The Most Beautiful Woman in the World (30 page)

She refused to attend any social event to which Bloom was invited, but one night the two actresses somehow ended up together in the Burtons’ suite, where Richard and le Carré were trying to top each other with witty stories. “Whether this—coupled with the fact that she was not the center of attention—triggered the lady’s annoyance, I don’t know,” Bloom said. “But she left the table and went to her room, unremarked by her husband.” Later, using the intercom, she ordered Richard to come to bed. He ignored her, and she started buzzing him at five-minute intervals. “Then Taylor appeared, like some spirit of vengeance, and a shouting match began,” Bloom added.

In le Carré’s recollection, Richard went into the bedroom to get Elizabeth “and they had a mother and father of a row. Sounds of slapping . . . Eventually she arrived in the sort of fluffy wrap-around dressing gown you send away for, barefooted, rather broad-arsed, but extremely cuddly . . . And she gave me one of those little-girl handshakes, ‘How’d you do?’ and left! Burton was wonderfully embarrassed: ‘Do you mind? Elizabeth is, I think, not feeling . . . ’” In Bloom’s estimation, the evening was ruined, and she and le Carré quickly left.
¹⁶

Like many couples in the throes of marital discord, the Burtons hoped that having a child of their own would strengthen the union. While in Dublin, Elizabeth went into the hospital for an operation that might enable her to get pregnant. Richard spent the day in a pub, flirting with every girl in sight, beginning with the waitresses. Elizabeth emerged from surgery still unable to bear children. Though she was besotted by Richard, he seemed trapped in a “terrible melancholy . . . a permanent anxiety,” according to a Dublin writer friend, Frank Delaney.
¹⁷

When
The Spy Who Came In from the Cold
was released, many called it the best Burton film ever. He received his fourth Oscar nomination but lost to Lee Marvin for
Cat Ballou
. After four nominations in a row in the late 1950s, Elizabeth hadn’t been cited by the Academy in five years, but she was about to make a comeback.
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
, Edward Albee’s closety gay play, was attacked by some critics as being more about homosexual relationships than heterosexual ones. Resuming their career as a husband-and-wife acting team, Elizabeth and Richard would, in a sense, be playing in drag. They were well paid to do so, Elizabeth holding out for a deal that brought them a total of $4 million. She had director approval and made a choice that was both daring and wise. Thirty-four-year-old cabaret entertainer Mike Nichols, who’d befriended her in Rome during
le scandale
, would give her the best direction she’d received since George Stevens. Throughout location filming on the campus of Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, and at Warner Bros.’ Burbank lot in late 1965, a resentful Richard complained that Nichols worked too slowly, but what he really minded was the extra time the director spent helping Elizabeth create and sustain a top-flight performance. Many of those who worked with them realized the couple was playing out their own conflicts in the coruscating domestic tragicomedy of George and Martha. In both cases, marriage had become a combat zone. Elizabeth seemed to be surviving the flak better than Richard, according to Nichols, who said, “She was wearing him down.”

The film opened in June 1966 to an almost unprecedented blast of controversy and acclaim. Warner bravely breached the censorship code and retained Albee’s raw dialogue, appending a note to advertisements: “No one under 18 to be admitted unless accompanied by an adult,” which marked the first time that a film with top actors had been so designated, paving the way for other movie makers to produce films of integrity, true to the way people actually talk and behave. Filming
The Taming of the Shrew
in Italy, the Burtons missed the world premiere at the Pantages Theater, which was such a hot ticket that not even Rock Hudson could get in. As kleig lights strafed the skies over Hollywood Boulevard, three thousand fans watched the arrival of Nichols, Jack Warner, Merle Oberon, Jonathan Winters, Pat Boone, and Julie Andrews.

Inside the 1,512-seat theater, from the moment of Elizabeth’s grand-slamming entrance on screen, a stunned hush fell over the audience. Speaking in a resonant contralto Nichols had somehow elicited from her, Elizabeth said, “What a dump,” delivering Bette Davis’s high-camp line from
Beyond the Forest
. As the reels spun out that night at the Pantages—from “Get the Guests” to “Hump the Hostess”—
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
set new movie standards in candor, spelling the end of old-fashioned Hollywood censorship. Stanley Kauffmann of the
New York Times
saluted “one of the most scathingly honest American films ever made” and credited Elizabeth for “the best work of her career.” In a shower of top acting honors, she received the prestigious New York Film Critics Circle award, the National Board of Review award, and the British Film Academy’s award as best actress of the year. She sent Brando, who’d been using her Gstaad chalet, to pick up her New York Critics award, and the actor used the occasion to excoriate the reviewers for having taken so long to acknowledge Elizabeth’s talent. Then he flew to Elizabeth’s overseas location and personally presented the award to her.

Movie insiders began to predict that both the Burtons would win Oscars, but Richard was pessimistic after Paul Scofield won the New York Critics award for
A Man for All Seasons
. On February 20, 1967, Elizabeth received her fifth Oscar nomination and Richard his fifth, both for their work in the Albee film. Many felt she had the Oscar sewed up because, at thirty-five, she’d deglamorized herself to play the fifty-two-year-old Martha, following the trend set by Oscar winners like Olivia de Havilland, who’d downplayed her beauty in
The Heiress
, and Grace Kelly, who’d worn glasses and drab housedresses in
The Country Girl
. The annual presentation ceremony was held on April 10 at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, with Bob Hope again emceeing. According to publicist John Springer, Elizabeth felt “the Academy Award was the most important thing in the world to her,” but Richard was afraid of losing and persuaded her not to attend. When Elizabeth advised Jack Warner that she wasn’t going, he warned her, “Do not burn the bridges you have built.” She then asked Richard to reconsider. “It’s for the industry,” she said. Irritated, he told friends, “There’s no guarantee she’ll win. She could fly all that way and lose.” When she showed him the telegram Warner had sent, Richard said, “Piss on him.”

During the Oscar telecast, Hope made a joke at Elizabeth’s expense, saying, “Leaving Richard alone in Paris is rather like leaving Jackie Gleason locked in a deli.” Richard lost out to Scofield, but Elizabeth was victorious, scoring her second Oscar. In her absence Anne Bancroft accepted. “It must be nice to have enough talent just to send for one,” quipped Hope, diminishing the importance of Elizabeth’s victory. A congratulatory call was put through to her, but she began cursing the minute she heard Richard had lost. For the first time in Oscar history, a winning actress refused to give a press statement. Never at a loss for words, Richard said he’d lost because Hollywood would never forgive him for marrying Elizabeth, but according to Oscar historian Anthony Holden, Richard was snubbed because he’d antagonized most of the men in Hollywood by sleeping with their wives.

Unfortunately, Elizabeth’s second Oscar was the kiss of death for her career as a serious actress. Typecasting herself as Martha, she played Albee’s loudmouthed harridan over and over in many of her succeeding movies. Jack Warner had been right: she’d burned her bridges, and she’d never again turn in a distinguished performance. After
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
she wasted herself in Richard’s amateur production of Christopher Marlowe’s
Doctor Faustus
, which he staged as a favor to his friend Nevill Coghill at Oxford. “University drama at its worst,” scolded Irving Wardle of the
Times
, but Richard insisted on filming the wretched production and releasing it for commercial distribution.

Critics jeered the Burtons as the worst act in show business, but they stubbornly continued to work as an acting team. On July 22, 1966, while they were filming
The Taming of the Shrew
at Dino de Laurentiis’s new studio in Rome, Elizabeth received an urgent call from New York. It was about Monty, who’d been preparing to join her in Rome to film
Reflections in a Golden Eye
. His hired companion, Lorenzo James, explained that he’d found Monty sprawled on his bed at 6 a.m., naked except for his eyeglasses—and dead of “convulsions due to alcoholism” and a heart attack. He would have been forty-six the following October. “He was my brother,” Elizabeth said, “my dearest friend.” Due to filming, she couldn’t attend his fifteen-minute funeral service on July 26 in Manhattan’s St. James Episcopal Church, where Frank Taylor, Libby Holman, Nancy Walker, Lauren Bacall, Dore Schary, Mira Rostova, and Robbie Lantz were among 150 mourners. Elizabeth sent two jumbo bouquets of chrysanthemums with the message, “Rest, perturbed spirit.”

When
The Taming of the Shrew
opened, critics thought Richard perfect as Petruchio, but Elizabeth was still playing Martha in
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
, screeching and posturing instead of acting. “When it comes to brewing up a real emotion, such as shrewish rage,” wrote Wilfred Sheed in
Esquire
, “she can only flutter her surface and hope for the best.”
Reflections in a Golden Eye
, her next film, was produced in Rome in October 1966, and she had to recast Monty’s role. Lee Marvin, William Holden, and Robert Mitchum all turned it down, but Brando leaped at the $750,000 salary despite his reluctance to portray a latent homosexual. Frequent rumors regarding his own alleged homoeroticism made him nervous in the role, but after he saw
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
he decided he wanted to work with Elizabeth, whose performance he respected.
¹⁸
Richard came to the set daily, so fascinated by Brando’s acting that he was blind to the flirtation going on between Elizabeth and Brando, who later revealed that he “turned down” Elizabeth because “her ass was too small.” Laurence Harvey evidently didn’t agree, having called her “Fat Ass,” though not to her face, when they’d filmed
Butterfield 8
in 1959.
¹⁹

On the
Reflections
set, Elizabeth ordered John Huston around, telling the director of
The Maltese Falcon
and
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
, “Let me know twenty minutes before you want me, then ten minutes, five, one . . . and then I’ll do the shot. But don’t keep me waiting.” While filming a scene with Brando, Julie Harris, and Brian Keith, Elizabeth spoke her lines and waited for Brando’s reply. He muttered something, but she didn’t hear him and started ad-libbing. “Cut,” Huston called. “Elizabeth flopped.” Script girl Angela Allen said, “No, she didn’t. She ad-libbed as long as she possibly could.” Glancing at Brando, Elizabeth said, “Yes. When Mr. Mumbles can open his mouth, so any of us can even hear what he says, it would be wonderful.”

One night in November, at a dinner with Brando and French actor Christian Marquand, the Burtons and their guests drank so much that they blacked out, and the next day, according to Richard, “no two people remember[ed] what happened.” When it finally occurred to him that booze was the root of all their problems, he tried to give it up, but Elizabeth refused to go on the wagon. “Elizabeth enjoyed her booze as usual and I don’t resent it—much,” he wrote, and soon he was drinking again. “I have been more or less drunk for two days,” he wrote on November 2, confessing that he’d created havoc throughout the household, insulting Bob Wilson and breaking his vow of fidelity by hitting on Maria’s nanny Karen. Elizabeth didn’t mind his indiscretion so much as she did the possibility of losing a good nanny. The following morning he apologized to Karen in Elizabeth’s presence and later wondered whatever could have possessed him, finally deciding that it must have been his impending forty-first birthday.
²⁰

By 1966, the Burtons’ drinking was wrecking their health and turning their home into a bedlam, with Richard shouting at Elizabeth and even at Liza, who adored him. Elizabeth warned him to stop screaming at Liza, reminding him that he couldn’t expect children to think and behave like adults. When Elizabeth began to hemorrhage in 1966, Richard wrote in his journal that he had “nightmares of her dying . . . from that bloody bleeding [and] shouted and bawled at her for being ‘unfit,’ for lack of discipline, for taking too much booze.” Dr. Middleton-Price of London was summoned to Italy “to knock her out,” and she went into a Rome clinic for curettage—the scraping of fibroid tumors from the interior of the uterus, a fairly common condition in women. After the operation she called Richard and said she was “in pain,” but would “live to be shouted at another day.” They had been unable to have sex for a month, but within the week, they dined at home and later “made lovely love,” he recalled, adding, “what a magnificent relief and release.”
²¹

On February 27, 1967, the Burtons celebrated Elizabeth’s thirty-fifth birthday with Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon in the Dorchester Hotel’s Terrace Room. Richard commented to HRH, “I hope you are not as nervous tonight, Ma’am, as I am.” She replied, “Would you like to bet?”
²²
The royal marriage was headed for the divorce courts. In Paris, the Burtons dined with Elizabeth’s old friends the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and the Windsors found them so congenial they came home with them. The two notorious couples had much in common, both having survived international scandal to form marriages that were at once passionate and opportunistic—the American Wallis Warfield Simpson had wanted to be Queen of England and Richard Burton had wanted to be king of the world. “We all got on famously,” Richard recalled. “The Duke and I sang the Welsh National Anthem in atrocious harmony.” During Elizabeth’s childhood in the 1930s, the Duke, who was then David, Prince of Wales, had ascended to the throne of England as King Edward VIII, reigning for 326 days before abdicating to marry Wallis, the current Duchess of Windsor, who was twice divorced. “Wallis taught me that life could be fun,” the Duke explained. Outcasts in England, the Duke and Duchess went into exile in France, where they were befriended by Eugene and Kitty de Rothschild, marking the beginning of an alliance between the Windsors and the Rothschilds that the Burtons would shortly benefit from.