5 Outrageous Stories From Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton’s Life on the Road

She spent her honeymoon with her first husband, Nicky Hilton, on the Queen Mary, projectile vomiting thanks to a bout of food poisoning, while after a trip to Morocco with her second husband, Michael Wilding, she checked herself into hospital for a month…for no discernible reason. Her doctor, the “quack” Rex Kennamer, traveled with her everywhere, dispensing prescription pills and questionable advice. (When Taylor screamed herself hoarse after her third husband, Mike Todd, died, Kennamer recommended she have her tonsils removed.)

Still, Lewis informs us, she “was never so prostrate she couldn’t apply lip gloss in the ambulance”—nor, it seems, to use her various ailments to further the myths that surrounded her. When, in 1956, Elizabeth had three spinal discs replaced at Harkness Pavilion in New York, her injury was variously attributed to being kissed too forcefully by her Ivanhoe costar Robert Taylor, falling over on the deck of Lord Beaverbrook’s yacht, and a riding accident on the set of National Velvet more than a decade earlier.

By her own admission, Elizabeth’s health was not exactly helped by the fact that she “live[d] too hard”—downing champagne with Truman Capote in her Dorchester suite days after an emergency tracheotomy overseen by Horace Evans, personal physician to the Queen Mother. (Evans also procured her a commode to recline in, which he claimed was used by the Windsors on their Commonwealth tours.) Still, her fans seemed to forgive her for what may at times have amounted to nothing more than hypochondria. When she had a tumour removed in 1997, Taylor received a casual 42,000 get-well-soon cards.

“Where am I going to put the fireplace?”

As a couple whose life was lived primarily on the road, it was only a matter of time before Burton and Taylor acquired their own yacht. They purchased the 290-ton Kalizma in 1967, which had been constructed in 1906 by the same shipbuilders who worked on vessels for “the kings of Siam, Portugal and Sarawak.” Burton spent a fortune refitting it—including $100,000, or $1 million today, on “radar equipment”—and filled it with Monets, Van Goghs, and Picassos along with Chippendale furniture and Wilton carpets. (The latter, according to Lewis, had to be replaced every six months after the pets soiled them.) Burton’s verdict on the finished result? “It’s a splendid toy.” Ultimately, the dogs got their own yacht to boot. While filming Where Eagles Dare in the UK, the Burton-Taylors rented them the 200-ton Beatriz of Bolivia as a kennel at the equivalent of $8,000 a week today, mooring it near Tower Bridge in order to avoid quarantine laws. As for flying? Burton and Taylor acquired a Hawker Siddeley jet in 1967 “so we could fly to Nice for lunch,” with Elizabeth tasking the Royal College of Art graduate Richard Macdonald with decorating it in “an ornate Regency style.” “Where am I going to put the fireplace?” the designer quipped—a question that Taylor took seriously.

“Dark glasses for hangovers in between.”

In their heyday, Burton and Taylor were invited just about everywhere by just about everyone: to spend time with Onassis on his aforementioned yacht; to the Grand Prix d’Arc de Triomphe, where they upstaged the thoroughbreds by strolling across the Longchamp Racecourse; to the Monte Carlo Sporting Club as Rainier and Grace of Monaco’s guests of honor; and to Kensington Palace, where Taylor met Princess Magaret. “How very vulgar,” the royal remarked on the Hollywood star’s Krupp Diamond. “Yeah,” Elizabeth replied. “Ain’t it great?”