Furious Love (8 page)

Burton had to wear an eye patch for several days, and his neck injuries would plague him in later years. Of great interest to Medak, Burton contacted the notorious Kray brothers, brutal twin gangsters from East London, and asked them to hunt down his attackers. They lurked around the set for several days, keenly interested in the whole motion-picture business. Whether they succeeded in finding Burton's attackers is unknown, but Medak was impressed enough to make a celebrated film about the twins in 1990,
The Krays.

 

In April of 1963,
Life
magazine put its imprimatur on the adulterous couple, in a stunning cover photograph of the two—Burton brooding into the camera, Taylor in dramatic profile against a black backdrop—to accompany the feature, “CLEOPATRA, Most Talked About Movie Ever Made.” The apotheosis was complete. Elizabeth had won her dangerous game of courting the press and the paparazzi, of grabbing with both hands what she most desired. “Burton and Taylor in their public adultery,” Burton's biographer Melvyn Bragg reflected, “seemed to be saying, ‘We love each other, we know we are destroying marriages and disrupting families, but love is all you need and all that counts. And we are not going to hide it. Furthermore, folks, we don't give a damn.'”

When
Cleopatra
opened at last, on June 11, 1963, the trade press and the
New York Times
gave it mixed reviews, though Brendan Gill, writing in the
New Yorker
, loved the film's spectacle. His review is virtually an effusive love letter to Elizabeth Taylor, describing her as

Several critics offered up howls of disdain. Judith Crist, in the
Herald Tribune
, jeered, “The mountain of notoriety has produced a mouse.”
Time
magazine complained, “When [Elizabeth] plays Cleopatra as a political animal, she screeches like a ward heeler's wife at a block party.” But the most damning verdict of all was delivered by Elizabeth Taylor herself after an advance screening in London. Upon viewing the film, Elizabeth rushed back to her penthouse suite at the Dorchester Hotel and promptly threw up.

But audiences loved it. They lined up around the block to see the picture, and, in fact, it made $15.7 million domestically—the top-grossing film of 1963, though not enough to earn a profit. That would take three more years, when, in 1966, Fox was paid $5 million [$35 million today] by ABC for two television-network showings. And in the forty-eight years since it was made,
Cleopatra
has grown in stature. In retrospect, there is much to admire in the movie's lush production values, its passionate performances, its rich language and ambitious storytelling. It's truly a feast for the senses, and the Burton-Taylor affair adds another layer of cultural history
to the various interwoven versions of the story (Pliny's, Suetonius's, Shakespeare's, Shaw's, Mankiewicz's). And though Rex Harrison is a superbly poised and cunning Caesar, you can't take your eyes off Burton and Taylor. They smolder and ignite; their fatal beauty infuses their self-wrought tragedy. They are, truly, comets unleashed.

Some of Elizabeth's biographers have noted the almost eerie way in which her films often mirrored her private life as she was living it, often blurring the boundaries between what was real and what was imagined. It's true that she had learned from MGM how to choose scripts that reflected the life she was living, but she was also swept away by the intense make-believe of whatever role she found herself playing. It was a kind of reverse method acting, in which she drew on her theatrical roles to provide direction and add luster to her life. Mankiewicz saw it. He commented: “She was the reverse of most other stars…For her, living life was a kind of acting.” Bragg observed that as Mankiewicz wrote the script by night while
Le Scandale
exploded all around him, he “wisely tried to ride it and was accused of putting in lines which were deliberately ambiguous.” Elizabeth's anger when Cleopatra slashed Antony's clothes after hearing of his marriage to Octavian's sister is often cited as a moment when real life intersected the opulent fantasy of the movie: Elizabeth was heard to cry out “Sybil!” and she accidentally cut herself in her fury.

“These were larger-than-life humans,” Mankiewicz said about his fated heroes, but he may just as well have been describing Burton and Taylor themselves. “They lived against larger-than-human backgrounds…I meant to focus interest upon the foreground, where those humans destroyed themselves in the end, or were destroyed, because it turned out that they were all-too-human after all.”

But if Mankiewicz was, consciously or unconsciously, weaving the threads of their affair into his screenplay, he could not have known how closely
Cleopatra
would anticipate the arc of Elizabeth and Richard's thirteen-year love affair, begun on that Roman soundstage. It's all there, like a blueprint: their unstoppable lust, which deepens
into love. Antony's jealous supplanting of Caesar, as he rips Caesar's necklace of gold coins from Cleopatra's throat, demanding, “Has it been his name you cry out in the dark?” (Richard resented the many framed photographs of Mike Todd in Elizabeth's villa, and saw the ghost of Todd—not Eddie Fisher—as his true rival. He noticed, too, that Elizabeth still wore Todd's wedding ring on her finger, a memento mori blackened and twisted from Todd's fatal air crash.) The opulence of Cleopatra's palace would pale next to the extravagance of Burton-Taylor's life together, with its yacht, its jewels, its furs, its entourages, its champagne and caviar, the five-star hotels, the Van Goghs and Matisses and Pissarros. And just as Antony and Cleopatra had plotted to rule together a third of the Roman empire, Burton and Taylor would form a company to produce movies that would capitalize on their notoriety, becoming—for a time—Hollywood's royalty. Antony is introduced in the film as a man redolent of wine; as his world collapses, he feeds his despair with more and more alcohol. Just so, Burton. When Cleopatra reproaches him and slaps his face, Antony knocks her to the ground. Elizabeth was already familiar with this apache dance.

Indeed, Mankiewicz created for Burton, in the role of Antony, the prototype for what would endure as the actor's greatest theatrical persona: his embodiment of self-pitying despair. The director saw Antony as essentially weak, a man “who stood always in Caesar's footsteps—right up to and into Cleopatra's bed.” In an interview for
Life
magazine, Mankiewicz described Antony as “a masculine façade, constantly threatened by Caesar, the all-powerful father figure. His love for Cleopatra was, in the beginning, as guilt-ridden and frightening as that of a son in love with his father's mistress.” Burton embraced that vision of Antony, explaining to the English drama critic Kenneth Tynan that the director/screenwriter had fashioned a man “who talks incessantly to excuse his own failure to become a great man…. The fury is there and the sense of failure is there, but sometimes all that comes out is a series of splendid words without any particular meaning.”

After Antony abandons his soldiers to follow Cleopatra's departing barge at the disastrous Battle of Actium, all he has left is his shame. When his remnant of an army finally deserts him and he and Cleopatra are defeated by Octavian, Antony can find no one to dispatch him with an honorable death. He cries out, “The ultimate desertion? I from myself! Is that what I aimed for all my life? Will you finish me now?”

In art and in life, Burton would often feel he had made the ultimate desertion: “I from myself.”

Perhaps Mankiewicz could sense the arc of their grand passion, and the current of injurious self-censure that lay within Burton. At one point, when Antony has foolishly dismissed his closest lieutenants before the Battle of Actium, Cleopatra realizes that something fateful has just occurred.

“Antony, what has happened?” she demands of him.

To which he replies, “To me?
You
have happened to me.”

Once he made up his mind to be with Elizabeth, two years would pass before Richard would see his children, Kate and Jessica. And Sybil, whom he once cherished, would never speak to him again, not ever, not for the rest of his life.

E
lizabeth Taylor was born to an upper-middle-class family with doting parents and an adored older brother, and was raised on an estate in Hampstead Heath, where she had her own pony and wanted for nothing. Originally from Arkansas City, Kansas, Francis Taylor—a shy but dapper man with a good eye for paintings—had moved to England to buy Old Masters for his wealthy uncle, an art dealer named Howard Young. It was Young who had launched Francis in the business, setting him up in one of his galleries in New York before sending him abroad. Francis Taylor opened his own gallery in London's Old Bond Street. Francis and Sara's two children, Howard and Elizabeth, were thus Americans born in England.

For a while, the Taylors lived well—some would say well beyond their means—partly on the generosity of others. Howard Young kept an eye out for his nephew (and his own vested interests), and Sara and Francis were invited to make use of a spacious, sixteenth-century
cottage on an estate in Kent belonging to Victor Cazalet, a wealthy art collector and well-liked Conservative Member of Parliament, who had bought paintings from Francis Taylor. Cazalet and Sara were both keen believers in Christian Science.

Elizabeth lived a fairy-tale life, given her own horse at the age of five, sent to the same ballet school as Princess Elizabeth and her sister Princess Margaret. She was fussed over not only by her mother but by Cazalet himself. It was rumored that his generosity to the Taylors stemmed from an affair he was having with Sara, and it was also rumored that the bachelor MP was having an affair with Francis; either scenario would have added to the unreality of Elizabeth's storybook childhood.

Elizabeth later wrote about her early years, “The happiest days of my childhood were in England, because I rode—that's where I learned to ride bareback…” But once the family decamped to Los Angeles before the outbreak of World War II, leaving her beloved horse behind, the sweet unreality of her English life would take on another kind of unreality—one full of triumphs, but not so sweet. “I never cared whether or not I was an actress, especially when I was a very little girl,” she recalled. “When I was first acting, I just liked playing with the dogs and the horses. Riding a horse gave me a sense of freedom and
abandon
, because I was so controlled by my parents and the studio when I was a child that when I was on a horse
we
could do whatever
we
wanted. Riding a horse was my way of getting away from people telling me what to do and when to do it and how to do it.”

In a way, it was a horse that changed the direction of Elizabeth's extraordinary life. Sara Taylor knew that the role of Velvet Brown in MGM's
National Velvet
would be a star vehicle for her beautiful little eleven-year-old. She was born for the role of an English girl who loved horses and who trained her horse, “Pi,” to win the Grand National Sweepstakes, while she rode him to victory disguised as a boy jockey. Abetted by her mother, Elizabeth came to feel that “National Velvet was really me,” and she began decorating her bedroom with statues
of horses and to dream of playing Velvet Brown. The only problem was that Elizabeth was too small for the role, looking more like a first-grader than an eleven-year-old. Elizabeth reportedly told the producer, Pandro S. Berman, “I will grow—I will grow in the part.” Again, with her mother's encouragement and her intense belief in Christian Science, the two prayed together that Elizabeth would shoot up in time to be cast as Velvet. Sara also plied her with farmer's breakfasts—heapings of pancakes, fried eggs, bacon, all washed down with jugs of fresh milk—in an effort to add three inches to Elizabeth's height. Amazingly, it did the trick (without adding three inches to her waist), but it may also have unleashed a hedonistic love of food that would wreak havoc with Elizabeth's tiny frame in later years. Sara Taylor credited the remarkable growth spurt to two things—their prayers and Elizabeth's amazing willpower. They both believed that Elizabeth had actually
willed
herself to grow three inches. It was the beginning of Elizabeth's sense that she was ultimately in control of her fate, and if she wanted something badly enough, she would find a way to have it.

She also learned at an early age that movie-making was hard, backbreaking work. “I worked harder on that film than on any other movie in my life,” she later said, spending hours riding a temperamental horse named King Charles, who would be Velvet's horse, Pi, in the movie. Through it all, Francis Taylor said little, though he did put his foot down after the studio pulled two of Elizabeth's baby teeth and replaced them with false stubs in order to put a set of braces in her mouth, which the role called for.
That
she endured, but Francis backed her up when she refused to have her long, lustrous hair cut for the role.

When
National Velvet
was released in 1943, it was a tremendous success, which made the now twelve-year-old a star. It also brought her an amazing salary for a child—negotiated by her mother—$30,000, plus a bonus of $15,000 (close to $450,000 in today's purchasing power). But, more important for Elizabeth, it brought her a horse. She asked Berman if she could have King Charles for her own, and
the studio decided to make her the gift (provided she would lend the horse back to the studio whenever it was needed). From then on, Elizabeth would come to expect—and even demand—expensive, meaningful gifts from her producers and directors at the end of a shoot. And she usually got them.

But Elizabeth continued to chafe under Sara's watchful control. She adored her mother, and the two were very close, but she would eventually have to rebel against such closeness. Margaret Kelly, Elizabeth's body double in
National Velvet
, recalled cringing every time she heard Sara Taylor call out, “Oh, Elizabeth, darling. Come along,” to which Elizabeth would meekly reply, “Coming, Mother dear.”

The differences in Elizabeth's and Richard's upbringing brought about a curious paradox: Elizabeth, raised as an upper-class girl, would delight in acting the vulgarian, with a lusty joy in using four-letter words and winning belching contests, which she indulged in with her costar Rock Hudson on the set of
Giant
, thirteen years after making
National Velvet.
Yet Richard, son of an impoverished miner, saw himself as nobility. Of all the major Shakespearean roles he would play in his life—Prince Hal, Henry V, Othello, Iago, Hamlet, Petruchio—he most identified with the noble Roman warrior Coriolanus, who disdained the treacherous crowds of Rome. “I'm the son of a Welsh miner,” he later told Kenneth Tynan, “and one would expect me to be at my happiest playing peasants, people of the earth, but in actual fact I am much happier playing princes and kings…I'm never really comfortable playing people from the working class.”

Another contrast: Elizabeth would have her parents with her for a very long time (Sara Taylor, in fact, died in her nineties). Richard was virtually orphaned by his parents, raised by his sister, Cecilia “Cissy” James, and later taken under the wing of Philip Burton, a Welsh teacher and dramatist who gave Richard his name. When Richard Burton was informed in 1957 that his father had died, the first words out of his mouth were, “Which one?” Indeed, there were at least two fathers Burton could claim to have lost.

His first, of course, was the man who sired him, a hard-drinking coal miner named Richard Jenkins, known as Dic Jenkins and called “Dadi Ni” by his seven boys and four girls—Tom, Ifor, Cecilia, Will, David, Verdun (named after the great battle of World War I), Hilda, Katherine, Edith, Richard, and Graham. Burton was named Richard Walter Jenkins, after his father, and called “Rich” by his family. He was the twelfth of thirteen children (two daughters died in infancy), born on November 10, 1925 in the mining-and-smelting town of Pontrhydyfen in South Wales. His mother, Edith Thomas, had married Jenkins at sixteen and raised her large brood with resourcefulness and hard work, taking in washing, making and selling sweets and nonalcoholic beer, and making sure her children were well fed and attended church regularly. All but Graham, Richard's youngest brother, would toil long hours in the coal pits. As Hilda Jenkins Owens, one of Richard's sisters, recalled, “the seven boys born to Dic and Edith between 1901 and 1927 survived. They grew tall like their mother, rugged and strong like their father, and the first five went down to the mines like their ancestors before them.”

Robert Hardy, who knew several of Burton's siblings, described the Jenkinses as “remarkable. Each and every one of them had an extraordinary ability about them, a sort of ancient dignity. That was wonderfully true of the eldest brother, Thomas, who had been a miner all his life. His face was pocked with all these little blue marks, and he was the gentlest and most dignified, charming, and easy man.” Yet they were tough. “To have Dadi Ni's boys against you was something to shy away from,” Hilda recalled. Richard himself had to earn his place among his six brothers. They would sometimes walk along the highest ledge of the bridge that gave Pontrhydyfen its name, a terrifying height. “I did it, even though I was frightened,” Burton recalled. “After all, I had to prove I was a full-fledged member of the Jenkins family.”

Dic Jenkins often worked from six thirty a.m. to seven thirty p.m. six days a week, which meant he saw daylight only on Sundays. Bur
ton's brother Verdun lost half of his foot in a mining accident. Besides the long hours in the pits and the hard poverty of the 1920s and 1930s, there were also the twin perils of malnutrition and tuberculosis. Pontrhydyfen means “bridge over the ford across two rivers,” but very few sons of the valley crossed those rivers into the greater world. (Of Burton's era and just after, the Welshmen who crossed over included the poet Dylan Thomas, the playwright Emlyn Williams, the pop singer Tom Jones, and the actors Stanley Baker, Thomas Owen Jones, and Anthony Hopkins.) This Welsh valley of roughly two thousand souls was sustained by three enterprises: the mines, the pubs, and the churches. The women of Pontrhydyfen would habitually climb to the top of the mines each payday, waiting for the men to surface so they could pluck the paychecks out of their hands before the local pubs took it all.

Nonetheless, Richard—and Hilda and Graham—looked back on their hardscrabble early years as happy ones. “It was our parents who had the hard time, not us,” Graham Jenkins wrote in his memoir,
Richard Burton
,
My Brother.
“We ate plentifully and with great gusto. The main diet was fresh fish but there was a joint once a week and on Saturday we had cockles and lava bread—a huge treat.” Burton, in fact, never developed a sophisticated palate and never lost his taste for lava bread, a Welsh dish consisting of the froth of boiled seaweed plunked down on the plate “like a cow pat,” or for a dish called
siencyn
, a “delicious mush” made from pieces of fried bread, bacon, and cheese, with sugared tea poured over it. Graham may have put too cheerful a spin on his memories, as another chronicler reported that Edith Jenkins often fed her family “by dribbling [two] eggs over fourteen slices of bread, particularly when the bread had turned moldy,” as it often did in the clammy Welsh air. All the family meals were washed down by gallons of hot, sweetened tea.

Graham remembers his father as a man who drank no more than other miners, and who was never cruel nor violent while drunk. Others recall a more prodigious appetite: “Dic was a real sweet man.
No harm in him at all, but a right terror for his booze. Only this size, tiny, couldn't be five-two out of his boots. But drink! Bloody hollow legs,” recalled one of the miners who had grown up in Pontrhydyfen with the Jenkinses. The village was full of pubs, then, with names like Bird in Hand, Heart of Oak, Boar's Head, Miners Arms, British Lion, where “the drinking was tremendous and cheap…There were only two ways of life. You were either going to the chapel or to the pub, and most of the miners went to the pub, and the women understood, because miners' work is hell.”

Barely five feet two inches tall, proud, hardworking, highly intelligent, full of stories and swagger, Jenkins bore his hard life stoically. Burned in a mine fire, he was treated at home by two of his daughters. Hilda remembers rubbing olive oil on his burned arms, which were then bandaged to his torso so he couldn't use them at all—which didn't keep him from showing up at the pub, where he'd have a pint of bitter poured directly into his mouth. On his way home from the pub one night, his ruined arms strapped to his side, he was horribly beaten by an old adversary; his teeth were knocked out and he was thrown over a wall where he wasn't found until the next morning. Still, he survived, hardened and darkened like a piece of coal, retelling the story with relish at the local pubs well into his eighties.

Jenkins, a masculine role model for Richard, wasn't pleased by Richard's choice of a profession. The fame and the money were to be admired, yes, but prancing around in costumes and wearing makeup and being bullied by women? Or perhaps Jenkins was resentful of his next-to-youngest son's extraordinary renown, seeing how he bore not his own name but the name of another.

Edith Jenkins died at the age of forty-four just after giving birth to Graham, her youngest. Richard was only two years old at the time, though he would claim that he had vivid memories of his mother. Jenkins farmed out the younger boys—Graham and Rich, an infant and a toddler—to their older, married siblings. Graham would be raised by Tom and his wife, Cassie, and Jenkins put Rich into the
hands of his twenty-one-year-old sister Cecilia, who was married and living on her own in nearby Port Talbot. Richard thrived in her care.

Cecilia was a striking, green-eyed, dark-haired woman known in the family as “Cis.” She would become, for Burton, the paragon of female perfection. In
A Christmas Story
, Burton's autobiographical short story, he described his sister as “no ordinary woman—no woman ever is, but to me, my sister less than any.”