The Most Beautiful Woman in the World (35 page)

Having established his top bid for the Ames ring at $1 million, Richard lost it to Cartier, who outbid him by $50,000, but he later purchased the ring from the jeweler for $1.1 million, the highest price ever paid for a diamond to that date. Onassis had bid $700,000, hoping to acquire it for his wife, Jackie. Elizabeth christened it the Taylor-Burton diamond. She originally wore it as a ring, but later commissioned Cartier to design a necklace for it, which she wore to Princess Grace’s fortieth birthday party at Hotel Hermitage in Monte Carlo, accompanied by two machine-gun-toting bodyguards. Outraged by such ostentation, the
New York Times
implied editorially that she should wear it “on the way to the guillotine.”

She was sometimes careless with the Taylor-Burton diamond. John Gielgud happened upon it after Elizabeth left it on the sink at Chalet Ariel. By November 18, 1969, its sparkle had evidently dimmed, for Elizabeth subjected Richard to what he called “a savage mauling,” punishing him for having ruined his handsomeness with drink and boring her with his bragging, his insatiable greed, his womanizing, and his lies.
²²

In 1970, Sinatra invited them to visit his 2.5-acre compound in the California desert at the foot of the San Jacinto Mountains. After the splendors of Château de Ferrières, Elizabeth and Richard weren’t impressed by his Palm Springs dwelling, sadly missing the charm of one of America’s utterly singular, historical houses. Situated along the seventeenth fairway of the Tamarisk Country Club in Rancho Mirage, on Wonder Palms Road, the Sinatra estate (today owned by Canadian businessman Jim Pattison) consists of a group of low, unadorned, anti-style houses that blend organically with the desert, but on the inside offer the ultimate in luxury and comfort. Sinatra told the Burtons he was campaigning for Ronald Reagan, and Richard reflected, “That’s like Laurel coming out for Hardy.” Elizabeth flirted with Sinatra in front of Richard, but the latter’s only objection was that Sinatra “didn’t respond” to her advances—so far as Richard knew. In Sinatra’s bedroom was a small plaque with the inscription: “I believe in the sun even when it’s not shining. I believe in love even when not feeling it. I believe in God even when he is silent.”

A large oil portrait of Debbie Reynolds dominated the projection room, the entertainment center of the compound. Despite Richard’s eagerness to leave, they overstayed their welcome by several days. In a 1998 interview Jean Porter explained, “Elizabeth learned to drink Jack Daniels from Sinatra.” On the return flight to L.A. aboard Sinatra’s jet, Elizabeth suggested they should buy one just like it, at a cost of $3,250,000. “We’d be flat,” Richard moaned, reminding her that they were “out in the cold and fallen stars.”

In Los Angeles, Richard stopped drinking after Dr. Kennamer told him he’d be dead in a year if he didn’t. Later, jabbing a finger at Elizabeth during a luncheon with Norma Heyman, Richard said, “There’s someone who could never give up drink.” Elizabeth said she hated his guts. “Ah,” said Norma, “but you do love him, don’t you?” Elizabeth considered her reply carefully, for she was at a turning point in the relationship. “No,” she said, “and I wish to Christ he’d get out of my life. It’s been growing on me for a long time.” To drive home her point, she looked at Richard and added, “Piss out of my sight.” Her face, he recalled, was “ugly with loathing.” She had said as much before, but never when sober and never in front of guests. He realized they were at the end of their love, if not their marriage.
²³

Observing a fragile armistice, they attended the Oscar ceremony on April 7, 1970, at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion at the L.A. County Music Center. Richard and Gin Bujold were nominated for
Anne
—and both lost. As John Wayne accepted for
True Grit
, Richard was left to contemplate the dubious distinction of being the most-nominated actor who’d never won an Oscar. Backstage as one of the evening’s presenters, Elizabeth barely managed to conceal her rage over Richard’s defeat. At the climax of the evening, the presentation of the Oscar for the best picture of the year, she flowed on stage in a gown of cascading ruffles, a regal, towering coif, and the Krupp on her sun-tanned bosom. After reading off the nominees, including Richard’s
Anne
, she ripped open the envelope and announced Jerome Hell-man’s
Midnight Cowboy
as the winner. At the post-awards party, the Burtons were seated at the most prestigious table along with George Cukor; Gregory and Veronique Peck; and the Chandlers, owners of the
L.A. Times
. Photographers flocked to Elizabeth, ignoring Barbra Streisand and the night’s Oscar winners, “to my delight,” Richard recalled. Elizabeth “completely eclipsed” Streisand, the current queen of Hollywood, and so many people stopped at the table to tell Richard that he was “robbed” that he and Elizabeth were left to wonder who’d voted for John Wayne.

Three days later, Richard hosted a party at the Beverly Hills Hotel for the losers, including Jane Fonda, who was escorted by Donald Sutherland and wheedled $6,000 out of Richard for the Black Panthers, the darlings of the radical-chic set. Elizabeth disapproved of the Panthers, but she made a sizable contribution to Jane’s Native American cause. After the party, the Burtons returned to their bungalow on the grounds of the hotel, where a drunken Elizabeth got into a screaming fight with her mother, Sara. Accusations flew back and forth all night, and the ruckus could be heard through the walls.
²⁴
Finally Richard interceded, effecting a reconciliation. “What a pair,” he mused. Elizabeth then went into the bathroom and hemorrhaged. Dr. Kennamer instructed Richard on the phone to wrap ice in a towel and hold it, as Richard put it, to “her arse.” When Kennamer arrived he applied bandages. On Monday, May 18, she entered Cedars-Sinai for a hemorrhoid operation performed by Dr. Swerdlow. “She had thus far had twenty-seven operations,” Richard noted, describing her condition as “piles.” Her doctors were attempting to wean her off heavy-duty medication, using tranquilizers instead of painkillers, and Dr. Kennamer assured Richard that he would limit the amount of “hard narcotics” prescribed for her post-op “since she is so susceptible to drugs.” Dr. Swerdlow said “everything is perfect,” and Richard went off to have breakfast.
²⁵

At 7:30 a.m. on May 21, she rang Richard at home. He complained that he was trying to enjoy a cigarette and a piece of medium-rare filet mignon salvaged from the refrigerator. In excruciating pain, she explained that Kennamer had been giving her 2.5 ccs of Demerol but now refused to, and was giving her instead, orally, “Emp & Chodine #3” and “Pergadon” pills. She insisted on being taken home, pointing out, quite logically, that pills, unlike IVs, do not require hospitalization. Her doctors objected. They wanted to observe her in the hospital as she detoxed. She would never forgive Kennamer, Richard feared, if she discovered he hadn’t been giving her Demerol, but merely tranquilizers, for the past thirty-six hours.
²⁶
When she left Cedars-Sinai, she sneaked out in a wheelchair to avoid photographers. If she ever intended to work again, her condition had to be hidden from the film industry, the press, and insurance underwriters. At home Richard looked at her bottom and “wondered . . . why any man would specialize in that particular part of the anatomy. So much more romantic to specialize in brain surgery.”
²⁷

By May 29, she was almost back to normal, and Richard had succeeded in staying sober for two weeks. On June 3, in Palm Springs, with the desert heat reaching 120 degrees, Elizabeth started hemorrhaging “great gouts of blood which were frightening to behold,” Richard related. “I cleaned it up . . . The bathroom floor was awash with it . . . The blood was richly dark red and had the consistency and appearance of half-set jelly.” She had eight anal “emissions” before Richard managed to get her back to the hospital. The doctor sedated her, but she remained fidgety and nervous. Richard urged the doctors to keep her away from hard narcotics, unable to face seeing her through another detox, which was “more than human flesh and blood can stand.” Both Swerdlow and Kennamer thought her condition “minor” and suspected she was just angling “to swing for some hard shots again.” In the end, she required another surgery to stop the bleeding. One of her stitches had come undone, and it took thirty minutes for the doctors to restitch her. She emerged from surgery weakened and depressed, a semi-invalid who required months of rest to build up her blood count. Despite these tribulations, Richard was able to report on June 8 that he’d been “a teetotaler for three months.”
²⁸

Back in Puerto Vallarta, every trip Elizabeth took to the bathroom was a “cliffhanger.” For Richard, June 8 was not only an important ninety-day sobriety anniversary, but “one of the worst days I remember.” Elizabeth complained of unendurable pain and cried from morning until afternoon, but Richard resisted giving her hard drugs, dreading a return to addiction. Her suffering made her, he wrote, “as helpless as a leaf in a whirlwind, a cork in a tempest.” He finally called a doctor who gave her an intravenous shot. “She became dopy but easier,” Richard wrote. On the morning of June 9, she was comfortable, but they were trapped again in her cycle of pain-painkillers-addiction. Sara came to visit, but Elizabeth despised the way her mother treated her like an infant, cooing “my baby, angel girl.”

When Richard left for location shooting on
Rommel
in San Felipe, Elizabeth “mooned about” for a few nights, according to Richard, and then took the children and joined him in the desert. “Her sexual appetite,” he wrote, “is as eager as ever and so is mine though I don’t think either of us attaches the urgent importance to it that we used to.”

After a painful trip to the dentist, she went back on drugs with a vengeance. As Richard observed 140 days of sobriety that July, he ruefully observed, “Jesus, it’s hard work when other people have had a few drinks and you haven’t, even when that people is someone you deeply love.” They had once fought over his drinking; now they fought over hers. Inevitably, he slipped.

It happened in early August 1970 as the Burtons traveled to New York by train. Elizabeth had a few drinks at dinner and told Richard he was not interesting unless he drank. To please her, he ordered a Jack Daniels and soda, downed it, and then killed two glasses of Napa Valley red wine. As he drank, he was abandoning not only sobriety but the new life he had carefully structured, one that had restored his health, good looks, strength, stamina, and the lucidity to write. He had also been able to cope with Elizabeth’s illnesses, but in the future he would be incapable of nursing her. Two days after his slip, he drank an entire bottle of Burgundy with their liver and bacon meal. By the end of August, he was “stupefied with drink all day long.” When Brando came from his home in Tahiti and joined them on a Mediterranean cruise aboard the
Kalizma
, Richard and Brando got into a violent shoving match.
²⁹

Under the circumstances Elizabeth was so eager to return to work that she agreed to play a lesbian in her new film
X, Y and Zee
, a story of Swinging London’s Bohemian upper crust, filmed at Shepperton Studios in October 1970, and costarring Michael Caine as her husband. The director was Brian Hutton. In our 1998 interview, I asked him if he had to do anything to get Elizabeth to do the lesbian scene with Susannah York. He replied, “No! They were on the bed and they kissed. That was the whole basis of the story. Two people who play this game of running around, and suddenly they get serious. Susannah York is never interested in Michael Caine, not really. I couldn’t get Susannah to play the lesbian thing. I told her, ‘Susannah, it’s not a lesbian thing, it’s a love scene.’ I had to run the beginning of
Jane Eyre
for her to understand. Elizabeth played the little girl in the rain, going around with the iron. I said, ‘She’s Elizabeth Taylor, and you’re Peggy Ann Garner [a leading child star of the 1940s who appeared with Elizabeth in the film and later won an Oscar for
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
]. You were in love with her when you were little—and suddenly you see her grown up. And you feel your attraction to her, but you’ve loved her all your life, and you thought she’d died, but now you can resume your relationship; it’s not a lesbian relationship. For Elizabeth Taylor it’s a lesbian relationship—she’s the aggressive one because when she figures out that you’re goin’ to take her husband, in order to stop you she’s goin’ to fuck you.’ And she does. Michael Caine walks into the room and catches her. And that’s when he says, ‘Let’s go, darling,’ and she gets up and pounces out, and he just sits there, boom, that’s the end. Columbia didn’t have the guts and cut the sex out of the scene.”

The final scene—a freeze-frame—shows the husband discovering his wife and girlfriend in bed together, and the implication, according to Edna O’Brien, the Irish novelist who wrote the screenplay, was a ménage à trois: “The last we see are their three bodies—arms, heads, torsos, all meeting for a consummation.”
³⁰
O’Brien, who was as beautiful as Elizabeth in her way, later wrote that Elizabeth seemed “surprisingly nervous, very watchful over Richard as if every woman was a threat.”
³¹

Brian Hutton continued, “Poor Elliott Kastner, who produced
Zee
, used to be up there at nine in the morning making bacon and eggs and getting Elizabeth sandwiches and doing anything in the world to get her down on the goddamn set and in the process became her personal gofer. I was so far behind, but it didn’t matter because Roman Polanski was making
Macbeth
for
Playboy
down the street for Columbia, and he was twice as far behind as I was, spending three times the amount of money that I was, and at least twice as late, but he was terrific. Every morning I’d see him at Shepperton Studios and I’d say, ‘Roman, are you getting your stuff?’ ‘I’m getting it,’ he’d say, ‘but they’re always pressing me to speed it up. I do what I want to do. They can go fuck themselves.’