The love of a lifetime
Richard Burton’s diaries reveal passion and pain
HIS MUSE — and obsession — had violet eyes.
Elizabeth Taylor is a “wildly exciting lover-mistress” and “beautiful beyond the dreams of pornography,” Richard Burton, her lover, husband and sometime co-star, wrote in his diary.
“She can be arrogant and willful, she is clement and loving. She is Sunday’s child, she can tolerate my impossibilities and my drunkenness, she is an ache in the stomach when I am away from her and she loves me.”
Those words are among the 450,000 that Burton, once one of the world’s biggest movie stars, scrawled in ledgers, in pocket books, on scraps of paper, before he died in 1984 at age 58.
Now with “The Richard Burton Diaries” due to be released next month, one of Hollywood’s greatest and most turbulent romances is laid bare in prose that is at times tender — and almost always passionate.
“I awoke this morning at about 7 o’clock,” he wrote in a 1969 entry. “I stared at Elizabeth for a long time.
“I held her hand and kissed her very gently. Probably no woman sleeps with such childish beauty as my adorable difficult fractious intolerant wife.”
While Burton would be eclipsed in life and death by Taylor, he was the George Clooney of his time — a seven-time Oscarnominated actor (he never won) who commanded the biggest paycheck in Hollywood.
Taylor, who died last year at age 79, once said that the sound of Burton’s voice made her melt.
“Imagine having Richard Burton’s voice in your ear while you are making love,” she said.
“It drowned out the troubles, the sorrows; everything just melted away.”
The voice that appears in Burton’s diaries is that of a man whose world began and ended with the violet-eyed actress he wound up marrying twice, once from 1964 to 1974, and again in 1975. The second marriage lasted just a year.
“I have been inordinately lucky all my life, but the greatest luck of all has been Elizabeth,” Burton wrote in November 1968.
“She has turned me into a model man, but not a prig; she is a wildly exciting lovermistress, she is shy and witty, she is nobody’s fool.”
Displaying an erudition atypical of movie stars — and familiarity with Benjamin Franklin’s “Poor Richard’s Almanack” — Burton in one entry called Taylor “the prospectus that can never be entirely catalogued, an almanac for poor Richard.”
“And I shall love her forever,” he wrote.
But Burton, when drunk, could also be a beast to his Liz.
“Yesterday was another terrible day,” he wrote in August 1969. “I behaved in a way to make a banshee look kind, good and sweet. Insulting Elizabeth, drunk, periodically excusing myself rather shabbily and then starting the rough treatment all over again.”
Burton lamented that he had become a copy of his abusive father, a Welsh coal miner prone to binge drinking who abandoned the family weeks at a time.
“Sometimes I am so much my father’s son that I give myself occasional creeps,” he wrote. “He had the same gift for damaging with the tongue, he had the same temporary violence, he had the same fidelity to Mam that I have to Elizabeth.”
Burton’s diaries were left to his last wife and widow, Sally Hay. Some snippets appeared earlier in the book “Furious Love,” where Burton recalled the first time he laid eyes on the then-21-year-old — and bikini-clad — Taylor.
“Her breasts were apocalyptic,” he wrote. “They would topple empires.”
Burton and Taylor were both married when they fell in love on the set of the 1963 movie “Cleopatra.” Taylor played the title character and Burton played Mark Antony.
Sparks flew the first time they kissed on-screen. Three years later, they played a bitter, aging couple in the 1966 film “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”
That role won Taylor her second Academy Award. And if Burton was able to coax that kind of performance out of her, it’s because the “battling Burtons,” as they came to be known, were feuding off-screen as well.
Jealous of Taylor’s rising star power, Burton belittled his wife, calling her fat and dismissing her as “my little Jewish tart” in letters to her.
Taylor, in turn, called him “Charlie Charm” and nagged him about his drinking.
They feuded on the set and off. And after one particularly nasty fight, Burton bought Taylor a $1.1 million Cartier diamond ring to make up.
In 1968, Taylor underwent a hysterectomy, ending any hope of bearing a baby with Burton. But it was Burton’s affair with French actress Nathalie Delon that finally killed their first marriage.
“Maybe we loved each other too much,” Taylor said in announcing the divorce.
They would remarry, divorce again, reconnect as co-stars in a Noel Coward play, and break up again.
On the night before Burton died of a cerebral hemorrhage, he wrote Taylor a final love letter. She got it the day after his funeral.
In it, “Furious Love” authors Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger wrote, Burton told Taylor “home was where Elizabeth was, and he wanted to come home.”
When Taylor died, that love letter went with her to the grave.