From PEOPLE Magazine
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Before she can marry Burton, however, she'll have to deal with something else—her present husband, 30-year-old Neil Balfour, a Tory banker and aspiring politician. Recently soundly defeated in the British parliamentary election (although his wife had campaigned for him dutifully), Balfour learned only a few hours later that he was a loser in marriage as well. "He was lovely about it," reported the princess. "I will always be very, very fond of him." She will start divorce proceedings as soon as she and Burton return from their idyll in Switzerland.
Burton's previous Elizabeth, who divorced him last June after a year of on-again, off-again breakups, did not comment publicly on her ex-husband's engagement, although Burton thoughtfully telephoned her in Hollywood to break the news personally. "We both love her very much," said the princess. "I hope she won't mind." Taylor is being consoled by her current boyfriend, Henry Wynberg, a Los Angeles automobile dealer who is having troubles of his own. Recently accused of setting back the odometers on several used cars, he has been charged with five counts of grand theft.
But if Taylor took the news like a trouper, Balfour's mother showered the couple with scorn. "Ridiculous!" she snorted. "Typical Richard Burton! But I suppose if he's splashing it about that he and my daughter-in-law are going to get married, then they'll get married."
For Princess Elizabeth, of course, life has always seemed unsettled and transient. Her father, Yugoslavia's ruler following the assassination of his brother, King Alexander, was overthrown in 1941 after virtually signing his country over to the Nazis. Elizabeth was only four years old when the British government sent Paul and his family to Kenya under house arrest. After the war he was given refuge in exile. As a titled young emigrée, Elizabeth was shuffled from one exclusive private school to another. Then, in early 1960 on a skiing vacation in Austria, she met the dashing Howard Oxenberg, an American manufacturer of maternity clothes. That spring she flew to New York and married him. "It was terrible," she once recalled. "I just went off and didn't come back. I didn't even leave a note."
Married seven years, the Oxenbergs had two children, Catherine, now 13, and Christina, 11. Though Oxenberg was handsome and charming, say her friends, the real attraction for Elizabeth was the liberation she found in New York. Free of the inhibitions of royalty, she lived the life of a carefree young socialite. The marriage ended amicably in 1967. Two years later she was married to Balfour, with whom she had one child, Nicholas, now 4.
Elizabeth first met Burton several years ago, but at the time she found him boorish and sodden with liquor. Then, recently, with her own marriage to Balfour coming apart at the seams, she saw Burton again when he was in London for filming. Miserable and disheartened, still floundering in the backwash of his divorce, he asked her to marry him the first night he saw her. "He kept on and on, and I said yes," she recalls. "It was as simple as that."
At 48, badly used by drink and hard living, Burton is scarcely the steely-eyed swashbuckler whose liaison with Taylor made them the pulp-magazine superstars of the sixties. His hair a dishwater gray, his face deeply careworn and creased, he looks more the aging coalminer's son from Wales than a matinee idol. Where once he seemed destined to emerge as the most commanding English-speaking actor of his generation, his career has sputtered along inconsistently during his tempestuous ten years with Taylor. Turning away from the stage and the classics, he has drifted aimlessly through a succession of potboilers, many of them merely undisguised star vehicles for an aging Hamlet and his glamorous wife.
As his reputation began its painful erosion, Burton's drinking reached depths of excess. "During dinner," he told a British reporter recently with pathetic hyperbole, "Liz would have a martini and a few glasses of wine. I would have 32 martinis before dinner, seven bottles of wine, and tell the waiter to leave the Remy Martin." Last spring he spent six weeks drying out in a Santa Monica, Calif. hospital. "This time I was worried because my memory was going," he ruefully admits. "Physically I was a mess, and the only answer was to stop drinking." But inevitably the years and the accumulated effects of alcohol have taken their toll. Once, Burton claims, as a young man who committed thousands of lines of Shakespeare to memory, he recited poetry for 22 consecutive hours without repeating himself. Recently, however, completing a made-for-television movie about Winston Churchill in London, he stumbled repeatedly over his lines, and finished each workday wrung dry with fatigue.
But Burton has no intention of calling it quits. "I would like to do Othello again," he muses, "I was 27 the first time. And I would like to do Lear, but I would have to go into training as if I were going to fight Foreman and Cassius Clay. Ideally, I would like to do three films every two years, like Elizabeth, my former wife, and then a play every so often. I'd like to stop acting and just write. But the acting bug has bitten me too deeply."
For the moment, at least, Burton seems precariously at peace with himself—and sober. That, claims a friend of Princess Elizabeth, is the sine qua non of her intention to marry him. Burton promised her he would stay away from the bottle, says the friend, and if he doesn't the engagement is off. Elizabeth herself, undaunted by Burton's former excesses, seems confident she has the situation in hand. "I know Richard has a bit of a reputation," she says, with affectionate understatement, "but that's what happens when people are under great stress. Some smoke, some drink, some do both. But he's happy now. He's a very hard worker, and at the moment he needs a good long rest. I think—I hope—I'm good therapy for him."
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