‘We are stuck like chicken feathers to tar’: Elizabeth Taylor’s description of the fabled romance

‘To begin at the beginning,’ intones Richard Burton with a voice like warm treacle at the start of the 1971 film Under Milk Wood. It’s hard to imagine an actor more obviously influenced by his own beginnings. The epigraph to this double biography is ‘The damp, dark prison of eternal love’, a line borrowed from Quentin Crisp. And if that’s an accurate assessment of Burton’s on-off-on-again relationship with the actress Elizabeth Taylor, it’s an even better summary of his childhood in Wales.

Born Richard Walter Jenkins to a barmaid mother and a coal miner father (a ‘12-pints-a-day man’ who sometimes disappeared for weeks on end to drink and gamble), as a teenager he attempted a fresh start by moving in with a teacher named Philip Burton. This Svengali-like figure swiftly became his legal guardian, giving him his own surname and nudging him towards an acting career. (He may also have persuaded him into his bed.) Burton soon outgrew his new father figure – after he went to Hollywood, he acquired a reputation as a ‘sexually inexhaustible’ womaniser – but his past continued to trail him like a shadow.

Taylor found it equally hard to escape her upbringing. A child star in films such as National Velvet (1944), although she later enjoyed even greater fame as an adult actress, in some ways she never really grew up. ‘I have the body of a woman, the emotions of a child,’ she admitted, and for the rest of her life she was ‘a bundle of appetites’ for food, alcohol, pills, clothes, attention and the largest and sparkliest jewels that money could buy. It wasn’t always her own money: she also collected rich husbands, who were expected to treat her as a strange hybrid of sex goddess and Disney princess, and were rapidly discarded when she tired of them.