Roger Lewis’s biographies are always rich, wayward, engrossing, idiosyncratic and above all obsessive, which seems entirely fitting for evoking the particular qualities of his latest subject – the celebrity couple to end them all, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.
Lewis’s substantial new book, Erotic Vagrancy: Everything About Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, takes its title from a phrase used in a papal condemnation of the couple when their affair began during the making of 20th Century Fox’s epic 1963 film Cleopatra in Rome. This served to emphasise the atmosphere of notoriety that surrounded Taylor and Burton’s relationship throughout its 20-year duration.
It also suggests the way they represented a new (and to the Vatican, unwelcome) approach to sexual and romantic conduct. Previous marriages were dispensed with in pursuit of this electric, ecstatic new coupling. The media pursued the couple as they criss-crossed the world on private jets and luxury yachts, hoovering up enormous diamonds and other expensive trinkets along the way.
