Great Romances of the 20th Century (1997) s01e03 Episode Script
Part 3
ln 1968 Richard Burton wrote in his diary: ''l have been inordinately lucky all my life, but the greatest luck of all has been Elizabeth She is a wildly exciting lover-mistress, she is shy, witty, she is nobody's fool, she is a brilliant actress, beautiful beyond the dreams of pornography AND SHE LOVES ME!'' The Sixties were a time of conspicuous consumption.
And two of that decade's most conspicuous consumers were Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.
Wherever they went, whatever they spent, the cameras and the reporters were always there to record the event.
Lashings of food and drink downed in the best restaurants.
Jets and jewels in abundance, the latter nestling on Taylor's sumptuous bosom.
Eventually, when they had consumed everything else, Burton and Taylor consumed each other.
Like the Sixties themselves, the bubble burst.
ln a spectacular case of life imitating art, the Burtons' marriage seemed almost to merge with that of the doomed couple they played in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? For two people who so readily embraced excess, it was entirely fitting that they should have fallen in love in 1963 on the set of one of the most expensive films in movie history.
Cleopatra nearly bankrupted its studio, 20th Century-Fox, switched its directors in midstream, devoured millions of dollars as vast sets lay idle for months on end and, in the middle of this chaos, united Burton and Taylor.
ln Cleopatra, Taylor took top billing.
She had been a star since childhood, discovered by Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper in 1942, when she was just ten years old.
ln 1943 MGM co-starred Taylor with a dog in Lassie Come Home ''She's going towards Yorkshire!'' ''She's going towards Yorkshire!'' Then came National Velvet, this time with a horse and another formidable child star, Mickey Rooney.
By 1949 Taylor had grown up - delectably and was bickering with parents Spencer Tracy and Joan Bennett in Father of the Bride, an anticipation of many marriages to come.
Taylor had been pursued by many men, including the wayward tycoon Howard Hughes, over 20 years her senior but shortly after completing Father of the Bride she became a bride herself, marrying hotel heir Conrad Hilton Jr Father of the Bride remains as fresh as the day it was made, but the marriage to Conrad Hilton quickly went sour.
Taylor was to fall hopelessly in love with Montgomery Clift, her co-star in A Place in the Sun and Raintree County.
But when they met she was married to English actor Michael Wilding and remained unaware of Clift's homosexuality.
While making Giant in 1956, Taylor became involved in the same kind of entanglement with James Dean When Dean died in an automobile crash shortly before the completion of Giant, she was heartbroken.
Husband Number Three was the flamboyant showman Mike Todd, who gave Taylor a $30,000 ring and a Mexican wedding at which the guests were outnumbered by the mounds of caviare.
Todd also gave Taylor a daughter, Liza, and left a movie monument of sorts, a sprawling version of Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days, filmed in wide-screen Todd-AO and completed amid a blizzard of bouncing cheques.
lt went on to win five Oscars.
But Todd's triumph was shortlived.
On the 22nd of March 1958, Mike Todd was killed when his private plane, the Lucky Liz, crashed as he was piloting it to New York.
His wife had stayed home with a flu virus When she heard the news of Todd's death, Taylor had to be sedated to prevent her taking her own life.
Taylor turned to Todd's best friend, the singer Eddie Fisher, then married to America's Sweetheart Debbie Reynolds.
The marriage was empty but Middle America branded Taylor a ''scarlet woman''.
She married Fisher the day he divorced Debbie.
Taylor's career was now entering a rich phase.
She won an Oscar nomination for her performance opposite Paul Newman in Tennessee Williams' steamy Southern drama Cat on a Hot Tin Roof The movie was toned-down for the screen, but Taylor still filled it with sexual static.
''When a marriage goes on the rocks, the rocks are there, right there'' Then, riding on a tide of sympathy after nearly dying of pneumonia, Taylor won a Best Actress Oscar as a call-girl in Butterfield 8.
''Command performances leave me quite cold, l've had more fun in the back seat of a 39 Ford than l could ever have in the vault of the Chase National Bank'' ln Butterfield 8 Eddie Fisher provided a shoulder for Liz to cry on, but by now Marriage Number Four had foundered.
This one wasn't for keeps either A new romance lay just around the corner.
Richard Burton was born Richard Jenkins, one of 13 children of a Welsh coalminer.
With the help of his schoolteacher, Philip Burton, from whom he took his stage name, he won a scholarship to Oxford.
After national service in the RAF, Burton embarked on a glittering stage career.
His Hamlet in the 1953 Old Vic season was full of fire, passion and power.
Burton was a brooding, intensely masculine Henry V.
But the movies beckoned, and in 1952 he went to Hollywood.
ln Tinseltown, he lent his rich baritone voice, and an elaborate coiffure, to lumbering epics like Alexander the Great.
Burton's reputation as a formidable Shakespearian actor was still growing, but the movies, and the money they provided, had captured him.
Mere flashes of his real authority illuminated Burton's Hollywood films.
The rest was mere posturing.
Only occasionally, as in Nicholas Ray's Bitter Victory, was Burton given the chance to unleash some of his reserves of poetry and power.
Burton was a notorious womanizer - but he remained married to his first wife Sybil.
After a run as King Arthur in the Broadway musical Camelot, Burton was cast to play Marc Antony in the much-delayed, multi-million-dollar production of Cleopatra.
His fee was a quarter of a million dollars and $1,000 a week plus a villa and servants while filming in Rome At first relations between Cleopatra and Marc Antony seemed cool.
Taylor told friends that Burton was a clumsy flirt.
Behind her back, Burton called his co-star ''Miss Tits'' This didn't fool anyone for a moment.
As soon as filming began, it was clear that Burton and Taylor were infatuated with each other.
The atmosphere on the set was electric.
Cleopatra's director, Joseph L.
Mankiewicz, likened it to being ''locked in a cage with two tigers''.
lt was not long before rumours of the affair were seeping out of the set.
As passions flared, Laurence Olivier sent a telegram to Burton.
lt read: ''Make up your mind, dear heart.
Do you want to be a great actor or a household word?'' Burton replied, ''Both''.
The paparazzi, a phenomenon new to Burton, descended on his villa in Rome.
The situation was spinning out of control.
For Burton, Taylor represented the latest in a long line of tempestuous affairs.
But although Taylor was much-married, she was not promiscuous.
She always married the men she slept with, whether THEY were married or not.
Burton was no exception.
Alarmed by the press reports of the affair between his wife and Burton, Eddie Fisher flew to Rome.
lt was too late.
When it appeared that a wavering Burton was about to return to his wife, Taylor produced her trump card, a suicide attempt with sleeping pills.
She was denounced by members of the US Congress.
The Vatican accused her of the curious crime of ''erotic vagrancy''.
The couple eventually found a refuge at Puerto Vallarta, in Mexico, a small fishing port where Burton had filmed another Tennessee Williams play, Night of the lguana.
lt was at Puerto Vallarta that the divorces were granted from Eddie and Sybil Here, too, Richard and Elizabeth could escape the most insistent attentions of the press.
Yet already Burton seemed distracted, consumed by some huge inner boredom, as if constantly waiting for something to happen.
Richard Burton married Elizabeth Taylor in Montreal in March 1964.
Afterwards, quoting Hamlet's line to Ophelia, Burton declared, ''l say we will have no more marriages''.
For a while it worked.
But there was a constant undertow tugging at their relationship.
Burton hated being hemmed in by their fame.
Taylor adored fighting her way through press and fans.
She had never known anything else.
But this rarefied existence increasingly cut Burton off from his family and friends.
Burton, a temperamental but very biddable man, had moved into Taylor's world.
A world in which she was a bigger star and in which the sole purpose of the secretaries and the sycophants who surrounded them was to keep the real world at bay But it was a world which could not last.
Taylor had always been impressed by Burton's academic background, and he was always talking about returning to Oxford to teach.
The closest they came was in 1966, when the Burtons descended on the city of dreaming spires to star in a production of Marlowe's Dr Faustus at the Oxford Playhouse.
Burton took the title role of the man who strikes a pact with the Devil, an ironic comment perhaps on the Faustian pact he had struck with Hollywood But briefly he was back in his element.
For this part, Burton was mad about Liz's opulent body.
He also genuinely admired her as a film actress.
lt was Elizabeth who tried to teach him that, in front of the camera, less is more.
She had only limited success She was more successful in encouraging her husband to extract colossal sums of money from studios anxious to exploit their fame at the box-office Between 1964 and 1972 the Burtons earned an estimated $50 million.
They spent it.
Elizabeth declared that she ''loved beautiful things''.
Burton bought them for her.
She dripped with jewels, one of them so large Burton called it 'the lce rink'.
Diamonds and emeralds were Liz's best friends.
On the way, Burton collected a few baubles of his own, among them a CBE in 1971.
lt was a happy moment undermined by the nagging realisation that for the man who in the Fifties had been hailed as the new Olivier, the stage was now almost a thing of the past.
lt was easier, perhaps, to play the fool with one of the jewels he bought for Liz.
They shone on her like a brand mark, as if to say Elizabeth Taylor belongs to Richard Burton or maybe it was the other way round.
Richard and Liz had become Hollywood royalty, moving out of the big league into a league all of their own.
Richard had always been ambitious for money, but it was Liz who made him ambitious for the kind of stardom where nothing less would do than the best suites in the best hotels and the best tables in the best restaurants An armlock on Marlon Brando was all part of the fun.
Sadly, most of the films the Burtons made together lacked the sparkle of Taylor's jewels.
A coarse-grained version of The Taming of the Shrew, directed by Franco Zeffirelli, set the tone, with Burton happy to ham and bluster his way through the part of Petruchio As Katharina, Taylor proved that when it came to being raucous, she was more than a match for her husband.
''l will'' ''Thou must be married to no man but me, for l am born to tame you'' - ''l'd rather die'' The exception was Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? which pitched the gilded couple into a marriage made in a hell shared by George Segal and Sandy Dennis.
''Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf'' The Burtons' own marriage was eventually to prove as rancorous, although the tantrums and tearful reconciliations usually took place in luxury hotels.
As the Burtons' caravan rolled from continent to continent and from movie to movie, their marriage became an equally moveable piece of mayhem.
At hotels the couple thoughtfully rented suites above and below their own accommodation to spare fellow guests the sound of their brawling.
London's Dorchester was their favourite watering hole.
One guest recalled that when the volatile Burtons stayed there, the tension could be felt quivering in the luxuriously appointed air like an exposed live wire.
Drink was at the root of it.
Burton's father had been an alcoholic.
Burton drank beer until he met Taylor, who introduced him to vodka.
She started every day at 8:30 with an outsize Bloody Mary.
By the end of the Sixties it was not just the vodka that was on the rocks.
The Burtons' marriage was breaking up.
The endless party ground on.
The celebrations which marked Liz's 40th birthday, held in Budapest, scaled new heights of indulgence but Burton was falling apart.
His elder brother lfor had been tragically paralysed in an accident in Burton's home in Switzerland.
Richard was nearly 45, and with much of his youthful promise unfulfilled.
He was now frightened of returning to the stage.
The refuge, as always, was drink.
His eye was roving again, too.
There was an affair with the French actress Nathalie Delon, accompaned by the usual media frenzy.
And there was talk of an off-screen romance between Burton and Genevieve Bujold, his co-star in Anne of the Thousand Days.
''l think of nothing but you, of you and me playing dog and bitch, of you and me playing horse and mare, of you and me in every way, l want to fill you up night after night, l want to fill you up with sons'' ''Bastards, they would be bastards''.
On the 3rd of July 1973 the Burtons announced their separation.
Burton told reporters: ''You can't keep clapping a couple of dynamite sticks together without expecting them to blow up''.
Richard was a great roarer when drunk, but in the negotiations which preceded the divorce settlement, Liz proved to be much the tougher bargainer.
She came away with the jewels, the art collection and the house in Mexico.
lt was small consolation.
Like George and Martha in Virginia Woolf, Richard and Elizabeth couldn't let each other go.
Their emotional involvement seemed as strong as ever.
The rhythms of their lives continued.
While Burton kept afloat on a sea of drink, surviving repeated warnings that he was at death's door, Liz battled her way gamely through the ritual obstacle course of reporters and cameramen They were both heading towards a brief reunion.
ln October 1975 Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were remarried in Botswana in southern Africa.
The bride wore a green dress trimmed with lace and guinea fowl feathers.
The groom a red shirt, red socks, white slacks and a large drink.
Liz had begged Burton to stop drinking, but the boozing began with the honeymoon.
As ever, it made him moody and belligerent.
With a huge effort Burton climbed back on the wagon.
There was one last fling at the Dorchester to mark Burton's 50th birthday, but within four months the marriage was over.
Richard and Elizabeth had believed that they could survive on the physical passion which had united them on the set of Cleopatra.
Their friends knew better.
ln December 1976, Liz married an American politician, John Warner, the Republican senator for Virginia.
She still moved in the same circles as Burton.
Acquiring expensive things remained a passion.
But now the inseparables were sometimes conspicuously separate When they did meet, Burton's eyes would fill with tears and he would tell her in his native Welsh, ''l love you more than the world itself''.
The steady Warner offered Taylor a respite from Burton's Boozing and brawling, but Taylor's temperament could take only so much peace and quiet.
The political hurly-burly was no substitute for the cocooned chaos of her own celebrity.
By now Liz had gained weight, and was rumoured to be addicted to a cocktail of pills and drink.
Like many another troubled star, she took the cure at the Betty Ford Clinic.
Thereafter the press cruelly turned watching Liz gain and lose weight into an international spectator sport.
Burton's drinking problem had been curbed by his marriage to Susan Hunt in 1976.
But even her monumental patience finally snapped in 1982.
ln 1983, Richard and Elizabeth were reunited for the last time, co-starring in a Broadway production of Private Lives, Noel Coward's comedy of divorce.
Their lives had been anything but private, but the enduring public fascination with the Burtons ensured that they received salaries of $70,000 a week, then a Broadway record The old chemistry still crackled.
What would it be like playing on stage together? ''l don't find that it will be any different, do you?'' ''No l just think you push it out a little louder and a little longer than one does in front of the camera'' ''You will probably try and upstage me more'' ''No, no you don't upstage, l'll teach you about that, you down stage.
'' Later Burton explained that comedy roles were rare ''l've only once played life comedy and that was on Broadway and it was successful'' ''l though that was in real life''.
And how did Taylor rate Burton as an actor? ''One of the finest actors'' - ''One of the finest!'' - ''Sorry'' The scrum of reporters and photographers prompted a wit to observe that it was just like a crowd scene from Quo Vadis? one of the Fifties epics in which Burton starred.
The final separation came on the 5th of August 1984 when Richard Burton died of a brain haemhorrage at his home in Switzerland.
He was laid to rest on a Swiss hillside but buried as a Welshman.
His fifth wife, Sally Hay, presided over the funeral.
Elizabeth stayed away out of deference to her.
lnside the coffin, Burton was dressed from top to toe in red, the Welsh national colour.
A copy of Dylan Thomas' collected verse lay on top.
At Richard Burton's funeral service in Wales, Sally Burton dominated proceedings.
But at the memorial service held in London, Elizabeth was the centre of attention, sitting in the front pew with Burton's family.
There is something heroic about Liz Taylor's capacity for survival.
Like Cleopatra she has defied the passing of time Burton once wrote that the world had always been amused by ''us two maniacs''.
One day, perhaps, the party will be resumed, in another place.
And two of that decade's most conspicuous consumers were Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.
Wherever they went, whatever they spent, the cameras and the reporters were always there to record the event.
Lashings of food and drink downed in the best restaurants.
Jets and jewels in abundance, the latter nestling on Taylor's sumptuous bosom.
Eventually, when they had consumed everything else, Burton and Taylor consumed each other.
Like the Sixties themselves, the bubble burst.
ln a spectacular case of life imitating art, the Burtons' marriage seemed almost to merge with that of the doomed couple they played in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? For two people who so readily embraced excess, it was entirely fitting that they should have fallen in love in 1963 on the set of one of the most expensive films in movie history.
Cleopatra nearly bankrupted its studio, 20th Century-Fox, switched its directors in midstream, devoured millions of dollars as vast sets lay idle for months on end and, in the middle of this chaos, united Burton and Taylor.
ln Cleopatra, Taylor took top billing.
She had been a star since childhood, discovered by Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper in 1942, when she was just ten years old.
ln 1943 MGM co-starred Taylor with a dog in Lassie Come Home ''She's going towards Yorkshire!'' ''She's going towards Yorkshire!'' Then came National Velvet, this time with a horse and another formidable child star, Mickey Rooney.
By 1949 Taylor had grown up - delectably and was bickering with parents Spencer Tracy and Joan Bennett in Father of the Bride, an anticipation of many marriages to come.
Taylor had been pursued by many men, including the wayward tycoon Howard Hughes, over 20 years her senior but shortly after completing Father of the Bride she became a bride herself, marrying hotel heir Conrad Hilton Jr Father of the Bride remains as fresh as the day it was made, but the marriage to Conrad Hilton quickly went sour.
Taylor was to fall hopelessly in love with Montgomery Clift, her co-star in A Place in the Sun and Raintree County.
But when they met she was married to English actor Michael Wilding and remained unaware of Clift's homosexuality.
While making Giant in 1956, Taylor became involved in the same kind of entanglement with James Dean When Dean died in an automobile crash shortly before the completion of Giant, she was heartbroken.
Husband Number Three was the flamboyant showman Mike Todd, who gave Taylor a $30,000 ring and a Mexican wedding at which the guests were outnumbered by the mounds of caviare.
Todd also gave Taylor a daughter, Liza, and left a movie monument of sorts, a sprawling version of Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days, filmed in wide-screen Todd-AO and completed amid a blizzard of bouncing cheques.
lt went on to win five Oscars.
But Todd's triumph was shortlived.
On the 22nd of March 1958, Mike Todd was killed when his private plane, the Lucky Liz, crashed as he was piloting it to New York.
His wife had stayed home with a flu virus When she heard the news of Todd's death, Taylor had to be sedated to prevent her taking her own life.
Taylor turned to Todd's best friend, the singer Eddie Fisher, then married to America's Sweetheart Debbie Reynolds.
The marriage was empty but Middle America branded Taylor a ''scarlet woman''.
She married Fisher the day he divorced Debbie.
Taylor's career was now entering a rich phase.
She won an Oscar nomination for her performance opposite Paul Newman in Tennessee Williams' steamy Southern drama Cat on a Hot Tin Roof The movie was toned-down for the screen, but Taylor still filled it with sexual static.
''When a marriage goes on the rocks, the rocks are there, right there'' Then, riding on a tide of sympathy after nearly dying of pneumonia, Taylor won a Best Actress Oscar as a call-girl in Butterfield 8.
''Command performances leave me quite cold, l've had more fun in the back seat of a 39 Ford than l could ever have in the vault of the Chase National Bank'' ln Butterfield 8 Eddie Fisher provided a shoulder for Liz to cry on, but by now Marriage Number Four had foundered.
This one wasn't for keeps either A new romance lay just around the corner.
Richard Burton was born Richard Jenkins, one of 13 children of a Welsh coalminer.
With the help of his schoolteacher, Philip Burton, from whom he took his stage name, he won a scholarship to Oxford.
After national service in the RAF, Burton embarked on a glittering stage career.
His Hamlet in the 1953 Old Vic season was full of fire, passion and power.
Burton was a brooding, intensely masculine Henry V.
But the movies beckoned, and in 1952 he went to Hollywood.
ln Tinseltown, he lent his rich baritone voice, and an elaborate coiffure, to lumbering epics like Alexander the Great.
Burton's reputation as a formidable Shakespearian actor was still growing, but the movies, and the money they provided, had captured him.
Mere flashes of his real authority illuminated Burton's Hollywood films.
The rest was mere posturing.
Only occasionally, as in Nicholas Ray's Bitter Victory, was Burton given the chance to unleash some of his reserves of poetry and power.
Burton was a notorious womanizer - but he remained married to his first wife Sybil.
After a run as King Arthur in the Broadway musical Camelot, Burton was cast to play Marc Antony in the much-delayed, multi-million-dollar production of Cleopatra.
His fee was a quarter of a million dollars and $1,000 a week plus a villa and servants while filming in Rome At first relations between Cleopatra and Marc Antony seemed cool.
Taylor told friends that Burton was a clumsy flirt.
Behind her back, Burton called his co-star ''Miss Tits'' This didn't fool anyone for a moment.
As soon as filming began, it was clear that Burton and Taylor were infatuated with each other.
The atmosphere on the set was electric.
Cleopatra's director, Joseph L.
Mankiewicz, likened it to being ''locked in a cage with two tigers''.
lt was not long before rumours of the affair were seeping out of the set.
As passions flared, Laurence Olivier sent a telegram to Burton.
lt read: ''Make up your mind, dear heart.
Do you want to be a great actor or a household word?'' Burton replied, ''Both''.
The paparazzi, a phenomenon new to Burton, descended on his villa in Rome.
The situation was spinning out of control.
For Burton, Taylor represented the latest in a long line of tempestuous affairs.
But although Taylor was much-married, she was not promiscuous.
She always married the men she slept with, whether THEY were married or not.
Burton was no exception.
Alarmed by the press reports of the affair between his wife and Burton, Eddie Fisher flew to Rome.
lt was too late.
When it appeared that a wavering Burton was about to return to his wife, Taylor produced her trump card, a suicide attempt with sleeping pills.
She was denounced by members of the US Congress.
The Vatican accused her of the curious crime of ''erotic vagrancy''.
The couple eventually found a refuge at Puerto Vallarta, in Mexico, a small fishing port where Burton had filmed another Tennessee Williams play, Night of the lguana.
lt was at Puerto Vallarta that the divorces were granted from Eddie and Sybil Here, too, Richard and Elizabeth could escape the most insistent attentions of the press.
Yet already Burton seemed distracted, consumed by some huge inner boredom, as if constantly waiting for something to happen.
Richard Burton married Elizabeth Taylor in Montreal in March 1964.
Afterwards, quoting Hamlet's line to Ophelia, Burton declared, ''l say we will have no more marriages''.
For a while it worked.
But there was a constant undertow tugging at their relationship.
Burton hated being hemmed in by their fame.
Taylor adored fighting her way through press and fans.
She had never known anything else.
But this rarefied existence increasingly cut Burton off from his family and friends.
Burton, a temperamental but very biddable man, had moved into Taylor's world.
A world in which she was a bigger star and in which the sole purpose of the secretaries and the sycophants who surrounded them was to keep the real world at bay But it was a world which could not last.
Taylor had always been impressed by Burton's academic background, and he was always talking about returning to Oxford to teach.
The closest they came was in 1966, when the Burtons descended on the city of dreaming spires to star in a production of Marlowe's Dr Faustus at the Oxford Playhouse.
Burton took the title role of the man who strikes a pact with the Devil, an ironic comment perhaps on the Faustian pact he had struck with Hollywood But briefly he was back in his element.
For this part, Burton was mad about Liz's opulent body.
He also genuinely admired her as a film actress.
lt was Elizabeth who tried to teach him that, in front of the camera, less is more.
She had only limited success She was more successful in encouraging her husband to extract colossal sums of money from studios anxious to exploit their fame at the box-office Between 1964 and 1972 the Burtons earned an estimated $50 million.
They spent it.
Elizabeth declared that she ''loved beautiful things''.
Burton bought them for her.
She dripped with jewels, one of them so large Burton called it 'the lce rink'.
Diamonds and emeralds were Liz's best friends.
On the way, Burton collected a few baubles of his own, among them a CBE in 1971.
lt was a happy moment undermined by the nagging realisation that for the man who in the Fifties had been hailed as the new Olivier, the stage was now almost a thing of the past.
lt was easier, perhaps, to play the fool with one of the jewels he bought for Liz.
They shone on her like a brand mark, as if to say Elizabeth Taylor belongs to Richard Burton or maybe it was the other way round.
Richard and Liz had become Hollywood royalty, moving out of the big league into a league all of their own.
Richard had always been ambitious for money, but it was Liz who made him ambitious for the kind of stardom where nothing less would do than the best suites in the best hotels and the best tables in the best restaurants An armlock on Marlon Brando was all part of the fun.
Sadly, most of the films the Burtons made together lacked the sparkle of Taylor's jewels.
A coarse-grained version of The Taming of the Shrew, directed by Franco Zeffirelli, set the tone, with Burton happy to ham and bluster his way through the part of Petruchio As Katharina, Taylor proved that when it came to being raucous, she was more than a match for her husband.
''l will'' ''Thou must be married to no man but me, for l am born to tame you'' - ''l'd rather die'' The exception was Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? which pitched the gilded couple into a marriage made in a hell shared by George Segal and Sandy Dennis.
''Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf'' The Burtons' own marriage was eventually to prove as rancorous, although the tantrums and tearful reconciliations usually took place in luxury hotels.
As the Burtons' caravan rolled from continent to continent and from movie to movie, their marriage became an equally moveable piece of mayhem.
At hotels the couple thoughtfully rented suites above and below their own accommodation to spare fellow guests the sound of their brawling.
London's Dorchester was their favourite watering hole.
One guest recalled that when the volatile Burtons stayed there, the tension could be felt quivering in the luxuriously appointed air like an exposed live wire.
Drink was at the root of it.
Burton's father had been an alcoholic.
Burton drank beer until he met Taylor, who introduced him to vodka.
She started every day at 8:30 with an outsize Bloody Mary.
By the end of the Sixties it was not just the vodka that was on the rocks.
The Burtons' marriage was breaking up.
The endless party ground on.
The celebrations which marked Liz's 40th birthday, held in Budapest, scaled new heights of indulgence but Burton was falling apart.
His elder brother lfor had been tragically paralysed in an accident in Burton's home in Switzerland.
Richard was nearly 45, and with much of his youthful promise unfulfilled.
He was now frightened of returning to the stage.
The refuge, as always, was drink.
His eye was roving again, too.
There was an affair with the French actress Nathalie Delon, accompaned by the usual media frenzy.
And there was talk of an off-screen romance between Burton and Genevieve Bujold, his co-star in Anne of the Thousand Days.
''l think of nothing but you, of you and me playing dog and bitch, of you and me playing horse and mare, of you and me in every way, l want to fill you up night after night, l want to fill you up with sons'' ''Bastards, they would be bastards''.
On the 3rd of July 1973 the Burtons announced their separation.
Burton told reporters: ''You can't keep clapping a couple of dynamite sticks together without expecting them to blow up''.
Richard was a great roarer when drunk, but in the negotiations which preceded the divorce settlement, Liz proved to be much the tougher bargainer.
She came away with the jewels, the art collection and the house in Mexico.
lt was small consolation.
Like George and Martha in Virginia Woolf, Richard and Elizabeth couldn't let each other go.
Their emotional involvement seemed as strong as ever.
The rhythms of their lives continued.
While Burton kept afloat on a sea of drink, surviving repeated warnings that he was at death's door, Liz battled her way gamely through the ritual obstacle course of reporters and cameramen They were both heading towards a brief reunion.
ln October 1975 Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were remarried in Botswana in southern Africa.
The bride wore a green dress trimmed with lace and guinea fowl feathers.
The groom a red shirt, red socks, white slacks and a large drink.
Liz had begged Burton to stop drinking, but the boozing began with the honeymoon.
As ever, it made him moody and belligerent.
With a huge effort Burton climbed back on the wagon.
There was one last fling at the Dorchester to mark Burton's 50th birthday, but within four months the marriage was over.
Richard and Elizabeth had believed that they could survive on the physical passion which had united them on the set of Cleopatra.
Their friends knew better.
ln December 1976, Liz married an American politician, John Warner, the Republican senator for Virginia.
She still moved in the same circles as Burton.
Acquiring expensive things remained a passion.
But now the inseparables were sometimes conspicuously separate When they did meet, Burton's eyes would fill with tears and he would tell her in his native Welsh, ''l love you more than the world itself''.
The steady Warner offered Taylor a respite from Burton's Boozing and brawling, but Taylor's temperament could take only so much peace and quiet.
The political hurly-burly was no substitute for the cocooned chaos of her own celebrity.
By now Liz had gained weight, and was rumoured to be addicted to a cocktail of pills and drink.
Like many another troubled star, she took the cure at the Betty Ford Clinic.
Thereafter the press cruelly turned watching Liz gain and lose weight into an international spectator sport.
Burton's drinking problem had been curbed by his marriage to Susan Hunt in 1976.
But even her monumental patience finally snapped in 1982.
ln 1983, Richard and Elizabeth were reunited for the last time, co-starring in a Broadway production of Private Lives, Noel Coward's comedy of divorce.
Their lives had been anything but private, but the enduring public fascination with the Burtons ensured that they received salaries of $70,000 a week, then a Broadway record The old chemistry still crackled.
What would it be like playing on stage together? ''l don't find that it will be any different, do you?'' ''No l just think you push it out a little louder and a little longer than one does in front of the camera'' ''You will probably try and upstage me more'' ''No, no you don't upstage, l'll teach you about that, you down stage.
'' Later Burton explained that comedy roles were rare ''l've only once played life comedy and that was on Broadway and it was successful'' ''l though that was in real life''.
And how did Taylor rate Burton as an actor? ''One of the finest actors'' - ''One of the finest!'' - ''Sorry'' The scrum of reporters and photographers prompted a wit to observe that it was just like a crowd scene from Quo Vadis? one of the Fifties epics in which Burton starred.
The final separation came on the 5th of August 1984 when Richard Burton died of a brain haemhorrage at his home in Switzerland.
He was laid to rest on a Swiss hillside but buried as a Welshman.
His fifth wife, Sally Hay, presided over the funeral.
Elizabeth stayed away out of deference to her.
lnside the coffin, Burton was dressed from top to toe in red, the Welsh national colour.
A copy of Dylan Thomas' collected verse lay on top.
At Richard Burton's funeral service in Wales, Sally Burton dominated proceedings.
But at the memorial service held in London, Elizabeth was the centre of attention, sitting in the front pew with Burton's family.
There is something heroic about Liz Taylor's capacity for survival.
Like Cleopatra she has defied the passing of time Burton once wrote that the world had always been amused by ''us two maniacs''.
One day, perhaps, the party will be resumed, in another place.