Divorce, Hollywood Style: It All Leads Back to Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton

Celebrity divorces last longer than celebrity marriages, and perhaps afford the public more sheer entertainment. Hearing about the clashing of egos, the mutual narcissism, the profligacy — it all makes us rather relieved to be living our littler, more anonymous lives.

“It’s easy to get into a marriage,” a Californian lawyer said, rubbing his hands with glee, “and very difficult to get out of one.” Love curdles into hatred, and soon enough it’s like the Wild West.

Currently, Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez, who said “I do” two years ago in Las Vegas, are hiring their attack dogs, i.e. their expensive attorneys, to argue about ownership of a $60 million-plus house in Beverly Hills, which has twelve bedrooms and twenty-four bathrooms.

Affleck earned $38 million last year — Jennifer might want a piece of that. Will she keep the $5 million engagement ring? There is much additional community property – a “bachelor pad” in Brentwood, worth $20.5 million; Jennifer recently sold a New York penthouse for $23 million. With these sorts of sums, you could run a country the size of Poland.

Melinda Gates received $76 billion from Bill Gates – she could not only run Poland, she could buy it and have it shipped. Jeff Bezos’ ex-wife, MacKenzie Scott, has spent her fortune on charitable causes.

After five years of marriage, Heather Mills wanted £125 million of Paul McCartney’s Beatles’ loot. In 2008, she settled for £24 million and reportedly tipped a bucket of water over Baroness Shackleton, the presiding solicitor.

Ivana Trump expected to receive $14 million from the President, plus $650,000 annually in child support. There was also a forty-five-room mansion in Connecticut, a flat in Trump Plaza, and Ivana also wanted the use of Mar-a-Lago for a month a year.

But all these examples are as nothing compared with the mother and father of all celebrity couples, the opulent and turbulent Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, who married and divorced each other twice. For the record, m. 1964 in the Mexican Consulate in Montreal, div. 1974 in Switzerland; m. 1975 in the jungle in Botswana, div. 1976 in Haiti.

Taylor had magnificent form as a divorcee. The way she took her numerous ex-husbands to the cleaners was a demonstration of her need for conquest and disputation. Her marriage to Nicky Hilton, for example, was over before the end of the honeymoon. Yet, in February 1952, she refused to sign the separation papers until she could make off with the wedding presents – Wedgwood porcelain, silver canteens of cutlery, Italian hand-embroidered tablecloths and napkins, six coffee services and 500 pieces of Swedish crystalware. Plus, Cadillacs and Hilton hotel stock, eventually worth $21.7 million.

Michael Wilding, forty, whom Taylor, still not quite twenty, married on the rebound from Hilton, didn’t last long and was reduced to becoming a waiter in a restaurant in Brighton. “Liz cut off his balls,” Stewart Granger said succinctly. He was replaced by Mike Todd, who showered Taylor with jewels. Their relationship lasted 414 days, brief enough for disillusion not to set in.

It’s likely Taylor would not for much longer have tolerated the kind of husband who inspected her filming schedules, expected to be granted approval of her wardrobe, her shoes and hats. Todd phoned her incessantly if they were apart. “I know what time you break for lunch and I’ll call you then, and I’ll know when you wrap up the day’s work and I’ll call you then.” (Todd was killed in a plane crash in 1958.)

Taylor wasn’t a widow for long – in May 1959 she married Todd’s friend Eddie Fisher, who wooed her with ten dresses from Dior, ten from Yves Saint Laurent, a Jaguar car, fur-lined coats and a $325,000 chalet in Gstaad. Taylor was indignant he didn’t fancy being generous, or as she saw it, chivalrous, during their divorce, especially when she discovered the $250,000 emerald necklace and an emerald-encrusted Bulgari mirror, in the shape of an asp, she’d been given for her thirtieth birthday, had been charged to her account. “I probably paid it,” Taylor said resignedly.

Later in life, if anyone so much as mentioned Fisher’s name in her presence, she’d chuck them out of the house. “Of all things living, man’s the worst,” as Taylor’s character says in The Taming of the Shrew, the colourful romp directed by Franco Zeffirelli. “There’s small choice in rotten apples.”

So, one way and another, Burton knew what was going to be expected of him – diamond rings and bracelets, including the thirty-three carat Krupp Diamond and what became known as the Burton-Taylor Diamond, a 69.42-carat rock, which when out of the bank vault had to be accompanied by armed guards. There were Picasso and Monet oil paintings; the Peregrina Pearl, once presented by Philip of Spain to Mary Tudor in 1554; boutiques in Paris; private jets and yachts; heaps of Neiman Marcus minks and furs, which as Burton said in his diary perpetuated “the legend of immense wealth and distant unattainability which is the very stuff of glamour.”

Though intended as joint investments, everything went Taylor’s way during the marital break-ups. What she didn’t grab the first time, she made sure she received the second time. Lawyers and accountants (the undisputed victors) spent years setting up and then dismantling holding companies in Bermuda, registering companies in Nassau, opening numbered accounts in Geneva.

If Taylor always fought over material things – possessions; the spoils – it’s because greed was an indication of her strength. She was never less than robust, definite. And what Taylor gave to Burton, whom before they met was chiefly a Shakespearean stage actor, was lasting fame, which in the end is a gift greater than rubies.

Look at the pair of them in Cleopatra or Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, or Burton solo in The Spy Who Came In From the Cold and Equus … Taylor and Burton stood alone on the world’s cultural map. They still do.