Price Burton paid for his dance with a beautiful devil
Erotic Vagrancy: Everything About Richard Burton And Elizabeth Taylor
The subtitle is misleading. For all its heft – 600-plus pages – Erotic Vagrancy is nowhere near to containing everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. The book, which Roger Lewis has spent more than 13 years writing, is full of fascinating factoids. But it is not a conventional life story. Indeed, he dismisses biography as ‘bogus… historical fiction’.
Lewis treats Burton and Taylor not as two people who met and fell in love, but as two players who couldn’t stop performing. No matter what they were doing, from knocking back pints in Burton’s native Pontrhydyfen to swanning around the Med, they did so in front of a real or an imaginary camera.
Even their non-stop bickering had a headline-ready quality. Little wonder,
Lewis argues, that so many of their movies – Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf ?, The VIPs, a dreadful TV remake of Brief Encounter
– ‘are about marriages breaking up’.
Break up Burton and Taylor very publicly did, before marrying – and divorcing – again. In fact, Taylor was convinced that had Burton lived a little longer (he died in 1984 aged just 58), they’d have got hitched a third time. They were, Lewis says, the ultimate Sixties’ ‘sexual revolution[aries]’. Andy Warhol was no wit, but his description of Taylor as ‘a tawdry empress’ is spot-on. As for Burton’s spending – executive jets, designer clothes and gizmos – Lewis finds the ‘tastelessness and shamelessness… increasingly expressive’.
Each to his own, but I can’t be the only one who regrets that Burton didn’t do more with his talent. So desperate for stardom was Burton, Lewis suggests, he might even have taken up with Taylor to bolster his Tinseltown status. Alas, Lewis argues, the price he paid for this dance with a devil he thought ‘beautiful beyond the dreams of pornography’ was to be ‘more or less murdered by fame’.