Here is the story of a wild folie à deux, or a dance of death in which both partners were tragically condemned to survive. Roger Lewis’s biography may not fulfil the promise of “everything” about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor but it surely contains more than you could ever wish to know. “I make no apology for this being a visionary book,” he explains, sonorously, and often the reader does hear a singular voice at work – fearless, funny, provocative, acute, insistent. But oh, it’s exhausting too. Lewis, a Welshman, understands his native weakness: “garrulity”. Or, as Taylor was once overheard to say, as her husband drunkenly dominated another evening with Dylan Thomas recitals and lectures: “Does the man ever shut up?”
Perhaps only an outsize book could comprehend the excess, “the magnificent bad taste and greed and money” that became the keynote of the Burton-Taylor partnership. Lewis, disdaining standard biography as “bogus” and “an affair of ghosts”, adopts an impish, even jesterish approach – bouncing back and forth between eras, zooming in on minor characters, speculating on omissions and obfuscations in the official story. His line on Taylor is that the child actor from MGM stayed a child; petulant, needy, selfish, making a drama of her many illnesses and bullying doctors into prescribing whatever she wanted (she took so many pills she must have rattled). She was essentially a “bundle of appetites” – a collector of clothes and shoes and husbands, of pets and presents and precious trinkets. As her fourth husband, Eddie Fisher, said: “Just a little $50,000 diamond would make everything wonderful for up to four days.” Her need to be on show at all times was incurable: even a surgical operation on her “benign” brain tumour (“the only chunk of her which was”) had to be photographed for Life magazine.
