How to Be a Movie Star (45 page)

Her cause wasn't helped by yet another scandal erupting around Kurt Frings. This time it was the agent's estranged wife, Ketti, who made the complaint. Hedda Hopper, only too happy to link Frings's behavior to his client's, phoned Ketti to get the scoop. Hedda made sure her readers knew that the wily Frings had managed to have assault charges against him dropped yet again. Frings endured another round of bad publicity when it was revealed that he was seeking visitation rights not to see his children, but to use the steam room in the house that he'd shared with Ketti.

All of it was enough to apparently convince George Stevens to look elsewhere for his Mary Magdalene. Frings's bullheadedness (and his unsavory reputation) may have been the chief reason, but the negative publicity could not have helped. "Liz Taylor will never play the role of Mary Magdalene in
The Greatest Story Ever Told
because George Stevens feels the risk is too great," Mike Connolly's column in the
Hollywood Reporter
revealed that summer. After the story broke, Stevens fired off a letter to Elizabeth saying that he'd been misquoted. "My affection and respect for you are too deep-rooted," the director told the star, "for me to ever say anything unfavorable concerning you."

Elizabeth's reaction is unknown; she seemed to have lost interest in
Greatest Story
by that point. But she was nevertheless annoyed by the latest firestorm that she'd caused in her home country, a place that now seemed hopelessly parochial to her. "I will never go back to America," she said. "I hate America and America hates me."

Those were fighting words. Elizabeth's reaction to this scandal would be very different from four years previous. She would not hide. She would not make nice. No battery of press agents would duel on her behalf for sympathetic coverage in the fan magazines. This time around, Elizabeth said to hell with all that. No matter the high-profile criticism, Le Scandale proceeded without letup or apology. Many, like Hedda, were appalled. But others, like the columnist Ruth Waterbury, felt some grudging admiration. Speaking privately to George Stevens, Waterbury observed that, although the press was "being real vicious towards her now ... and she has nowhere to hide," Elizabeth was leaving many people impressed with "the courage to be herself." On her own, no longer protected by any studio or any husband's organization, Elizabeth had to trust that such courage would be enough.

From his secluded perch on the volcanic island of Ischia at the northern end of the Gulf of Naples, Elio Sorci trained his telephoto camera at the yacht docked just off the coast. The hot Mediterranean sun beat down on the backs of a sunbathing Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor onboard. Sorci snapped a rapid-fire series of shots as the lovers huddled close together, moving in at one point for a quick kiss. The photographer was ecstatic. He knew pictures of Elizabeth Taylor in a bathing suit cuddling with Richard Burton would fetch hundreds of thousands of lire.

Such telephoto pictures by the paparazzi had not yet become commonplace in celebrity culture; they were an immediate sensation when they were published in 1962. "Incendiary," they were called—an extraordinary glimpse into the private moments of the two most written-about people on the planet. After seeing the pictures, Sybil Burton reportedly sent for her lawyer.

But even then the lovers didn't quit each other. Indeed, the times seemed to give them license to continue just as they were. "The Sixties was to pride itself on being a decade of honesty, of openness, an end to hypocrisy," Burton's biographer Melvyn Bragg observed. The "sexual cover-up" was exposed; shame was a thing of the past. "The brave flaunted it and [Taylor and Burton] were the first of the brave. Older generations may have envied them in secret; younger generations openly applauded."

Richard Burton was an unlikely herald of a new age. Born Richard Jenkins in 1925 in Pontrhydyfen, a tiny village near Port Talbot in southeast Wales, he was the twelfth of thirteen children, the son of a coal miner, a "twelve-pints-a-day" man, with whom his son shared much in common. "He looked very much like me," Burton would say of his father. "That is, he was pockmarked, devious, and smiled a great deal when he was in trouble." His mother died before he was two years old and he was raised by his sister and her husband. The working-class life of a mining village meant that Richard began smoking when he was eight and drinking regularly by the time he was twelve. Still, he was a good student, with an affinity for literature—but he was no shrinking intellectual. His skill in the classroom was matched by his ability on the playing field. Many thought that if he hadn't become an actor Richard would have become a rugby star like his brother Ifor. He himself wondered sometimes if he'd chosen the right path: "I would rather have played for Wales at Cardiff Arms Park than Hamlet at Old Vic."

But it was his lively performances in school theatrical productions that really made him stand out from his sooty classmates. One of his teachers, the urbane Philip Burton, himself a child of the coal mines, who'd managed to graduate from the University of Wales and write drama for BBC radio, spotted Richard's potential early on; eventually Burton adopted the teenager as his ward and gave him his name. While eternally grateful to his new father for this lift out of poverty, Richard seemed to believe on some level that he'd been snatched from his natural course and set upon a more elite, effeminate route in life. He'd spend the rest of his days blustering and swaggering to make up for it.

The young Richard Burton was strikingly handsome, with eyes as compelling as Elizabeth's: blue-green and so intense that they gripped audiences over the footlights. He suffered, however, from terrible acne, the scars of which left his face and shoulders pitted for the rest of his life. Yet nothing could blunt his sheer magnetism, his raw sexual energy. "He oozed sexual charm for both men and women," said Hank Moonjean, who got to know Burton well in Rome. "It was very powerful. And he could turn it on and off like a faucet." Richard understood his appeal and how to use it. He wasn't averse to flirting with a man if it meant getting what he wanted; he admitted that one time he actually gave in to a male admirer, although sex with men just wasn't for him. Still, his power over gay men was well known. According to some, Philip Burton was a deeply circumspect homosexual who regarded his teenage ward, at least in the beginning, as an unrequited object of desire. So powerful was Philip's devotion that he never lost his commitment for making Richard a success.

This he accomplished first by keeping the boy in school, when so many others dropped out to work in the mines. He also trained Richard's acting voice and helped him land radio parts on the BBC. Philip discovered that the young man had an insatiable curiosity to learn. Richard was rarely without a sack slung over his shoulder filled with dictionaries, the complete works of Shakespeare, and books of quotations. He discussed the classics of literature, art, and music with ease and passion, thanks to the tutelage of his mentor.

In 1943, when Richard was eighteen, Philip was instrumental in getting him into Exeter College, Oxford, for a special term of six months. At first, the coal miner's son found himself brawling with the sons of aristocrats, those "chaps with posh accents" whom he had always resented. His worldview would be forever imprinted with a sense of his otherness. "It's difficult for somebody," he explained, "who comes from the majority to know quite what it's like to be in a minority, to be a Jew or a Welshman or an Irishman. What it does to a Negro, I shudder to imagine." At Oxford, far from the sooty streets of Pontrhydyfen, Richard taught himself to speak with a standard accent. But still, he admitted, he never quite spoke what might be considered "proper" English.

Again he was saved by an older homosexual man who discerned his potential. Nevill Coghill was a fellow in English literature and director of Oxford's lavish annual undergraduate production, an event that had launched many actors on their way. Coghill gave Richard an audition for
Measure for Measure
in which the young man intoned, "To be or not to be." Coghill was bowled over. "Out came the most perfect rendering I had ever heard," he said. He told colleagues: "The boy is a genius and will be a great actor. He is outstandingly handsome and robust, very masculine and with deep inward fire."

Another of Richard's gurus was Emlyn Williams, in whose play,
The Druid's Rest,
he made his professional debut first in Liverpool and then in London in 1943. He was a natural, instinctive actor, disdaining the kind of training so popular then in New York. "I'm the least Method actor that ever was," he'd declare. For Burton, acting was about summoning his own depths of power and emotion. Following a stint in the Royal Air Force, he began making a name for himself on the stage, appearing with John Gielgud in
The Lady's Not for Burning,
both in the West End and on Broadway. In 1951 he was a sensation as Prince Hal in
Henry IV, Part 1
at Stratford. Critic Kenneth Tynan noted, "His playing of Prince Hal turned interested speculation to awe almost as soon as he started to speak; in the first intermission local critics stood agape in the lobbies. Burton is a still, brimming pool, running disturbingly deep; at twenty-five he commands a repose and can make silence garrulous."

From there it was a series of quick leaps to the top: first
Montserrat
at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, then two memorable seasons of Shakespeare at the Old Vic, where he played Hamlet, Caliban, Henry V, and Othello, among others, and was hailed as the heir of Gielgud and Olivier. And yet he did it all without an abiding interest in the traditions and history of his art. "[Acting] doesn't especially appeal to me," he said. "I hardly ever go to see plays or films, and I've never been much interested in the so-called craft or art of acting." Nonetheless, Alexander Korda signed him to a film contract and sent him on a jaunt to Hollywood in 1952 to make
My Cousin Rachel
with Olivia de Havilland. There, at a party at Stewart Granger's house, he first met Elizabeth Taylor, aged twenty and married to Michael Wilding. While she noticed Burton—and that he had obviously noticed
her
—she thought, "Huh! I'm not going to be a scalp on his belt because he was a terrible flirt." At that first meeting, the sparks were suppressed.

Richard was married to Sybil Williams by this point, an actress of Welsh background who had given up her career after bearing two girls. Richard worshipped Sybil, setting her on such a pedestal that she became almost untouchable, the sanctified mother of his beloved daughters Kate and Jessica. Such a hallowed relationship, however, almost demanded extramarital affairs for a man as carnal as Burton. His womanizing proceeded apace, while Sybil obligingly looked the other way. "Sybil was the good loving bride," her friend, the actress Rachel Roberts, wrote in her journal, "keeping house, making French fries, ignoring his infidelities, perhaps not even accepting them herself." Many felt Sybil, by her denial, ensured the continuance of their marriage. For all her husband's philandering, Sybil trusted that she was first in his heart.

That presumption, held by so many, has served Elizabeth's story well. Only a woman as irresistible as Elizabeth Taylor could possibly tear Richard away from Sybil, the chroniclers insisted; only Elizabeth could have succeeded where so many other women had tried and failed. Yet Richard had fallen head over heels for a woman and contemplated leaving Sybil for her at least once before. "Oh, my lovely girl," he wrote to Claire Bloom, his pretty, spirited Viola from the
Twelfth Night
that ran at the Old Vic in 1954. "I've had a savage attack of flu. It must be 'love pine.'" He apologized for not reading her letters at home, where Sybil might peer over his shoulder. Their next play, he hoped, would be during the winter, because then "my lovely girl [would] be forced to sleep with me because of the cold." (He jokingly advised her to "cooch up to the working class"—meaning himself.) "I haven't looked at another woman," he swore. "This has never happened to me before. You have changed me. I have almost grown up."

Yet not that grown up, because Bloom eventually walked in on him trysting with Susan Strasberg. In the end, the marriage to Sybil endured all of these capers—that is, until Rome. And even then, there were those who still placed their bets on Mrs. Burton. "Not a chance!" Hedda Hopper declared, when asked if Burton would leave his wife for Elizabeth. "Richard has romanced many leading ladies; Sybil has made a career of being the forgiving wife. It's made them millionaires, which they enjoy being."

But those on the ground, the ones watching the affair unfold in Rome, had a rather different perspective. "Richard couldn't believe how attached [to Elizabeth] he'd become," said Tom Mankiewicz. "He tried to end it, but he kept turning around and coming back to her. He just couldn't help himself. He couldn't get enough of her."

When they'd started the film, she'd been "Miss Tits," a silly overhyped Hollywood movie star whom Burton had dismissed to his friends. Now Elizabeth was his sun and his moon. "I have been inordinately lucky all my life but the greatest luck of all has been Elizabeth," he wrote in his diary, lifting some passages from the Welsh poet David Jones. "She is a wildly exciting lover-mistress, she is shy and witty, she is nobody's fool, she is a brilliant actress, she is beautiful beyond the dreams of pornography, she can be arrogant and willful, she is clement and loving, Dulcis Imperatrix, she is Sunday's child, she can tolerate my impossibilities and my drunkenness, she is an ache in the stomach when I am away from her,
and she loves me!
[his emphasis] And I'll love her till I die."

So different from each other in many ways, yet the attraction of opposites is a mighty force. Richard would load himself down with old volumes from obscure bookshops in Rome and London while Elizabeth was off buying furs and shoes. He was an Oxford man, she a graduate of the Little Red Schoolhouse. In terms of acting, she knew what the movies had taught her: that sometimes a look or a turn of the head said it all. For Burton, language was everything. A put-down from Burton was always framed in irony. When the despised director Tony Richardson wanted him for a project, Burton said that he ought to have been "scared witless to approach me to play Scrabble." Elizabeth, on the other hand, just said "Fuck you" when someone ticked her off. Not that Richard didn't resort occasionally to such mundanities himself. He once screamed "Fuck!" at the top of his lungs in the middle of a hotel lobby because "To scream 'fuck' in the lobby was the only possible way to meet the justice of the day," he wrote in his diary.