After ten years of marriage, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor were divorced in June 1974. Their intense passion for each other had dissolved into drunken arguments, fights and tantrums. So when Taylor asked to meet her ex-husband, just over a year later, he was understandably trepidatious. ‘What will it be like seeing her again? I’m a little scared…keep my fingers crossed,’ he wrote in his diary.
During their year apart, they’d both had prolonged peccadilloes. Taylor had sailed around the Mediterranean with a used car salesman, Henry Wynberg. ‘Let’s say she put her heart into it,’ Wynberg said later about their couplings. ‘Sex was one of Elizabeth’s great discoveries. She had indulged in it relentlessly.’
Burton, too, had been indulging. One girlfriend was Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia; another was a Playboy bunny, Jean Bell, whom he’d persuaded to move into his home in Switzerland, where her son was enrolled at the local school.
Then came the meeting with Taylor, 42, on August 11, 1975, at a hotel in Lausanne, Switzerland. ‘Someday, somewhere, you son of a bitch, something will make you realise you can’t live without me,’ she told him.
A few days later, they announced their decision to remarry. The next month, they flew by Learjet to South Africa, where Taylor decided she had lung cancer. ‘I had about 12 hours to contemplate death,’ she said later.
If Taylor’s eight marriages broke up like meringues, it is because the chief difficulty she had with men is that they were romantic projections, willed into existence on her terms
After ten years of marriage Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor’s intense passion for one another had dissolved into drunken arguments, fights and tantrums
The couple (pictured after a performance in New York) announced their decision to remarry in 1975.
When she was first married, Taylor believed her romantic life was settled forever
Taylor attending the Macy’s Passport benefit at the Barker Hangar in Santa Monica, California in September 2009
Taylor was just 17, a sacrificial virgin, when she first got engaged. Her hotel chain heir had a 64-room mansion in Bel Air, with five kitchens, gold silk walls and 26 lavatories with gold taps
The actress made similar claims of undying love for other husbands, including American politician John Warner
Taylor with Richard Burton in Sardinia on the set of ‘Go forth’ which was later entitled ‘Boom’
The lung cancer – cured by a Valium pill – was a ruse to get Burton, 49, as quickly as possible to the altar – an outdoor ceremony in Botswana, conducted by an elder of the Bantu-speaking Tswana tribe. Taylor remarked: ‘We are stuck like chicken feathers to tar, for lovely always.’
Their bodyguard remembered that, though Burton was meant to be detoxifying, Taylor poured him murderously big gins. Both were drinking heavily, getting ill in the heat, blacking out, having the shakes – no wonder, with double brandies first thing of a morning.
On his return from Africa, Burton looked back on his second wedding to Taylor as a hallucination. ‘It was like a huge dream… doomed from the start.’
If Taylor’s eight marriages broke up like meringues, it is because the chief difficulty she had with men is that they were romantic projections, willed into existence on her terms.
Her expectations were wholly far-fetched – ‘I am now Mrs Hilton. You can take it from me that my romantic life is settled forever,’ she said when she married for the first time in 1950, aged 18, to hotel chain heir Conrad Nicholson Hilton Jr.
She made similar claims of undying love for other husbands, including American politician John Warner – ‘I want to spend the rest of my life with him and I want to be buried with him’ – and divorced him after six years.
The only exception was her last, construction worker Larry Fortensky, about who she doesn’t seem to have said much at all.
She’d been just 17, a sacrificial virgin, when she first got engaged. Her hotel chain heir had a 64-room mansion in Bel Air, with five kitchens, gold silk walls and 26 lavatories with gold taps.
Taylor’s mother was dazzled: ‘You are never going to do any better than Nicky Hilton.’ Her daughter concurred. Hilton certainly seemed more palatable than the billionaire Howard Hughes, who’d wanted to purchase the former child star from her parents for $1million.
MGM, the studio who’d arranged everything for Taylor since the age of eight, supervised every detail of the wedding, which was attended by Spencer Tracy, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers and Gene Kelly.
Louis B Mayer paid for her gown as well as the wedding breakfast, the blue silk going-away frock with mink stole, her trousseau and the 17 steamer trunks piped aboard the Queen Mary.
On their honeymoon in Europe, Hilton drank, gambled and beat up his 18-year-old bride. In Rome, she told a friend her marriage was a cruel farce. She was wearing long sleeves to conceal her bruises.
‘I had terrible pains… I left him after having a baby kicked out of my stomach… I saw the baby in the toilet,’ she told the friend. The marriage was over before the end of the honeymoon.
By January 1951, they were divorced. But she hung on to one wedding gift – shares in the Hilton Corporation – and by 1994 her portfolio was valued at $21.7million. After she had rid herself of Hilton, there was never again any indication of a fragile girl somewhere inside. If Taylor wanted to be beaten by future husbands – and she clearly did – it was so she could kick and bite right back.
Just a year later she was married again, this time to a man 20 years her senior who ‘represented tranquillity, security, maturity’. These qualities soon irritated her enormously.
Michael Wilding was the typical English gentleman, shy and distant in manner and an actor in the style of David Niven.
He had noticed Taylor – then starring in Ivanhoe – while working at MGM’s British studios. She was ‘wiggling her hips,’ he later recalled, as she walked the length of the canteen to collect a salt cellar. ‘Why don’t you invite me out to dinner tonight?’ she asked him.
Their bodyguard remembered that, though Burton was meant to be detoxifying, Taylor poured him murderously big gins
Taylor and Michael Wilding at Caxton Hall register office in London. It was the second marriage for both of them
Elizabeth Taylor wearing a green sleeveless low-cut dress in around 1950
Taylor starred as the title character in the 1963 film Cleopatra
Taylor pictured with Fran Drescher in the 1993 film The Nanny, directed by Dorothy Lyman
Wilding found her ‘a seething mass of feminine wiles’ but didn’t stand a chance. As it turned out, 1952 was a leap year and it was Taylor who proposed. She said Wilding was ‘all I need in the world’, but was soon to find he was the last thing she wanted.
Her new husband expected her to be domesticated and was astounded at her incompetence. ‘Elizabeth has very little of the housewife in her,’ he said incredulously. ‘Forgets to order dinner. Elizabeth couldn’t even fry eggs. She can’t cook and shows no sign of trying to learn.
‘She is untidy to the point of disaster. She makes a room look as if a tornado has hit it. It’s a kind of disease with her.’ How like a testy 1950s husband Wilding sounds. But Taylor, always wilful and capricious, was not to be tamed.
They did, however, manage to have two children. ‘The happiest years of our marriage,’ Wilding told her later, ‘were when you were dependent on me.’
But how could he conceivably expect to keep her subservient?
She’d become enraged when her husband refused to participate in her sado-masochistic games. ‘Go on, hit me! Hit me, why don’t you?’ she demanded.
‘I’ve never gone in for hitting hysterical females,’ he said, attempting to keep some dignity. ‘If only you would,’ she taunted. ‘At least that would prove you are flesh and blood instead of a stuffed dummy.’
Taylor and Mike Todd on their honeymoon
He was often absent, drinking during the day in seedy bars with actors Errol Flynn and John Garfield, while Taylor was constantly in demand for film roles.
‘You’d better watch out,’ these old soaks warned him, ‘or you’ll be known as Mr Elizabeth Taylor.’ He didn’t really rise even to that level of attainment. Wilding just sat there, ‘watching my career turn to ashes’. Which it certainly did.
Though there would be brief appearances in future films, Wilding was eventually to be found working as the maître d’ at a restaurant in Brighton called The Three Little Wilding Rooms.
‘I was dead. Old at 24,’ Taylor confided to a friend. At least she was able to indulge her taste for torment – which she both feared and required – with her next husband.
At a swanky dinner, while still married to Wilding, Taylor found herself the focus of a fellow guest: 47-year-old film producer Mike Todd. She was 24.
Almost immediately, he presented her with jewels, roses, Impressionist paintings, even a Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud. Soon he was flying her to Chicago and Atlantic City for dirty weekends.
‘They are two of a kind,’ said Wilding, resignedly.
He allowed Taylor to file for divorce in November 1956, citing ‘extreme mental cruelty’. ‘Mike’s courtship hit me like a tornado,’ gasped Taylor. His proposal was novel: ‘From now on, you’ll f*** nobody but me’.’
They recorded their grapples on a reel-to-reel tape recorder – the moaning and groaning; the bedspring sonatas – and Todd found it amusing to present a spool to the newspaper magnate Lord Beaverbrook when they went on his yacht.
Todd and Taylor’s wedding in Mexico, when she was three months pregnant, was vulgar in the extreme – lorry after lorry bringing 15,000 white gladioli and bushels of orchids; crabs, lobsters, caviar; 25 cases of champagne poured into coconut halves.
Her relationship with Todd was savage. ‘I’d try to drive Mike mad,’ she said. ‘I’d be late, I’d love it when he would lose his temper and dominate me. I’d start to purr because he’d won’ – yet didn’t it mean she’d won?
In public, Todd and Taylor would be pushing, shoving and slapping each other across the chops.
Singer Eddie Fisher, Todd’s best friend, saw him knock her to the floor at dinner. ‘He really belted her. Elizabeth screamed, walloped him right back… Mike dragged her by the hair, while she was kicking and scratching him… she liked to be roughed up.’
Fisher’s wife, actress Debbie Reynolds, who also witnessed the ugliness, says the film producer would be chewing on his food gorilla-fashion, then look at Taylor and say, ‘I’d like to f*** you as soon as I finish this.’
Todd was a ghastly huckster who each day chewed 20 Cuban cigars. Slamming doors, slamming into people, barking into five phones simultaneously, he craved excitement and was never far from brutality.
Was he a murderer, too? His first wife Bertha died ‘accidentally’ in 1946 as a result of a ‘self-inflicted stab wound’, sustained when chasing Todd with a kitchen knife. Her jewels and furs went missing and were never recovered.
His second wife, actress Joan Blondell, discovered he’d gambled away $3million of her savings. When she complained, he dangled her by the ankles out of a 16th-floor window. Joan was left with a broken arm, a nervous breakdown and nothing in the bank.
To Taylor, however, ‘Mike was the greatest love I shall ever know’.
He inspected her schedules, expected to be granted final approval of her wardrobe – and when she had difficulty choosing among a batch of 50 hats, Todd said: ‘Oh, wrap up the whole 50.’ Taylor always fell for gestures like that.
His control freakery she interpreted as adoration. When she went away on location for the film Raintree County, the phone was ringing the moment she set foot in her rented house.
‘I didn’t want you there one second before you talked to me,’ said Todd down the line.
Every day, when Taylor returned from work, there he’d be again: ‘Shut-eye time for you! You’ve got a 7am call tomorrow morning… I know what time you break for lunch and I’ll call you then.’
The marriage was never going to end well, though it did end.
On March 22, 1958, Todd took off in his private plane from Burbank, California, for New York. It crashed in New Mexico and he was burned to a crisp, identifiable only by his wedding ring.
On being told the news, Taylor was hysterical, running out into the road screaming. She wailed so much that her doctor said she should have her tonsils out.
On being told the news that Todd was dead, Taylor was hysterical, running out into the road screaming. She wailed so much that her doctor said she should have her tonsils out
At home, she was comforted by Debbie Reynolds, wife of Eddie Fisher, and by Greta Garbo who said: ‘Be brave!’ Her relationship with Todd had lasted 414 days, brief enough for disillusion not to set in. ‘I shall never love anyone so much again,’ said Taylor.
Comforter in chief was Eddie Fisher, who soon abandoned Debbie to offer more. Taylor liked to be pinned to the ground during love-making, he said – ‘Elizabeth loved to fight’ – with sex as abrupt as rape. Fisher’s other job was as an errand boy – looking after Taylor’s 60 pieces of luggage, answering the phones, walking the dogs, ordering the limos.
His original appeal was an intimacy with Todd. Indeed, it was Todd who got him to effect an introduction to Taylor: ‘Come over and talk to her. Tell her how great I am.’
‘I tried to copy him,’ Fisher admitted of his predecessor, ‘from the tips of his shoes to the way he combed his hair.’ As Taylor later viewed it, her relationship with Fisher was an odd way of resurrecting Todd. ‘All Eddie and I had in common was Mike and that was sick. Boy, did I realise how sick it was.’
At the time, however, she told the world: ‘I love Eddie dearly… I have never been happier in my life.’
Fisher did his best to please her: he bought her ten dresses from Dior, ten from Yves Saint Laurent, a Jaguar car, fur-lined coats, a 40-carat diamond bracelet and a $325,000 chalet in Gstaad.
However, for much of their five-year marriage – after their wedding in Las Vegas in May 1959 – he was more like her nursemaid than a lover because Taylor had by then become, as he said, ‘the world’s greatest hypochondriac… she enjoyed playing the invalid. It was a way of testing the devotion of those around her’.
Many of her illnesses were a result of too many tumblers of Jack Daniel’s or of swallowing quantities of opiates, hypnotics, tranquillisers, antidepressants and stimulants. Racing yet again through the night in an ambulance, Taylor would command: ‘Get my lip gloss!’
In 1962, Fisher accompanied her to Rome where she was about to shoot Cleopatra. He was soon alarmed by the electricity between her and Richard Burton, there to play Antony.
‘Don’t leave me, Eddie. You must stay and help me exorcise this cancer,’ said Taylor. But you can’t stop what’s coming. Fisher, goaded almost beyond endurance by her affair with Burton, obtained a gun. ‘Don’t worry, Elizabeth. I’m not going to kill you. You’re too beautiful,’ he told her.
After eventually leaving Taylor, Fisher took to vodka and barbiturates and was dropped by the RCA Victor record label. His former wife Debbie saw him again in 1973 and found he’d become prematurely ‘an old, beaten man’.
Taylor’s second marriage to Burton, in 1975, drooped because ‘the trouble is, he can’t get it up any more’. Or so she told a journalist, in Burton’s hearing, over lunch at Scott’s restaurant in London.
They divorced the following year. What had fundamentally gone wrong was what went wrong with her other relationships: real and dream images had collided. Yet after two divorces, the pair came back together in 1983 to co-star in the play Private Lives, for $70,000 a week each. ‘How terrible a thing time is,’ said Burton in his diary that March. ‘Elizabeth gave me the terrors again. She is such a mess.’
Taylor’s second marriage to Burton, in 1975, drooped because ‘the trouble is, he can’t get it up any more’
She was avoiding rehearsals, claiming she was sick and her teeth were falling out. During the run, she called Burton in the middle of the night, convinced she’d gone blind. Burton heard loud crashes and yells (‘S***! Hell!’), finally an explanation: a false eyelash had got stuck. ‘I bred her in my bones,’ Burton once said of Taylor – but his bones were not well. He had all the alcohol-related illnesses: gout, epilepsy, arthritis, bursitis.
During the run of Private Lives, he married Sally Hay, a 35-year-old TV production assistant. ‘Elizabeth can’t look after me. I need Sally. She takes care of an old man,’ he said.
Did he ever really leave Taylor, though? Burton’s last two wives – Suzy Hunt and Sally – both feared the answer would be ‘No’.
Taylor went around saying to anyone who’d listen: ‘In my heart, I will always believe that we would have been married a third and final time … from those first moments in Rome, we were always madly and powerfully in love.’ She adorned her house with framed pictures of Burton: ‘He’s where I can keep an eye on him, and he’d better believe it.’
Burton was less consistent, raving in July 1984: ‘I didn’t think I would ever feel this or say this, but I don’t want to see her ever again.’
Yet that same month, on the last occasion he saw his brother Graham, he told him: ‘You know, Elizabeth and I never really split up, and never will.’
When Burton died of a cerebral haemorrhage the following month, Taylor ‘was completely out of control’, said Mexican lawyer Victor Luna, her latest lover, who’d only recently given her a Cartier ring worth $300,000.
Sally, who’d spent a grand total of 26 months with Burton, barred Taylor from the funeral.
Excruciatingly, in his last days at home in Switzerland, he’d called Sally ‘Elizabeth’. It was an eerie fulfilment of a prophecy he’d made in 1973: ‘When I am on my last bed and nearing the eternal shore… the words Elizabeth, Elizabeth, Elizabeth…will be on my lips.’
© Roger Lewis 2023
Adapted from Erotic Vagrancy by Roger Lewis (Quercus Publishing, £30), to be published on October 26. To order a copy for £27 (offer valid until October 30, 2023; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.
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