The Most Beautiful Woman in the World (38 page)

The 1970s would become the decade of spectacular theme parties, and one of the first was the fortieth birthday celebration Richard threw for Elizabeth in Budapest, Hungary, on February 27, 1972. Richard’s film
Bluebeard
, in which he hammed it up a la Vincent Price as Baron Kurt von Sepper, was financed by Hungarian and Italian money, and the Communist Party was fully cooperating with the production. The Burtons were now such fixtures in the jet set—rechristened “the beautiful people” by
New York Times
society reporter Marylin Bender in her 1967 best-seller—that Princess Grace de Monaco did not hesitate to RSVP with an enthusiastic yes when invited to Elizabeth’s party, though it was being held behind the Iron Curtain, in a Soviet satellite nation. It seemed to Her Serene Highness, one of Elizabeth’s oldest friends, the perfect way to celebrate the new decade. But the seventies, for Elizabeth, would be anything but serene, beginning with the embarrassingly meretricious Budapest bash.

Chapter 10
One More Go at Love
THE DIVORCE AND REMARRIAGE OF STURM UND DRANG

In the 1970s Hungary was a brave, freedom-loving, and defiant nation trying to survive under the yoke of communist tyranny—hardly the ideal setting for one of the most expensive and showy revels of modern times. Elizabeth’s birthday party guests were flown to Budapest first-class and put up at the Duna-Intercontinental Hotel, all courtesy of the Burtons. Duna is the Hungarian word for Danube, the 1,770-mile river that flows beneath the penthouse suite the Burtons occupied in the winter of 1972. Richard’s
Bluebeard
costars were four of the most attractive women in the world—Raquel Welch, Nathalie Delon, Virna Lisi, and Joey Heatherton—and none of them was among the two hundred guests Elizabeth invited for the weekend of February 26–27.

When guests arrived, they discovered huge bouquets of flowers in their rooms at the Duna, as well as champagne on ice, wet bars stocked with hard liquor, and carte-blanche room service. There were several parties during the weekend, graded to the status of the guests, who included British Ambassador and Mrs. Derek Dodson; Ringo Starr and his wife; Michael Caine and Shakira Baaksh; Michael Wilding Sr. and his wife Margaret Leighton; David Niven; Susannah York; poet Stephen Spender; Princess Grace (with her lady-in-waiting Madame Aurelli); Mrs. Yul (Doris) Brynner; model Bettina; comedian Frankie Howerd, who’d given Richard a guest shot on his show early in his career; Nevill Coghill; Simon and Sheran Hornby; Kurt Frings; publicist John Springer; Emlyn Williams and his sons Brook and Alan; Welsh actor Victor Spinetti; Alexandre; Gianni Bozzachi; Joseph and Patricia Losey; Elizabeth’s mother and brother; a dozen members of Richard’s family, including Cis James and Graham Jenkins; Christopher Wilding (now at the University of Hawaii); and Liza Todd, released from Heathfield, her English boarding school, for the occasion. According to Hollywood agent Dorris Halsey, her friend George Cukor attended, and was feted by Hungarian film students, who called him “
Gyuri bacsi
[Uncle George].” Conspicuous by his absence was Michael Wilding Jr., who refused to attend, finding the Burtons’ gaudy lifestyle increasingly repellent.
¹

During a cocktail party in the Burtons’ suite, Richard introduced Maria to all her Welsh aunts and uncles. The Jenkins family adored Maria because she closely resembled Kate Burton, and some of them said Maria could easily have been Sybil’s daughter with her round face and cherubic cheeks. Richard’s brother Verdun, who’d never been in an airplane before his flight from Wales to Budapest, sat next to Princess Grace at a small family dinner. Uncomfortable in a new shirt with a collar that was too small for his muscular neck, Verdun told the Princess, “I can’t understand it. I know I asked for the right size.” The sensible Grace suggested, “You must change. You can’t sit there all evening looking as if you’re about to have a seizure.” Verdun left the table and when he returned in ten minutes, Grace noticed he was wearing the same shirt. “There was nothing wrong with the size,” Verdun explained. “It was just that I’d forgotten to take out the cardboard stiffeners.” Richard noted that both Elizabeth and Grace “behaved superbly” when introduced to his sprawling working-class clan, including brother Tom, who helped himself to the Beluga caviar and made a heaping deli-type sandwich.
²

The Jenkinses gave Elizabeth an engraved plate made of Welsh steel and a box of laver (seaweed) bread, a Welsh specialty. Caine and Starr gave her paintings. In a spirit of high camp, Spinetti gave her a tin of diamond polish, perhaps anticipating Richard’s gift: the legendary “Taj Mahal” diamond, an engraved heart-shaped gem in a red-stone and jade setting, suspended from a chain of gold and cabochon rubies, and dating back to 1627. Emperor Shah Jahan gave the diamond to his wife, Mumtaz-I-Mahal, and later built the Taj Mahal in her memory.

At her birthday supper, Elizabeth wore her new diamond on her bosom and the Krupp diamond on her finger. On either side of her were seated Michael Caine and the American ambassador, one of eight envoys in attendance, and sitting opposite her were the Ringo Starrs. Richard was surrounded by Princess Grace, Cis, the British ambassador, and Spender. A Hungarian pop group played as chicken Kiev and fruit salad were served, followed by iced chocolate cake with forty candles. “I would have liked to have brought the Taj Mahal for Elizabeth,” Richard announced, “but it would have cost too much to transport it.”

As the lavish weekend of partying got under way, the press was increasingly critical of the Burtons’ boastful hedonism. Elizabeth got “fractious at the slightest hint of criticism,” according to Richard, who found it necessary to round up all the reporters and mollify them at a press conference, “which went alright,” he wrote. Elizabeth later grumbled, “We don’t live in the jet set at all. We go to two or three parties a year. I haven’t lived in a vacuum.”
³
But reporters had been chronicling her life in the fast lane for too many years to be fooled.

The main event on Sunday evening was held in the Duna’s rooftop nightclub, decorated for the occasion with white lilacs, red tulips, and thirty-five hundred helium-filled gold balloons from Paris. Guests danced to a thirty-piece orchestra, and the uninhibited exuberance of Richard’s family made everyone relax and have a good time. At one point, Princess Grace unwound her braids, let down her hair, and broke into a wild Hungarian dance. Later she joined a conga line, sweeping merrily past the booth where Richard sat talking with Spender, Frankie Howerd, and Susannah York. Spinetti described it all as “a riot of fun and nonsense.” Raquel Welch managed to crash the party, and one of Richard’s brothers, noticing that Raquel had her arm in a plaster cast, inquired whether he could help her get into her bra. The party succeeded largely because Richard remained sober and embarrassed no one, sipping soda water throughout the weekend.

The only mistake had been inviting Emlyn Williams’s older son Alan, author of a book on the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Though Emlyn was Richard’s discoverer and esteemed mentor, and though Emlyn’s younger son Brook (“Brookie”) was Richard’s best friend and sometime employee, Alan called Elizabeth “a beautiful doughnut covered in diamonds and paint.” Confronting her at the wine-cellar party in the Duna, he said, “Don’t you know what happened here in 1956? What does the Hungarian Revolution mean to you?”
⁴
A nonplused Elizabeth burst into sobs.
⁵
With admirable presence of mind, Richard promised to match the projected cost of the party, $45,000, with a donation to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). Bob Wilson and Gaston the chauffeur then tossed Alan out of the party.

Later, Emlyn strolled with his son beside the Danube, and they were observed conversing in a dark mood. Eventually Emlyn wrote the Burtons a thoughtful letter and Richard forgave them. The following July 8, Richard presented $45,000 to Peter Ustinov, ambassador-at-large for UNICEF, later telling reporters, “Elizabeth and I do this sort of thing to square our own consciences.” Though extraordinarily generous, the UNICEF contribution fell short of the cost of Elizabeth’s party by $955,000.
⁶

Such extravagance disgusted Michael Wilding Jr., who told reporters, “I really don’t want any part of my mother’s life. It seems just as fantastic to me as it must appear to everyone else. I just don’t dig all those diamonds and things. I suppose I’ve always rebelled against it.” London’s
Daily Mirror
headlined, “Liz’s Dropout Son: Michael Wilding Jr. Lives the Hippie Life to Get Away from All Those Diamonds.” Despite Elizabeth’s protests, Michael moved his family into a commune in Pnterwyd, a remote village in Wales, and tried to grow natural foods. Richard, who’d fought his way out of Welsh poverty, said, “I made it up and the boy’s trying to make it down, and I try not to interfere, but I still get goddamned mad. When I think what it took to climb
out
!” Michael Jr. told reporters, “Mama has only Richard Burton on her mind, and he likes to live like a Roman emperor.”
⁷

The Burtons celebrated their eighth wedding anniversary on March 15, 1972, which Richard called “a monumental achievement.” A monumental disaster was more like it, for the dinner party that Ambassador Dodson and his wife gave them turned into a scene out of
Virginia Woolf
, thanks to Richard and his drinking. Edward and Jean Dmytryk were there, along with dignitaries from several embassies, including the U.S. attaché and his wife, and Joey Heatherton. Recalled Eddie Dmytryk in 1998: “Elizabeth went through a lot; Burton was on the wagon when I was directing him, but then his brother [Ifor] died. There was something wrong with his brother mentally. He had an accident at their place in Switzerland. They were just waiting for him to die, and finally he died. I gave Richard a few days off to go to the funeral. When he returned, he was on the liquor. He’d use any excuse to get off the wagon. Elizabeth was having dinner with the American ambassador in Hungary, and other high diplomatic officers. Richard made a crack about a Belgian woman who was there with her diplomatic husband. Elizabeth said, ‘RiCHARD!’ He got up, went out, got his chauffeur, and got into his car and left. One word from her was all it took.” Earlier in the evening, Richard had enchanted their hosts’ young daughter by reciting poetry. “He knew all of Dylan Thomas by heart and would recite it to the kids, the family,” Dmytryk said. “He was a brilliant man in many ways, but when he got drunk, he was as nasty as Spencer Tracy. In
Bluebeard
, Richard had to be carried to work in the morning; his guard and his manager would each be under one shoulder.”

In our 1998 interview, I asked Dmytryk what brought about the end of the Burtons’ marriage, and he said, “He was fooling around with women all the time, and she always knew it.” Dmytryk was doing some night shooting in Budapest, and Richard was to film a scene with Nathalie Delon. It was a simple sequence—Dmytryk told them to walk down the street and turn a corner. When the cameras started rolling, Richard and Nathalie walked down the street, turned the corner, and were not seen or heard from for the next twenty-four hours. Nathalie had previously had an affair with Eddie Fisher, her husband Alain Delon having “set up the situation,” according to Fisher, because Alain always had to have “at least six woman [
sic
],” and he needed someone to amuse Nathalie during his extramarital dalliances. Fisher became infatuated with Nathalie after she turned to him following coitus one night and said she felt “
bien baise
[well-kissed].” After Richard’s tryst with Nathalie, he commented, “Once I started being attracted to other women, I knew—the game’s up.”
⁸

Elizabeth took revenge by flying to Rome for “a quiet dinner” with Aristotle Onassis, whose marriage to Jacqueline Kennedy cooled off after Ari discovered a note she’d written to Roswell Gilpatric aboard the
Christina
, beginning “Dearest Roz.” Ari and Jackie had feuded in January at Heathrow Airport, and he’d later said, “My God, what a fool I have made of myself. I’m afraid my wife is a calculating woman, coldhearted and shallow.” Because he was suffering from myasthenia gravis, a neuromuscular disease, his appearance was increasingly gnomelike. The only way he could keep his eyes open was by hitching his eyelids up with Scotch tape, fastening them to his eyebrows. In Rome, Ari took Elizabeth to Hostaria Dell’Orso, and they commiserated with each other over a quiet dinner. Outside the restaurant, two dozen paparazzi got into a brawl with the restaurant’s waiters. When the photographers finally burst in, Onassis threw his champagne at them and Elizabeth crawled under the table, afraid of Richard finding out. Eventually the
carabinieri
arrived and restored order. Elizabeth and Ari didn’t leave until dawn. In at least one respect, Ari would have been perfect for her, since she expected a man to keep her in furs, diamonds, yachts, and airplanes. “Richard pays all the bills,” Elizabeth once boasted. “That’s only happened in my life once before . . . Nowadays the money I earn goes mainly into trusts for the children.” According to Richard, she spent an average of $1,000 an hour.
⁹
He was working himself to death in bad movies to keep them in booze, drugs, diamonds, jets, and yachts.

From Rome, she rang the Duna in Budapest and told Richard to “get that woman out of my bed.” When he asked Dmytryk how she’d known, the director replied, “Don’t you realize that you are surrounded by her agents?” Elizabeth returned to Budapest, and Richard scolded her for running to Onassis. She broke a plate over his head and, later, never took her eyes off him when he was filming with his leading ladies. Joey Heatherton complained that Elizabeth was so close to the camera during a love scene that she found herself looking into Elizabeth’s eyes instead of Richard’s. Though unnerved, Joey allowed that Elizabeth “was very nice and smiled at me.”
¹⁰