“I make no apology,” roars Roger Lewis, “for this being a visionary book, a fierce book, a prose version of a portrait in pinks and lilacs and orange and yellow…” He could perhaps apologise for it being such a very long book – 750 pages. Don’t publishers have editors any more? Did no one dare pipe up, “These 20 pages could usefully be cut, and so could these?” Probably not to Roger Lewis, whose comically furious diaries, and idiosyncratic biographies of Peter Sellers and Charles Hawtrey (among others), have found many admirers.
He is a genius writer and he knows it – brilliant, witty, exhilarating, and a fund of good stories. I love the one about Richard Burton and John Neville, who were alternating the roles of Othello and Iago, both turning up on stage in blackface after a good lunch and neither they nor the audience noticing.
But Roger Lewis is also an obsessive, which means he never knows when to stop. Despite the book’s subtitle (“Everything About Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor”), this isn’t quite everything about Burton and Taylor, because he has little to say about their subsequent marriages, but it is a heck of a lot. He has watched every one of their films including some that aren’t even obtainable in English. He actually bothered to read the official report on the plane crash that killed Taylor’s third husband Mike Todd, which established that the plane was grossly overloaded, and he tracks down what happened to her second, Michael Wilding, after their divorce – he became the maitre d’ of a Brighton restaurant called The Three Little Wilding Rooms. At least he fared better than her first husband, Conrad Hilton, who ended up as a certified lunatic.
The title Erotic Vagrancy comes from a Vatican newspaper complaining about Burton and Taylor’s antics in Rome during the filming of Cleopatra. But we don’t get to Rome till page 323. Before that, we have their separate lives. Taylor claimed she couldn’t remember a day when she wasn’t famous (she was signed by MGM when she was 12) but for Burton stardom came relatively late, and he was not always comfortable with it. He liked to hide away in his study and read – he was probably the best-read film star ever – though I was shocked to learn that Sophia Loren could beat him at Scrabble.