Furious Love (9 page)

First published in 1965, three years after the beginning of his affair with Elizabeth, the story makes it clear that the other woman in whom he sees the reflection of his adored sister is Elizabeth, another dark-haired, gypsy beauty. If Sybil had kept him moored to his Welsh life and family, Elizabeth supplanted her in representing a type of raven-haired, lavishly shaped woman that he associated with the comeliest women of his Welsh childhood.

Cis doted on her young brother, even after her own two daughters were born a few years later. Cis and her gruff husband, Elfred James, had only been married for four months when two-year-old Richard came to live with them. Elfred often resented the care and attention Cis lavished on Richard. “He was never smacked,” Graham recalled, but he at times had to be shielded from Elfred's temper. “Nothing
is good enough for that boy,” Elfred often complained. Graham reports that his sister tried to be fair-handed, but “when it came to a choice between Elfred and Rich, as it often did, Elfred lost out.”

Part of Cis's preference was due to her strong family loyalty, but it was also because Richard, as he would prove to be his entire life, was catnip to women. He was charming, he was playful, he was smart. He delighted not just Cis but his entire family—although apparently not Elfred—with his playacting. He loved to imitate the local preacher by giving mock sermons in the family parlor. He was, according to Graham, “quick to discover the power of language—the Welsh language, to be precise, since our patch of South Wales remained loyal to its mother tongue.”

Richard didn't speak English until he was six, but he learned the beauty of language from attending chapel. Graham recalls, “The chapel was our other world. Within that simple building we let our emotions rip. We sang lustily, prayed fervently, and listened in awe to the thunderous declarations of moral judgment. A good preacher was a poet in action. He could spin words into a story of such power as to stop the mind.” Men who would be actors found their niche in the church, where, as preachers, they could indulge all their penchants for drama, language, passion.

Hardy observed that Burton “spoke the most perfect Welsh, coming from that part of Wales where the most sonorous, the deepest kind of Welsh is spoken—pure, classical Welsh. He felt very attached to that.” Burton would never lose his love of the language, which he described as “a wild, breathy, passionate, powerful tongue. I once heard Shakespeare's
Macbeth
recited in Welsh, and it shook me to the core.”

It wasn't just the beauty of the Welsh tongue, it was the quality of the Welsh voice as well. The Welsh have had a long, passionate tradition of choral societies. Young men often resorted to fisticuffs to win singing contests. Byrn Davies, another Welsh miner, who used to drink with Burton's father, once observed, “The Welsh gift of lan
guage is a sad gift of God. He inclined us all towards poetry and then buried us in coal.”

Graham thought his older brother might join the clergy. In his parlor-room sermons, Richard often played for laughs, exaggerating the fire-and-brimstone, but he and other boys of the village were also invited, from the age of seven, to read scripture at Sunday sermons. Rich easily memorized long passages from the Bible and recited them to the congregation, mesmerizing them with his voice. He was a born performer. But when Richard—still known as Rich Jenkins—came of age and had an opportunity to continue his secondary school studies in Port Talbot, Elfred put his foot down. They had already locked horns over various adolescent outbursts—Rich was smoking at eight, drinking at eleven, and at fifteen going with girls—now it was time for the boy to work and earn his keep, even though Cis was willing to pay the money to keep him in school. But he was set up as a clerk in a local haberdashery, where he was misplaced and miserable.

Meredith Jones, one of Burton's teachers and a brilliant, thundering Welshman who had escaped the mines as a “scholarship boy,” came to Rich's rescue. He taught Rich at Dryffen Grammar School and recognized the boy's quickness and gifts, particularly in local theater. He encouraged and inspired Rich, and made it possible for him to leave the hated work as a haberdashery clerk at Mr. Maynard's Co-op. Rich, now a year or two older than all the other boys, returned to finish his education at Port Talbot Secondary School. That's where he met—or rather re-met—Philip Burton, whom Richard would consider his second father.

Philip Burton had taught the boy English his first year of grammar school, but had not been especially impressed, put off by Rich's atrocious accent and noticing that “the boy had spots.” Rich suffered from cystic acne, which left scars on his cheeks and back, and an enduring sense of shame. A Welshman, Philip Burton had taught himself to
speak perfect English. He was an officer in the Air Training Corps and a director and actor in local theater. Besides teaching English, he wrote and performed radio dramas for the BBC Welsh radio. He was plump, demanding, beautifully dressed, and highly cultured. He was also gay, though probably celibate—or mostly celibate, given the time and place. When he cast Rich in
Gallows Glorious
, one of Philip Burton's local productions, he first realized what he had on his hands. He offered Rich another role, in a radio drama he had written called
Youth at the Helm
, and the man and boy traveled to Cardiff to record the play. Graham remembered hearing his brother's performance, for the first time, over the radio: “Not having to act, physically, he concentrated on voice. And what a voice…I was bowled over by the melodious, seductive tones of the
Welsh
Welsh, deeper and stronger than anything you will hear in the north.” Aware of his impact and no doubt blossoming under his mentor's approval, Rich knew then he wanted to be an actor.

Philip was pleased to have a new protégé. He had earlier on nurtured the career of another young Welsh actor, Thomas Owen Jones, who had won a scholarship to the prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (RADA), but had become a fighter pilot in the Second World War and died in the Battle of Britain. In a sense, Rich Jenkins would replace the lost Thomas Owen Jones, and, if anything, young Jenkins, now fifteen, seemed even more gifted. As Graham noted, “he had the rough good looks of a warrior, a stubborn jaw and compelling blue eyes. He was strong and intelligent and he could act.” (Richard's eyes would variously be described as blue or green.)

Philip wanted Rich to have extra tutoring, but Cis and Elfred couldn't afford it. There was no other way; Philip suggested that Rich move into his lodging house in Port Talbot, essentially sharing his rented rooms, while the older man continued to mentor him.

Cis had prayed for such an opportunity for her gifted brother—but there were unspoken concerns. It wasn't lost on the other Jenkins
men that Philip was a fortyish bachelor, and they wondered what other interest he might have in the fifteen-year-old, but the fact that Burton's new lodgings in Connaught Street were part of a respectable household consisting of a widow and her two daughters put everyone's mind at ease. And so Rich moved in with Burton and the great project began, Philip drilling Rich on his English for hours a day, teaching him Shakespeare and elocution and theater. He smoothed Rich's rough manners and dressed him, at his own expense, better than he had ever dressed himself.

Rich knew this was a way to stay out of the mines forever, if he could only pass his exams and apply to RADA, as his predecessor had done. In later years, he would say that it was
he
who had adopted Philip Burton, and not the other way around, though Rich surely must have known that his benefactor was in love with him. It would remain, apparently, an unrequited love.

Philip made plans to adopt his protégé, but was technically too close to Rich in age to legally do so. But he could make the young man his ward, so Philip Burton approached the Jenkinses about becoming Rich's legal guardian, which, he explained, would smooth his way academically and professionally. He had already realized that he could put Rich up for a Royal Air Force (RAF) officer's training program, which would include a six-month stint at Exeter College, Oxford. Oxford! The son of a coal miner could only dream of such an opportunity, but the ward of a teacher, writer, and director just might pull it off. But permission was needed from Rich's true father, Dic Jenkins, for the legal guardianship to go forward.

Rich would have to repudiate his family name and take Philip Burton's name as his own.

But there was a problem. “However often the advantages of the Burton connection were explained to him,” Graham recalled, Dadi Ni “could never quite reconcile himself to Rich assuming another name. To him, it was a renunciation of a birthright. And the Welsh
miners of the old school were very strong on birthright.” Indeed, in his whole life, his name was the only thing Jenkins had been able to give his seven sons. It was all he had.

So, when the time came to meet with Philip Burton at Hilda's cottage in Pontrhydyfen to finalize the arrangements, Dadi Ni just didn't show up. He'd stopped in at the Miners Arms and got drunk, his own, time-tested way of avoiding what must have seemed like a repudiation. So Richard Walter Jenkins became Richard Burton that December in 1943, and from then on would refer to Philip Burton as his father. Years later, in a documentary about Burton titled
In from the Cold
, directed by Tony Palmer, Joe Mankiewicz commented on Burton's abandonment of his father's name. “Burton's tragedy,” he explained, “was that he couldn't go beyond Philip Burton to access his true ancestry.” It would seem that the only thing he would inherit from his scrappy, original father was his alcoholism.

The devil's bargain paid off. In 1951, the influential London drama critic Ken Tynan wrote of Burton, “…a shrewd Welsh boy shines out with greatness” as Prince Hal in
Henry IV
, Part I.

 

“Before I met her,” Burton confessed to Tynan in a
Playboy
interview, “I was making any kind of film in sight, just to get rich. Then Liz made me see what kind of rubbish I was doing. She made me do the film
Becket
when I didn't want to—and it was a turning point in my career. She also made me do
Hamlet
.” It was to Elizabeth's credit that she wanted to see Richard in prestigious roles, not just Hollywood money-makers. Cast as Thomas Becket in Hal Wallis's screen version of Jean Anouilh's play, opposite his good friend Peter O'Toole as the swaggering young Henry II, Burton found himself not just in the company of esteemed theatrical talents—including Sir John Gielgud and Pamela Brown—but in the company of a fellow actor with a capacity for drink that matched his own. Though Burton refrained from imbibing on the set, he and O'Toole would usually knock off around
noon and begin their consumption—wine and champagne at lunch, then, after work, they'd go pub-hopping where Burton switched to hard liquor with beer chasers.

Taylor joined them on these merry jaunts and made sure Burton returned home safely each night to the Oliver Messel Suite at the Dorchester, where they had taken up semipermanent residence after completing
The V.I.P.s.
The director, Peter Glenville, was mostly tolerant, in part because his lead actors' carousing was in keeping with the debauched bonhomie of the two characters depicted onscreen. Beyond that,
Becket
would admirably illustrate just what Richard had learned from Elizabeth about film acting. In contrast to the theatrical, scenery-chewing O'Toole, Burton radiates cool control onscreen. He had learned, from Elizabeth, how to underplay and how to be
still
, and indeed his performance is hard, brilliant, powerful. Where O'Toole is
acting
, Burton is
being
. The gemlike performance endures as one of Burton's best. It's all there—the voice, the control, the depth of feeling, the ease with which Anouilh's and screenwriter Edward Anhalt's rich dialogue falls from his tongue, his effortless, graceful masculinity. Richard was entering his great period of screen acting, beginning with
Cleopatra
and
Becket
and continuing through his next several films.

If Taylor influenced Burton's screen acting, she, too, was influenced by her now-famous paramour. Oddly enough, the rough-hewn son of a miner was having a civilizing influence on the coddled daughter of privilege. She began to adopt a British accent. Though she was born in England of American parents, her slight English accent had been something she could put on or take off, like a designer gown; under Burton's influence, her plummier tones returned. And, though Burton loved her earthiness, he was not overly fond of her sailor's vocabulary, and he wanted her to tone it down. That was harder to do: since early years, Elizabeth had felt liberated by uttering four-letter words—it was her spell-breaking rebellion against the imprisonment of praise. Her newly dusted-off English accent was on display in
Eliza
beth Taylor in London
, a CBS special for which she served as tour guide while Burton was busy filming
Becket.
Another record broken: she had been paid $500,000 to do it. It had also strengthened her ties to the country of her birth. Burton would seek to strengthen his ties, but not to England. To Wales.