This is the title of a book about Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.  The title is curious but apt.  A vagrant is someone who has no settled home or job.  Erotic is, well, erotic.  The author, Roger Lewis, adopts a stream of consciousness approach to a subject on which it is impossible to say something new. 

Like most contemporary biography, it is far, far too long.  I started skimming early, and tossed the towel in half way through. 

Each subject was deeply troubled, insecure, and unhappy.  The catalogue of misery just wears you down.  For example, any luster of a list of the ‘conquests’ of Burton is shattered by the disclosure that he liked one to keep on her school uniform during the consummation so devoutly to be desired.  It is about then that you may feel like a Peeping Tom.  (Some readers may be relieved to hear that Julie Andrews is specifically ruled out, although the author in an aside says that when in Camelot, she sings of the ‘simple joys of maidenhood’, ‘there’s absolutely no randy undercurrent or subtext.’  Keep the faith, Julie – and keep handy that big, cold spoon.)

Burton had that wonderful voice and he could act.  I cannot recall much discussion in the book of Taylor as an actor.  She was made for the screen – he for the stage.  It looks to me that he never forgave himself for giving up the stage for the movies – and the money. 

His alcoholism was on a par with that of the contemporary Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas.  (His death certificate referred to ‘insult to the brain.’  He redefined alcoholism by ordering a beer spider for breakfast.) 

It is amazing Burton lived until fifty-eight.  Taylor seemed to be in love with illness and had no conception of a home – none of her many pets was toilet trained.  They both had a Wagnerian conception that the world owed them a living because of the gifts they bestowed on it.  They got fabulously rich and viciously unhappy.

As they plough their way through betrayal after betrayal, you may get the impression that they deserve each other, and feed off the weaknesses of each other – just like Antony and Cleopatra (especially as played by Ciaran Hinds and Estelle Kohler).  But you are left wondering whether anyone in that cesspit ever manages to find contentment.

Mr Lewis certainly knows all about the movies – most of which look to be catalogued and noted helter-skelter in full Joyce-like waterfalls.  But you have to wonder about ‘a prize-winning student of St Andrews University and Magdalen College, Oxford’ who can say – apparently with a straight face:

And they were similar in another way, too – as spoilt children.  Shakespeare’s Antony is an ‘old ruffian’, a version of Falstaff; Burton’s is the needy lost boy Taylor described…

And Don Quixote stood for Spanish sanity, and Leopold Bloom for Irish social security.

The cover of the paperback is covered with the usual deceitful blurbs that demean the club and the house that publish them.

When was the last time you watched Cleopatra or Camelot?

Erotic Vagrancy

This is the title of a book about Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.  The title is curious but apt.  A vagrant is someone who has no settled home or job.  Erotic is, well, erotic.  The author, Roger Lewis, adopts a stream of consciousness approach to a subject on which it is impossible to say something new. 

Like most contemporary biography, it is far, far too long.  I started skimming early, and tossed the towel in half way through. 

Each subject was deeply troubled, insecure, and unhappy.  The catalogue of misery just wears you down.  For example, any luster of a list of the ‘conquests’ of Burton is shattered by the disclosure that he liked one to keep on her school uniform during the consummation so devoutly to be desired.  It is about then that you may feel like a Peeping Tom.  (Some readers may be relieved to hear that Julie Andrews is specifically ruled out, although the author in an aside says that when in Camelot, she sings of the ‘simple joys of maidenhood’, ‘there’s absolutely no randy undercurrent or subtext.’  Keep the faith, Julie – and keep handy that big, cold spoon.)

Burton had that wonderful voice and he could act.  I cannot recall much discussion in the book of Taylor as an actor.  She was made for the screen – he for the stage.  It looks to me that he never forgave himself for giving up the stage for the movies – and the money. 

His alcoholism was on a par with that of the contemporary Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas.  (His death certificate referred to ‘insult to the brain.’  He redefined alcoholism by ordering a beer spider for breakfast.) 

It is amazing Burton lived until fifty-eight.  Taylor seemed to be in love with illness and had no conception of a home – none of her many pets was toilet trained.  They both had a Wagnerian conception that the world owed them a living because of the gifts they bestowed on it.  They got fabulously rich and viciously unhappy.

As they plough their way through betrayal after betrayal, you may get the impression that they deserve each other, and feed off the weaknesses of each other – just like Antony and Cleopatra (especially as played by Ciaran Hinds and Estelle Kohler).  But you are left wondering whether anyone in that cesspit ever manages to find contentment.

Mr Lewis certainly knows all about the movies – most of which look to be catalogued and noted helter-skelter in full Joyce-like waterfalls.  But you have to wonder about ‘a prize-winning student of St Andrews University and Magdalen College, Oxford’ who can say – apparently with a straight face:

And they were similar in another way, too – as spoilt children.  Shakespeare’s Antony is an ‘old ruffian’, a version of Falstaff; Burton’s is the needy lost boy Taylor described…

And Don Quixote stood for Spanish sanity, and Leopold Bloom for Irish social security.

The cover of the paperback is covered with the usual deceitful blurbs that demean the club and the house that publish them.

When was the last time you watched Cleopatra or Camelot?