| | |  Entertainment | Books 
The Private Love Letters of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor: New Book Reveals Intimate Details of Their Romance
 Sam Kashner & Nancy Schoenberger - Daily Mail UK
go to original
June 05, 2010
| | Richard wrote that Elizabeth was 'so extraordinarily beautiful that I nearly laughed out loud...' | |
Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor famously fell in love on the set of the 1963 epic Cleopatra, which was shot partly at Pinewood Studios in London, but mostly in Rome.
Burton revealed he was smitten from the moment he saw Elizabeth naked in Cleopatra’s bath. In their first deep screen kiss, shortly afterwards, he found himself caught up, almost drugged, in her presence.
They repeated the scene several times; the kiss between Mark Antony and Cleopatra lasting longer with each take. Finally, the director Joe Mankiewicz asked: ‘Would you two mind if I say cut?’ Still the kiss did not stop.
Burton didn’t stand a chance.
Unlike other movie stars, such as Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich, Elizabeth really was a sex goddess - she adored sex, she loved inspiring lust and satisfying it.
Then aged 29, she had already been divorced twice, widowed once and was married again - her fourth husband, crooner Eddie Fisher, was a hovering presence on the Cleopatra set.
But the allure of Burton, who loved poetry and Shakespeare and booze in equal measure and possessed a vibrant sexuality that could heat up a room, proved irresistible.
In the ensuing 13 years, theirs was to become the most notorious, celebrated and vilified love affair of the century.
Along with the high drama of their two marriages and two divorces, the Burtons’ relationship brought with it all the modern accoutrements of celebrity: relentless paparazzi, yachts and private jets, grand hotels, fabled jewels and glittering parties.
Richard and Elizabeth were the embodiment of Hollywood royalty. Remarkably, though, there was something that, until now, has remained private about their all-too-public lives. Richard was a prolific writer of love letters.
In Elizabeth he found a woman who matched him in sexual fire, and frequently he poured out his emotions to her in intimate and pulsating detail.
Dame Elizabeth has kept this trove of some 40 letters and notes from Richard secret for decades. Now, however, she has agreed to share their contents for the first dual biography about their extraordinary lives.
She also agreed to work with us behind the scenes by allowing us to see parts of her 1965 autobiography Elizabeth Taylor, which she had previously suppressed for fear they might hurt people or disappoint her fans.
For Dame Elizabeth, 78, her union with Richard was the one true marriage and, more than 26 years after his untimely death at the age of just 58, she wants the world to know the place he held, and continues to hold, in her heart.
'I don't care what you write about me', she told us. 'God knows I've heart it all, just as long as you honour Richard.'
She continued: 'Richard was magnificent in every sense of the word... and in everything he did. He was magnificent on the stage, he was magnificent in film, he was magnificent at making love... at least to me.
'He was the kindest, funniest and most gentle father. All my kids worshipped him. Attentive, loving - that was Richard. The bond with all of us continued until he drew his last breath. In my heart, I will always believe we would have been married a third and final time... from those first moments in Rome we were always madly and powerfully in love.’
Here is a glimpse of how Burton expressed his insatiable thirst for Elizabeth in one of his earlier letters.
‘I lust after your smell … and your round belly and the exquisite softness of the inside of your thighs and your baby-bottom and your giving lips & the half-hostile look in your eyes when you’re deep in rut with your little Welsh stallion,’ he wrote.
And later: ‘My blind eyes are desperately waiting for the sight of you. You don’t realise of course, E.B., how fascinatingly beautiful you have always been, and how strangely you have acquired an added and special and dangerous loveliness.
‘Your breasts jutting out from that half-asleep languid lingering body, the remote eyes, the parted lips.’ Here is a glimpse, too, of his remorse after his alcoholism and reckless infidelity destroyed her trust.
‘I know I’m a terrible liar sometimes, but please believe that I have never betrayed either in word or deed the physical you or the mental you. I simply love you too much. I flatter and am flattered and both too easily. It’s only a question of booze. I behaved like an idiot ... I deserve all the injury that you can inflict, and I will take it as long as you stay with me — Husbs (I hope).’
Burton seemed compelled to write down his feelings for Elizabeth. He would, he said, ‘love her till I die’.
On the back of a photograph taken in 1970 of her running towards him, he wrote: 'She is like the tide, she comes and she goes, she runs to me as in this stupendous photographic image.
'In my poor and tormented youth, I had always dreamed of this woman. And now, when this dream occasionally returns, I extend my arm, and she is here ... by my side. If you have not met or known her, you have lost much in life.'
From beginning to end, his letters to her are intense, raw and achingly passionate.
But before we delve into them further, we need first to fully understand the man who composed them, the woman he loved, and the electrifying chemistry that fused them together - and ultimately, with the eyes of the world upon them, tore them apart. Elizabeth was always better than Richard at handling the relentless press attention their affair engendered - she had grown up with it.
The English-born daughter of American parents, she spent her early childhood in London, where she attended the same ballet school as Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret, and spent endless hours riding her pony on Hampstead Heath.
When World War II broke out, her art dealer father Francis and mother Sara, who was a former actress, decided to return their family to the U.S. to escape hostilities. Shortly after arriving in Los Angeles with her elder brother Howard, Elizabeth was cast in Lassie Come Home and then National Velvet.
By the age of 12, she was an international-star. Richard, in contrast, grew up in Pontrhydyfen, near Port Talbot, in Wales, the 12th of 13 children born to Richard and Edith Jenkins.
His mother died in childbirth when he was two. His father was a hard-drinking coal miner who never approved of his renowned son's chosen profession.
The fame and money were to be admired, yes, but prancing around in costumes and wearing make-up and being bullied by women?
Young Richard won a grammar school place and had his English teacher - whose name he eventually adopted - to thank for nurturing his performing talents. Philip Burton helped win his protege a six-month stint at Exeter College, Oxford, from where he was able to forge his acting career.
Burton's first ever encounter with Elizabeth was in 1953, at the Bel Air home of Stewart Granger and Jean Simmons. He had already been hailed as the greatest successor to Sir John Gielgud and Sir Laurence Olivier on the London stage.
Swooping into Hollywood, he accepted Granger's party invitation and found himself agog at the suntanned beauties lounging around the largest swimming pool he had ever seen.
Among them was Taylor who, as he later wrote in his diary, was 'so extraordinarily beautiful that I nearly laughed out loud ... she was unquestioningly [sic] gorgeous ...She was lavish. She was, in short, too bloody much, and not only that, she was totally ignoring me.'
By the time of their second meeting nine years later, Elizabeth had become a mother to Michael and Christopher, her two sons from her second marriage to Michael Wilding, and to Liza, her daughter from her third marriage, to Mike Todd (Todd was tragically killed in a plane crash in 1958 when Liza was just eight months old).
She was also one of Hollywood's most bankable stars and had commanded a record $1 million for the Cleopatra role.
Like everyone on the set, she knew of Burton's legendary conquests. Despite being married to his sane and stalwart Welsh wife Sybil, with whom he had two daughters, Kate and Jessica, Richard expected to bed all of his leading ladies (with the apparent exception of Julie Andrews, who turned him down).
Elizabeth determined that she, too, would treat him coolly, vowing that she would not become another notch on his bedpost.
On the day of their first scene together, Burton, who was also known for keeping libations flowing in his dressing room, showed up hung over from a night of carousing.
'He was kind of quivering from head to foot,' Elizabeth remembered. 'He ordered a cup of coffee to sort of still his trembling fists and I had to help it to his mouth, and that just endeared him to me. I thought, well, he really is human ... so vulnerable and sweet and shaky and terribly giggly that with my heart I "cwtched" him - that's Welsh for "hug".'
They probably first made love in Burton's dressing room, and soon they were doing it everywhere they could - from borrowed apartments to boats, once in a catamaran, once in a photographer's studio.
'Richard and I had an incredible chemistry together,' she said. 'We couldn't get enough of each other'
Elizabeth's voluptuous body was a marvel to Richard - the eighth wonder of the world. And she was equally in thrall to him sexually.
'Imagine having Richard Burton's voice in your ear while you are making love,' she recalled. 'It drowned out the troubles, the sorrows - everything just melted away.'
Rumours quickly began to swirl around the set, reaching Fisher, the husband that Elizabeth had 'stolen' from the actress Debbie Reynolds three years earlier.
'Tell me the truth,' Fisher asked his wife. 'Is there something going on between you and Burton?'
'Yes,' Elizabeth told him, because she couldn't lie.
Fisher tried to escape the madness by fleeing to Florence, where he called Elizabeth at their villa in Rome. But it was Richard who answered the telephone. 'What are you doing there?' Fisher asked him.
'What do you think I'm doing?' Burton answered. 'I'm f****** your wife.'
Studio publicists tried to suppress the affair, but it was too late. Hordes of photographers hounded the couple, wildly snapping pictures of them throughout Rome.
Their constant buzz inspired Federico Fellini, who was filming La Dolce Vita on the streets of the city at the time; he named his intrusive reporter 'Paparazzo', which means 'buzzing insect'. The name stuck.
For Richard and Elizabeth, the best times were when they could escape to a hideaway in the country outside Rome.
She recalled how they would 'make love, and play Scrabble, and spell out naughty words for each other, and the game would never be finished. When you get aroused playing Scrabble, that's love, baby.'
Almost 50 years on, Cleopatra remains one of the most expensive movies ever made - the final price tag was $44 million, close to $300 million in today's dollars. It is also, at slightly over four hours, one of the longest. And its stars were to become the most talked about couple in Hollywood history.
Richard and Elizabeth finally escaped Rome for London in December 1962 and settled into neighbouring penthouse suites at The Dorchester Hotel.
Even then, Richard's prodigious boozing was evident - Bloody Marys before noon, straight vodka for lunch, which then rolled into evenings spent pub-hopping with his old chums, including Terence Rattigan and Robert Bolt.
Elizabeth was happy to join him on pub crawls. Indeed, she was proud of the fact that she could drink him under the table. Truly a man's woman - she belched and swore and readily made fun of herself.
At one point, she sat silent during a long discussion about stage dramas before throwing back her head and declaring: 'I know nothing about the theatre. But I don't need to. I'm a star!'
Friends noted how she and Richard enjoyed heaping insults upon each other. Richard was fond of calling Elizabeth 'my little Jewish tart' (because she had converted to Judaism to marry Mike Todd), while Elizabeth ridiculed his pockmarked skin, which had been scarred by acne during his teens.
'I think they had fights for the glory of making up,' recalled the Australian actor Rod Taylor. 'It was foreplay to them.'
Burton's divorce from Sybil on the grounds of 'abandonment and cruel and inhumane treatment' was announced in December 1963. (Sybil, whom he had once cherished, would never speak to him again for the rest of his life.)
Taylor was granted her divorce from Eddie Fisher, also on the grounds of abandonment, in March 1964. By then, Elizabeth and Richard had relocated to Toronto, where he was appearing on stage in Hamlet.
On March 15, they chartered a Viscount turboprop airliner to take them to Montreal, where they registered at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel under the name of Smith. That Sunday afternoon, they were married in a private ceremony.
The bride wore a yellow chiffon dress with hyacinths and lily of the valley in her coiled hair, and a $ 150,000 emerald- and- diamond necklace, with a pendant that could be detached as a brooch, that Burton had given her for her 32nd birthday, along with matching earrings as his wedding gift. Newsmen were barred from the hotel; the only official statement given was Richard's: ' Elizabeth Burton and I are very happy.'
Over the next decade, the Burtons criss- crossed the world, wining, dining, partying and making films together.
Both were tipped for Oscars for their performances in Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?, but although the film won Elizabeth her second Academy Award, Richard lost out to Paul Scofield, a particularly bitter blow as Scofield - whom Richard liked and admired - was often pointed out to him as the Shakespeare actor who had not sold out his stage career for Hollywood. (Burton was nominated seven times for an Oscar in total and failed to win once.)
Financially, however, the Burtons reigned supreme. Throughout the Sixties, they earned approximately $88 million (about $616 million today) between them, and spent three- quarters of it on furs, diamonds, designer clothes, and the other adornments of their lavish lifestyle.
They bought a ten-passenger, twin-engine de Havilland jet for $1 million (named Elizabeth) and paintings by Monet, Picasso, Van Gogh, Renoir, Pissarro, Degas, Augustus John and Rembrandt (Elizabeth very much her art dealer father's daughter in her eye for ever-appreciating works of art).
They bought a fleet of Rolls-Royces and invested in real estate: 685 acres on Tenerife in the Canary Islands (where they grew bananas), ten acres of land in County Wicklow, Ireland (where they bred horses), in addition to their villa Casa Kimberley in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, with its spectacular view of the Banderas Bay.
And, of course, they held on to the three homes they already possessed - his in Hampshire and Celigny, Switzerland, and hers in Gstaad.
Then, having decided they were too famous to live on land, they bought a 130ft yacht. It was christened Kalizma, an amalgam of the names of their daughters Kate, Liza and Maria - the young German girl they had jointly adopted shortly after their marriage.
(Elizabeth had been told she would be unable to bear more children after the Caesarean delivery of Liza. Meanwhile, Burton's other daughter from his first marriage, Jessica, had been diagnosed as 'severely retarded' and lived in an institution which the Burtons paid for).
Kalizma boasted seven bedrooms and three bathrooms. A crew of eight - including a maid and a waiter - was required to keep it afloat. It cost $192,000 to buy and another $200,000 to refurbish and Burton estimated it was going to take close to $30,000 a year to run it.
'Not too bad,' he wrote in his diary, 'when one considers our last house (rented) costs ten thousand a month ... if we can use it as much as possible instead of hotels, we can actually save money.'
Old habits died hard, and Richard, ever the miner's son, would sometimes wander around their chalet at Gstaad, turning off the lights to cut down on the electric bill. Meanwhile, Elizabeth teased him about ordering the cheapest wine while admiring the $65,000 sapphire brooch glittering on her dress, his gift to her.
The running costs for their yacht included nearly $1,000 every six months to replace the Wilton carpeting spoiled by Elizabeth's menagerie of untrained cats and dogs, who relieved themselves wherever they happened to be.
Both Richard and Elizabeth took particular delight in pulling up in the Kalizma alongside the yacht of the Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis. Keeping up with the Onassises was one of their mild obsessions.
When Elizabeth discovered that Onassis had presented his future wife, the then Mrs [Jacqueline] Kennedy, with 'half a million pounds worth of rubies surrounded by diamonds', Richard noted: 'Now the battle of the rubies is on.'
He later spent $1.1 million on what became known as the Taylor-Burton diamond - a stunning, 69.42 carat stone then considered the largest and most expensive diamond in the world. A huge part of the thrill was that he had outbid his rival, who had 'chickened at $700,000'.
Despite the yacht and their myriad properties around the world, the Burtons continued to live mostly in hotels, booking entire floors to house their ever expanding entourage of children, nannies, secretaries, assistants and an assortment of pets, which at one stage included a turtle and budgerigar.
When the Burtons ordered room service, it often came not simply from the hotel kitchen, but from another country.
In Rome, it was chilli con carne flown in from Chasen's in Los Angeles; in Paris, pork sausages flown in from Fortnum & Mason in London. Other guests witnessed them openly trading silly insults - 'Lumpy', 'Twit Twaddle', 'Snapshot' and 'One Take' for Elizabeth; 'Fred', 'Charlie Charm', 'Old Shoot' and 'Boozed-up, burned-out Welshman' for Richard.
Some onlookers couldn't contain their curiosity. Elizabeth learned about a couple staying at the Regency Hotel in New York who took the suite below theirs just so they could eavesdrop on the Burton battles.
They reportedly climbed up on chairs, placed empty glasses against
'Well, they got an earful,' said Elizabeth, ' but what the poor schmoes didn't know was that it was a vocal exercise.'
The Burtons knew each other's vulnerabilities: Richard's touchiness over Elizabeth's higher earning power and top billing, for example, and Elizabeth's sensitivity over her fluctuating weight and her increasing frustration with Richard's drinking. 'I think you should go and take a nap, Old Shoot,' she'd tell him.
'You're drunk again. I mean - the hair of the dog was the whole dog this time!' There were times when they yearned to jump off the merry-go-round, and at one point they contemplated taking a three-month break, but the movie industry shuddered, because, as one observer noticed, 'nearly half of the U.S. film industry's income ... came from pictures starring one or both of them.'
In January 1967, they arrived in Dahomey (now Benin), on the West African coast, to film Graham Greene's jaded political drama The Comedians.
For the first time since Cleopatra, they were able to walk into a restaurant without being gawped at.
One local journalist popped up to interview Richard, but didn't recognise Elizabeth, mistaking her for Burton's assistant. That delighted her. Another local newspaperman mistook Burton for a cameraman.
They spent their evenings reading, Taylor discovering a genuine interest in poetry under Burton's influence, and Burton absorbed in Alex Haley's The Autobiography Of Malcolm X. But they also drank heavily in the relentless African heat.
Usually, it was Richard who was the worse for wear. And the more he drank, the more he became a Dr-Jekyll-and-Mr-Hyde figure.
He could be so loving towards Elizabeth, so devoted, but with too much drink in him, he turned on her and on the world she had brought him into. Everyone was a 'bore' or 'a poor bastard'. He lashed out and she felt the lash.
The Comedians was released in Hollywood on October 9, 1967. Whether it was the curse of the voodoo priest they had encountered on location, or just the fact that the film was too sombre, critics were adamant that the Burtons had failed to sizzle on screen and the movie became the first in which they did not make a profit.
Suddenly, Elizabeth was being bested by younger, slimmer, stars such as Vanessa Redgrave and Anouk Aimee, who embodied the new bony, androgynous look that Elizabeth would never have.
This did not matter to Richard, who wrote of his wife in his diary: 'She is a wildly exciting love-mistress, she is shy and witty, she is nobody's fool, she is a brilliant actress, she is beautiful beyond the dreams of pornography... she is an ache in the stomach when I am away from her, and she loves me! ... And I'll love her till I die.'
But for Hollywood, the voluptuous woman as the ultimate film goddess was on her way out.
In 1969, Richard was cast as Henry VIII in Hal Wallis's film Anne Of The Thousand Days. Elizabeth wanted desperately to play Anne Boleyn, but Wallis informed her that at 37 she was too old to play the 22-year-old Queen.
It was a bitter pill for Elizabeth, who had to watch the fresh-faced French-Canadian actress Genevieve Bujold being pursued on camera by Richard in a role she felt should have been hers.
She was still beautiful, still idolised by the public, but she had to confront what so many actresses face: the beginning of the end of her career as a leading lady.
Burton, out of loyalty to Taylor, tried to get out of making the film, but he was threatened with a lawsuit by Universal Pictures.
So before debarking to dreary London, where Anne Of The Thousand Days would be shot, the Burtons returned to the paradise of their villa in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico - a place that seemed to have the power to restore them to sanity and to health, and to remind them why they were still together.
Elizabeth relaxed and swam and their sexual energy cut through all the alcohol and dark moods.
Burton's ardour was kindled anew and it poured out of him in letters, sometimes written when she was sleeping in the next room.
On May 10, 1969, he wrote: 'You will never, of course, because you are too young, understand the idea of loneliness. I love you better than buckets of brine poured over a boiling body, than ice cream laved on a parched mouth, than sanity smoothed over madness ...'
Ahead, however, was a kind of alcohol-induced madness that would leave them both isolated and bereft.
Abridged extract from Furious Love: Elizabeth Taylor And Richard Burton And The Marriage Of The Century by Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger, to be published by JR Books on July 25 at £18.99. © 2010, Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger. To pre-order a copy for £16.99 (p&p free), call 0845 155 0720. |
|
| |
Vallarta Weddings
Tell a Friend
Site Map
Print this Page
Email Us