Furious Love (51 page)

Within two weeks of their separation announcement, Richard was able to cable Joe Losey, “You are too old a hand to believe what you read in the papers. Elizabeth returns here to Rome next Friday…it was simply a burst of disillusioned inebriation. Am sober, slim and beautiful.”

On July 20, 1973, dressed in a red blazer and white cotton pullover, Richard was chauffeured in his Rolls-Royce to the Fiumicino Airport
in Rome to meet Elizabeth's plane. Nearly four hundred members of the press surrounded the airport, held back by two hundred policemen. It was
Le Scandale
all over again, or Cleopatra's entry into Rome, or was it a scene out of
The V.I.P.s
?—the limousine idling on the tarmac—as if “Liz and Dick” were condemned to endlessly live out their lives on film. They watched Richard slouched in the back of the Rolls, waiting for Elizabeth to arrive.

So many of the important things in Elizabeth's life seemed to happen in Rome. She had flown over from Los Angeles in a leased jet, with two dogs, a cat, and nine cases of luggage. As she deplaned, dressed in blue jeans, an oversize orange T-shirt, and the Taylor-Burton diamond, Burton still waited in the back of his car, unmoving. Many in the press assumed it was a game they were playing—neither wanted to make the first move.

Elizabeth disappeared into customs.

Burton sat, patiently waiting, in the Rolls.

She finally left the terminal, and policemen made a passageway for Elizabeth through the throng of reporters and paparazzi, as flashbulbs exploded all around her.

Still, Richard sat, unmoving, until the door opened and Elizabeth was practically propelled into the waiting car by a surge of photographers. That's when they finally had the satisfaction of seeing Richard, through the darkened windows of the Rolls, kiss her face and bury his head in her breasts, taking in the smell of her. The Rolls inched through the crush of reporters and made its way to the Pontis' villa thirteen miles away, chased by paparazzi the entire distance.

The Pontis' villa was—thankfully for the Burtons—guarded like Flora Goforth's island in
Boom!
The Rolls passed through electronic gates and armed guards, complete with snarling German shepherds on leashes, till it finally reached the magnificent villa, where Sophia and Carlo greeted the couple with drinks in hand. There, they dined on a splendid lunch of “risotto, roasted Palumbo fish, fruit, and white wine.”

Elizabeth had always been wary of Sophia Loren. When the tall, voluptuous Italian movie queen was proposed to star with Richard years ago in
The V.I.P.s
, Elizabeth had commanded, “Let Sophia stay in Rome!” and had taken the role for herself. Sophia was a taller, darker, Mediterranean version of Elizabeth, admired as an actress, worshipped as a sex goddess, loved for her earthiness and warmth. She was tall and regal where Elizabeth was short and flamboyant. Elizabeth had shown up in a cotton T-shirt and jeans that day (after traveling all night), whereas Sophia had greeted them in “a Dior suit, matching handbag, and shoes.” They shared, however, a love of and appreciation for jewels. Earlier, Sophia had responded to Elizabeth and Richard's purchase of the Taylor-Burton diamond by telling
Photoplay
, “The stone had been offered to Carlo,” but “he appraised it and decided that it was not worth the price. And I assure you, Carlo knows the value of jewelry.” Battling divas often slugged it out in the pages of movie magazines, but Elizabeth had too much dignity to catfight in print.

Despite the seclusion and luxury of the Ponti estate, the Burtons' reconciliation lasted only nine days. First of all, Richard was drinking again (having sent his internist packing), which had finally become intolerable to Elizabeth. And Richard had heard about the attentions of Henry Wynberg, whose name he continually, and contemptuously, mangled, calling him “Mr. Wiseborg,” or “Weinstein,” or, simply, “the used-car salesman.” Now, Elizabeth suspected Richard was having an affair with his sultry costar, especially when she happened to see the draft of an article he was writing about her for
Ladies' Home Journal.
He had never written such lavish praise of another woman before—certainly not for public consumption. He praised Sophia as “[t]all and extraordinary. Large-bosomed. Tremendously long legs…Beautiful brown eyes set in a marvelously vulpine, almost satanic face…” But when he described her as “beautiful as erotic dreams,” that phrase was uncomfortably close to his earlier description of Elizabeth as
“beautiful beyond the dreams of pornography.” She now felt she had proof that the two were more than just friends.

After what had happened in Budapest, during the shoot of
Bluebeard
, Elizabeth was furious. “I knew he was flirting his head off,” she recalled, “and she was flirting right back, both of them speaking in Italian, which made me feel ridiculously left out. I thought, I'm not going to sit here and watch this. Screw them both!”

So the Burtons separated again, and Elizabeth checked into a baroque, seven-room suite in the Grand Hotel in Rome, where she was to begin filming
The Driver's Seat
the following day. Miserable, she arrived very late to the set, where she was overwhelmed by a standing ovation by cast and crew. She told her producer, Franco Rossellini, that she never thought she could ever feel as awful as she did on the day of Mike Todd's death, but she was wrong. “Today is the second sad day in my life. I am desolate,” she told him. She and Burton both put in a call to Aaron Frosch, to begin divorce proceedings.

Like her lonely character Barbara Sawyer in
Ash Wednesday
, Elizabeth spent days in bed when she wasn't working on her new film. “I don't want to be that much in love ever again,” she told a friend. “I don't want to give as much of myself. It hurts. I didn't reserve anything. I gave everything away…my soul, my being, everything.” She sought consolation with Andy Warhol, who was in Rome to appear in a cameo in
The Driver's Seat.
She poured out her heart to him during a long lunch, over drinks and tears, while she distractedly pulled all the leaves off of a decorative tree near their table. But lunch with Andy did not end well. She discovered that he had been secretly taping her anguish with his state-of-the-art, micro-cassette tape recorder, for use in
Interview
magazine, which Warhol had recently founded. Elizabeth jumped up, furious, and pulled the tape out of the micro-cassette with her long fingernails, destroyed it, and departed, prompting Warhol to later ask the question, “Gee, she has everything—magic, money, beauty, intelligence. Why can't she be happy?”

And so, again like Barbara in
Ash Wednesday
, she took a lover—the ever-ready Henry Wynberg, who quickly flew in from Los Angeles to console Elizabeth in Rome.

 

On July 31, John Springer announced that Aaron Frosch was drawing up divorce papers for the Burtons. They were, of course, both concerned about the impact of the divorce on their children. Michael was on his own, but seventeen-year-old Christopher was still in school and living with his uncle Howard in Hawaii. Liza, sixteen, and twelve-year-old Maria were in boarding schools in Switzerland. Sixteen-year-old Kate was attending the United Nations School in New York, living with Sybil when she wasn't flying in to be with Richard and Elizabeth. They continued to regard Richard as very much their father, though Richard had often reminded Michael and Christopher to honor Michael Wilding as their true father, and Liza to honor the memory of Mike Todd. The meaning of fatherhood had always been important to Richard. Throughout the Burtons' nine-year marriage, they had done all they could to shelter their brood from the paparazzi and the prying questions of journalists. When not in school, the children had spent fabulous vacations aboard their floating zoo, the
Kalizma
, or chasing lizards and playing in the sun-warmed waves at Busseria, their private beach in Puerto Vallarta. The three eldest had appeared as extras in
The Taming of the Shrew
, and had reveled in their mother's unending, effortless glamour. Whatever emotional costs inflicted upon them by the turmoil of their parents' lives—and their parents' drinking—remained private, except for Kate. Kate would later appear in Tony Palmer's brilliant documentary about Burton,
In from the Cold
, recounting how she told her father to stop drinking or she would never see him again.

As for Elizabeth, the only time she ever cried after reading what had been written about her was when
Life
magazine questioned her devotion as a mother. She loved her children and tried to give them as “normal” a life as she was capable of. “Let's face it, I was a freak,”
Elizabeth later admitted. She didn't see her first baseball game until she was in her mid-fifties. “I never went to a senior prom. I wasn't a normal teenager. I wasn't even doing the things my brother was doing, or the girl across the street.”

The only child of Richard's that he kept locked out of his life was Jessica, living in an institution on Long Island, for which Richard paid, and paid, and kept on paying.

A few days after his impending divorce was announced, Richard began filming
The Voyage
, moving between the Pontis' villa and the
Kalizma
, moored off of Palermo. He refused to take Elizabeth's calls. He rattled around the massive yacht, drinking cases of white wine, entertaining journalists onboard, just because he was lonely, though surrounded by the boat's crew and by members of his entourage. He missed the presence of his children, and he missed Elizabeth most of all.

Sophia accepted an invitation to spend a weekend on the yacht, though Burton still denied that they were having an affair. Indeed, an affair seems unlikely, as Sophia was devoted to her husband, and the two of them actually spent most of their time talking about Elizabeth or playing Scrabble (Sophia often beat Richard, to his dismay). It's doubtful that Richard would return Carlo and Sophia Ponti's hospitality by having an affair with his host's wife, even if he were capable. When he wasn't playing Scrabble and flirting with Signora Ponti, he was trying, unsuccessfully, to dry out.

Holed up on the
Kalizma
, Burton would go out drinking at a Palermo hotel with crew members from the yacht, who had to watch him carefully now. Not so long ago, when he was with Elizabeth, he had ended a night of pub crawling with Gianni Bozzacchi and had nearly drowned. Standing at the edge of the marina, Burton had jumped into the water to swim back to the
Kalizma
. Bozzacchi—who was not drinking, and who was not even a swimmer—jumped in after him. The next morning, Richard had asked Bozzacchi how they'd gotten back that night, and Bozzacchi, who'd almost drowned rescuing Burton, angrily replied, “You fuckin' English!”

“Welsh!” Burton corrected.

“English! Welsh! I thought we were gonna die!”

De Sica, too, was concerned about his star actor, who seemed like a man determined to kill himself with drink. “He came onto the set shaking, in a daze. It broke my heart to see him…”

In October, the
Ladies' Home Journal
got into the act by analyzing the Burtons' marriage and separation in their popular column, “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” Except they retitled it, for the Burtons, “Why This Marriage Can't Be Saved,” listing, among the couple's many challenges, “Public pressure to be always on display, to live up to manufactured identities—to glow and sparkle regardless of fatigue, indigestion, or hangovers” “too much togetherness” “too much drinking and partying” “Elizabeth's severe back trouble and other health problems…an emotional strain on any marriage” and, finally—tactfully stated—“Richard's reported ‘drinking problem.'” They were accurate in all their assessments. What the article didn't say, and the author could not have known, was that Richard faced that classic dilemma: he felt he couldn't live without Elizabeth, nor could he live with her.

 

Richard was still writing to Elizabeth, but if he was hoping to bring about a reunion, his behavior made that impossible. On October 9, he wrote to Elizabeth from Rome:

In November, Elizabeth Taylor and Henry Wynberg returned to California, stopping in London to visit Laurence Harvey, who was
now near death from lung cancer. Elizabeth cradled her dying friend. She had already survived the deaths of many in her forty-one years of life—Mike Todd, Monty Clift, Francis Taylor, Dick Hanley, Ifor Jenkins. Even Nicky Hilton, her unfortunate first husband, had died at the age of forty-two, alone except for three male nurses in his sixty-four-room Holmby Hills mansion. When his physician had arrived to forcibly take Hilton to Menninger's Psychiatric Hospital, he'd greeted the doctor sitting up in bed, holding a loaded pistol. He would die a few months later of a heart attack.

For the next four months, Richard continued to deteriorate, drinking heavily and taking up with a number of young women. Philip Burton, in touch by telephone, was concerned about him. Though outwardly carousing, Burton was still tortured by the loss of Elizabeth, and he wrote her from Venice just before flying to New York.