by Ben Watt
As the next couple of days unfolded, she seemed to find her own – and our – company excruciating. If she was unsettled in the room upstairs, she offered little when she came down – just long stares out to the garden, her thumb under her jaw, her index finger pressed against her lips as if she’d shushed her own mouth. The children skirted round her watchfully. She’d take Blake on her lap and read to him from a storybook with big print, but if he wriggled it was an excuse to put him down. The girls grew wary. It was like listening to a silent rage.
‘Now what, Mum?’ I asked after three nights.
‘You tell me.’ She seemed adrift and defensive.
‘Home?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Here.’
‘No.’
‘Some time with Dad?’ I suggested. ‘At . . . where he’s staying now.’ (I couldn’t say its name.) ‘A couple of weeks? Get your strength back.’
She stared at the wall. I could tell she couldn’t bring herself to say yes outright. It must have seemed to her like a defeat, the care home a step too far. Then I saw her eyes brighten, as though a thought had come clearly to her.
‘Would they let me visit like that?’ she asked. ‘Just for a short time?’
‘I’m sure they would,’ I said. She could be a ‘visitor’ if she wanted.
‘For Tom’s sake.’
‘For Dad’s sake.’
And so she joined him for a couple of weeks. We went via the flat to collect some clothes and belongings, and she chose to wear a smart raincoat knotted at the waist and a mustard woollen beret for her arrival. She was to be invincible. My dad was pleased to see her. He smiled passively as she hovered nervously in the lobby, his trousers held up by his clip-on braces. He had shaving nicks on his face. I thought he looked like an elderly Ernie Wise.
After a week she asked if I would pop back and check up on the flat and bring her a couple of her scrapbooks to show the carers.
‘Any in particular?’ I asked.
‘Make sure you bring the Burton one.’
Chapter 10
In the summer of 1970, a few weeks before my dad began work writing for his new residency at the Dorchester, my mum interrupted my school holidays with an announcement.
‘I’ll be away for a few days in August, darling.’
‘How many?’
‘Five.’
‘Five? Where are you going?’
‘Mexico.’
If I remember anything about 1970 it’s that it was in colour, and it took place largely – as far as I was aware – in sun-soaked Mexico. In June, the FIFA World Cup was beamed into our north-facing little sitting room all the way from Mexico. It was the first World Cup not to be transmitted in black and white. The images glittered and flared. The Brazilian kit looked amazing: iridescent blue shorts; golden shirts. It was like the uniform of gods. The only other colour I could liken it to as an eight-year-old boy was Jason and the Argonauts. England wore dazzling all-white. It was like gazing into another lustrous technicolor world. I made my dad buy extra petrol every week from our local Red Lion garage so I could top up my Esso World Cup coin collection. The TV shone. My coins shone. Everything was brilliant.
‘Why are you going?’ I asked.
‘I am going to interview a couple of people for a magazine.’
‘Who?’
‘A couple of film stars.’
‘What are their names?’
‘Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.’
‘Oh.’ I went back to my coin collection.
My mum’s scrapbooks and souvenirs are full of notes, inserted scraps of paper, and handwritten annotations underlining the importance of ‘Burton’ in her own version of her life. Articles and letters are photocopied – sometimes in triplicate. Photographs are marked up with accurate dates and exclamation marks, and in 1985 (a year after his unexpected death at the age of fifty-eight) she wrote a lengthy retrospective story for the TV Times called ‘The Burton I Loved’. The fuss was not without reason.
She first met him in 1951 at Stratford-upon-Avon, the year after she had acted there herself in the Festival Season of 1950. Her first husband, Ken, better known by his pen name, Richard Findlater, was also friends with Burton and had stayed with him and his first wife, Sybil, in Switzerland. Ken and my mum had travelled up to Stratford to see the young Burton in Henry V, taking with them their newly born son – and now my eldest half-brother – Simon. Backstage Burton had greeted them and – as my mum never got tired of recounting – placed his crown over baby Simon’s head and shoulders, ‘Until,’ as she often said, ‘it came to rest on his nappy pin.’
‘He was just sex in chainmail,’ she once confessed to me.
Twelve years later, in May 1963, she was dispatched to Shepperton Film Studios to interview Burton who was playing opposite Peter O’Toole in Becket. As they were chatting, the phone rang. It was Liz Taylor calling from the Dorchester where she and Burton were staying in separate suites midway through their affair; it was a year before they were to marry for the first time.
‘Can’t talk now, love,’ said Burton down the phone. ‘I’ve got this wild Welsh Gypsy asking me intimate questions about us.’
After the interview they left the studios together and walked out towards Burton’s Rolls-Royce and his awaiting chauffeur. My mum stopped by her scruffy Mini-Traveller and started to say goodbye. ‘I’ve never been in one of these,’ Burton said, unflappably, ignoring his Rolls-Royce and running his hand, without a hint of embarrassment, along the wooden trim of the Mini. ‘Could I have a go?’ Within seconds he had taken the keys, dismissed his chauffeur, and then casually driven my mum all the way home to London. In her own car.
By 1970 he and Taylor were still arguably the world’s biggest celebrity couple. Hollywood may have begun to turn its back on them in the wake of low-budget gritty successes like Easy Rider and Midnight Cowboy, but audiences were still thrilled and repelled by stories of jewels worth three million pounds, the private jet, the yacht, the rows, the inflated fees. Besieged by interview requests, they turned most of them down, but my mum knew Burton was nothing if not loyal to old theatre friends, especially those with a Welsh connection and a sense of humour, so she sent him a telegram:
Have paid for three wheels of our new Renault 5. Please invite me to Mexico and enable us to pay for the fourth.
Burton was tickled. The velvet rope was lifted, and in August my mum was invited to leave rainy London for an enormous world exclusive. Fourteen hours later she found herself in the remote fishing village of San Felipe on the Gulf of Mexico, swimming in the sea with the Burton family surrounded by pelicans.
It was 110 degrees in the shade when she breakfasted with him in his trailer borrowed from John Wayne – the eye-patch from True Grit was still hanging on the mirror. He was starring in a desert war movie called Raid on Rommel and, striking a chord with my mum, was ‘on the wagon’. A photograph by the assignment photographer shows Burton – forty-four – slim, rugged and tanned on the steps of the trailer in beige army fatigues. My mum, forty-six, is in character as the ‘wild Welsh Gypsy’, and is gazing up at him adoringly, and slightly submissively, leaning back against the trailer dressed in a full-length vibrant orange-and-black kaftan, headscarf, coral necklace and pearl earrings. To say it was a side she didn’t get much of a chance to express at home would be putting it mildly; forty-eight hours earlier she’d been collecting school blazers from the dry-cleaner’s, washing up dinner plates for seven and lending an understanding ear to my dad’s anxieties. It was a transformation. When I was young I didn’t recognise her in the official photos that came back from the Mexico trip. I preferred the personal off-duty Polaroid of her in a plain one-piece bathing suit, floppy hat and sunglasses, sitting awkwardly and girlishly on the edge of a blue canoe with her back to the sea on the day she first arrived. In it, she looked just like my mum. The idea that adults could be more than one person – one for the children, one for their partner, one for themselves – did not
make sense to me for a long time.
Now, of course, I admire the exuberance and the style, the self-expression that didn’t get much of an outlet at home, but I realise she was clever too – she knew it was the side that would get the best from the occasion, especially when allied with her interview style. ‘Being ordinary’, as she called it, was perhaps one of her greatest assets as a journalist. As an ex-actress she was trusted, and of course had a great deal of sympathy with the stars she interviewed, but, for all the monthly-mag surface fluff, it is clear she succeeded by asking simple well-researched sincere questions that often got to the heart of her subjects’ feelings and motivations.
Her style chimed with the times. Cosmopolitan had relaunched in the US in 1965 under Helen Gurley Brown – my mum wrote a lead feature on Burton and Taylor for the UK launch issue in 1971 – and ‘having it all’ and pop-feminism dominated the new driving editorial mantra. Hard work, wily opportunism, lavish indulgences, frankness and liberation could all coexist in an empowering consummate life, where men were smouldering and spellbinding but also malleable and exploitable. Burton and Taylor were perfect triple-page features.
In San Felipe she interviewed Liz Taylor separately. Having been assured in the morning that Taylor was unavailable that day, my mum had sent the outfit she had intended to wear for the occasion to be laundered. Suddenly she found out the interview had been arranged at short notice for the same afternoon, and she was forced to sit down opposite one of the world’s most famously beautiful women wearing the only thing she had clean – a tatty towelling beach dress. They met in a deserted café overlooking the ocean. In her notes she writes of Taylor, then thirty-eight: ‘She looked stunning, wearing minimal make-up, her dark cloud of hair grey-streaked, as Richard liked it, and her extraordinary kingfisher-blue eyes, fringed with double sets of dark lashes, the envy of all of us.’ But my mum’s outfit must have struck the right laid-back tone; Taylor was very open and relaxed and revealed a lot about her relationship with Burton. It was, as my mum, said later, ‘gold dust’, and paid for my upkeep for several years.
Afterwards they both went shopping with Taylor’s three children, strolling into San Felipe to walk round the small local supermarket. They bought sandals and jointed wooden snakes for the kids. (My mum brought me one home in her suitcase.) She also bought herself a strap for the wristwatch Taylor had given her the day before – a wind-up watch with a comic picture of Nixon’s vice-president Spiro Agnew on the face, dressed in ‘Stars and Stripes’ shorts and slippers, with gloved Mickey Mouse hands pointing to the numbers. My mum was well prepared; in return she gave Taylor a silk scarf that had belonged to her Romany grandmother; she’d taken it with her to Mexico just in case.
A handwritten letter from Taylor arrived shortly after my mum got back to London:
Dear Romany,
Thank you so much for the fantastic scarf. It was – and still is – my secret ambition to be a Gypsy. (Maybe that’s why I so enjoy the way we live.) When I was kid my fantasy was that Gypsies had left me on my mother and father’s doorstep and someday they (always a handsome young man on a white, equally handsome horse) would retrieve me – and I would live happily in the magic golden world of my people for ever more.
I have to this day all the fake jewellery, clothes, hairstyles etc etc ever attributed to anyone even resembling a Gypsy. I never thought I’d be so lucky as to have the real article – because I know you’re close people – at least according to my lore [or love]. Maybe some of the magic will rub off on me.
Thank you so much,
Love,
Elizabeth
A year later, the Italian magazine Oggi carried paparazzi photographs of Burton and Taylor on holiday on the streets of Portofino. Taylor – sporting a variation on the vintage Romany fortune-teller look worn by my mum in San Felipe – is wearing a long pale Paisley kaftan and on her head is my great-grandmother’s scarf.
Chapter 11
‘Happy Christmas,’ I said, as I helped my dad out towards the car under the overcast afternoon sky.
It was Christmas Day 2002.
My mum had lingered at the care home after her operation but had been back at the flat on her own since the beginning of December, trying out some ‘independent living’, as the link worker had called it. It was a reprieve from looking after my dad full-time, but she was visiting him every other day. (‘Have bus pass. Have stick. Can travel.’) On Christmas Eve, my half-brother Toby had taken her over to his house near Esher for a few nights, but my dad hadn’t wanted to go. He had insisted on staying put at the care home (‘Less fuss, no children’) on the condition I took him for ‘a seasonal spin in the car’ after lunch.
‘You all right?’ I said, opening the car door.
‘All the better for seeing you.’
He had on his double-breasted navy blazer with the gold buttons, and his best tartan trousers. With clip-on braces they were pulled a little too high and I could see his camel-brown socks. On his feet he was wearing his special plum-red leather tassel loafers. Someone must have helped him into them – they needed a shoe-horn to get them on. His care assistant had taken me aside and told me he was up and awake at 2 a.m. The night staff had found him sitting on his bed. ‘What are you doing, Tommy?’ they’d said. ‘Watching out for Santa?’ He had got himself completely dressed and had pushed his curtains open and was looking up into the dark silent star-specked Christmas night sky, wakeful and expectant. ‘My son’s coming,’ he’d said quietly. ‘We’re going for a special drive.’ ‘He’s coming at 2 p.m. Not 2 a.m.,’ they’d had to say. ‘It’s the middle of the night, Tommy. You’ve got yourself in a right old muddle.’ It had taken them half an hour to convince him. They’d had to get him undressed and back into bed in his pyjamas.
The car was still ticking and clicking.
‘I’m not doing this every week for you,’ I said jokingly.
‘I have no intention of returning.’
I helped him into the car and shut the door.
‘Are we off for a spin?’ he said. ‘Nice car. You’ve always had good taste.’
His face looked tired and thinner.
‘That’s what you asked for. OK with you?’
He turned to me in his seat. He had his stick with him. The end of it was down in the footwell between his knees and he was holding the handle with two hands like a little old lady holds a handbag on the bus, or as if he were about to ride a hobby-horse. ‘I’d like that very much,’ he said.
I smiled at him. ‘Where shall we go then?’
He paused for a brief second, then said quite firmly, ‘Barnes.’
‘Barnes!?’ I laughed. ‘OK, why not.’
I turned on the ignition, gave him a wink, and swung round and we headed off towards Maida Vale and Westway. We sped down through Swiss Cottage and St John’s Wood to Warwick Avenue, my dad gazing out of the window as London flashed by, the shadows of trees and buildings flickering across his pale face. He let out a quiet hum of approval as we passed the lines of brightly painted houseboats moored at Little Venice. All flowerpots and lace curtains. An unexpected yucca.
We passed under the Marylebone flyover and up on to Westway. I have always loved Westway; it is like a futuristic relic from the days when hopeful and expectant planners envisaged central London ringed with an inner motorway. I read recently that it was conceived as part of the London Ringways System and many of the ideas pre-dated the Second World War in the years when issues of environmental impact were not high on the agenda. The plans were ultimately deemed too invasive – and having seen some of them, such as the dramatic flyover from the top of London at Whitestone Pond down over the wilds of Hampstead Heath, I can see why – but two of the three remaining pieces of the expansion programme (the Westway itself, and the dog-legged West Cross Route from White City to the Holland Park roundabout) remain. They are somehow suggestive of a more streamlined and optimistic London, even though the thick monstrosity of their concrete footprints stamps brutally thro
ugh the old neighbourhoods of Notting Dale and Portobello. Landmarks crouch just visible below its thin hard shoulder: the overground Hammersmith and City Line station of Westbourne Park with its fringed peely-painted white wooden awnings; the voluptuous curves of the old British Rail building that almost touch the guard-rails; the white tent-tops of Portobello Market; Ladbroke Grove awash with colour and noise and the thud of sound systems on Carnival days, when the road above is lined with police vans and aerials and surveillance cameras; the tags and throw-ups of the graffiti writers on the brick walls below on the southern side, which you can’t see from the road but you can from a train approaching Paddington Station; and gazing down on it all, still more impressive than the recent office skyscrapers of the Paddington Basin development is Ernö Goldfinger’s functionally beautiful Trellick Tower with its patchwork of balconies festooned with drying washing and bicycles. Above us was the wide west London sky, all ancient and modern: a removals-van blanket of flecked grey clouds and fingers of light. It felt like a modish and gracious journey to be taking on Christmas Day.
At Hammersmith Bridge, my dad, who had been largely silent throughout the journey, let out a big sigh, as if it had been in there for a while. Hammersmith Bridge was a gateway on to an old world for both of us. Barnes and south-west London started on the other side. The outspread sweep of the Thames curves in both directions under the bridge, rippling and polished, with the old Harrods repository building peeping over the towpath trees, a once yearly national landmark on Boat Race day. It was also the place I found out recently where my dad proposed to my mum for a second time.
We crossed over and turned right down Lonsdale Road past my old school and the old reservoirs. From the age of eleven I used to ride my bike to school down that road come rain or shine. Neither of my parents ever dreamed of taking me in the car; that would have been far too indulgent. Instead, my mum woke me every school day and I got dressed in my uniform upstairs in my room. She prepared breakfast for me in her nightie and occasionally my dad might appear before I left, but only to stand blearily in his dressing gown at the kitchen sink facing the garden to down a large beer glass of ice cold water from the mains tap – sometimes with an Alka-Seltzer – and then wipe his mouth on the back of his sleeve before turning round and going silently back to bed.
