"We are such doomed fools..."

I couldn't let the recent passing of Elizabeth Taylor go unmentioned. She has always been a favorite of mine. I admired her passion and her energy, and of course, her beauty. She made great films, mothered four children and several step children, championed and supported serious and worthy causes, had great success as a business woman and lastly, never stopped believing in love and romance.

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