Furious Love by Sam Kashner Page A

inches. It was the beginning of Elizabeth’s sense that she was ultimately in control of her fate, and if she wanted something badly enough, she would find a way to have it.
    She also learned at an early age that movie-making was hard, backbreaking work. “I worked harder on that film than on any other movie in my life,” she later said, spending hours riding a temperamental horse named King Charles, who would be Velvet’s horse, Pi, in the movie. Through it all, Francis Taylor said little, though he did put his foot down after the studio pulled two of Elizabeth’s baby teeth and replaced them with false stubs in order to put a set of braces in her mouth, which the role called for. That she endured, but Francis backed her up when she refused to have her long, lustrous hair cut for the role.
    When National Velvet was released in 1943, it was a tremendous success, which made the now twelve-year-old a star. It also brought her an amazing salary for a child—negotiated by her mother—$30,000, plus a bonus of $15,000 (close to $450,000 in today’s purchasing power). But, more important for Elizabeth, it brought her a horse. She asked Berman if she could have King Charles for her own, andthe studio decided to make her the gift (provided she would lend the horse back to the studio whenever it was needed). From then on, Elizabeth would come to expect—and even demand—expensive, meaningful gifts from her producers and directors at the end of a shoot. And she usually got them.
    But Elizabeth continued to chafe under Sara’s watchful control. She adored her mother, and the two were very close, but she would eventually have to rebel against such closeness. Margaret Kelly, Elizabeth’s body double in National Velvet , recalled cringing every time she heard Sara Taylor call out, “Oh, Elizabeth, darling. Come along,” to which Elizabeth would meekly reply, “Coming, Mother dear.”
    The differences in Elizabeth’s and Richard’s upbringing brought about a curious paradox: Elizabeth, raised as an upper-class girl, would delight in acting the vulgarian, with a lusty joy in using four-letter words and winning belching contests, which she indulged in with her costar Rock Hudson on the set of Giant , thirteen years after making National Velvet. Yet Richard, son of an impoverished miner, saw himself as nobility. Of all the major Shakespearean roles he would play in his life—Prince Hal, Henry V, Othello, Iago, Hamlet, Petruchio—he most identified with the noble Roman warrior Coriolanus, who disdained the treacherous crowds of Rome. “I’m the son of a Welsh miner,” he later told Kenneth Tynan, “and one would expect me to be at my happiest playing peasants, people of the earth, but in actual fact I am much happier playing princes and kings…I’m never really comfortable playing people from the working class.”
    Another contrast: Elizabeth would have her parents with her for a very long time (Sara Taylor, in fact, died in her nineties). Richard was virtually orphaned by his parents, raised by his sister, Cecilia “Cissy” James, and later taken under the wing of Philip Burton, a Welsh teacher and dramatist who gave Richard his name. When Richard Burton was informed in 1957 that his father had died, the first words out of his mouth were, “Which one?” Indeed, there were at least two fathers Burton could claim to have lost.
    His first, of course, was the man who sired him, a hard-drinking coal miner named Richard Jenkins, known as Dic Jenkins and called “Dadi Ni” by his seven boys and four girls—Tom, Ifor, Cecilia, Will, David, Verdun (named after the great battle of World War I), Hilda, Katherine, Edith, Richard, and Graham. Burton was named Richard Walter Jenkins, after his father, and called “Rich” by his family. He was the twelfth of thirteen children (two daughters died in infancy), born on