Pink Triangle: The Feuds and Private Lives of Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, and Famous Members of Their Entourages (Blood Moon's Babylon Series) (138 page)

Elizabeth and Burton, even Harrison himself, looked on helplessly. “Bill and I got up to leave after Rachel rolled around on the floor and began to masturbate her sloppy old Bassett hound,” Tennessee said.

On the quay at Portofino, once again on
terra firma
, Tennessee and Glavin encountered a crowd of ragamuffin boys, shouting obscenities at Elizabeth on board.

“For me, the scene evoked all those ravenous boys in the closing reel of
Suddenly Last Summer,”
Tennessee said. “Some of them had even taken out what Gore called ‘their little pieces of okra,’ and were shaking them at the yacht, yelling in Italian what they wanted to do to Elizabeth’s snatch.”

—John Waters

Beginning with
Cleopatra
,
Boom!
was the eighth film that the Burtons had made together. For their latest venture, they were paid one million dollars each.

But when Tennessee and Bill Glavin arrived on Sardinia for the first day of shooting, they found that Burton was unable to report to work. After forty-eight hours of heavy drinking, with no food intake, he’d lapsed into a coma. As he lay unconscious, Elizabeth had a specialist flow in from Rome. Five hours later, Burton regained consciousness, sitting up in bed and asking, “Where am I?”

The next day he was fine—“Ready and raring to go,” he told the director, Joseph Losey.

Two days later, Burton noted in his diary, “Tennessee and Bill arrived. The former seemed to be tipsy. He is certainly not very prepossessing physically. I heard he tried to kill himself a few weeks ago, but was saved by Bill. There were no details.”

Burton warned Tennessee about Losey. “So far, he is a bit of a crasher and a fusspot, interfering in every department. He’ll probably want you to rewrite every line of dialogue.”

Burton also told Tennessee, “My brother, Graham Jenkins, fancies himself a great critic. He read the film script. He claimed, ‘There is no one to root for, that my character is just a male whore, and Flora Goforth is just a rich, self-indulgent bore.’”

“I’ve faced harsher critiques,” Tennessee said.”

Throughout the course of much of the filming, Elizabeth and Burton, along with their extended family, slept aboard the
Kalizma
, their yacht. After a night of drinking, Burton invited Tennessee to come aboard and have breakfast with him the following morning. When Tennessee arrived on deck, Dick Hanley, Elizabeth’s secretary, led him down to the main stateroom. Hanley knocked on the door, and Burton called out for Tennessee to come in. Hanley opted not to follow him inside.

To Tennessee’s astonishment, Burton was lying nude in the center of the bed he’d recently shared with Elizabeth. “He was masturbating,” Tennessee later said. “I think this was done deliberately for my sake. I had not caught him accidentally. I don’t think it was an attempt to seduce me, but knowing I was a homosexual, he decided to put on a little show for me. I understand that he often received well-wishers back stage at various theaters in the nude, so he was a bit of an exhibitionist.”

“Excuse me,” Tennessee said. “I’ll come back.”

“No! Stay!” Burton commanded, continuing to masturbate himself. “I’m almost there.”

A few moments later, he erupted. Rising from the bed still half erect, he told Tennessee, ”Sometimes when I didn’t get any last night, I whack off in the morning.”

“You are an impressive sight for my sad, sore eyes,” Tennessee said.

Then Burton headed toward the bathroom for a shower, leaving the door open. “From the sound of things, he seemed to take a horse piss before getting into the shower. “I’m not a golden shower queen, so that offered little temptation for me.”

Later that day, Tennessee met with Losey.

He told Tennessee that working with Elizabeth “is a journey on the road to absolute hellfire. She doesn’t like her lines; she complains about her wardrobe. She says this film is causing her to suffer insomnia. She has struggled and fought with me right from the beginning. It took thirteen takes for the first scene alone. She kept fucking up her lines.”

Later, during the director’s assessment of Tennessee’s condition, he didn’t hold out much hope for him either. “He was a hell of a druggy mess and probably needed to be sent to rehab. Swimming, boozing, and sleeping it off seemed to be his main pastimes.”

Elizabeth met privately with Tennessee for a very late lunch. She told him that she identified with much of the character of Flora Goforth—“The many marriages, the violent death of one of her husbands, the luxurious surroundings, the ostentatious display of wealth, a retinue of servants, physical back pain, and—through it all—an ever-lasting sense of personal loneliness.”

“My favorite line,” she told him, “is, ‘If you have a world famous figure, why be selfish with it?’”

She said she also used her impressions of Vivien Leigh to help her develop her character on screen. “The declining health and eventual death of Vivien were always on my mind. She was a manic depressive slated for an early death after a destructive lifestyle, much of it a journey into madness.”

She surprised him by telling him, “After forty movies,
Boom!
may be my farewell to films. I would be happy settling down as Mrs. Richard Burton. I’ve about had it. When you’ve reached the last rung of the ladder, there is nowhere to go but down. I don’t want to be pushed off. I want to walk down with all the dignity I can summon—and not on crutches!”

“Creating a life off screen with Richard is far more interesting than playing someone’s fantasy on the screen. I don’t mean to insult your wonderful characters like Maggie the Cat, of course.”

Up close, Tennessee witnessed Elizabeth’s consumption of large amounts of both food and drink. “I begin with Bloody Marys after I brush my teeth in the morning. It’s straight vodka throughout the day and champagne all night. My favorite foods include chocolate malted milkshakes, fried chicken with lots of mashed potatoes and gravy, large bowls of chili, plus caviar and
pâté de foiegras
at any time of the day or night.”

“I tried to understand Elizabeth better,” Tennessee said. “After repeated binges of heavy eating, she had to take off weight. She hated to diet. I’m not one to judge others, but I found it amazing that a woman like Elizabeth, celebrated everywhere in the world for her beauty, would eat and drink so much. I think at times she wanted to destroy Mother Nature’s gift to herself. All her life, she’d been gaped at; men had lusted after her; women had envied her; the press had dissected her every move. Maybe she wanted to destroy the beauty that had made her the ongoing subject of such perverse scrutiny.”

Before lunch was over, Elizabeth and Glavin had finished off two bottles of champagne. Tennessee kept noting their darting eyes, as they were clearly attracted to each other. He vowed to pay close attention.

Elizabeth introduced Tennessee to her brother, Howard Taylor, who was vacationing on Sardinia with his family. Losey had given him a small role in the film as a marine skipper. He told Tennessee that he was getting one thousand dollars for the cameo.

“No doubt, this will lead to a fabulous screen career for you,” Tennessee assured him.

Then she told Tennessee that Noël Coward was scheduled to arrive on Sardinia later that day to settle in and prepare for his upcoming role as The Witch of Capri. “I’ll set up a luncheon with you, Noël, and myself,” she promised. “I’m afraid to invite Bill here because Noël would probably abduct him right away. Bill is his type.”

Coward finally arrived on Sardinia, having been delayed by transportation problems. Burton was there to greet him. Both of them looked worse for wear, and both of them recorded their impressions of each other in their diaries. Coward asserted that, “Richard, of course, was sweet,” but he hardly looked like the sexy, strikingly handsome youth Coward had first seduced when the actor was an eighteen-year-old cadet in 1943.

Conversely, Burton defined Coward as “looking very old and slightly sloshed. He proceeded to get more sloshed. He is almost completely bald, and the bags under his eyes made those eyes more Asiatic than hitherto. He called himself ‘the oldest Chinese character actress in the world.’”

“When not due on the set, Noël and Elizabeth liked to deep-dish other actors.” Tennessee said. “In one of my sessions with them, they both were aware that Noël had had sex with Burton long before Elizabeth got him. Between them, they discussed the dick sizes of their joint seductions, sometimes doubling up on the same actor. “The list was long, and my memory is bad. I recall some names, although I got all the measurements mixed up. John Gilbert, James Cagney (of all people); Louis Hayward, Cary Grant, Laurence Olivier, Tyrone Power, Ronald Reagan, President Kennedy, Errol Flynn, Eddie Fisher, David Niven, Montgomery Clift, Peter Lawford, Nicky Hilton, Frank Sinatra. Of course, Elizabeth knew that Noël had also seduced her previous husband, Michael Wilding, a bisexual.”

The next day, Tennessee journeyed over to the Capo Cacchio Hotel, where Coward was staying. Tennessee left a note for him at the desk. “Please feel completely free to alter any part of the dialogue you see fit—one playwright to another.”

Actually, Coward disliked much of the dialogue, particularly one line:
“The Boss may be dying under the unsympathetic, insincere sympathy of the faraway stars.”

***

The filming of
Boom
! took place in Sardinia during the Red Brigade’s terrorist scare.

[Organized in 1970, and based in Italy, the Red Brigade (Brigate Rosse) was a Marxist-Leninist paramilitary organization which claimed responsibility for several widely publicized bank robberies and assassinations, and attempts to destabilize Italy through acts of sabotage and kidnapping. Its mission involved the creation of a revolutionary government based on armed struggle, with the intention of pulling Italy out of NATO. Models for the Red Brigades included the Latin American urban guerrilla movements. After the mass arrests of their members in the late 1980s, the group became disorganized and fell apart.]

Elizabeth had already expressed her fear that one or more of her childre
n
might be kidnapped. She informed Tennessee that Lloyds of London had demanded $2.5 million for $15 million worth of life insurance during the filming in Sardinia. “In addition, I had to pay $2 million to have my jewelry insured while on island.”

“Paste would have been cheaper, my dear,” Tennessee suggested.

Ironically, although none of her children disappeared during their time in Sardinia, it was Burton who went missing during his sojourn there. Elizabeth called the police and an island-wide search was launched. By ten o’clock the following morning, the police located Burton standing atop a dining table, outdoors, reciting Shakespeare. The tavern associated with that table, a few paces away, was said to have been regularly patronized by a den of thieves.

Burton was orchestrating a competition for the tavern’s largely illiterate patrons, none of whom had ever seen a play by Shakespeare. He offered the equivalent of $100—payable in Italian lire—to anyone in his audience who could name the particular Shakespeare play whose dialogue he was reciting.
[It was from
Titus Andronicus
. Whereas Laurence Olivier could have delivered the correct answer in a millisecond, none of the spectators that morning came even close to getting it right.]
Eventually, Burton was delivered back to Elizabeth in a police car.

During his disappearance, Losey had escorted Tennessee and Glavin on a tour of one of the key sets in the upcoming film, Flora Goforth’s villa. Universal had spent $500,000 on the replication of a white marble palace-cum-mausoleum. Some of the travertine used in its construction had been pilfered centuries before from the ruins of the Colosseum in Rome.

In the immediate aftermath of Burton’s return, he and Elizabeth had one of their knock-out, drag-down fights, ending in tempestuous love-making aboard their yacht.

***

One drunken night, Tennessee received the verbal lashings of a spectacularly intoxicated Burton, who appeared at the time, according to Tennessee, as demented. Burton recklessly, and falsely, accused Tennessee of “making a pass” at Chris Wilding
[one of the two boys Elizabeth had produced with Michael Wilding]
who was only eight years old at the time.

“You’re nothing but a bloody, self-pitying pain in the ass,” Burton charged. “You’re depressed all the time.
STAY AWAY FROM MY CHILDREN!
”

The next morning, an angry Elizabeth confronted Burton after he rose from his drunken stupor with a hangover. “Luv, did you know last night you called Tennessee a child molester?”

“I would never do that, even if he were,” Burton said. “I have no memory of that. Perhaps it was the Devil who lives inside me speaking, certainly not Sir Richard, who is forever gallant, a knight of the realm.”

***

Tennessee had his most destructive fight with Glavin after he’d spent two hours alone with Elizabeth in her dressing room when Burton was away. “You obviously prefer to fuck her instead of me,” he shouted at Glavin. “Not only that, but you’ve stolen my drugs and hypodermic needs.”

[Whereas Tennessee may have been accurate about the seduction, he was wrong about his drugs, He had simply misplaced them.]

Tennessee remained on Sardinia long enough to witness the filming of one of the most dramatically campy scenes in
Boom!
: Flora Goforth’s
[as played by Elizabeth]
rendezvous with “the Witch of Capri
[Noël Coward]
.

Elizabeth appeared in a Kabuki-style robe that weighed 42 pounds. It was festooned with 22,000 beads, each of them hand-stitched by seamstresses in Rome. She also wore an elaborate headdress and a 29.4 carat diamond, a gift from her late husband, Mike Todd, who had died in a plane crash over New Mexico.

As part of the logistics associated with the scene, the Witch, on film, had to be carried in a sedan chair across craggy, sun-blasted rocks by stout men for this treacherous
dîner-à-deux
. As a main course, Flora Goforth served him/her a monstrous baked black fish that repulsed him. On camera, “The Witch”
[Coward]
makes his distaste for “this monster from the sea” abundantly clear.