This book lover holds no frequent reader card for which one pays $25 to save an occasional $5. Most of my purchases are made at Orangeville’s BookLore, vendor to Dufferin’s more discriminating readers. A recent acquisition was Furious Love, the story of actress Elizabeth Taylor-Hilton-Wilding-Todd- Fisher’s liaison with Richard Burton. I asked if I could carry it away in a plain paper bag. One tends to be surreptitious about such an excursion into ‘schlock’.

William Bothwell Burton and Taylor were, perhaps, as much to be pitied as scorned, hounded as they were by the paparazzi. I am told that

paparazzo’ is a regional Italian word for an annoying, buzzing insect. Its plural fits the photobikers who pursued the Liz and Dick ‘sexual vagrants’, a phrase coined by ‘Osservatore Romano’.

In their heyday the pair are said to have often felt homeless although they owned multiple dwellings, alone in spite of an army of hangers-on, lost amidst the many roles they played. They were, of course, as we all are, strangers and pilgrims on Earth. They tried to love and be loved. John Donne’s, “O miserable (i.e. pitiable) condition of man” comes to mind.

This writer had a bit part in their long-playing soap opera. More about that anon. It was because in the spring of 1964 I happened to be in Montréal where, between Burton’s Toronto preview of a Broadway production of Hamlet

its longest run) and after a twoyear wait for Liz’s most recent divorce, they planned to marry, he for the second time, she for her fifth.

One had seen Burton play Marcellus in the 1953 film of Lloyd Douglas’s The Robe and Jimmy Porter in the 1958 Look Back in Anger. Poor Elizabeth, barely 5 foot, two inches, had since childhood been bullied by her ambitious mother and by MGM.

Like the fictional Willie Loman and the real-life Judy Garland, she may never have known, or been able to face, who she was. Richard was a refugee from a large family of scrabble-poor Welsh miners.

Their 1960 co-casting in the filming of Cleopatra precipitated the prolonged scandal that kept newspapers and magazines busy reporting it during the next four years. The other players and camera people gossiped endlessly. Dick was a mid-30s womaniser and a heavy drinker. Liz was still in her 20s, alternately vulnerable/ pathetic and a violet-eyed vamp. MGM disregarded her fairly obvious psychological fault lines and rocketed her to stardom. She claimed never to have wished to be other than wife to some responsible man.

Born in London (1932) to U.S. parents, Ms Taylor had been divorced three times and widowed once by the time she and Richard Burton married in 1964. The first marriage to wealthy Nicky Hilton had been studio-managed and lasted six months. The next, with English actor Michael Wilding, was meant by MGM to improve her public image. It produced two sons.

The third husband, Michael Todd, was a film producer with whom, in her own words, she “adored sex and loved inspiring lust”. He died after 13 months of marriage in 1958 when his plane exploded over the Nevada desert. There was one daughter. Disconsolate, Elizabeth then turned to Todd’s best friend, singer Eddie Fisher. As ‘Mr Elizabeth Taylor’, he was a feckless witness to the early smoke of the Taylor- Burton fire.

Richard (born Jenkins) Burton had become in Britain the most acclaimed Shakespearean actor since Laurence Olivier. His resonant and musical Welsh voice captivated theatre audiences but periodic depression and a growing alcohol dependency created problems for fellow thespians and theatrical directors.

My tangential involvement in his affairs occurred in March, 1964. As aforesaid, the principals had been frequenting Toronto’s O’Keefe Centre. I was the rector of Christ Church Cathedral in Montréal, caught up in the post- Vatican II ‘ecumenical spring’, the FLQ and ‘Québec libre’ crisis and the preparations for Expo 67. The philanderings of film stars were not - and are not- my interest.

The inter-com in my chapter house office buzzed one morning. “Mr Dean”, (i.e. Dean of the Diocese of Montréal), said secretary Daisy Yellion, “you have a telephone call from someone who says he is speaking for Richard Burton, the actor”. “Whatever for? Put him through”, I said. The fellow’s name is forgotten but the request was clear. “Would you be willing to marry Mr Burton and Miss Taylor”? The possibility was baited by the unsolicited suggestion of a generous fee.

I was vaguely aware that Miss Taylor had embraced the Judaism of Messrs Todd and Fisher. Only later was the extent of her interest in Kabbalah mysticism known. One was more cognizant of the long scandal of their relationship. When I explained the canonical difficulties, the spokesman asked if I could suggest another possibility. Timing was of the essence.

The person who came to mind was the leader of the Montréal Unitarian congregation whom I had met recently at a symposium on public education. My friend Rabbi Leonard Poller was out of town and unavailable. The gentleman in question would not have the problems I faced in discussing a hurry-up fifth marriage. He presided at a brief ceremony at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel the next Sunday afternoon.

That alliance lasted for a frantic ten years of illness, alcoholism and shouting matches plus the deaths of Hollywood friends and of the studio and star systems. Richard was fired from the cast of Laughter in the Dark in 1968 and Elizabeth had three film ‘flops’. They divorced in 1974 and reallied for less than a year in 1975. Subsequently she married and divorced twice more. He married a third time, grew haggard and died at age 58 in 1984.

In May, 2010 Elizabeth unveiled a bust of Richard in London. Furious Love was inspired by a letter he wrote to her a day or so before he died. It reached her after his passing.

Though Miss Taylor was not always, as was Cleopatra in her salad days, “green in judgment”, it would be prudent to call the not uncommon Taylor-Burton conduct ‘amoral’ rather than ‘immoral’. A better title for Furious Love might have been Amoral Amour.