The Most Beautiful Woman in the World (39 page)

In June 1972, the Burtons went to London, where Elizabeth was again directed by Brian Hutton.
Night Watch
was her first genre movie—a mystery-thriller—representing the same kind of setback for an actress of her stature that
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
represented in the once-distinguished career of Bette Davis. In a 1998 interview in Beverly Hills, Brian Hutton said, “When I got Elizabeth and Larry Harvey, I thought, ‘What am I directin’? She’s gonna do what she does, and he’s gonna do what he does. And the dialogue’s all written. A gorilla could be directin’ this movie.’ All I had to yell out was ‘Cut! Print!’ We did it in London in ten weeks. Elizabeth would go off to lunch with Richard and they’d start talkin’ to people and eatin’ and drinkin’ and they wouldn’t come back until 3:30. It was okay by me, because she was terrific. But Marty Poll [one of the three producers of
Night Watch
] hired a cordon bleu chef to make sure he’d get Elizabeth back from lunch on time, and he took over a restaurant-size room at Shepperton Studios. Shepperton only has about three sound stages and it’s about twenty minutes away from the West End, as opposed to being out at Twickenham [site of British film studios], way out in the middle of nowhere. We took a big room, and every day the chef would ask Elizabeth, ‘What would you like for lunch?’ He would take the order for lunch at one o’clock, and after an hour, at two, I’d say, ‘Okay, everybody, let’s go back to work!’ So she had to get up and go back to work because there was nobody around to play with. It was a very smart move.”

During the production, Laurence Harvey underwent emergency cancer surgery, and twenty feet of his intestines were removed. Later, Elizabeth asked him to show her his surgical scar, but he showed her far more than that. “My scar is great and has a long nose at the end of it,” he said. “Oh, Larry,” Elizabeth said, “why don’t you wear shorts?” When the movie was released, the
New York Times
liked it, Howard Thompson writing, “Miss Taylor churns up a fine, understandable lather of nerves.”
¹¹

In the Cambrian mountains of Wales, Elizabeth’s daughter-in-law Beth was churning up something else—organic butter, most likely. After cooking and cleaning for Michael Jr. and his six communards, as well as looking after baby Laele, she took the infant and fled to the Establishment luxury of Elizabeth’s suite at the Dorch. Richard felt “auto-blackmailed,” he wrote, into caring for Michael’s wife and baby, but Elizabeth became involved in a tug-of-war for the child with Beth, who recalled, “Laele was like a new toy, a new amusement to her.” Poor as Beth was, she did not want Laele to be brought up by Elizabeth, later explaining, “It wouldn’t be good for her to have all the material things she wanted and so little real family life.” Once again in flight, Beth moved out of the Dorch, divorced the skeletal, glassy-eyed Michael, and returned to her mother in Oregon, taking Laele. Elizabeth cursed Beth, shouting, “Nobody tells me whether I can see my own grandchild. I’ll never help you again.”
¹²

Elizabeth was disconsolate, but fortunately her daughter Liza was there to comfort her. “Liza was an angel to Elizabeth and watched her as if the positions were reversed, [as if] Liza were the mother and Elizabeth the child,” Richard wrote. “I love that child. She can be a bit of a bastard at times, but she is fundamentally an angel and great in a crisis.” Michael Jr. soon had a new girlfriend, Johanna Lykke-Dahn. He also acquired a police record after a bust for growing marijuana. Christopher Wilding, whose eyes were as arresting as Elizabeth’s, would also have to struggle, like many Hollywood offspring, to find a role for himself in life.
¹³

In September 1972, the Burtons tried to bring off one more project together, a television movie,
Divorce His/Divorce Hers
, about the breakup of a marriage. After it was aired on ABC-TV in 1973,
Variety
sounded the death knell for the Burtons’ career together, writing that the film “holds all the joy of standing by at an autopsy.” Elizabeth was much better off working on her own, as her next project,
Ash Wednesday
, demonstrated, and she again received $1 million, plus expenses and a percentage. Produced by Dominick Dunne for Paramount, the film was to be shot in Italy, as was Richard’s next project, Carlo Ponti’s WWII story,
Massacre in Rome
, costarring Marcello Mastroianni. The Burtons took over ten connecting rooms in Rome’s Grand Hotel, where they hosted a New Year’s Eve party shortly before Elizabeth left for filming in Cortina d’Ampezzo in 1973. When Dunne and director Larry Peerce met the Burtons in their suite for champagne and caviar before joining the other guests downstairs, they found Richard in the sitting room, dressed in a green velvet dinner jacket and using a Kleenex to wipe up after their unhousebroken Shih Tzu. Elizabeth made a blinding entrance in most of her jewels, poured herself a Jack Daniels, and said that she “drank mostly when Richard drank.” It was a typical alcoholic copout indicating the depth of her denial. Everyone around her knew that she drank because she wanted to.

As the Burtons entertained Dunne and Peerce before their party, Raymond Vignale, the butler, interrupted them. Pointing to the Cartier timepiece on his wrist, he reminded Elizabeth that twenty guests were waiting in the lobby, including hairdressers Alexandre and Gianni Novelli and other members of the entourage. Leaving the suite, they made a regal entrance, descending the Grand’s marble staircase to the lobby, and joining their assembled employees to see out 1972 together. For Christmas that year, Elizabeth had given Vignale a white mink coat with jeweled buttons, a knockoff of her double-breasted, knee-length white mink. Fortyish, Vignale was a blond, slender, Leslie Howard type, and one of his more unusual duties as the Burtons’ butler was to hold Elizabeth in his arms and rock her to sleep after she’d spiked her Jack Daniels with Seconals. To jump-start the Burtons’ passion for each other, sometimes “Ray-baby,” as Elizabeth called him, would bring them pornographic magazines. When Richard vomited after drinking too much, it was Vignale who cleaned up the mess.
¹⁴
Elizabeth rewarded Vignale by giving him the small role of Gregory de Rive in
Ash Wednesday
.

Costarring Henry Fonda and the dashing young Austrian actor Helmut Berger, the film was a stylish but otherwise trivial soap opera about a woman undergoing plastic surgery. The posh ski resort location shoot turned into a catastrophe when Paramount CEO Robert Evans exploded over Elizabeth’s lateness and ordered Dunne, as her producer, to “read her the riot act.” Dunne, who later admitted he was “drinking too much and snorting too much,” was afraid Elizabeth would make mincemeat of him if he tried to shape her up. Relinquishing control of the film, he was reduced to being an audience for the Burtons’ fights in their Miramonti Hotel suite. During a lunch break at a chalet nestled in the Dolomites, Richard started screaming, accusing Elizabeth in front of everyone of sleeping with Helmut Berger. His imagination was working overtime. According to Dunne, Italian director Luchino Visconti had been “more than [Helmut’s] mentor for years and had assured Helmut that he would be his heir.”
¹⁵

One night, Elizabeth and Dunne were drinking in the Miramonti bar when she predicted, “This is the last movie you’re ever going to produce, Dominick.” Shortly thereafter, Vignale overheard
Ash Wednesday
’s screenwriter, Jean Claude Tramont, slamming Elizabeth’s taste in clothes. The ever-loyal Vignale reported it to Elizabeth, and Tramont was sent back to Los Angeles. He was the future husband of a powerful Hollywood agent named Sue Mengers, who was the best friend of Robert Evans. In the 1950s, Dunne had known Tramont in his pre-Mengers days as Jack Schwartz, a uniformed pageboy at NBC. While drunk at a party in Cortina, Dunne made insulting remarks about Mengers and Tramont that were repeated in the
Hollywood Reporter
. After that, Dunne was blackballed and never worked in the industry again, becoming, instead, a best-selling novelist. Recalling Elizabeth’s prediction, he said in 1999, “It was meant as a joke, but I knew that what she said was going to prove to be true.”
¹⁶
His drinking, drugging, and inability to handle stars like Elizabeth probably accounted for his downfall as a producer far more than the Tramont-Mengers-Evans episode.

In
Ash Wednesday
, thirty-eight-year-old director Larry Peerce, whose previous credits included
Goodbye Columbus
and
A Separate Peace
, and whose father was opera singer Jan Peerce, guided Elizabeth through a subdued and elegant performance in which she at last dropped the vulgarity of Albee’s Martha and assumed the enigmatic mask and manner of a
Vogue
model. On release in 1973, the film reminded critics and public alike that Elizabeth could still act, and that her beauty was seemingly imperishable. Rex Reed cheered her in the
New York Daily News
, writing, “It’s the first time she hasn’t been a bad parody of Bette Davis in
Beyond the Forest
.”
¹⁷

By mid–1973, Burton watchers were predicting the imminent end of the marriage. Zeffirelli noticed that Richard was fed up with Elizabeth’s possessiveness,
¹⁸
and producer Ed Ditterline, who saw them in a restaurant, recalled, “Liz berated Richard Burton in front of everyone, cursing him, humiliating him as a ‘worthless lazy son of a bitch.’” After virtually working himself to death to support their lavish lifestyle, Richard had reached the end of his willingness to squander his money on her. In a March 28, 1973, letter to Maria, he complained that Elizabeth was using her “feminine wiles” to extract a new present from him. He’d made the mistake of mentioning a silver-and-lavender art nouveau vase he wanted, and Elizabeth had said, “If ever you would like to buy me a present, I wouldn’t be averse to be given that.”

Finally, Richard decided to bail, telling reporters, “Our natures do not inspire domestic tranquility.” Later he explained, “The problem wasn’t drink, it was career.” He blamed her for everything—his inability to write books, teach, and return to the theater—but it was not Elizabeth, or Hollywood, as he claimed, but alcohol that robbed him of the clarity and strength to pursue his dreams as a writer. A friend observed, “He felt he would die without Elizabeth . . . and then he realized that it was perhaps better to die than to submit to the relationship again. It was too humiliating for him. It was killing him.”
¹⁹
In fact, Richard was killing himself—leaving Elizabeth didn’t remove the conflicts and character flaws that continued to drive him to drink.

She flew to California in late June, leaving Maria with Richard in their hotel suite in Rome. In L.A., she looked in on her ailing mother and sought solace from such old friends as Roddy, Rex Kennamer, Peter Lawford, and Laurence Harvey. “Women have always surrendered to Richard Burton,” she said. “Not me. He has no rights over me.” She started going out with Peter Lawford and his handsome young son Christopher, a nephew of the late President Kennedy, who was trying to break into the movie business. When Richard realized that Elizabeth was enjoying herself in Hollywood, he called and jealously demanded, “Get your ass back here, or you won’t have an ass to sit on.” She told him to sober up and she might return. Maria Burton, who was now twelve, packed her suitcase and told Richard she was going to America “to be with Mommy.” Richard asked, “Are you packing for me too?” “No,” said Maria, and departed with her nanny. Richard soon followed, and Elizabeth met him at JFK International Airport in New York. A shouting battle raged until Elizabeth bolted and checked into the Regency alone. “I told her to go,” Richard explained to reporters, “and she’s gone.” On July 4, 1973, she released an oxymoronic statement announcing their split, but in effect she was begging Richard to come back. “Pray for us,” she pleaded.

Referring to “her extraordinary statement,” an amused Richard told reporters that he was no longer willing to be Elizabeth’s personal nursemaid and career manager, and their resultant fights involved dangerous “physical force.” He instructed attorney Aaron Frosch to work out financial arrangements, adding, “Just do whatever she wants.” George Barrie, the director of Faberge who’d financed
Night Watch
with Joseph E. Levine, lent Elizabeth his private jet for her return flight to California amid rumors that she was being pursued by various suitors including Peter Lawford, Warren Beatty, Helmut Berger, and Roger Vadim. She and Maria stayed with Paramount costumer Edith Head and her husband, art director Wiard Ihnen, in their Mexican-style villa, Casa Ladera. Abetting Elizabeth in her scheme to get Richard back, Edith told reporters, “They need each other. They’re just taking a little vacation.” Smoking pot with Peter and Christopher Lawford, Elizabeth hit L.A. night spots like the Candy Store, a private club in Beverly Hills.
²⁰

Christopher Lawford became her frequent escort. He’d been brought up by his mother, Patricia Kennedy Lawford, who divorced Peter and took Chris and his three sisters to live with her when Chris was nine. Robert F. Kennedy had served as surrogate father to Chris and his sisters just as he had to Caroline and John F. Kennedy Jr. after the assassination of the President. Then RFK was assassinated, and Chris felt like an orphan. He hitchhiked and panhandled for drug money with RFK’s son David, smoking pot and dropping LSD and amphetamine “black beauties.” Chris was expelled from Middlesex boarding school for drug use, and David Kennedy later died of an overdose. Chris started shooting up. One day, Pat Lawford found him behind a couch in her Fifth Avenue apartment with a needle in his arm. She sent him to stay with Peter in Hollywood in 1971. Peter was glad to share his drug stash with his teenage son, and asked him to serve as his best man at his Puerto Vallarta wedding to Mary Rowan, daughter of Dan Rowan of
Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In
. “He had to be the cutest guy I’d ever seen,” said Mary, describing not her bridegroom but her new stepson Chris, who had dark hair down to his shoulders, carried a backpack, and looked like Andy Gibb of the Bee Gees. Chris joined Mary and Peter in pot-smoking sessions when Mary was twenty-one, Peter was forty-seven, and Chris was sixteen.
²¹