The Most Beautiful Woman in the World (33 page)

On a Friday evening in late October, they were again with Callas, who lived in Paris at 36 Avenue Georges Mandel. The newspapers had just reported Ari’s forthcoming marriage to Jacqueline Kennedy, and Callas was in shock. Richard enveloped her in a bear hug, whispering into her ear that Ari was a son-of-a-bitch. Like the rest of the world, the Parisian haute monde was dismayed that the thirty-nine-year-old widow of the slain U.S. President had chosen to wed a sixty-nine-year-old foreigner. Though jilted and humiliated, Callas put on a brave face and even forced a tight little smile during dinner. Siding with Callas against Ari, Marie-Hélène whispered to the Burtons that Ari would never be invited to another Rothschild party. In his cups, Richard accused Marie-Hélène of lying, slurring that “the Onassises would be the toast of Europe.” Certainly, the Burtons were as curious about the Onassises as Jackie and Ari were fascinated by the Burtons. Elizabeth liked Onassis and insisted, “Jackie made an excellent choice.”
²
Guy de Rothschild agreed and promised Elizabeth he’d invite the Onassises to Ferrières.

On October 20, the Burtons double dated with Callas and Warren Beatty, and Richard later wrote that Callas “needs our company & comfort & perhaps the attention we attract, tho God Knows she can attract enough at the moment in her own right.” Elizabeth wore a white Dior with an emerald necklace and emerald earrings and monopolized the attention of reporters and photographers as if the others were invisible, causing Richard to reflect, “I look at her when she’s asleep at the first light of a grey dawn and wonder at her.” At this point she could upstage anyone in the world. The Burtons had been married eight years, and there were times when he still felt like the luckiest man alive. Such periods were short-lived.

By October 25, Elizabeth was putting Richard under pressure not to let Jackie Kennedy outdo her as owner of the world’s greatest private jewel collection. Onassis had just given Jackie $2.5 million worth of rubies surrounded by diamonds. “The Battle of the Rubies is on,” Richard sighed. “The idea has already been implanted that I shouldn’t let myself be out-done by a bloody Greek.”
³
Richard took it as another challenge to his virility, hard on the heels of his suspicions about her relationship with Beatty. According to author Stephen M. Silverman, his jealousy was the cause of another physical crisis with her back. One day Richard invaded the
Only Game in Town
set and forcibly separated Elizabeth and Beatty, who were in the middle of an on-camera clinch. He yanked her hard, wrenching her back and creating an expensive two-week delay in production.
⁴

“Marred royalty,” as Richard called them, flocked to the Burtons’ movie sets in Paris. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor paid a visit, as did Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia, one of the leaders of European society. For the moment, Richard did nothing to make his wife suspect that the Yugoslavian Princess was a rival for his love. Though Richard was drawn to the Princess and found her “very pretty,” he also thought her “quite impertinent.” He suspected that she was polite to his face, but as soon as he turned his back, out would come the daggers. The Princess confided that she had a date that night with Beatty, pretending, not very successfully, to be unexcited by the prospect. She seemed to be amused by the aging Rex, whose wife, Rachel Roberts, wore micro minis and flashed her bare bottom to the crew, bragging, “I can take any three of you.” Her marriage to Rex was breaking up, and Rex later wrote, “Rachel and I had hoped that working together on
Flea in Her Ear
would be a help to our marriage, but we should have seen that our two life-styles would never fit, before we were married.”
⁵

When the Burtons and the Harrisons went together to the premiere of
Flea
, a Gallic farce by Feydeau, Rachel screamed at Elizabeth because the Burtons’ limousine was called first. A few days later, Rachel appeared on the
Staircase
set and proceeded to get drunk. Elizabeth rang from their hotel suite, and Richard asked Rachel if she’d like to talk to Elizabeth, thinking she’d apologize for having attacked her at the premiere. Instead, Rachel took the receiver and started barking like her basset hound, Homer. For once Elizabeth was at a loss for words, “so embarrassed that she didn’t know what to do,” Richard recalled. A few days later Rachel again visited the set and showed everyone her pubic hairs, then lay down on the floor and said that she’d show her ass to anyone who cared to see it. She pulled up her miniskirt and made good on her promise. Glaring at Rex, she hissed, “I don’t care about his hard-faced blondes.” Richard, who was playing Rex’s “wife” in the film, said, “Neither do I.” Richard was drawn to Rachel’s firm, athletic body and eventually succumbed to her blatant come-ons.

The once-fat Callas aspired to look like Audrey Hepburn, a goal never reached because of the diva’s rugged features, but in Paris, at her thinnest, Callas was a statuesque, dark-haired stunner. Elizabeth seems never to have regarded her as a serious rival, though Callas pursued Richard throughout November 1968, nagging him to help her film
Medea
. She was desperate to score a grand triumph that would make Onassis regret having left her for Jackie, and she chose the Euripides play rather than an opera, because her singing voice was no longer capable of grandeur. Richard was not keen to play Jason, Medea’s husband, an unchallenging role for an actor of his stature. In his opinion, Callas was “not beautiful,” but he liked her face with its “black-eyed animation” and her body—at least the lean part from her midriff upward. Those “massive legs,” however, left him cold. When Callas removed her dark glasses, he saw bags under her eyes and assumed she’d been on a crying jag.

After watching Richard and Rex film their scenes, Callas, at last realizing that Richard wasn’t going to help her, left and went over to try her luck at Elizabeth’s set. During a break in her
Only Game in Town
filming, Elizabeth was in her dressing room, playing gin rummy with her nurse, Caroline O’Connor. Callas sat watching them in silence, trying to pick up tips from Elizabeth’s manner and gestures on how to become a movie queen. When Caroline scored a quick gin, Elizabeth yelled, “Shit,” and Callas shot out of her chair and started pacing the room. Elizabeth later told Richard that Callas said, “Oh no, I’ve never heard such words. Oh no, no, no, never heard such things.”

After Elizabeth turned down the role of Mary Magdalene in George Stevens’s
The Greatest Story Ever Told
, Callas was set for the part. At the urging of Ari Onassis, Spyros Skouras asked Princess Grace to play the Virgin Mary, but Grace declined upon learning that Callas had the juicier, prostitute’s role, saying, “She gets to play Magdalene and I get stuck with the Virgin Mary? No way!” In the end neither appeared in the film.

November 12, 1968, marked a high point in French society’s courtship of the Burtons, who were now one of the city’s most sought after couples. They attended a dinner for twenty at the Windsors’ home in Paris, where guests were expected to arrive punctually at 8:45 p.m. They entered by a marble hallway, dimly illuminated with candelabra and fragrant with incense. A butler stood by the open guest book, pen in hand. Ornate, grand, and in impeccable taste, the drawing room had soft French-blue-and-silver decor by M. Stephane Boudin and clusters of chairs and sofas for conversational groups. The adjoining dining room had a musicians’ gallery and, over the fireplace, Brockhurst’s portrait of the square-faced, square-jawed Duchess.

Liveried footmen appeared twice before dinner, offering highballs, martinis, sherry, and champagne. “Forty-five minutes of drinking before dinner is
quite
enough,” ordained the Duchess. The chef, one of Europe’s greatest, had an assistant chef, a pastry chef, and two kitchen boys. A meal at the Windsors’ was, according to Lady Diana Mosley, “the perfection of perfection.” At table, the Duchess changed her conversational partner frequently, forcing everyone to switch, a practice that revitalized her wine-besotted guests. Richard was an exception. He’d drunk too much and was highly critical of everything. The Duke was also out of sorts, sulking because he hadn’t been seated next to Elizabeth. Gulping the Duke’s seventy-five-year-old Forge de Sazerac brandy, Richard sank into a blackout and, to Elizabeth’s horror, glared at the Duchess of Windsor and said, “You are, without any question, the most vulgar woman I’ve ever met.” Without blinking, the Duchess remarked that he and Elizabeth were the only untitled guests present.
⁶
Richard then picked up the Duchess and began swinging her in wild circles, her tiny aged feet a few inches from the floor. Elizabeth was sure he was going to drop her and kill her.

Whatever her shortcomings, the Duchess was not vulgar. “Her style of dress,” Daphne Fielding wrote, “was based on classical simplicity of line and, with her trim figure, clear complexion and spick-and-span American grooming, she was capable of eclipsing more beautiful but less soignée English roses, who in her presence looked like croquet mallets beside a polished arrow.” Richard later attributed his assault on the Duchess to “drink and the idiocies that it arouses . . . I shall die of drink and make-up.” When they got home, he was so violent that Elizabeth locked him in the guest room, and he tried to kick the door down. His drinking continued to embarrass her at dinner parties, but the invitations kept coming. High society worshipped Elizabeth and apparently would forgive her—and her husband—almost anything. One evening a drunken Richard cursed their hosts and stormed out, leaving Elizabeth to entertain the guests with a seemingly endless supply of near-death experiences: “When my back was fused . . . When I choked on my phlegm . . . When my eye was almost gouged out . . . When I almost died four times . . . When they nearly amputated my leg.”
⁷
The haut monde hung on Elizabeth’s every word, probably understanding very little of her English but content just to gaze at her. With the possible exception of Catherine Deneuve, she was still regarded as the world’s foremost beauty.

Even the arrogant, belligerent Richard tried to be on his best behavior when with the Rothschilds, banking scions of one of Europe’s noblest families. On November 16, the Burtons left to spend a few days as guests of Baron Guy and Baronne Marie-Hélène de Rothschild at Château de Ferrières outside Paris, bringing along nurse Caroline, who, according to Elizabeth, was thrilled by the great house and grounds, tended by one hundred servants. Their hosts’ daughter, Lily, had had a blood clot on her brain two months previously, and Richard helped her husband carry her up two flights of stairs “fireman fashion.”

There were thirteen for dinner, seated at two side-by-side tables to break up the spooky number thirteen. Conversation was surprisingly coarse, focusing on sexual aberrations. Guy described a man who could have an orgasm only by imagining his mother hurtling from a building and passing his window at the crucial moment. Richard repeated a story of David Niven’s about the actor who sat naked on a cake and masturbated until he was advised, “You can’t have your cake and have it too.”

Table talk at Ferrières also included matters of vanity. Marie-Hélène confessed she’d been given a complete makeover by Alberto di Rossi, but no one complimented her since she was still, according to Richard, as plain as a collier’s wife on wash day. She was also a person of wit and eloquence, adored by both Burtons. A quarrel erupted during dinner between Marie-Hélène and Lily when the inevitable subject of the Onassises resurfaced. Marie-Hélène was still banning Ari and Jackie from Ferrières, but Lily, like the Burtons, was dying to invite them.
⁸

The following day was Marie-Hélène’s birthday. Since the festivities didn’t begin until high tea at 4:30 p.m., the Burtons slept until noon and brunched in their room on bacon, eggs, homemade brioche and toast, and home-grown apples. Elizabeth elected to remain in bed and read while Richard ambled through the estate’s snowy woods. She went to a window and leaned out, breathing in the crisp winter air. Phillippe and the other young Rothschilds, including a pretty girl cousin, were shooting rabbits and pheasants. For a moment, she listened to far-off sounds of the hunt. Then she saw Richard strolling in the park below and was touched when he looked up and waved to her. He walked on toward a lake where ducks and swans were still swimming in the unfrozen areas. Trees along the avenues had been planted by generations of reigning monarchs prior to the French Revolution.

Finally dressing and going downstairs, she joined twenty-five guests, including the minister of the interior, for tea, which consisted of chicken-in-the-pot and a cornucopia of vegetables, cheeses, desserts, roasted chestnuts, raisins, fresh figs, mandarins, oranges, apples, and homemade preserves. Later, at the cocktail hour, as the Burtons circulated among the sixty guests, Marie-Hélène approached them and asked Richard to chat up a dark lady standing by herself. “For God’s sake, Marie-Hélène, I don’t know her,” he objected, “why should I?” The woman was dying to hear Richard’s “heavenly” voice, Marie-Hélène explained. “Tell her I’ll be over in a minute and give her an impersonation,” Elizabeth said, affecting her tough American accent.
⁹
“My broad doesn’t muck around,” an appreciative Richard reflected. Marie-Hélène was so bent on flaunting Richard as her prize catch that she later joined a group at the bar, where Richard was trying to conduct a conversation with Mrs. Pierre Salinger, and asked if anyone had seen Richard. Marie-Hélène’s eyesight was failing, and she didn’t recognize Richard. One of her guests was “dying” to meet him, she explained. Turning to Marie-Hélène, Richard said, “It is I, Hamlet, the Dane.”
¹⁰
Still not recognizing him, she stared at him blankly before wandering off to look for him elsewhere.