“My liver is to be buried separately from the rest of me, with full honors.”
A star of the stage in London and on Broadway, Richard Burton carved out a niche onscreen headlining historical epics. But however well he wore a crown, it was his series of tumultuous marriages to Elizabeth Taylor in the 1960s that cemented him as one of the biggest stars in the world. Welsh, he came to Hollywood after a much-lauded portrayal of Prince Hal in Henry IV, Part I (1951). His debut in My Cousin Rachel (1952) earned him the first of seven Oscar nominations (though he never won). Burton’s portrayal of Jimmy Porter, an angry young man, in Look Back in Anger (1959) helped spawn the next generation of British actors. In 1963, he fell in love with Taylor on the set of Cleopatra, at the time the most expensive movie ever made. They tied the knot the following year and made numerous pictures together, most notably Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966). The film would garner thirteen Academy Award nominations. (Taylor would win, for Best Actress, while Burton, nominated for Best Actor, would not.) The stress of playing the dysfunctional couple at the heart of the movie was said to take a toll on their real-life marriage. The couple divorced in 1974, remarried in 1975, then divorced for good in 1976. Burton received a final Oscar nomination for Equus (1977). His last movie was a well-regarded adaptation of Orwell’s 1984 (1984).
HE THOUGHT IT WAS IN THE BAG. After much persuasion, Mike Mindlin had finally convinced Richard Burton to go through with the Ed Sullivan taping. Mindlin was handling publicity for Becket, currently in production at Shepperton Studios outside London, with Burton and Peter O’Toole in starring roles.
Ed Sullivan had just flown to England with the express purpose of interviewing them on location. Burton, however, had decided at the last minute that he’d cancel the appearance if he didn’t receive his normal television fee. Fortunately, now that he’d had a few drinks, he wasn’t feeling quite so obstinate. On the contrary: he was holding court in the lobby of the Dorchester Hotel, tourists everywhere, his new love, Elizabeth Taylor, by his side. One minute he was quoting Dylan Thomas and the next—well, the next, he was throwing up. Everywhere. It was an instance in which Burton, legendary for his capacity to consume alcohol, had gone beyond even his limit.
This was a man who at his peak (or valley) was known to drain three bottles of vodka in a day—a man who once proclaimed, “If you can’t do Hamlet straight through with a hangover, you ought to get right off the damn stage.” According to Robert Sellers’s terrific biography Hellraisers, during the theatrical run of Camelot, starring opposite Julie Andrews, Burton wagered that he could start with a bottle of vodka while performing the matinee and then work through a bottle of cognac during the evening performance—without showing the effects. After the last curtain fell, Andrews, not even realizing he was drunk, commented that his performance was “a little better than usual.” Performing in John Gielgud’s production of Hamlet, Burton downed a whole quart of brandy in one evening’s performance. The only noticeable difference, a critic would note, “was that he played the last two acts as a homosexual.”
This was a man who at his peak (or valley) was known to drain three bottles of vodka in a day—a man who once proclaimed, “If you can’t do Hamlet straight through with a hangover, you ought to get right off the damn stage.”
And now, here in London, it seemed he and O’Toole were in the midst of a friendly but intense competition. Becket was the first time the two men had worked together, and from a collaborative standpoint, they’d been excited from the start. O’Toole himself was a phenomenal lush and something of an eccentric, with a habit of getting drunk enough to pick fights with policemen and a proclivity for climbing walls. One night, after having been booed on the London stage, O’Toole got pissed on homemade mead and was locked up for disturbing a building. In court the next morning, he confessed to bursting into song in an attempt to seduce an insurance office.
But once they arrived on set, what the two stars were especially curious to discover was who could perform better under the influence. So they made a pact: both would remain on the wagon until they felt fully comfortable in their roles. After that, all bets were off. Sobriety had lasted all of ten days, when Burton suggested they deserved a little snifter—after which, the pair drank straight through the next two days. For the rest of the five-month shoot, they were perpetually wasted. Burton later described O’Toole’s performance, a scene where King Henry puts a ring on Becket’s finger, as a man threading “a needle wearing boxing gloves.”
Mindlin knew all of this. It was impossible to visit the set and not know. So as embarrassing as Burton’s public puking might have been—and even Burton himself felt humiliated—it didn’t come as a total shock. Mindlin just walked Burton and Taylor to the elevator, wished them a good night, and told them he’d see them for the Sullivan interview tomorrow.
The next morning, Peter Glenville, the director of Becket, phoned Mindlin and urged him to schedule the Sullivan taping before lunch. Burton and O’Toole sometimes went to a local pub, the King’s Head, on their break, and if that happened, there was no telling what shape they’d return in. Mindlin arranged for everyone to meet at the studio at noon. Ed Sullivan was there on time. So was O’Toole. No Burton. For hours. Around 5 p.m., Burton and Taylor finally arrived, epically sloshed. Burton, attempting to put on his Becket costume, kept trying to pull his tights over his trousers. Taylor laughed as though she’d never seen anything so funny. Sullivan began the interview by asking Burton if this was the first time he and O’Toole had worked together; Burton slurred that it was, and would “prolly fucking be the lashed.” Tape rolled for another fifteen minutes before everyone involved gave up. Suffice to say, the segment never aired.
When filming began on Tennessee Williams’s Night of the Iguana, director John Huston gave each member of his principal cast the gift of a gold-plated Derringer. One each for Ava Gardner, Deborah Kerr, Sue Lyon, Richard Burton, and finally, Elizabeth Taylor (who wasn’t in the movie, but was hanging out because she was in love with Burton). Inside the box for each gun were four bullets engraved with the names of the other costars. By the time all was said and done, he figured the bullets might come in handy.
The location for Night of the Iguana was Mismaloya, a remote village in Mexico, a few miles off the coast of Puerto Vallarta. Huston’s plan was to house the cast and crew in the village, and to that end he ordered the construction of a small American suburb: a restaurant, bar, and living quarters; roads, power plants, and water storage facilities; plus an editing room and the film’s one set, an old hotel. It was a beautiful setting, but there wasn’t a lot to do besides work. And drink. This would seem to be a theme of many of Huston’s productions.
Despite an entire cast of all-star tipplers, the lion’s share of the drinking fell to Burton and Taylor, at that time the most gossiped-about couple in the world. (That Taylor was still technically married to singer Eddie Fisher only added grist.) The day the couple arrived in Mexico, the mob that swarmed them was so overwhelming that they were forced to run from the plane to their car, with Taylor being groped and Burton punching anyone who got in their way. Later, Burton issued a statement to the press: “This is my first visit to Mexico. I trust it shall be my last.”
But to their surprise, Burton and Taylor fell in love with the place. Specifically Casa Kimberley, a house they’d rented in Puerto Vallarta (they had refused to stay in the primitive Mismaloya digs), which they promptly announced their intention to buy. The only drawback to staying in Puerto Vallarta was the trip across the water to the set each morning. This journey involved wading out to a canoe, then paddling over to a motorboat that, after crossing a short patch of Pacific, would land at the foot of what was more or less a rope ladder. The ladder led to a wooden staircase that was then climbed to a rough footpath. When Taylor heard Gardner whining about how unpleasant the boat ride was, she suggested Gardner water-ski across instead. Which is exactly what Gardner started doing: one hand holding the towline, the other a cocktail. Given the heat, the discomfort, and the boredom, cocktails only seemed to help.
Drinking started early and never stopped: Burton insisted that the set of stairs he had to climb at the Mismaloya boat-landing be equipped with two bars: one at the bottom, one at the top. Taylor, since she wasn’t working, began her days at 10 a.m. at the Oceana Hotel bar, starting with vodka, then moving on to tequila. Burton would start his day with beer, this at 7 a.m., so that by the time shooting was over he would have polished off a case. Joining Taylor at the bar, he would shift to hard liquor. There was a joke around the set—to make a Burton cocktail you first take twenty-one shots of tequila. Quite literal, the joke stemmed from the time Burton took twenty-one shots of tequila. His one big booze discovery in Mexico—a cactus brandy called raicilla, which he swore you could feel move through your intestines, though somehow that doesn’t seem so pleasant.
Equally unpleasant was the smell of Burton. Apparently, he consumed so much alcohol throughout the day and well into the night that his 80-proof sweat threw off an incredibly foul odor. Working under a hot Mexican sun, this posed a unique challenge to his costars. Still, Taylor put it up with it, as she did his rudeness. Though deep in the throes of courtship and soon to marry, the couple found time to fight, publically and awfully. When Taylor paraded around set in ever-more revealing bikinis, Burton would comment that she looked like a tart. During a conversation at a dinner party in which Taylor insinuated Burton might be an opportunist for getting involved with her, Burton brought her to tears with his response: “You scurrilous low creature, you.” So irritated did Burton get with Taylor’s constant fussing over him that once, after she insisted on fixing the job his hairdresser had just finished, he poured an entire beer over his head and asked, “How do I look now, by God?”
Luckily, it seems the golden bullets were forgotten somewhere along the way.
RICHARD BURTON’S DRINKING ability was nothing less than miraculous, described by biographer Robert Sellers as “one of the wonders of the twentieth century.” Alan Jay Lerner, the creator of Camelot and one of Burton’s drinking mates, when looking for an explanation for his friend’s gift, went so far as to consult a doctor, who said, “Welsh livers and kidneys seem to be made of some metallic alloy, quite unlike the rest of the human race.” But really there is no explanation. Add to this that until the age of forty-five, Burton claims to have never had a single hangover.
One of his favorite drinks in those early years was a Boilermaker—a sudsy speedball of booze that combines a glass of beer and a shot of whiskey. There are several methods for tossing this mixture back, but Burton’s method, appropriately dramatic, was to line up pints of beer threaded in shots of whiskey, then go chugging down the row. He once took on a rugby team of Welsh miners, managing to kill off nineteen such Boilermakers. Details remain fuzzy as to exactly who won.
Changing genres, there is also a comedic Boilermaker to be had. In The Nutty Professor, Jerry Lewis, as Buddy Love, orders one, saying, “I’ve decided that I shall not continue the flight on the gas I’ve got, so give me a Boilermaker, and heavy on the boil.” Unfortunately, we never get to see the results. But in the opening credits of The Bad News Bears—the wonderful comedy created by Bill Lancaster and based upon his father, Burt—Walter Matthau couldn’t be more obliging. As the booze-soaked Coach Buttermaker, he makes his own uniquely hilarious Boilermaker, this in the front seat of his car.
And finally, one last genre: horror (or maybe more accurately, tragedy). When Bela Lugosi, B-movie star of Count Dracula fame, among other monsters, wasn’t on screen sucking on necks, he was off screen sucking down Boilermakers. Lugosi was also a well-known morphine addict and, in later years, nearly destitute. Ed Wood, B-movie director and himself a fiend with the bottle—whether wearing a skirt and pumps or not—recounts one particularly frightening tale.
It was three in the morning, and Wood had been asked to bring the Prince of Darkness some scotch, only to find him in his living room standing behind the curtain. This was where Lugosi would go when he wanted to fix. Having shot up, the Count stepped out, his body shaking and his face streaked with tears. In his hand there was a gun and it was pointed at his friend. “Eddie, I’m going to die tonight. I want to take you with me.” Fortunately Wood, who had taken several bullets in WWII, kept cool enough to see a way out—Boilermakers.
That night Lugosi would forsake glassware. The canned beer was to be room temperature—the Count was European after all—the scotch he just drank from the bottle. Soon enough, Lugosi put the gun away in a drawer and continued to drink his Boilermakers. At least the two old friends, the unemployed monster and the angora fetishist, had each other. After a while, Lugosi started to mix paraldehyde in with the beer, which he drank with the scotch. A sedative used to treat alcoholics for delirium tremens, paraldehyde smelled a bit like ether and helped induce sleep. The sun, after all, was just breaking and the Prince of Darkness would soon be heading off to bed.
