The Most Beautiful Woman in the World (26 page)

On February 27, 1962, Elizabeth turned thirty. Years later, after becoming a grandmother, she revealed, “I feared turning thirty more than I fear being called Grandma.” Like Marilyn Monroe, she was afraid the world would reject her as her beauty faded. “In the industry, these were the suicide years,” recalled Hedy Lamarr, the epitome of early 1940s Metro glamour, who explained that many actresses attempt suicide between thirty and forty because they’re worn out by the inhuman working hours of the industry. J. Lewis Bruce, M.D., who treated Lamarr and many other stars, urged studio chiefs to shorten the workday and eliminate overtime, as in England, and pointed out that no one could “withstand the nervous strain of picture making as it is done today” without psychic injury, especially in films like
Cleopatra
, made under unbearable pressure due to “scripts being written and rewritten as they work.”

Sensing that Elizabeth was “scared to death” on her birthday, Eddie threw a champagne party for her in the Borgia Room, a nightclub in the fashionable Hostaria dell’Orso. Richard was not invited but slipped her a $150,000 diamond-and-emerald brooch from Bulgari’s. Elizabeth’s father, who’d come to Rome with Sara, insisted she return it. She did—and later retrieved it. Eddie gave her a ten-carat yellow diamond ring at the party and later recalled, “I got zip reaction.” He saved his other present, a Bulgari folding mirror that opened into an emerald-studded snake, for bedtime, knowing “the sex was always wonderful after I’d given her a gift.”
²¹
That night proved an exception to the rule, and he felt “ignored in the cold darkness.”
²²

On March 9, Louella O. Parsons announced “another scandal involving Elizabeth” in her column and speculated whether the world would tolerate the end of the Taylor-Fisher marriage. Skouras rushed to Rome the next day, issuing frantic disclaimers. He scolded Richard but not Elizabeth. She threatened to quit if Skouras came near her. Nevertheless she released a public denial of the affair. During a drunken dinner party at Villa Papa on March 15, she told Richard that she loved him in front of Eddie. When Richard asked her to prove it by sticking her tongue down his throat, she obliged, and Eddie stalked from the room. A few nights later, Eddie made love to her as a kind of “farewell kiss” and left for New York, ending their marriage. Oddly, he agreed to deny their separation and to tell the press, if asked, that he’d come to New York on
Cleopatra
business. It made no sense, but neither did Eddie, who washed down Seconal with a couple of drinks as he left for Fumigino Airport.

Eddie, unlike Nicky Hilton, had loved being Mr. Elizabeth Taylor and wasn’t quite ready to relinquish the title. In New York he detoxed from Seconal addiction at Gracie Square Hospital, but two days later started shooting up unmixed, undiluted meth. He disgraced himself globally at a wacky press conference in the Sapphire Room of the Pierre Hotel on March 30. Speeding his brains out, he attempted to prove to reporters that he was still Elizabeth’s main man, getting her on the long-distance line from Rome. She refused to deny her affair with Richard, or to confirm that Eddie was in Manhattan on
Cleopatra
business. Sheilah Graham later wrote in her column, “In four-letter language she told him where to put their marriage.”
²³

There would have been little point in Elizabeth’s continuing to prevaricate. With both their spouses gone, she and Richard were flaunting their liaison on the Via Veneto. “Fuck it,” Richard said, “let’s go out to fucking Alfredo’s and have some fucking fettucini.” From his Vatican perch not far from Cinecittà, Pope John XXIII denounced
le scandale
as the “caprices of adult children” and scorned Elizabeth for “erotic vagrancy,” calling into question her fitness as a mother and hinting that her children should be given to proper parents. The Hollywood establishment again turned against her, and even British friends like Peter O’Toole and David Niven were disloyal. Laurence Olivier cabled Richard, “Make up your mind, dear heart, do you wish to be a household word or a great actor?” But Richard’s problem was not Elizabeth, career, or fame, but the bottle. As he put it, he drank to cope with the tensions of being an actor, believing that the need to act came from the homosexual part of his nature. Cavorting as Elizabeth’s lover made him feel like a phony, and he took his anger out on her. According to Rex Harrison, they continually hit at each other, causing black eyes and making it impossible for them to appear before the camera.
²⁴
Richard, like Elizabeth’s father, exploited her even as he resented her, insanely jealous because her notoriety and income exceeded his own, and because she was part of the great sexual lie he was living.

Olivier was not the only homoerotic mentor who attempted to sabotage his relationship with Elizabeth. “Philip Burton had a falling out with Richard,” Frank Taylor recalled. “Philip disapproved of Richard and Elizabeth and sided with Sybil. There was much
sturm und drang
, and it was many years before that was patched up.” The most snide and unwarranted attack came from the closety bisexual Emlyn Williams, who flew from London at his own expense to warn Richard that Elizabeth was “just a third-rate chorus girl.” Not until 1973 did Williams reveal his love affair with a twenty-year-old Welsh drifter, Fess Griffith, “this silent boy, with the lithe, smooth body and the amiable smile,” with whom he tried to have a ménage à trois after marrying Molly Carus-Wilson.
²⁵
In Rome, Richard shut Williams up by telling him, in Welsh, “
Dwi am broidi’r eneth ma
[I am going to marry this girl].”

Elizabeth no longer felt safe even on her own turf, Cinecittà, where she’d become the queen of denial, fornicating at work and lying about it to press and coworkers. For days, she lived in fear of assassination by stoning at the hands of the six thousand Catholic extras she faced during the filming of Cleopatra’s triumphal entry into Rome, the most expensive scene in motion picture history. Carried by three hundred Nubian slaves, Elizabeth was seated atop a huge, mobile, fifty-foot-high sphinx. Slowly the two-ton prop lumbered beneath the massive Arch of Titus and out into the throng. “Oh my God,” she thought, “here it comes.” Instead of stoning her, the extras loved her, throwing kisses and shouting, “
Leez! Leez! Baci! Baci!
” Holding on to a hidden handrail, Elizabeth borrowed the director’s bullhorn, smiled at the crowd, and said, “
Grazie, grazie
.” Later she called it “one of the sweetest, wildest moments I’ve ever had.”

Meanwhile, Elizabeth and Richard’s respective spouses considered their next moves. Eddie consoled himself with endless shots of speed, and keeping company with Maria Schell,
²⁶
and the friendship of Mafia boss Frank Costello, who offered to break Richard’s legs. In a last-ditch effort to retrieve her husband, Sybil Burton returned to Rome at Easter and demanded a meeting, but Richard and Elizabeth had fled to a coastal resort one hundred miles to the north, Porto Santo Stefano, where they drank, according to Richard, “to the point of stupefaction and idiocy.” Richard gave Elizabeth a brutal beating that left her with temporarily disfiguring facial contusions. She threatened to kill herself and Richard said, “Go ahead.” After she gulped a handful of pills, he loaded a comatose and battered Elizabeth into their Fiat and drove back to Rome like a maniac.
²⁷

For the second time in four months, the star was hospitalized at Salvator Mundi, having her stomach pumped and remaining in the hospital twenty hours. In a letter to Zanuck, Skouras referred to “the beating Burton gave her in Santo Stefano. She got two black eyes, her nose was out of shape, and it took twenty-two days for her to recover enough in order to resume filming.”
²⁸

After that, it was easy for Skouras to blame all the studio’s troubles on Elizabeth, but the real problem at Fox was the studio’s own administrative ineptitude. Although 20th was currently employing the two biggest female stars in the world—Taylor and Monroe—studio executives were so dense and out of touch they couldn’t figure out how to make money on either. With Elizabeth giving them grief in Rome and Marilyn skipping work to sing “Happy Birthday” to President Kennedy in New York, Fox finally decided to can Elizabeth, and studio chief Peter Levathes was dispatched to Rome to deliver the coup de grâce. “It began long before I became production chief, and was handled so unprofessionally,” he said. “The inmates were running the asylum.”

Always shrewd in the crunch, Elizabeth summoned Wanger and Mankiewicz and told them, “We can take over the film and fire Fox.” Her lawyers had advised her that technically Levathes couldn’t terminate her, and if he were foolish enough to try, she could sue and stall
Cleopatra
for years. Wary of crossing Elizabeth, Fox fired Marilyn instead, and shortly thereafter she was found dead in her home in L.A. of a drug overdose.

As corporate convulsions continued to rock Fox, executives convinced themselves that Elizabeth was their only hope of survival. In Rome, an ambulance, complete with stomach pump, was kept on the set in case she tried to commit suicide, a distinct possibility after Richard told her he was going back to Sybil as soon as the film wrapped. The company left Cinecittà to shoot location scenes in Ischia in the summer of 1962. On her last day of filming, Elizabeth stood on Cleopatra’s gold barge as it passed in front of a seething mass of extras lining the waterfront at Ischia Ponte. Begun 632 days earlier at Pinewood,
Cleopatra
had become a way of life, taking her from Hollywood to London and Rome, to the brink of death, to the end of a marriage and the beginning of the love of her life. Now that it was over, she didn’t know what to do with herself.

In the wake of
Cleopatra
, Fox attempted to pull itself together again. Skouras was kicked upstairs to the board of directors. Zanuck returned to the presidency and shut down all production except
Cleopatra
. Levathes resigned as executive in charge of production and was replaced by Zanuck’s son, Richard. Lawsuits proliferated, some of them instigated by those for whom
Cleopatra
had proved a career graveyard:
Wanger v. Fox
for $2.6 million for being terminated (he would settle for $100,000, and he would never produce another film);
Skouras v. Wanger
for mismanagement;
Harrison v. Fox
to get billing equal to Elizabeth and Richard’s; and
Taylor v. Fox
for thirty-five percent of the profits.

On June 12, 1963, the film opened in Manhattan to snickers and jeers. Elizabeth received the worst reviews of her life, and the picture fared no better, quickly becoming known as the “Hollywood Edsel.” Elizabeth saw it in London and threw up. Fox blanched over the movie’s final tally: $62 million, making it the most expensive film ever made. Even decades later, after money-shredders like
Heaven’s Gate
,
Ishtar
,
Waterworld
, and
Titanic
, the film still held its title as Hollywood’s costliest.
Variety
estimated
Cleopatra
’s expense in inflation-adjusted dollars at $300 million, a full $100 million more than
Titanic
’s cost.
Cleopatra
would finally break even in 1966, but in 1963 the plodding epic played to yawning, half-full houses throughout the world. The worst of its many failures was the total lack of chemistry between Taylor and Burton. As an acting team they were about as exciting as Ma and Pa Kettle, and considerably less amusing. Elizabeth had been better with almost any of her other costars, including Lassie.

Two weeks after the premiere, Zanuck sued Elizabeth and Richard for $50 million, invoking the studio’s morals clause and claiming damages from “the deplorable and amoral conduct of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.”
²⁹
Elizabeth was cited for “suffering herself to be held up to scorn, ridicule, and unfavorable publicity as a result of her conduct and deportment.”
³⁰
While Monroe had succumbed under such pressure, Elizabeth came out of her corner throwing knockout punches.

Fox sent Darryl Zanuck’s son, Richard Zanuck, now vice president in charge of production, and David Brown, the studio’s executive in charge of story operations, to confront Elizabeth, but she fired the opening shot when they tried to corner her at the Plaza Athenee Hotel. “Richard, you’re a brat, and you always were a brat,” she told Zanuck, reminding him that as children, he and Irving Thalberg Jr. had tied her to a beam in Thalberg’s basement, with her hands behind her back. “Needless to say,” Zanuck recalled, “we did not settle the lawsuit during the course of that meeting.”
³¹

Fox ended up apologizing to Elizabeth and Richard in public, paying them $2 million, and giving Elizabeth another $1 million to costar with Warren Beatty in
The Only Game in Town
. In one of the immortal malapropisms in film history, Darryl Zanuck, on viewing the final cut of
Cleopatra
, remarked, “If any woman behaved toward me the way Cleopatra treated Antony, I would cut her balls off.”

Big talk—but with
Cleopatra
, it was Elizabeth who’d effectively demolished the old studio system and unmanned its moguls.

Chapter 8
The Burtons
ONE BRIGHT, SHINING MOMENT

The village of Gstaad lies in the Saane Valley, set among forests, mountains, lakes, and glaciers. Elizabeth’s home, Chalet Ariel, a haven of luxury thanks to a $100,000 renovation, was the perfect place for her to regain her equilibrium. Her friend Princess Grace de Monaco also had a home in Gstaad, and eighty-five miles away, in the less fashionable village of Celigny, where he owned an Alpine cottage called Le Pays de Galles (French for Wales), Richard Burton found himself torn between conscience and ambition. The former nagged him to return to his wife and daughters; the latter prompted him to go for Elizabeth, who represented the promise of global superstardom and million-dollar film assignments. It took only a few weeks of soul-searching for him to choose the latter.