The Most Beautiful Woman in the World (28 page)

Often Richard retired to his writing hideaway upstairs and filled page after page with everything that popped into his mind. While drinking steadily, he composed lengthy accounts of his life with Elizabeth, his reading, his friends, politics, gossip, films, and rambling anecdotes, eventually amassing 350,000 words. When he at last published a book,
A Christmas Story
, he compared Elizabeth with his beloved sister Cis James, about whom he wrote, “She felt all tragedies except her own . . . It wasn’t until thirty years later, when I saw her in another woman, that I realized I had been searching for her all my life.” He also published a fictional version of his and Elizabeth’s romance called
Meeting Mrs. Jenkins
. Elizabeth herself caught the writing bug and put together a self-serving memoir,
Elizabeth Taylor
, with
Life
staffer Richard Meryman, based on garrulous and diffuse tape recordings. Harper and Row gave her a $250,000 advance (the nineties equivalent of $1 million), but neither Elizabeth nor Burton emerged as a writer of substance. In Mexico, when her family cleared out, they drew closer as a couple, and there were times when she felt totally fulfilled. “He is the ocean,” she said. “He is the sunset . . . He is such a vast person.”

According to Graham Jenkins, it was at Casa Kimberley that Richard went beyond infatuation with Elizabeth and experienced the “full blossoming of love,” finding “a sense of contentment he had never known before.” That of course depended on when you saw them and how much they’d been drinking. When Stephen Birmingham, author of the best-selling
Our Crowd
, visited Ava on the
Iguana
set, he noticed that Elizabeth was urging Richard to drink, despite his obvious alcoholism.
⁷
But no one denied she was often a source of strength, especially when Richard finally realized that he didn’t have the right stuff to be a writer. She encouraged him once more to resume his ambition to be the world’s leading Shakespearean actor and to assay the role of Hamlet on Broadway. He agreed, but not entirely wholeheartedly, for his true ambition was to top her by making $2 million a picture. “I’ve always believed that a husband should have a larger pay packet than his wife,” he said, betraying his boneheaded sexism.

Since the Burtons were still the hottest celebrity news item in the world, everyone wanted to put money in Richard’s
Hamlet
. The show was quickly financed and set for a Broadway opening in April 1964. Michael Jr., Christopher, and Liza stayed with their nanny in a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and Maria was with Sara and Francis in West L.A. On January 28, Elizabeth and Richard left for Toronto for his
Hamlet
rehearsals. Her peregrinations had never been more constant or intense than they would be in 1964, a year marked by separations from her children as she followed Richard.

He’d played the Prince of Denmark with such authority at the Old Vic in 1953–1954 under Michael Benthall’s direction, with Claire Bloom as Ophelia, and with Philip Burton supplying behind-the-scenes textual interpretations, that Winston Churchill had come to his dressing room and addressed Richard as “My Lord Hamlet.” Now, ten years later, under the ineffectual direction of the patronizing John Gielgud, Richard floundered around in the role, trying various interpretations, including a homosexual Hamlet. Elizabeth saw failure on the horizon.

Interviewed in 1999, Richard’s standby, Robert Burr, recalled, “There was a party every night, with so much money around this production. I was standing alone on a Sunday night when I saw Elizabeth circling the room. We’d never met before, and when she saw I was by myself, she came over and stood next to me. ‘Are you having fun?’ I asked, and she said, ‘I’m so tired.’ I told her, ‘Why don’t you go home and go to bed?’” That established the character of their relationship, and thereafter she knew she could count on a straight answer from Richard’s ruggedly handsome, blue-eyed standby. She was less civil to Burr’s blond, blue-eyed wife, Jacqueline, who recalled, “Richard liked women and was always nice to me. Elizabeth acted like a silly jealous teenager.”

During the early part of the Toronto run, Richard still wasn’t clicking with the audience. Elizabeth knew that Philip Burton was the one drama coach he trusted, and despite Philip’s disapproval of
le scandale
, she phoned him on February 2, 1964, begging him to come to Toronto. He said he’d need to check with Sybil. “Of course you must go,” Sybil told him, “he needs you.” When Philip arrived in Toronto, Elizabeth took him directly to the theater. Richard’s only problem was that he badly needed to have his confidence restored, which Philip accomplished with a few supportive remarks. The next performance of
Hamlet
caught fire, the entire cast sparked by Richard’s dash, driving attack, and verve.

Elizabeth pampered the cast, rounding them up after performances and inviting them up to the “Royal Suite” for champagne and theater talk, often staking them to dinner. William Redfield, who played Guildenstern, admired her “modesty, self-effacement, [and] softness.” But the Toronto audiences hated her. She was hissed so viciously at the beginning of a February performance that Richard estimated the incident added twenty-eight minutes to the playing time. It was her thirty-second birthday, and she was damned if she’d let anyone intimidate her, remaining until final curtain. Richard punished his worshipful audience for their rudeness to Elizabeth by refusing to take more than two curtain calls.

They were finally married in Montreal on March 15, 1964. It was her fifth trip to the altar in a little over a dozen years. Oscar Levant, a faithful friend throughout her marriages to Hilton, Wilding, Todd, and Fisher, quipped, “Always a bride, never a bridesmaid,” and christened Elizabeth “the other woman of the year.” The wedding party of ten, flown in by private jet, included her parents, Hugh French, and Hume Cronyn,
Hamlet
’s Polonius. Richard started drinking at 10 a.m. and was unsteady on his feet by the time of the civil ceremony at the Mexican embassy. Elizabeth kept them all waiting, and Richard grumbled, “She’ll be late for the last bloody judgment.” When she arrived, she looked at him and said, “I don’t know why he’s so nervous. We’ve been sleeping together for two years.” Her yellow chiffon Irene Sharaff décolleté gown was based on the costume she’d worn in her first scene with Richard in
Cleopatra
; her hairdo, augmented by $600 worth of thirty-four-inch falls, had Roman hyacinths woven through it; and she wore the diamond necklace and matching diamond-and-emerald drop earrings Richard had given her. In his new suit, he stood next to his best man, Bob Wilson, his black dresser. The thirty-two-year-old Jewish bride and the thirty-eight-year-old Presbyterian groom exchanged their vows in front of a Unitarian Church of the Messiah pastor, Reverend Leonard Mason, the only member of the clergy willing to associate himself with a couple who, between them, had wrecked three families.

At a subsequent performance of
Hamlet
, Richard announced from the stage, “Some of you have come to see Alfred Drake, some have come to see Eileen Herlie, some have come to see Hume Cronyn, and some have come to see Elizabeth Taylor. For the first time on any stage, Elizabeth Taylor will be here to see you.” It took several crew members to push her from the wings, and then she stood on the apron baffled and blushing, paralyzed by stage fright. Suddenly the audience exploded in the kind of sustained, orgiastic cheering only heard at football games or boxing matches—marking the beginning of her love affair with the legitimate theater. She knew Richard was using her to draw standing-room-only crowds, but she made it clear to producer Alexander Cohen that her support must never be taken for granted. One evening, when Cohen called for her a quarter of an hour before curtain, she was enjoying a TV rerun of Roddy’s
How Green Was My Valley
. “Do you think you might dress?” Cohen inquired. “Not before the movie’s over,” she said. Knowing that she was the production’s most valuable asset, though an un-billed and unsalaried one, the producer sat down and waited.

When the play opened at the Lunt-Fontanne in New York in April 1964, police had to block off the street as thousands of the curious surged in from Times Square to catch a glimpse of the Burtons. “Why?” Richard asked Truman Capote, and Elizabeth said, “Because they’re sex maniacs, and we’re sinners and freaks.” Sinatra told them that the bobbysoxers’ siege of the Paramount during his forties heyday was nothing compared with the bedlam at the Lunt-Fontanne when Elizabeth, resplendent in diamonds, arrived. She’d sent Monty opening-night tickets. When he spotted her in the orchestra, he yelled, “Bessie Mae! Bessie Mae!” She stared in shock at his ravaged figure but stood up and hugged him warmly, inviting him to the cast party hosted by Alexander Cohen at the Rainbow Room.

The
New York Herald-Tribune
critic, Walter Kerr, called Richard “one of the most magnificently equipped actors living,” but added a reservation: “His passion is always a
way
of doing passion, not passion proper, passion unpremeditated.” Richard later admitted to the
New Yorker
’s Kenneth Tynan, “I played it absolutely as myself” (that is, Richard Burton playing Richard Burton playing Hamlet). That satisfied most of the critics, who were bowled over by the sheer force of Richard’s energy, using superlatives such as “electrical,” “bold,” “virile,” and “unprecedented” to describe his performance, but not the distinguished Harold Clurman, who walked out. “This is an actor who has lost interest in his profession,” wrote Clurman.

During the run of the play Richard let Robert Burr substitute for him twice, telling him, “They won’t have to change the marquee much, will they?” Elizabeth’s chilly relationship with Burr’s wife, Jacqueline, eventually blossomed into friendship. “She went from being jealous to being maternal toward me,” Jacqueline recalled. “Richard invited us to dinner at Sardi’s, and Elizabeth was snippy and nasty with me at first. I ignored her. Later I mentioned that I had a tragic situation with one of my children and described how I intended to deal with it. My son as an infant had cancer of the retina. This was pre-laser, and his eye had to be removed. I thought I must protect him from playing tennis so the ball wouldn’t hit his eye. I told them, ‘He’s a tough, masculine, good-looking kid, but I’m going to protect him from injury.’ Elizabeth said, ‘No, no, don’t do that.’ Suddenly she began to talk to me one-on-one, changing from black to white. She had been through physical pain and understood, talking common sense to me. I took her advice—did whatever I could, for example, to get him to wear sunglasses when driving in an open car—and was never sorry I’d listened to her suggestion that I let him live his own life. He’s wonderful today.

“After that, Elizabeth and I spent some time together. We were to be photographed at the World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows. I told her, ‘I perspire on my head—my hair looks terrible.’ She said, ‘Oh, wear a hat, dear.’ I told her I didn’t have one. ‘Well, you come with me,’ she said. In her room, I’d never seen such a wardrobe, and she picked out a white Belgian lace hat and wouldn’t let me return it. She was always sending us champagne.”

Running concurrently in New York with Burton’s
Hamlet
was Joseph Papp’s
Hamlet
, starring Alfred Ryder, in the highly regarded “Shakespeare in the Park” repertory at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. When Ryder left the production Robert Burr was offered the role, and Richard magnanimously told his standby, “Any actor who gets a chance to play Hamlet must grab it.” Burr received excellent reviews, as did Julie Harris as Ophelia and Stacey Keach as Horatio. “Though Richard was playing Hamlet the same night, Elizabeth told me she wanted to see Robert’s Hamlet with me,” Jackie said. “If you had a date with her, she took care of everything. Dick Hanley called and said, ‘About this theater thing—the chauffeur will pick you up—’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘I’ll meet Elizabeth at the theater.’ Hanley said, ‘Because of security, they don’t like to do it that way. Can you do it our way?’ I told him okay, and later the chauffeur took me to their hotel. She didn’t have very good clothes then; like a kid, she put on outfits that didn’t work. I was in a black dress and matching coat. Richard saw Elizabeth and said, ‘See, I told you that’s what to wear.’ She ended up in black like me. When he dressed her she looked right. Roddy McDowall joined us and we left for the park.

“The security the Burtons required in those days was like a head of state’s. As the chauffeur drove us through the park, cops were stationed everywhere along the road for her. ‘Okay, go ahead,’ one would say, and then a little later we’d stop again and another one would tell us it was all right to proceed. After we were seated and the play began, Elizabeth turned to me and said, ‘Oh, Bob’s good.’ During the break she wanted to go to the john, but I told her, ‘I’ll take you to the actresses’ dressing room.’ Nan Martin, who was playing Gertrude, dropped her costume and her mouth flew open when Elizabeth entered. After Richard finished that night on Broadway, and Robert finished in the park, we all met at their hotel and partied. At closing time in the bar the maître d’ said, ‘This is the last drink.’ Richard said, ‘No, it isn’t.’ He was boss in the hotel but did it with great style.” When the reviews came in that night, Burr was a hit as
Hamlet
, Lewis Funke of the
New York Times
calling him “a pleasure to behold and to hear, full of vigor and virility.”

Elizabeth invited Monty to dinner at the Regency, and he reciprocated by asking her to his brownstone. Monty hadn’t worked for three and a half years, largely out of choice, but also because he was uninsurable. Eager to help, Elizabeth suggested starring together in a film, adding that Richard would have to be included. Monty thought she vastly overestimated Richard’s talent. He was nothing but a “reciter,” Monty said, and his Hamlet was “phony.” Nevertheless, Elizabeth was determined to help Monty engineer a comeback. “If you ever get into Elizabeth’s small circle of friends,” said Rex Kennamer, “you always stay there.”