The Richard Burton Diaries (13 page)

Philip Burton had been born on 30 November 1904 in Mountain Ash, in the Cynon valley, Glamorgan. His parents were of English stock and the family were Anglican in religion. Burton's father had been killed underground when Philip was fourteen, but he had nonetheless studied at the University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire in Cardiff, obtaining a double honours degree in mathematics and history. On graduation in 1925 he had become a teacher at Port Talbot Secondary School, and had developed strong interests in drama and youth development. He was a published playwright, had had work dramatized on BBC radio, and produced and directed a series of accomplished productions both at the Sec and through the Port Talbot YMCA, of which he had become chairman. During the early stages of the Second World War he had taken a lead in establishing the Port Talbot Squadron of the Air Training Corps (ATC), becoming a Flight Lieutenant and its commanding officer.

Between the autumn of 1941 and the spring of 1943, a strong and mutually beneficial relationship developed between Richard Jenkins and Philip Burton. Burton was a man of pronounced learning who was generous with his time. Richard possessed a very considerable drive to achieve, succeed, get on in life. At one time sport had appeared to offer the best way forward, but, with the encouragement and guidance of Philip Burton, a more academic avenue now opened up. Perhaps as well, in some respects Philip Burton appeared to Richard as a surrogate father – at a time when his relationship with his brother-in-law Elfed might have been strained.

Burton gained great pleasure from nurturing and championing young talent. An earlier protégé, Owen Jones, had won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and appeared in Shakespearean productions alongside Laurence Olivier at the Old Vic in London.

Richard and Philip began to spend much time together outside as well as inside school. Richard was cast in a number of dramatic productions at school, the YMCA and the ATC, and Burton advised him on vocal projection, and on how to adapt his accent. Then, in March 1943, a room became vacant at Philip Burton's lodgings, in Connaught Street, Port Talbot, and Richard moved in.

The relationship between Richard and Philip was formalized in December 1943 when Richard became Philip's ward and Philip his legal guardian until Richard reached the age of twenty-one. Adoption had been considered but Philip was twenty days short of the minimum age difference of twenty-one years required in law. Henceforth Richard used the surname Burton, and it was as Richard Burton that he became known to the wider world.

From this point on, Richard's world changed and his horizons were immensely broadened. He passed the School Certificate examinations (in English, history, geography, Welsh, mathematics and chemistry) in the summer of 1943, reaching the standard necessary for matriculation to university. Under the auspices of the Royal Air Force, he was accepted on to a short-course programme at Oxford University, to run for six months from the spring of 1944. In the meantime, he made his professional debut as an actor.

Philip Burton had arranged an audition for Richard with the playwright and actor Emlyn Williams, who was seeking Welsh-speaking actors for a production of
The Druid's Rest
. Richard got the part, and appeared at the Royal Court Theatre, Liverpool from 22 November 1943, and in London from 26 January 1944. When at Oxford he then starred in the Friends of Oxford University Dramatic Society production of
Measure for Measure
, staged in the cloisters at Christ Church, where he was directed by Nevill Coghill.

Richard's dramatic career was interrupted by the exigencies of wartime service. When his brief stint at Exeter College, Oxford came to an end he began training as a navigator at RAF Babbacombe near Torquay. There were other postings, including to Heaton Park near Manchester, and occasionally Richard obtained leave of absence to appear in some of Philip Burton's productions for
BBC Radio. But by May 1945 he was on a ship bound for further training in Canada, when the war in Europe came to an end. Burton remained in Canada, training for potential bombing campaigns against Japan, but by the time the war ended in August 1945 he had not seen active service.

It would take twenty-eight months after the war's end for Richard Burton to part company with the Royal Air Force. Most of that time was spent on RAF bases in the United Kingdom – in Norfolk, Gloucestershire and Wiltshire – and he did manage to keep his acting ticking over with occasional work for radio and television.

Demobilization eventually came on 16 December 1947. Pursuing an offer made to him in Oxford in 1943, Burton approached Hugh ‘Binkie’ Beaumont, of the H. M. Tennent casting agency, and his full-time stage career, with a contract of £10 a week, was launched. From 24 February 1948 Burton was directed by Daphne Rye as Mr Hicks in a production of
Castle Anna
at the Lyric, Hammersmith. Other parts followed – in
Dark Summer
, and
Captain Brassbound's Conversion
. And Burton's activities were not confined to the stage, for Emlyn Williams cast him in the part of Gareth in his film
The Last Days of Dolwyn
, which would appear in 1949.

While filming
Dolwyn
Burton met his first wife, Sybil Williams. She was five years younger than Burton, but also from the South Wales coalfield. Her father had been a colliery under-manager at Tylorstown, in the Rhondda Fach, and she had attended the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. She was appearing in
Dolwyn
as an extra. Richard and Sybil married on 5 February 1949 at the Kensington Registry Office, and started married life in a rented room in Daphne Rye's house in Fulham. Later they would move to Lyndhurst Road, Hampstead. Not long after marrying, Sybil gave up her acting career.

From the very beginning Richard Burton had pursued a dual acting career, on stage and in film, as well as appearing on radio, and all of this continued as his career prospered. He was highly successful in Christopher Fry's plays
The Boy with a Cart
and
The Lady's not for Burning
, the last of which enjoyed a successful run in New York as well as in London. He received lucrative sums for appearances in British film productions such as
Now Barabbas, Waterfront, The Woman with No Name
and
Green Grow the Rushes
. But what truly propelled Burton into the ranks of great actors were the Shakespearean parts that he took – first at Stratford-upon-Avon, later at the Old Vic in London – from 1951 onwards. Burton made his mark as Prince Hal and Henry V in the history cycle under Anthony Quayle at Stratford in 1951, and this brought him to the attention of Twentieth Century-Fox, who subsequently secured his services from Alexander Korda.

Burton went to Hollywood in 1952, playing opposite Olivia de Havilland in
My Cousin Rachel
, which earned him his first Academy Award nomination. This was followed by
The Desert Rats
and then another Academy Award nomination (this one for Best Actor rather than Best Supporting Actor) for
The Robe
. It was at this time that Burton first met Elizabeth Taylor, then married to fellow actor Michael Wilding.

For the next three years Burton juggled his film career with a continuing commitment to the stage. He was immensely successful in the Old Vic productions of
Hamlet
and
Coriolanus
in 1953 and 1954, of
Henry V
in 1955, and of
Othello
in 1956. His record on film was more mixed: the series of films he made with Twentieth Century-Fox between 1954 and 1956 –
Prince of Players, Alexander the Great, The Rains of Ranchipur, Sea Wife
and
Bitter Victory
– were not as successful as had been anticipated and he failed to establish himself as a Hollywood ‘leading man’. Perhaps his greatest tangible achievement from this period (tangible in that we still have a record of it, unlike his stage performances), was his performance in his friend Dylan Thomas's
Under Milk Wood
, first broadcast in January 1954.

The year 1957 was one of major changes in Burton's life. Early in the year he and Sybil moved to the small Swiss village of Céligny, near Geneva, where they bought a villa, naming it Le Pays de Galles (‘Wales’ in French). This would remain Burton's home to his death, notwithstanding that he would often live elsewhere. The move was undertaken for tax reasons, and ensured that he could henceforth spend just 90 days in any given year in the United Kingdom. Effectively this curtailed his stage career in Britain and committed him more firmly to film projects, especially those that could be shot outside the UK. In March 1957 his natural father Richard died (at the age of eighty-one) back in Wales, but Richard did not attend the funeral. Six months later and, after some years of frustrated waiting, Richard and Sybil became parents: daughter Kate was born on 10 September. A second child, Jessica, would be born on 26 November 1959.

Though resident in Switzerland Burton would continue to work mainly in the USA and, to a lesser extent, in Britain. There were more undistinguished films –
The Bramble Bush, Ice Palace
– but also a notable success: the part of Jimmy Porter in the film adaptation of John Osborne's
Look Back in Anger
. Osborne wrote the play
A Subject of Scandal and Concern
in which Burton played the lead for BBC Television in 1960, mentioned in the brief diary he kept during the early months of that year.

What is not covered in the 1960 diary is any of Burton's work for the production of the musical
Camelot
, in which he would play King Arthur, and which opened on Broadway, following some weeks in Toronto and Boston, on 3 December. This was an enormous success, chiming with the zeitgeist of the presidency of John F. Kennedy (Burton was invited to the White House and became particularly friendly with Bobby Kennedy). It gave Burton a level of public exposure in the USA (including an appearance on the
Ed Sullivan Show
) that he had not enjoyed since 1953, and he won a New York Drama Critics’ Circle award (a Tony) in 1961 for the best performance in a musical. Burton's credentials for ‘star quality’ and panache were effectively
re-established, and his prowess in
Camelot
led directly to an approach from Twentieth Century-Fox to take the part of Mark Antony (originally allocated to Stephen Boyd) in the troubled mega-production of
Cleopatra
.

In September 1961 Burton flew out to Rome to join the cast, which included Elizabeth Taylor in the title role and Rex Harrison as Julius Caesar. Sybil and the children joined him, the family sharing a villa with Roddy McDowall, who had also made the transition from
Camelot
. In January 1962 Burton played his first scenes opposite Taylor, and a romance swiftly developed between them.

Taylor, six and a half years younger than Burton, was the supreme female Hollywood star of the moment, rivalled only by Marilyn Monroe. She was in the third year of her marriage to her fourth husband, the singer Eddie Fisher. Previously she had been married to Conrad ‘Nicky’ Hilton (1950–1), Michael Wilding (1952–6) and Mike Todd (1957–8), the last marriage ending with Todd's death in a plane crash in March 1958. She was a mother of three children: Michael (born 1953) and Christopher (born 1955) by Michael Wilding; and Liza (born 1957) by Mike Todd. She and Fisher were in the process of trying to adopt a German girl, Maria.

Burton was certainly no stranger to extramarital liaisons, some of which, such as those with Claire Bloom and Susan Strasberg, had been quite serious. Sybil had apparently tolerated this state of affairs, confident that Richard would never leave the security of his marriage, or risk losing his children. This time, however, things turned out differently. The Taylor–Fisher marriage was more brittle, and Taylor did not hesitate long before effectively ending it. Burton was undoubtedly torn. Racked by guilt, yet captivated by Taylor, he lived a very public double life throughout the first half of 1962, repeatedly making public statements that denied any serious intention in his relationship with Taylor, yet equally repeatedly being caught on camera in her company.

Contemporary and subsequent accounts of the Burton–Taylor romance are legion. Biographers’ accounts are often more sympathetic to, or indulgent of, their subject's position during this time. Various levels of calculation are ascribed to the protagonists. Burton's diaries offer virtually no comment on, or insight into, this phase in his relationship with Taylor, but on the evidence therein it is difficult to agree with those who see his choice of Elizabeth over Sybil as motivated by a desire for fame and fortune. Quite what Burton's state of mind was at any given point in what was eventually a fifteen-month period when he hovered between his wife, his children and his lover is probably impossible to judge. It would appear, however, that his hesitation, vacillation and apparently heavy drinking were all indications of his recognition that the decision he would have to take would be momentous.

The decision was finally taken, and Burton chose Taylor. They had separated at the end of the filming of
Cleopatra
in July 1962, but after some weeks began meeting again in Switzerland (Taylor having recently taken possession of a chalet in Gstaad). Their liaison continued throughout the autumn and
winter in London, where they occupied adjoining suites at the Dorchester Hotel while filming
The V.I.P.s
. By this time Sybil, Kate and Jessica were also in London, living at the house Burton had bought in Squire's Mount, on the edge of Hampstead Heath. Only in April 1963 were matters resolved, when Sybil left with her children for New York. On 5 December she divorced Richard on the grounds of abandonment and cruel and inhuman treatment, took custody of Kate and Jessica, and obtained a $1 million settlement.

In the meantime Burton had made two of his best films –
Becket
, alongside Peter O'Toole, in London, and
The Night of the Iguana
, alongside Ava Gardner and Deborah Kerr, in Mexico. Taylor, putting her career temporarily on hold, had been at his side throughout both productions. While in Mexico they had lived in the small town of Puerto Vallarta, and subsequently they bought the property they had rented – Casa Kimberley – renovating it and adding to it over the months and years that followed. The adoption procedures for Maria continued, with Burton as adoptive father in place of Eddie Fisher, from whom Elizabeth obtained a divorce in March 1964.