The Man on the Billboard

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head is large. In fact, it has a common circumference with Elizabeth Taylor's waist, which he demonstrates by buckling one of her belts around his forehead. Because of his big chest, head, and shoulders, he has been told that he looks short. This worries him. His imagination takes hold and he sees himself as the world's most conspicuous dwarf. Hence, he has a short man's height complex although he is well above the average height of men. He has pale blue-green eyes, finely textured brown hair, and a coarse complexion, which is said to contribute to his enormous appeal to women. But even more, women lose their balance over his look of essential melancholy. His face can light suddenly with a smile, but it always returns to its primal gloom.

"Beautiful Man." He talks to everyone as if they matter. It is his special gift, seldom found in actors, or, for all that, in clergymen. Burton's secret is simpie. Everyone actually does matter to him. He tells more stones than Scheherazade, but between them he listens. He really wants to hear about one man's children or another's Sunday football match. He can make people feel larger than life. Men appreciate him for it; but women write him letters, chase him around tables, and follow him overseas.

"He has a terrific way with women," says Fredric March. "I don't think he has missed more than half a dozen." Amateur statisticians would have it that he has probably given some sort of lasting memory to roughly 75,000 women in the past 20 years, few as articulate as Tammy Grimes. "He called me 'shining,' " she remembers, "and I was madly in love with him for at least four days. Strictly an infatuation. He makes women feel beautiful. He is a genius. His acting has such a tragic quality. It comes from a completely unsentimental nature, a pure wonderment, and a deep loneliness. His life is a kaleidoscope. Turn him and you see 50 different patterns. Every time you meet him, you see a million different colors. He is a vodka man with a quicksilver mind and a violent temper. He's moody, completely unpredictable, always fascinating, very frugal, extremely shrewd, a tremendous snob, and a beautiful, beautiful man."

Sleepless & Slangless. Making a film called The Last Days of Dolwyn in the late '405, Richard met a beautiful, 19-year-old Welsh actress named Sybil Williams. She came from the Rhondda Valley, not far from his own home. They were married five months later, and she became a wife unparalleled—"impeccable" is Richard's word for her—with a total devotion to him, a mind quick enough to keep up with him, and a limitless tolerance. Her father was a miner, too, but he had risen to managerial status. "Her family was a fairly gifted lot," says Richard. "We have a little joke to the effect that she, as it were, represents the bosses, whereas I represent those men who crawl between heaven and earth." Richard and Sybil call each other "Boot," a Welsh diminutive for "beautiful." They have two daughters, Kate, 5, and Jessica, 3.

Life with Burton was never quiet. He sleeps five hours, no more, and he has the energy to skip sleep altogether and work steadily the following day. He can sit at a piano all night flogging Welsh songs or playing miscellaneous mood pieces, usually incongruous,