Love Letters: Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton

For the Baby Boomer generation and those who came before them, there can be few relationships comparable in memory to that of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. These two actors provided much entertainment in their careers, but it is their personal relationship that springs first to memory when the names are mentioned in tandem.

Elizabeth Taylor has made the couple's love letters available to authors Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger whose book, "Furious Love: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and the Marriage of the Century" becomes available for purchase June 15, 2010. Taylor has stated her motivation for sharing the private correspondence is an attempt "to keep Burton's memory alive" (Time.com).

As anyone with private or public knowledge of the couple will attest, there was always a smoldering passion between these two people. Unfortunately, as much of the passion seemed to be of the negative brand as it was of the positive kind.

From the vivid and sensual characters the two actors portrayed in the movie where they met each other, "Cleopatra," Taylor and Burton morphed into their own love affair. It was 1962 and the fact that both were still very much married made the affair a scandal at the time, even provoking the Vatican to make a statement condemning their adulterous relationship.

An excerpt from one of Burton's letters to Taylor at the time stated, "If you leave me, I shall have to kill myself. There is no life without you" (Time.com). In another letter he wrote, "One of these days I will wake up - which I think I have done already - and realize to myself that I really do love. Who invented that concept? I have wracked my shabby brain and can find no answer" (Time.com)
The two were first married from 1964 to 1974, divorced, and married again in 1975, only to divorce in 1976.

Taylor admitted there is one letter she has kept from publication, which is the final letter Burton wrote to her, one that she did not receive in the mail until she returned home from his memorial service in 1984. Burton had written to her as he lay dying from a brain hemorrhage.

"Vanity Fair" is making the Taylor-Burton story it's cover story for the month of July 2010, which will be available June 8, 2010. Theirs was a romance for the ages, every bit as tragic as Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet." The difference, of course, is that this relationship involved two very real human beings.

Sources: Time.com
MSNBC.com