When Richard Burton first laid eyes on a ravishing 21-year-old, bikini-clad Elizabeth Taylor, he was so awestruck that he almost laughed out loud.
“A girl sitting on the other side of the pool lowered her book, took off her sunglasses and looked at me,” Burton, then 28, poetically recalls in his diary. “She was lavish. She was a dark, unyielding largesse. She was, in sort, too bloody much, and not only that she was ignoring me.”
He ended his ode to the violet-eyed screen siren with, “Her breasts were apocalyptic, they would topple empires.”
And so began the passionate love affair of the world’s most famous couple, according to riveting, heart-rending tome “Furious Love.” Author team Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger culled together 40 never-before-seen impassioned letters from Burton to Taylor, exclusive interviews with Taylor and snippets from Burton’s diary to capture the destructive, diabolical love affair.
Antony and Cleopatra
Although Burton was clearly taken by Taylor’s ethereal beauty, it would be another nine years before they would meet again, on the set of the blockbuster film “Cleopatra.”
Elizabeth, then 29 and at the height of her popularity, was on her fourth marriage, to Eddie Fisher, after her third husband, producer Mike Todd, died in a plane crash. Fisher had left his wife Debbie Reynolds, considered America’s sweetheart, for her.
Welsh actor Burton was married to the matronly Sybil Burton, who had been his emotional rock since they met in 1949.
That is until he met Taylor.
Enthralled by her beauty, he made jabs to take her down a few pegs. “Has anybody ever told you that you’re a very pretty girl?” he once said facetiously. He also reportedly let slip to her, “You’re too fat,” when, in reality, she was just “too bloody marvelous.”
He had no intention of falling in love, nor did she. “I must don my armor once more to play against Miss Tits,” he quipped.
All it took was one long on-set kissing scene to cast the spell. As they smooched, the director Joseph Mankiewicz called it a wrap. But they continued on.
“Print it,” Mankiewicz said.
“Would you two mind if I say cut?” he said a moment later.
Finally: “Does it interest you that it’s time for lunch?”
From then on, the couple was inseparable, sneaking off to Burton’s dressing room for midday quickies. He began writing sultry love letters to his paramour, listing the things he lusted after: “The inside of your thighs and your baby-bottom and your giving lips.”
The rumor mill went crazy, though Sybil was unfazed. Burton had cheated before, but he always came back, she told Fisher.
She was right — for the time being.
Burton called off the affair. But Taylor wasn’t going to be let go so easily. She swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills and was rushed the hospital. When released, she repeated her suicide attempt and, like clockwork, Burton was back at her side.
“We Loved Too Much”
On March 5, 1964, Taylor was granted her divorce from Fisher and two days later Burton and Taylor charted a plane to Montreal, where they were married in front of their growing entourage of lawyers, publicists, accountants and hairdressers.
They costarred in a string of movies that capitalized on their notoriety. The artistic highlight was 1966’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” — a drama about a feuding couple. Life began imitating art. Hounded relentlessly by the paparazzi, the began to develop the reputation of the “battling Burtons.”
Drinks flowed constantly on the set — Burton was often a nasty drunk — and the whole cast could hear the viscous rows. They fought over many things: his jealousy of her earning and star power, her weight fluctuations and Burton’s excessive drinking habits (matched in part by Taylor).
He called her “my little Jewish tart” and “lumpy” in love letters written to her. She called him “pockmarked face” and “Charlie Charm” for the effect he had on women.
Still, the couple made love “like bunnies,” Taylor said. “Imagine having Richard Burton’s voice in your ear while you are making love. It drowned out the troubles, the sorrows, everything just melted away.”
Burton was similarly smitten. “She is a wildly exciting love-mistress, she is shy and witty, she is nobody’s fool, she is a brilliant actress, she is beautiful beyond the dreams of pornography,” he wrote in his diary. “And I’ll love her till I die.”
But tragedy loomed. In 1968, she had to undergo a hysterectomy, squelching her hopes to one day have a child with Burton. “A child with Richard. I would have wanted that above everything in the world,” Taylor later said.
Also, a series of flops, including “Boom!” and “The Comedians,” hearkened the end of their on-screen partnership. They began to fight more viscously.
“We are fighting,” Richard wrote in his diary, “& have been fighting for a year now over everything and anything. I have always been a heavy drinker but during the last 15 months I’ve nearly killed myself with the stuff, and so has Elizabeth.”
He could also be cruel. When she reached out to hold his hands, he angrily said, “I do not wish to touch your hands. They are large and ugly and red and masculine.” To make amends for the comment, he bought her a $1.1 million Cartier diamond ring.
It all came to a head during the making of “Bluebeard,” where he began an affair — the first of their eight years together — with co-star Nathalie Delon. Half of a year later in 1973, after completing the film ironically titled “Divorce His, Divorce Hers,” Taylor called off the marriage in a press release. “Maybe we loved each other too much,” she wrote.
Divorce His, Divorce Hers
They would separate, then get back together. Divorce, then marry again. He would swear off her — then see her in his favorite blue nightie, after which the door would be slammed, and they would engage in what he liked to call “lovely love.”
By January 1976, Burton had met a young model and left Taylor. Humiliated and heartbroken, Taylor hid out in the Beverly Hills Hotel, where she drank and ate excessively, putting on 50 pounds. They each announced engagements, but by Taylor’s 50th birthday in 1982, they were back at each other’s sides, arm-in-arm, again.
The couple agreed to star in the show “Private Lives” by Noel Coward, about an ex-married couple who rediscover each other. The reviews were terrible, but it was a sold-out show every night. They made love, drank excessively and looked like they were young lovers again. Until he critiqued her acting techniques. In response, she disappeared for a long weekend, leaving him to act with an understudy.
On Aug. 2, 1984, Burton sat down to write Taylor a love letter in the library that she had bought for him. The following day he went out drinking with his friends, where he got in a fight and hit his head on the floor. He suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage, dying on the operating table. He was 58 years old.
After Taylor went to Burton’s funeral she arrived back home and saw the letter from Burton postmarked a day before his death.
“And in it he told her what he wanted. Home was where Elizabeth was, and he wanted to come home,” the book says. “She’s kept that letter by her bedside ever since.
Furious Love
Elizabeth Taylor,
Richard Burton, and the Marriage of the Century
by Sam Kashner
and Nancy Schoenberger
Harper”