The Mellifluous Prince of Disorder

By Gerald Clarke

Richard Burton: 1925-1984

The magnificent baritone was not merely a voice. It was an orchestra of enormous range and power, and when it was silenced last week, its graceful sound seemed to linger on for millions who had heard it on film and stage. Homer must have known someone very much like Richard Burton. Describing Odysseus' effect on an audience in a faraway land, the poet wrote: "He ceased; but left so pleasing on the ear his voice, that list'ning still they seemed to hear."

Burton was not the greatest actor of his generation, although many of his peers were convinced that he could have been. Nor was he the greatest success at the box office, although 20 years ago he was almost certainly the highest-paid actor in the world. But for the better part of the '60s and '70s, the years of his romance with and marriages to Elizabeth Taylor--the Elizabethan years, as he later called them--he was one of the most celebrated men on the planet. Amplified by the resources of modern media, the lovemaking and the battles of Liz and Dick echoed across oceans. Many critics thought him the greatest Hamlet of the era, and he received seven Academy Award nominations for his parts in such films as Becket, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? But his greatest role was the one that both he and his audience seemed to enjoy best: Richard Burton, the romantic and joyous spirit. When he died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the comparatively youthful age of 58, it was as if some clumsy stagehand had missed his cue and dropped the curtain before the performance had really come to an end.

He had been touched by the finger of God, Actor Hume Cronyn observed, and there was in fact something miraculous in his becoming an actor at all. His father, Richard Jenkins, was a coal miner in the Welsh steel town of Pontrhydyfen; Burton was the twelfth of 13 children, and his mother died when he was two. An ambition to be not only an actor but a superb actor was somehow ignited, and when he was in his teens he attached himself to Philip Burton, who taught literature and drama in a local school. "He had a very coarse, rough voice then, with a heavy Welsh accent," says the senior Burton, who became his legal guardian, giving him a new home and a new surname. "We would go to the top of a mountain, and I would teach him to recite Shakespeare to me without shouting. He wanted to speak standard English, without the Welsh accent, and I had him read the part of Henry Higgins in Pygmalion." Young Burton probably had more in common, however, with Alfred Doolittle, the free-living dustman in the play, who, as Higgins said, had "a certain natural gift of rhetoric." That gift took Burton to Oxford during World War II, and in 1948, after a mandatory stint in the Royal Air Force, to London's West End, where he soon established himself as a logical successor to the reigning monarchs of the stage: Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson. Coriolanus, he thought, was his greatest role, and others agreed. "Nobody else can ever again play Coriolanus now," said Olivier. Added Critic Kenneth Tynan: "We thought he could be another Edmund Kean, that he was going to be the greatest classical actor living."

Burton believed so too. When he discussed his work years later, he talked almost exclusively about the stage, rarely about films. "He had the most extraordinary, magical stage presence," says Philip Burton. "Sometimes there is a mystical interaction between an audience and an actor, and it is that that distinguishes the great from the very talented." Even his silences were magnetic. Claire Bloom, who appeared with him more than 30 years ago in Christopher Fry's The Lady's Not for Burning, remembers a moment when "he simply washed the floor, quietly on the side, while John Gielgud and Pamela Brown were having some great scene at the front of the stage. But nobody could take his eyes off Richard." When he broke that silence and pumped up the organ behind those golden vocal cords, the theater was his. Says Director Franco Zeffirelli: "You could hear his voice around and inside you."

His voice reached as far as California, and when Hollywood beckoned in 1952, Burton jumped, like many another British actor before and since. He made several big films, like The Robe, but he did not become an international star until 1960, when he returned to the stage as King Arthur in Lerner and Loewe's Camelot. Arthur himself could not have been more virile and vibrant, and the play's final words, sung as an elegy by the King, took on an almost unbearable poignancy in the days after John Kennedy's assassination. Jacqueline Kennedy recalled that she and Jack had loved listening to the words before going to bed: "Don't let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot."

Broadway had turned him into a box-office attraction and in 1961 20th Century-Fox, exercising its rights under an old contract, took away his stage crown and shipped him off to Rome to play Mark Antony in a sprawling screen epic called Cleopatra, with Elizabeth Taylor in the title role. Gossip about the two stars quickly spread: "Elizabeth and Burton are not just playing Antony and Cleopatra," declared Director Joe Mankiewicz. The world professed to be shocked at candid shots of them cavorting in bathing suits, like teen-agers rather than great celebrities. "He was like Prince Charming kissing the sleeping princess," said Taylor, who at the time was still married to Singer Eddie Fisher. A revenge of sorts was achieved by Fisher when he appeared on a Manhattan stage with Juliet Prowse, who purred provocatively, "I'm Cleo, the nympho of the Nile."

Even after they shed their spouses and legalized their union, Liz and Dick were denounced by the pious. Everywhere they went the paparazzi trailed behind; following their soap-opera romance became almost a necessary diversion for a world wearied by wars and assassinations. The pair made millions and spent millions, traveling with an entourage that would pauper a Saudi prince, taking over entire floors of famous hotels. Like Henry VIII, a part he played with gusto in Anne of the Thousand Days, Burton lavished jewels on his consort: the 33-carat Krupp diamond, the 69-carat Cartier diamond and the lustrous Peregrina pearl that King Philip II of Spain gave Mary Tudor in 1554. Liz and Dick made a couple of good movies together, including Virginia Woolf and The Taming of the Shrew, and some fine glitzy entertainments, like The V.I.P.s, but for the most part their professional collaboration was disastrous, resulting in embarrassments like Hammersmith Is Out and The Sandpiper.

Burton loved to brag about how much he could drink, but his bouts with booze caused Taylor to divorce him in 1974. Fourteen months later they remarried in Botswana, with two rhinos and a hippo among the witnesses; but a second divorce soon followed. He married, divorced and married again. His fourth wife Sally was with him last week when he was stricken at their modest villa in the Swiss village of Celigny, where, dressed in red, the Welsh national color, he was also buried. The services included the familiar words of Dylan Thomas and the strains of a Welsh rugby song.

In the post-Elizabethan years he finally gave up the bottle, did a few good plays and movies, notably Equus, and many bad ones, such as The Klansman and The Wild Geese. "I've done the most unutterable rubbish, all because of money," he confessed a few years ago. "I didn't need "it. I've never needed money, not even as a child, though I came from a very poor family. But there have been times when the lure of the zeros was simply too great." It may have been those seductive zeros that reunited him with Taylor last year in a national tour of Noel Coward's Private Lives; each reportedly was paid $70,000 a week. Grotesquely miscast, Liz and Dick endured perhaps their ultimate humiliation.

He was a born actor who chose a "rather mad way of throwing away his theater career," said Gielgud last week. Burton's friends had been telling him that for years. It was advice he did not want to take. "I rather like my reputation, actually," he said when he turned 50. "That of a spoiled genius from the Welsh gutter, a drunk, a womanizer. It's rather an attractive image." Some measure out their lives with coffee spoons; Burton, like his friend and fellow Welshman Dylan Thomas, poured his out by the bucketful until, at last, there was nothing left. --By Gerald Clarke