Book review: Erotic Vagrancy, by Roger Lewis

Bilsen, Joop van / Anefo, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

What a title, eh? I was a bit uncertain as to whether to order it from the library or not, in case they started to wonder what I was up to. Happily they didn’t (or maybe, if they did, they were just too polite to say anything). The title actually comes from a disapproving comment the Pope made about what he saw as Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor’s louche lifestyle.

Majestic, gargantuan, baggy, overblown, tragic, romantic, odd (and, you might say, that’s just the protagonists), Lewis’s joint biography is not your usual standard approach – x was born in such-and-such a place, and went to school at y, etc., although you will find these things out along the way, together with much more obscure details ferreted out by Lewis himself. His subtitle is ‘everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor’, and I think by the time you’d finished reading it, it would definitely be quite a while before you’d want – or need – to look up anything else about them. While not strictly chronological or conventional, it is certainly exhaustive and, really, something of a work of art in itself. For Lewis gives you their lives and, more importantly, their work through the prism of his own obsession.

To take just the first page as an example: we begin with a quote from Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra, leading on to a swift comparison with the Burton/Taylor A&C, which leads on to a mention of Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon’s respective impressions of Burton on ‘The Trip’, which leads on to a reminiscence about Bill Murray, which ushers in mention of an  Alan Bennett production, which brings him on to the work of Thora Hird, Benny Hill, Mike Leigh, Roseanne Barr, Joan Rivers, Dawn French and John Candy  … well, you get the picture.

This is where the book scores, for me anyway: its lively discursions and digressions not just about, but also on and around, its topic. It’s a heady mix of gossip, anecdote, fact, opinion and critique tangled and knotted together in a sort of verbal filigree. One thing follows another in a madcap, yet thoughtful, scramble. Lewis is – perhaps not surprisingly, as a former Oxford academic – hot on literary allusions and filmographic aspects of the stars’ careers. He regularly sends you scurrying off to look up obscure references, or less popular films that one or other of the pair appeared in, particularly Burton. It is thanks to this writer, for example, that I found out about The Last Days of Dolwyn, an acclaimed early black-and-white Burton film from 1949 about the drowning of a Welsh reservoir, starring Edith Evans. I had never even heard of it before (but, coincidentally, it got a separate mention on here from Destrier the other day!)

We discover that, far from being filled with pride or euphoria, everyone was thoroughly fed up with the massive epic that was Cleopatra when it was finally finished. It had gone on far too long, gobbled up too much money and too many directors. Taylor felt the final cut had ‘had the core cut out of it’. She was a very astute businesswoman, becoming rich on practices like demanding a percentage of the gross box office takings, and of course later on, via marketing her own products, such as perfumes. Being brought up as a child star in the Hollywood studio system may arguably have stunted her development as a person, but it gave her an insight into the workings of the beast that was pretty much unrivalled. ‘If you don’t get what you want’, she once said, ‘scream and don’t stop screaming until you do’. A prima donna with a taste for booze and semi-permanent hypochondria (she was once hospitalised with what was described as ‘an internal blockage’ when she needed a good shit), Taylor – one imagines – would have tried the patience of a saint. Although she also had hidden depths: she once told a friend she hated having good looks, and ‘couldn’t wait for them to go’. Mr F, on reading the book after me, astutely observed that Taylor seemed to live each of her relationships as if each one were a new film script, with a beginning, middle and end, and all the drama and ups and downs that would involve.

Burton, on the other hand, gives the impression of a reserved, slightly melancholy scholar manqué – the outsider with the face of a disappointed monk. ‘What a terrible thing is time’, he once wrote in his diary. ‘Elizabeth gave me the horrors again. She is such a mess’. He once said that nothing really mattered in life except words. Not fame, not family, not money – only words. And, indeed, his cosy library in his Swiss house seemed like a second home to him: one of Taylor’s more cherished presents to him was a full set of the Everyman library, bound in Morocco leather. Yet, despite being one half of one of the most well-known and iconic romantic pairings ever, one is left wondering if Burton actually liked Taylor very much. Admired – wanted – was swept off his feet by: yes, definitely. But liked? I’m not sure. He once said (whether truthfully or not, who knows?) that he was going to use Elizabeth as his route to fame and riches. Sounds rather gigolo-like to me. Whatever the reason, the serious classical  actor set his sights firmly on the tinselly heights of Hollywood. One of his friends later observed that the great thing Suzy (Suzy Hunt, his second wife, married to James Hunt at the time) did for him was to ‘enable Richard to leave Elizabeth’. Taylor famously liked her men to fight her physically, and whilst one can see that Burton’s rambunctious South Wales background might easily have provided the wherewithal for that, it is also not hard to imagine that his quieter, more introspective side might find such goings-on distasteful. ‘He was a pussycat, really’, said his last wife, Sally. He once said the thing he liked most about his part of Switzerland was that it reminded him of Wales.

One of the saddest aspects of the whole process was Burton’s treatment of his first wife – his pretty Welsh sweetheart, fellow thespian Sybil. The couple had two daughters, one of whom had mental problems. The disabled daughter was apparently very badly affected by her parents’ separation, and spoke only a few words, including (ironically)‘Rich, Rich, Rich’. It is tempting to speculate that she had heard her mother crying the same bitter phrase out loud. Sybil did all right: she got a $1 million divorce settlement plus custody of the children and went on to marry a man much younger than herself. They ran a chic and successful New York nightclub. She never spoke to Burton again. She was later to say, ‘I had the best of him. I had the twenty-three year old’.

An enigmatic part of the puzzle, which Lewis gives more emphasis to than other works I have seen, is the role played in Burton’s early life by Philip Burton, a sophisticated local schoolteacher with BBC connections who took the young Rich Jenkins, as was, under his wing. Philip Burton adopted Jenkins and Jenkins adopted Burton’s surname. For a while, they lived together. Lewis puts forward the view that the relationship teetered very close to what we would now call ‘grooming’. Middle-aged Philip said that the younger man sought him out, which was true, and ‘seduced’ him, but that could I suppose be taken in a metaphorical sense.

It’s a love story, it’s a tragedy, it’s a gloriously sweeping international saga of art, ambition, creativity and greed; a tangled path leading to unimaginable riches and unimaginable betrayal. Roger Lewis has woven this all together into  a rambling, encyclopaedic masterpiece – a portrait of one larger-than-life relationship which somehow epitomises a whole glamorous, technicolour era. The book comes with a gushing recommendation from Stephen Fry: I’m not sure if that counts for or against it. If you’re literary, like free association and wordplay, you’ll probably love it. If verbose asides get on your nerves, maybe best avoided.
 

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