Elizabeth Taylor & Richard Burton

The production of Cleopatra (1963) was already a disaster before Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton began their affair. It had been filming in London with Peter Finch as Caesar, then halted when Taylor became dangerously ill with pneumonia, then relocated to Rome with a new director, new cast, and a budget that would eventually reach $44 million, making it the most expensive film ever produced at that point. Taylor was being paid $1 million, an unprecedented sum for the era. Burton had been added to play Mark Antony.

They began their affair on the set in January 1962. Both were married to other people. The press, who were stationed in Rome in enormous numbers because the production itself was news, noticed almost immediately. The Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano condemned the affair as an act of "erotic vagrancy." This condemnation was distributed worldwide. The effect was to make Taylor and Burton the most talked-about people on earth.

This is the foundational condition of the relationship: it was, from its very first weeks, a public spectacle. The two people at the center of it were already accustomed to public spectatorship in different ways, Taylor having been a screen presence since childhood and Burton having been a celebrated Shakespearean stage actor since the late 1940s. What they had not encountered before was the specific experience of being a spectacle together, of the relationship itself becoming the performance.

Elizabeth Taylor was born in London in 1932 to American parents and began appearing in films at age nine. By the time she was twelve she had filmed National Velvet and become one of the most recognizable faces in the world. She had not, at that point, been permitted the ordinary developmental experiences of childhood: private failure, private embarrassment, the gradual construction of a self without an audience.

What this produced, over decades, was a person for whom the boundary between the self and the image was extremely permeable. She had been told since childhood that her beauty was her primary fact. She had experienced that beauty as both gift and burden: the source of professional opportunity and the lens through which everyone, including people who claimed to love her, primarily saw her. By 1962 she had been married four times. She was thirty years old.

Taylor's wound was not simply that she had been objectified. It was that she had been objectified so thoroughly and for so long that the category of being seen clearly had become almost conceptually unavailable. She attracted people who wanted to possess the image. Burton, who was himself extraordinarily beautiful and who understood projection from the actor's side, was at least responding to something more complex than the image. Whether that constituted seeing her is a different question.

Richard Burton grew up in Port Talbot, Wales, one of thirteen children of a coal miner. He was taken in and educated by his schoolteacher Philip Burton, who recognized his extraordinary gifts and whose name he eventually adopted. He won a place at Oxford, served in the RAF, and by the late 1940s was being described by critics as the heir to Laurence Olivier.

The Shakespeare career was real. His Hamlet was celebrated. His Henry V was documented as one of the great stage performances of his generation. But Hollywood offered money that the stage could not match, and Burton went, and the compromises accumulated, and by the time he was deeply involved with Taylor, the gap between who he had been trained to be and who he had become was a source of persistent and largely unspoken anguish.

He drank. The drinking was not incidental to his psychology; it was load-bearing. His father had been a heavy drinker. His brother Ifor, to whom he was deeply attached, was a heavy drinker. Burton's own drinking moved from social to compulsive over the course of the 1950s and accelerated sharply in the 1960s. He described it in his diaries with a combination of self-awareness and helplessness that suggests someone who understood exactly what was happening and could not find the internal resource to stop it.

The diaries, published posthumously, are among the more psychologically honest documents produced by a public figure of that era. They show a man of genuine intelligence and remarkable literary sensibility, acutely aware of his own failures, oscillating between grandiosity and self-contempt, and organizing much of his interior life around Taylor with the same mixture of adoration and resentment that the letters suggest.

Burton gave Taylor, over the course of their relationship, some of the most significant jewels in private hands: the 68-carat Cartier-Burton diamond, the La Peregrina pearl (a Spanish royal jewel dating to the sixteenth century), an Asscher-cut diamond ring of 33 carats, the Krupp Diamond of 33.19 carats. The gifts were widely reported and widely mocked as excess.

The terrain reading is more specific. The gifts were not primarily acquisitive. They were a form of communication between two people who had both learned, in different ways, that material exchange was a more reliable channel than direct emotional disclosure. Taylor understood jewelry as love made tangible. Burton understood giving as a form of witnessing her beauty that required no words. The diamonds were not a substitute for intimacy. They were the specific vocabulary of intimacy that was available in that particular dyad.

But the relationship also contained real violence. Burton's drinking produced episodes of cruelty that Taylor's accounts, given in interviews decades later, describe with considerable specificity. She was not a passive recipient. The dynamic was volatile in both directions. Two people who were each accustomed to filling a room entirely, who had no practice in being peripheral, who could not modulate their need for the other person's attention: the result was a closed system with no pressure release.

They married in March 1964, ten days after Burton's divorce from Sybil Williams was finalized. They divorced in June 1974. They remarried in October 1975 in Botswana. They divorced again in July 1976.

The remarriage is the psychologically revealing data point. After a year of separation, after the legal dissolution of a relationship that had been, by both their accounts, increasingly damaging, they returned to each other. The return was not irrational in any simple sense. It was the behavior of two people for whom the intensity of the relationship, however destructive, felt more real than the alternatives.

This is the specific structure of intensity addiction: not that the intense relationship is better than the calm one, but that the calm one feels insufficient, anaesthetic, like a diminished version of experience. Taylor and Burton had been each other's primary reality for over a decade. The world outside that reality had become hard to inhabit at full amplitude.

The second marriage lasted fourteen months. Burton married Suzy Miller shortly afterward. Taylor married Senator John Warner. Neither of those marriages produced the intensity that had organized both of their lives for thirteen years. This is not evidence that the Taylor-Burton relationship was good. It is evidence that intensity addiction, once established, is very difficult to replace with something more stable.

Burton died in August 1984 of a cerebral hemorrhage. He was fifty-eight. His drinking had contributed substantially to his decline. Taylor was not with him at the end. She had remarried for a seventh time and was living a life that was, by outward appearances, stable.

Her accounts of Burton in the years after his death were consistent in their tenor: he was the great love of her life. She returned to this formulation repeatedly, in interviews, in her memoir, in public statements. Whether "great love" and "relationship that was good for you" are the same thing is a question the phrase does not answer.

What the Burton-Taylor relationship actually demonstrates is something that the culture finds uncomfortable: that the most consuming relationships are not necessarily the most nourishing ones, that intensity and love overlap but are not identical, and that two people can recognize this at some level while remaining constitutionally incapable of choosing the less consuming alternative.