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<\/p>\nOn May 16, 1968, Richard Burton purchased the 33-carat Krupp diamond \u2014 named after a wicked industrialist who’d used forced labour during the war \u2014 for \u00a3127,000 (around \u00a33million today). It was just one of many exquisite jewels he’d give to Elizabeth Taylor.<\/p>\n
Three years later, at a reception at Kensington Palace, Princess Margaret examined the diamond, set in a ring, and remarked to Taylor: ‘How very vulgar.’<\/p>\n
Taylor replied, ‘Yeah, ain’t it great. Want to try it on?’<\/p>\n
Ma’am did so.<\/p>\n
‘Not so vulgar now, is it?’ the actress said, before leaving the gathering.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
On May 16, 1968, Richard Burton purchased the 33-carat Krupp diamond \u2014 named after a wicked industrialist who’d used forced labour during the war \u2014 for \u00a3127,000 (around \u00a33million today). It was just one of many exquisite jewels he’d give to Elizabeth Taylor.<\/p>\n
A month later, Taylor wore her diamonds to a society wedding, making fellow guests the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret look like they’d been dressed by Oxfam.<\/p>\n
In the four years after they first came together, Burton and Taylor’s films made them a staggering $200million (\u00a3164million) combined, and they couldn’t get through the stuff quick enough.<\/p>\n
On October 23, 1968, for example, Burton recorded in his diary: ‘I had only recently given [Taylor] a \u00a3127,000 diamond ring simply because it was a Tuesday. I enjoy being outrageous.’<\/p>\n
Most famously, there was the whopping 69.42-carat Krupp diamond, for which Burton paid $1.1million in 1969. Cartier designed a necklace for it and insurers insisted it was always accompanied by bodyguards.<\/p>\n
Taylor rather enjoyed arranging for what became known as the Burton-Taylor Diamond to be placed on a bed of lettuce and paraded around the Lanai Restaurant in the Beverly Hills Hotel.<\/p>\n
As for Burton, he commented: ‘It won’t seem out of place in the yacht parked in the Bahamas or the Mediterranean . . . It sort of hums with its own beautiful life.’<\/p>\n
Their yacht, the Kalizma, had seven double-berth state rooms, Chippendale furniture and paintings by Monet, Van Gogh and Picasso. When Burton had to be in London for the filming of Where Eagles Dare, the vessel was moored on the Thames and used purely as a kennel for Taylor’s dogs.<\/p>\n
In 1967, ‘so we could fly to Nice for lunch’, the Burtons bought a Hawker-Siddeley de Havilland 125 twin-engine executive jet, which even he admitted was a purchase ‘beyond outrage’.<\/p>\n
The following year, The New York Times admonished the Burtons for scaling ‘the heights of true vulgarity’, which prompted her to say unrepentantly, ‘I know I’m vulgar, but would you have me any other way?’<\/p>\n
Would we? There can be too much importance given to display and there will be people always disgusted by Burton and Taylor’s materialism. They certainly stand in marked contrast to our 21st century’s chilling and arrogant neopuritanical modes of thought (if you can call it thought), where everyone is crushed and ‘cancelled’ if they can’t signal virtue.<\/p>\n
But I absolutely refuse to disapprove of Taylor and Burton. I prefer to see vulgarity as an antidote to drabness and uniformity; the triumph of the bizarre over the ordinary. Where they were revolutionaries is in the way their sense of power, their energy and neediness made them live their lives flat out. They were joyously vulgar in that they were a ludicrous intensification of themselves.<\/p>\n
When they’d met in Rome, in 1962, to shoot the film Cleopatra, they’d both been married to other people: she to her fourth husband Eddie Fisher and he to his Welsh wife Sybil, by whom he had two children. Yet Burton and Taylor had embarked almost immediately on an intensely erotic affair, and to hell with wives, husbands, children, duty.<\/p>\n
‘I had to be with Richard. I knew it was wrong. I knew it would hurt people. I knew. I knew. But I also knew what I had to do . . . I had to be with Richard,’ said Taylor.<\/p>\n
They were spellbound by each other, enchanted, as were their characters Mark Antony and Cleopatra. Watch their performances now, and you can see Burton’s muscles and nerves alerted, his eyes devouring her.<\/p>\n
‘He is the ocean. He is the sunset. He is such a vast person,’ she said of him. ‘She looks at you with those eyes and your blood churns, I tell you,’ he said of Taylor.<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n
Richard Burton with his wife Elizabeth Taylor following their performance of prose and poetry readings at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, New York<\/p>\n
They were, in many ways, an unlikely pairing; certainly their backgrounds could hardly have been further apart. During Burton’s early years in the village of Pontrhydyfen, Wales, he collected dung, selling it to people for their gardens. He’d been born into a large family, with nine siblings above him, and his mother died soon after giving birth to the tenth.<\/p>\n
His father, Dick Jenkins, earned only \u00a33 a week as a coal miner, and became a drunkard after his wife’s death. Burton was taken by his sister Cis to live with her and her new husband. Though he saw the rest of the family every weekend, he felt himself to be an orphan.<\/p>\n
‘Completely wild was Richie when he lost his temper,’ schoolfellows recalled. ‘Wild as a bloody hawk he was.’ He was no delinquent, however, becoming the first in his family to have a grammar school education. And at the school, he came to the attention of Philip Burton, the schoolteacher who changed his life.<\/p>\n
It was Philip who instilled in the future actor a sense of craftsmanship, but I’ve always found him creepy. One can grasp at once why Taylor, who was animated, ardent and spontaneous, was going to be a powerful and necessary counterbalance. Chiselled and precise, Philip had what he liked to call ‘a Pygmalion Complex. It’s a very deep urge to fulfil myself as an actor or writer through another person. Perhaps I should be unkinder to myself and call it a Svengali Complex.’<\/p>\n
Is that how a paedophile attempts to explain it?<\/p>\n
Much later he would say: ‘I was fascinated by [Richard]. I thought he had incredible potential and great need . . . He had an obvious virility.’<\/p>\n
He also added, as paedophiles always do, ‘he courted me’. In his deliberately misleading account of their relationship, Philip stressed how Burton jostled to get his attention, piping up in class, wanting to join the Air Training Corps to increase proximity. ‘He saw to it that he did fire-watching duty on my nights.’<\/p>\n
Cis’s husband forced Richard to drop out of school at 15 and start earning a wage as a draper’s assistant \u2014 a job he hated. Fortunately, another teacher, recognising his academic abilities, managed to get him reinstated as a pupil when he was 17.<\/p>\n
Philip was able to exploit Richard’s quarrels with his sister’s husband and his growing interest in amateur dramatics. He gave him elocution and drama lessons at his lodgings, directed him in the school play, started buying him clothes and eventually persuaded his family that the boy would be better off living with him.<\/p>\n
On March 1, 1943, St David’s Day, the teenager moved in for good. In adulthood, he would always celebrate the anniversary by getting drunk.<\/p>\n
Philip saw to it that Richard became genteel, teaching him table manners, how to hold his cutlery. Yet in their shared lodgings, there were quarrels and door-slamming. According to Cis, Richard ‘came straight from school to see me, for a long time. He wasn’t happy there’.<\/p>\n
Philip nevertheless managed to persuade Richard’s father to let him adopt the boy and change his surname to Burton. Money changed hands, thought to be \u00a350, for Dick’s signature, which gave Philip ‘uncontrolled custody’.<\/p>\n
Richard, however, later looked back on this period with Philip as ‘hell’. He started to drink. ‘You drink to overcome the shame.’<\/p>\n
Of what? Years later, he told one of his lovers, the actress Mary Ure, that Philip had ‘made a pass’. To another lover, Rosemary Kingsland, he confessed that there had been a sexual relationship going on. She chiefly remembered how furious Burton always was on the subject of Philip, ‘very, very black and angry’.<\/p>\n
Later, he publicly declared, ‘I was a homosexual once but not for long. But I tried it. It didn’t work, so I gave it up.’ It was always assumed he was joking.<\/p>\n
One bizarre link between Burton and Taylor is that she, too, had a homosexual parent. Her father Francis worked as a minor art dealer in London and Los Angeles, but seems to have left little mark on her life; he complained that his wife Sara ‘wanted the child all to herself. She dotes on her night and day’.<\/p>\n
Indeed, Taylor had no friends, and there was a distinct element of emotional smothering. Visitors to the family home in Los Angeles recalled a creature being trained to be another Shirley Temple.<\/p>\n
‘Sing, darling, sing!’ Sara commanded. She’d then ask the company in a theatrical, rhetorical way, ‘Have you ever seen a more beautiful face, more beautiful hair, more beautiful teeth?’<\/p>\n
As she hoped, her daughter became a child star, but she also became an adult too soon. It’s why in 1941, when Taylor was nine, a casting director could report, ‘[Elizabeth’s] eyes are too old. She doesn’t have the face of a child.’<\/p>\n
Hers was a royal upbringing, with the studios providing what little education she ever had, booking her flights, reserving hotels, giving her chauffeurs, hiring the band and caterers for her parties. As the producer of Cleopatra would later comment: ‘From early childhood, she had lived in a world of fantasy. She doesn’t know any other world.’<\/p>\n
This toy existence left her with a child’s introspection, and a child’s need for instant gratification of basic needs. Taylor got whatever she wanted. She was determined never to be crushed by the movie moguls, as Judy Garland was \u2014 Judy who, said Taylor, ‘never talked back. She followed the studio’s orders. They pumped pills into that poor girl to keep her awake, to put her to sleep, and to keep her slim.’<\/p>\n
At 18, she married Conrad Nicholson Hilton Jr, the hotel chain heir. On their honeymoon, without warning or preamble, he punched his wife in the belly.<\/p>\n
Hilton, who died in 1969, aged 42, at least had one attraction for her. ‘He had absolutely the largest penis \u2014 wider than a beer can and much longer \u2014 I have ever seen,’ said a starlet named Terry Moore. ‘To make love to him was akin to fornicating with a horse.’ Taylor would ever after be appreciative of well-endowed men. Even Burton was heard to boast, ‘If I’m called upon, I can sometimes summon up a good 11-and-a-half inches. But of course, I’m only joking.’<\/p>\n
More significantly, Taylor was shown in her first marriage that sex and violence were connected, that desire can also mean a desire to hurt. The psychological legacy of this was long-lasting.<\/p>\n
During the making of Cleopatra, Rex Harrison \u2014 who played Julius Caesar \u2014 discovered that the Burton\/Taylor affair had a violent component.<\/p>\n
‘At the height of it, Elizabeth and Richard kept hitting each other and giving each other black eyes,’ he said. Later, on the set of The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, John Le Carr\u00e9 reportedly saw Taylor slapping Burton around.<\/p>\n
Ernest Lehman, who adapted Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? for the screen, also witnessed violence. ‘Elizabeth loves to fight. She was constantly hitting and punching Burton,’ he said.<\/p>\n
Many of the couples they played on film are like them, from Mark Antony and Cleopatra to the disintegrating pair in Divorce His, Divorce Hers (1973): ‘It’s no fun behaving badly if you’re not going to punish me,’ says Taylor’s character. ‘Beat me black and blue, but please don’t leave me.’<\/p>\n
Her own views on sex were explicit: pleasure and pain were the same thing; making love was inseparable from danger and suspense.<\/p>\n
‘A woman will try and dominate a man,’ she explained. ‘She will try and get away with it. But really, inside herself, she wants to be dominated. She wants the man to take her.’<\/p>\n
But she never allowed herself to be dominated for long. For her, the challenge of physical fights, tantrums, roaring panic, was what love meant, what having a relationship meant.<\/p>\n
And the massive amounts of alcohol the couple consumed exaggerated everything, coarsened everything.<\/p>\n
Eddie Fisher had tried to cut down Taylor’s drinking, but Burton encouraged it \u2014 cocktails of vodka, grappa and ouzo; brandy disguised in Coca-Cola bottles. For Burton himself, an abstemious day was a whisky and soda, a few glasses of wine, several brandies, and a few more whiskies and soda. Taylor was no help. ‘Richard, take a drink. You are so goddamned dull when you are not drinking,’ she’d say.<\/p>\n
Private jets, jewels, fur coats, an entourage, unimaginable wealth . . . With Taylor in his life, Burton simply needed to pose, or loll, or bask, on yachts, on hotel balconies. He became so lordly, he never carried money. Gaston Sanz, their chauffeur, paid for everything. The boot of their Rolls-Royce was filled with fan mail, which Burton and Taylor never bothered to open. They retained suites in hotels in cities they never visited. They had matching $120,000 mink coats.<\/p>\n
It’s easy to see them as a comical couple because their ridiculous side is what’s mostly on display. But the truth is they are tragic. If they thought the advantage of stardom was the freedom it conferred \u2014 a life unhindered \u2014 they were to discover it was only another way of being held prisoner. ‘I can’t go to a pub any more. Elizabeth is more famous than the Queen. I wish none of it had ever happened,’ Burton told John le Carr\u00e9, a big admission, and not entirely an honest one.<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n
Taylor wearing the diamond on a necklace at the 1970 ‘Oscar’ ball at Beverly Hills, California<\/p>\n
With Taylor in his life, his became an enclosed existence \u2014 the star in Swiss chalets, private planes and yachts, opulent hotel suites. He was always in lovely places \u2014 Italy, Switzerland, Mexico \u2014 but in 1977, he admitted that for the past two decades he’d ‘very rarely gone out’. His response was a sort of paralysis, a loss of identity, which is why he drank.<\/p>\n
Soon enough, unremitting proximity led to put-downs, sarcasm, blows: ‘Go f*** yourself,’ ‘P*** off out of my sight’, and similar imprecations.<\/p>\n
Taylor called Burton ‘a boozed-up, burned-out Welshman!’ Service was returned in kind, with Burton saying of Taylor, ‘She has the shape of a Welsh village girl. Her legs are really quite stumpy.’ Chivalrous to the end, he also called her ‘Miss Tits’, ‘that fat little tart’, a ‘French tart’, ‘that fat Jewish wife of mine . . . Beautiful, plump, jewel-studded \u2013 and very hairy.’<\/p>\n
His nickname for her was ‘Monkey Nipples’, which may begin to explain why Taylor spent hours in the bathroom, depilating. And he liked to mock her lack of formal education: ‘Oh yes, I forgot. You don’t know any Shakespeare, do you? Not one bloody word that doesn’t come out of the dictionary of clich\u00e9s.’<\/p>\n
Her reply was very cool: ‘I don’t know anything about the theatre, but then I don’t need to. I’m a star.’<\/p>\n
Just like the characters they played in many films they made together, they started screaming and fighting, hurling things at each other. By the late 1960s, Burton was someone to whom Taylor could say: ‘Now, you s***-faced bastard, give me a drink.’<\/p>\n
He’d be alarmed by the way ‘the eyes blaze with genuine hatred and contempt’ during their arguments. ‘Her lovely face becomes ugly with loathing.’<\/p>\n
But he wasn’t exactly tranquil either. ‘Richard loses his temper with true enjoyment,’ Taylor said.<\/p>\n
‘He’s like a small atom bomb going off. Sparks fly, walls shake, floors vibrate.’<\/p>\n
The hysteria and unhappiness led to an official separation in July 1973. Eight months later, Taylor visited Burton in California, where he was shooting The Klansman.<\/p>\n
‘I could hear them fighting at night in their room,’ said a crew member. ‘There were screams and then a door slammed. I looked outside and Elizabeth was on the ground where he’d flung her.’<\/p>\n
Burton made his way to St John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, where for six weeks he was fed intravenously and given blood transfusions for chronic alcoholism. His liver was so shot, it couldn’t metabolise the Antabuse medication.<\/p>\n
‘With deep regret,’ Taylor announced to the Press that the reconciliation had failed and the marriage had died of irreconcilable differences.<\/p>\n
That June, she told a divorce judge in Switzerland that life with Burton was intolerable. Twenty minutes after the divorce was granted, she rang her ex-husband.<\/p>\n
‘Richard,’ she said, ‘do you think we did the right thing?’<\/p>\n
Adapted from Erotic Vagrancy by Roger Lewis (Quercus Publishing, \u00a330), to be published on October 26. \u00a9 Roger Lewis 2023. To order a copy for \u00a327 (offer valid until October 30, 2023; UK P&P free on orders over \u00a325) go to mailshop.co.uk\/books or call 020 3176 2937.<\/p>\n