The Lionheart in Summer

Frederic Raphael reviews The Richard Burton Diaries:

Burton’s desertion of his first wife, Sybil, and their children during the shooting of Cleopatra, afforded the 1960s media (and some of the public) an opportunity for the humbuggery to which the Sexual Revolution would supposedly put an end. Burton and Taylor were, for a while, shunned by almost all those who had fawned on them severally. Guy and Marie-Hélène de Rothschild were among the few who helped them buck the tide. Darryl Zanuck, who habitually used the starlets on the 20th Century Fox lot as his lunchtime sexual buffet, threatened to sue them for ruining Cleopatra’s commercial prospects. In fact, the runaway passion which made the headlines is the only thing one remembers about the movie, except perhaps Joe Manckiewicz’s line about Cleopatra’s chief eunuch’s holding “an office not won without a certain sacrifice”. Professor Williams finds no place to mention that the production was already ruinously over budget before the scandal broke. Shortly before shooting, Nunnally Johnson was solicited to do a rewrite. Zanuck was desperate enough to ask Johnson to name his own price. He is reputed to have replied, “How about ten per cent of the losses?”.

... Franco Zeffirelli, who directed the Burtons in The Taming of the Shrew, was another maestro (“not entirely masculine, it seems”) with whom Burton was soon disillusioned. He quotes the designer Irene Sharaff’s “immortal, peace-loving and diplomatic words” to Zeffirelli, “I would like to say before we go any further that you Franco are a fucking liar . . . [and] nothing but a fucking fag”. Burton comments: “Pots and kettles turned over in the kitchen of their own accord recognising kinship when they saw it”.

The greatest pleasure to be found here derives from what might be called Burton’s in-spokenness: enclosed within the privacy of his diary, which he claims to have kept only for his own satisfaction, he declares his feelings, often in eloquent cadenzas (although he does say that something was done “for Elizabeth and I”). His most likeable quality is lack of cant. Denouncing the “unctuous, rubbishy shit written about pornography”, not least by Malcolm Muggeridge, he tells of a woman he knew who sustained her marriage with an unloved older husband by a preliminary dose of pornography before going to bed with him. “The moralists would have flayed her alive if she had left him for another man . . . . Muggeridge quotes Kingsmill as saying that the act of love is ludicrous and disgusting. Speak for yourself Kingsmill. I love its disgustingness and comicality.” Burton notes, without mockery, how his “beloved” Maureen Stapleton blamed a convent education for her failure to discover masturbation earlier. “Think of all the emotional entanglements I could have saved myself”, she told him, “instead of getting laid by guys I didn’t even like just because I was horny.”

Taylor and Burton on the set of ‘The VIPs’ in 1963

From a review by Thomas Hodgkinson:

...  in November 1968, he writes:

I have been inordinately lucky all my life, but the greatest luck of all has been Elizabeth. She has turned me into a moral man but not a prig, she is a wildly exciting lover-mistress, she is shy and witty, she is nobody’s fool, she is a brilliant actress, she is beautiful beyond the dreams of pornography…

At other times, the prose is less lyrical: grim, honest and affectionate. In June 1969, he describes his horror when she starts to bleed from her ‘bumsy’:

And I mean BLEED. Not your pale pink variety but thick clots of blood that had to be fingered into disappearing down the drain… I searched E’s bumsy very often to check up on its progress. It is an extraordinary thing to look up somebody’s ass-hole, and a beautiful ass it is, and to do it not with lust or sex in mind, but with love.

I’m guessing Taylor, who died last year, didn’t want this published in her lifetime.

... He loves Evelyn Waugh (‘the writer I’d like to write like most’), but hates Hemingway (‘a romantic shit’). After reading Malcolm Muggeridge quoting Hugh Kingsmill, who described the act of love as ludicrously disgusting, he responds:

Speak for yourself Kingsmill. I love its disgustingness and comicality. Put some jaundice in your eye and the act of walking is ludicrous and obscene, and swimming and, above all, eating. All those muscles, in most people, 50 per cent atrophied, sluggishly propelling people over land or through water or gulping oysters. Come off it.

... The common line on Burton has been that he was a man who failed to fulfil his promise, but I don’t buy it. I’m not sure I buy it about anyone. Burton smoked and drank a lot. When he wasn’t married to Taylor, he had affairs with some of the most beautiful women of his time. He swanned about from Rome to Paris, to Monte Carlo to New York. He gave enormous pleasure to many, many people, and left a handful of movies that might be called truly great. May we all leave our promise similarly unfulfilled.