The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Airing Burton and Taylor’s laundry
The Hollywood couple’s wild excesses meet their match in Roger Lewis’s vast and gossipy biography
766pp, Riverrun, T £25 (0844 871 1514), RRP £30, ebook £12.99
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“I make no apology,” roars Roger Lewis, “for this being a visionary book, a fierce book, a prose version of a portrait in pinks and lilacs and orange and yellow…” He could perhaps apologise for it being such a very long book – 750 pages. Don’t publishers have editors anymore? Did no one dare pipe up, “These 20 pages could usefully be cut?” Probably not to Lewis, whose comically furious diaries and idiosyncratic biographies of Peter Sellers and Charles Hawtrey have found many admirers.
Lewis is a writer of genius, and he knows it – brilliant, witty, exhilarating, and a fund of good stories. I love the one about Richard Burton and John Neville, who were alternating the roles of Othello and Iago, both turning up on stage in blackface after a good lunch and neither they nor the audience noticing.
But Lewis is also an obsessive, which means he never knows when to stop. Despite the book’s subtitle (“Everything About Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor”), this isn’t quite everything, because he has little to say about their subsequent marriages; but it is a heck of a lot. He has watched every one of their films, including some that aren’t even obtainable in English. He actually bothered to read the official report on the plane crash that killed Taylor’s third husband, Mike Todd, which established that the plane was grossly overloaded, and he tracks down what happened to her second, Michael Wilding, after their divorce – he became the maître d’ of a Brighton restaurant called the Three Little Wilding Rooms. At least he fared better than her first, Conrad Hilton, who, Lewis says, ended up as a certified lunatic.
The title Erotic Vagrancy comes from a Vatican newspaper complaining about Burton and Taylor’s antics in Rome during the filming of Cleopatra. But we don’t get to Rome until page 323. Before that, we have their separate lives. Taylor claimed she couldn’t remember a day when she wasn’t famous (she was signed by MGM when she was 12), but for Burton stardom came relatively late, and he was not always comfortable with it. He liked to hide away in his study and read – he was probably the best-read film star ever – though I was shocked to learn that Sophia Loren could beat him at Scrabble.
Despite his innate puritanism, Burton soon adjusted to their extravagant lifestyle. He once gave Taylor a £127,000 diamond ring “simply because it was a Tuesday”.
Someone once saw one of Liz’s dogs chewing on her necklaces and she explained “She loves to teethe on diamonds”. The director Franco Zeffirelli said they travelled with “a court of about 12 people, ranging from lawyers to hairdressers… I always knew when this tribe was coming my way; there was the tell-tale chink of gold bracelets and necklaces.”
Burton never looked happy. Lewis believes he was consumed by guilt – guilt over deserting his wife Sybil, of course, and his younger daughter Jessica, who never spoke after he left and was diagnosed autistic. He last saw her when she was six. But Lewis believes that there was an older, longer guilt connected with his adoptive father, Philip Burton, who effectively bought him from his father Dick Jenkins for £50 and made him take his name. Lewis believes Philip Burton was a paedophile – Richard told Mary Ure that he once made a pass at him. He also told a journalist, “I drank because I was afraid of being a homosexual… I was a homosexual once but not for long.”
Rather late in the day – after 700 pages – Lewis mentions that the Burtons had a serious fault: they were mean. Tony Richardson told Isherwood that they were “completely corrupt; they think only of money”. They had a nasty habit of promising charitable donations which didn’t ever materialise. When they did Doctor Faustus at Oxford, they said they would build an Oxford arts centre – they never did. Nor did they build the hospital they promised in Botswana.
After Burton’s death, Taylor became well-known as an Aids philanthropist, but one of her soi-disant friends said “there’s not much anonymous giving on Elizabeth’s part… She definitely wants credit for her generosity. It helps soften her public image.” She was canny too: when Mike Todd died, she presented the LA County Art museum with his Renoirs, Picassos and van Goghs, but she took them back after a year – she only wanted them out of the house while probate was being settled.
Lewis says most biographers seem to disapprove of their subjects, but declares, “I absolutely refuse to disapprove of them. Burton and Taylor uplift me.” Fair enough. I don’t mind biographers being obsessive. But I want them to be obsessive about their subjects, not anyone who takes their fancy. An early warning comes in the prologue when Lewis devotes seven pages to the actress Rachel Roberts, who is not remotely relevant except that Lewis tells us, “Born in Glamorganshire, in 1960, I’m not dissimilar.”
Lewis says he started writing this book more than 10 years ago as a straight biography, but then he was hospitalised with pancreatitis and spent months watching Burton and Taylor films and decided to go back to the beginning, “to the spontaneity of my notebooks, where a scrawled rapture was to be found”. I love his scrawled rapture – but I still think he could do with a stern editor.