The Most Beautiful Woman in the World (34 page)

At Marie-Hélène’s birthday dinner, the guests, seated at numerous small tables, included former prime minister Georges Pompidou and Madame Pompidou; the Countess of Bardolini; and Alexis de Rede. Guy de Rothschild insisted on having Elizabeth at his table, but spent the entire meal looking after his ill dachshund, cowering in a basket by his chair. Richard was banished to a comparatively insignificant table, where he entertained everyone by impersonating the other guests, using only three words per impersonation. Since there were so many distinctive accents represented—French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese—“it was a piece of glottal cake,” he remarked, but Madame Pompidou found his feat of thumbnail mimicry astounding. After dessert, all the children came to the head table, one by one, and made little speeches. “How boringly middle-class,” one of Elizabeth’s tablemates murmured, but she couldn’t have agreed less and looked at him in surprise. Neither she nor Richard was “bored or blasé,” he later wrote. “We are not even envious. We are merely lucky.” As innocents abroad, they regarded the Rothschilds with the same awe and wonder with which these titled aristocrats regarded the fabled Burtons. Most of the guests left for Paris after dinner, but Elizabeth and Richard sat up until three, entertaining Guy, Marie-Hélène, Alexis, and Lily, singing a Welsh duet, “
Ar lan y moree mae rhosys cochion
,” and Richard recited Shakespeare. The small children huddled at Elizabeth’s feet, staring up at her as if she were Snow White come to life.
¹¹

The next day Richard had to break the news that her seventy-year-old father had died in Bel Air on November 20, 1968. She reacted “like a wild animal,” which surprised him since Francis Taylor had been ill for years and everyone was supposedly prepared for his death. They flew to L.A. for the simple funeral service in Westwood, conducted by a Christian Science reader. By now, Elizabeth and Richard had become fashion slaves and looked silly in their matching fur coats; she’d given him a knee-length mink for his forty-third birthday. After her father’s death Elizabeth drew closer to her mother, Sara, wanting only, according to Richard, “to protect and cherish her.” Sara decided to live in Arizona, and the Burtons went there with Howard and Mara to help her get established in local society.

Francis Taylor’s death was followed not long afterward by the demise of Nicky Hilton, who died of cardiac failure at the age of forty-two on February 5, 1969, surrounded by an arsenal of guns. In the weeks preceding his death, a psychiatrist had been planning to commit him to the Menninger clinic.
¹²
Elizabeth made no public comment, and was far more grieved by the death of her secretary and trusted confidant Dick Hanley, who died in 1970 after having taken care of her like a father since the death of Mike Todd. She paid for a lavish funeral for Hanley and later held a wake at the Beverly Hills Hotel, sending a spectacular floral display with a card saying, “I will love you always—Elizabeth.”
¹³

The Burtons roamed the world in late 1968 and well into 1969, hitting Paris, Gstaad, Las Vegas, Beverly Hills, London, and Puerto Vallarta. They spent Christmas 1968 in Gstaad, remaining until January 5, 1969, surrounded by family. The entourage was too large for their twin jet, so they chartered a sixteen-seat turbo jet to transport Mike and Chris, both teenagers; eleven-year-old Liza; six-year-old Maria; the septuagenarian Sara; nurse Caroline; Simmy, the adopted Samoan daughter of Howard and Mara Taylor; Simmy’s boyfriend John from Hawaii; and a menagerie of pets including five dogs, a cat, and a canary. It was, the long-suffering Richard complained, the usual “screaming madhouse.” He was sick to death of looking after luggage and keeping Elizabeth’s growing children in line. The boys saw
Easy Rider
so many times that Richard lost count. The gritty New Hollywood represented by Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper (Elizabeth’s son in
Giant
), and Jack Nicholson left the sybaritic Burtons cold, and the feeling was mutual.

Elizabeth was now hospitalized to get her off the painkillers she used for her back problems. Richard foresaw doom for both of them, writing that they would “live the rest of our lives in an alcoholic haze, seeing the world through fumes of spirits and cigarette smoke. Never quite sure what you did or said the day before or what you read, whether wise or foolish, tardy or too soon. God, I’m going to have a whisky and soda right now. There are few pleasures to match tipsiness in this murderous world.” The pleasure induced by alcohol invariably backfired on them, beginning with tipsiness and ending in blackouts, screaming fights, hemorrhages, and delirium tremens. Their lifestyle, Richard wrote, was a “first-class recipe for suicide.”
¹⁴

On January 13, 1969, he noted that for the past month Elizabeth had been “not merely sozzled or tipsy but
stoned
. . . unfocused, unable to walk straight, talking in a slow meaningless baby voice.” All that kept him from matching her drink for drink was the thought that one of them had to sober up occasionally or “we’ll have to get a keeper to look after us both.” Even worse, when he tried to leave her, he realized he couldn’t. Typical codependent alcoholics, they’d taken each other hostage, and there was no escape short of institutionalization or death.
¹⁵
“This woman is my life,” he wrote.

Despite ill health, in February 1969, Elizabeth resumed filming
The Only Game in Town
, this time on location at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. In March, she made a rather lame attempt at drug detoxification at a hospital in L.A., using back trouble as a cover story for the press. Her liver had been damaged by alcohol and “hard narcotics,” according to Richard.
¹⁶
After she left the hospital in March, she and Richard retreated to Casa Kimberley, where she received constant attention from nurse Caroline. The Wilding boys continued to worry Richard. In his sixteenth year, Mike was still neglecting his studies, but Chris, two years Mike’s junior, was faring better at their school in Hawaii, where they were being raised by Howard Taylor. Liza was not exceptional at school but showed great promise and was improving regularly under Richard’s generous if grudging encouragement. He also devoted extra time and attention to his adopted child Maria, whose surgeries were now completed. The Burtons were paying for the education of Simmy, Howard’s daughter. Kate Burton was a winner, but her sister, the pale, darkhaired Jessica, was permanently hospitalized, a possible victim of
le scandale
. The youngest of Richard’s two daughters with Sybil, Jessica had been a beautiful baby, but she’d screamed in terror when paparazzi stormed their home in Rome. The last recorded words Jessica uttered, as Sybil took her to America, were, “Rich! Rich! Rich!” At the age of six, she went into the hospital of the Devereux Foundation. Richard blamed himself, convinced that his affair with Elizabeth plunged the child into the eternal darkness of schizophrenia and autism.

The village of Puerto Vallarta had grown from a population of one thousand when Elizabeth and Richard discovered it in 1963 to a bustling international resort of twenty-five thousand. The Burtons deservedly were regarded by the locals as founders, patrons, and unofficial leaders. They raised funds to establish a $100,000 school and performed numerous community services. One night, they attended the circus, and Elizabeth let the knife thrower hurl daggers at her, neither screaming nor wincing when a scimitar landed two inches from her ear. Though she was a few pounds overweight and beginning to gray, her smooth, unwrinkled skin still excited Richard, who would lie stroking her and wondering why they’d ever complicated their lives with alcohol and drugs. “The breasts despite their largeness and considerable weight, sag very slightly but no more than they did ten years ago,” he wrote, and added, “her bottom is firm and round.” Elizabeth lolled in the sunshine, relieved to be fondled for a change instead of yelled at. She caught up on current best-sellers, reading
Portnoy’s Complaint
and
The Godfather
.
¹⁷

On April 3, after one too many, Richard reverted to bloody-mindedness and asked Elizabeth if “the bathroom [was] still smelling?”

“Yes,” she replied.

He said, “Perhaps it’s you,” and she told him to “fuck off,” storming out of the bedroom.

Later he looked up and saw her glaring at him from the doorway. “I dislike you and hate you,” she said.

Sarcasm oozing from every syllable, he replied, “Goodnight and have a good sleep.”

“You too,” she said, but he wasn’t ready to make up and left her alone in the bedroom to continue his reading in Christopher’s room. Later he confessed that he’d been “testy for no very good reason,” but there was no winning with him. He complained that, during their contretemps, she’d “bickered back with almost masculine pride.” Any woman who disagreed with him ended up being called a lesbian, in so many words. Despite the advent of Betty Freidan’s
The Feminine Mystique
and women’s lib, his sexism remained as toxic as it was incurable. “In terms of being self-supporting, I’ve been women’s lib ever since I was a baby,”
¹⁸
Elizabeth declared, but in a deeper sense, she was the antithesis of a liberated woman in her conviction that she was incomplete without a man. Nonetheless, as author and journalist Cy Egan pointed out, “She broke the mold that had trapped women for many years. She started in an era when it was a social liability for a woman to be intelligent—you’d never get a man if you revealed how smart you were or said what you meant. Elizabeth Taylor said go out there and do what you want and say what’s on your mind. Women love her. Whatever her faults, she’s a feminist model.”

In April 1969, peace at last returned to Casa Kimberley. Elizabeth was content to work jigsaw puzzles or play with her jewels while Richard, whose arthritic legs kept him from walking, lay abed reading. He called her “Lumpy” and said she looked “like a little girl.” Their truce soon ended. By the time she accompanied him to London in May for his new film,
Anne of the Thousand Days
, they were fighting again “over anything and everything.” She wanted to play Anne Boleyn opposite Richard’s Henry VIII, but he frankly told her, “Sorry, luv, you’re too long in the tooth.” The fresh, vibrant twenty-seven-year-old French-Canadian actress Genevieve Bujold got the part. She wanted Elizabeth off the set, but it was written into the Burtons’ contracts that spouses could be present any time they chose. “I’m going to give that bitch an acting lesson she’ll never forget,” Bujold said, and proceeded to deliver one of the screen’s memorable performances, later receiving the Golden Globe trophy as the best dramatic actress of the year.
¹⁹

During a 1969 trip to Paris, the Burtons’ booze-fueled brawls at the Georges V attracted attention, and the press dubbed them “the battling Burtons.”
²⁰
Thirty years later, in
USA Today
, they were still being referred to as “the world’s most tempestuous couple.” By May, they were back in London, mooring the
Kalizma
at Princess Steps on the Thames. Evidently the violence of their recent fights had rekindled their sex life. “Elizabeth is an eternal one night stand,” Burton wrote on May 25. “She is my private and personal bought mistress. And lascivious with it.” As a sex partner she was “a receiver, a perpetual returner of the ball,” he wrote. They were just beginning to make love on June 6 when she started bleeding, “and I mean BLEED,” he recalled. “Thick clots of blood that had to be fingered into disappearing down the drain.” Many heavy drinkers attest that alcohol liquefies their food intake and gives them diarrhea, eventually resulting in injury to their rectums and hemorrhages with every bowel movement.

Returning to the United States, she consulted her Beverly Hills proctologist, Dr. Herman Swerdlow, at the Palm Springs home of her friend Dorothy Allen. She underwent a procedure that involved “the insertion of some dreadful machine up her behind,” Richard related, but her recuperation was so speedy that by June 11, he was crowing that nothing excited him quite as much as seeing her “in the shortest mini-skirt. The slightest inclination from the vertical and her entire bum was revealed.” She enraged him, however, when she failed to cooperate with his attempts to go on the wagon.

By late September, in Gstaad, Richard’s drinking had reduced him to a vegetable. Elizabeth had to help him raise his highballs to his lips because his own hands were so palsied from alcohol. On October 2, a terrible argument erupted, but Elizabeth attempted to pacify him, saying, “Come on, Richard, hold my hand.”

He sneered, “I do not wish to touch your hands. They are large and ugly and red and masculine.” As a guilty, unfulfilled, and repressed homoerotic male, the worst punishment he could think of was to cast aspersions on her heterosexuality. Learning at last how to capitalize on his sadistic streak, the following morning she informed him that the largest diamond in the world was for sale, and she wanted it. Perhaps it would be big enough to make her “ugly big hands look smaller,” she said.
²¹
He was dumbfounded. She already had the 33.19-carat Krupp and La Peregrina Pearl, and now she expected him to acquire a 69.42-carat diamond ring being offered at auction by Mrs. Paul A. Ames, the sister of billionaire
TV Guide
publisher Walter Annenberg, U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. At one inch long and one inch thick, it outsparkled the most famous diamond in the world, the blue 44.5-carat Hope diamond, bought by Edward B. McLean in 1911 and worn by Evalyn Walsh McLean. One of the few diamonds capable of upstaging Mrs. Ames’s was the Koh-i-noor, the principal jewel in Queen Elizabeth’s state crown, which was 106.6 carats.