The Most Beautiful Woman in the World (25 page)

The liquor flowed that evening, gradually becoming a torrent—vodka before dinner, champagne with the meal, followed by “Ivan the Terribles”—a blend of vodka, grappa, and ouzo—in the living room. Richard launched into an anecdote, drawing it out with baroque flourishes as Elizabeth listened in obvious rapture. Then they went over to a small couch for a tête-à-tête, whispering and laughing. Eddie had seen her huddle intimately with gay friends like Roddy, Monty, Tennessee, and Truman, but he felt a
frisson
as he watched her and Richard. “I felt excluded,” he recalled. Trying to draw them back into the party, he went to the piano and started performing. “Shut up,” Elizabeth said, “we can’t talk.” Slamming the lid, Eddie went to the hi-fi and played one of his records at high volume. Elizabeth stuck her fingers in her ears. “All right, Elizabeth, we’ll go now,” said Frings. She ignored Eddie the next day, remaining in her bedroom, but by evening, according to Eddie, she was again “sexy [and] flirtatious.”
⁷
Mike Todd had always been able to charm her with a present, but when Eddie bought her a $50,000 diamond necklace, she looked at it and told him he’d been swindled—there wasn’t a decent stone in the lot.
⁸
Eddie once told Rona Barrett that he hated giving women presents, feeling that he was entitled to “a piece of ass” without having to pay for it.

Roddy was staying with Richard and Sybil. One evening, he asked Elizabeth and Eddie to join them for dinner. After the meal, at about 9:30 p.m., Eddie started nudging Elizabeth to leave, but she was keyed up and having a good time. Sensing their conflict, Richard slyly exchanged her empty wineglass for his full one, and he kept doing it until she was tipsy. “I absolutely adore this man,” she thought. She also liked his wife, later writing, “I admired Sybil tremendously and loved being around her. And Richard and I really fought and hurt each other to keep it from happening.” Circumstances seemed to conspire to make their affair not only inevitable but convenient. Sybil divided her time between Rome and London, and Eddie went to Switzerland, purchasing a chalet for them in Gstaad. He was getting fed up with their marriage and later wrote, “She needed a lot of nursing, mollycoddling, support and attention. I couldn’t keep on giving that.”

At a party hosted by Sybil, Elizabeth and Richard retired to a corner and smooched, apparently not caring who saw them. When Eddie tried to drag her home, she became cantankerous. In the third week of January 1962, Richard walked into the men’s makeup trailer at Cinecittà and announced, “Gentlemen, I’ve just fucked Elizabeth Taylor in the back of my Cadillac.” Many coworkers were aware that the lovers were trysting regularly in Dick Hanley’s apartment. In Hollywood, Louella O. Parsons reported in a front-page article that Elizabeth’s marriage was in jeopardy. One thousand journalists immediately descended on Cinecittà to confirm the story but Mankiewicz quipped, “Actually, Richard Burton and I are having a fling.” Nevertheless Mankiewicz went to Wanger in alarm and told the producer, “Liz and Burton are not just ‘playing’ Antony and Cleopatra.” Wanger’s only concern was whether the affair would “help the movie,” but he later confronted Richard, who attempted to appease him, saying, “It might just be a once-over-lightly.”
⁹

At Villa Papa, the Fishers were in bed when Eddie took a telephone call from Bob Abrams. After hanging up, Eddie said, “Tell me the truth. Is there something going on between you and Burton?” Elizabeth softly replied, “Yes.” Eddie left the villa and spent the rest of the night with Abrams.

The following day Mankiewicz, fearing that Elizabeth’s distraught condition would jeopardize the production, ordered Eddie “to get the hell back” or be “charged with desertion.” More than anything else, Eddie’s pride was hurt. The womanizer had become a cuckold, and the only way he could stand himself was to raid Elizabeth’s Percodan stash. After he swallowed two pills, Elizabeth said, “Eddie, you look like you have a face full of shit.”
¹⁰

Richard assured his wife that the affair was over and then went to Wanger and offered to drop out of the picture. The studio could never decide whether “
le scandale
,” as it came to be known, was helping or hurting
Cleopatra
, so Wanger simply advised him to try to be more discreet. Richard then told Sybil that he didn’t love Elizabeth, but explained that he had to “play along” with her until Fox had the picture in the can. He complained to his brother Graham Jenkins that he and Elizabeth were being “thrown together.” All Elizabeth knew was that Richard represented a way out of the tomb of a dead marriage. Later, she tried to explain in her memoir, “I didn’t feel immoral then, though I knew what I was doing, loving Richard, was wrong. I never felt dirty . . . I felt terrible heartache because so many innocent people were involved.”
¹¹

If she was using Richard, he was also using her. Truman Capote observed them at close range and concluded, “She loved him, but he didn’t love her. He married her because he wanted to be a movie star. That was the career he wanted—money, money, money.” According to Elizabeth, they became obsessive joined-at-the-hip lovers: “We can’t bear to be apart, even for a matter of hours. When I’m alone, I can’t concentrate on anything.” For all his ambivalence, he could be an effective sex partner when reasonably sober and with the right person. Said Sybil, “He gave a lot of pleasure to a lot of people, but couldn’t find any for himself.” After becoming Elizabeth’s lover, he reflected, “The woman who brings out the best in a man—who is good in bed—is very rare. In my entire life I have known only three. The qualities they possessed were a responding passion and a responding love.”
¹²

Not since Mike Todd had Elizabeth been so physically and emotionally satisfied. Richard once explained his technique with women, also revealing how he tricked himself into the role of great lover: “You must first love, or
think
you love the woman . . . the only one you
think
there is for that moment—you must love her and know her body as you would think a great musician would orchestrate a divine theme. You must use everything you possess—your hands, your fingers, your speech: seductively, poetically, sometimes brutally, but always with a demoniacal passion.” Obviously he was as good an actor in bed as on stage, but in both cases it was acting (“You must first love, or
think
you love . . . ”).
¹³

Eddie, having totally submerged his identity in Elizabeth, didn’t know what to do. As an appendage that had been severed from the host body, he could no longer survive on his own. “I put up with it, because I had no choice,” he recalled. He hung on in the hope that she’d have a brief fling and come back to him, but she tortured him daily with accounts of her affair. “She was . . . a bit of a sadist,” he realized. He was a bit of one too: he started carrying a loaded pistol
¹⁴
after friends assured him that the Italian authorities went easy on crimes of passion.
¹⁵

At the same time, he continued to cooperate with Elizabeth in maintaining a semblance of married life. When her old Metro friend Cyd Charisse arrived in Rome to film
Two Weeks in Another Town
with Kirk Douglas, the Fishers went to dinner with Cyd, her husband, Tony Martin; Audrey Hepburn; and Mel Ferrer. At one point Eddie and Tony sang a duet, and someone passed a plate around and gave them a stack of lira. Later they all went to a party given in honor of Kirk and his wife, Ann. Richard and Sybil were there, as was Guilaroff. When Elizabeth and Richard left their spouses to dance together, the excitement in the room was almost palpable. Cyd and Tony glided by them on the dance floor, and Cyd gave Elizabeth “a soft, knowing smile,” Guilaroff recalled. Everyone seemed to know what was going on.

Scattered from Wales to Rome, the large, close Jenkins clan had been scolding Richard for endangering his life with Sybil and their daughters. Richard’s brother, Ifor, who was hired to be his bodyguard, “beat the living shit out of Burton for what he was doing to Sybil,” said a member of the crew, “beat him up so that Richard couldn’t work the next day. He had a black eye and a cut cheek.” A few nights later Elizabeth brought Richard to the Villa Papa. They were both drunk, and Eddie sat down with them and started drinking brandy until he was as drunk as they were. Richard spilled his guts, admitting that Elizabeth was of interest to him only as a stepping stone to stardom. She burst into tears and ran from the villa. Suddenly, Eddie realized he didn’t care where she was going or what happened to her. Neither did Richard, who decided he wanted to have sex with Eddie.
¹⁶

Having gone to Dick Hanley’s apartment, Elizabeth called the villa and Richard answered the phone. “I’m going to fuck him,” Richard said. If Eddie raised any objection to being a potential bottom man, he failed to mention it in his detailed account of the episode in his memoir
Been There, Done That
. To Eddie it all seemed “perfectly normal.” Eddie does not say that Richard made good on his promise, only that he continued drinking “brandy with her lover” until Roddy and his partner John Valva arrived at 2 a.m. and hauled a reluctant Richard from the villa. Breaking away from them, Burton went to Hanley’s apartment and kicked the door in. He called Elizabeth a “cunt,” which only made her desire him all the more, but he stormed out and refused to take her calls the next day. Meanwhile, the film’s budget shot sky-high, to something like $100 million in 1990s dollars.

Wanger had been pressuring Eddie to leave Rome. Finally fed up, Eddie packed and prepared to leave, but first he tried to get even with Richard. He paid a visit to Sybil Burton, blowing everybody’s cover. “You don’t know Elizabeth,” he warned Richard’s wife. “This time, he’s not coming back.” Sybil started sobbing and ran from the room, and Eddie beat it out of town, speeding to Milan in the green Rolls-Royce Elizabeth had given him. In Rome, Sybil forced a showdown at Cinecittà, bringing the production to a standstill at a cost of $500,000 to Fox (in inflation-adjusted dollars) and completely freaking out Elizabeth and Richard, both caught totally by surprise. For a moment, it seemed that Eddie’s vengeance could not have been sweeter. But then, from Florence, he started calling around Rome trying to find Elizabeth, finally locating her at Hanley’s apartment. She bawled Eddie out for snitching to Sybil, and before he could reply Richard grabbed the receiver and said, “You cocksucker, I’m going to come up there and kill you.” Eddie was carrying his gun and said, “Stay right there. I’m going to kill you.”
¹⁷
After hanging up, Richard told Elizabeth that he’d decided he didn’t want to destroy his marriage after all. He ended their affair. Running after him, she almost crashed through a glass door.

Richard left for Paris to reshoot his cameo in
The Longest Day
for Darryl F. Zanuck. Sybil joined him. When they dined at Maxim’s, Richard reminded a reporter who’d inquired if he was going to marry Elizabeth, “Sybil is my wife, you know. I’m already married.” In Rome, Hanley notified Wanger that Elizabeth wouldn’t be reporting for work the next morning, and Wanger noted in his diary, “She’s hysterical. Total rejection came sooner than expected.”
¹⁸
Having been deserted by two men in as many days, she overdosed on Seconals, a prescription sedative, on February 17, 1962, and her stomach was pumped at the Salvator Mundi International Hospital in Rome. Fox publicists devised a food-poisoning story for the press, and the physician in charge, Dr. Pennington, blamed bad oysters. Years later, Elizabeth joined the chorus of denial, trying to explain that “it was more hysteria . . . I needed the rest, I was hysterical, and I needed to get away.” Whatever she called it, she nearly died. The OD put her on the cutting edge of drug abuse that was to overrun the movie industry in the 1960s. With Mankiewicz on ups and Elizabeth on downs,
Cleopatra
became the first of the drug-driven movies almost a full decade before
Easy Rider
established cocaine as filmdom’s drug of choice.

When Eddie returned to Rome after a few days, Elizabeth told him to bring some beer to the hospital. He found her smoking a cigarette, and she popped open one of the beers as if nothing had happened. To all appearances the Fishers had reconciled, but Eddie expected Richard “to sneak into the house to fuck her” any minute.
¹⁹
In Paris, Richard was luxuriating in his new status as Elizabeth Taylor’s lover. Moguls like Zanuck, who’d previously treated him like a peon, now listened with respect as he held forth on the mess Fox was in and how to salvage
Cleopatra.
“Richard Burton urged me to go to Rome and sit on the set to get Mankiewicz moving and scare hell out of him,” Zanuck recalled. Vying with Spyros Skouras for the presidency of Fox, Zanuck wanted to shut the entire studio down and sell it, but Peter Levathes, Skouras’s protégé, out-ranked him as production chief, and Levathes was aware that Skouras had given Mankiewicz and Wanger “carte blanche to make the greatest picture that has ever been made.”
²⁰
Richard was inclined to leave Sybil to her own devices and return to Rome. When he heard of Elizabeth’s Seconal OD, he gave in to what he called “the pulling power” of Elizabeth and went back to her.

Sybil attempted suicide at their chalet in the Swiss village of Celigny. According to Richard, she took too many pills, but a friend said she “cut her wrists—I saw the scars,” and Mike Nichols later noticed “two red razor-blade scars on her left wrist.” Nichols, a stand-up comic at the time, had flown to Italy, alarmed by the brutal publicity surrounding Richard and Elizabeth’s affair, and eager to help them any way he could. “Richard and I once shared an alley on Broadway,” Nichols recalled. “
Camelot
was at the Majestic Theater, and
An Evening with Nichols and May
was at the Golden Theater. He was a pal, and Elizabeth I was getting to know pretty well.” Elizabeth would later reward Nichols by launching him as a movie director. In Rome, Elizabeth and Richard sneaked away each night to an apartment, and at Cinecittà they enjoyed afternoon delight in Casa Taylor. By February 20,
le scandale
was front-page news throughout the Western world. Fox was terrified that everyone would turn against Elizabeth
and
the picture and kept issuing denials. With the studio’s future hanging in the balance, the
New York Times
prognosticated, “If Taylor doesn’t make it, Fox is lost.” Richard told Graham Jenkins that he’d never abandon Sybil, and he collaborated with Fox on a press release denying the affair but later rescinded it, lest it alienate Elizabeth and rob him of his newly won status in films. In the immediate aftermath, everyone, including Eddie, tried to pretend that both marriages were stable.