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How to See the World Through the Eyes of Hollywood's Golden Couple Liz and Dick
 Frank Barrett - Daily Mail UK
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November 30, 2010
| | A love affair to remember: Richard Burton weds Elizabeth Taylor in Montreal in 1964 | |
Port Talbot to Puerto Vallarta: from the Welsh valleys to a sunbaked Mexican seaside town - for Richard Burton a journey much further and more amazing than the mere 5,500 miles that separates the two places on the map.
His life encompassed probably the world's most famous adulterous romance and subsequent marriage (twice); it involved some of the world's most expensive pieces of jewellery, huge critical acclaim, raging alcoholism, yachts, jets, Swiss homes, Broadway triumphs and a level of global fame that had never been known before.
There has certainly never been another love affair which has held the world's fascinated gaze like the passionate partnership of Richard Burton, the miner's son from Pontrhydyfen near Port Talbot, and Elizabeth Taylor, the Hollywood princess.
In a time before the world was littered with celebrities, it became addicted to the extraordinary details of 'Liz and Dick's' amazing lives.
They met on the set of Cleopatra - at the time the world's most expensive film - and fell in love. The consequence was mayhem - or 'le scandale', as Burton chose to describe it. For a decade their individual careers soared, each becoming in turn the highest-paid actor in Hollywood, and they lived their lives in public.
Burton variously described Liz and himself as 'doomed nomads' and 'professional itinerants'. And like a medieval royal family proceeding in state from castle to castle, Liz and Dick's global procession went from hotel to hotel - nearly always the world's finest - where they would live in several suites running up huge bills on flowers and alcohol (mostly alcohol) as they entertained lavishly and incessantly.
And just like a royal court, they travelled with a retinue of servants and functionaries: drivers, security men, make-up artists, dressers, agents, secretaries, nannies, family members and friends. At one time Burton estimated that the couple had to pay the monthly wages of some 50 people.
They lived a life of unimaginable self-indulgence. While in London in 1963, Taylor decided to surprise Burton with a Van Gogh painting that she bought in Sotheby's on Bond Street for £92,000.
Incredibly, she simply took it back to The Dorchester in a taxi and carried it up to Burton's penthouse suite where she hammered a nail above the fireplace and hung the painting herself, ready for Burton's return. (She recently put the painting up for sale for £13million.)
The one real fixed point in their vast universe was the house they bought soon after they married in 1964 - Casa Kimberley in Puerto Vallarta. Bought by the couple when Burton was filming the John Huston film The Night Of The Iguana with Ava Gardner, the Mexican house became the only place they could find peace and seclusion together.
| | Captivating: The couple fell in love with Puerto Vallarta while filming in Mexico | |
It was so dear to them both that when Burton died in 1984, Taylor immediately sold it, declaring that she could not return to a house that held so many happy memories of the man she had loved so passionately.
I once read on the internet that somebody had done a tour of the house - actually two houses joined by a bridge - and last month I decided to take a peek for myself, looking forward to entering this most famous of love nests. Sic transit gloria mundi, as they say - or thus passes the glory of the world.
Casa Kimberley is being gutted. All that remained of its interior was a pile of shattered tiles that lay in a sad heap next to the house. I gathered a few blue fragments and I have them now on my desk - dusty mementoes of a very fine romance.
It was Larkin who wrote that after death 'what will survive of us is love'. Love and a few broken tiles. Oh, and all those sumptuous hotel suites favoured by Burton and Taylor whose walls could tell a tale or two...
London - The Dorchester
This was something of a second home for Taylor before she got together with Burton. She knew it in her days as a child star and made the largest of the three roof suites, The Harlequin, her own. It boasts a master bedroom with an en suite bathroom and dressing room, a dining room, living room, bar and large outside terrace overlooking Hyde Park.
The suite's second bedroom still has the original pink marble bathroom that was installed for Taylor. According to legend, the couple carved 'RB xxx ET' into the marble after one night of carousing - something to search for next time you check in.
| | London calling: The couple spent a lot of time at Park Lane's Dorchester Hotel | |
It was in this very suite that Taylor received news of her record-breaking, multi-million pound deal to star in Cleopatra. It was also here that she suffered a near-fatal bout of pneumonia.
When they became a couple, The Dorchester was the pair's London centre of operations around which their social life revolved. They took adjoining suites and The Dorchester moved Heaven and Earth to keep them happy.
In 1967 Burton brought down 150 friends and family from South Wales for the Royal Command Performance of The Taming Of The Shrew. The Burton family were ferried by Rolls-Royce from Paddington to The Dorchester, where 14 suites were among rooms booked for the occasion. Fresh flowers were supplied by ET herself, and a legendary all-night party ensued.
The Harlequin Suite at The Dorchester (www.thedorchester.com) costs £4,950 per night. More modest accommodation is available from £255 a night.
Beverly Hills Hotel
Not many cities take their names from a hotel, but then there aren't many hotels like the Beverly Hills. Just before the First World War its founders came drilling for oil but found a much more valuable commodity: water. The hotel, which opened in 1912, was seen as the potential hub of a future housing development.(at)From the start it attracted the Hollywood elite: Charlie Chaplin, Rudolph Valentino and later Spencer Tracy. When Taylor was a child her father had an art gallery at the hotel, and in a display next to the hotel gym you can see a photograph of her at the art shop with him.
| | Hollywood Heights: The Beverley Hills Hotel, where John Wayne interrupted Burton's Oscars party | |
It says something of her affection for the place that part of six of her eight honeymoons were spent at The Beverly Hills.
The hotel boasts a luxurious complex of private bungalows and it was in their favourite, Bungalow Five (which these days is still popular because it has its own pool), that Burton and Taylor drowned their sorrows after he again missed out on an Oscar for his role in Anne Of The Thousand Days. It went to John Wayne for his performance in True Grit.
Wayne turned up at the Bungalow Five party and pushed his Oscar under Burton's nose, declaring: 'You son of a bitch, you should have this, not me.'
Burton was nominated seven times but never won.
Bungalow Five at The Beverly Hills Hotel (www.beverlyhillshotel.com) costs from £5,350 per night. Standard rooms cost from £360 a night.
Paris - Hotel Lancaster
Located in the heart of Paris just off the Champs-Elysees, the Hotel Lancaster was the perfect luxurious hideaway for Burton and Taylor to go to ground in as they tried to escape the paparazzi amid the controversy surrounding their adulterous affair. Even the Vatican had weighed in with a Papal condemnation of their romance.
Still feeling very much like the intimate 19th Century private mansion it was (it was built in 1889), it's a surprise to discover that it has 46 rooms and 11 suites over eight floors. It's not hard to see why the couple enjoyed rooms and lounges furnished with antiques and fine works of art.
When the Burton and Taylor circus came to town - their friendship with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and the Rothschilds meant that Paris was a favourite place - the couple would take over two floors of the hotel.
Rooms at the Lancaster (www.hotel-lancaster.fr) cost from £350 a night.
Puerto Vallarta - Casa Kimberley
Director John Huston described Puerto Vallarta as hardly changed for centuries and isolated by bad roads with access only possible by sea or air. Little can the locals have realised that after Hollywood came to town in 1963, their isolation would rapidly come to an end.
| | Beach life: Taylor looks relaxed as Burton holds court at a local bar in Puerto Vallarta in 1964, weeks before they married | |
Almost overnight the patronage of Burton and Taylor and their acquisition of Casa Kimberley, a villa in the old town, helped to put Puerto Vallarta on the tourist map.
Today it boasts more than 100 hotels and has become a major cruise port.
Burton is said to have bought Casa Kimberley, a nine-bedroom villa, for £37,000 as a gift to Liz for her 32nd birthday. As a gift to himself, and to ensure he would always have somewhere quiet to sit and read, he bought the villa across the road and linked it to Casa Kimberley with a bridge that is said to resemble Venice's Bridge of Sighs - it actually looks like the Ponte della Paglia from which tourists take pictures of the Bridge of Sighs.
After Burton and Taylor divorced for the second time in 1976, he gave her up but refused to abandon Puerto Vallarta. Burton bought Villa Bursus as a Valentine's Day gift for his third wife Susan: hence the name Bur-Sus. The property was later bought by American hotelier Janice Chatterton who, with four other neighbouring villas, created the Hacienda San Angel.
Burton's bedroom is now the Celestial Suite - one of 14 suites - and the Hacienda also has three large heated pools, one with panoramic views of the city and Banderas Bay, and another in a tranquil setting with fountains. Chatterton also now owns Casa Kimberley and is remodelling the house into another hotel.
Rooms at Hacienda San Angel (www.haciendasanangel.com) cost from £290 a night.
Carnival (0845 351 0556, www.carnivalcruise.co.uk) sells a nine-night fly cruise to the Mexican Riviera from LA from £1,019 per person, including scheduled flights from London, pre-cruise hotel night in LA, transfers and seven-night cruise, with full board.
Montreal - Ritz Carlton
The city's iconic grand hotel, confusingly not part of the international Ritz-Carlton group, grabbed the headlines when Burton and Taylor suddenly arrived on March 15, 1964, for what was to be their first marriage.
Montreal was chosen for the ceremony, conducted by a Unitarian minister, because of the prevailing complications involved in divorcees getting remarried - Taylor was a converted Jew and Burton was a chapel boy.
Taylor wore a yellow chiffon dress and the £100,000 diamond and emerald necklace that was a present from her new husband.
The Ritz Carlton (www.ritzmontreal.com) will reopen next year after refurbishment.
Rome - St Regis Grand Hotel
When Burton and Taylor were filming Cleopatra in Rome at the beginning of the Sixties, the St Regis Grand (www.stregisrome.com) was in its heyday - a celebrity hangout of writers, artists, actors, musicians and politicians. It remains one of the city's truly grand hotels.
Rooms at the St Regis Grand cost from £295 a night.
Vienna - Hotel Imperial
On a weekend trip to Vienna in 1972, Burton and Taylor checked in to the Hotel Imperial (www.hotelimperialvienna.com) on Vienna's Ringstrasse.
As the favoured hotel of the Austrian emperor, it had attracted the most distinguished clientele including Wagner, who wrote parts of several of his operas here, and Charlie Chaplin.
Less illustriously it was also the favourite hotel of Adolf Hitler, who worked here as a day labourer but returned as conquering hero following Germany's annexation of Austria in 1938.
| | Grandeur: The Royal Suite at the Imperial Hotel in Vienna, which was famously used by Hitler | |
At check-in, Burton asked for Hitler's suite and he and Liz immediately jumped into bed to enjoy what he described as 'lovely love'.
Rooms at the Imperial Hotel cost from £290 per night.
You can read more about Burton and Taylor's tempestuous romance in the recently published book Furious Love: The Love Affair Of Elizabeth And Richard, by Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger (HarperCollins, £18.99). |
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