by Sam Kashner
Elizabeth later wrote about her early years, “The happiest days of my childhood were in England, because I rode—that’s where I learned to ride bareback…” But once the family decamped to Los Angeles before the outbreak of World War II, leaving her beloved horse behind, the sweet unreality of her English life would take on another kind of unreality—one full of triumphs, but not so sweet. “I never cared whether or not I was an actress, especially when I was a very little girl,” she recalled. “When I was first acting, I just liked playing with the dogs and the horses. Riding a horse gave me a sense of freedom and abandon, because I was so controlled by my parents and the studio when I was a child that when I was on a horse we could do whatever we wanted. Riding a horse was my way of getting away from people telling me what to do and when to do it and how to do it.”
In a way, it was a horse that changed the direction of Elizabeth’s extraordinary life. Sara Taylor knew that the role of Velvet Brown in MGM’s National Velvet would be a star vehicle for her beautiful little eleven-year-old. She was born for the role of an English girl who loved horses and who trained her horse, “Pi,” to win the Grand National Sweepstakes, while she rode him to victory disguised as a boy jockey. Abetted by her mother, Elizabeth came to feel that “National Velvet was really me,” and she began decorating her bedroom with statues of horses and to dream of playing Velvet Brown. The only problem was that Elizabeth was too small for the role, looking more like a first-grader than an eleven-year-old. Elizabeth reportedly told the producer, Pandro S. Berman, “I will grow—I will grow in the part.” Again, with her mother’s encouragement and her intense belief in Christian Science, the two prayed together that Elizabeth would shoot up in time to be cast as Velvet. Sara also plied her with farmer’s breakfasts—heapings of pancakes, fried eggs, bacon, all washed down with jugs of fresh milk—in an effort to add three inches to Elizabeth’s height. Amazingly, it did the trick (without adding three inches to her waist), but it may also have unleashed a hedonistic love of food that would wreak havoc with Elizabeth’s tiny frame in later years. Sara Taylor credited the remarkable growth spurt to two things—their prayers and Elizabeth’s amazing willpower. They both believed that Elizabeth had actually willed herself to grow three inches. It was the beginning of Elizabeth’s sense that she was ultimately in control of her fate, and if she wanted something badly enough, she would find a way to have it.
She also learned at an early age that movie-making was hard, backbreaking work. “I worked harder on that film than on any other movie in my life,” she later said, spending hours riding a temperamental horse named King Charles, who would be Velvet’s horse, Pi, in the movie. Through it all, Francis Taylor said little, though he did put his foot down after the studio pulled two of Elizabeth’s baby teeth and replaced them with false stubs in order to put a set of braces in her mouth, which the role called for. That she endured, but Francis backed her up when she refused to have her long, lustrous hair cut for the role.
When National Velvet was released in 1943, it was a tremendous success, which made the now twelve-year-old a star. It also brought her an amazing salary for a child—negotiated by her mother—$30,000, plus a bonus of $15,000 (close to $450,000 in today’s purchasing power). But, more important for Elizabeth, it brought her a horse. She asked Berman if she could have King Charles for her own, and the studio decided to make her the gift (provided she would lend the horse back to the studio whenever it was needed). From then on, Elizabeth would come to expect—and even demand—expensive, meaningful gifts from her producers and directors at the end of a shoot. And she usually got them.
But Elizabeth continued to chafe under Sara’s watchful control. She adored her mother, and the two were very close, but she would eventually have to rebel against such closeness. Margaret Kelly, Elizabeth’s body double in National Velvet, recalled cringing every time she heard Sara Taylor call out, “Oh, Elizabeth, darling. Come along,” to which Elizabeth would meekly reply, “Coming, Mother dear.”
The differences in Elizabeth’s and Richard’s upbringing brought about a curious paradox: Elizabeth, raised as an upper-class girl, would delight in acting the vulgarian, with a lusty joy in using four-letter words and winning belching contests, which she indulged in with her costar Rock Hudson on the set of Giant, thirteen years after making National Velvet. Yet Richard, son of an impoverished miner, saw himself as nobility. Of all the major Shakespearean roles he would play in his life—Prince Hal, Henry V, Othello, Iago, Hamlet, Petruchio—he most identified with the noble Roman warrior Coriolanus, who disdained the treacherous crowds of Rome. “I’m the son of a Welsh miner,” he later told Kenneth Tynan, “and one would expect me to be at my happiest playing peasants, people of the earth, but in actual fact I am much happier playing princes and kings…I’m never really comfortable playing people from the working class.”
Another contrast: Elizabeth would have her parents with her for a very long time (Sara Taylor, in fact, died in her nineties). Richard was virtually orphaned by his parents, raised by his sister, Cecilia “Cissy” James, and later taken under the wing of Philip Burton, a Welsh teacher and dramatist who gave Richard his name. When Richard Burton was informed in 1957 that his father had died, the first words out of his mouth were, “Which one?” Indeed, there were at least two fathers Burton could claim to have lost.
His first, of course, was the man who sired him, a hard-drinking coal miner named Richard Jenkins, known as Dic Jenkins and called “Dadi Ni” by his seven boys and four girls—Tom, Ifor, Cecilia, Will, David, Verdun (named after the great battle of World War I), Hilda, Katherine, Edith, Richard, and Graham. Burton was named Richard Walter Jenkins, after his father, and called “Rich” by his family. He was the twelfth of thirteen children (two daughters died in infancy), born on November 10, 1925 in the mining-and-smelting town of Pontrhydyfen in South Wales. His mother, Edith Thomas, had married Jenkins at sixteen and raised her large brood with resourcefulness and hard work, taking in washing, making and selling sweets and nonalcoholic beer, and making sure her children were well fed and attended church regularly. All but Graham, Richard’s youngest brother, would toil long hours in the coal pits. As Hilda Jenkins Owens, one of Richard’s sisters, recalled, “the seven boys born to Dic and Edith between 1901 and 1927 survived. They grew tall like their mother, rugged and strong like their father, and the first five went down to the mines like their ancestors before them.”
Robert Hardy, who knew several of Burton’s siblings, described the Jenkinses as “remarkable. Each and every one of them had an extraordinary ability about them, a sort of ancient dignity. That was wonderfully true of the eldest brother, Thomas, who had been a miner all his life. His face was pocked with all these little blue marks, and he was the gentlest and most dignified, charming, and easy man.” Yet they were tough. “To have Dadi Ni’s boys against you was something to shy away from,” Hilda recalled. Richard himself had to earn his place among his six brothers. They would sometimes walk along the highest ledge of the bridge that gave Pontrhydyfen its name, a terrifying height. “I did it, even though I was frightened,” Burton recalled. “After all, I had to prove I was a full-fledged member of the Jenkins family.”
Dic Jenkins often worked from six thirty a.m. to seven thirty p.m. six days a week, which meant he saw daylight only on Sundays. Burton’s brother Verdun lost half of his foot in a mining accident. Besides the long hours in the pits and the hard poverty of the 1920s and 1930s, there were also the twin perils of malnutrition and tuberculosis. Pontrhydyfen means “bridge over the ford across two rivers,” but very few sons of the valley crossed those rivers into the greater world. (Of Burton’s era and just after, the Welshmen who crossed over included the poet Dylan Thomas, the playwright Emlyn Williams, the pop singer Tom Jones, and the actors Stanley Baker, Thomas Owen Jones, and Anthony Hopkins.) This Welsh valley of roughly two thousand souls was sustained by three enterprises: the mines, the pubs, and the churches. The women of Pontrhydyfen would habitually climb to t
he top of the mines each payday, waiting for the men to surface so they could pluck the paychecks out of their hands before the local pubs took it all.
Nonetheless, Richard—and Hilda and Graham—looked back on their hardscrabble early years as happy ones. “It was our parents who had the hard time, not us,” Graham Jenkins wrote in his memoir, Richard Burton, My Brother. “We ate plentifully and with great gusto. The main diet was fresh fish but there was a joint once a week and on Saturday we had cockles and lava bread—a huge treat.” Burton, in fact, never developed a sophisticated palate and never lost his taste for lava bread, a Welsh dish consisting of the froth of boiled seaweed plunked down on the plate “like a cow pat,” or for a dish called siencyn, a “delicious mush” made from pieces of fried bread, bacon, and cheese, with sugared tea poured over it. Graham may have put too cheerful a spin on his memories, as another chronicler reported that Edith Jenkins often fed her family “by dribbling [two] eggs over fourteen slices of bread, particularly when the bread had turned moldy,” as it often did in the clammy Welsh air. All the family meals were washed down by gallons of hot, sweetened tea.
Graham remembers his father as a man who drank no more than other miners, and who was never cruel nor violent while drunk. Others recall a more prodigious appetite: “Dic was a real sweet man. No harm in him at all, but a right terror for his booze. Only this size, tiny, couldn’t be five-two out of his boots. But drink! Bloody hollow legs,” recalled one of the miners who had grown up in Pontrhydyfen with the Jenkinses. The village was full of pubs, then, with names like Bird in Hand, Heart of Oak, Boar’s Head, Miners Arms, British Lion, where “the drinking was tremendous and cheap…There were only two ways of life. You were either going to the chapel or to the pub, and most of the miners went to the pub, and the women understood, because miners’ work is hell.”
Barely five feet two inches tall, proud, hardworking, highly intelligent, full of stories and swagger, Jenkins bore his hard life stoically. Burned in a mine fire, he was treated at home by two of his daughters. Hilda remembers rubbing olive oil on his burned arms, which were then bandaged to his torso so he couldn’t use them at all—which didn’t keep him from showing up at the pub, where he’d have a pint of bitter poured directly into his mouth. On his way home from the pub one night, his ruined arms strapped to his side, he was horribly beaten by an old adversary; his teeth were knocked out and he was thrown over a wall where he wasn’t found until the next morning. Still, he survived, hardened and darkened like a piece of coal, retelling the story with relish at the local pubs well into his eighties.
Jenkins, a masculine role model for Richard, wasn’t pleased by Richard’s choice of a profession. The fame and the money were to be admired, yes, but prancing around in costumes and wearing makeup and being bullied by women? Or perhaps Jenkins was resentful of his next-to-youngest son’s extraordinary renown, seeing how he bore not his own name but the name of another.
Edith Jenkins died at the age of forty-four just after giving birth to Graham, her youngest. Richard was only two years old at the time, though he would claim that he had vivid memories of his mother. Jenkins farmed out the younger boys—Graham and Rich, an infant and a toddler—to their older, married siblings. Graham would be raised by Tom and his wife, Cassie, and Jenkins put Rich into the hands of his twenty-one-year-old sister Cecilia, who was married and living on her own in nearby Port Talbot. Richard thrived in her care.
Cecilia was a striking, green-eyed, dark-haired woman known in the family as “Cis.” She would become, for Burton, the paragon of female perfection. In A Christmas Story, Burton’s autobiographical short story, he described his sister as “no ordinary woman—no woman ever is, but to me, my sister less than any.”
When my mother had died, she, my sister, had become my mother…I was immensely proud of her. I shone in the reflection of her green-eyed, black-haired, gypsy beauty. She sang at her work in a voice so pure that the local men said she had a bell in every tooth, and was gifted by God…. She was naïve to the point of saintliness, and wept a lot at the misery of others. She felt all tragedies except her own. I had read of the Knights of Chivalry and I knew that I had a bounden duty to protect her above all other creatures. It wasn’t until thirty years later, when I saw her in another woman that I realized I had been searching for her all my life.
First published in 1965, three years after the beginning of his affair with Elizabeth, the story makes it clear that the other woman in whom he sees the reflection of his adored sister is Elizabeth, another dark-haired, gypsy beauty. If Sybil had kept him moored to his Welsh life and family, Elizabeth supplanted her in representing a type of raven-haired, lavishly shaped woman that he associated with the comeliest women of his Welsh childhood.
Cis doted on her young brother, even after her own two daughters were born a few years later. Cis and her gruff husband, Elfred James, had only been married for four months when two-year-old Richard came to live with them. Elfred often resented the care and attention Cis lavished on Richard. “He was never smacked,” Graham recalled, but he at times had to be shielded from Elfred’s temper. “Nothing is good enough for that boy,” Elfred often complained. Graham reports that his sister tried to be fair-handed, but “when it came to a choice between Elfred and Rich, as it often did, Elfred lost out.”
Part of Cis’s preference was due to her strong family loyalty, but it was also because Richard, as he would prove to be his entire life, was catnip to women. He was charming, he was playful, he was smart. He delighted not just Cis but his entire family—although apparently not Elfred—with his playacting. He loved to imitate the local preacher by giving mock sermons in the family parlor. He was, according to Graham, “quick to discover the power of language—the Welsh language, to be precise, since our patch of South Wales remained loyal to its mother tongue.”
Richard didn’t speak English until he was six, but he learned the beauty of language from attending chapel. Graham recalls, “The chapel was our other world. Within that simple building we let our emotions rip. We sang lustily, prayed fervently, and listened in awe to the thunderous declarations of moral judgment. A good preacher was a poet in action. He could spin words into a story of such power as to stop the mind.” Men who would be actors found their niche in the church, where, as preachers, they could indulge all their penchants for drama, language, passion.
Hardy observed that Burton “spoke the most perfect Welsh, coming from that part of Wales where the most sonorous, the deepest kind of Welsh is spoken—pure, classical Welsh. He felt very attached to that.” Burton would never lose his love of the language, which he described as “a wild, breathy, passionate, powerful tongue. I once heard Shakespeare’s Macbeth recited in Welsh, and it shook me to the core.”
It wasn’t just the beauty of the Welsh tongue, it was the quality of the Welsh voice as well. The Welsh have had a long, passionate tradition of choral societies. Young men often resorted to fisticuffs to win singing contests. Byrn Davies, another Welsh miner, who used to drink with Burton’s father, once observed, “The Welsh gift of language is a sad gift of God. He inclined us all towards poetry and then buried us in coal.”
Graham thought his older brother might join the clergy. In his parlor-room sermons, Richard often played for laughs, exaggerating the fire-and-brimstone, but he and other boys of the village were also invited, from the age of seven, to read scripture at Sunday sermons. Rich easily memorized long passages from the Bible and recited them to the congregation, mesmerizing them with his voice. He was a born performer. But when Richard—still known as Rich Jenkins—came of age and had an opportunity to continue his secondary school studies in Port Talbot, Elfred put his foot down. They had already locked horns over various adolescent outbursts—Rich was smoking at eight, drinking at eleven, and at fifteen going with girls—now it was time for the boy to work and earn his keep, even though Cis was willing to pay the money to keep him in school. But he was set up as a clerk in a local haberdashery, where he was misplace
d and miserable.
Meredith Jones, one of Burton’s teachers and a brilliant, thundering Welshman who had escaped the mines as a “scholarship boy,” came to Rich’s rescue. He taught Rich at Dryffen Grammar School and recognized the boy’s quickness and gifts, particularly in local theater. He encouraged and inspired Rich, and made it possible for him to leave the hated work as a haberdashery clerk at Mr. Maynard’s Co-op. Rich, now a year or two older than all the other boys, returned to finish his education at Port Talbot Secondary School. That’s where he met—or rather re-met—Philip Burton, whom Richard would consider his second father.
Philip Burton had taught the boy English his first year of grammar school, but had not been especially impressed, put off by Rich’s atrocious accent and noticing that “the boy had spots.” Rich suffered from cystic acne, which left scars on his cheeks and back, and an enduring sense of shame. A Welshman, Philip Burton had taught himself to speak perfect English. He was an officer in the Air Training Corps and a director and actor in local theater. Besides teaching English, he wrote and performed radio dramas for the BBC Welsh radio. He was plump, demanding, beautifully dressed, and highly cultured. He was also gay, though probably celibate—or mostly celibate, given the time and place. When he cast Rich in Gallows Glorious, one of Philip Burton’s local productions, he first realized what he had on his hands. He offered Rich another role, in a radio drama he had written called Youth at the Helm, and the man and boy traveled to Cardiff to record the play. Graham remembered hearing his brother’s performance, for the first time, over the radio: “Not having to act, physically, he concentrated on voice. And what a voice…I was bowled over by the melodious, seductive tones of the Welsh Welsh, deeper and stronger than anything you will hear in the north.” Aware of his impact and no doubt blossoming under his mentor’s approval, Rich knew then he wanted to be an actor.