The Most Beautiful Woman in the World (36 page)

“They couldn’t bother with me because he was so far behind. Elizabeth wouldn’t get down to the set until ten or eleven o’clock, and she’d go to lunch at one o’clock, and she wouldn’t get back from lunch until three o’clock—unintentionally, of course. This was what she was: a fuckin’ major movie star and the most famous woman in the world. All her life, this is what she did. She was the nicest lady in the world, sweet, fun, a million laughs, I had a great time with her. But when I was two or three weeks shooting, I was already a week behind. Columbia was going hysterical about it. The studio’s British chief, Stanley Shapiro, was a nice guy; he came on the set and expected Elizabeth to be there by 9:30. I told him, ‘You watch now. That fuckin’ broad hasn’t gotten down here by 9:30 once since we started shootin’ this picture.’

“If you’d have said anything to Elizabeth like, ‘You’re holding up production,’ she would have broken down crying and said, ‘Why, I’m here every day!’ And she was. Stanley said to me, ‘Get her down on the set. Get her down here.’ I was a week behind schedule, and Stanley said, ‘Oh, you got to get her down here.’ I said, ‘Look, it’s eight o’clock in the morning. If you want her, you can get her. It’s not my job to get the actors onto the set. You do that, or get the producers to do it. When they get the actors on the set, that’s when I start to direct a movie. You don’t hire Elizabeth Taylor thinking that she’s going to be here standing by at 8:30 in the morning. If you don’t know what you’re getting after she’s been a star for thirty years, that’s your problem, not my problem. I knew she wasn’t going to be on time, and I don’t give a shit if she’s not on time.’

“Shapiro comes on the set. Now this is class: She told me, ‘They can stick it up their ass.’ Shapiro sat there for three hours waiting for her. She comes down a quarter till twelve. She’s Elizabeth Taylor. She comes down when she wants to come down. I’m not goin’ to go up and knock on her door and say, ‘Hey, Elizabeth, we’re waiting for you.’ She’d start to cry. You tell her she’s got to come down and she’ll never come down. Or she’ll come down a week from Friday. She’ll fall down the fuckin’ stairs or somethin’. She’s the most accident-prone person in the world. But she was just wonderful.

“She was perfect with her lines. She would come in in the morning. She’d take the script and put it on the mirror. She’d sit there and learn the lines. She would know her lines perfectly. The great advantage of working with her was that I would make these enormous setups. I’d set up a shot, and when she came on the set, she went through the blocking once and you tell her you go here and you go there, and I’d get six or seven pages on the first fuckin’ setup. Even if she did come down at eleven o’clock, it wasn’t so bad, the way we worked. I’d use the time to plan. She was a fuckin’ babe, a real trooper. If she’d have been an unknown, the fuckin’ critics would have raved about her in that role instead of knockin’ her.

“Michael Caine had just started to go out with Shakira, his [future] wife, and they were very romantically involved at the time. He was great with Elizabeth, and would go upstairs and be able to get her on the set: ‘Come on, moms,’ he’d say, ‘let’s go!’” In his 1992 memoir
What’s It All About
Caine recalled that Elizabeth always had a “huge jug” of bloody Marys on the set, and that Richard got drunk every night and slept off his hangovers on her dressing room sofa. Richard considered himself sober any time he didn’t have more than a fifth of vodka in him, but at this point he was going through two to three bottles a day. After interviewing him on the set of his film
Villain
, a thriller in which he played a psychopathic Cockney gang-leader, Bernard Weintraub wrote in the
New York Times
, “The drinker, the lover, the celebrity have flattened into a surprisingly weary figure.” The reporter found Richard to be “oddly vulnerable, even frail.”
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On October 6, 1970, at London’s Caxton Hall Registry, long-haired eighteen-year-old hippie Michael Wilding Jr. wed Beth Clutter, the nineteen-year-old daughter of a Portland, Oregon, oceanographer. As usual, all eyes were on Elizabeth, and a British daily headlined, “Here Comes the Mother of the Groom.” With one of her elephantine diamonds flashing on her finger, Elizabeth wore a white wool knitted pants suit, a cardigan maxi, and a pearl necklace. Richard stood at her side in a conservative business suit. The father of the groom, Wilding Sr., was suffering from heart disease and unable to attend. Mike Jr.’s hair was so long people were yelling, “Hey, girlie,” at him. Elizabeth had been so insulated in her jeweled cocoon the past ten years that she was ignorant of the “youthquake,” the generational upheaval of the sixties, and admitted to Charles Collingwood on CBS’s
60 Minutes
that she didn’t know what the word “hippie” meant. Her son certainly did. His bare toes peeped out of his sandals, and he wore a Tudor tunic of maroon velvet and bell bottom trousers, while his flower-child bride appeared in white butter muslin and an Afro hairdo. A sensitive and intelligent girl, Beth seemed to understand Michael’s unusual background and how it had affected his character. “Elizabeth was away so much,” she said. “He dropped out of school at fifteen and lived on what Elizabeth gave him.”
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And Elizabeth was still doling it out—she generously gave the newlyweds an all-expense-paid honeymoon at the Dorch, a Jaguar, and $100,000 in cash. Richard gave them a $70,000 house next to his home in Hampstead.

No amount of largesse could provide a solid foundation for Michael, who’d been deprived of a normal family life, and whose childhood acting ambitions had not been nurtured as they could have been a few years back when his parents had been among the most powerful figures in show business. “Michael is in danger of earning Elizabeth’s hatred,” Richard wrote. “He thinks of his mother simply as a beautiful woman who because of her looks alone is a highly-paid film star. He has no idea that she is a major talent and therefore resents her wealth.” Michael eventually found work in his mother’s entourage as an assistant to Gianni Bozzachi, her personal photographer, but he remained uncomfortable sharing the Burtons’ affluent, let-them-eat-cake existence. Shortly after their marriage, Beth confided to Elizabeth that she was pregnant, and that Michael “didn’t know what he wanted.” Beth knew. She wanted the baby, and Elizabeth stood behind her, promising to help her in every way, including financially. “She spoke to me like a mother,” Beth recalled. Though Elizabeth could no longer give birth, she hadn’t given up hope of having more children, nor had Richard, who said, “We’ve been thinking about adopting another child for some time now.”
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Though in poor health, Richard worked furiously to cover their skyrocketing expenses as the number of their dependents continued to grow. He completed five films between the autumn of 1970 and the end of 1971, all box-office bombs. Though he’d dreamed of a knighthood, the most the Queen offered him was the lesser CBE (Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire), and an affronted Elizabeth advised him to turn it down. Though disappointed they weren’t to be Sir Richard and Lady Burton, he viewed the CBE as preferable to the Beatles’ “inferior” MBE. He claimed, somewhat disingenuously, that his CBE “was obtained without any attempt on our part to get it,” though all their charitable donations and activities at Oxford had been undertaken with exactly that end in mind.
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On Richard’s forty-fifth birthday, Elizabeth and Cis James, his beloved sister, accompanied him to Buckingham Palace, where he received the only public honor of his career.

He blamed the Inland Revenue for his failure to appear higher on the Queen’s honors list, saying, “How can they give a knighthood to someone who doesn’t pay taxes?” But Noel Coward’s tax dodges had not prevented him from being knighted. Richard simply couldn’t come to terms with the fact that at the highest level of British society he would always be declassé, not for having sinned but for having done so indiscreetly. His intimacy with the disgraced Duke and Duchess of Windsor may also have annoyed Buckingham Palace. When the Burtons gave $100,000 to one of Princess Margaret’s charities, HRH said, “Good heavens, how very generous of you. I am absolutely staggered. We must simply spend some time together. Well, goodbye, I still can’t get over your extraordinary generosity.”
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Still smarting over the palace’s having withheld a knighthood, Richard called the Princess “fatuous.”

Studio interest in the Burtons remained so nil that they worked for expenses and fifteen percent of the gross in Peter Ustinov’s
Hammersmith Is Out
, a comic version of
Faust
, filmed in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Elizabeth played Jimmie Jean Jackson, a waitress in a blond wig, and Richard portrayed an escapee from an insane asylum. Robert Redford was approached to costar as the nose-picking antihero Billy Breedlove but declined, and the role went to Beau Bridges, a star of lower wattage. In her role, Elizabeth was erratic, in and out of character, and Richard tried to recapture his old fire, but there was no chemistry between them. They reminded some viewers of two worn-out prizefighters hanging on to each other in a last-round clinch. At one point during the filming, Richard made a wrong move on camera and Elizabeth yelled, “For God’s sake, Richard, not that way. You’re throwing shadows on Beau and me.”
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He endured her rudeness, according to an onlooker, like a “tranquilized lion.”
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She became a grandmother at thirty-nine when Beth Wilding gave birth to a daughter, Laele, in mid–1971. Arriving in London decked out in white lace hot pants, a plunging lace top, gold hoop earrings, and white knee boots, Elizabeth told reporters, “This is the baby Richard and I could never have,” betraying somewhat possessive designs on the infant. She reportedly offered to help Michael Jr. establish himself in whatever profession he chose, but she refused to support the street people who were crashing in his townhouse, where sleeping bags were spread out on the floors. On July 28, Richard wrote, “I think Elizabeth and certainly I would abandon Mike to his own idiocy for a while—were it not for the baby and Beth.”

Mike started a band and acquired $40,000 worth of electronic equipment, including guitars, drums, and speakers. Although the “British Invasion” dominated the top forty for a decade, his band never caught on.

That summer of 1971, Elizabeth had no film commitments and stayed at Chalet Ariel as Richard prepared to play Marshal Tito in
The Battle of Sutjeska
. Maria, Liza, Michael, Christopher, and Kate were in and out of their lives, and Richard objected that fourteen-year-old Liza, who was attending Heathfield, a British boarding school, took up too much of his time. Mike Todd’s daughter had blossomed into a beautiful girl, much pursued by boys, and Elizabeth was as watchful “as a mother superior to a novice.”
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Liza’s concerns, such as masturbation, which she’d seen mentioned in a “Dear Abby” column, were the kind normally taken to a mother, but she came to Richard. He assured her that masturbation was a normal part of growing up, but wisely cautioned that overindulgence could “spoil” her for sexual intercourse. When Liza had her first period, she went to neither parent, appealing instead to Elizabeth’s blond, Swiss secretary-majordomo Raymond Vignale, who revealed that Elizabeth was not “closely involved” in her children’s lives but loved them nonetheless.
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“Raymond was a great character and wit, who stage-managed the Burtons’ nomad hotel existence, took charge of the packing of their thirty trunks, carried the jewels, and hid the pills,” remembered Dominick Dunne in 1999. “He could speak five or six languages and camp in all of them.”
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Elizabeth accompanied Richard to Yugoslavia when he portrayed Marshal Tito as a wartime guerrilla in
Sutjeska
. Years later, Hollywood mogul David Geffen told her he was going to Yugoslavia and asked her to recommend a good hotel. “I don’t know,” she said. “Whenever I was in Yugoslavia, I stayed with Tito.” Princess Margaret told the Burtons that Tito’s palace “makes Buck House look pretty middle-class,” and Richard later confirmed that Tito and his wife lived in “remarkable luxury unmatched by anything else I’ve seen.” Tito, whose communist forces drove the Nazis from Yugoslavia in 1944, was “surprisingly small and delicate,” Richard noted. Portraying him in the official state film paid for by the Yugoslav government was “tedious” work, but Elizabeth thrived on the pomp and circumstance of palace life. Protocol decreed that they remain close to the president and his wife almost constantly—Tito with Elizabeth, Richard with Madame Broz. The liquor never stopped flowing in Dubrovnik. Elizabeth consumed both Smirnoff and Jack Daniels. Richard managed to put together two months of sobriety but the effort caused him to smoke one hundred cigarettes a day, and watching Tito gulp glass after glass of whiskey was demoralizing.

In October 1971 the Burtons were back in Paris, where Richard played the title role in Joseph Losey’s
Trotsky
, costarring with Alain Delon and Romy Schneider. Neither of the Burtons was drinking, and as a result the children’s behavior was exemplary. “Michael was himself again,” Richard wrote, “loving with the baby, fun to talk to
and to listen to
. Elizabeth was happy as only a grandmother can be.” Baby Laele was delightful, kicking her legs and blowing spit bubbles and almost never crying. Elizabeth slopped around in Levi’s. Thanks to their sobriety the Burtons were like newlyweds again, forgiving old grudges and staying up half the night talking about places they’d been to and where they’d go next. Sometimes they performed their “bed exercises” together, running in place, and Richard loved to watch her holding on to her breasts, “one hand on each, or firm as they are, really like a thirty year old’s more than a nearly forty year old’s, they are pretty big and the resultant wiggle-waggle would be pretty odd as well as bad for her. It’s a very fetching sight.” He found it profoundly satisfying to contemplate that ten million people would immediately rush into their bedroom if given the same access to her breasts that he enjoyed.
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