The Most Beautiful Woman in the World (40 page)

By the time Elizabeth returned to L.A. in 1973, Chris was eighteen and living with his dad in an apartment on Cory Avenue, where Peter was dealing drugs. Earlier in the year Mary Rowan had gone back to her father in Holmby Hills after deciding that Peter’s life of Quaaludes, pot, painkillers, and booze wasn’t for her. Peter resented it when Christopher asked him to act like a father and give him some guidance. “I need you, Dad,” Chris said. “My life is a mess.” Peter told him to lighten up or “get the hell out.” At this point, Elizabeth started going around with the lanky, six-foot-two Christopher and with Peter, the trio’s mutual interest in drugs forming a strong bond. Peter’s friend Arthur Natoli recalled, “He and Elizabeth used to turn on together. They were high on pot a lot. I don’t know if he supplied her.” Elizabeth and Peter were both working on MGM’s fiftieth anniversary movie,
That’s Entertainment
, a compilation of old musical clips that proved a box-office hit. Elizabeth’s sequence had been filmed in Rome, and she also appeared in clips from
Cynthia
, singing “The Melody of Spring” in a reedy soprano to the piano accompaniment of S. Z. Sakall, and
A Date with Judy
, lip-synching “Love Is Where You Find It.”
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Dominick Dunne was in a party Elizabeth took to Disneyland that included Christopher, Peter, Liza, Maria, Roddy, and Cukor. “Elizabeth had a bottle of Jack Daniels, and Peter had something, and everybody got the bottle going,” recalled Dunne. “Then a bit of coke was going around and you’d hear sniffing. Everybody was just screaming with laughter.”
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Some who saw Elizabeth and Christopher together got the impression she was flirting with the youth. She took him along with her when, out of curiosity, she went to see legendary sex goddess Mae West, who appeared in a curve-hugging silver gown. Two bodybuilders accompanied Miss West and were introduced as her security guards. “Christopher, let’s get the hell out of here,” Elizabeth murmured. The following day, she was with Chris again, at a barbecue at the home of L. B. Mayer’s daughter Edie Goetz, the doyenne of Hollywood society. Subsequently, Elizabeth and Christopher were seen at the Candy Store together. Inevitably reporters asked Peter Lawford if his son and Elizabeth were having an affair.
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Peter denied it but became so distressed by his teenager’s relationship with the forty-one-year-old Elizabeth that he introduced her to someone closer to her own age, Henry Wynberg, a used-car salesman once indicted and fined $250 for setting back the odometers on the vehicles in his inventory. Elizabeth started dating him in July 1973, and he became a pivotal figure in her life the day he told her, speaking softly in his Dutch accent, “Darling, you could ‘create’ a superb perfume that will make you very comfortable for years to come.”

She returned to Rome that month to film Muriel Spark’s
The Driver’s Seat
. She and Richard got back together again, taking over the guest house at Sophia Loren and Carlo Ponti’s sixteenth-century villa in the Alban hills, half an hour from the city. Elizabeth and her hostess were incompatible, Elizabeth slouching around in jeans and Madame Ponti dressed to the teeth, including Dior gloves, in her own home, “too piss-elegant for words,” Elizabeth told her hairdresser and secretary, a pair of Mediterranean bodybuilders named Ramon and Gianni. The Burtons resumed their fighting, and the reconciliation was all over in nine days.

When Elizabeth reported for work on the
Driver
set at 5 p.m., she told producer Franco Rossellini and the crew that she’d never expected to see another day as sad as the one when Mike Todd had died. “I was wrong,” she said. “Today is the second saddest day of my life. I am desolate.” The crew applauded her, though she’d kept them waiting all day. She arranged for Andy Warhol to have a walk-on part, and the pop-art painter asked her to his rented villa for lunch the next day. He’d invited every titled Italian he could round up on short notice, hiring six cooks to prepare a meal to suit all tastes, including chicken, veal, lamb, beef, sole, shrimps, lobster, lasagna, ravioli, ziti, spaghetti, cavatelli, and gnocchi. Elizabeth finally arrived at 3 p.m. with Ramon and Gianni in tow, dressed in their customary matching white-and-red outfits. Wearing blue jeans, a purple T-shirt with mirrored embroidery, gold chains, and an American-flag ring of diamonds, rubies, and sapphires—a gift from Gianni Bulgari—Elizabeth was oblivious to the ire of the other guests, most of them princes and princesses who’d been kept waiting for two hours. They retired to the dining room, but Elizabeth started coughing and asked for a Jack Daniels neat, explaining that she wanted to stay outside and talk with Warhol and his sidekick Bob Colacello. She had several more Jack Daniels and continued coughing. Warhol flattered her by saying she should direct films, and she replied that she’d always wanted to direct. She boasted that
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf
? was the highest-grossing black-and-white film ever made, and that she’d just purchased seventy-five percent of
Around the World in 80 Days
from the Todd estate and intended to rerelease it every year at Yuletide (not a good idea, since the film’s vogue had long since passed). Another guest joined them on the terrace, and Elizabeth insisted that the man accompany her to the library to help her place a call to Richard. “He won’t take calls from me,” she sniffed, “but from you he would.” She left with the guest, and a minute later screams were heard. Elizabeth emerged from the library shouting, “I’m no easy lay. That moth-erfucker tried to put the make on me. I’m crying on his shoulder and he tried to grab me.” She dragged Andy into the garden with her, where she sat nervously, compulsively stripping the leaves from a hedge. “Elizabeth is staying for dinner,” Andy told Colacello. “Maybe you should tell the cooks.”

Dinner was served at eight o’clock, but Elizabeth had gone into the bathroom and wouldn’t come out. Finally a doctor was summoned by Ramon and Gianni, and when he arrived, carrying a black bag, Elizabeth let him into the bathroom and then left with him without saying anything to her host. “Gee,” Andy said, surveying a table groaning with an overcooked feast, “she has everything: magic, money, beauty, intelligence. Why can’t she be happy?”

During a medical examination in late November 1973, doctors discovered Elizabeth had a tumor that might be malignant. The following day, she went into surgery, and an ovary upon which the cyst had grown was removed; fortunately it was benign. To keep Elizabeth company, Wynberg rented the suite next to hers at the Scripps Clinic in La Jolla, where she’d gone to recover. They planned to vacation in Hawaii upon her release, and they also got tickets for the Rose Bowl game. Meanwhile, Richard was filming in Palermo, but when he heard that she’d been operated on for a possible cancer he went to Carlo Ponti and requested time off to fly to her side. Pale and exhausted after an eleven-hour hop across the Arctic Circle, he came bearing a thirty-eight-carat cognac diamond. “Hello, Lumpy,” he said. “How are you feeling?” Elizabeth smiled and replied, “Hello, Pockmarks.” After telling Wynberg to get out, Richard asked for a bed to be placed next to hers, and they spent one of the happiest nights of their married life. The next day they flew to Naples for the 1973 Christmas holidays. During her absence, Wynberg used her house and turned it into a harem. When advised of Wynberg’s unusual genital endowment, Richard blurted, “I’m sure that like the used cars he sells, it will fall off just at the psychological moment.” Elizabeth admitted she’d been “using” Wynberg and would eventually drop him.
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Elizabeth was in a wheelchair, and the nurse who accompanied them on their flight to London regularly administered painkilling pills prescribed by Elizabeth’s surgeon, Dr. Herbert Machlader. The Burtons held hands and smiled throughout the flight. On December 10, they arrived by private jet in Naples, which was frigid but sunny. The
Kalizma
was waiting for them in the bay, Richard having told Graham Jenkins to bring the yacht to Italy. Graham recalled that when they came on board, he’d never seen them looking so happy. At dinner they began to reminisce about old times, and Richard turned to Graham and said, “Tell them at home the bad times are over.”
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In reality, the worst was yet to come, for neither had changed. In Gstaad for Christmas, Michael Jr. joined them, evidently having decided that his mother’s wealth was bearable after all. On NBC-TV, news anchor John Chancellor announced that the Burtons “are reconciling permanently—[pause]—as opposed to temporarily.” Richard waited on Elizabeth hand and foot, according to one of their servants, but as soon as her health improved, he started screaming at her. In January 1974, fifty-year-old pothead Peter Lawford arrived to spend the remainder of the holidays with them at Chalet Ariel. The Burtons were attempting to cure their alcoholism, someone suggested, with marijuana, not realizing that a drug is a drug, any way it’s taken, and one drug invariably leads to another. Soon they resumed their drinking, but Elizabeth attempted to moderate Richard’s intake by telling bartenders to substitute lemonade every time he ordered a drink. Richard told Lawford, “I know how to make that bitch shut up.” When she wasn’t looking, he slipped bartenders extra money to pour him a vodka. One day, Elizabeth went to the Gstaad branch of Van Cleef & Arpels to pick up a $300,000 jewel, and she told Peter to keep Richard away from the bar. When she returned and saw Richard sloshed, she snapped, “Peter, you cocksucker, I told you not to let him drink.”
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The Burtons returned to Italy, completed their film assignments, and then flew to Puerto Vallarta to celebrate Elizabeth’s forty-second birthday in February 1974. Then, attended by her private nurse, Elizabeth joined Richard in Oroville, California, where he filmed
The Klansman
, a story of racial violence in the South, with Lee Marvin. Interviewed in 1998, Dale Olson, a publicist, recalled, “Lee Marvin goaded Richard into drinking. Assistants had to hold both of them up from behind to finish a scene. Everyone seemed to be staying in motels; I saw no hotels there. My room was next to Richard and Elizabeth’s. They were a mismatched pair, deeply in love and undermined by booze on both parts. They fought a lot but couldn’t keep away from each other. I could hear them fighting at night in their room. There were screams and then a door slammed. I looked outside and Elizabeth was on the ground where he’d flung her. I went out and helped her up. Her knees were bloody.

“For publicity we sent out a notice to the press, ‘Mr. and Mrs. Richard Burton invite you to a day in Oroville.’ I brought in about a hundred pundits, and NBC asked me if it was true that Elizabeth had left Richard. ‘No,’ I said, ‘she can’t. She’s hosting a party for me tonight.’” Merv Griffin filmed an interview with Richard for his TV talk show, and later recalled that Richard was dating a local girl “in order to invest new drama into his relationship with Liz.” Evidently he invested a little too much; Elizabeth packed up and left. Dale Olson told a planeload of journalists, “There’s good news and bad news. The bad news is that Elizabeth has left Richard. The good news is that you’re the first to see Richard after the split.”

Elizabeth rebounded to Wynberg, later telling Max Lerner, “He fucks me beautifully, and I know he’s not a big mind like you are, but he takes care of me, and that is what I need.” Elizabeth behaved as if the breakup of her marriage had all been Richard’s fault, telling Sophia Loren his alcoholism was to blame, and bursting into tears when she described the horror of his drinking to Ava Gardner. Though she was just as alcoholic as Richard and equally responsible for the destruction of their relationship, Richard gallantly refused to expose her as a drunk and a drug addict and tolerated her indiscretions without reprisal.
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On April 26, 1974, the Burtons announced in Los Angeles that their reconciliation had failed, and they were seeking a divorce in Berne. On June 26, in a cream-and-brown silk suit and dark glasses, Elizabeth appeared at a wooden-frame courthouse in the Swiss town of Saarinen for the case of
Taylor v. Burton
. Throughout the forty-minute proceeding, she maintained a blank stare. Richard, who’d been drying out in a rehab, was not present for the end of a ten-year partnership that, at least in one respect, had been thunderously successful, producing eleven movies and $30 million in income. Divorce was granted on the grounds of incompatibility. In the financial settlement, Richard was magnanimous as usual, but Elizabeth chose to be tough, keeping $5 million in jewels, though they’d been a joint investment; Casa Kimberley;
Kalizma
; and their paintings, some of them priceless. “The main question of course,” one of their friends joked, “is who will get Brook Williams.” Brook went with Richard.
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Elizabeth’s old friends, Prince Rainier and Princess Grace, rallied to her support, premiering her film
The Driver’s Seat
in Monte Carlo as a Red Cross benefit. Elizabeth’s presence on the Riviera completely upstaged the nearby Cannes Film Festival as the cream of international society flocked to Monaco, including an old and enfeebled Ari Onassis, whose marriage to Jackie O. was on the rocks; Paulette Goddard and her ghost writer Andy Warhol, whose Harcourt Brace collaboration would never be completed; Ursula Andress; Elsa Martinelli; São Schlumberger; Stavros Niarchos; Princess Ira von Furstenberg; Countess Marina Cicogna; Helene Rochas; and Kim d’Estainville. On opening night Elizabeth sat in a box with Prince Rainier, Princess Grace, and Franco Rossellini. Later, at Regine’s club, New Jimmy’z, she sat at the royal table, which enraged Paulette Goddard, who wasn’t assigned a table because she’d refused Princess Grace’s request to appear on TV in behalf of the Monaco Red Cross. “I never do TV,” said Paulette, dripping blue-white diamonds. “Grace has to. It’s her country.” In conversation with Warhol, Paulette accused Elizabeth of spreading a rumor that she’d performed oral sex on director Anatole Litvak under a table at the Mocambo in Hollywood.
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