{"id":9358,"date":"2023-10-25T10:31:45","date_gmt":"2023-10-25T05:01:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/a-new-biography-of-hollywood-star-elizabeth-taylor-and-her-husband-books-entertainment\/"},"modified":"2023-10-25T10:31:45","modified_gmt":"2023-10-25T05:01:45","slug":"a-new-biography-of-hollywood-star-elizabeth-taylor-and-her-husband-books-entertainment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/a-new-biography-of-hollywood-star-elizabeth-taylor-and-her-husband-books-entertainment\/","title":{"rendered":"A new biography of Hollywood star Elizabeth Taylor and her husband | Books | Entertainment"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Their vanity, their hubris and their sheer bad taste were displayed for all to see as they travelled around the world by private jet, wrapped in furs and flashing their diamonds. \u201cI have a lust for diamonds,\u201d Taylor once admitted, \u201cthat\u2019s almost a disease.\u201d<\/p>\n

I rediscovered their films \u2013 the overblown sparkling filigree of Boom!, The Comedians, The Sandpiper, Doctor Faustus and Hammersmith Is Out \u2013 while recovering from pancreatitis in a hospital\u2019s high dependency unit 13 years ago.<\/p>\n

They perfectly captured my mood at the time, feverish and off my head on painkillers, and they have now inspired my new biography of the pair, Erotic Vagrancy.<\/p>\n

Burton first met Taylor professionally in Rome in late 1961, when the actress was busy bankrupting Twentieth Century Fox whilst making Cleopatra \u2013 the budget eventually reached \u00a325.5million \u2013 a staggering 10 times that in today\u2019s money.<\/p>\n

There were endless delays because Taylor was ill \u2013 throat and bladder infections, back strain, twisted intestines and pneumonia. Production had already been halted and abandoned in London \u2013 the scrapped sets at Pinewood were recycled by Peter Rogers for Carry On Cleo.<\/p>\n

Instead of simply playing Antony and Cleopatra, Burton and Taylor turned into the characters in real life, conducting an affair in front of the paparazzi\u2019s cameras.<\/p>\n

Burton was still married to his nice little Welsh wife Sybil. Taylor was still married to the devoted Eddie Fisher, whom she had poached from nice little Debbie Reynolds. This was public adultery on a grand scale.<\/p>\n

The Pope was outraged. \u201cYou will finish in an erotic vagrancy, without end or without a safe port,\u201d John XXIII thundered from the Vatican. \u201cCan I sue the Pope?\u201d Taylor was heard to ask.<\/p>\n

Their love was never normal, never domesticated. It was obsessional, psychotic, disturbed, haunted.<\/p>\n

Burton and Taylor went in for scenes. As Rex Harrison, cast as Julius Caesar, said of the Cleopatra shoot: \u201cAt the height of it, Elizabeth and Richard kept hitting each other and giving each other black eyes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Whenever Burton threatened to return to Sybil, Taylor swallowed an overdose. An ambulance was kept on standby at the studio, to rush her to hospital.<\/p>\n

Fisher was led a merry dance. Meant to be responsible for getting Taylor to the make-up chair on time, Taylor decided she didn\u2019t like being supervised \u2013 so the exasperated Eddie disappeared to New York and on March 30, 1962, held a press conference there.<\/p>\n

Over the transatlantic phone, and witnessed by reporters, Eddie asked Taylor to confirm that tales of her involvement with Burton were \u201cpreposterous, ridiculous,
absolutely false\u201d.<\/p>\n

There was a long pause. \u201cEddie, I can\u2019t do that, because there\u2019s some truth in the story,\u201d she admitted. Cleopatra remains a
monument to the self-indulgence of its stars and of the Hollywood system, as Taylor was well aware.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat ballooned the unbelievably insane quality of everything was the insanity going on at the set every day,\u201d she later recalled.<\/p>\n

Fifteen hundred spears went missing. Lavish sequences were shot and discarded. Elephants from Chipperfield\u2019s Circus were shipped to Rome and not needed.<\/p>\n

A cat had kittens under the floorboards, so an Egyptian palace set was ripped up to free them. The cast was on overtime for months, distinguished actors and actresses, such as Michael Hordern or Francesca Annis, were left at a complete loose end.<\/p>\n

So much wood, steel and paint were used to build and decorate the Forum, there were shortages in the Italian construction industry.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, Burton and Taylor survived the scandal. He went on to Broadway to play Hamlet \u2013 followed by Taylor, who made a nuisance of herself sitting in the stalls, attracting all the attention and drawing huge crowds every night at the stage door.<\/p>\n

This episode is dramatised in the marvellous new Jack Thorne play The Motive And The Cue, directed by Sam Mendes, in which Johnny Flynn is a creditable Burton.<\/p>\n

But who really can duplicate Burton\u2019s voice? It was one of the 20th century\u2019s great noises, roaring, swelling, deliberative and bombastic by turns. His articulation and diction were very precise.<\/p>\n

Burton and Taylor were married in 1964, divorced in 1974, remarried in 1975, divorced again in 1976, and never seemed to leave each other alone.<\/p>\n

\u201cI love her mindlessly and hopelessly,\u201d said Burton of Taylor. \u201cIf I\u2019m away from Richard I feel like half a pair of scissors,\u201d Taylor said by way of return.<\/p>\n

They always remained each other\u2019s idea of fun \u2013 and the 11 films they made together are very knockabout, the characters and couples they played pummelling each other and threatening to separate. Best known is Who\u2019s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, directed by Mike Nichols in 1966 based on Edward Albee\u2019s play and a rare hit for the pair.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s about a long night of drinking and arguing, and Taylor won the Academy Award for her blowsy Martha. Burton, as the boozy, bookish George, could have been playing himself \u2013 for if his diaries are any indication, the actor was already lost in an alcoholic haze. \u201cSloshed all day,\u201d is a frequent admission. \u201cI am drinking too steadily \u2013 lunchtime and dinner time\u2026 Am still a bundle of nerves.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The Taming of the Shrew, made in Italy in 1967, is a comic version of the Burton and Taylor Punch and Judy act, with more pummelling. Burton\u2019s Petruchio and Taylor\u2019s Kate throw furniture and fruit at each other, race over rooftops, swing from ropes, fall through trapdoors and off donkeys, collapse in rain puddles \u2013 it\u2019s all very excessive.<\/p>\n

Yet this was their appeal, at least to me. They were never ordinary. With multi-million-dollar fees coming their way \u2013 and Swiss residency meaning no income tax was paid \u2013 Burton and Taylor could enjoy private yachts and executive jets.<\/p>\n

They could afford to have hamburgers flown to London or Rome or Mexico by specially-chartered Pan-Am jets from A-list restaurant Chasen\u2019s in Los Angeles. Cheesecake was delivered from Lindy\u2019s deli in New York.<\/p>\n

When the stars stayed at The Dorchester hotel, there was a boat anchored on the Thames for their pets, which couldn\u2019t come ashore because of quarantine restrictions.<\/p>\n

And wherever they might be residing, the dogs were never housetrained. Burton and Taylor simply had the Wilton carpets replaced every three weeks.<\/p>\n

This is how it went on for years on end \u2013 suites retained in grand hotels simply to store their clothes; chauffeured limousines on 24-hour call. Taylor, the former child star of Lassie and National Velvet, who had exchanged dogs and horses for husbands, was used to luxury and deference.<\/p>\n

For Burton, however, who had originated in South Wales, and who grew up in the poverty of the mining community, there was always a streak of puritanical guilt.<\/p>\n

Is this why he drank? \u201cI loved my silly image of the besotted Welsh genius, dying in his own vomit in the gutter,\u201d he once joked.<\/p>\n

But it was scarcely a joke. Sciatica, gout, and assorted alcohol-related ailments did for him, and he was in his grave in 1984, at the age of 58. Burton really was a Faustian figure, who had sold his soul to the devil in return for worldly success and<\/p>\n

material riches.<\/p>\n

As for Taylor, she kept going until 2011, by then dependent on an emerald-encrusted wheelchair. \u201cI get ill because I live too hard,\u201d she explained of her continuing hospitalisations. \u201cI give too much, out of a lust for life. I never back away.\u201d She was 79 when she finally gave up the ghost.<\/p>\n

From the Cleopatra days, it was often as if she was about to die, but never did. She had too much savagery and pride to cave in \u2013 as her later husbands, Senator John Warner and redneck drug addict Larry Fortensky, would concur.<\/p>\n

She contributed to Aids charities, earned more money from endorsing brands of perfume than she ever did from acting, and had a peculiar friendship with singer Michael Jackson, which looks unsavoury now. She got fat.<\/p>\n

\u201cHer blood type is Ragu,\u201d laughed Joan Rivers. \u201cThis woman could moon Europe.\u201d Her story, and Burton\u2019s, is one of disaster, drugs, violence and lechery.<\/p>\n

To an ordinary person like me, this is riveting, if alien. Burton and Taylor were people needing to be transported by irresistible powers; everything had to have intensity, force, excitement, fervour. I hope in my new book some of this comes across.<\/p>\n

It had better. The day after I finished it, I crashed to the ground again. This time with a heart attack, necessitating an air ambulance helicopter to hospital, the works. If I were to say Burton and Taylor nearly killed me, believe me I am not exaggerating.<\/p>\n