Free Furious Love by Sam Kashner Page A

been wrestling with the myriad disasters of Cleopatra , Zanuck had smoothly overseen production of The Longest Day , flying in Richard Burton from Rome, with none of the Sturm und Drang. Zanuck took over the final edit and produced one four-hour epic, served up with an intermission. Its final price tag, including distribution costs: $62 million ($434 million today), the most ever spent on a Hollywood movie at that time. The final cut ran slightly over four hours, making it the longest film ever released. It was not just the longest, it was also the heaviest: each print of Cleopatra weighed six hundred pounds. Even the publicity kit weighed more than ten pounds. Finally, when all was said and done, Wanger sued 20th Century-Fox for breach of contract, and the studio sued their two stars for $50,000, claiming that the bad publicity of their “scandalous conduct” had harmed the value of the film. They countersued, and the lawsuit was eventually dropped.
    Mankiewicz was heartbroken. With the film taken from his hands and drastically cut, he felt that some of his finest work was sacrificed, and that the final product—though it had its spectacular moments, such as Cleopatra’s grand entrance into Rome—lacked cohesion. Elizabeth, too, felt that the truncated version did Richarda disservice, leaving some of his best scenes unseen. Instead of portraying a strong character who gradually gives in to his weaknesses, Elizabeth complained, “they cut the film so that all you see is him drunk and shouting all the time, and you never know what in his character led up to that. He just looks like a drunken sot.”
    It was a disappointment that would haunt Mankiewicz the rest of his life, eventually turning him into a rather bitter recluse, nursing his grudges in a baronial country house in Bedford, New York, being trotted out to various film festivals toward the end of his life to receive honors for movies he’d made decades earlier. Elizabeth, in later years, was very much aware that Mankiewicz blamed the demise of his career on her and Burton’s “indulgences,” though she would speak graciously about her former director whenever she had the opportunity.
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    Signed by de Grunwald and free of the onerous work of Cleopatra , Burton and Taylor arrived in London on a cold morning in December of 1962. The hoopla that had surrounded the couple in Rome continued, but now it was mostly excited fans hounding them. They were mobbed at Victoria Station and fled in separate cars (Elizabeth in a blue Jaguar and Richard in a blue station wagon). When they arrived at the Dorchester Hotel on Park Lane, where they had taken adjoining penthouse suites, the lobby was awash with journalists and photographers. (Elizabeth had always stayed at the luxurious Dorchester, beginning with her days as a child actress. It was home to her.) Other actors signed to the film, including Rod Taylor, Linda Christian, and even Orson Welles, checked into the hotel virtually ignored by the press, which continued to swarm around Burton and Taylor.
    Burton was still married to Sybil and he agonized over his dilemma. There was no doubt that he was infatuated with Elizabeth. What had begun as a conquest quickly became an obsession—Elizabeth’s body was a marvel to him, the eighth wonder of the world. He reveled in her voluptuousness. And Elizabeth was in thrall to him sexually aswell—his rough skin, his intense, blue-green eyes, his voice, his smell, his “arrogant hair” all delighted her senses. “Imagine having Richard Burton’s voice in your ear while you are making love,” Elizabeth later recalled. “It drowned out the troubles, the sorrows, everything just melted away.” She found Richard “an incredibly sexy man. I was the happy recipient of his reputation as a man who knew how to please a woman. Being unfaithful to Richard was as impossible as not being in love with him.” In