Actors: The Man on the Billboard

(9 of 10)
edges toward the Elizabethan, Richard Burton's adoptive world, and the study of character develops an interesting flair with Mankiewicz' concept of a long-overshadow Antony who comes to hate the very name of Caesar.

Richard Burton tries to avoid seeing his own movies. Will he see Cleopatra'?

"No."

"Why?"

"Well, I don't want to kill myself."

Wife of Bath. Any reminder of Rome offends his sensibilities. "I never want to see the place again as long as I live," he says. He has had his fill of flashbulbs in the dead of night, visiting "priests" with cameras under their cassocks, spoiled beans, stomach pumps, sleeping pills, Jewish singers, German orphans, and old friends who mail him headlines that say FUN—BURTON. But he has come away with an interesting souvenir—this riggish, Anglo-Egyptian dish of his, whom he has installed in a rooftop suite in London's Dorchester. He is not at all sure what to do with her.

Some people think she has installed him there. He seems chained in taffeta. But it was Burton who made the first move. The question is: If he had known he was stumbling into a fight to the death, would he have done it anyway?

The answer is probably yes. "Show a Welshman i.ooi exits, one of which is marked SELF-DESTRUCTION," says Mankiewicz, "and he will go right through that door." The outcome of the Taylor-Burton game must inevitably yield up a loser. If he should ever marry her, he will be the Oxford boy who became the fifth husband of the Wife of Bath. If she loses him, she loses her reputation as a fatal beauty, an all-consuming maneater, the Cleopatra of the 20th century.

Darryl Zanuck, president of 2Oth Century-Fox, is pleased with them. "I think the Taylor-Burton association is quite constructive for our organization," he says. But what if the Taylor-Burton association were to collapse before Cleopatra opens? The picture would be an anachronism while it is still in the can.

Playing Adonis. It is possible that Burton cares more about Cleopatra than he admits. "What if the first kiss isn't up to scratch?" he worries. "We're finished." With Taylor's assistance, Cleopatra has made him a big-money star and its success could keep him there. He has new power, not to mention fame. Before Cleopatra, Burton got $125,000 a picture; today his price is $500,000, most of which he banks. His own term for his emotional world today is "suspended animation." He has never asked for a divorce from Sybil and apparently never intends to. Meanwhile, the service is good in the Dorchester. For an actor of his accomplishments, a few more months in the role of Adonis is an easy price to pay.

"Elizabeth is capable of great, violent, tempestuous hates," he observes; but in brighter moods she calls him "Richard Bursnips" and combs his silken hair, saying it is "soft as a baby's bum." Her parents stop in from time to time to sip black velvets with their new fun-in-law. null or without company, Elizabeth tries to stay close by him 25 hours a day, filling poor Richard's almanac with some dull stretches of prose as well as short bursts of poetry. During most of the winter, he would slip out to see his family several times a week, playing