Book Review: Erotic Vagrancy: Everything About Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor

(Bought at Barnes and Noble. Full price. The perfect  big, fat, juicy, movie-star book to read on my ten day cruise of the Mediterranean.) When Roger Lewis says his book contains everything about Taylor and Burton, he means it. We get considerations of how their film roles paralleled their real lives including some really obscure films (such as The Flintstones for Taylor and several early English works for Burton), itemized lists of the personal effects left by their separate estates with the auction prices, a rundown of the TV-movies based on their lives and Benny Hill's parody of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, wherein the British comic played both stars. 

Weighing in at 600 densely-packed pages, Lewis assesses the notorious couple's impact on pop culture and public morals, their bacchanalian extravagant lifestyle, and their movie legacy. He often goes off on tangents, offering pages of details on figures whose paths the Burtons crossed: Andy Warhol, Sophia Loren, even Sylvia Plath. His analysis is pithy and sharp, ever sympathetic to his subjects and harsh to their critics. He sees them as emblems of an era, their explosive union tragic. They did love each other, but their temperaments did not allow them to stay together. A normal, settled marriage where you make compromises in order to live with each other was not for them. Taylor turned out to be the stronger of the two, her career and life continued while Burton spun out of control, succumbing to booze and hard living at 58.

This is far from a conventional movie-star biography. Lewis does not strictly follow chronological order in charting Burton and Taylor's meteoric rise and world-famous romance. He does separate the book into five sections, like the acts of a Shakespearean play: each of the subjects' lives before they met; the chaotic production of Cleopatra where they collided (featuring a day-by-day breakdown of the entire shooting schedule), their explosive two marriages; and their lives after their second and final divorce. 

Lewis inserts himself and his prejudices into his narrative. We learn of his prolonged illness (making him sympathetic to Taylor's many health issues). There is more than a hint of homophobia here as Lewis makes unnecessary, unfunny gags about Taylor's many gay friends (her favorite hairdresser and confidante is labelled "nelly"; Dirk Bogarde is described as a repressed homosexual as opposed to the fiercely straight Burton; Cecil Beaton is supposedly afraid of Taylor's breasts and that's why he didn't want to photograph her). 

Despite its flaws, Erotic Vagrancy (named for the Pope's description of the Burtons' adulterous behavior on the Cleopatra set), is a huge banquet of movie gossip and social commentary. Not all the courses are nutritious, but they are wickedly delicious.