The Most Beautiful Woman in the World (41 page)

Returning to L.A., Elizabeth leased an Italianate mansion in Bel Air and moved Henry Wynberg in with her, but shortly thereafter her “disintegrating vertebrae” required that she be placed in traction with a twenty-pound weight. Wynberg daily injected her thigh with Demerol, a dangerously addictive painkiller. He became the latest in an endless succession of drug enablers, drawn like the other sexual, a-loving men in her life into a treacherous codependency. Wynberg eventually rebelled against this role and began to substitute distilled water for Demerol when she asked for a fix.
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Richard told friends that Elizabeth would marry Wynberg “over my dead body,” but Wynberg fulfilled her sexually as no one had done in years—they even experimented with amyl nitrate, an anti-angina drug that heightens orgasm if it doesn’t kill you first. In the heady afterglow of popper-enhanced coitus, Elizabeth and Wynberg continued to discuss marketing Elizabeth Taylor fragrances, with a sixty-forty income split in his favor. He also drew up a contract for Elizabeth to associate herself with a diamond-selling firm, but the venture ended in litigation before it got off the ground.
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Raymond Vignale warned her that Wynberg was using her, but it was more likely that she was using Wynberg. In the Polo Lounge one night, she pointed to him and said, “Would you buy a used car from this man?” Eventually Wynberg had to give up his automobile wholesale business and borrow $15,000 from friends to keep up with Elizabeth.
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He nursed her through a viral infection and amoebic dysentery when she made the soporific George Cukor megaflop
The Blue Bird
in Russia in 1975.

Another important influence as Elizabeth gradually prepared herself to enter the perfume business was her dress designer Halston, who launched his own successful fragrance line (within two years Halston perfume generated $85 million in worldwide sales). He created the low-cut strapless gown Elizabeth wore to the 1975 Oscar presentations. In New York he became her regular escort to Studio 54, introducing her to the American branch of the jet set. He consoled her during her single years and even tried to advise her on her love life, though his knowledge of intimate human relationships was restricted to negotiating $200-to-$500 fees for sex with black hustlers. One night Elizabeth telephoned Halston at his Manhattan townhouse at 101 East Sixty-third Street when Halston’s favorite prostitute and pimp was in bed with the couturier. “There was a Burger King commercial on TV,” the call boy remembered, “and Halston’s advice to Elizabeth was, ‘Have it your way.’”
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Wynberg was summarily dumped by Elizabeth when Richard decided he wanted her back. On August 11, 1975, she rendezvoused with Richard at the Hotel Beau Rivage in Lausanne, Switzerland. To her delight, he was sober, drinking only milk and Perrier, thanks to a black
Playboy
centerfold model named Jean Bell, who’d helped him detox with sedatives, tranquilizers, and anticonvulsants. On August 18, Elizabeth summoned Wynberg to a meeting at Chalet Ariel and, in Richard’s presence, gave him his walking papers as her lover, as well as a gold watch and $50,000 to set her up in the perfume business. On August 20, Richard announced that he and Elizabeth were remarrying, and fourteen-year-old Maria Burton asked, “For how long?” There was a tense twenty-four-hour scare that Elizabeth had cancer, but upon examination it proved to be old pneumonia scar tissue. Though sober, Richard’s alcohol-related infirmities—gout, sciatica, epilepsy, and arthritis—were giving him the shakes, and Elizabeth again had to feed him like an invalid.
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They flew to Israel, where Richard was to discuss a possible picture, and on the plane, he relapsed and got drunk on champagne cocktails. Elizabeth started screaming at him, and she angrily canceled a press conference at the terminal and whisked him to the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. However bitter it was in private, their reunion ignited near-hysterical excitement among their Israeli fans, and a riot was barely averted at their charity benefit. U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who was also staying at the King David, offered them the protection of his personal escort of seventy U.S. marines and one thousand Israeli troops. They declined, but later created such a commotion at the Wailing Wall that an onlooker said, “The Messiah has come.” Kissinger gave them a cocktail party in his suite, and they confirmed to him that a remarriage was imminent. “The Burtons prove the axiom that truth is lots stranger than fiction,” said Kissinger. “There’s nothing bland about that couple—they’re simply fabulous.”
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In Kissinger, Elizabeth had made a powerful new friend, one who adored her and would do anything for her.

Campaigning for the Republican presidential nomination, both Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford were quizzed about Elizabeth and Richard’s rumored remarriage at press conferences. Ford called them “extremely colorful people,” and Governor Reagan said they were “unlike some Hollywood types I know, they insist on being themselves.” Henry Miller, author of
Tropic of Cancer
, praised them as a vanishing breed who did exactly as they pleased, regardless of public opinion. “If she wants to wiggle her ass, she wiggles her ass,” Miller said. “If he wants a piece of tail, he’s not afraid to get a piece of tail . . . They still reign supreme and are dear to the public’s heart.”
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The ceremony for the Burtons’ second marriage was held on October 10, 1975, in a game reserve in Botswana, a South African republic, after they’d performed at a charity benefit in Johannesburg. Richard was drunk by 8 a.m. on his wedding day, and on awaking Elizabeth regarded his bleary eyes and limp body with revulsion.
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Nevertheless, she dressed in an exotic outfit the late Ifor Jenkins had given her: a floor-length green robe with pale-colored birds overlapping each other, ribbed with multicolored wooden beads on chiffon cords, and fringed with guinea-fowl feathers. Richard struggled into white slacks and a red silk turtleneck sweater. The district commissioner from the Tswana tribe, Ambrose Masalila, conducted the ceremony in a one-room cabin. The bride and groom exchanged $40 ivory wedding rings. The following day, the
Boston Globe
announced, “Sturm has remarried Drang and all is right with the world.” But all was not right with the Burtons. Their traveling companion, Marguerite Glatz, Richard’s long-time housekeeper, said, “It was difficult for Mr. Burton because Liz loved whiskey and always had a bottle with her, and he wasn’t supposed to drink.”
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His immune system radically compromised by alcohol, Richard could not withstand the hardships of the African bush and contracted malaria during their honeymoon safari. Chen Sam, a thirty-seven-year-old pharmacologist, expertly nursed Richard back to health and helped him detox again. She was an extraordinary creature to come across in the African bush, with her knee-length brown hair, voluptuous figure, and unique background (her father was an Egyptian Muslim and her mother an Italian Catholic). Her marriage to a Spaniard had failed, but she had a son who was living in Paris. Chen Sam knew how to get drugs and how to inject them intravenously. When the Burtons left Africa, she came with them as a paid member of their entourage. Upon arriving in London, Chen Sam was informed that her son had just died of pneumonia. As she grieved in the following days, Chen Sam had less time to devote to keeping Richard sober, and he relapsed again.

Elizabeth threw a fiftieth birthday party for Richard at the Dorch in November 1975, but he looked terrible, like someone dying of cirrhosis of the liver or TB. She was also in poor health. When she entered Wellington Hospital in St. John’s Wood, complaining of unbearable back and neck pains, she expected Richard to move in and take care of her as Mike Todd had once done, and as Eddie Fisher and Richard himself had often done. Tired and ailing himself, and bored with her problems, he no longer wanted to be her caregiver. She cursed him when he refused to come to the hospital after a few visits, but their friends sided with Richard, commenting that she was suffocating him with unreasonable demands. Alone in her room, she started flirting with bodyguard Brian Haynes in desperation. “She frequently slept nude or topless,” recalled Haynes, “so that when I came racing in I would get a close-up of those famous boobs.” In Richard’s absence, she turned to Haynes to assuage her loneliness, calling him in one night to show him “a very short, very sexy, and very transparent nightie.”
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Richard knew the time had come, that the bell had tolled for them as a couple for the last time, but they doggedly went to Gstaad for Christmas 1975 with her children and Brook Williams. They found they couldn’t stand each other anymore and took separate bedrooms. Though Elizabeth was only forty-three, Richard compared her with Norma Desmond, the crazy
Sunset Boulevard
has-been with delusions of grandeur. He hated the sight of her, and he hated the entourage even more—that hired claque of servants who doubled as spies, dealers, and enablers.
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Elizabeth was astonished one day when Richard brought a pretty girl named Suzy Hunt back from the ski slopes and flaunted her at Chalet Ariel. To get even, Elizabeth picked up a young ad exec at a disco in the village and brought him home, giving Richard some of his own medicine. Green-eyed, twenty-seven-year-old Suzy Hunt was the estranged wife of British racing car ace James “The Shunt” Hunt. When Richard flew to New York to replace Anthony Perkins as the gay psychiatrist in Peter Shaffer’s Broadway hit
Equus
, Suzy went with him. Elizabeth’s new boy toy, thirty-seven-year-old Peter Darmanian, later recalled, “She is passionate in bed. I did not sleep much . . . We’d stay in bed until two in the afternoon and not get dressed until dinner.” When Richard called in February and told her to meet him in New York, she immediately booked a flight, leaving Darmanian with a broken heart and a gold charm engraved “
Obesanzo di Te
[I need you].”
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In Manhattan, Richard was waiting for her at the Lombardy Hotel with Suzy Hunt, looking nervous and uncomfortable. “What is wrong, love?” Elizabeth asked. “I want a divorce,” Richard said. After catching her breath, she said, “Why the hell did you have me come all this way to tell me that?” Richard thought it would be simpler to discuss their second divorce face-to-face, but she swept out of the room with Chen Sam, canceled a forty-fourth birthday party in her honor, and bowed out of a commitment to host the annual Tony Awards. Producer Alexander Cohen lined up Jane Fonda to replace Elizabeth as Tony emcee, leaving Elizabeth free to fly to L.A., where she moved into Wynberg’s rented four-bedroom house, 400 Truesdale Place. On wacky weed and Jack Daniels, she went at sex “relentlessly,” Wynberg said.
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He gave her a small birthday dinner on February 27, 1976. From various parts of the world, all the children called, including Mike Jr., twenty-three, who was playing saxophone and flute in a rock band in London and Wales; Chris, twenty-one, still a student at the University of Hawaii; Liza, eighteen, studying sculpture in London; and Maria, fifteen, a student at the International School in Geneva. In reply to a reporter who asked if she was divorcing Richard, Elizabeth said, “You don’t read the newspapers, do you? My husband is getting the divorce, and don’t worry your pretty little mustache about it.” Darmanian rang repeatedly from Gstaad, but Chen Sam, following Elizabeth’s orders, got rid of him. Like Eddie Fisher, Darmanian was a little too fond of basking in Elizabeth’s limelight.

Wynberg kicked her out when he discovered that she was having assignations with a forty-seven-year-old screenwriter named Harvey Herman in Bungalow 8 at the Beverly Hills Hotel. He took everything she’d brought to 400 Truesdale—including two dogs—called a cab, and told the driver to deposit the lot on her doorstep at Bungalow 8. She was well out of it with Wynberg. The following year he was jailed for ninety days after admitting sexual misconduct with a sixteen-year-old girl.
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Elizabeth’s dalliance with Harvey Herman ended when she rang his house during a birthday party for his wife, and he told her to stop calling.
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Actor Ray Stricklyn saw Elizabeth after the final split with Burton and described her as “drinking heavily, quite bloated, and no longer the great beauty.” At a dinner party in Cukor’s home, a guest attempted to make polite conversation by inquiring about the pendant on her neck. Through tightened lips she hissed, “That’s the Taj Mahal diamond, you dumb shit.” She seemed just about ready to go over the edge, but a meeting with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in Palm Springs in 1976 opened up a new world for her to conquer—Washington, D.C.

Chapter 11
Showbiz Takes Over D.C.
ELIZABETH TAYLOR + JOHN WARNER = RONALD REAGAN

Henry and Nancy Kissinger were vacationing with Kirk and Ann Douglas in California when Kissinger asked about Elizabeth, whom he’d admired ever since meeting her and Richard the previous year in Israel. On hearing how miserable, bored, and heartbroken she was, the secretary of state asked Elizabeth to dinner and later invited her to Washington in April 1976 for a round of high-profile bicentennial events. She could not have found a better man to throw open the doors of the nation’s capital. Looking for new challenges after the failure of her sixth marriage, and with Kissinger’s social imprimatur as her banner, she stormed Washington and had the capital at her feet by the late 1970s, just as she’d charmed the jet set in the 1960s.