Richard Burton: Playboy Interview

Kenneth Tynan, who conducted this interview for Playboy, is widely esteemed as Britain's most articulate and iconoclastic commentator on the theater. Writing with a rare authority gained from his multifarious background as a stage director, movie script editor and television writer-producer, he has become internationally known as a drama critic (for the London Observer since 1954, and for The New Yorker, succeeding the late Woolcott Gibbs, from 1958 to 1960); trenchant essayist on drama in England, Europe and America; and author of six books (including an illuminating profile of Sir Alec Guinness). Lauded by literary critic Alfred Kazin as a "virtuoso performer in journalism" for his barbed and burnished prose, he has also earned a reputation as an engineer of reportorial coups: He once arranged and presided at the only meeting between Tennessee Williams and Ernest Hemingway; he is reputed to be the only writer who ever interviewed the reclusive Greta Garbo; and he is one of the few journalists in the world to whom the press-beleaguered Richard Burton has consented to speak for publication in the two years since Cleopatra began production. Tynan writes of their most recent meeting -- occasioned by Playboy's request for an exclusive interview—in the following preamble:


"Richard Burton is a wealthy, seductive and extremely gifted Welshman with a checkered past, a turbulent present and an unpredictable future. At the age of 37, he has behind him a stage career that once led responsible critics—myself among them—to hail him as the natural successor to Sir Laurence Olivier. 'Burton is first and last an animal actor,' I wrote of him, 'with an animal's accidental grace and unsentimental passions; offstage he has the dangerous high spirits of an unbroken colt. What he has done to Shakespeare is to abolish the tradition of vocalized word music, replacing it with something more personal—the sullen poetry of the soil.'


"That was a dozen years ago. Since then the films have increasingly claimed him, and his course in their shadow kingdom has been bumpy, reaching its culmination in the vast untitled portrait—depicting Burton and a recumbent odalisque—which is displayed on Times Square outside the Manhattan residence of Cleopatra. The supine houri is of course Elizabeth Taylor, and Burton is Antony, the Mark of her esteem. Thanks to his connection with the most expensive picture ever made, and his relationship with the most expensive actress ever paid, Burton began to hit the headlines hard, and has often come close to replying in kind to the journalists who wrote them. Since his career entered its Egyptian phase, we have met only twice—once in Paris last fall, when I waited with an apprehensive Miss Taylor, whom he had never seen on the screen before, to hear his verdict on Suddenly Last Summer (he thought she was splendid); and again this year when I went to London's Dorchester Hotel for Playboy to learn the current state of his opinions on life and art.


"As we shook hands in the lobby, his large, watchful face—cratered like the moon—broke into a broad, crafty smile, as if we were schoolboys jointly bent on some act of terrible mischief. We took lunch in the hotel restaurant, discussing the Duke of Argyll's spectacular divorce, then much in the news; Burton scoffed at the judge's splenetic insistence on describing the Duchess as an immoral woman. Across the room I noticed Laurence Olivier, who stopped by to talk on his way out. Burton told him that he hopes before long to make a film of Macbeth. This was for many years a pet project of Olivier's, but lack of funds caused it to be shelved. Betraying no resentment, he suggested that Burton might do worse than to consider Vivien Leigh for the role of Lady Macbeth; but something in the Welshman's reaction conveyed to me that the part was already cast.


"Lunch over, we repaired to Burton's suite, pausing at the elevator door to make way for an emerging passenger with drooping eyebrows and a general air of desiccated grandeur; by name, Harold Macmillan. Burton's drawing room commands a wide-screen vista of Hyde Park, and over the fireplace hangs a Van Gogh landscape lately acquired by Miss Taylor, who lives in the suite next door. The lady herself floated silently in and out, wearing pink lounging pajamas and no makeup. I switched on the tape recorder."