Published: 12 August, 2010
by GERALD ISAAMAN

RICHARD Burton called her his “Jewish tart” and declared: “My blind eyes are desperately waiting for the sight of you. If you leave me I shall have to kill myself. There is no life without you.”

She insisted: “I love not being Elizabeth Taylor, but being Richard Burton’s wife. I don’t want to be that much in love again.”

They clashed in life just as they did in their films, from Cleopatra to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Their tumultuous time together was a cauldron of scandal, lust and love unmitigated, headline fame and condemnation galore, money by the millions and alcohol by the gallon – a lethal cocktail that resulted in two marriages and two divorces among the many other men and women in their carnal lives.

And it all began in Hampstead, when the green-eyed actor who mesmerised women with the wonder of his voice earned his first accolades on the West End stage, buying a house in Lyndhurst Road, Hampstead, where neighbours listened to him declaiming Shake­speare in the garden.

He was married to Sally Williams, his girl from the Welsh valleys of his youth, who suffered his dalliances, insisting he would always come home to her.

Claire Bloom was among the first, Burton taking her back to her mother’s home in Finchley Road, tip-toeing out at daybreak and, subsequently, even making love to another actress in his dressing room – Claire hearing all as she hid in a cupboard.

By the time Burton reached Hollywood he devoured everything he desired, except Elizabeth Taylor, the child star born in Hampstead Garden Suburb, who grew up to become a screen goddess, her fabled passion and fortune attracting no fewer than eight husbands.

Only on the set of Cleopatra did the spark ignite, when she was 29 and he was 36. Only then did Sally know she – and their two daughters – had lost him.

“I lust after your smell and your paps, and your divine little money-box and your round belly and the exquisite softness of the inside of your thighs, and your baby-bottom and your giving lips and the half hostile look in your eyes when you’re deep in rut with your little Welsh stallion,” Burton wrote to her. 

That gives you a taste of the love letters and, although there is some new research and photographs, much of this is known from previous biographies, memoirs and tonnes of magazine and newspaper sagas during – and since – the 13 Burton/Taylor years’ trading bitter blows and kind kisses.

What spurred Taylor since Burton’s death, in Switzerland, in 1984, was the suggestion that her great, bad lover had been forgotten.

So Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger have revitalised the plot by persuading her to reveal Burton’s love letters.

They are undoubtedly compelling reading, his poetry too, but the authors are hardly entitled to describe the Burton/Taylor romance as “the marriage of the century”. 

“You must know, of course, how badly I treat you,” he wrote. 

“But the fundamental and most vicious, swinish, murderous, and unchangeable fact is that we totally misunderstand each other. 

“We operate on alien wavelengths. You are as distant as Venus – planet, I mean – and I am tone-deaf to the music of the spheres.”

They funded 42 members of their families, Burton buying his brother Ifor a cottage in Squires Mount, Hampstead, a familiar hideaway when they were in London. I took their photograph once strolling up Heath Street, but the only words I received from Burton’s magic voice were an expletive.

It ended up a soul-destroying life played out in front of and behind all the cameras, victims of their own celebrity. 

Yet, for me, the fascination of this rehashed memoir is in the poignant depiction of Burton’s tragic decline.

There is talk now of a Blue Plaque to Burton, perhaps in Hampstead, but he left his own sad epitaph: “You never get to be a great actor until you’re dead.”

• Furious Love. By Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger. 

JR Books, £20