Does Elizabeth Taylor's death signify the end of big romance?
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There is an illuminating interview with Elizabeth Taylor in the December 1964 edition of Life Magazine, published as she contemplated the aftershocks of her affair with Richard Burton (it is tellingly entitled “I refuse to cure my public image”).
In it, she mulls over the couple’s enduring fascination for the public. “Maybe Richard and I are sex symbols together because we suggest illicit love… our love is married now. But there is still a suggestion, I suppose, of rampant sex on the wild.”
Some suggestion. Nearly 50 years on, the Burton-Taylor coupling has remained a byword for larger than life passion, for huge fights and bigger reconciliations, for a love without end, she apparently kept till her deathbed a letter from him asking to come home.
Sex, she says, is “absolutely gorgeous”, but she makes clear that they love fighting just as much. “I adore fighting with him… it’s rather like a small atom bomb going off – sparks fly, walls shake, floors reverberate.” There is barely a sentence in 3,000 words that doesn’t fill you with a kind of lusty awe.
Now let’s fast forward to yesterday’s celebrity headlines, which inform us that X Factor’s Tesco Mary is “over” the caterer lover who had deserted her while pregnant; that the parents of Charlie Sheen and his ex have had a row over email; and that Kerry Katona and Peter André have gone to the opening of Mel B’s sister’s cake shop. Yup, this is our modern-day stuff of dreams. Is there any wonder that there has been so much wistful sighing over Burton and Taylor?
We live in an age where there has never been more “rampant sex on the wild” available to us, the lives and bodies of celebrities laid out for our viewing pleasure like meat on a slab. We can watch in real-time the courtship, child-bearing and subsequent divorce of “celebrities” like Katie Price and Peter André – without having a clue what they are famous for.
Even today’s A-list relationships seem stagey and insipid alongside that of Burton and Taylor. Last week, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie were swiftly held up as possible inheritors of their crown. But the much-vaunted Jolie-Pitt chemistry now appears buried under a small classroom of children, and paled by over-exposure. And – really – would Burton and Taylor have whinged publicly about the difficulty of finding “Mommy-and-Daddy-time”?
Posh and Becks? Successful global brand: Yes. Hotbed of Barely Suppressed Desire? Um, no, no matter how hard they try to convince us otherwise. If you doubt this, try to imagine Burton and Taylor – a couple once condemned by the pope for “erotic vagrancy” – pouting furiously at each other to promote a scent called “Intimately Burton”.
Kate Middleton and Prince William, young and virile as they might be, come across like a pair of very sweet young Sunday school teachers; Justin Bieber seems too young to actually possess any genitals, while one wishes Cherie and Tony Blair would shut up about their own supposedly rampant sexuality.
No, look back at Burton and Taylor, Bogey and Bacall, Olivier and Leigh, the Kennedy/Onassis/Callas love triangle and it’s hard to shake off the idea that it’s the relationships that have got smaller. Part of it is down to a publicity machine that now insists that celebrities should be brought down to mortal level; that their lives should reflect the lives of their readers. Look at me! they say, from the pages of Hello! I am normal, like you. I walk my children to the swings and have my wedding reception at the local pub. Nannies, personal assistants, the wealth of Croesus are all neatly airbrushed away.
Meanwhile, celebrity gossip magazines take fetishistic delight in pointing out celebrities’ physical flaws – the stray underarm hair, facial blemish or unflattering outfit that will make them Just Like Us. Only a brave few – Jennifer Lopez springs to mind – dare suggest that they do live and love bigger than the rest of us. We seem to live in an age where we are quietly appalled by the idea of appetites, whether they be for sex, food or diamonds.
This is why nearly all the women I know have sighed a little this week at remembrance of the Burton-Taylor relationship, an honest, earthy passion, a love lived large, with removal vans heading out, and then back in again two days later. (After all, the dramatic breaking up with your own beloved isn’t quite the same when it’s you heading off with a toaster under your arm and a dog on a string.)
And it is why the problem today’s stars have is not dissimilar to the problems of the romantic novelist in writing a love story – to present something transportative that will lift the observer, and ignite their dreams, or something real, grounded in domestic mundanity, that reassuringly reflects the reader’s life back at them. In an age of austerity, this view says, conspicuous displays of anything – money, jewellery, sex – are likely to alienate. And when money talks, the consumer cannot afford to be alienated from the brand.
But there is something else about these couples; they were smart and they were gracious. Taylor and Burton were widely read, astute about each other and their place in the firmament. Life ’s interviewer, Dick Meryman, said after interviewing Taylor that she and Olivier (whom he had also interviewed) shared a “volcanic quality” teamed with “extreme graciousness. That seems to be an integral part of these people who are absolutely at the top of their professions.”
And there was also a kind of fearlessness about them. They were so sure of themselves, their talents, that they genuinely didn’t care how they were presented. Taylor talks disarmingly frankly of how they were spat at in the street, her guilt at her children having to deal with different fathers, the fact that Burton was often so drunk that she had to hold his coffee cup. I remember, when researching my last book, coming across a 1960s edition of a newspaper that reported Vivien Leigh “camping” outside Laurence Olivier’s dressing room to try to work out whether he was going to divorce her. These days her publicist would have had her in an office, tranquillised up to the eyebrows and on Good Morning putting out her side of the story so that she didn’t lose her sportswear contract.
The beauty of Burton and Taylor was precisely that it wasn’t airbrushed. In a disarmingly frank extract of the Life interview, Taylor tells of how Burton had recently come home in a fury after being booed as Hamlet, and how, sick with flu and engrossed in a Peter Sellers film, she had ignored him. “He walked over to the television set and kicked it right over and it hit the wall… he kicked quite a large metal screw and cut his foot to the bone… I bandaged it but …I was helpless with laughter. I think he could have killed me for that.”
Blood? Violence? The casual cruelties of married life? I’m still trying to imagine the modern day publicist who would have let that one through. It’s not pretty. What it does have, however, is the ring of truth.
These days the image is everything – and consequently means nothing at all. It’s hard to believe in grand passions presented to us in the glossy pages of magazines, when a week later the same couple’s divorce is announced. It’s hard to care about pop princess Rihanna being beaten up by her boyfriend when he then gets to talk about it on breakfast television and she makes millions out of a song with the refrain “I love the way it hurts”. As Taylor noted, there is no deodorant like success.
“I have almost zero contact with the public, and I try not to read much of what’s written about me,” Taylor said, blithely. “I’m not going to answer for an image created by hundreds of people who do not know what’s true or false… I mean, like, who really cares?”
You didn’t, Elizabeth. And we did. And that’s why it’s our loss.
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Does Elizabeth Taylor's death signify the end of big romance? - Telegraph
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