Never A Curtain For Burton.

The moment I heard of Michael Parkinson’s death one name immediately leapt to mind. And it wasn’t Michael Parkinson again, although he was a good chap and a fine interviewer and I hope he rests in peace; though I might have to take a couple of marks off for being such a shameless Yorkshireman. It was clear who most people were thinking of when the tributes and clips surged forward in their legions: Billy Connolly, Dame Edna Everage, Muhammed Ali, Kenneth Williams, Miss Piggy, Billy Connolly, Orson Welles, Peter Ustinov, Bette Davis, Billy Connolly, Joan Rivers, Joan Collins, Elton John, George Michael, Posh and Becks, Rod Hull and Emu (who achieved the distinction of being a slightly more dynamic pairing), Billy Connolly, James Stewart, David Niven, Billy Connolly, David Attenborough, Meg Ryan, Helen Mirren, Billy Connolly, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, Peter Kay, Peter Sellers, Gary Glitter (who knew?), Judi Dench, James Cagney, Billy Connolly and, perhaps most famously, that one where Billy Connolly said something funny about parking a bike. I knew my favourite wouldn’t get a mention. I knew they wouldn’t play a clip of them either. They never do; whenever some compilation of great chat show moments gets aired they’re never to be seen. It’s almost as if they’ve been wiped out of popular history. And I think Richard Burton deserves so much better than that.

Burton’s one and only appearance on Parkinson is probably my single favourite television moment of all time. I truly can’t think of one I’ve watched quite as often. I knew of him in my teens, from his sterling work in Where Eagles Dare and The Wild Geese, but that was all I knew. Then, and I guess I was around 17, quite by chance I recorded the re-run of his 1974 Parkinson interview (introduced afresh by Parky himself) on a VHS tape and suddenly I was in love. For a while that was all I had. This was pre-internet so I couldn’t just find out a load of shit about him with the hit of a button and I wasn’t about to go and do something drastic like spend my money on a book, so instead I just watched that interview again and again until I found that lines and quotes were becoming firmly embedded and that suddenly I could recite the same Tennyson and make a sort of impression of his ludicrously gifted silk punch of a voice. This, I decided, would be a new hero. This would be a man to talk about with warmth and glee. Mind you, I’ve never picked my heroes very well; they’re supposed to be heroic (naturally) and virtuous, not splintered and riddled with flaws and shortcomings, addictions and shadows. But that’s what makes these sorts of people so attractive. They are exquisitely human and dangerously compromised but aren’t afraid to let it show.

By 1974 Richard Burton had most certainly been there and done that, as they say. A supremely gifted stage actor and bon viveur in excelsis, he had decided to chase the money, and the skirt, all the way to Hollywood where he was doing pretty well by the early 60’s. That changed, for both better and worse, when he met Elizabeth Taylor and the two started to fall in love. His world, her world, their world and (it is no exaggeration to say) the entire world turned upside down. For ten years they were more or less the most famous couple the planet could think of. Their every move was monitored and measured. By all accounts they spent most of their waking hours drinking, laughing, fucking and fighting; but most importantly they watched each other’s backs, at least in a fashion. Their entire existence became a permanently erupting volcano of flashing lenses, newspaper columns and sickly excess. Sure, Taylor was the one they really had their eyes on but it was Burton that somehow leant a touch of muscle and a touch of class; the sort of class you could only expect to get from the son of a Welsh miner who just happened to be able to recite the complete works of Shakespeare and just happened to have ended up with the most beautiful woman in the world on his arm. It is not insignificant that his other arm was used mainly as a conduit for his other passions.

You could very easily argue that it was too much time couped up together, too much intensity and too much love that did it in the end for Taylor and Burton, but you’d be a fool if you didn’t take into account their shared demons. Burton was one of the most ferocious drinkers imaginable, even in a time and a profession where everyone drank more than they should, all the fucking time. His entire relationship with Taylor was fuelled by lust and love in some kind of equal measure, certainly, but also insecurity and imbalance and loneliness and booze and booze and booze: beer, wine, champagne, cocktails, whisky, cognac, tequila and a pick-me-up Bloody Mary for breakfast, and that wasn’t just him; she was more than capable of holding her own. The crackle of their early years was slowly doused by all their thirst, his even more so to quell the guilt of his former misdemeanours and the boredom of living in a string of hotel suites, picking up dog shit and waiting for his sumptuous, almost cartoonish wife to be bloody well ready to go out. As he confesses on Parkinson, by the time their marriage (the first one, at least) was crumbling into sand he was reaching his peak as a drinker – “two to three bottles of hard liquor a day”, he pauses then adds, “which is a lot”, as if that needed saying. Now, I don’t know about you but the mere idea of getting through three bottles of vodka a day is beyond scary, not to mention chugging through upwards of a hundred cigarettes. I am fond of both such toxins, but I’m staggered to contemplate quite what else he would have been able to achieve on a day-to-day basis with all that going on. I am also very certain that Burton was at a very low ebb; there is no way in the world that living like that could have been much fun for very long.

And yet, by the time he appeared on Parky he looked in pretty good shape and sounded it as well. He had spent time drying out in a plump Californian luxury clinic (he could afford it) and looked trimmer and brighter than he had in the few years prior. He looks nervous and admits to it, but you can see from his eyes (no actor, ever, has been able to act as proficiently with nothing more than their eyes) that he is still sharper than your average man, especially one who only a few months before had been barely able to stand up on the set of his latest movie (called The Klansman – it is a very poor film indeed but is worth watching if only for for the warped, voyeuristic thrill of seeing one of the biggest stars in the world in the process of potentially killing himself). The whole interview could have ended up a heavy, coal-black brew of melancholy, self-loathing and regret and wouldn’t necessarily have been any worse for it, but Burton is better than to slide into his dark places and stay there, whimpering. He is spectacularly lucid and clear, funny and warm, his evident wisdom nicely offset by an acceptance that he could be a very stupid man indeed, when it took his fancy. This is a man who has had the world at his feet and nearly lost it through the bottom of a glass but watching him chain-puffing away furiously on a packet of Benson & Hedges, his body and brain perpetually restless, his beautiful mouth occasionally breaking into a saucy grin is deeply fascinating. He was alive again, at least for now.

There are 37-ish minutes of this interview on YouTube. It says it is complete, but it is not, because I can remember topics of conversation from that VHS tape that don’t come up and besides which there are far too many clunky edits. Admittedly the last quarter of an hour gets a bit too luvvied-up with assorted board-treading tales, but the rest is nothing short of gripping. Film stars just aren’t made like this anymore. Everything now is about plugging a product and being as safe as possible and blowing smoke up the next guest’s expensively bleached arsehole. The charisma and life lessons take so much of a back seat that they have effectively fallen off the back of the truck. Please don’t tell me that any of today’s stars are as cool or compelling as Richard Burton (I was going to add ‘in his prime’ but that never applied to him; he was somehow, miraculously always in his prime), because they aren’t, principally because it just can’t be done. Burton is in his own league. Parkinson went on to interview many great actors, some of the biggest the world has ever seen but even then, he never again landed a catch as big as he did that day. Thank goodness they still have as much of it for others to watch. Thank goodness some bright spark had the good idea to get him on in the first place.

Oddly enough there are very few good quality, lengthy bits of Burton available to watch out there, beyond his actual films of course. He aged very rapidly in the second half of the 70’s and when he appeared on The Dick Cavet show barely five years later you can see how his gloriously foolish habits had creased his body, if not so evidently his brain. Still blessed with a unique brand of handsome, but feeling the pinch. You could argue that he lived twice the life that most mere mortals do so perhaps he was meant to die so young, at 56, yet look a good twenty years older. But even at the end he still had it. Only he knew what it was really like to be Richard Burton. Only he could occupy the corners of pain and triumph that defined his life. Only he could deliver, as he does, a gorgeously constructed and voiced speech in praise of (and to) Frank Sinatra which surely must stand as one of the greatest Hollywood complements yet made (look it up if you haven’t seen it). We should be grateful we can still see him, just as seeing is believing. He wouldn’t last minutes now. The woke police would be on him in a flash and then he’d probably end up having to do adverts for oat milk and vegan muffins. He would have hated that, and I would have had to love him just a little bit less, and I don’t know if I could bear to dilute my admiration as a result. So, to get back to the start, RIP Michael Parkinson, and thank you so much for giving us a window into Richard Burton and all his doomed majesty. The world needs people like Richard Burton, to show us what can be done well and what should never be done at all. And it was Richard Burton that I immediately thought about the other day; dead decades ago but still alive and sparkling in my silly little mind.

G B Burton. 19.08.2023