Even during the terminal decline of publishing and literacy rates in the United States, it’s remarkable that a book like Roger Lewis’ Erotic Vagrancy exists at all. The fact that it’s garnered a not insignificant audience is even more surprising, and encouraging—publishing may never know the riches of the 1990s again, but an enthusiasm for reading and a real culture must come back, otherwise we’ll be living in the service of the machines that made us into unwitting cyborgs 15 years ago. Lewis started writing Erotic Vagrancy right around then, and towards the end of the book, he talks about his initial moment of inspiration: sick in the hospital with severe diabetic complications, he watched the news coverage of the death of Kim Jong-Il.
Fading in and out of focus, he struck on an obsession that would last years, far past finishing the book in 2023. Around the same point in the book, he talks about his previous subjects—Charles Hawtrey, Laurence Olivier, Peter Sellars, Anthony Burgess—and how he can’t stand to think about them anymore (Hawtrey excluded). But Burton and Taylor? The appreciation and the fascination has only grown, an obsession maintained, one which takes you to films no one’s ever seen, like Under Milk Wood, a 1973 tax shelter movie based on Dylan Thomas’ play—a good movie, even if Taylor’s hardly in it. But this was the kind of movie that only existed because of Taylor and, to a lesser extent, Burton. “Dick and Liz” overwhelmed their final collaboration, a 1983 staging of Noël Coward’s Private Lives in London. Audiences loved it, but critics tore it apart. Twenty years after Cleopatra, they were no longer a new, fresh phenomenon, no longer something to look at in awe; they were there to be gawked at, no more surprises.
Lewis writes at length about Taylor and Burton’s excesses, separate and together: her childhood in the studio system, her dead friends (Jimmy, Monty, Roddy), her dozen brushes with death and regular hospital stays (her early 1980s cameo on General Hospital riffed on her many illnesses); his abusive father figure Philip, his brother Ivor (whose death may have been at Burton’s hands), and his alcoholism. Burton died in 1984 at 58, but he looked, moved, and sounded far older, a sick man beset with cirrhosis, kidney problems, heart problems, destroyed joints, and absolutely nothing to look forward to. He told many people that his final words would be “Elizabeth… Elizabeth…” and they probably were. She said as much: “It feels like we’re still together.”
Erotic Vagrancy isn’t a chronological biography, nor one that gets mired in narrative or barely concealed agendas; Lewis himself is a presence in the book, and while his approach is subjective and particular, he points out the holes in other, more “definitive” biographies, whether they be self-serving distortions by Taylor in her memoirs or Burton in his diaries; or other biographers and former friends and lovers getting basic details and dates wrong. I haven’t read a “proper” biography of either Taylor or Burton, and after reading Erotic Vagrancy, I certainly couldn’t give you the A to Z of their lives. Lewis’ whirlwind prose deals with the totality of their lives and their marriages simultaneously, producing a blizzard of associations and quotes and scenes that produces a more vivid picture than any standard biography even could. Erotic Vagrancy makes these movie stars real again, even as they fade into relative obscurity as the 21st century lurches forward.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @MonicaQuibbits