Year 1967. Taormina, Sicily. Two of today's biggest Hollywood stars, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, attend the film festival on the island. They will receive the David di Donatello Prize for the best foreign actors. Both. There are pictures of the couple enjoying a few days in the area: at the train station, at a restaurant, taking a walk and of course collecting the awards. But Burton and Taylor aren't just the stars of the moment, they're also the couple of the moment. In the chronology of their relationship in Taormina, they have been together for five years now, since they met while filming Cleopatra, when they were both married – he to Sybil Williams, she to Eddie Fisher. In 1964, after their divorce, Taylor and Burton married for the first time. “Elizabeth Burton and I are very happy,” he concluded in a short statement. They didn't need to say anything else, their pictures around the world spoke for themselves: yachts, jewelry, fancy dinners, haute couture clothes, cigarettes and huge sunglasses helped build the image and legend of this primal power couple There was even the concept of a power couple. Now a new book about the couple, “Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor”, signed by Roger Lewis, reveals that the image projected by these two stars was not the result of coincidence, but of a huge team that included Secretaries, makeup artists, housekeepers, personal photographers, bodyguards, nurses, drivers, butlers and even employees responsible for packing and unpacking suitcases. No wonder, because according to this book they didn't exactly travel to Taormina light: they had a total of 156 pieces of luggage with them.
One word would describe this couple perfectly: excess. We knew that Burton and Taylor drank a lot (according to Love and the Fury, another biography of the couple, they started drinking at breakfast time and didn't stop until they went back to bed). We also knew they were overspending. Particularly in fine jewelry that Burton gave to his wife, such as the yellow Krupp diamond, the Peregrina pearl (which belonged to Philip II and appears in works by Velázquez), or the 69-carat Taylor-Burton diamond. We knew that they loved each other very much and even married twice. Now we know more about their special la dolce vita, down to the details: they lived in a total of 21 rooms at the Hotel Lancaster in Paris and “their dogs used to accompany them to restaurants and they were given a menu.” On other occasions, the glamorous couple booked rooms in cities it never visited, leaving them empty.
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Their possessions also reflect these excesses. According to the author, in 1967 they bought a luxury yacht called Kalizma, which had “seven cabins with double bunk beds, three bathrooms and an armory with machine guns.” The actors furnished it with Chippendale furniture and carpets, which had to be replaced every six months because the pets relieved themselves there. In addition to eating restaurant menus, their dogs also had their own boat: it was in 1968, while the couple was in London filming, that they decided to board their pets on a boat nearby for a fee Tower Bridge was paid £1,000 per week to avoid the UK's dog quarantine restrictions at the time. Both were aware of their own needs and, according to the author, constantly joked about them. “I introduced Elizabeth to beer, she introduced me to Bulgari,” he said.
Burton and Taylor at Taormina train station, Sicily, on August 1, 1967. Keystone-France (Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images)
This book will not be the only cultural artifact commemorating the character Elizabeth Taylor, who was already inextricably linked to the person known as the love of her life: Richard Burton. And it is precisely another lover of excess who will return to her: a few days ago it was announced that Kim Kardashian will be the executive producer and one of the voices of a new BBC documentary about the actress that aims to do to some extent to dismantle some of the legend that the book exactly claims. “For too long, Elizabeth Taylor’s story has been told like a soap opera,” explains the description of the documentary, titled “Elizabeth Taylor: Rebel Superstar.” It will be divided into three parts: “The Eight Marriages, the Diamonds, the Addictions.” “This series gives Elizabeth Taylor, in all her incarnations – actress, rebel, business mogul and activist – the spotlight she deserves and shows how Taylor has created the blueprint for modern celebrity.” It will look at Taylor's talent as an actress and “how she reinvented the nature of fame even as she broke the Hollywood glass ceiling before becoming a billionaire businesswoman, activist and advocate .” Kim Kardashian’s participation is no coincidence. As media outlets such as Variety and The Hollywood Reporter revealed, the reality TV star and millionaire businesswoman was the last person to interview the actress, who died in March 2011 at the age of 79.
Thirteen years after her death, Elizabeth Taylor continues to make headlines: from Bulgari collections celebrating her legacy to news of her latest romances (particularly with Irish actor Colin Farrell). Perhaps this is the best reflection of how he “reinvented the nature of fame.” But his work and his characters also remain, such as Gloria, the prostitute protagonist of A Marked Woman; Martha, the alcoholic woman she played in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”; or Maggie, the unforgettable Cat on the Roof, films that are remembered and justified from a feminist perspective after #MeToo. In 2024 it will return again, in both excess and deficiency.