Furious Love Read online

  Elizbeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and the Marriage of the Century

  Furious Love

  Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger

  Contents

  Preface

  One Le Scandale

  Two Very Important People

  Three A Year in the Sun

  Four No More Marriages

  Five In from the Cold

  Six Who’s Afraid of Elizabeth Taylor?

  Seven Married Love

  Photographic Insert 1

  Eight Seduced by Faust

  Nine Boom!

  Ten The Only Game in Town

  Eleven “Rings and Farthingales”

  Twelve Fallen Stars

  Photographic Insert 2

  Thirteen Bluebeard

  Fourteen Divorce His Divorce Hers

  Fifteen Massacre in Rome

  Sixteen Private Lives

  Epilogue

  Two Poems by Richard Burton

  Endnotes

  Bibliography

  Searchable Terms

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors

  Other Books by Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PREFACE

  “I am forever punished by the gods for being given the fire and trying to put it out. The fire, of course, is you.”

  —RICHARD BURTON

  “Since I was a little girl, I believed I was a child of destiny, and if that is true, Richard Burton was surely my fate.”

  —ELIZABETH TAYLOR

  When asked by Time magazine a few years ago to name the five great love affairs of all time, the Texas-born gossip columnist Liz Smith didn’t even have to think about who would occupy first place. The Burtons, of course. Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor “were the most vivid example of a public love affair that I can think of. The Burtons and the Lindbergh baby being kidnapped and Kennedy’s assassination—these are the biggest stories of our time. Whenever somebody says, ‘So and so is a big star,’ I say, ‘Have they been condemned by the Vatican?’”

  Their thirteen-year saga was the most notorious, publicized, celebrated, and vilified love affair of its day. Indeed, their ten-year marriage, followed by a divorce, remarriage, and a final divorce, was often called “the marriage of the century” in the press. Just thirty years earlier, the Duke of Windsor had embarked upon his own famous marriage, to Wallis Simpson, giving up the throne of England to marry the American divorcée from Baltimore. A nation wept, but the Duke and Duchess of Windsor went on to rule a shadow empire of jet-setters, aristocrats, gigolos, international bon vivants, in a floating world of yachts, dance floors, casinos, and the homes and hotels of the very rich. So famous were the Burtons in the 1960s and 1970s that the duke and the duchess were their only peers, the only other couple who knew what it was like to be pariahs for a time, to pay a high price for their choices, and to live the rest of their lives in isolated luxury. But the notorious Burtons managed to win their way back into the hearts of the American public through sheer talent, hard work, chutzpah, and glamour. “On the face of it,” said columnist Smith, “Elizabeth Taylor was just totally arrogant. She’d walk out in capri pants and her Cleopatra makeup and her kerchief and go off to whatever local restaurant and drink up a storm with Burton. That’s part of what excited the public: her vulgarity and her arrogance and the money. Oh God, their love story had everything.”

  It also brought us the modern accoutrements of celebrity: the relentless paparazzi, the continuous press exposure, the public airing of private grief. In short, it brought us “Liz and Dick,” a tabloid shorthand that they hated but that stood for everything extravagant and over-the-top about their all-too-public lives.

  In fact, you might say there were two marriages: the ballyhooed union of Liz and Dick and the private marriage of Richard and Elizabeth. More often than not, Liz and Dick overwhelmed the private marriage, holding it hostage and ultimately helping to destroy it. The yachts, the glamorous ports of call (Monte Carlo, Portofino), the grand hotels of the world, the fabled jewels, the homes in London, Gstaad, Céligny, and Puerto Vallarta, the hobnobbing with the Rothschilds, Ari Onassis, General Tito of Yugoslavia, and, of course, the Windsors. They were indeed Hollywood royalty. But like any other married couple, they had to deal with children coming of age during the cultural upheavals of the 1960s—communes, family squabbles, balancing two careers (even if their careers meant making some of the most remarkable films of the 1960s)—in short, the real marriage of two people trying to live their lives together.

  If Burton had entered into the pact with impure motives, he quickly found himself utterly bewitched. He discovered in Elizabeth the embodiment of all the women in Wales he had loved or lusted after: from his sainted sister who had raised him to the dark-haired Welsh “tarts” he knew as a randy youth in the towns of Pontrhydyfen and Port Talbot. “My blind eyes are desperately waiting for the sight of you,” he would write to her well into their marriage. “You don’t realize of course, E. B., how fantastically beautiful you have always been, and how strangely you have acquired an added and special and dangerous loveliness. Your breasts jutting out from that half-asleep languid lingering body, the remote eyes, the parted lips.”

  For Elizabeth, this was the one true marriage. When she agreed to share with us letters that Richard Burton had written to her in the last few years of their life together, she wanted us to know the place he held, and continues to hold, in her heart. She wrote to us,

  Richard was magnificent in every sense of the word…and in everything he ever did. He was magnificent on the stage, he was magnificent in film, he was magnificent at making love…at least to me. He was the kindest, funniest, and most gentle father. All my kids worshipped him. Attentive, loving—that was Richard. The bond with all of us continued until he drew his last breath. We knew he was absolutely there for us no matter what. In my heart, I will always believe we would have been married a third and final time…from those first moments in Rome we were always madly and powerfully in love. We had more time but not enough.

  Of the nearly forty letters Richard wrote to Elizabeth, perhaps the most important was written shortly before his untimely death on August 5, 1984, at the age of fifty-eight. He was in the attic study of his beloved house in Céligny, Switzerland, a home he shared with his fourth wife, Sally Hay Burton, when he wrote what would turn out to be his final letter to Elizabeth. He had recently completed work in Michael Radford’s adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984, ironically the year of Burton’s death, in what would be a brief but powerful performance. His costar, the English actor John Hurt, was staying with Richard and Sally for a few days, but Richard managed to slip away and sequester himself in the study. Surrounded by his treasured thousand volumes of The Everyman Library—a gift from Elizabeth—he wrote to her at her home in Bel Air in Los Angeles.

  But by the time Elizabeth received the letter, Richard Burton was dead. He had gone to bed with a terrible headache, and sometime during the night he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. Elizabeth was barred by Richard’s widow from attending his funeral in Céligny, for fear of the disrupting crowds and paparazzi that still followed Elizabeth wherever she went. That letter would be her most cherished remembrance of the thirteen years, all told, they spent together in the whirlwind of their grand affair.

  But what was in that letter?

  1

  LE SCANDALE

  “I did not want to be another notch on his belt.”

  —ELIZABETH TAYLOR

  “How did I know the woman was so fucking famous?”

  —RICHARD BURTON

  The first time Richard Burton laid eyes on Elizabeth Taylor, he nearly laughed out loud.

 
It was 1953, and Burton had been plucked from the London stage where he was being hailed as the great successor to Sir John Gielgud and Sir Laurence Olivier, to make three dramas for 20th Century-Fox—My Cousin Rachel, The Robe, and The Desert Rats. He had swooped into Hollywood with his Welsh wife, Sybil, and had cut a swath through willing Hollywood wives, earning a reputation as an irresistible lover, a great raconteur, a rough and randy Welshman, a powerful drinker. At a party at Stewart Granger and Jean Simmons’s house in Bel Air, the twenty-eight-year-old actor outdid himself in drinking and storytelling. It was the Welsh actor’s first time in California, and his first visit to “a swank house,” where he was agog at the suntanned beauties lounging around the largest swimming pool he had ever seen. The hot desert air was cooled by the sound of ice clinking in glasses, and Bloody Marys, boilermakers, and ice-cold beer kept the party well lubricated. “It had been a hell of a year,” Burton would later write in his frank and colorful notebooks, his diary entries recorded for a possible autobiography. “Three big movies; drinking with Bogie; flirting with Garbo…” He recalled,

  I was enjoying this small social triumph, but then a girl sitting on the other side of the pool lowered her book, took off her sunglasses and looked at me. She was so extraordinarily beautiful that I nearly laughed out loud…she was unquestioningly gorgeous…She was lavish. She was a dark unyielding largess. She was, in short, too bloody much, and not only that, she was totally ignoring me.

  Well, not “totally.” That cool look took in a man she considered, at the time, swaggering and vulgar. She would have none of it. Besides, she was a year into her second marriage, to English actor Michael Wilding, a close friend of the Grangers. (Elizabeth, for her part, would recall that first meeting as having taken place at her and Michael’s home in the Hollywood Hills; in her memory, she was nineteen at the time.) But Burton was already, let’s say, intrigued. Reliving that first glimpse of twenty-one-year-old Elizabeth Taylor, he later described her as “the most astonishingly self-contained, pulchritudinous, remote, removed, inaccessible woman I had ever seen…. Was she merely sullen? I thought not. There was no trace of sulkiness in that divine face.” And later still: “Her breasts were apocalyptic, they would topple empires…” They would also topple Burton.

  He would not meet her again for another nine years.

  By the time they met in 1962 on the set of Cleopatra—after the production’s lengthy, expensive delays, a costly move from London’s Pinewood Studios to Rome’s Cinecittà, and a shuffling of studio heads, producers, directors, writers, and actors—Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton had already lived several lives. Elizabeth had survived child stardom, with all its demands and excesses. Having been wrenched from a bucolic childhood in Hampstead, England (complete with a pony), resettled in Los Angeles by her doting parents to escape the gathering storm of World War II, and thrust into filmdom by her ambitious mother, the former stage actress Sara Sothern Taylor, Elizabeth found herself famous at the tender age of ten, the diminutive costar of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s Lassie Come Home, and National Velvet the following year. (She would always have a fondness for animals, especially horses; since the age of three, she could jump without a saddle.) She learned early the value of her preternaturally beautiful, eerily adult face, though she treated her beauty cavalierly and had almost no personal vanity. She learned how the business worked: the fussing over by wardrobe and makeup and hair stylists and studio publicity agents, the constant fawning, the power struggles, the peaks and valleys of popularity. She became used to, and came to require, an entourage of helpers that would sink most ships. (Her even more beautiful brother, Howard, had wanted no part of it, so at fifteen he shaved his head the day before being hauled into Universal Studios to be tested for a boy-with-horse Western, thus assuring his escape into normalcy.) Elizabeth’s rewards—fame, money, attention, studio animals to play with—balanced out her punishment: putting up with relentless control by her mother and her directors and tyrannical studio chief Louis B. Mayer, and a complete lack of privacy and independence. “I was so totally chaperoned,” she recalled, “that I couldn’t go to the bathroom alone.” She was taught how to look and to speak and to walk and to stand and to breathe. But through it all, she learned about power: who had it, how to get it, how to keep it. When Louis B. Mayer once swore at Elizabeth’s mother in a fit of rage, eleven-year-old Elizabeth shouted back, “You and your studio can go to hell!” She refused to apologize, and—amazingly—Mayer didn’t fire her on the spot. Truly, at that moment, a diva was born.

  At her second meeting with Burton, Elizabeth was at the height of her raven beauty but seemed older than her twenty-nine years. She had been married thrice and widowed once. Her first, brief marriage at age eighteen to the compulsive gambler, hotel heir Conrad Nicholson “Nicky” Hilton Jr., was a studio-arranged disaster from the start. When he wasn’t jilting her for the gaming tables, he beat her; Elizabeth later claimed that he even kicked her in the stomach when she was a few months into a pregnancy, inducing a miscarriage. The studio had convinced her to marry the attractive but louche playboy as a publicity tie-in to Father of the Bride, MGM’s 1950 film with Elizabeth as the young bride and Spencer Tracy as her put-upon father. Sara Taylor went along with MGM’s plans; she knew it would help her daughter on her way to becoming a star, and, anyway, she’d wanted Elizabeth to marry wealth.

  “When I met Nicky Hilton,” Elizabeth later admitted, “I was ripe to get married. Dazzled by his charm and apparent sophistication, driven by feelings that could not be indulged outside of marriage, desperate to live a life independent of my parents and the studio, I closed my eyes to any problem and walked radiantly down the aisle.” The ballyhooed wedding, designed and flogged by MGM and witnessed by a crush of fans, did what it was meant to do: Father of the Bride was a huge success for the studio. The marriage lasted six months.

  The brief marriage was ended on February 1, 1952, on the grounds of mental cruelty. Nicky blamed his bad behavior on the goldfish life he had suddenly found himself plunged into. When a legion of reporters and photographers invaded their hotel suite—a frequent occurrence—one of the photographers aimed his camera at Elizabeth and barked at the bridegroom, “Hey, Mac, get out of the way, I want to snap a picture.” It was too much for the immature, headstrong playboy to bear. His father, Conrad Hilton, agreed: “They never had a chance…Elizabeth is a princess who isn’t allowed to lead a normal life, and those near her are affected, too…. [I]f she had been a counter girl at Macy’s instead of a movie star…”

  By the time Elizabeth took up the Queen of the Nile’s headdress in 1962, she was already the mother of three. Her two sons, Michael and Christopher, were born during her second marriage, to Michael Wilding, the genteel English actor who was closer to Elizabeth’s father’s age than her own. It had been another marriage encouraged by MGM, to wipe out the bad publicity of her short-lived stint with Nicky, but Elizabeth had been attracted to Wilding, who seemed to offer stability and protection.

  Mike Todd, Elizabeth’s third husband, was the epitome of a self-made man: born into a poor rabbi’s family, lacking in formal education, he made money as a peddler and in the construction business before becoming an independent film producer. He turned his considerable publicity skills toward producing one endlessly flogged hit, Around the World in 80 Days. He was part showman, part hustler, part genius, and was touted in the movie magazines as “the love of Elizabeth’s life” she had reveled in the manic showman’s macho bluster and outsized personality. He was the complete opposite of her husband Michael Wilding, and thus the complete opposite of her mild-mannered father, art-and-antiques dealer Francis Taylor.

  The writer and satirist S. J. Perelman, who wrote the screenplay for Todd’s big movie, ended up with a less than sanguine impression of the diminutive mogul, pre-Elizabeth: “Todd’s living up to his legend,” he wrote in a 1955 letter to his wife, Laura, “standing off from himself and admiring this Napoleonic figure he’s created who’s…producing War
and Peace and The Life of Toscanini at the same time he’s releasing Oklahoma! and preparing Around the World in 80 Days and sleeping with sixteen dames alternately and flying back from Las Vegas and leaving for Paris tomorrow and returning from London yesterday.” But his ultra-masculinity and total devotion were just what Elizabeth wanted. Having found her life controlled by others—her mother and MGM—she felt protected by his swagger and strength. And, as an independent producer, he could help her win her freedom from MGM. With Todd at her side, she could tell them all to go to hell.

  Todd lived on chutzpah and hype and bought Elizabeth magnificent gifts, including a blinding, 27-carat diamond. He dazzled her with attention. He also knocked her around a few times. Her experience with Nicky Hilton notwithstanding, Elizabeth admitted that she relished the caveman attention—had even goaded him into it—because, in the old morality, it meant he was passionate about her. She needed someone who was tougher, more macho, and more in control than she was. She had tried goading Wilding into bossing her around, but he just wasn’t up to it.