Richard Burton [antikvár]

Chapter One Just how öifficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs. Sex is, as Rebecca West implies, the real stuffing of biography; and I much admire those who, ne ver having met the subject of their research, let alone their paramours, feel compelled to commit to paper today what was in the newspapers yesterday. Two recent biographies of that ilk have detailed the lives of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor without ever once Coming anywhere near the trae flesh—that real truth which Burton's Welsh schoolmaster of elementary days described as 'a shadowy, untouchable threequarter forever jinking down a ghostly touchline'. Those who tackle the public shadow rather than private substance are those who, as one of the biographers so aptly put it, 'find themselves so overcome by fame that it inspires a kind of lunacy on the part of the unfamous'. It could be, of course, that the unfamous (journalists like myself) inspire a sort of lunacy on the part of the famous. Indeed this is what happened some twenty years ago when Burton and Taylor appeared in Cleopatra and rubbed bodies together more vigorously off stage than they did on set. It wasn't an unusual occurrence