “sullen, resentful, and ultimately violent” Nicky Hilton, and to “sweet Michael Wilding, to whom I was more a sister than anything,” and “to Mike [Todd] whom I adored
but had only two marvelous years with,” being with Burton was like a revelation to Taylor. “Richard and I had an incredible chemistry together,” she later said. “We couldn't get enough of each other.” She loved best of all when they would slip off to their hideaway outside of Rome. “Even with paparazzi hanging out of the trees and hearing them tramping over the rooftops above us, even with all that going on, we could make love, and play Scrabble, and spell out naughty words for each other, and the game would never be finished. When you get aroused playing Scrabble, that's love, baby.”

Through it all, Elizabeth prevailed. It had been a gamble. Thirteen years earlier, Ingrid Bergman had derailed her career by leaving her husband, Peter Lindstrom, and running off with the Italian director Roberto Rossellini, with whom she had an illegitimate child. She was hounded by the Hollywood gossip mavens and denounced on the floor of the Senate. But Elizabeth had been through all this before, when the public had sided with Debbie Reynolds in the Fisher-Taylor-Reynolds scandal, a mere two years earlier. If anything, that notoriety had continued to fuel the unstoppable engine of Elizabeth's white-hot career. If the paparazzi were camping outside Villa Pappa and the Cinecittà studios, what did she care? She was already used to crowds—ten thousand fans had gawked at her at Mike Todd's funeral, where she'd collapsed, weeping on his grave.

Indeed, it was Mike Todd himself—the ultimate showman, who had taken Elizabeth along on an endless series of hyped premieres for
Around the World in 80 Days
—who had shown her the transformative power of publicity. She had learned from a master: there's no such thing as bad publicity. The world's disapproval was nothing more than its newest incarnation, and publicity she could handle. And if she had any doubt that the public would cease to love her, would turn away from her in moral outrage, she got her answer when shooting began on Cleopatra's grand entrance into Rome.

In the spectacular scene, Cleopatra enters the city in a $6,500 gown of pure gold, perched atop an enormous, golden sphinx pulled
through the Roman gates by scores of Nubian slaves, preceded by a legion of writhing snake dancers, splendid archers, horses, elephants, and fire-eaters. Elizabeth later confessed that the scene terrified her. Given the frenzy of bad press over the affair, she confided in Mankiewicz, “Being pulled through that mob—alone up there—who knows? They'll jeer at me and they'll throw rocks at me.” The director had received anonymous bomb threats and had taken them seriously enough to place toga-clad detectives among the extras on the set. It's a testament to Elizabeth's courage that she endured the scene.

And then something amazing happened. The crowd of six thousand extras—Romans playing Romans—were meant to yell in jubilation, “Cleopatra! Cleopatra!” as she entered Rome.

Instead, they yelled, “Leez, Leez!
Baci
,
baci!
[Kisses!]”

Tears sprang to her eyes. When the scene was completed, she thanked the crowd of extras—standing in for all of Rome—for their love and approval.

By the end of July 1962, the ten months of filming
Cleopatra
were over.

“After my last shot,” Elizabeth recalled, “there was a curiously sad sort of aching, empty feeling—but such astronomical relief. It was finally over. It was like a disease, shooting that film—an illness one had a very difficult time recuperating from.” The Roman sets were taken down at Cinecittà. In September, Elizabeth decamped to her Swiss villa with her four children, having installed her parents at a nearby hotel. Richard returned with his family to Le Pays de Galles, the villa he and Sybil had bought in Céligny, on the west side of Lake Geneva in Switzerland, to avoid Britain's high taxes.

Conveniently, perhaps, Elizabeth's Chalet Ariel in Gstaad was on the other side of the lake, an hour's drive away over hairpin turns. For four months, the lovers tried to let the fires that had burned so intensely in Rome die down. “We tried to stay away from each other,” Elizabeth later explained. “We were too aware of the pain we were causing others to stay together. But it is a hard thing to do, to run away
from your fate. When you are in love and lust like that, you just grab it with both hands and ride out the storm.”

Unable to tell him in person, Elizabeth wrote an agonizing letter to Richard, admitting that their affair was causing too much suffering, “making too many people unhappy” and that they should separate. She also decided to start divorce proceedings to dissolve her marriage to Eddie Fisher.

On her thirtieth birthday, which Elizabeth remembered as “the most miserable day of my life,” she had already known it was over when Eddie gave her a pair of yellow-diamond pendant earrings, a brooch, and a matching ring. “It came as a total surprise,” she'd recalled, “but you know something? The whole time I was just looking for something from Richard. I felt miserable, I thanked Eddie, but all I wanted was some sign from Richard. There wasn't even a bouquet of flowers.” Later, a few months after their separation, Fisher sent her a bill for the jewelry. “I probably paid it,” Elizabeth remembered. Now she was trying to stay away from Richard.

Burton was just as unhappy. He missed Elizabeth and he, perhaps, equally missed the attention of the world. He finally broke their enforced silence and telephoned, admitting that he was concerned about her and arranging a meeting at the Château de Chillon, a twelfth-century castle on Lake Geneva. She agreed.

Even though she was with her children in Gstaad, her parents, Francis and Sara, staying in a nearby villa, Elizabeth had not lived without a man in her life since her first, ill-advised marriage to Nicky Hilton. She was lonely. She later wrote in her autobiography: “I was dying inside and trying to hide it from the children with all kinds of frenzied activity.” Her children seemed to miss Burton almost as much as she did, whereas, Elizabeth later noted, “When Eddie left, the children didn't even ask where he'd gone.” She credits her younger son, Christopher, with helping her make up her mind when he confided, “I prayed to God last night that you and Richard would be married.”

So Burton drove eastward from his villa, alone, while Elizabeth was driven by her parents. It's surprising that Sara Taylor went along with this plan; as the prime mover of Elizabeth's rise at MGM, she had sanctioned her daughter's earlier marriages as good for her career. But the terrible publicity over
Le Scandale
, she feared, would ruin all those years of hard maneuvering. It shows that Elizabeth was standing up for her own desires, no matter the cost, and finally taking the reins of her career—and her life—away from her mother.

“Richard and I arrived at exactly the same moment,” recalled Elizabeth. “The top of his car was down, he was terribly suntanned and his hair was cut very short. I hadn't seen him since
Cleopatra.
He looked nervous, not happy, but so marvelous.” Suddenly shy, Elizabeth had a hard time getting out of the car. Sara leaned over and whispered to her, “Have a lovely day, baby,” and her father, Francis, kissed her on the cheek.

“Oh, doesn't he look wonderful!” Elizabeth said. “I don't know what to do! I'm scared.”

Richard ambled over to their car and sheepishly said hello. The Taylors practically pushed Elizabeth out of the car—as she remembers it—and she and Richard blurted out simultaneously, “You look marvelous!” Then a peck on the cheek, then a quiet lunch at a lakeside restaurant.

Sitting at an outdoor table without the attendant fussing of publicists and the blinding flashbulbs of the paparazzi, Elizabeth and Richard found themselves in an awkward silence. Suddenly alone, they discovered they didn't really know each other all that well—the mad attention had distracted them, perhaps, from true intimacy. Even the loquacious Burton, who could recite reams of verse at the drop of a hat, found himself surprisingly without words. But eventually, they began to find things to talk about—their children, the now-completed movie, the beauty of Lake Geneva. Her parents having by now departed, Burton drove Elizabeth home. They parted without a
kiss, but agreed to see each other again. If Elizabeth had indeed intended to reconcile with Fisher—not likely—she changed her mind. She knew now that she still wanted Richard. The flame still burned, though Burton would continue to publicly say that he had no intention of leaving his wife.

And he had good reason to stay with Sybil. There were reports that she had tried to commit suicide while Burton was in Gstaad with Elizabeth—surprising for one as grounded and sane as Sybil. But her entire world had been shaken. Besides Burton's betrayal, their youngest daughter, Jessica, was alternately identified as “severely retarded” or possibly autistic and faced the possibility of lifelong institutionalization. It was too much to bear. Burton would learn of Jessica's condition later that summer, and it would add another layer of guilt to his already wounded psyche. He would stay in Céligny, with his family, though he still longed for Elizabeth.