The Most Beautiful Woman in the World (27 page)

By December 7, 1962, Elizabeth and Richard were in London filming
The VIPs
and occupying adjoining roof-garden penthouses at the Dorchester—the Terrace Suite for him and the Harlequin Suite for her, with a separate corridor of rooms for the children and their nannies and Dick Hanley and his assistants. Though still wed to Sybil, Richard had already begun talking marriage to Elizabeth. The film, a love story set during a crisis at a London airport, was completed in eight weeks, largely because Elizabeth was miffed at Lloyd’s of London for refusing to insure her and determined to restore her reputation as an employable actress. Their combined earnings from the film, including percentages, was $3.2 million. When the movie premiered in New York the following year, it was a commercial success, quickly outgrossing
Cleopatra
, but audiences as well as critics once again noted the absence of sparks between Elizabeth and Richard. He was overwrought in their scenes together; she seemed emotionally spent, though still worth the price of admission just to look at.

While they were living together at the Dorch in December, his wife and daughters arrived at the Burton home in Hampstead for Christmas, joined by Ifor Jenkins and his wife Gwen. “It was neither one thing nor the other,” Elizabeth recalled. Richard wouldn’t leave his family and he wouldn’t give her up. His twelve brothers and sisters all took Sybil’s side, and Sybil confidently announced, “Richard can never leave me.” Equally sure of herself, Elizabeth told Graham Jenkins, “Sybil was yesterday,” but Richard’s favorite sister Cecilia (Cis) James shook her head and muttered, “We all rue the day when he met Elizabeth.”
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The press reported every development in the battle between wife and mistress. At last deciding to capitalize on the publicity, Sybil moved from Hampstead to a flat in Brompton Square, her first step in becoming a den mother to cafe society. Soon she was the personification of sixties London chic, holding forth at the Ad Lib nightclub, where her set included Princess Margaret, Lord Snowdon, Rex Harrison, Dirk Bogarde, Stanley Baker, and Emlyn Williams. In January 1963, Richard finally met with Sybil in the foyer of the Savoy and told her he wanted a divorce. Sybil left for New York, richer by $1 million, thanks to a divorce settlement that wiped Richard out. The following month he asked Elizabeth to marry him. Eddie was giving her a bad time, threatening to drag her through court. Sinatra called Eddie and said, “Why don’t you lay off Liz?” Eddie responded with a threat of his own, saying, “Oh, come on, Frank, you know Elizabeth almost as well as I do.” He heard no more from Sinatra.
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In New York, Sybil introduced the new Swinging London style, opening the mother of all discos, Arthur, on Manhattan’s East Side. She snagged a young lover, Jordan Christopher, twenty-four, leader of Arthur’s rock group The Wild Ones. Elizabeth and Richard continued to maintain separate suites at the Dorch, staying in London through the early fall of 1963. Her adopted daughter, Maria, went through three of the five operations required to realign her malformed hip. Professionally, Richard was in such demand that he beat out Laurence Olivier for the lead in the film
Becket
, and Elizabeth made her first TV special,
Elizabeth Taylor in London
, a tour of cultural landmarks, for $250,000, the highest fee for a single TV show ever paid to that time. Aired on CBS in October 1963, her debut was a ratings success, hailed by the
L.A. Times
as “sensitive, poetic, [and] warm,” but the script writer, S. J. Perelman, complained that she had “all the histrionic fervor of a broom handle.”

Richard introduced her to his London circle, which ranged from nondescript, rugby-obsessed barflies to luminaries such as Sir Terence Rattigan, Welsh actor Stanley Baker, and playwright Robert Bolt, author of
Lawrence of Arabia
. At a dinner party, Elizabeth listened to Richard’s theater friends for hours and then confessed, “I know nothing about the theater.” Mock-melodramatically, she put her hand to her brow and added, “But I don’t need to. I’m a Star.” Her modesty and self-mockery won over some of his friends, but others found her tedious, at least when she was sober and babbling about her children. They liked her when she got high and started flirting with everyone. Upon leaving actor Robert (Tim) Hardy’s Chelsea home one night, she begged, “Don’t hate me, Tim.” Richard always defended her, insisting that she’d given him the secret of effective film acting, which was “absolute stillness . . . My very penetrating voice need not be pitched louder than a telephone conversation.”

Melvyn Bragg believed that Burton’s decline began with Elizabeth: “He was poisoned by guilt: equally, he was obsessed by one woman who brought out the finest and the most destructive forces in him.” True, he was obsessed by Elizabeth, but she cannot be blamed for his decision to desert his wife and children or for bringing out the demon in him, which was alcohol-induced. Long before they met, he was already in the grip of a deadly drinking problem, starting each day with three bloody Marys at breakfast, followed by whiskey and wine at lunch and dinner. By 1963 Graham Jenkins viewed his brother as a full-fledged alcoholic but added that when Richard was feeling good, he could still “engulf you in a marvelous sensation of well-being.”

Elizabeth finally browbeat Graham into endorsing her wish to meet the Jenkins clan, though they remained dead set against her. When Richard took her to Wales, she stepped out of their pale gray Daimler and “the gasp of wonder could be heard the length of the valley,” Graham recalled. They stayed with his sister Hilda, sleeping in her tiny spare room, one flight up from the only loo, and the sole luxury Elizabeth requested was a chamber pot under the bed. She followed Richard down narrow streets and into dank pubs where the only subject was rugby, and she sat through a family reunion wedged between argumentative windbags. With warm if calculated handshakes and juicy kisses, she finally captivated his family and friends, successfully negotiating one of the last obstacles to marriage.

After
The VIPs
she wasn’t particularly eager to work again, her fascination with Richard eclipsing everything else in her life. Deciding to take a career respite, she deliberately faded into the background in the mid–1960s to let Richard shine. Had she continued to upstage him, their relationship might never have resulted in marriage. In September 1963, they left for Mexico City with the six-year-old Liza Todd for three months. Richard had signed to film Tennessee Williams’s
The Night of the Iguana
, playing a defrocked priest escorting a group of women on a tour of Mexico. Directed by John Huston, the film was to be shot on location in Puerto Vallarta, a fishing village three hundred miles north of Acapulco. The two Wilding boys, Michael, eleven, and Christopher, nine, were dispatched to California for schooling, and Maria—Elizabeth’s physically challenged daughter—remained in London with a nurse to undergo further medical treatment.

Elizabeth kept Richard and his delectable feminine costars—Ava Gardner, Deborah Kerr, and Sue Lyon—under close surveillance throughout the shoot, most of which took place ten miles south of Puerto Vallarta, in Mismaloya, a fishing hamlet accessible only by boat, where about one hundred Indians lived in thatched huts. While the women in the cast had to wear dowdy costumes for filming, Elizabeth brought seventy-four suitcases full of exotic tropical outfits, including a Mexican-style green-and-white shift worn over a bikini, beaded thongs of turquoise and gold for her feet, and enormous black flowers on her head made from human hair purchased from a Paris couturier. She entertained the cast and crew at lavish parties notable for delicious food and abundant liquor.

On Richard’s working days, after spending an hour teaching Liza how to read, Elizabeth dressed and took their rented motor launch, the
Taffy
, to Mismaloya. The film’s hotel set had been constructed on a plateau three hundred feet above the Pacific, and Elizabeth climbed every inch of it to bring Richard a hot lunch. “She’s seducing me again,” he said, taking in her alluring tropical ensemble. He gloried in being, for once, the uncontested star of the movie and not just another member of her entourage, but he remained uneasily aware of his junior status in the relationship. “My sole ambition is to earn as much as Elizabeth and her only ambition is to play Hamlet,” he said. Hard-drinking Ava Gardner, the ultimate femme fatale, whose conquests included Sinatra and Artie Shaw, recognized in Richard a fellow alcoholic, describing him as a “ferocious drinker . . . someone I would’ve liked to have had for a brother and his teasing manner made me feel at ease.” In her memoir, Ava added, “Elizabeth and I were friends from the old Metro days [and] pleased to find each other in the wilderness.”
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The difficult jungle location had been suggested by Mexican architect Guillermo Wulff. Drawn to the wilderness by the notoriety of the Taylor-Burton affair, 130 journalists converged on Puerto Vallarta and spread the name and beauty of the locale around the globe. Soon it was crawling with tourists. Elizabeth and Richard settled in a section known as “Gringo Gulch.” A tiled four-story stucco villa called Casa Kimberley was brought to their attention by Michael Wilding Sr., who, unable to find work as an actor, was now an assistant to Richard’s agent Hugh French, and hoping to become a press agent. At fifty-two, he had been reduced to carrying suitcases full of chili con carne to Elizabeth from Chasen’s in Beverly Hills. He arranged for her and Richard to rent Casa Kimberley, and they grew to love the sprawling twenty-two-thousand-square-foot compound with its ten bedrooms, eleven baths, three kitchens, and a swimming pool that measured seventeen feet by forty-seven feet. Guillermo Wulff later built another house directly across the narrow street and joined the two structures with an exact replica of Venice’s Bridge of Sighs. Since the compound was close to a garbage dump, locals called it “
la casa de los zopilotes
[the house of the buzzards].” Eventually Richard bought Casa Kimberley for $40,000. Their first home together, it would be their headquarters for the next decade.

The
Iguana
set was a nest of illicit romantic intrigues. Tennessee was cohabiting with his boyfriend, and seventeen-year-old Sue Lyon—fresh from playing the title role in Stanley Kubrick’s
Lolita
—had brought along “a tall, pale youth ravaged by love [who] haunted the surrounding flora,” according to Huston’s biographer, Lawrence Grobel. “Word got about that he was murderously inclined toward both Burton and Skip Ward, who had love scenes with Sue.” Deborah Kerr joked that she was the only member of the cast who wasn’t shacking up with someone. Zoe Sallis, Huston’s mistress and the mother of his son Danny, noticed that Elizabeth and Richard were perpetually pickled on tequila, which invariably touched off fights. Huston presented all five of his stars, Burton, Lyon, Gardner, Kerr, and Skip Ward, as well as Elizabeth, with gold-plated derringers, along with bullets engraved with their names.

The entire company was depressed on November 22, 1963. “We were sitting at a table in the middle of the day,” Huston recalled. “The company manager came out of his office and said, ‘Our president is dead.’ We were just shocked.” Huston made a brief but moving speech. According to Melvyn Bragg, Richard was “liked by the Kennedys; Burton was invited to the White House.”
Camelot
had symbolized for JFK “where America wanted to be. In a Kingdom of Grace and Righteousness, surrounded by monsters and dark enemies but triumphing over them all, the Democracy of Good over the Empire of Evil, with a big sword and a song.” Earlier in 1963, Kirk Douglas and his publicist Warren Cowan had visited the White House and met Jacqueline Kennedy, who immediately asked, “Warren, do you think Elizabeth Taylor will marry Richard Burton?”

It was still a good question. They were free to marry now that Eddie had accepted a $500,000 settlement, but Richard was not eager to sacrifice his freedom to sample any pretty girl who caught his fancy: Sue Lyon, for example; Eddie Fisher has written that Burton had a fling with Sue, something he learned later when he himself had an affair with her. “She wanted to compare my sexual prowess with Richard Burton’s,” Fisher wrote.
⁴
At Casa Kimberley, where Elizabeth and Richard were making a home together for the first time, Richard discovered that Elizabeth’s way of life was gratingly unsuitable to his temperament. Around Christmas, her large family descended on Gringo Gulch, including her parents and Howard and Mara and their five children. Elizabeth had all of her offspring with her now, including Maria, who delighted her by being able to walk down the plane ramp without any assistance. As Edward Dmytryk said in 1998, “Elizabeth is the only one I know who adopted a cripple so she could make her well—little Maria. It required many surgeries.” In addition, there was Dick Hanley and the rest of the entourage, as well as the usual menagerie of animals. Soon Richard could endure it no longer and repaired to the relative peace and quiet of various cantinas, where he recited Dylan Thomas, Lorca, and Shakespeare to anyone who would listen and confessed to an American tourist, “You understand I have to get out of the clutter of my house.”

In frustration, he called Elizabeth “you scurrilous low creature,” driving her to tears.
⁵
When he sobered up, he apologized, wallowing in abject remorse, and she forgave him. He was still plagued by vocational uncertainty, and she encouraged his high-flown ambitions to renounce show business and become a writer and teacher. On his thirty-eighth birthday, November 10, 1963, she’d given him a library of calfskin-bound classics valued at $35,000.
⁶
She encouraged his friendship with Oxford professor Nevill Coghill, who replaced Philip Burton as Richard’s literary mentor after Philip annoyed Richard by bragging to the press that he’d discovered him. According to Graham Jenkins, Philip was “inflating his reputation as a talent spotter . . . to boost his own flagging career.”