Sunday, October 21, 2012

Richard Burton’s Sexy Diaries: 13 Juiciest Bits


Oct 20, 2012 The Daily Beast  - 

By Kevin Fallon.

 What was Elizabeth Taylor like in bed? Who was a bigger drunk? Did they really love each other? Screen legend Richard Burton answers all those questions in his exhaustive journals, all released in the new collection, ‘The Richard Burton Diaries.’ 

Liz and Dick. Few Hollywood romances captured the attention of the world with such whopping force as the glamorous, tumultuous, and, ultimately, genuine love affair and marriage between screen stars Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. The couple, who had a total of 11 spouses between them, were married for 12 years, from 1964–1976, with a brief divorce in 1974.

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Throughout the relationship, and for two decades before and the decade after, Burton—celluloid icon of films including Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Cleopatra, and The Taming of the Shrew—kept diligent diaries. They are reproduced in their near entirety for the first time in a new collection, The Richard Burton Diaries. At more than 700 pages and spanning the years 1939 to 1983, the musings include not just innocuous details of an actor’s daily regimen (though there are a fair share of Facebook statuslike entries recalling what he had for lunch), but vivid anecdotes of life as one of Hollywood’s brightest stars and intimate details of its most intriguing marriage. Sex, booze, and gossip: here are the 13 juiciest bits.

His relationship with Liz Taylor was remarkably normal.
Burton and Taylor’s reputations precede them. There’s the opulence, the revolving door of spouses, and swirling rumors of salacious affairs (a juicy new tell-all touts anecdotes of Taylor’s teenage sexual encounter with Ronald Reagan and a threesome with John F. Kennedy and actor Robert Stack). But in Burton’s account, Dick and Liz lived like almost any other Dick and Jane. They ate dinner together, they played Yahtzee with their children at night, they bickered, made up, and spent a lot of time together. Burton’s musings about Taylor, called “E” throughout the diaries, range from very husbandly (“E has bangs. Can’t make up mind whether like or not.”) to candid (“Woke in foul temper … then went on to a rip and tear quarrel with no holds barred. Slept alone! Fools!) to especially humorous (“E works today so we shall go in together, which means I shall be late.”).

Full piece at The Daily Beast

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