Richard Burton's diary entries about Elizabeth Taylor. In all their glory. One minute they loathe each other, the next they can't keep their hands off each other. As sick as it sounds, I quite like that dynamic. How exciting....
After reading the entries, I suspect many of these fits of rage were fueled by lots of alcohol, not simply their already tempestuousness relationship. I am almost convinced they were lovers in a past life that found each other again simply because the fighting was too thrilling to resist. Only someone with preternatural memories from a past life could find this soul mate again and marry them (and divorce them) twice.
Some favorite quotes from these secret entries:
2 June 1965
Rose [at] 10 o’clock but weather dull. Had a good row with Burt [Elizabeth Taylor] and accused her, among other things, of lousy taste. She accused me among other things of snobbery. I said the only thing we had in common was Yahtsee. I forgot some other things.
10 January 1967
I am madly “in love” with her at the moment, as distinct from always loving her, and want to make love to her every minute but alas it is not possible for a couple of days. She’ll have trouble walking in a couple or three days.
30 July 1967 – Taormina
She is at the moment among the most dishiest girls I’ve ever seen. The most. I mean dishiest.
We worked from seven last night to approx four this morning. […] Elizabeth has gone off to work and “test” costumes. She should be back before I leave I hope. After seven or is it eight years I still miss her if she goes to the bathroom.
19 November 1968 – Paris
Famed as we are, rich as we are, courted and insulted as we are, overpaid as we are, centre of a great deal of attention as we are, [we] are not bored or blasé. We are not envious. We are merely lucky.
I have been inordinately lucky all my life but the greatest luck of all has been Elizabeth. She has turned me into a moral man but not a prig, she is a wildly exciting lover-mistress, she is shy and witty, she is nobody’s fool, she is a brilliant actress, she is beautiful beyond the dreams of pornography, she can be arrogant and wilful, she is clement and loving, Dulcis Imperatrix, she is Sunday’s child, she can tolerate my impossibilities and my drunkenness, she is an ache in the stomach when I am away from her, and she loves me!
2 October 1969 – Geneva
When we came out of the Musée des Beaux Arts the cab driver had vanished, but he returned a few minutes later having very sweetly bought a single rose for Elizabeth. Somewhere between [then] and dinner, brooding set in. Between long silences deadly insults were hurled. At one point E knowing I was in a state of nastiness said to me: “Come on Richard, hold my hand.” Me: “I do not wish to touch your hands. They are large and ugly and red and masculine.” Or words to that effect.
This morning E said that I really must get her the 69-carat ring to make her ugly big hands look smaller and less ugly! Nobody turns insults to her advantage more swiftly or more cleverly than Lady Elizabeth.
You can read more juicy bits here:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/9544243/Richard-Burton-Diaries-Elizabeth-is-an-eternal-one-night-stand.html
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