“I’ll carry you off on a white charger but I’d prefer it if it was the other way around. I’m a hopeless romantic and want to be romantically swept away. In the meantime we will be loving and sweet – but someday, you son of a bitch, something will make you realise that you cannot live without me and you have to marry me, otherwise your life will not be complete.”
- Elizabeth Taylor in a letter to Richard Burton before their 2nd marriage, 1976 (source: x)
(Source: bellecs, via loimprescindible)
I love Elizabeth to the point of idolatry but - let’s repeat that “but” - she will unquestionably be…late for the last bloody judgement. And, infuriatingly, she is always breathtakingly on time. She actually misses no train or plane or boat, but, of course, misses the fact that her husband has had several minor heart attacks waiting for her while he shifts a shivering scotch from his trembling hand to his quivering mouth to his abandoned liver, waiting, waiting, waiting for her to come out of the lavatory….there is my stupendously serene lady, firmly believing that time waits for no man but will wait for her.
(Source: alalex, via dunfayedaway)
I cannot imagine life without him. I love him. I adore him. Our love is so deep that I don’t give a goddamn what people think or say about us. If you have a real relationship with your lover, you can do anything and make it magic.
(Source: elizatittaylor)
Imagine having Richard Burton’s voice in your ear while you are making love…It drowned out the troubles, the sorrows, everything just melted away…I was the happy recipient of his reputation as a man who knew how to please a woman. Being unfaithful to Richard was as impossible as not being in love with him.
(Source: missavagardner, via elizatittaylor)
Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, 1963.
“I love not being Elizabeth Taylor, but being Richard’s wife. I would be quite content to be his shadow and live through him.”
As a matter of fact, even our fights are fun — nothing placidly bovine about us. Richard loses his temper with true enjoyment. It’s beautiful to watch. Our fights are delightful screaming matches, and Richard is rather like a small atom bomb going off — sparks fly, walls shake, floors vibrate.
I heard about some people who were staying in New York at the Regency Hotel and who deliberately got the suite below ours. Can you believe this? They reserved it almost a month in advance, and they stood up on several chairs and put empty glasses against the ceiling and listened to what was going on. Well, they got an earful. I think the glasses cracked, and they went around telling everybody, “Oh, it’s terrible, it’s a shame about the Burtons. Oh, we heard the most awful fight.” But what the poor schmoes didn’t know is that it’s a vocal exercise really, that’s all.
— Elizabeth Taylor
As I’ve said, I used to test Mike, but I have no need for that with Richard. A little example: We were going to dinner and I was puttering around — I hadn’t showered or anything. Richard said, “Listen, Luv, I’m leaving this house in exactly twenty minutes, so if you’re going with me, get your drag on and come.” In eighteen minutes flat I had my bath, put on my make-up and was sitting in the living room saying, “Hee, hee, I’ve got time for a drink.”
— Elizabeth Taylor
We arrived exactly at the same moment. The top of his car was down, he was terribly sun-tanned and his hair was cut very short. I hadn’t seen him since Cleopatra. I was sitting in the back seat with my parents and he didn’t see us right away. He looked nervous, not happy, but so marvelous. His eyes were like bright blue bulbs, and he was looking around. And all of a sudden I got like first-night fear — I couldn’t get out of the car. I grabbed one arm of my father and one arm of my mother and I said, “Oh, doesn’t he look wonderful? Oh, I don’t know what to do, I’m scared.” I didn’t know how to get out of the car. My mother put her arms around me, and said, “Have a lovely day, baby.” My father put his arms around me and kissed me. By that time, he’d seen us and he walked up to the car and said hello kind of shyly. I said hello, and began to stammer. My father gave me a shove, and I got out and we shook hands. Finally, Richard gave me a peck on the cheek. We stood there looking at each other. I had just washed my hair and I had on a brand-new dress. He’d just washed his hair and it was all shiny. And we said at the same moment, “Well you look marvelous.” And everything we said for about an hour, was you know, at the same moment and the same words. Then there’d be these awful silences when we couldn’t say anything. It was like my first date when I was sixteen, and it was as though he’d never seen a girl before. At last we began to relax and we had lunch at a place overlooking the lake. Then he drove me home. We didn’t even kiss.
— Elizabeth Taylor
I might run from her for a thousand years and she is still my baby child. Our love is so furious that we burn each other out.
— Richard Burton
Richard seemed possessed of superhuman stamina. Their love life appeared to flourish in a pool of alcohol. A flash of Elizabeth’s leg peeking out of the blanket in “that blue nightie he loved” while she read a book in bed would mean the door would be slammed shut and the two of them would make “lovely love,” as he called it. It made them feel like the forbidden lovers they had once been, when they’d lived that “wonderfully nourishing sense of defiance which had given them such outlaw energy in the 1960s.
(Source: inebriatedbitch)
