The Most Beautiful Woman in the World (31 page)

As the two couples visited that night in Paris, Richard got drunk and referred to Queen Elizabeth II, the reigning monarch and the Duke’s niece, as “her dumpy majesty.” The Windsors appeared to agree wholeheartedly with him. They resented the Royal Family’s refusal to let Wallis be referred to as Her Majesty, as well as their failure to give the Duke an impressive ambassadorial post following his abdication. The Windsors’ marriage had endured because from the first time they’d made love, when he was the Prince of Wales and heir to the throne, Wallis had been the dominant partner, ordering him around like a servant. He tolerated her abuse because she had succeeded, where earlier mistresses such as Freda Dudley Ward and Thelma Lady Furness had failed, in giving him the passional life of his dreams. “He was a masochist,” Freda said. “He liked being humbled, degraded. He
begged
for it.” Like Elizabeth Taylor, the Duchess had a-loving relationships with heterosexual men and loving, a-sexual relationships with gays. Her marriage almost ended when she became infatuated with a well-known gay, Jimmy Donahue, a cousin of Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton. Eventually Donahue died of acute alcoholic and barbiturate intoxication, and Wallis refocused her attention on the Duke, though her contempt and boredom were sometimes as obvious and vocal as Martha’s for George in
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

For the jaded Windsors and increasingly for other titled figures in European society, the Burtons were a breath of fresh air. The Duchess, like Elizabeth, loved to talk about medical matters, especially plastic surgery (as long as everyone agreed she didn’t need it), and she adored telling risqué jokes. “What is the difference between a night on the beach at Coney Island and a night on the beach in Hollywood?” she asked. “At Coney, the girls lie on the beach and look at the stars, and in Hollywood the stars lie on the girls and look at the beach.”

Elizabeth and Richard won the British equivalent of the Oscar for
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
and, despite critical brickbats for their other joint ventures, found themselves the most famous acting couple in the world. On May 21, 1967, they celebrated by purchasing a luxurious, sixty-year-old motor yacht, naming it the
Kalizma
, after Liza, Maria, and Kate Burton, Richard’s daughter from his marriage to Sybil. As millions of dollars continued to roll in from
Iguana
,
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
, and
Shrew
—the last brought them a $12 million return on a $2 million investment—they splurged again and purchased a $215,000 mink for Elizabeth and a $120,000 Monet for Richard.

On May 24, as the
Kalizma
set out for Portofino, Elizabeth was urging Richard to costar with her in
Boom!
, the film version of Tennessee Williams’s play
The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore
. Sean Connery had already turned down the role, and Maria Callas had declined Elizabeth’s part. One of Elizabeth’s closest friends, Norma Heyman, was married to the man producing the film, John Heyman. The play had flopped twice on Broadway, first in 1963 with Hermione Baddeley and Paul Roebling. The second version, directed by Tony Richardson and starring Tallulah Bankhead and Tab Hunter, fared no better, partly due to the unlikely pairing of the forceful Bankhead with timid Tab. When Bankhead, a lesbian, was asked if Tab were gay, she replied, “How would I know, darling, I never fucked him.”
²³
A London production starring Ruth Gordon had disintegrated before opening night due to Gordon’s heckling of her costar, Donald Madden.

The play’s subject—a dying woman having a nervous breakdown while penning her memoirs—was an autobiographical elegy compounded of Tennessee’s regret, relief, and guilt over the death of his gay lover, Frank Merlo. The play attempted to transmit homosexual angst through heterosexual characters, resulting in irrelevant pomposity. As Richard pondered the project during their stay in Portofino, they spent several evenings with Tennessee, who introduced them to his tall, handsome paid companion. At a restaurant one night, Elizabeth admonished the inebriated Tennessee to stop shouting. “We attract enough attention as it is,” Richard added. He was annoyed when the playwright made a pass at their eight-year-old, Chris Wilding, and told Williams he was “a self-pitying pain in the neck . . . depressed all the time.” Tennessee accused his companion of hiding or stealing his drugs and hypodermic needles, but the companion, who’d recently survived gastrointestinal surgery, denied ever touching his drugs.
²⁴

Richard at last agreed to film
Boom!
, largely to lend his box-office clout, which was now greater than Elizabeth’s. During the filming in Sardinia in 1967, Tennessee said he was delighted with Elizabeth’s performance as Flora (Sissy) Goforth, the richest woman in the world, whose companions are a gay gossipmonger played by Noel Coward and a sexy drifter, Chris Flanders, played by Burton. Tennessee would later call
Boom!
“a beautiful picture, the best ever made of one of my plays,” but in
Memoirs
he executed a volte-face, writing that casting the Burtons had been “a dreadful mistake . . . Dick was too old for Chris and Liz was too young for Goforth . . . Despite its miscasting, I feel that
Boom!
was an artistic success and that eventually it will be received with acclaim.” He could scarcely have been further off the mark. Critics loathed
Boom! Life
blamed the Burtons, deploring the “tired, slack quality in most of their work that is, by now, a form of insult.” Casting aside, the fundamental flaw in the piece was Tennessee’s dialogue, which had been composed under the influence of brain-scrambling methamphetamine and consequently was fraught with pseudo-poetic pontifications such as: “The Boss may be dying under the unsympathetic, insincere sympathy of the far-away stars.” Elizabeth complained that the text’s “changing rhythms” threw her, and Noel Coward wrote in his diary, “I had a bit of trouble with Tennessee’s curiously phrased dialogue.” Otherwise Coward enjoyed the shoot, writing that he “bathed in lovely sunshine all the time . . . I love Liz Taylor [and] Richard, of course, was sweet.”

Elizabeth worked on her figure all summer, not only to lose weight but, through exercise and massage, to redistribute her assets. “I can barely keep my hands off her,” Richard wrote in his notebook. “She is at the moment among the most dishiest girls I’ve ever seen.” According to Tennessee, Elizabeth briefly enjoyed the company of a man pseudonymously referred to in
Memoirs
as Ryan, “the handsomest of my companions . . . Ryan embrac[ed] Elizabeth Taylor during the film
Boom!
on the island of Sardinia. He was bisexual and very attractive to ladies with the exception of the Lady Maria St. Just and Miss Ellen McCool, both of whom objected to [Elizabeth’s] very beautiful and very blue eyes.”
²⁵

During a break in filming that summer, the Burtons sailed to Santa Marguerita, where ten-year-old Kate Burton—“bonny and long-legged and freckled,” in her father’s description—came aboard with Aaron Frosch, their lawyer. Kate “immediately re-established warm ‘lovins’ with Elizabeth,” Richard recalled. Elizabeth and her stepdaughter were like a pair of giggly sisters, constantly laughing at each other’s antics. “Kate jumping all over the place and slept with us the night,” Richard wrote, and added, “I finally went to sleep downstairs in Kate’s room.”
²⁶
In Portofino, Elizabeth took Kate shopping, and they returned to the yacht laden with watches, sweaters, and everything they could find designed by Pucci. Richard was spending a great deal of time coping with the educational crises of Elizabeth’s sons. Mike Jr. was fifteen, and an exasperated Richard said, “Let’s face it, our son is a hippie. His hair lies on his shoulders, and we can’t keep him in school.” The solution, Richard suggested, was to “kick the living daylights out of him,” but Elizabeth argued, “He has the right to wear his hair any length he wants; it’s his right as an individual.” Richard appealed to the boy’s father, Wilding Sr., who immediately sided with Richard. Liza and Maria were in schools in Switzerland, and Kate stayed in the United States with Sybil most of the time, but the Wilding boys had been shifted in and out of so many schools during their mother’s marriages and world travels that they were seriously behind in their classwork. Finally, Norma Heyman, who named two of her children after Elizabeth’s kids, used her influence to get the Wilding boys admitted to Millfield, an expensive British boarding school.

Though suffering from arthritis, Richard took the boys to London to get them settled in. He thought that Mike was “lethargic, sluggish and graceless,” but he appreciated that Mike was “loving and intelligent” and told Elizabeth that if they could keep him in school for another couple of years, they’d be lucky. The boys continued to worry Richard, who wrote in his notebook two years later, “The school has been bad for them. Their values have become tremendously coarsened, Michael started to smoke and drink there and found jail-bait companions . . . I have seen him read nothing but comic strips . . . I haven’t seen Chris read anything else either.” Mike was eventually “sacked” from Mill-field, but Chris was popular and won the art prize.

Given Mike Todd’s death in a plane crash, Elizabeth understandably had some trepidation regarding private aircraft, but on September 30, 1967, the Burtons couldn’t resist splurging on a Hawker-Siddeley De Havilland 125 twin jet. “Something beyond outrage,” Richard called it, adding that “it costs, brand new, $960,000. [Elizabeth] was not displeased.” On one of their first flights they landed at Abingdon and then drove to Oxford University for the world premiere of Richard’s film
Faustus
. Interviewed in 1998, Brian Hutton, who would soon direct Elizabeth and Richard in separate films, recalled, “I went up to Oxford with Elliott Kastner, who’d later do
Where Eagles Dare
with Richard and me. I don’t own a suit or tie, so a friend lent me his tuxedo . . . We went to dinner, about twenty of us, including their close friends John and Norma Heyman, who were great fun. Princess Margaret or someone royal comes out, and there’s great fanfare, heralds and all. Everybody gets up. Nothing. Five minutes later, more heralds, out comes Elizabeth and everyone goes wild—she’s in a big tiara, black fur, and she’s looking sensational, pearls, necklaces, jewels. Heralds, a third time, out comes the Duchess of Kent. She looked like the lady-in-waiting for Elizabeth. Then we sat through this god-awful movie. Elizabeth had a walk-on with no lines. Sad—they were running around trying to raise money for charity.”

In 1968, Elizabeth accompanied Richard to the location shoot of
Where Eagles Dare
, one of the first of the rugged action pictures. Brian Hutton recalled in 1998, “Elizabeth was an enormous plus on location in Austria. She really kept Richard in line, chased him around, and kept him from drinking. She was like a second assistant—very, very helpful. It was always in his best interests. I got to know her then, and afterward we did two films together.” In a supporting role, paid a fraction of Richard’s $1 million, Clint Eastwood said the picture should have been called
Where Doubles Dare
. “It was a very hard picture for Richard to make,” Hutton acknowledged. “We had him in that fuckin’ bus saying ‘Turn the bus left, turn the bus right,’ and it was all process, all rear projection, and he was pissed three quarters of the time, couldn’t see the process behind him. He had one big beef with ‘the bomb’—a stick of wood with a clock on it, made up to look like dynamite. I made it up as an all-purpose bomb. We threw it at everything, every time the script called for a bomb—the universal bomb. If you didn’t kick the spring—it was on a timer—you could throw it, you could eat it. I wanted Burton to put this stick of ‘dynamite’ around a telegraph pole, he was gonna blow it up when the Germans came. So I said, ‘Okay, Richard, take this and put the string around the pole.’ ‘No, no, no,’ he says, ‘I can’t do it.’ I said, ‘Why not?’ He replies, ‘I don’t touch high explosives.’ ‘It’s a stick of wood, Richard,’ I say, ‘we’ve been using it for two weeks, in every scene.’ ‘I’m not going to touch high explosives.’ ‘Richard, it’s fuckin’ wood.’ He was drunk, pissed. ‘No high explosives,’ he says. ‘Get me Elizabeth,’ my second assistant says. Elizabeth got Richard to do a lot of things that he didn’t want to do. They had to go back to the hotel to get her. She comes on the set twenty minutes later and says, ‘You silly bastard, that’s not dynamite, it’s wood—RiCHARD, do it! Get up and do it. Get out of here!’ Elizabeth and Richard were a great couple. I always rooted for them.” One day, wrapped in sable, Elizabeth led a procession of hotel waiters up a mountain to the set and spread out a champagne picnic. “Isn’t she beautiful,” Richard said.

They arrived in London in mid-February for Elizabeth to film
Secret Ceremony
. Her $1 million fee overshadowed the salaries of costars Robert Mitchum ($150,000) and Mia Farrow ($75,000). Joseph Losey was again her director. Lacking the finesse of Mike Nichols, he let her indulge her worst excesses, and she trashed what was left of her reputation as a serious actress. “The disintegration of Elizabeth Taylor has been a very sad thing to stand by helplessly and watch,” wrote Rex Reed. “Something ghastly has happened over the course of her last four or five films. She has become a hideous parody of herself—a fat, sloppy, yelling, screeching banshee.” She was in excruciating pain much of the shoot, and her doctor advised her to lie flat on her back for at least four weeks. The film was postponed, and Richard feared she was “going to end up in a wheelchair . . . [or] tottering about on crutches.” Refusing to follow the doctor’s orders, she got up and went to a bistro to dine with Richard and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. She rarely stayed in bed as ordered for more than an hour. Her drinking worried Richard, who wrote, “It can’t be alright for her to drink
and
take the doses of drugs that Caroline [her nurse] is forever pumping into her.” After she had her drug injections at night, she was “only semi-articulate,” Richard complained. The cortisone she had to take for her sciatica and other ailments bloated her and forced her to go on diets that she could never succeed in keeping to. In exasperation, Richard accused her of “total self-indulgence” and added she bored him with her “moans and groans in agony.” He blamed his increased alcohol intake on her. With his drunken blackouts and her drugged stupor, they began to lead what he described as a “half-life.” Eventually, he predicted, he’d die of alcohol poisoning, but Elizabeth, a classic survivor, would “go blithely on in her half world.” Even after she resumed filming
Secret Ceremony
, she drank and took pills. One night, she came home “crocked as a sock, sloshed as a Cossack.”
²⁷