Hello Goodbye Hello: A Circle of 101 Remarkable Meetings (7 page)

Thirty years ago, they were the most glamorous couple in the world; that title, only ever temporary, is now held by Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, who are, by chance, both making movies in Paris. The balance of fame, perhaps also of wealth,
¹⁷
dictates that it is the Windsors who make eyes at the Burtons, though the latter are far from displeased, as the Windsors reinforce their sense of having arrived, their craving for being centre-stage, particularly when off-stage.

The Windsors visit the Burtons on their separate sets, and the two couples dine together regularly. In honour of Burton’s Welsh roots, the Duchess makes a point of wearing her Prince of Wales brooch – the fleur de lys in white and yellow diamonds. Elizabeth Taylor looks at it covetously: she is celebrated for her jewellery collection.
¹⁸
Dining with the Windsors and the Rothschilds before the European premiere of
The
Taming of the Shrew
, she wears roughly $1,500,000-worth – so much that the couple have to be protected by eight bodyguards on their short journey to the Paris Opera House. Earlier the same day, Burton spends $960,000 buying her the jet plane on which they flew into Paris. ‘Elizabeth was not displeased,’ he confides to his diary.

Elizabeth remains enchanted by the fairy-tale glamour of the Windsors, but Burton, less convinced that the world he has created is the world he wants, his unease fuelled and allayed by three bottles of vodka a day, is beginning to find them a little wearing. Unlike the Duchess, the Duke lacks zip: another of their acquaintances finds himself mesmerised by the way that he ‘always had something of ... riveting stupidity to say on any subject’.

On November 12th, the Burtons grace a dinner for twenty-two at the Windsors’ home. As they enter the room, Burton recognises just two people, the Count and Countess of Bismarck, and then only by name. ‘He, the Count, looks as much like one’s mental picture of the iron chancellor as spaghetti. Soft and round and irresolute. He couldn’t carve modern Germany out of cardboard.’

The Duke and Duchess seem, through his jaded eyes, much diminished. ‘It is extraordinary how small the Duke and Duchess are. Two tiny figures like Toto and Nanette that you keep on the mantelpiece. Chipped around the edges. Something you keep in the front room for Sundays only. Marred royalty. The awful majesty that doth hedge around a king is notably lacking in awfulness. Charming and feckless.’

Elizabeth notes that she and Richard are the only two people without titles in the entire room. She is offended that she has not been placed next to the Duke, and Richard is furious that he has not been placed next to the Duchess. Instead, he is between another Duchess and a Countess, both ‘hard-faced and youngish’.

One of them tells him that she saw him in
Hamlet
, and asks how he could possibly remember all those lines. Burton says that he doesn’t bother, that he improvises, that Shakespeare is lousy, that Hamlet’s character is so revolting that one could only say some of his lines when drunk. ‘I mean, the frantic self-pity of “How all occasions do inform against me, and spur my dull revenge”. You have to be sloshed to get around that. At least
I
have to be.’

He thinks he may have shocked her. Another lady, ‘not a day under seventy, whose face had been lifted so often that it was on top of her head’, asks him if it is true that all actors are queer. Yes, he replies, and that’s why he married Elizabeth, because she was queer too, but they have an arrangement.

‘What do you do?’

‘Well, she lives in one suite, and I in another, and we make love by telephone.’

After dinner, Taylor looks on in horror as Burton approaches the Duchess of Windsor and says, ‘You are without any question, the most vulgar woman I’ve ever met.’ Before long, he has picked up the seventy-two-year-old Duchess and is swinging her around ‘like a dancing singing dervish’. The room falls silent. Watching the event with the Duke, Taylor is terrified that Burton will drop her or fall down and kill her. Meanwhile, Burton, who has long suspected that his lifestyle is a betrayal of his origins, is overcome with self-pity and starts pining for the Welsh valleys. ‘Christ! I will arise and go now and go home to Welsh miners who understand drink and the idiocies that it arouses ... I shall die of drink and make-up.’

Arriving back at the Plaza Athénée, Taylor is furious, and locks Burton in the spare bedroom. He tries to kick the door down, ‘and nearly succeeded which meant that I spent some time on my hands and knees this morning picking up the battered plaster in the hope that the waiters wouldn’t notice that the hotel had nearly lost a door in the middle of the night’.

In the morning, Taylor berates him for his misbehaviour, complaining that they’ll never be invited again. ‘Thank God,’ he replies, adding, ‘Rarely have I been so stupendously bored.’

That weekend, he reluctantly agrees to accompany Taylor to a grand fancy-dress party at the Rothschilds’ château in the country. Also at the party is Cecil Beaton, who spots them across the room. ‘I have always loathed the Burtons for their vulgarity, commonness and crass bad taste,’ he writes in his diary the next day. ‘She combining the worst of US and English taste, he as butch and coarse as only a Welshman can be.’

UNNERVES

Marfa, Texas

June 6th 1955

She is the former child star, now Queen of Hollywood. He is the up-and-coming method actor, surly and unpredictable. Though Elizabeth Taylor is a year younger than James Dean, she belongs to an earlier generation of old-fashioned, glamorous, self-confident, untouchable stars, whereas he heralds a new generation: scruffy, grunting, brooding, callow. They are to act together in
Giant
, Elizabeth Taylor as the wife of a Texas cattle baron, James Dean as the troublesome ranch-hand who strikes oil.

They are introduced a few days before filming begins. To everyone’s surprise, he charms her, and takes her for a ride in his brand-new Porsche. Taylor ends the day convinced that he is a perfect gentleman, and that others have tarred him with the wrong brush.

The following day, Taylor, expecting a warm welcome after their pleasant introduction, goes up to Dean and says hello. He glares at her over the rims of his glasses, mutters something incomprehensible to himself and strides off as though he hasn’t seen her. It dawns on her that, after all, his reputation for moodiness may be justified.

Their first four weeks are to be spent on location in the small, sleepy town of Marfa, Texas, where the temperatures frequently rise to 120 degrees in the shade. On their first day of filming, his friend Dennis Hopper has never seen James Dean so nervous on a set.

Their first scene involves Dean firing a shot at a water tower, Taylor stopping her car, and Dean asking her in for tea. But Dean is so nervous that he can barely get the words out. ‘At that time there wasn’t anybody who didn’t think she was queen of the movies, and Jimmy was really fuckin’ nervous. They did take after take, and it just wasn’t going right. He was really getting fucked up. Really nervous,’ recalls Hopper. ‘Well, there were around four thousand people watching the scene from a hundred
yards away, local people and visitors. And all of a sudden Jimmy turned and walked off towards them. He wasn’t relating to them or anything. He got half-way, unzipped his pants, took out his cock, and took a piss. Then he dripped off, put his cock back, zipped up his pants, and walked back to the set and said, “OK, shoot.”’

This is not the sort of behaviour to which Elizabeth Taylor is accustomed. On the way back from the location, Hopper says to Dean, ‘Jimmy, I’ve seen you do some way-out things before, but what was
that
?’

‘I was nervous,’ explains Dean. ‘I’m a method actor. I work through my senses. If you’re nervous, your senses can’t reach your subconscious and that’s that – you just can’t work. So I figured if I could piss in front of these two thousand people, man, and I could be cool, I figured if I could do that, I could get in front of that camera and do just anything, anything at all.’

As the filming continues, Dean irritates the cast and crew with his habit of coming to a halt in the middle of a take and shouting, ‘Cut – I fucked up!’ He attributes it to the perfectionism required of a method actor. His co-star Rock Hudson, one of the old school, is less forgiving of the solipsistic neurosis that powers Dean’s acting. The director, George Stevens, also grows irritated by Dean’s random behaviour, regarding it as unprofessional. ‘I’d get so mad at him, and he’d stand there, blinking behind his glasses after having been guilty of some bit of preposterous behaviour, and revealing by his very cast of defiance that he felt some sense of unworthiness.’ Stevens is equally annoyed by Taylor’s obsession with her looks. ‘Until you tone down your veneer, you’ll never be an actress,’ he tells her.

Their shared sense of directorial persecution may help forge a bond between Taylor and Dean: in time, the two stars grow to like each other. ‘We were like brother and sister really; kidding all the time, whatever it was we were talking about. One felt he was a boy one had to take care of, but even that was probably his joke. I don’t think he needed anybody or anything – except his acting.’

Both Dean and Taylor are reliant on drugs of one sort or another: he smokes marijuana, while Taylor takes medications for her plentiful ailments, which Stevens regards as psychosomatic. ‘When Jimmy was eleven and his mother passed away, he began to be molested by his minister. I think that haunted him the rest of his life. In fact, I know it did. We talked about it a lot. During
Giant
we’d stay up nights and talk and talk
and that was one of the things he confessed to me,’ Taylor says forty-two years later.
¹⁹

‘He would tell me about his past life, some of the grief and unhappiness he had experienced, and some of his loves and tragedies. Then, the next day on set, I would say, “Hi, Jimmy,” and he would give me a cursory nod of his head. It was almost as if he didn’t want to recognise me, as if he was ashamed of having revealed so much of himself the night before. It would take maybe a day or two for him to become my friend again.’

One day in September, with only a few scenes left to shoot, the director, crew members and actors assemble in the screening room to view the day’s rushes. In the middle of the screening, Stevens takes a call, then orders the lights up. James Dean, he announces, has been killed in a car crash.

The following day, Taylor is summoned to film reaction shots for a scene in which she acted with Dean a few days ago. She realises with a start that she is being asked to react to a young man whose corpse is now lying on a slab in a funeral home at Paso Robles, but she goes ahead with it just the same.

IS FOREWARNED BY

The Villa Capri, Hollywood

September 23rd 1955

A week before he is due to die, James Dean is sitting at a table in his favourite little restaurant in Hollywood, the Villa Capri. He is very chummy with Nikkos, its maître d’, from whom he has started renting a log house in Sherman Oaks.

Looking towards the entrance, he spots a familiar figure attempting to get a table, then being turned away. He recognises him as the English actor Alec Guinness, the star of so many of his favourite Ealing comedies, such as
Kind Hearts and Coronets
.

Guinness has always been more than a touch superstitious, and in a few minutes he will be applying his sixth sense to James Dean. He regularly visits fortune tellers, and has even indulged in a little table-turning. At one time in his life he became obsessed with tarot cards, until all of a sudden one evening, ‘I got the horrors about them and impetuously threw cards and books on a blazing log fire.’

Guinness delights in recounting his psychic powers. On the afternoon of New Year’s Eve, 1943, he was resting in the cabin of the naval ship of which he was a lieutenant, when he apparently heard a sinister voice saying, ‘Tomorrow.’ He became convinced that this was a premonition of death.

That night, sailing from Sicily to the Yugoslav island of Vis, his ship hit a hurricane. An electrical discharge caused ribbons of blue fluorescent light, ‘until the whole ship was lit up like some dizzying fairground sideshow’. Convinced that he was going to die, Guinness found the spectacle ‘beautiful and strangely comforting.’

The ship was dashed against the rocks as it entered the small Italian port of Termoli, and he gave the order to abandon ship. He had, it seems, outwitted the sinister voice – or had it been delivering less of a judgement than a warning?

In March this year, he and his wife were on holiday in the Trossachs in Scotland when their car had a bad puncture. ‘Couldn’t get the wheel off,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘After nearly an hour’s effort said a little prayer to St Anthony and the nuts came loose the very next time I tried – and with only a small effort.’

Six months later he arrives in Hollywood, exhausted after a sixteen-hour flight from Copenhagen, in order to begin filming
The Swan
with Grace Kelly and Louis Jourdan.

The screenwriter of
Father Brown
, Thelma Moss, has invited him out to dinner, but they have difficulty finding a table because Thelma is wearing slacks. They finally settle for a small Italian restaurant, the Villa Capri, which has a more casual dress-code, but when they get there they are told by the genial maître d’ that it is full, and so they begin to walk away.

‘I don’t care where we eat or what. Just something, somewhere,’ grumbles Guinness irritably, adding, ‘I don’t mind just a hamburger.’

At that moment, he becomes aware of the sound of feet running down the street behind him. He turns to see a young man in sneakers, a sweatshirt and blue jeans. ‘You want a table?’ he asks. ‘Join me. My name’s James Dean.’

‘Yes, very kind of you,’ replies Guinness with relief, and eagerly follows him back to the Villa Capri.