Book review: Erotic Vagrancy – Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, by Roger Lewis

This brilliantly forensic account of the relationship between Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor is a reminder of a time when stars were stars and lovers were lovers, writes Aidan Smith

Maybe Donald Trump’s This Time, the Absolute Truth and Why Doesn’t Everyone Just Leave Me Alone? by Kim Kardashian are more unlikely books, but Roger Lewis’ 645-pager on Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor is still a surprise.

In his 2011 memoir Lewis wrote: “Elizabeth Taylor has died at long last … She bored me slightly. Not much of an actress. Spoilt child star. After Lassie it was all downhill, and watching Cleopatra you long for the asp … Horrible eyes.”

Then he turned to Burton: “Despite the braggadocio and excessive masculinity (all that boozing, all that tedious rugby talk, all that laughing at danger), he was something of a mummy’s boy … I never sensed any athletic outpouring. There was always something sickly … He was at the end of his rope.”

Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton at the theatre, May 1968 PIC: Fox Photos/Getty Images

Pretty conclusive, you’d think. But no. Erotic Vagrancy promises “everything” about the Posh and Becks of the 1960s and … I can’t believe I’ve just called them that. It’s the other way round. But the 1960s are disappearing fast in popular culture’s rear-view mirror so contemporary references can be helpful. Lewis himself writes: “My ideal readers … will be those who’ve never heard of Taylor and Burton … beings I’ve entirely imagined, as a byproduct of insomnia, anxiety, lowered oxygen and benign prostatic hyperplasia.”

Unsurprisingly, given this stupendous book has been in the making since 2011, Lewis ends up sounding like Taylor. Surely the most melodramatic person that ever lived, she reckoned surgical procedure in 1957 to be “like being killed”. A few pages later Lewis is writing of himself: “As usual, I think I’m dying.”

And even in movies in which only one starred he finds the other looming ghost-like over them, scripts chiming with the couple’s own tumult. From X, Y & Zee, the line “Men from poor backgrounds never get over it, do they?” applied to Burton. And like Montgomery Clift in A Place in the Sun, Burton when he met Taylor “suddenly found himself beyond limitation. All was permitted … ”

When he’s not thinking he’s dying, Lewis must occasionally wake up with the ghost of Burton next to him and roaring about rugger (“Gareth Edwards passes to Barry John … ”) with that “sonic boom” of a voice. “Taylor,” he writes, “enjoyed disaster, illness, drunkenness, drugs, violence, lechery, insults and acrimony.” This was all in the company of Burton and everything’s here.

Taylor’s eight weddings (two with Burton). Their 11 films together, only one of which wasn’t a commercial disaster. The 1,500 spears misplaced during the making of Cleopatra (“Insanity every day”). The seven times he was “robbed” of an Oscar. The 600 pills she popped in just over a fortnight. The 42,000 get well cards she received following removal of a brain tumour. Her 41 costume changes for Giant. Her 2,800lbs of excess luggage for one flight. Her 18 cover shots for Life magazine.

Stars were stars back then – and lovers were lovers. There are two big romances of the modern age currently featuring on Netflix: Charles and Diana and – royalty in their own heads – the footballer and the Spice Girl. But the Beckham documentary is a hagiography which, realising its limitations, sticks up a couple of racy tabloid headlines without comment to add a whiff of danger. The Crown, about the family which “never explains”, has to use dramatic licence. Burton and Taylor, it seems, never edited, and they always gave good quote.

He loved her “mindlessly and hopelessly”. She loved him “with every fibre of my soul” – this not from the time of one of their marriages but one of their divorces. Taylor, Burton rhapsodised, “became the kind of animal that all men seek in their women”. The kind, the utterly, brilliantly forensic Lewis records in this classic biography, that would swan out of a hotel room leaving the chambermaids to wonder how lipstick got onto the ceiling.

Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, by Roger Lewis, Riverrun, £30