It has been more than three decades since she made a memorable film but no other movie actress in the second half of the 20th century sustained a hold on the public’s imagination longer or more assuredly than Elizabeth Taylor. Maybe Marilyn Monroe ran her a close second, but she had to die in her prime to do it.
“Dying young does give Marilyn an edge over most of us,” Elizabeth conceded when the subject of Hollywood immortals came up the last time we met in Los Angeles. “But I nearly died quite a few times. Nearly dying was my speciality. That has to count for something, doesn’t it?”
I first met Liz in 1960 when she began filming Cleopatra in London — a production that was abandoned, and later moved to Rome, when she nearly died of pneumonia. Doctors had fought for 10 days to save her life.
Survival, she liked to say, was her middle name. “I’ve appeared in more theatres than Dame Nellie Melba on her farewell tour. Unfortunately, mine have all been operating theatres,” she once told me. She could always be funny about her ailments. In 30 years she had more than 37 operations, including the removal of a benign brain tumour, congestive heart failure, and hip joint replacements.
Her loyalty to old friends was staunch and often puzzling. She stuck by Michael Jackson at the height of his scandal, when it was considered unwise even to return his phone calls. She did the first big charity show for AIDS when AIDS was still a forbidden topic.
Elizabeth was a great collector: of two Oscars (Butterfield 8 and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), innumerable global accolades (she treasured her DBE), and eight husbands (if you count Richard Burton twice). It was her two marriages to the bibulous Welsh actor that most people remember, and which will always define her.
They first met on the set of Cleopatra in Rome in 1962. For her role as the fabled Egyptian queen, Elizabeth became the first actor ever to be paid $1 million for a film. For far less money, Burton played Mark Antony.
“Richard came on the set and sort of sidled over to me and said: ‘Has anyone ever told you that you’re a very pretty girl?’ ” she recalled of their first encounter. “I thought, ‘Oy, gevalt’,” — she had been married to Mike Todd, the brash Jewish-America showman, whose religion and vernacular she had adopted — “the great lover, the great wit, the great Welsh intellectual, and he comes out with a corny line like that!” But then she noticed that his hands were shaking, “as if he had Saturday-night palsy. He had the worst hangover I’d ever seen. He was obviously terrified of me. I just took pity on him. I realised he really was human. That was the beginning of our affair.”
From their first screen embrace, it was plain that she and Burton were more than just good friends. Director Joseph Mankiewicz, aware of the potential for scandal and trouble, cabled the studio: “I want to give you some facts you ought to know. Liz and Richard are not just playing lovers — they are lovers.” Their affair broke up each other’s marriage. The scandal almost bankrupted the studio 20th Century Fox. Each got $1 million for their next film.
They were still going through the process of their divorces when I caught up with Elizabeth in Mexico, where Burton was making Night of the Iguana. It was 1963. He was now the top-notch star he had always wanted to be.
Aged 31, with four marriages behind her she contemplated marriage to Burton with an equanimity that astonished me. “Richard knows me better than any man I’ve known,” she said. “I think he was born knowing me. I feel I’m in safe hands.” Burton agreed. “I know her inside out, stewed and sober, in sickness and what passes for health in her hurt and troubled life.”
At dinner that evening, she told me: “A lot of mistakes I’ve made were because of the peculiar world I’ve lived in. I’ve been a movie actress since I was 10 years old, so of course I’ve been spoiled and pampered. The most difficult problem for any actress is trying to understand the difference between reality and make-believe. Richard has given me a sense of reality. I’m now, above and beyond anything else, a woman. That’s his gift to me.”
She married Burton in 1964, but it was a tempestuous relationship as well as an enriching one. Together they made 11 films and achieved a kind of corporate notoriety. They drank too much.
In 1974, they divorced. But their addiction to each other remained unchanged. The following year they remarried. One year later they divorced for the final time.
“It takes one day to die — another to be reborn,” Elizabeth announced defiantly, but those who knew her well knew that Burton was still the love of her life. The happiest and most exhilarating years of her life, which began and ended with Richard Burton, were over.
She was increasingly frail in her last years, and only seen in a wheelchair. “I never imagined there’d be such a price to pay for the fun we had,” she said the last time I saw her.
Last year, 25 years after his death, Elizabeth Taylor was asked if she would marry Burton again if that were possible. “In a heartbeat,” she said.
I’m told that she died with a picture of Burton by her bedside.
(The writer is working on ‘Ava’, a personal memoir of Ava Gardner)
The Daily Telegraph