The Man on the Billboard

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while he recites poetry, now mocking the voice of Gielgud, now mimicking Olivier, slipping into the tongue of Richard Burton when he does something that holds particular gravity for him. He doesn't swear like a trouper (he barks at Taylor for her vulgarisms), being too much in love with words to settle for slang.

He says he wants more than anything else to be alone, but—in the pre-Taylor era—his dressing-room door was always open to cronies of all ages and sexes. People not only like him, they come near to worshiping him, often for a good reason. Once, in Camelot, a young boy was put into the show green and frightened, and during his first rehearsal with Burton he froze. Burton purposely began to stutter, stumble, turn white and quiver. It was one of his most adroit performances. The boy's nerves receded; his voice coughed into life. He still writes to Burton once a month; Burton has no idea why.

Glamorganshire. Once, after fluffing the same line repeatedly on a movie set, Burton lowered his head and rammed it into a wall. It is impossible to imagine an English actor doing that, but Burton of course is not English. He is Welsh. In fact, he is so thoroughly, defensively, and patriotically Welsh that it costs him some loss of perspective. His gallery of great Welshmen includes Louis XIV, Christopher Columbus and Alexander the Great.

He remembers James Joyce's belief that every man spends his life looking for the place he wants to belong to. "I think I grew up in the place I have dreamed of all my life," he says. It is a village in a valley between high loaves of bald green mountains, split by a small river of rushing white water—called, oddly enough, the Avon—and spanned by a high, narrow stone bridge that was once an aqueduct. Poverty has seldom had a more graceful setting. The village even has a euphonically romantic name—Pontrhydy-fen (pontra de venne)—and, particularly in Richard Burton's view, it is a kind of Glamorganshire Brigadoon. "When I go home," he says, "as I go around the lip of the mountain, my heart races."

Which Child? He was born in Pont-rhydyfen on the loth of November, 1925. His father—Richard Jenkins—was a miner with little more to his name than a No. 6 shovel and a massive gift for words. Richard was the twelfth of thirteen children. His mother died when he was not quite two, just after giving birth to Richard's brother Graham. In Taibach, a suburb of the coastal town Port Talbot, at the foot of the Avon, Richard was devotedly raised by his eldest sister, Cecilia. He went to school in Port Talbot, but he spent his weekends in Pontrhydyfen. The town spoke English and the village spoke Welsh; hence Richard was raised bilingual. He was also raised with a powerful sense of belonging to a village where he could not live.

"My father was a self-taught man," says Richard, "demoniacal in debate, agnostic, with a divine gift of the tongue in both languages. He used hyperbole. He was not afraid of the octosyllabic word. He had a sort of maxim—'Never use a short word where a long one will do.' He was a Welsh Conrad in conversation. He would go off on jags that would make John Barrymore look sedate. He never knew which son I was. He was 50 when I was born. We called him Daddy Ni, which means 'our father.' He sometimes

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