MY NIGHT OUT WITH RICHARD BURTON, LIZ TAYLOR AND A GUNMAN
50 years after Where Eagles Dare, PHILIP NORMAN reveals a behind the scenes tale just as gripping.
BY 2AM, the vast lobby of the Hotel Osterreichischer Hof in Salzburg had not a single staff member left on duty. No night manager or concierge was around to notice that Richard Burton, one of the finest actors of his generation, seemed in danger of getting himself shot. Burton, dressed in the uniform of a Second World War Nazi officer, was shouting furiously at a pudgy American who one would not have looked at twice but for the large black revolver he held pointed directly at the actor’s heart. Anaesthetised by relays of double brandies, Burton showed no fear for his life. Indeed, he seemed to be enjoying himself. The majestic Welsh voice, perfect for Shakespeare and Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood, had morphed into the accent of a Chicago mobster. ‘Don’t mess with me, baby,’ he bellowed. ‘Either use that gun or stick it up your...’ It was January 1968 — almost exactly 50 years ago. Burton had come to Austria to make Where Eagles Dare, since acknowledged to be the most exciting of all British war films. I was there to interview his wife, Elizabeth Taylor, then said without much dispute to be the world’s most beautiful woman.
In those days, ‘celebrity culture’ was still in its infancy and only a handful of names, mostly from Hollywood, guaranteed a storm of headlines and packs of paparazzi wherever they went.
Unquestioned leaders of this tiny elite were the couple known as ‘the Burtons’: Taylor with her string of husbands (of whom Burton was the fifth), Burton with his drinking and hell-raising.
They had fallen in love on the set of Cleopatra, a calamitous screen epic starring Taylor in the title role and Burton as Mark Antony, which almost bankrupted its makers, 20th Century Fox. Their subsequent adulterous affair titillated the whole world and even brought an official denunciation from the Vatican.
It had raised Burton from respected classical actor to mega-stardom on a par with Taylor, though many whispered he was sacrificing his formidable talent for the sake of Hollywood big money.
To keep up with a wife of such legendary extravagance, he clearly needed it: his recent gifts to her had included a $2million diamond ring.
That January day in Austria had already been an eventful one for this 24-year-old who, not long previously, had been covering whist drives and jumble sales for the Hunts Post, a small newspaper for the county of Huntingdonshire in England.
I had spent it with the Burtons at the Hohenwerfen Castle, a grim Alpine fortress outside Salzberg in which some of Where Eagles Dare’s climactic exteriors were being shot. Six years on from Cleopatra, their mutual passion was still such that Taylor had put her own massive movie career on hold just to be with Burton on location.
IMET the 42 year-old Burton first, seated in a smoky workmen’s cafe in which film people and locals were about equally mixed. He was doing The Times crossword, evidently in the throes of a severe hangover.
In the film, he plays a British army officer, Major John Smith, who’s parachuted into the Alps at the head of a commando team disguised as Germans on a seemingly impossible mission.
His elite squad is charged with rescuing an American general with intimate knowledge of the D-Day plans, who is being held at an impregnable mountain-top castle which is also a German army headquarters.
At the cafe, he was already costumed in Nazi field grey, a highcrowned peaked cap on the seat beside him. His rugged, slightly pockmarked face looked grim. I had no idea how to introduce myself.
Then, as luck would have it, he was stumped by a crossword clue to which the answer was a P.G. Wodehouse character. ‘Gussie FinkNottle,’ I called out.
Burton fixed me with something between a glare and a grin. ‘Young man,’ he said. ‘Come and sit by me.’
‘Bessie’, as he’d taken to calling the world’s most beautiful woman, did not put in an appearance until past noon. Although she wasn’t in the film, she was its undoubted star, walking in with a retinue of PAs, secretaries, hairdressers and make-up artists.
Then aged 35, she was hardly a figure of high fashion in her mink coat, baby-blue track suit and white moon boots, a silver scarf pulled over her unruly black pompadour.
But you noticed only her eyes, which were deep violet with double rows of spiky lashes like amethysts at the centre of black starfish. Whenever they settled on me, my own eyes seemed to mist over and I felt my heart do a back-flip.
They settled on me first with concern at the sight of my flimsy Carnaby Street jacket amid the Austrian snows. ‘Didn’t you bring an overcoat,’ she asked, like a scolding mum.
‘No,’ I confessed. (For, truth to tell, I didn’t own one.)
‘Honey, you’ll freeze. Let me see if Wardrobe can lend you something.’
So it was that I spent the afternoon wearing the gold-epauletted greatcoat of a Wehrmacht field-marshal.
Nowadays, with stars of such magnitude — if there still were stars of such magnitude — at least two PR people would have been on hand to regulate my access to them.
In 1968, I was under no such constraints. I could go wherever I pleased on the set, other than in front of the camera, and talk to whomever I liked.
I effectively became a part of the Burtons’ entourage with special responsibility for carrying their oneeyed pekingese, E’en So, from one set-up to the next.
Where Eagles Dare differs from other classic war films, such as The Colditz Story and Albert R.N., in