Here is the story of a wild folie à deux, or a dance of death in which both partners were tragically condemned to survive. Roger Lewis’s biography may not fulfil the promise of “everything” about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor but it surely contains more than you could ever wish to know. “I make no apology for this being a visionary book,” he explains, sonorously, and often the reader does hear a singular voice at work – fearless, funny, provocative, acute, insistent. But oh, it’s exhausting too. Lewis, a Welshman, understands his native weakness: “garrulity”. Or, as Taylor was once overheard to say, as her husband drunkenly dominated another evening with Dylan Thomas recitals and lectures: “Does the man ever shut up?”
Perhaps only an outsize book could comprehend the excess, “the magnificent bad taste and greed and money” that became the keynote of the Burton-Taylor partnership. Lewis, disdaining standard biography as “bogus” and “an affair of ghosts”, adopts an impish, even jesterish approach – bouncing back and forth between eras, zooming in on minor characters, speculating on omissions and obfuscations in the official story. His line on Taylor is that the child actor from MGM stayed a child; petulant, needy, selfish, making a drama of her many illnesses and bullying doctors into prescribing whatever she wanted (she took so many pills she must have rattled). She was essentially a “bundle of appetites” – a collector of clothes and shoes and husbands, of pets and presents and precious trinkets. As her fourth husband, Eddie Fisher, said: “Just a little $50,000 diamond would make everything wonderful for up to four days.” Her need to be on show at all times was incurable: even a surgical operation on her “benign” brain tumour (“the only chunk of her which was”) had to be photographed for Life magazine.
Burton’s background was hardscrabble – the 12th of 13 children born to a drunkard father, Richard Jenkins, and a mother who died when Burton was two. He was raised by his older sister and her miner husband in a suburb of Port Talbot, where a local schoolmaster, Philip Burton, took the boy, fatefully, under his wing and trained him up for the stage. Yet Lewis lays bare not just an anguished Mephistophelian relationship between mentor and adoptee (“Hell”, as Burton recalled) but, in the first of the book’s two major allegations, calls out Philip as a paedophile. It may be that Burton’s later womanising hid a homosexual insecurity, not unrelated to his chronic drinking, self-loathing and black rages. Thank goodness, then, for that voice, his supreme gift and enchantment, and “one of the 20th-century’s great noises”, says Lewis, revelling in “the fire and flint of things spoken”. This imagery of the combustible and incendiary smoulders around Burton the entire book, “like floating fire or coals”; Claire Bloom’s describing sex with him as “a flame with an incandescence that astonished us both”; his voice again, “a smoky fire burning… of glassblowers’ furnaces”, “hot coals and cinders, left over from a primeval Welsh forest” (blimey). And every day, the fumes “pouring from his nostrils” from his chainsmoking.
Fire met fire, eventually, on the set of Cleopatra (1963), re-created here in diary form as a sumptuous catastrophe that burned up money, marriages, reputations. Lewis isn’t the first to identify the consonances between Antony and Cleopatra/ Taylor and Burton – a couple of lovers “consuming themselves, like a fire” – though none have told it more compellingly or ominously. The mood of extravagance was Roman in itself – $120,000 a day on the shoot, palm trees shipped from Hollywood to Pinewood, Taylor in a huge corner suite at the Dorchester holding up proceedings, the rooms overrun with cats that shed and dogs that shat everywhere. The two stars seemed to compete over who could be more possessive, spoilt and unmanageable – a dead heat, I imagine – the upshot being humiliation for spouses Sybil Burton and Eddie Fisher, betrayed and discarded. Even the Vatican was moved to pronounce on the sinful pair, describing Taylor as “an avaricious vamp who destroys families and devours husbands”, which, adds Lewis, “actually isn’t an exaggeration”. Jokes were made about the film for years, decades, afterwards. Joan Rivers: “If Liz Taylor filmed Cleopatra today they’d have to widen the Nile.” And the epic sets at Pinewood were soon repurposed for Carry on Cleo (1964), as were the costumes: Kenneth Williams wore Peter Finch’s toga. The first time as history, the second time as farce.
Lewis wonders if Burton and Taylor ever made “a full, thorough exit from the world of that film”, their names thereafter a byword for vulgar ostentation and wanton acquisitiveness. After the yachts and the Rollers in 1967 they bought a twin-engined executive jet whose interiors Taylor commissioned her designer to decorate in a fancy Regency style. “Where am I going to put the fireplace?” he asked, and Taylor didn’t even think he was joking. They would also become their own rolling news story of walkouts and bust-ups. Their fights, fuelled by drink and drugs, weren’t just verbal. Taylor had a violent streak. “She was constantly hitting and punching Burton,” reported screenwriter Ernest Lehman on the set of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), which Lewis reckons to be “their entire marriage, crammed into a single picture”. The ugliness of it is nearly unwatchable, and the humour of it pure aggression. Burton was himself pugnacious, criminally so one night in 1968 when a drunken row with his older brother, Ivor, ended with the latter falling and breaking his neck. Paralysed from the neck down, he died four years later. In Lewis’s telling it was Burton’s fatal shove that did for him. So add fratricide to the charge sheet.
And then, on page 595, comes a startling reversal: “I absolutely refuse to disapprove of them,” writes Lewis, having covered a few thousand acres of prose not just disapproving but dismantling them. He has charted an odyssey of moronic, near-barbaric misbehaviour to make even the most liberal-minded reader go all pursed and Protestant, only to rehabilitate them as “joyously vulgar”. Unlike his previous biographical subjects – Peter Sellers, Anthony Burgess – “I grew to hold them in huge affection”. In the name of God, how? I suspect that during the troubled 13-year period he was writing (he got ill), at some point Lewis decided to change tack just to jolly things up. It’s not as though he can’t write concisely – his brilliant portrait of Charles Hawtrey (The Man Who Was Private Widdle) comes in at around 100 pages. But Erotic Vagrancy o’erflows the measure. At times I couldn’t quite remember my life before I was reading this book. But let us concede at least that Lewis has put in the hours, compiled all the anecdotes and panned them for gold. Like this, from Frankie Howerd, backstage at Stratford one night as Burton was in full flow: “I can hear Shakespeare clapping his hands… over his ears.”
• Erotic Vagrancy: Everything About Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor by Roger Lewis is published by Riverrun (£30). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
