Richard Burton slept with three women a week for 30 years
Richard Burton waited until his wife Sybil was asleep before, in the dead of night, creeping out to the woodshed.
One by one, he carefully removed the logs and placed them on the ground. Then, with the stealth of a cat-burglar, he squeezed through an access flap at the back of the shed.
Yes! Standing up again, he found himself within the sumptuous Beverly Hills home of the Hollywood actor Stewart Granger. As he tiptoed down a corridor, he held his breath.
He had good reason to be on edge: not only did Granger possess a collection of firearms, but he was unlikely to give Burton a chance to explain himself.
And what would he say, anyway, if he had the misfortune to be caught? It wasn’t as if he had any excuse. Although the Burtons were house guests of Granger and his wife Jean Simmons, they were staying in a cottage in the grounds.
But Granger, who slept in a separate bedroom from his wife, didn’t hear a thing. Not even when Burton pushed open Simmons’ door, swept her into an embrace and proceeded to make vigorous love to her on a big sheepskin rug. Afterwards, the actor slunk out through the log-flap again and restacked all the wood. Moments later, he was lying beside his sleeping wife.
Amazingly, this wasn’t the last time he risked all for a few hours with Simmons. The secret night-time forays went on for months — yet neither of their spouses ever suspected a thing.
The story of how Richard Burton eventually left Sybil and married the screen siren Elizabeth Taylor (twice) has often been hailed as one of the greatest of Hollywood romances. What is far less well-known is that the actor from the Welsh valleys was continually unfaithful to both his wives.
Indeed, in Burton’s heyday — between 1947 and 1975 — he made love to at least one new woman every other day, with the total tally reaching around 2,500. At times, his promiscuity rivalled even that of the great Seventies playboy Warren Beatty.
The big difference, though, was that Burton was married and made the vast majority of his conquests virtually under the noses of the first two Mrs Burtons. Not only that, but for most of that time, he had a marital sex life that would have sated any other man.
So how are we to account for his astounding one-man rampage through the female sex?
The first thing to be said is that his motivation was quite simple: until his late 40s, Burton had an insatiable appetite for sex. He didn’t need to love the woman he was seducing, or to be loved by her; nor had he any desire to possess her.
If she was willing, he was happy to do the deed anywhere: a dressing-room sofa, a vacant room in a pub, a garden bench, or even — if his wife was out — the marital bed. Often, he never even knew his lover’s name.
Women were drawn to him as if by magnetic force. Many enthused later about his glinting grey-green eyes, full of mischief — but his chief seduction tool was undoubtedly his mellifluous voice.
Blessed with a prodigious memory, he’d usually start by reciting poetry. If that failed, he’d go on to Shakespeare, which he could declaim all night if required. And in the rare event that the woman was still standing, he’d sing — often in Welsh.
It helped, too, that he had a quick wit, charm and a total lack of inhibition when under the influence of alcohol — which was most of the time. He had no shame, either: even the wives of friends, like Simmons, were fair game. The writer Ruth Waterbury, who witnessed his dalliances with the women of Los Angeles in the mid-Fifties, was struck by the fact that he never seemed to make obvious passes.
‘He has a kind of availability about him, and the girls come running,’ she said. ‘He does not implore. He just quietly demands full surrender.’
Frank Ross, who produced two of Burton’s earliest films in Hollywood, was astounded by the respect women had for him, even when he signalled that a relationship was over: ‘I’ve watched some of his girls and you can see they’re bewildered, first by their good luck — and then by their loss of him. Yet when he rejects them, they all go away. They act as though they’ve been momentarily blessed — and that’s enough for them.’
If he’d been alive today, Burton would have been classified as a sex addict and urged to seek treatment. As his close friend, the actor Robert Hardy, remarked: ‘He was Don Juan, and it was a necessity in his nature to have any female who was not under age or terribly ugly.’
But even Hardy was wrong, because one of Burton’s more lengthy affairs was actually with a schoolgirl. Then aged 28 and married to Sybil, he’d bumped into Rosemary Kingsland at a cafe opposite the Old Vic theatre when he was appearing in The Tempest in 1954.
Burton’s sexual adventures had begun in 1944, while at Oxford University, when he lost his virginity at 18 to a mature student he met in a pub. Once initiated, he started rampaging through the town’s female population.
A pretty girl with thick dark hair and flawless skin, she was then just 14 — though she deflected questions about her age. Mesmerised by Burton, she started skipping hockey practice to hang around the theatre. ‘I think I was flaunting myself a bit,’ she said.
After a few meetings, Burton took her back to a flat that belonged to a friend, where she happily lost her virginity. From then on, they met there most Wednesdays.
By the end of 1956, Rosemary was pregnant. His response was immediate: ‘You’ll have to get rid of it’ — and he paid for her to have an abortion.
Later, he told her he was scared that he might be jailed, but claimed it was every man’s fantasy to make love to a schoolgirl. The affair came to a natural end when he moved to Switzerland soon afterwards for tax purposes.
Burton’s sexual adventures had begun in 1944, while at Oxford University, when he lost his virginity at 18 to a mature student he met in a pub. Once initiated, he started rampaging through the town’s female population. Alarmed by his promiscuity, Burton’s family put pressure on him to marry the blameless Sybil Williams, a girl from South Wales, whom he’d met on a film set.
The marriage was in all ways but one a great success. What Sybil didn’t know was that the day after the wedding in 1949, he met the actress Claire Bloom — then aged 17 — and quickly fell in love. Their relationship was finally consummated after he bet a fellow actor a pint that he could take Bloom’s virginity.
Bloom recalled: ‘We made love quietly in my room with my mother sleeping upstairs. Richard left me in the early morning to go back home, and I went to sleep happy and childishly thrilled that I was a “woman” at last.’
She gave him the key to the house, and Burton would often sneak into her bedroom. Before sunrise, he’d go back to Sybil, telling her he’d been out drinking all night with friends
Even two besotted women weren’t enough for him, though. After he and Sybil moved to London, he took advantage of her frequent absences on tour with a theatre company. Collecting random girls from pubs, cinema queues and buses, he’d take each in turn back for a tumble on the marital bed.
The sheer quantity of his casual conquests, say his friends, was astounding. And then he discovered the frustrated wives of Hollywood . . .
Arriving in Los Angeles in 1952, he found that almost every woman he met gazed at him with hungry and inviting eyes. One married starlet in her mid-20s — never named because of her powerful husband — walked into his trailer on the set of My Cousin Rachel, locked the door and removed her white mink coat to reveal she was wearing only underwear.
Even Sybil’s arrival in the city failed to cramp his style. Not only was he having an affair with Jean Simmons — who co-starred with him in The Robe — but he also bedded another actress in the same movie.
The only time Burton nearly came unstuck was at a New Year’s Eve party, attended by the cream of the Hollywood in-crowd. At midnight, he was seen kissing Simmons on the lips for the full 12 gongs. Everyone was transfixed, then Sybil dashed up to her husband and gave him a resounding slap across the face, before flouncing off. Burton was momentarily stunned and the music stopped.
Lee Remick said Burton had 'the marvellous quality of making a woman feel as if she’s the only one in the world worth talking to, and it’s bliss'
Realising that they might no longer be welcome at the Grangers’ house, Burton and Sybil — by then convinced that her husband had only been flirting — moved out. Burton, of course, simply carried on sleeping with Simmons, as well as the wives of various Hollywood executives. By the time he went back to the UK, it was said that he’d caused more than a dozen husbands to file for divorce.
A year later, he was back in town — but this time, he left the wives alone and scythed through some of Hollywood’s leading actresses, including his co-star in the sentimental 1955 film Prince Of Players, Maggie McNamara.
Another conquest was the starlet Lee Remick. ‘He has the marvellous quality of making a woman feel as if she’s the only one in the world worth talking to, and it’s bliss,’ she said later.
Even the love goddess Lana Turner, who co-starred with Burton in The Rains Of Ranchipur, enjoyed a fling with him in his trailer. Burton reportedly said: ‘She set out to get me, and I let myself get caught. Why not? Who’s going to turn down Lana Turner?’
After he’d also bedded many of the extras, producer Frank Ross said: ‘Richard is probably the most notable seducer of our time. He is sexually inexhaustible and, apparently, he gives a satisfactory performance any time, any place, anywhere, under any conditions.’
In 1957, for the first time since meeting Claire Bloom — with whom he was still having an affair — he fell in love, with his co-star in the Broadway comedy Time Remembered. Susan Strasberg, then just 19, was strikingly beautiful and similar in appearance to Bloom.
Immediately smitten, she kept Burton on a string for months before eventually inviting him into her bed. Even the arrival of his wife and baby daughter, Kate, failed to deter the lovers.
‘He surpassed all my childhood fantasies when he laid his passion at my feet,’ said Strasberg. And Sybil? As always, she refused to believe anything was going on.
After Burton returned to the UK, Strasberg was distraught, taking to her bed for days on end with one of his old T-shirts. Some months later, she flew out to see him, and headed straight for the set where he was filming Look Back In Anger, with co-stars Claire Bloom and Mary Ure.
Burton was having the time of his life: not only was he back with his darling Bloom, but he was also sleeping with Ure — the wife of the playwright John Osborne — not to mention his own wife. But even he had to question whether he could manage a fourth lover.
As soon as Strasberg arrived at his dressing-room, she flung herself into his arms for a passionate kiss. Moments later, Bloom skipped through the door.
For almost five seconds, the two women simply looked at each other in shock. The incorrigible Burton, however, was merely bemused: he’d never realised, he admitted later, just how similar his lovers were in looks.Eventually, Bloom screamed: ‘F*** off, the pair of you’, and stormed off. Strasberg flew off the next day, but not before she’d contemplated throwing herself off Waterloo Bridge.
As for Burton, he was soon collecting scalps again. In 1959, he went back to Hollywood and made a film for Warner Brothers called The Bramble Bush. On set, Burton was having affairs with both his co-star Angie Dickinson and a starlet called Barbara Rush.
That year, Dickinson’s marriage to Gene Dickinson, the American football star, broke up. Some laid the blame on Burton.
Finally pinned down by a woman who had a chance of holding him in check, the great Welsh lothario ceased his extracurricular activities. For a while. Aware of his weakness, Taylor had warned him from the start of their marriage in 1964 that she had zero tolerance for infidelity.
He, meanwhile, even picked up a stewardess on a flight to the East Coast.
Then, back on Broadway two years later, he energetically worked his way through most of the 20 girls in the chorus of Camelot. The good-natured chorus-girls, fully aware of what he was doing, used to manipulate the lyrics in one of their songs — ‘I wonder what the King is doing tonight’ — to sound surprisingly like: ‘I wonder who the King is sc***ing tonight.’
Straight from Camelot, Burton flew to Rome for the making of the film Cleopatra, where he was soon in the throes of a tumultuous affair with Elizabeth Taylor. Unlike his other entanglements, though, this one was making headlines round the globe that Sybil couldn’t fail to see.
Losing his nerve, Burton told Taylor he was going back to his wife. Taylor, who’d taken an apparently accidental overdose of sleeping pills after being dumped, reacted with jealous fury. Once she’d recovered, she pulled out all the stops to get her lover back.
Finally pinned down by a woman who had a chance of holding him in check, the great Welsh lothario ceased his extracurricular activities. For a while. Aware of his weakness, Taylor had warned him from the start of their marriage in 1964 that she had zero tolerance for infidelity.
But even she couldn’t stop him returning to his old tricks. During the filming of When Eagles Dare, while Liz Taylor was absent, he resumed his casual affair with co-star Mary Ure. After that, Taylor made sure she was with on set with Burton every day in 1969 for the shooting of Anne Of The Thousand Days.
But neither her vigilance nor her charms were proof against the ethereal glamour of his co-star, the 26-year-old French-Canadian actress Geneviève Bujold. Burton’s big chance came when Taylor was hospitalised with piles — and the resulting affair with Bujold carried on for many years.
In 1972, Burton enjoyed a romance with the French actress Nathalie Delon on the set of Bluebeard, and there were strong rumours that he was also bedding pin-up Raquel Welch.
The final straw for his marriage, though, came in 1974 when he flew alone to California to make a film called The Klansman.
During the shoot, he took up with a teenage waitress — given the nickname locally of Miss Pepsi of Butte County — a hotel receptionist and a string of other women.
Arriving in the midst of this maelstrom, Taylor quickly realised that her marriage was over. As the world knows, the couple divorced and then remarried 16 months later — but their reunion was short-lived.
By now a confirmed alcoholic with severe health problems, Burton delivered the death blow to their second marriage by having an affair with the model Suzy Hunt.
As far as anyone knows, he was faithful to his two last wives — Suzy followed by Sally Hay — but that was because, by his 50th birthday, he’d simply run out of energy.
Burned out by a life of debauchery, he was forced to give up his favourite hobby. But it had certainly been a good run while it lasted.
Extracted from And God Created Burton by Tom Rubython, published by the Myrtle Press at £20.
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