The May 1971 issue wasn’t a particularly memorable one by British Vogue standards. The cover features an unnamed model wearing “holiday clothes for Fiji”, while the headlines promise “great summer fashion from £5” and “beauty at sea, in the sun”. Inside, though – sandwiched between a feature on Lady Diana Cooper’s daily routine and a “spotlight” on Germaine Greer – is an essay by Richard Burton. Its subject: the “exquisite pain” of travelling with his then wife Elizabeth Taylor, “who firmly believes that time waits for no man but will wait for her”.
“Travel has become to us, as to most itinerant professionals, a part of our lives,” Burton writes. “We have been forced by habit to become doomed nomads, incapable any more of being sweet stay-at-homes, sweet lie-a-beds, forced to work around the world… We sit around in the middle of the night wherever we are and dream of places we have been to or know – my wife is a bad sleeper and worries about spiders and mosquitos – and the middle of the night is sometimes an open forum as to where would you like to be now? And she says, or I say, perhaps in Paris, ‘Wouldn’t you sell your soul for a delicatessen or even an ordinary drugstore where you can have hamburgers or coleslaw or corned beef hash with an egg on top or to be able to whip around the corner right now and get any kind of short-order cooking, and screw Maxim’s and the Tour d’Argent and their frigging duck in orange?’ And I say, or we say, with a sigh, ‘Yes!’ And then again we’re in New York and again we awake at the dying time of night and dream of a bistro in Switzerland or some of the remoter regions of France unspoiled by Michelin or a trattoria in Italy nestling at the foot of a hill at the top of which is a magnificent church where the choir gives chant at seven o’clock every evening and there is a turbulent red wine and salami and a cheese that crumbles in the hand falling down its own face like a landslide.”
Published this month, Roger Lewis’s more than 600-page biography Erotic Vagrancy: Everything About Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor retraces this peripatetic existence in almost excruciating detail. Researched and written over the course of 13 years, it contains every surreal fact you could possibly wish to know about Burton and Taylor’s eye-wateringly extravagant universe – and many more that you could have gone your whole life without knowing. Say, the fact that they perched on bar stools “upholstered with whale foreskin” during cocktail hour on Aristotle Onassis’s yacht. The book’s title, of course, comes from the Pope’s denunciation of Burton and Taylor’s affair on the Roman set of Cleopatra (“Where are we all going to end up?” John XXIII worried aloud. “In an erotic vagrancy without end or without safe port?”) Burton’s unfazed response: “Fuck it, let’s go to fucking Alfredo’s and have some fucking fettuccine.”
I am not the Pope, and I’m not sure it’s my place to (publicly) pass moral judgement on Burton and Taylor here (even if Lewis’s epic brings to life elements of their characters that are unsavoury at best and appalling at worst). But my God, they were entertaining – pushing conspicuous consumption to its very limits (“I had only recently given [Elizabeth] a £127,000 diamond ring simply because it was a Tuesday”) and ushering in another era of Hollywood celebrity, even if their fame will never be eclipsed.
“There is, of course, the press,” Burton considers at the end of his Vogue essay. “I mean photographers. If they are not here to meet us off a plane or train or boat, I lament the end of our careers. If they are, I blame Elizabeth for being too notorious. What can you do? What can she do? You’re damned if they’re there and you’re damned if they’re not.”
Damned, and damn near impossible to look away from. Below, some of the most incredible stories from the Burton-Taylor travelling circus in Erotic Vagrancy.
“No, Elizabeth. You can’t take an elephant home.”
If the Burton-Taylors regularly took several dozen rooms at the world’s grande dame hotels to accommodate their entourage, they were notoriously awful guests. Elizabeth, in particular, had a reputation as a “slattern”, according to Lewis: “When she came out of a bathroom, it was ‘as if a cyclone had hit a Bloomingdale’s cosmetics counter’, said a clerk at the Beverly Hills Hotel.” She even managed to deposit lipstick marks on the ceiling during one visit to the California institution, despite being no taller than five foot three in stilettos.
“When she borrowed Calvin Klein’s house on Fire Island, ‘he was horrified, as were the maids’,” Lewis continues. “Mattresses and rugs were always having to be replaced at The Dorchester.” This was, in no small part, thanks to the four-legged entourage that Taylor insisted on travelling with. Her pets included, at various points in her life, an “unhousebroken Shih Tzu”, a monkey named Matilda, an aviary of parrots (who travelled with their own dedicated claw trimmer), a terrier who “love[d] to teethe on diamonds”, an aquarium full of crabs, a chipmunk named Nibbles, and a bush baby, which “rampaged around the room, knocking over lights and vases” during a stint at The Gresham in Dublin.
Occasionally, she attempted to pick up animals on the road, too. While travelling through Asia with her then fiancé, Mexican lawyer Victor Luna, Taylor “saw an elephant and wanted Luna to buy it”. He refused. (“No, Elizabeth. You can’t take an elephant home.”) Taylor broke off their engagement before the year was out. And when she was once presented with a $2,500 surcharge at The Plaza for animal-related damages? She ransacked the suite – tearing the curtains to shreds and dropping the pillows into the toilet – as vengeance.
“We need so many people to help us.”
By 1969, Burton and Taylor spent $800,000 a year on their fleet of staff, the equivalent of more than $6 million today, all of whom travelled with them like a royal train. Included in their number: a secretary-stroke-mixologist; someone responsible for covering up Burton’s “deep pockmarks” with his “plasterer’s trowel”; and multiple “suitcase-packers” and “luggage-captains”. The latter make more sense when you begin to wrap your head around the manner in which Taylor travelled. When she joined Burton in Puerto Vallarta in 1963, for example, she arrived with 74 pieces of luggage “filled with hot-weather clothing, including her 40 new bikinis, bought in Paris”. (Burton was filming The Night of the Iguana with Ava Gardner, whom Taylor promptly tried to run over with a drinks trolley.) By all accounts, this was Elizabeth at her more restrained; when she had arrived in Rome a couple of years earlier to shoot Cleopatra, she brought 300 dresses and 120 pairs of shoes with her to her villa, which she had redecorated from top to bottom every morning.
“Get my lip gloss!”
Most people, when battling an illness, stay at home – but most people are not Elizabeth Taylor, who travelled in spite of a medical dictionary’s worth of illnesses, then insisted she had contracted more diseases abroad. “Her health was her favourite subject after her diamonds,” director Laurence Harvey once said. Over the course of her lifetime, she was hospitalised hundreds of times – and that’s without counting her stints drying out at Betty Ford and Rancho Mirage.
She spent her honeymoon with her first husband, Nicky Hilton, on the Queen Mary, projectile vomiting thanks to a bout of food poisoning, while after a trip to Morocco with her second husband, Michael Wilding, she checked herself into hospital for a month… for no discerible reason. Her doctor, the “quack” Rex Kennamer, travelled with her everywhere, dispensing prescription pills and questionable advice. (When Taylor screamed herself hoarse after her third husband, Mike Todd, died, Kennamer recommended she have her tonsils removed.)
Still, Lewis informs us, she “was never so prostrate she couldn’t apply lip gloss in the ambulance” – nor, it seems, to use her various ailments to further the myths that surrounded her. When, in 1956, Elizabeth had three spinal discs replaced at Harkness Pavilion in New York, her injury was variously attributed to being kissed too forcefully by her Ivanhoe costar Robert Taylor, falling over on the deck of Lord Beaverbrook’s yacht, and a riding accident on the set of National Velvet more than a decade earlier.
By her own admission, Elizabeth’s health was not exactly helped by the fact that she “live[d] too hard” – downing champagne with Truman Capote in her Dorchester suite days after an emergency tracheotomy overseen by Horace Evans, personal physician to the Queen Mother. (Evans also procured her a commode to recline in, which he claimed was used by the Windsors on their Commonwealth tours.) Still, her fans seemed to forgive her for what may at times have amounted to nothing more than hypochondria. When she had a tumour removed in 1997, Taylor received a casual 42,000 get-well-soon cards.
“Where am I going to put the fireplace?”
As a couple whose life was lived primarily on the road, it was only a matter of time before Burton and Taylor acquired their own yacht. They purchased the 290-tonne Kalizma in 1967, which had been constructed in 1906 by the same shipbuilders who worked on vessels for “the kings of Siam, Portugal and Sarawak”. Burton spent a fortune refitting it – including $100,000, or $1 million today, on “radar equipment” – and filled it with Monets, Van Goghs and Picassos along with Chippendale furniture and Wilton carpets. (The latter, according to Lewis, had to be replaced every six months after the pets soiled them.) Burton’s verdict on the finished result? “It’s a splendid toy.” Ultimately, the dogs got their own yacht to boot. While filming Where Eagles Dare in the UK, the Burton-Taylors rented them the 200-tonne Beatriz of Bolivia as a kennel at the equivalent of $8,000 a week today, mooring it near Tower Bridge in order to avoid quarantine laws. As for flying? Burton and Taylor acquired a Hawker Siddeley jet in 1967 “so we could fly to Nice for lunch”, with Elizabeth tasking the Royal College of Art graduate Richard Macdonald with decorating it in “an ornate Regency style”. “Where am I going to put the fireplace?” the designer quipped – a question that Taylor took seriously.
“Dark glasses for hangovers in between.”
In their heyday, Burton and Taylor were invited just about everywhere by just about everyone: to spend time with Onassis on his aforementioned yacht; to the Grand Prix d’Arc de Triomphe, where they upstaged the thoroughbreds by strolling across the Longchamp Racecourse; to the Monte Carlo Sporting Club as Rainier and Grace of Monaco’s guests of honour; and to Kensington Palace, where Taylor met Princess Magaret. “How very vulgar,” the royal remarked on the Hollywood star’s Krupp Diamond. “Yeah,” Elizabeth replied. “Ain’t it great?”
Their hosting prowess, too, became the stuff of legend. The couple dispatched 200 telegrams inviting guests to Taylor’s 40th birthday party in Hungary in 1972. (“Dress slacks for Saturday night in some dark cellar and something gay and pretty for Sunday night STOP Dark glasses for hangovers in between STOP Lots of love Elizabeth and Richard.”) Eighty people ultimately turned up – many of them flying into the Communist country on “a specially chartered British Airways Trident jet” before checking into the Duna-International Hotel, where their rooms had been filled with “trays of champagne, whisky, wine and Russian vodka, in addition to arrays of out-of-season blooms”.
The party lasted all weekend, with the main event taking place at the Belle Vue Supper Club on the hotel’s 12th floor, which had been filled with 3,000 red and gold balloons and a 30-piece orchestra for the occasion. Vogue’s Norman Parkinson photographed Burton and Taylor together, wrapped in furs and anointed with diamonds, as their guests feasted on Chicken Kiev, before Burton presented Elizabeth with her gift: a “canary-yellow diamond cut in 1621 by a court jeweller of the Mughal Emperor… set amongst a latticework of rubies and jade, and suspended as a pendant on a silken cord”. Taylor was delighted with the gift – that is, as soon as she’d had the silk cord replaced with a gold one.
Erotic Vagrancy by Roger Lewis is out now, published by riverrun in the UK
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