Reclaiming the Archive: Feminism and Film History

4. The “True Love” of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton

74 The “True Love” of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton The most difficult problem for any actress is knowing the difference between reality and non-reality. Now Richard has given me a sense of reality. With Richard, as with Mike (Todd), I’m above and beyond anything else, a woman. That’s infinitely more fascinating than being an actress, if you ask me. —Elizabeth Taylor, Los Angeles Herald Examiner, July 30, 1968 Elizabeth Taylor’s invocation of the reality of her romantic relation with the actor Richard Burton, as well as her and Burton’s repeated public declarations that they would die without the other, helped to secure for the pair permanent placement in the annals of Hollywood’s most celebrated loves. In 1996, People magazine featured Taylor and Burton in their special double issue, “The Greatest Love Stories of the Century,” and claimed, “through two marriages and 23 years, the lustiest of couples couldn’t live with—or without—each other.”1 Such language evidences the degree to which Taylor and Burton’s romance, which began as an adulterous affair on the set of Cleopatra in 1962, continued to be accorded epic status even some forty-odd years after its inception. That this relationship remains recognizable and even idolized in the twenty-first century might be attributed to its having so closely approximated itself to a script recognizable as that of a once-in-a-lifetime romance—the Burtons were described as utterly dependent on one another and passionately in love, even after years of marriage . Moreover, the pair had a penchant for showcasing their celebrated romance in the multiple films they made together, and especially for ac02 Chapters_4_7.indd 74 1/13/10 11:55 AM 75 The “True Love” of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton cepting roles so nearly aligned with their star persona that they were often considered to be playing themselves on screen.2 In addition to having repeatedly appeared on screen as a couple, Taylor and Burton were a consistent feature in the tabloid press. Gossip magazines charted the pair’s every emotional upheaval and pursued the couple with such zeal that their spats literally made international headlines. Not ones to reject this constant commodification, Taylor and Burton also seemed eager to stage the spectacle of their relationship for the press, their public, and even each other—the pair made a habit out of discussing and performing their notorious bouts, seemingly as much for the edification of their followers as for their own pleasure. Taylor and Burton thus consistently appeared both on screen and in their personal lives to be performing, and quite convincingly at that, the role of great lovers. Borrowing from a postmodern logic, we might say that Taylor and Burton’s love was created through the act of incessantly citing that love on screen and in star discourse, rather than existing in any way outside the Taylor and Burton’s legendary passion finds expression in The Comedians (1967). 02 Chapters_4_7.indd 75 1/13/10 11:55 AM 76 S u z a N N E L E o N a R d realm of performativity. Indeed, it is the argument of this article that the films in which Taylor and Burton appear together as well as the hyperbolic discourses that surrounded them in the form of advertisements, gossip columns , publicity materials, and magazine articles were constitutive of their “true love.” Specifically, this investigation will call on the tenets of star studies, postmodernism, and the burgeoning field of sexuality studies in order to unpack the mechanisms of the couple’s image construction, in an effort to illustrate their romance’s discursivity. at the same time, the project has within its purview the larger aim of demystifying the heterosexual contract. The cultural theorists Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner have usefully defined the term “heteronormativity” to describe how scenes of intimacy, coupling, and kinship become associated with the forms and arrangements of social life. as they argue, in american culture “a whole field of social relations becomes intelligible as heterosexuality, and this privatized sexual culture bestows on its sexual practices a sense of rightness and normalcy.”3 Star discourses, I argue, participate in this process because they reify certain notions of heteronormativity, notions that are in turn codified across a wide social spectrum. While feminism has consistently been critical of the process of romantic mystification and also heterosexual marriage (at the...