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THE DUKE OF WINDSOR

LOOKS ON AGHAST WITH

ELIZABETH TAYLOR

4, route du Champ d’Entraînement, Bois de Boulogne, Paris

November 12th 1968

Both now in their seventies, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor potter along as stately relics of their former glamour. They occupy their time either entertaining or being entertained by what has come to be known as the jet set. After jetting into Paris, and before jetting out, their ever-changing friends – foreign aristocrats, shipping millionaires, misplaced royalty, international playboys, amusing bachelors, the higher echelons of show-business – are delighted to receive the call from the Windsors.

Thirty years ago, they were the most glamorous couple in the world: that title, only ever temporary, is now held by Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, who are, by chance, both making movies in Paris. The balance of fame, perhaps also of wealth,^* dictates that it is the Windsors who make eyes at the Burtons, though the latter are far from displeased, as the Windsors reinforce their sense of having arrived, their craving for being centre-stage, particularly when off-stage.

The Windsors visit the Burtons on their separate sets, and the two couples dine together regularly. In honour of Burton’s Welsh roots, the Duchess makes a point of wearing her Prince of Wales brooch – the fleur de lys in white and yellow diamonds. Elizabeth Taylor looks at it covetously: she is celebrated for her jewellery collection.^† Dining with the Windsors and the Rothschilds before the European premiere of The Taming of the Shrew, she wears roughly $1,500,000-worth – so much that the couple have to be protected by eight bodyguards on their short journey to the Paris Opera House. Earlier the same day, Burton spends $960,000 buying her the jet plane on which they flew into Paris. ‘Elizabeth was not displeased,’ he confides to his diary.

Elizabeth remains enchanted by the fairy-tale glamour of the Windsors, but Burton, less convinced that the world he has created is the world he wants, his unease fuelled and allayed by three bottles of vodka a day, is beginning to find them a little wearing. Unlike the Duchess, the Duke lacks zip: another of their acquaintances finds himself mesmerised by the way that he ‘always had something of … riveting stupidity to say on any subject’.

On November 12th, the Burtons grace a dinner for twenty-two at the Windsors’ home. As they enter the room, Burton recognises only two people, the Count and Countess of Bismarck, and then only by name. ‘He, the Count, looks as much like one’s mental picture of the iron chancellor as spaghetti. Soft and round and irresolute. He couldn’t carve modern Germany out of cardboard.’

The Duke and Duchess seem, through his jaded eyes, much diminished. ‘It is extraordinary how small the Duke and Duchess are. Two tiny figures like Toto and Nanette that you keep on the mantelpiece. Chipped around the edges. Something you keep in the front room for Sundays only. Marred royalty. The awful majesty that doth hedge around a king is notably lacking in awfulness. Charming and feckless.’

Elizabeth notes that she and Richard are the only two people without titles in the entire room. She is offended that she has not been placed next to the Duke, and Richard is furious that he has not been placed next to the Duchess. Instead, he is between another Duchess and a Countess, both ‘hard-faced and youngish’.

One of them tells him that she saw him in Hamlet, and asks how he could possibly remember all those lines. Burton says that he doesn’t bother, that he improvises, that Shakespeare is lousy, that Hamlet’s character is so revolting that one could only say some of his lines when drunk. ‘I mean, the frantic self-pity of “How all occasions do inform against me, and spur my dull revenge”. You have to be sloshed to get around that. At least I have to be.’

He thinks he may have shocked her. Another lady, ‘not a day under seventy, whose face had been lifted so often that it was on top of her head’, asks him if it is true that all actors are queer. Yes, he replies, and that’s why he married Elizabeth, because she was queer too, but they have an arrangement.

‘What do you do?’

‘Well, she lives in one suite, and I in another, and we make love by telephone.’

After dinner, Taylor looks on in horror as Burton approaches the Duchess of Windsor and says, ‘You are without any question, the most vulgar woman I’ve ever met.’ Before long, he has picked up the seventy-two-year-old Duchess and is swinging her around ‘like a dancing singing dervish’. The room falls silent. Watching the event with the Duke, Taylor is terrified that Burton will drop her or fall down and kill her. Meanwhile, Burton, who has long suspected that his lifestyle is a betrayal of his origins, is overcome with self-pity and starts pining for the Welsh valleys. ‘Christ! I will arise and go now and go home to Welsh miners who understand drink and the idiocies that it arouses … I shall die of drink and make-up.’

Arriving back at the Plaza Athénée, Taylor is furious, and locks Burton in the spare bedroom. He tries to kick the door down, ‘and nearly succeeded which meant that I spent some time on my hands and knees this morning picking up the battered plaster in the hope that the waiters wouldn’t notice that the hotel had nearly lost a door in the middle of the night’.

In the morning, Taylor berates him for his misbehaviour, complaining that they’ll never be invited again. ‘Thank God,’ he replies, adding, ‘Rarely have I been so stupendously bored.’

That weekend, he reluctantly agrees to accompany Taylor to a grand fancy-dress party at the Rothschilds’ château in the country. Also at the party is Cecil Beaton, who spots them across the room. ‘I have always loathed the Burtons for their vulgarity, commonness and crass bad taste,’ he writes in his diary the next day. ‘She combining the worst of US and English taste, he as butch and coarse as only a Welshman can be.’