Furious Love (50 page)

Elizabeth's intake of alcohol and prescription pain medication was by now alarming, but she seldom showed any signs of inebriation. The movie's director, Larry Peerce (son of the great Metropolitan Opera star Jan Peerce), noticed that she “drank champagne by the magnum,” but, unlike Richard, she never lost her appetite for food. She wasn't looking to kill herself on the installment plan, and the food absorbed the excess alcohol in her system. Though her weight would vary from week to week, she was able to drink without becoming drunk.

Burton again turned his hand to writing magazine pieces and took to referring to himself as a writer, not an actor. He not only resented Elizabeth working while he was idle, he loathed the kind of movie she was making, which was the kind of movie they had both appeared in together: the dilemmas of the rich (
The V.I.P.s
,
Boom!
,
Divorce His Divorce Hers
).

Richard had rediscovered his working-class roots to the extent that he railed against
Ash Wednesday
, telling Elizabeth, “I don't like the thought of you doing that kind of thing, because it represents the worst kind of people.” He told Brook Williams, “I really don't like the jet set, you know. They offend me”—ironic, coming from a man who, with Elizabeth, had embodied what it meant to be a member of the jet set in the second half of the twentieth century. What had all those fabulous shopping sprees been about—competing with Onassis for the largest jewels, buying a jet and a yacht and furs and houses? He had done it because he could, because it was a lark for a working-class boy, because it kept Elizabeth happy in the way she was used to being happy. It was part of the adventure of being Liz and Dick, perhaps their greatest roles. But now his old Welsh sentiments surfaced, and he was sheepish about the way he had lived his life for the past ten years.

Gianni Bozzacchi had seen this in Burton. “Richard Jenkins, Richard Burton—they were two people. ‘If I had remained Richard Jenkins, I would have done everything different'—that's what Richard would say. I could see that sometimes Richard just needed to be himself, not the person he had become,” but the person he was born to be.

When Zeffirelli met with the couple in Rome that year, their former director was surprised at how Richard seemed to chafe at Elizabeth's jealousy. Burton's romp with Nathalie Delon had apparently increased her possessiveness. Now, when she playfully punched him in the arm, it was a punch he could feel, and when Burton was too engrossed in talking with an attractive woman, Elizabeth would yell “Richard!” in a loud voice from across the room. Zeffirelli had worked with the
Burtons at the height of their film success, and at the height of their love for each other—their true honeymoon—and six years later, the dissolution of their relationship was painful to witness.

Dunne believed that Elizabeth was still crazy about Richard, but “they fell out of love” during the making of
Ash Wednesday.
It began with an excruciating, jealous row when Richard accused Elizabeth of having an affair with one of her costars, the handsome Helmut Berger, who played her young lover in the film. Dunne and Peerce were often called in to witness their fights. Elizabeth was in despair, and on at least one occasion Vignale cradled her, weeping, in his arms, trying to console her. When she showed up two hours late for a scene with Henry Fonda, the director tried to reason with her. When she failed to show up at all on another occasion, and then lost a week to the German measles, he feared that
Ash Wednesday
was becoming “a mini-
Cleopatra
,” but instead of Richard and Elizabeth coming together, they were breaking apart.

 

Elizabeth flew to New York when filming was over. This time, Richard did not go with her. He made his way to Los Angeles and checked into the Beverly Hills Hotel, where he wrote Elizabeth a drunken, heartfelt letter on June 25, 1973, marked “Very Private and Personal”:

A few days later, Richard holed up in Aaron Frosch's guest cottage in Quogue, Long Island, about seventy-five miles from New York City. Richard felt safe there. Before he worked for the Burtons as a couple, Frosch had been Richard's lawyer, when he was still married
to Sybil in the era before Elizabeth. It had been Frosch who'd had the sad duty of depositing a million dollars into Sybil Burton's Swiss bank account, and arranging for her to receive $500,000 annually for ten years, when Richard finally made the decision to divorce her and marry Elizabeth. “They were like brothers,” Elizabeth felt. “He was our lawyer forever and took such great care of Richard and me.” Now his Long Island house was where Richard was hiding out while he came to terms with their separation.

Still drinking, Richard telephoned Elizabeth and ordered her to meet him there, in one last attempt to patch things up and go on as before. He met her plane at Kennedy Airport, but as soon as she got into the limousine next to her husband, she could tell he was smashed. At one point on the long drive to Frosch's house, he turned to her and said, “Why did you ever bother to come back?” By the time they reached Quogue, they had quarreled so furiously about his drinking that she ordered the limo to take her back to New York. She checked into the Regency Hotel on Park Avenue, where they had once been so happy during their triumphant
Hamlet
year.

Back in New York, she took Richard's suggestion to “announce the parting of the ways,” writing a personal statement about separating from Richard that would be issued to the press. That was her training, after all. She belonged as much to the public as she did to herself and to Richard, and she owed them an explanation. She had always understood publicity. On July 4, 1973, Elizabeth issued the following, handwritten statement:

With Elizabeth gone, for the first time Richard enlisted the help of a doctor to try to detoxify from alcohol. Insisting that he wasn't an alcoholic but merely a “drunk,” like his father, who imbibed by choice, he must have known that this was his last chance to save his marriage, and, possibly, his life.

T
hough he had provoked it, and perhaps had sought it, Richard was blindsided by Elizabeth's public announcement of their separation. Three months earlier, in Rome, he had written a revealing letter to Elizabeth while she slept in the next room. In it, he'd addressed his own bad behavior (his “usage” and “jealousy”), his cynicism about the very concept of love, and how Elizabeth had somehow vanquished that cynicism.

There was no hiding from the press in the wake of Elizabeth's July 4 announcement. Reporters made a beeline to Quogue, congregating on Frosch's driveway, to get Burton's response to the separation. Burton hid in a cottage on the property but was found out by London reporter Nigel Dempster of the
Daily Mail.
With a bottle of vodka in front of him (he had yet to start his detoxification regimen), Burton vented his complaints about marriage with Taylor, blaming everything but his own drinking—their volatile temperaments, her demands upon him. “Perhaps my indifference to Elizabeth's personal problems triggered off this situation,” he mused. “I have only twenty-four hours a day. I read and write and film. Elizabeth is constantly seeking problems of one kind or another. She worries about her figure, about her family, about the color of her teeth,” he complained defensively.
“She expects that I drop everything to devote myself to these problems.” He even tried to make light of the situation, describing himself as “amused” by it, but when asked if a divorce were imminent, he changed his tune, insisting that Elizabeth had not really left him.

“There is no question of our love and devotion to each other,” he said solemnly.

“I don't even consider Elizabeth and [me] as separated…I even have Elizabeth's passport in my possession. Does that look as if she has left me?” He had, a few days earlier, written a three-page letter to Elizabeth from Quogue, again declaring his need for her, though recognizing their intractable differences:

Realizing that his drinking was out of control, Richard finally sought treatment with a New York internist. Perhaps if he really sobered up, Elizabeth would return to him. And he needed to get in shape for his next film for Carlo Ponti,
The Voyage
, in which he would costar with Sophia Loren, Ponti's wife and an actress whose iconic beauty and sensuality rivaled Elizabeth's. The great Italian Neorealist Vittorio De Sica would direct what would turn out to be his last film. Burton asked if he could stay in the Pontis' guesthouse at their home in Marino, outside of Rome, afraid he would be overrun by the
press were he to check into a hotel. They graciously agreed. So on July 12, 1973, Burton traveled to the Ponti estate, a fifty-room, sixteenth-century villa in the Alban Hills outside of Rome, where he would nurse his wounds. He brought with him a reduced entourage: his new doctor and nurse, a secretary, and two bodyguards.

Elizabeth flew to Los Angeles, in part to be near her widowed mother, Sara, but really to put distance between herself and Richard's endless drinking and their endless quarreling. She managed to hide from the press at the 1600 Coldwater Canyon home of her friend, Edith Head, and her husband, Bill. She loved their Spanish-style home, complete with swimming pool and tennis court, and she found it “a haven, where I could get away from everyone and work out my problems on my own.” An added attraction to Edith's safe harbor was the fact that both women loved Jack Daniel's. Whenever Edith returned home from her work, they would have “a nice, big glass of Jack Daniel's together,” Elizabeth remembered. They were so close that the famous costume designer had a plaque placed on the stairs going up to the guest room that read,
ELIZABETH TAYLOR SLEEPS HERE
, which completely delighted Elizabeth. So much of her life had been devoted to recreating a sense of home and family, and Edith Head's was yet another of Elizabeth's surrogate homes, even more important now that her true home, with Richard, had foundered.

And so, Elizabeth reentered Hollywood, where she had spent her youthful years and her too-brief marriage to Mike Todd. She began going around town with Peter Lawford, her long-ago costar in
Julia Misbehaves
, filmed when Elizabeth was just an ingénue but had also had a woman-sized crush on the debonair English actor. (He gave Elizabeth her first screen kiss, but had been reluctant to romantically take on the sixteen-year-old.) By now divorced from Pat Kennedy, the late president's sister, Lawford was on a downward slide, indulging in Quaaludes, cocaine, and vodka. Elizabeth also saw Dominick Dunne in Hollywood, and her longtime friend and confidant, Roddy McDowall. She found herself doing things she would never have done
with Richard, such as a wild daytime trip, by helicopter, to Disneyland with Dunne and his daughter, Dominique; Lawford and his son, Christopher; and Roddy McDowall. For the first time in its history, a helicopter, which had picked them up at the top of Mulholland Drive, was allowed to land inside Walt Disney's massive amusement park. Once they were inside Disneyland, crowds began to surround Elizabeth and her coterie, and they retreated to the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, where the grownups passed among themselves a flask filled with Jack Daniel's. It was a desperate kind of fun.

But when Roddy McDowall and eighteen-year-old Christopher Lawford brought Elizabeth to meet Mae West in the Ravenswood Apartments, Elizabeth was uncomfortable. The plump eighty-one-year-old former sex goddess greeted them wearing a silver gown that fitted her like a second skin. Her long, platinum-blond hair framed her frozen face like cotton candy. Two muscle-bound bodyguards stood by her side. After fifteen minutes of strained conversation, Elizabeth leaned over to Roddy and whispered, “Can we get the hell out of here?” Elizabeth had been asked to appear in
Myra Breckinridge
a few years earlier—the Gore Vidal satire in which Mae West had made a gloriously bizarre screen appearance (her first in twenty-seven years). Elizabeth had turned it down, but the sight of the tiny, preserved-in-aspic diva made Elizabeth wonder if this was her future. Was she on the edge of camp, and would she be unable to come back from that edge, without Richard? Of the many costs of fame, the preservation of endless copies of herself, each one less authentic—like Warhol's brilliant repeating images of her—threatened to trap her in unreality. Were she and Richard becoming like the stiff effigies in Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum in London, which were placed on opposite sides of the room when the Burtons' separation was announced? She beat a hasty retreat.

Elizabeth also reunited with the novelist Truman Capote, whom she had known since
Cleopatra
days. He had been witness to Elizabeth and Richard's “affectionate rows” throughout their nine-year
marriage. “They really riled each other up,” Capote thought, “and I always felt that they did it on purpose so that they could have a big makeup in bed.” But Capote had remained skeptical about Burton's motives from the start. He'd always felt that Burton had only married Taylor to boost his career prospects. “She loved him,” he believed, “but he didn't love her.” In the wake of their separation, people in Hollywood were beginning to tear down Richard—it was really Elizabeth's town, as Hollywood had never embraced Burton—but Elizabeth knew better than anyone that Capote was flat-out wrong. The proof was not just in their lovemaking, his devotion to their children, their thousands of nights together, the magnificent, storied jewels he gave her, but in letter after letter in which he had poured out his love and his need for her. Ten days after she'd announced their separation, she received a telegram from Richard, in Rome:

Like much of Old Hollywood, Lawford had no real fondness for Richard Burton, and he introduced Elizabeth to another man-about-town, the Dutch businessman, photographer, and used-car dealer Henry Wynberg, a swinging bachelor who was cutting a swath among Hollywood women of all ages. Tall, attractive, and divorced, Wynberg spoke in a charming, Dutch-accented English. He was five years younger than Elizabeth, and he seemed to be living out a Hugh Hefner fantasy, with a plush couch and wall-sized aquarium in his apartment where he did his wooing. He was also half-Jewish, and Burton himself had noted in his diary how much Elizabeth was attracted to Jewish men, like Mike Todd, Eddie Fisher, Max Lerner, even the potbellied, out-of-shape writer Wolf Mankowitz, and Joe Mankiewicz as well. (And himself, perhaps, if Burton's claims to a Jewish heritage were true.) “Elizabeth has always fancied Jews,” Burton wrote. “She seems
to have a rapport with them, which she doesn't have with the ordinary Anglo-Saxon.” For now, Wynberg consoled Elizabeth, taking her dancing, squiring her around town, hanging out in nightclubs—all things in which Richard had long ago lost interest (if indeed he ever enjoyed them). “Going out was
life
for Elizabeth then,” said Vignale. But that was all Wynberg was to her at the time—an attractive escort—as Elizabeth made plans to return to Rome, where she would begin work on another film,
The Driver's Seat
, her forty-ninth. And to see Richard.

Richard had written Elizabeth again, from Rome, two letters in particular that showed the depth of his despair without her, suggesting that he might kill himself if she did not return:

Curiously, Elizabeth did not seem to answer any of Richard's letters, though she would treasure them for the rest of her life, keeping them private for four decades. “Richard had so much passion for life through words,” she later said, whereas she was more invested in living for the moment. And there was that other problem: she had been trained since childhood to control whatever might turn up in the press, which meant being careful about what she wrote, and to
whom. A letter from Elizabeth Taylor could easily go astray. It wasn't until she entered the Betty Ford Clinic for the first time, on December 5, 1983, that she realized the price she'd paid for that careful secrecy: she had suppressed some of her deepest emotions.

Meanwhile, letters of condolence and telegrams from old friends and colleagues poured in from around the world, to both sides. Joe Losey, reading about the separation, wrote to Richard from London, “I will not talk about the present situation with Elizabeth…I will only say, tragically sad and mistaken.”

Later that month,
The Battle of Sutjeska
would win the “Best Anti-Fascist” movie award at the Moscow International Film Festival, a good omen for the “great men” roles Richard would continue to take on—after Tito, Winston Churchill; after Churchill, Richard Wagner. Yet Burton continued to rail against his profession, writing again to Elizabeth,