Description
We see Taylor the child actress exchanging dogs and horses for husbands. We see Burton emerging from the mists and brimstone of Wales to be the greatest theatrical animal of his generation. The pair come together in Rome during the making of Cleopatra, which gives Lewis the opportunity for a major farcical set-piece. We then enter a world of jewels and private jets, vodka, yachts and furs - the splendid vulgarity of the Sixties, where the narrative of Taylor and Burton becomes a Pop Art story.
Then, inevitably, it all goes wrong, with alcoholism, violence, recrimination and divorce ( twice ) - with Burton, whom Lewis depicts as a Faustus figure, damned by fame, dead at fifty-eight.
Stephen Fry has said, 'It is one of the very best biographies I have ever read. One of the best books about fame, desire, Hollywood and mid-to-late twentieth century culture ever written. Inside which, brilliant, hilarious and sensitive insights on all manner of subjects fizz and froth. Magnificent, terrible, tragic, triumphant.'
Product Details
| Publisher | Hachette Mobius |
| Publish Date | March 26, 2024 |
| Pages | 608 |
| Language | English |
| Type |  Hardback |
| EAN/UPC | 9780857381729 |
| Dimensions | 9.3 X 6.4 X 2.3 inches | 2.4 pounds |
About the Author
Reviews
Erotic Vagrancy is about obsessions with sex and fame and luxury, making Taylor and Burton vagrants on a worldwide scale who come to grief, as Antony and Cleopatra do, in a kind of romantic displacement - with Burton adrift from his native Wales and Taylor seemingly born adrift in the make-believe of Hollywood, an unfixed world that she conquered with a towering ego that mesmerized Burton and put him at her mercy...for Mr. Lewis, the Taylor and Burton story can never be over...the point about the couple, though, is that they are unsettling and unforgettable and can be portrayed only in a cyclical account of the cyclical comedy and tragedy of their two marriages - not unlike what we get in their celebrated portrayals of George and Martha in the film of Edward Albee's 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?--Carl Rollyson, The New York Sun
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