Elizabeth Taylor by David Bret

Author:David Bret
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO005000
Publisher: Greystone Books
Published: 2011-05-09T04:00:00+00:00

TEN

THE BIG HANGOVER:

WHO’S AFRAID

OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?

FOR A WHILE, THE TAYLOR-BURTON AFFAIR HAD BEEN KEPT off the front pages by the death in August 1962 of Marilyn Monroe. Suicide was given as the official cause, but, then as now, there was much speculation over whether she might have been murdered. Cynics have suggested that with her greed for hogging the limelight, Elizabeth deliberately maintained a low profile until the Monroe scandal had abated. But if she and Richard Burton were trying to kid their respective circles that their ‘romance’ was over, those who stood to gain financially from their liaison – for example, the studios, who hypocritically were more than eager to rake in any profits from La Scandale they had openly condemned – were delighted when, at the end of the month, they read in the press that it had resurfaced with a vengeance. When news leaked that the pair had met for lunch ‘somewhere in Switzerland’, MGM were the first to monopolise on the tidings – and Elizabeth’s ‘scandalous’ comment that rather than marry Burton she had no objections to becoming his mistress – by persuading them to appear in Terence Rattigan’s The VIPs.

Shooting began early in 1963, with Elizabeth and Burton travelling separately from the Victoria boat-train to the Dorchester, where they took up residence in separate suites. Burton feigned the dutiful husband, ping-ponging back and forth to see Sybil at their house in Hampstead’s Squire’s Mount. Needless to say, the press were not fooled because neither Burton nor Elizabeth stopped boasting about how much they missed one other whilst apart, even for a few hours. So that he would always be thinking of her whilst alone in his suite, Elizabeth forked out a cool $250,000 for a Van Gogh landscape, along with $10,000 for several hundred leather-bound books that Burton never found time to open. If he was not with Elizabeth – indeed, most of the time that he was with her – he was in too much of a stupor to be aware of his surroundings.

Occasionally, Burton sobered up sufficiently to bellow a few good lines in The VIPs, not that this made the film any better. Pathologically boring, it comprises a series of Grand Hotel-style vignettes set in and around the VIP lounge of a London airport. The flights have been delayed by fog, allowing an assortment of odd-bod characters to meet and fling around a few home truths. On account of the leads’ salaries, it was MGM’s costliest production in years: Elizabeth demanded and received $500,000, along with half this amount against a percentage of the box-office receipts. Upon her insistence, Burton was paid the same, and the money was deposited in bank accounts in Bermuda for tax purposes. The rest of the cast received considerably less than $1 million among them, despite being comprised of the cream of the British acting crop, including Maggie Smith, Rod Taylor, Michael Hordern, Richard Briers and the wonderful Margaret Rutherford, who ran rings around everyone else as an eccentric duchess and who was rewarded with a Best Supporting Actress Oscar.

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