Her greatest romantic love, I believe, will always be Richard Burton. Their love was as complicated and passionate and messy and huge as any romance novel story I have ever read. If you haven't read Furious Love: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and the Marriage of the Century, then you must remedy that immediately. It chronicles one of the great true romances of our time. I'm not sure exactly what I believe about the afterlife, but it comforts me to think of Richard and Elizabeth reunited in some way. Of course, if they are together on some heavenly plane, they are probably already fighting. True passion can be that way.
I leave you with a letter from Richard to Elizabeth, one of the many wonderful letters that she graciously shared with the authors of Furious Love...
The last day of March
My darling Sleeping Child, …I am oddly shy about you. I still regard you as an … inviolate presence. You are as secret as the mysterious processes of the womb. I'm not being fancy … I have treated women, generally, very badly and used them as an exercise for my contempt except in your case. I have fought like a fool to treat you in the same way and failed. One of these days I will wake up—which I think I have done already—and realize to myself that I really do love. I find it very difficult to allow my whole life to rest on the existence of another creature. I find it equally difficult, because of my innate arrogance, to believe in the idea of love. There is no such thing, I say to myself. There is lust, of course, and usage, and jealousy, and desire and spent powers, but no such thing as the idiocy oflove.
Who invented that concept? I have wracked my shabby brains and can find no answer. But when people die … those who are taken away from us can never come back. Never, never, never, never, never (Lear about Cordelia). We are such doomed fools. Unfortunately, we know it. So I have decided that for a second or two, the precious potential of you in the next room is the only thing in the world worth living for. After your death there shall only be one other and that will be mine. Or I possibly think, vice versa.
Ravaged love,
And loving Rich
And loving Rich
I've recently realized that I may use "heart" too much. But... I really do heart the Taylor-Burtons. I think it's the mad, grand passion of it all, the same thing that draws me into soaps, and the tragic bittersweetness of their story, doomed by the very thing that brought them together--their fame and their flaws. They remind me of all my favorite doomed loves: your Catherine and Heathcliff, Rhett and Scarlett, Lucie Manette and Sydney Carton.
ReplyDeleteI love the letter you quoted and the picture at the end. (Speaking of pictures, those pictures in Furious Love? GUH. Anyone who thinks Elizabeth Taylor is beautiful before they've seen the photographs in the book--she's amazingly more beautiful in them. I especially like the one of them in the ocean, and she and Richard are holding hands, up in a victory sign of sorts. She looks exuberant, and I just... sigh. I love them.
Sometimes I wonder vaugely if it's hell-bound-ing to love so much a couple who were married to other people when their affair began. Maybe I'm practicing moral relativism here, but I feel like their love ends up justifying it all somehow. Anyway, even though it was wrong, they couldn't stop loving each other, and just like that, I can't stop loving them. Thanks for a great post, and your last line, "it comforts me to think of Richard and Elizabeth reunited in some way. Of course, if they are together on some heavenly plane, they are probably already fighting" makes me awww, and my heart flutter. I think you're right.
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ReplyDeleteDamn, I forgot to close my parenthesis! *edit button* :)
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