Over the holidays, I took Richard Burton to bed with me nearly every night. His diaries, I mean. (He died in 1984, at the age of fifty-eight.) An avid diary-keeper myself for the past thirty years, I can attest to the challenges of this solipsistic genre: sustaining an interest even in one’s own life can sometimes pose nearly insurmountable difficulties. But Burton succeeds, in no small measure because of who he was and because of the scores of famous people he came in contact with. But a worthwhile diary can’t rest on fame alone.
In these pages—which Burton began when he was fourteen and continued until the year before his death—he strips away the larger-than-life abstraction that he became for the public to reveal a human dimension more complex than any biographer could ever hope to capture. He is sensitive, intelligent, literary, outwardly and inwardly curious, tender, sometimes boorish and spiteful but conscious of fair play, wickedly discerning and funny, surprisingly modest, wildly generous, a delightful gossip, and virtually never boring—something that would have frightened and appalled him. Apart from books and language, which Burton had a lifelong passion for (especially poetry, which he constantly cites; he vied with Robert Kennedy over who could recite the greatest number of Shakespeare’s sonnets from memory and was reading Blake the day before his death), he loved, more than anything, it appears, both his own children and those of his extended families, booze, sex, and Elizabeth Taylor—and especially sex with Elizabeth Taylor, whom he married for the first time in 1964. He adored and cossetted her, worried endlessly over her, encouraged her, and, under the influence of frequent black moods and alcohol, sometimes fought viciously with her. Interestingly, there are no entries during the period in which “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” his and Taylor’s wrenching, brilliant collaboration, was filmed. But he has this to say about a particularly hectic day of filming (the basically unwatchable) “Doctor Faustus,” which came out the following year:
How you wish that he had written children’s books!
During their free hours, the couple appear to have lived surprisingly ordinary lives—getting the kids off to school, spending long hours in bed reading (Burton read books by the pound) and napping, sunbathing, walking the dogs, cooking hot dogs and steaks on the grill, waking up in the middle of the night, hungry: “Made myself some cabbage soup at 2.00 am and was joined by Bon Apetito. We eat from the same bowls like pups.” “Bon Apetito,” “Cantank,” “Snapshot,” “old fatty,” “Shumdit,” “Quicktake”: these are just of few of the nicknames he coined for Taylor. There were lots of other made-up words. Like children, they invented a language of their own, and beneath the surface of celebrity they inhabited a world all their own, too, for a surprisingly long time.
The couple divorced for a second time in 1975, but in 1983 he and Taylor agreed to appear together (unsuccessfully, it turned out) in Noël Coward’s “Private Lives.” Visiting her in New York on March 13th, Burton writes:
He continues the following day:
“All true love must die, / Alter at the best / Into some lesser thing. / Prove that I lie.” I wonder if Burton knew those lines by heart as well.
Photograph: 20th Century Fox.
