Free Furious Love by Sam Kashner

become accustomed to deference. Even her name befitted a queen. Her love of jewelry—diamonds especially—would be a leitmotif running throughout her life, apotheosized in the publication of Elizabeth Taylor , My Love Affair with Jewelry , a coffee-table book replete with vivid photographs of her most famous jewels and the circumstances surrounding them. One of Elizabeth’s early chroniclers, the literary biographer Brenda Maddox, speculated that Elizabeth’s attraction to diamonds was a kind of atavistic need to deflect the rapt gaze of her admirers. Her penchant for jewels was not lost on Andy Warhol, who believed that women live longer than men because they wear diamonds, which—because of the mystical powers of crystals—intensify and protect the life force. Perhaps he was on to something: Elizabethhas so far outlived four of her seven husbands, despite her often perilous health.
    One of her few pleasures in Rome, besides falling in love with Richard on the set of Cleopatra , had been Elizabeth’s discovery of the Italian jeweler Bulgari’s “nice little shop” on Via Condotti. “I used to visit Gianni Bulgari in the afternoons,” she later recalled, “and we’d sit in what he called the ‘money room’ and swap stories.” One day, when they’d managed to evade the paparazzi, Richard told Elizabeth, “I feel like buying you a present!” Off they went to Bulgari’s back room, where Richard announced his intention to buy a gift, but it had to be under $100,000. Gianni showed them a pair of lovely but rather small earrings. Richard and Elizabeth exchanged glances—by now he knew her tastes. “Try again,” he told the jeweler.
    By the end of the afternoon, they departed with a stunning, emerald-and-diamond necklace with a pendant that could be detached and worn as a brooch. The diamonds surrounding the pendant were 10 carats each, and the necklace cost well over $100,000, but Elizabeth pointed out to Richard that with the detachable pendant, “it’s really like getting two pieces for the price of one.” She would later complete the set (or, rather, Richard would) with a matching emerald-and-diamond ring, pendant earrings, and a beautiful bracelet—all part of what Bulgari described as “the Grand Duchess Vladimir Suite.”
    Elizabeth would later have a little fight with Anthony “Puffin” Asquith, the director of The V.I.P.s , over wearing the brooch as part of her Givenchy-designed costume. The producer, who had accepted the uninsurable Elizabeth Taylor, would now have to insure the fabulous jewel. However, the quick-thinking director persuaded her to allow a copy to be made for filming.
    Â 
    After Burton’s and Taylor’s work was done on Cleopatra , the real power struggle began. Horrified over the movie’s tremendous cost, which had forced Skouras to sell off 260 acres of 20th Century-Fox’s back lot to the real estate developer William Zeckendorf (turningthe vast acreage into present-day Century City), the studio’s founder, Darryl F. Zanuck, swooped in to save his company from destruction. In a stockholders’ takeover, he forced out Skouras, reclaimed his former title as studio head, and fired Cleopatra ’s producer, Walter Wanger. After being ignominiously fired, Wanger would never produce another film. Zanuck then turned his attention to Mankiewicz.
    Burdened with twenty-six hours of film, the director had planned to bring out two parallel movies: Caesar and Cleopatra and Antony and Cleopatra , and he set about editing the two epics. Zanuck, however, hated the idea. First, it was not yet clear how the worldwide publicity surrounding Taylor’s adulterous affair with Burton would play out at the box office. Hedging his predecessors’ bets and trying to salvage what he could, Zanuck fired Mankiewicz and took over editing the film himself. While Mankiewicz had