by Sam Kashner
It had only been two years since he’d walked away from playing King Arthur to don Roman general Marc Antony’s breastplate, but he feared the public would be waiting to judge him, eager to see him fail. Behind that was the sheer terror of live performance, which he had never completely overcome, made more intense, perhaps, by a dislike of being touched while performing onstage. When the London drama critic Tynan said that Burton seemed “isolated, apart, in a world of [his] own” onstage, Burton confided, “I do feel that on the stage it’s quite literally every man for himself. I don’t think anyone wants to help you particularly…you have to look after yourself. And I think that particular loneliness, solitude, that idea of carrying on in your own private room is not…unique to actors…I have it perhaps more than most. When I go out there, onstage, I’m battling the world—I have to beat the world. I have to be the best, as far as I can make it.”
It was Elizabeth who urged him to face up to his fear of live performance. In this, and in other aspects of their life together, she was his courage-teacher. For example, she noticed that in interviews he tended to speak with his hand close to his mouth, to shield his pockmarked right cheek from the intrusive camera. She would have none of that. It was her philosophy to drag secrets and fears into the pitiless light, and she called him out on it, teasing him with seemingly cruel endearments like “my pockmarked Welshman.”
Burton, in fact, like many stage actors, had a number of phobias and conditions he hid from the public. One was that acute fear of heights, which he only began to reveal under Elizabeth’s influence. The other secret he’d nurtured was the fact that he was a hemophiliac, though to a mild degree, remarkable in one so athletic and so physically engaged with the world. In fact, his sword fights each night in Hamlet put him at risk, because he never held back. John Cullum, the actor who played Laertes, recalled that sometimes the fight was so intense that he would get quite banged up, eventually losing a thumbnail as a result. “I bleed more than Laertes,” Burton said. “Of course, I’m a wilder duelist. But he stops bleeding within twenty-four hours. It takes me five days.”
In spite of it, there wasn’t a pub brawl he ducked from if it came his way; he’d had dreams of being a rugby player for Wales long before he’d hoped to become an actor. It was Elizabeth who urged him to stop hiding his hemophilia, which Richard felt was unmanly. She urged him to go public with the inherited condition, and later he would take it on as a cause, touting the benefits of vitamin K in treating the blood disorder. (Elizabeth would later say that taking up this cause with Richard was a precursor to her AIDS charitable work, long before the AIDS-related death of her friend and costar in Giant, Rock Hudson.) In a press release announcing the establishment of the Richard Burton Hemophilia Fund, Burton told the press, “I’ve been a bleeder all my life,” though his own case was relatively slight. Two of his brothers, however, had the condition in a more severe form, and had almost died undergoing tonsillectomies in their youth.
Another condition that haunted Richard was epilepsy. He had suffered a mild seizure when he was a young actor in London and was reportedly set to rights by a couple of brandies. Since then, he feared its recurrence and felt that alcohol kept the seizures at bay—as if he needed another reason to drink. He would be free of attacks for some time, but they would recur toward the end of his career, during a period when he was not drinking, sending him twice to the hospital.
Elizabeth gave him the courage to face the abominable crowds that now pushed against them whenever they ventured out in public. Though he would later admit to liking the perks of fame—“the best seat at the restaurant, the best seat on the plane; you’re treated like a kind of demigod”—Burton disliked the hurly-burly of fandom, with its prying journalists and relentless paparazzi. He would never quite learn how to manage the crush of fame, unlike Elizabeth, who, as he later marveled in a BBC interview, “had a kind of private veil she put on in public, where she didn’t seem to notice photographers or journalists. She walked through them as if through a vacuum. [Her] public persona was aloof and enormously difficult to break.” Elizabeth would have to teach Burton how to be private in public, now that she had brought him into her world.
Elizabeth would need her “private veil” when the couple flew to Toronto on January 28, 1964, to rehearse Hamlet at the O’Keefe Theater. When they checked into a five-room suite on the eighth floor of the King Edward–Sheraton Hotel, they were met by huge crowds, not all of them fans. One hostile picketer carried a sign that read, “Drink not the wine of adultery.” Except for rehearsals at the O’Keefe, Taylor and Burton were virtual prisoners of the eighth floor, afraid to go out and be overwhelmed by adoring or hostile crowds. An armed guard was placed outside the door of their suite, for their own protection, and Elizabeth, who had arrived with two poodles, had to walk her dogs on the roof of the hotel.
John Gielgud was appalled at this American form of worship. He wrote in a letter to his partner, Paul Anstee, “Ghastly crowds of morons besiege the hotel where Burton and Taylor are staying—every drink and conversation they have is paragraphed and reported. It really must be hell for them, and now some Ohio congressman has demanded that his American visa be rescinded for moral turpitude…!”
Elizabeth came to only two of the Toronto rehearsals, recalls the actor Richard L. Sterne (who appeared as “A Gentleman” in Hamlet), during the entire three-city run of the production. “Mostly, she stayed in the hotel. It was dangerous for them to go out. I’ve never seen anything quite like that. I suppose some of the rock musicians get that treatment, but it’s exceptional for theater people. There was always a crowd outside the theater trying to just see them, to get a glimpse of the two of them.”
At the first company meeting in Toronto, Sterne recalled the cast sitting down at a large table to read through the script. Burton “read with such enormous energy. Usually, at first readings, you’re just studying the words. Richard was giving an all-out, rip-roaring reading that amazed everybody.”
The young actor was particularly taken with Burton’s voice: “He had an amazing projection. The timbre of it was quite penetrating and carried all the way to the last row of the theater. We weren’t microphoned then. One of the reviewers said he had a voice that could outshout Times Square traffic.” Years later, when asked by British TV interviewer Michael Parkinson, “Is there such a thing as a ‘Welsh voice’?” Burton had said, partly tongue-in-cheek, “It’s the deep, dark answer from the valleys, to everybody.” But he also said, “I can’t help the voice…. It was given to me. I’m very lucky to possess it, I suppose. It’s not a gift I would wish on anybody else.”
Sterne remembered that Elizabeth “was very quiet during rehearsals.” This was her first up-close exposure to classical theater, and she wanted to learn. “She steeped herself in the play and its various interpretations.” Sterne was also struck by how “awesomely beautiful” she was. “I can still see her coming into the rehearsal hall for the first time. It was maybe a week or so after we’d started rehearsing; she was dressed in a purple pantsuit. You couldn’t miss those violet-colored eyes. She sat very quietly; she barely moved, and she watched very attentively. Then we didn’t see her again until we were in performance.”
Gielgud was immensely pleased with the advanced booking for the play (“We shall be sold out for the entire engagement,” he wrote to his friend), and equally pleased with his assembled cast: “Rehearsals have begun unbelievably well…Richard looks pretty gross and red, but he is so beguiling and gifted that one succumbs the moment he begins to act, and he is utterly amenable to every suggestion and extremely skilled in adapting any idea one gives him. I really think he will be wonderfully moving and affecting.”
Sterne knew that “Richard adored Sir John and thought he was the greatest Shakespearean actor of all time, the best Hamlet he’d ever seen; he was in awe of him, as we all were in that cast.” Nonetheless, Burton seemed to have mixed feelings about Gielgud’s direction, explaining to Tynan that in theater, which
is essentially a writer’s medium, “directors are relatively unimportant. They’re not much more than jumped-up stage managers [who] should show you the place on the stage where you will be best seen. Then, assuredly leave the rest up to you.” Nonetheless, he praised Gielgud to Tynan as “the best director I’ve ever worked with on the stage…He was as dominating as a director could be, with somebody like myself” because he understood, Burton felt, that he needed to be left alone onstage. “I do think he thinks I’m an undisciplined actor…. I wouldn’t want to be that kind of disciplined actor who goes onstage every night and gives the same cadence to every speech, every night for days and days and days on end. I would prefer to be free so that I’m invited to be bad some nights…”
However, Elizabeth noticed that Richard was not completely at ease with Gielgud’s direction, nor with the physical and mental demands of the role. Perhaps he’d just been away too long, and though he’d played the part many times before, he couldn’t find his footing. Just before the play was to open, Elizabeth took it upon herself to call Richard’s “father”—his second father, the one who had plucked him from obscurity and set him on the path to fame—Philip Burton—to come to Richard’s aid.
It was a bold thing to do. Philip was now living in New York City, where he had launched an acting school, the American Music and Dramatic Academy, and he had sided with Sybil over the scandalous affair and subsequent divorce. It had been two years since Philip, now fifty-nine, had even spoken to his protégé. Whether Sybil graciously encouraged him to fly to Toronto, or he just wanted another chance to instruct and influence his brilliant ward, Philip agreed to step in. According to Sterne, Philip took over from Gielgud, taking an active role in shaping Burton’s performance. Gielgud was not happy about it, but, if nothing else, Philip’s presence seemed to calm Burton and give him confidence, and he stayed on for a few days as an unofficial, and unpaid, adjunct to the production.
Philip Burton arrived a few days after the play opened on February 26, 1964, to mixed reviews, though Burton fared much better than the production itself. Though the Toronto Daily Star called the pre-Broadway opening “an unmitigated disaster,” the Toronto Telegram lauded Burton as “magnificent” and described him as “the only thing of consequence” in Gielgud’s production. “We’ve seen in Toronto only two other such brilliant displays. Sir Laurence Olivier’s Becket in 1961 and Sir Alec Guinness’s Dylan two months ago.” The pared-down, minimalist approach came in for the biggest criticism—audiences apparently wanted the trappings of Denmark, not modern-day dress. Luckily, two days after opening in Toronto, Burton’s Becket was released in New York, to strong reviews.
Despite the production’s mixed reception and the nightly strain of performing onstage, Burton was gracious to the entire cast and crew. (“The crew adore him,” Gielgud had observed.) Sterne, fresh from Philadelphia and embarking on his first major theatrical production, noted that Burton “treated everybody, from the producer down to the doorman, the same. We had this rather odd character named Peter Green, who was the stage doorman,” Sterne recalled. “He was a very old man, and he had a wooden leg…. Richard’s dressing room was one floor up, so every message that came to the stage door, Peter Green had to get up those stairs with his wooden leg and hand it to him. Richard adored him; he was very, very kind. His dressing-room door was almost always open. Anybody could go by and say hello.”
As he had while appearing as King Arthur in Camelot, Burton held court in his dressing room, regaling cast and crew with his storehouse of anecdotes, jokes, and bawdy songs. Once the play opened and his dressing room was thronged with well-wishers, security guards, and Burton’s growing entourage, Gielgud found it next to impossible to get in to see Burton to give him performance notes. He had to wait in line, like everybody else. “There was one performance in Boston where he couldn’t even get backstage afterward,” Sterne remembered. “The police were posted at the door, and he went up and said, ‘I’m the director of this play!’ and they told him to move along. So, Richard had to get the notes the next day before the matinee.”
The sheer enormity of Burton’s fame greatly outshone Gielgud’s, and seeing Philip Burton swoop in to add grace notes to his own direction must have created a strain between the two men. Added to that, Burton, of course, was intent on putting his own stamp on the role. In commenting on the difference between his 1953 Hamlet performed at the Old Vic and his 1964 Hamlet, Burton told Tynan, “The first time I played it as if I’d like to be John Gielgud. The second time…I played it absolutely as myself.”
Even so, Burton altered his performance vastly from show to show, Sterne recalled. “You never knew what he was going to do. He was always in character, and it was always fascinating and exciting to watch him. Maybe a few performances he was down and not completely into it, but for almost all of them, he was electrifying.” One night he recited the “To be or not to be” soliloquy in German, to acknowledge some important German-speaking people in the audience—social workers who had come to New York to decide if Burton and Taylor were fit parents to adopt Maria, whose adoption was not yet finalized. (Burton had easily picked up a smattering of languages, German, French, and Spanish.) He was even capable of reciting “To be or not to be,” backward. Despite the enormous amounts of alcohol Burton put away, his memory never seemed to fail him.
Offstage, Richard and Elizabeth “couldn’t keep their hands off each other,” recalled Robert Misil (who played Horatio in the production). “She was captivated by his poetic brilliance and he was—to the extreme—inordinately proud that he, Richard Burton, the twelfth of thirteen children born to a barmaid and a Welsh coal miner, had married the most beautiful and most famous woman in the world.” John Cullum, the tall, rugged actor who played Laertes (and Sir Dinadan in Camelot) saw that “everybody wanted to be around them. They were so charismatic, so much in love, so generous to everyone in the production.” Sterne thought so, too. “Physically, Burton was magnetic. He had an aura about him.”
Sterne was also impressed by the enormous amounts of alcohol Burton was able to consume without affecting his performance. “Richard belonged to that school of British actors who were big drinkers. Richard and Peter O’Toole. I would say, just from my own observation, that he actually drank a fifth of scotch during the performance. It seemed to have no effect on him whatsoever.” Gielgud wrote to Burton’s longtime friend and supporter, the playwright Emlyn Williams, “Richard is at his most agreeable—full of charm and quick to take criticism and advice—but he does put away the drink, and looks terribly coarse and heavy—gets muddled and fluffy and then loses all his nimbleness and attack.”
It’s mind-boggling that Burton was able to perform nightly while downing a fifth of scotch. Cullum, who was a drinking buddy of Burton’s when they were in Camelot, couldn’t keep up with him (Cullum no longer drinks). Though he did notice that while Burton’s dresser, Bob Wilson, always had a full glass of scotch waiting for him just offstage, he didn’t think Burton always finished each drink. Throughout the run of the play, Burton only missed two performances, and that was because he was beginning to have severe bursitis in one shoulder. His performances were consistently brilliant and physically energetic. “Richard was so energetic in his fencing,” Sterne recalled, “the foil broke three or four times during performances.” (When the pianist Oscar Levant saw the New York production, he commented to his wife, June, that Burton’s Hamlet was so energetic he actually felt sorry for Claudius.)
Sterne was one of the actors who carried Burton off at the end of the play after Hamlet is slain by Laertes. “There were six of us carrying him out in a sort of funeral procession,” Sterne recalled. “Drums in the background. Hamlet gets a short break during the fourth act while Ophelia is doing the mad scene. Richard would go up and take a shower in his dressing room and put on a clean, fresh costume to do the last act. So, he always smelled very, very fresh, that he’d just come out of the shower. Maybe he sweated the alcohol out.”
Ster
ne was well aware of Burton’s need for physical space around him onstage: “He didn’t like to be touched…he let us know that, and people were very respectful. There were a few times when we had to touch him, pulling him out of the grave. I think it broke his concentration. Some of the old-time actors were like that, too. They would stand in the center of the stage, in the limelight, and everybody else had to work from outside that circle. It could have been a fear too, because of the crowds who tried to grab at him.”
Once the play opened, Sterne recalled, “Elizabeth was always there with him. Every night, never missed one. I think she only saw it once in the audience, after that she saw it from the wings or heard it over the monitor.” That was because when she arrived on opening night, her very appearance caused such a ruckus it delayed the curtain by a half hour. Audience members actually climbed onto their seats to get a better look at her. Rather than upstage the actors, from that night on she either slipped in and sat at the rear or wings of the theater or watched the performance from backstage. But she was there every night.
Elizabeth celebrated her thirty-second birthday with the cast and crew of Hamlet. She showed up backstage, dressed in black, exactly like Richard, and everyone sang “Happy Birthday” and then broke into a chorus of “Danny Boy” for Burton. She then cut the birthday cake with a sword. It was one of the happiest moments of her life. “She couldn’t have been lovelier,” Sterne recalls. “She was kind of a prisoner of the whole crowd because she couldn’t go out in public without being molested,” but she was safe with Burton and the actors. And Burton gave her a stunning birthday present, an emerald-and-diamond necklace from Bulgari. It gave him, this miner’s son, as much pleasure to buy her jewels as it pleased her to have them. He admired the way the jewels, brought up from the great mine of his fame and wealth, shone between her breasts. He felt as proud of bedecking Elizabeth in jewels as of anything else in his life.
