The Most Beautiful Woman in the World (29 page)

She told Monty she’d been sent the script of
The Owl and the Pussycat
and reminded him they’d always wanted to do a comedy together. He agreed to read the script aloud with her, but in the end Seven Arts refused to insure him. “If he doesn’t work soon he’ll die,” she told Richard, who suggested that he, Elizabeth, and Monty star together in a remake of the 1947 Gregory Peck–Joan Bennett–Robert Preston film,
The Macomber Affair
, but Monty still hated the prospect of working with Richard. This created complications when Elizabeth finally succeeded in finding a suitable vehicle, Carson McCullers’s
Reflections in a Golden Eye
, which Ray Stark had first brought to her attention on the set of
Iguana
. McCullers’s story of a boisterous, buxom woman married to a latent homosexual seemed a perfect property for her and Monty, and she told Stark she’d insure Monty herself, putting up her $1 million salary as bond. Since her contracts now stipulated that she and Richard were never to be more than half an hour’s drive apart, she insisted that Richard costar and also direct. Elizabeth, Richard, and Monty shared a late dinner at Dinty Moore’s after a performance of
Hamlet
, and Richard, with a wry smile, said, “Monty, Elizabeth likes me, but she loves you.” Referring to Elizabeth’s tracheotomy, ulcerated eye, ruptured spinal disc, phlebitis, and bronchitis, Monty said, “Bessie Mae is the only person I know who has more wrong with her than I have. Tragedies are not cathartic. They make life more mysterious.” They continued to talk about
Reflections
, but actual filming would not begin for another two years.

Before her marriage to Richard, Elizabeth’s children had never gone to her husbands with their problems. “Now . . . they’re absolutely certain that Richard and I will always be married,” she said. He played with them as if he were their age, acting out all the Shakespearean plays, taking all the parts, and the children sat mesmerized until the end and then asked him to do another play. They all loved living at the Regency, where the staff coddled Elizabeth after Richard warned Jacques Camus, the manager, “If you want to get along with my wife, say yes to everything she wants.” At three o’clock one morning, she asked room service for “cheesecake from Lindy’s.” Room service advised her they didn’t have any such item, but she insisted, “I must have it.” Roused from bed, Camus got dressed and went to the kitchen. “I took our own cheesecake out of the ice box and brought it up to her, and said it was from Lindy’s,” he recalled. “It cost her $50 and all she ate was a tiny sliver.”
⁸

Richard did not permit
Hamlet
to interfere with his drinking, according to Graham Jenkins, who watched him down four martinis before going on stage, “and these were just a top-up on the day’s intake.” On May 6, 1964, he was booed for blowing the “play’s the thing” speech, and when he returned to the Regency expecting sympathy from Elizabeth, who was watching a Peter Sellers movie on TV, she told him, “It’s just some idiot . . . Don’t be silly.” He kicked in the TV set, cutting his foot to the bone, and limped through the next few performances. Eddie Fisher visited them at the Regency, and they all decided to bury the hatchet. A few nights later at the Copacabana, Eddie was furious when he was consigned to the balcony, while the Burtons, who arrived fifteen minutes after Sammy Davis Jr. started his act, were shown to a ringside table hastily set up for them. Eddie’s date was Pamela Turnure, Jacqueline Kennedy’s press secretary, and his party included Sam Giancana, Walter Wanger, Mike Todd Jr., and Jennie Grossinger. Miss Turnure wanted to marry Eddie, but she did the one thing he “really couldn’t handle,” he said. “She fell in love with me.”

In June 1964, Elizabeth made her stage debut in New York, reading poetry and prose selections at a fund-raiser,
World Enough and Time
, at the Lunt-Fontanne for Philip Burton’s school, the American Musical and Dramatic Academy. She came on stage wearing a white Grecian pleated gown and emerald-and-diamond earrings, a spray of white flowers holding back her hair, and nervously surveyed a celebrity-studded audience that included Mayor John Lindsay, Patricia Kennedy Lawford, Myrna Loy, Anita Loos, and Lady Peel (Beatrice Lillie). She knew they’d come to “see me fall flat on my face,” she remembered. At first she fumbled lines and sweated through her silk jersey dress, but when Richard quipped, “This is funnier than
Hamlet
,” a sudden rush of adrenaline restored her audacity, and the recital took on such power that Bea Lillie, during intermission, shouted to Carol Channing, “If she doesn’t get worse soon, they’ll be leaving.” The next day,
Variety
lauded Elizabeth’s “undeniable charm.”
⁹

The episode inspired her to resume her movie career. She was second choice for
The Sandpiper
, a hippie love story set in Big Sur. The property had been designed for Kim Novak by producer Martin Ransohoff, but their relationship ran into trouble and she was out of the picture. The role of Laura Reynolds, a painter, went to Elizabeth, and Richard was cast as the married Episcopal minister Laura falls in love with. Ransohoff handed them a list of directors to choose from, including William Wyler, but Elizabeth preferred Vincente Minnelli. The director flew to New York to be interviewed by the Burtons. Though he thought Ransohoff’s story “ludicrous and dated,” Minnelli wanted the job, knowing that the Burtons could now assure the success of any venture they undertook.
¹⁰

Though set in the California wilderness, much of the film had to be shot in Paris because the Burtons could work only four weeks in the United States and not at all in England due to tax considerations. Elizabeth’s salary was $1 million, but she was uninsurable and had to pay her own $180,000 premium. Her eleven-year-old son Michael was given the opportunity to play her son in the film, but she wouldn’t let him do it, explaining, “An ex-child actress in the family is enough—too much maybe.”
¹¹
The role went to Morgan Mason, son of James and Pamela Mason, who evidently was not damaged by the experience, since he grew up to become deputy protocol chief in the Reagan White House and later a successful Hollywood executive.
¹²

After a month of filming in Big Sur, the
Sandpiper
company left for the Boulogne-Billancourt studios in Paris in October 1964. Such was Elizabeth’s fame that customs officials merely kissed her hand and waved her through. “They enjoyed their fame enormously,” said Colin Donnarumma, who was interviewed in 1999 aboard the
Queen Elizabeth 2
, where he works as assistant restaurant manager in the first-class Queen’s Grill. Donnarumma served the Burtons on the ship’s distinguished predecessor, the
Queen Elizabeth
, and recalled, “They immediately held a press conference on board.” The Burtons took over all the ocean liner’s six first-class suites save one, which was occupied by Debbie Reynolds and her latest husband Harry Karl, whose family had been in shoe manufacturing. “Well, isn’t this the silliest,” Elizabeth giggled on seeing Debbie, who chirped, “It’s just totally ridiculous.” Over cocktails, Elizabeth proposed a Dom Perignon toast, telling Debbie, “Just look how you lucked out, and how I lucked out. Who the hell cares about Eddie?” Debbie’s marriage lasted until 1975, when she divorced Karl for sleeping around and gambling away all her money.
¹³

In Paris, the Burtons checked into the Lancaster Hotel and were later joined by Michael, eleven; Christopher, nine; Liza, six, and Maria, four. “Their lives have been up and down,” Elizabeth recalled. “We’ve lived like gypsies.” Hardly. They occupied twenty-one rooms in the Lancaster at a cost of $10,000 a week, including room service. The entourage of eleven included Bea, the governess; the children’s tutor; Dick Hanley; Richard’s assistant John Lee; chauffeur Gaston Sanz; and Maria’s nurse. According to the tutor, the children lived on a different floor, and Elizabeth and Richard didn’t see them for weeks at a time. Periodically, they’d receive the children for an hour’s audience, and Bea would dress them up like model kids. In her seventies, the crotchety governess beat them when they defied her, and Mike Jr. understandably was turning into a rebel.

The Burtons never bothered to make restaurant reservations in Paris, even at Maxim’s, often bringing their dogs and expecting them to be fed as well. At Boulogne-sur-Seine, Metro assigned them quarters almost the size of a hotel, as well as a Rolls-Royce and a driver. When the studio hosted a cocktail party at the Georges Cinq, fans mobbed Elizabeth in the lobby, and Denise and Vincente Minnelli were terrified of being killed in the crush of more than one hundred photographers. Richard’s strength and fearlessness came in handy. In his youth, he’d achieved varsity status in his Welsh school as a rugby football champion and captain of cricket. At the Georges Cinq he grabbed Elizabeth and the Minnellis and blocked, shoved, and tackled until he had them safely in a small office, where they were able to enjoy their drinks in peace before proceeding to the ballroom for the party.

Though physically strong, Richard lacked the confidence to accept Elizabeth for what she was, the most famous woman in the world. As they filmed at Boulognesur-Seine, their coworkers accorded her a deference he would never receive, no matter how hard he tried to outshine her. He became furious at an opening at the Lido when photographers leaned on him to grab shots of her, ignoring everyone else at their table, including Maria Callas, Aristotle Onassis, and the Minnellis. He was in such a rotten mood by the time they vacationed in Amalfi, Elizabeth tossed his clothes out the hotel window.
¹⁴

In December, while in Switzerland, they visited Noel Coward at Château D’Oex. “Christmas is at our throats again,” the witty playwright observed in his diary, adding that Elizabeth, “engagingly thrilled” with a diamond ring Richard had given her, was “a girl anxious for us all to share her enjoyment, to try it on for ourselves and make the facets catch the light.”

She had not been seen on the screen for two years. When
Sandpiper
opened at the Radio City Music Hall in 1965, her fans stormed the box office, breaking all-time records at the legendary Manhattan showplace—and making a top ten hit out of its theme song, “The Shadow of Your Smile.” Richard’s association with Elizabeth at last lifted his movie career out of the doldrums. He’d made twenty films in seventeen years, but it took
Sandpiper
to boost him into the select company of the top ten box-office stars. Somewhat ominously, Elizabeth trailed at number eleven.

He didn’t include her in his next project. After they’d scored three critical duds as an acting couple, Richard temporarily dropped Elizabeth as his partner and attempted to redeem himself artistically by teaming up with his Old Vic Ophelia and sometime mistress, Claire Bloom, in
The Spy Who Came In from the Cold
. According to Bloom, Elizabeth “offered to play the part of the innocuous librarian herself, but the appearance of a star of her magnitude would have unbalanced the stark tone of the film. She settled for feeling extremely uncomfortable having me around.”

Protecting her interests, Elizabeth accompanied Richard on February 9, 1965, to Dublin, where director Martin Ritt made the film at the Ardmore studio. Paramount paid Richard $750,000, but he was not happy working with Ritt, who disapproved of Richard’s heavy drinking. Interviewed in 1999,
Show
magazine writer Jerry O’Connell said Elizabeth was often sloshed on brandy and champagne, and he also recalled a flirtation between Richard and Marya Mannes, the tall, attractive American talk-show personality and arts reviewer for the
Reporter
magazine, who spent a day interviewing Richard for
McCall
’s. “Richard said Elizabeth was insanely jealous of him when she drank,” Mannes said. “He liked ‘statuesque’ women like me, he said, adding that I looked elegant in my gray slacks, red silk blouse, and highland cap. ‘You’re the kind of tough-minded intelligent woman I enjoy talking and drinking with,’ he told me. He left the
Spy
set and we spent the day barhopping. I’m no mean drinker myself, and we ended up at a romantic pub down the coast. I found Richard so dangerous and bawdy that I completely forgot to take notes for my article. When we returned to Dublin, he escorted me to the Anna Livia shop, a chic boutique, and insisted on buying me a long Irish-wool scarf.”

The Burtons took over the top floor of the Gresham Hotel. They’d brought along a young man from Princeton, having found him in Switzerland, to teach their children. He was a draft dodger on his way to Canada. The children hadn’t gone to school at regular places and had a “noneducation,” so he had to teach them all at different levels. A charmer and a drinker, the tutor appealed to the Burtons. Elizabeth and Richard became regulars at restaurateur Peter Parry’s popular Soup Bowl restaurant, located in a townhouse in a cul-de-sac called Molesworth Place. The menu included game birds of the British Isles—widgeon, quail, and teal—and there was an impressive wine cellar. Sinatra and Laurence Harvey, Elizabeth’s
Butterfield 8
costar, were often there, but Harvey’s wicked tongue finally got him banned from the Soup Bowl.

On March 12, Francis Taylor barely survived a cerebral hemorrhage. Elizabeth flew to L.A. to be with her mother and brother at Francis’s bedside at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. “What can I do,” she told reporters, “except pray?”
¹⁵
Francis, who was sixty-five, would never fully recover, and Elizabeth returned to Ireland. The rivalry between Elizabeth and the smug, vengeful Bloom spoiled everyone’s fun during the tense shoot. When Richard complained that his dialogue lacked “balls,” Ritt sent for author John le Carré, who came from Vienna to punch up the script. Over a pub lunch, Richard told le Carré, “I wish none of it had ever happened, Elizabeth is more famous than the Queen.” Le Carré saw fights break out between Elizabeth and Richard in restaurants.