Playboy Interview: Richard Burton

Kenneth Tynan, who conducted this interview for Playboy, is widely esteemed as Britain's most articulate and iconoclastic commentator on the theater. Writing with a rare authority gained from his multifarious background as a stage director, movie script editor and television writer-producer, he has become internationally known as a drama critic (for the London Observer since 1954, and for The New Yorker, succeeding the late Woolcott Gibbs, from 1958 to 1960); trenchant essayist on drama in England, Europe and America; and author of six books (including an illuminating profile of Sir Alec Guinness). Lauded by literary critic Alfred Kazin as a "virtuoso performer in journalism" for his barbed and burnished prose, he has also earned a reputation as an engineer of reportorial coups: He once arranged and presided at the only meeting between Tennessee Williams and Ernest Hemingway; he is reputed to be the only writer who ever interviewed the reclusive Greta Garbo; and he is one of the few journalists in the world to whom the press-beleaguered Richard Burton has consented to speak for publication in the two years since "Cleopatra" began production. Tynan writes of their most recent meeting -- occasioned by Playboy's request for an exclusive interview -- in the following preamble:

"Richard Burton is a wealthy, seductive and extremely gifted Welshman with a checkered past, a turbulent present and an unpredictable future. At the age of 37, he has behind him a stage career that once led responsible critics -- myself among the m-- to hail him as the natural successor to Sir Laurence Olivier. 'Burton is first and last an animal actor,' I wrote of him, 'with an animal's accidental grace and unsentimental passions; offstage he has the dangerous high spirits of an unbroken colt. What he has done to Shakespeare is to abolish the tradition of vocalized word music, replacing it with something more personal -- the sullen poetry of the soil.'

"That was a dozen years ago. Since then the films have increasingly claimed him, and his course in their shadow kingdom has been bumpy, reaching its culmination in the vast untitled portrait -- depicting Burton and a recumbent odalisque -- which is displayed on Times Square outside the Manhattan residence of 'Cleopatra.' The supine houri is of course Elizabeth Taylor, and Burton is Antony, the Mark of her esteem. Thanks to his connection with the most expensive picture ever made, and his relationship with the most expensive actress ever paid, Burton began to hit the headlines hard, and has often come close to replying in kind to the journalists who wrote them. Since his career entered its Egyptian phase, we have met only twice -- once in Paris last fall, when I waited with an apprehensive Miss Taylor, whom he had never seen on the screen before, to hear his verdict on 'Suddenly Last Summer' (he thought she was splendid); and again this year when I went to London's Dorchester Hotel for Playboy to learn the current state of his opinions on life and art.

"As we shook hands in the lobby, his large, watchful face -- cratered like the moon -- broke into a broad, crafty smile, as if we were schoolboys jointly bent on some act of terrible mischief. We took lunch in the hotel restaurant, discussing the Duke of Argyll's spectacular divorce, then much in the news; Burton scoffed at the judge's splenetic insistence on describing the Duchess as an immoral woman. Across the room I noticed Laurence Olivier, who stopped by to talk on his way out. Burton told him that he hopes before long to make a film of 'Macbeth.' This was for many years a pet project of Olivier's, but lack of funds caused it to be shelved. Betraying no resentment, he suggested that Burton might do worse than to consider Vivien Leigh for the role of Lady Macbeth; but something in the Welshman's reaction conveyed to me that the part was already cast.

"Lunch over, we repaired to Burton's suite, pausing at the elevator door to make way for an emerging passenger with drooping eyebrows and a general air of desiccated grandeur; by name, Harold Macmillan. Burton's drawing room commands a wide-screen vista of Hyde Park, and over the fireplace hangs a Van Gogh landscape lately acquired by Miss Taylor, who lives in the suite next door. The lady herself floated silently in and out, wearing pink lounging pajamas and no makeup. I switched on the tape recorder."

[Q] Playboy: As the son of a Glamorganshire coal miner in South Wales, what inspired you to scale the social, economic and educational barriers separating you from an acting career in Britain's class-stratified society?

[A] Burton: The process was quite accidental. I happened to see my first professional stage production in Cardiff when I was about 16. I was appalled by the inefficiency of the company, and being the original man who said, "If he can do that, so can I; it looks terribly easy," I became fascinated by the idea of earning so much money for what I considered to be so little work. Until then, I had thought life would demand of me something far more exacting. The people I came from were poor, and I thought I'd be expected to contribute to their betterment by leaving grammar school and going to work in the mines -- youthful idealism, et cetera. I'd no idea then I was going to be an actor and become spuriously, speciously, meretriciously successful.

[Q] Playboy: You sound as if you dislike acting.

[A] Burton: It doesn't especially appeal to me. I hardly ever go to see plays or films, and I've never been much interested in the so-called craft or art of acting.

[Q] Playboy: Was the prospect of easy money your only motivation, then?

[A] Burton: Well, there was one thing which excited me about that otherwise lamentable performance in Cardiff: the applause at the end. That was thrilling.

[Q] Playboy: Was this what decided you to abandon the mines for the stage?

[A] Burton: It helped. But at first I didn't think there was a career in it for such as me. I thought, as you suggested, that it would be immensely difficult to get one's foot in the door. I imagined that, like most things in Britain, it was a closed shop. It's difficult for somebody who comes from a majority to know quite what it's like to be in a minority, to be a Jew or a Welshman or an Irishman. What it does to a Negro, I shudder to imagine. I remember when I first went up to Oxford I sometimes got belligerent when chaps with posh accents from inferior public schools -- yes, I became a snob, too -- would patronize me and call me "Taff." I used to get a bit frenetic and break noses and things like that. But even today, in spite of fame -- or notoriety in my case -- I still meet people who ask me what school I went to. The old school tie and the Establishment are still as powerful as ever. Despite the anti-Establishment movement that's been going on, snobbery is just as great or even greater in England. You get the same thing in America, too, but there it's more concerned with financial status than blood background. Life is always going to be a battle to the death, even in an ideal Aldous Huxley world, where some are delegated to be peasants, and some mechanics, and some philosophers. There will always be competition within each particular field and class. What I didn't suspect, though, when I set out as an actor, is that if you happen to have a lucky combination of phagocytes or something, you could make more than a fair living at it.

[Q] Playboy: Was your own combination a lucky one from the start?

[A] Burton: Not entirely. I spoke with a profound Welsh accent and nobody understood a word I said. So I had to teach myself to speak with a standard accent: you can't call it English, but at the same time it's not American, and I don't think it's Welsh anymore. I still do my vocal exercises rigorously because I believe it's an essential part of an actor's equipment. I spend roughly 20 minutes in the shower every morning, and it kills two birds with one stone. I have become one of the cleanest actors in the world -- which may be why I'm losing my hair -- and for 20 minutes or so I shout, I scream, I cry, I speak immensely complicated poetry at tremendous speed to increase my ability to speak fast and still be clear. I become basso profundo, I become castrato tenore, I do the lot, so that my voice can hit the back row of the stalls with absolute clarity. I may not have a beautiful voice, or even a good one, but it's certainly penetrating.

[Q] Playboy: Do you feel that this sort of vocal training is as important for an actor as the more fashionable disciplines of the Stanislavsky Method?

[A] Burton: I think Stanislavsky is like all the other great leaders of acting, or of anything else. Like Jesus Christ, he tends to help the weak. The weak rely on Christ, the strong do not. It always astounds me when I hear Method actors explaining why they protect themselves under the callus of Stanislavsky's doctrine. They stand for half-an-hour in the wings before they can go on, because they need the sustenance of some mystic communion with Stanislavsky, Jung, Adler and Freud. I will admit that a strange chemistry takes place in me when I'm acting on stage, a total immersion in the role which lends verisimilitude to Stanislavsky's idea that you become what you're acting. My wife Sybil, to whom I've been married for something like 14 years, knows exactly how I'll behave while I'm working on a new part. During Coriolanus I was arrogant and intolerable, I despised the working class, and I was a fighter in pubs, liable to throw a punch at anyone. When I played Iago, I was devious offstage as well as on. When I played Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night, I was the jolliest, cuddliest little man you ever met. As an actor, however, I'm a very burly boy. I have a very muscular intelligence and the idea of Stanislavskian self-indulgence is anathema to me. I hate this public display of a personal rat biting a personal stomach.

[Q] Playboy: Marlon Brando uses the Method. How do you feel about him?

[A] Burton: I don't think he needed it, and in fact it may have damaged him. The actor's yen for self-pity is a very dangerous thing, and if you allow yourself to indulge in this tremulous mumbling it can weaken everything you do. It seems to me that the Method, as practiced by Lee Strasberg and taught to people like Brando, has become mutated into an attitude toward films. It has encouraged a sort of quiet, personal withdrawal into the intimacy of the camera, rather than letting the people in the cheap seats hear what you are saying. The vocal blaze that hits the back of the balcony -- the scream of Olivier in Oedipus -- this is something very different. Perhaps Brando should have developed that power, but I hate to be pontifical about it. He's still an instinctively great actor, and there are very few about.

[Q] Playboy: In a recent Look magazine cover story, you went so far as to say that Brando is the finest actor America has ever produced. Why do you think so?

[A] Burton: What fascinates me in a great actor is the unexpected. Brando is unexpected. With most actors, I know exactly what they're going to do before they do it. With Brando I'm not sure. He can surprise me -- not in an outrageous, vulgar, tasteless way, but in the proper way.

[Q] Playboy: Does Laurence Olivier surprise you as an actor?

[A] Burton: Continually. Not emotionally, though, as Brando can. Olivier surprises me with his fantastic flair for technical virtuosity. He attempts astonishing things and they usually come off with perfect taste. He has an absolute knowledge of his audience and a tremendous assumption of power over them, which is something very rare.

[Q] Playboy: You were once regarded as the heir apparent to Olivier as the crowned head of classical drama. Do you feel you have any histrionic qualities in common with him?

[A] Burton: Well, I bear a superficial physical resemblance to him, and our voices unfortunately have the same timbre, but as an actor I'm very different. I think he's cerebral, intellectual, a cunning actor, a man who approaches each part with enormous forethought. I don't; I go straight at it on instinct. I'm not a clever actor in the ordinary sense. I think I'm a clever man, but I'm not a clever actor.

[Q] Playboy: In the 1930s and 1940s Olivier and John Gielgud were the great rivals in the field of British classical acting. Many people hoped that you and Paul Scofield would carry on a similar rivalry in the 1950s; but it didn't happen. Do you have any regrets?

[A] Burton: It might have made an interesting combination, because in many ways we are perfect foils for each other -- Paul being evasive and meandering and me being very straight. He's tall and willowy, I'm short and thick. His voice is delicate where mine is brass. But we never got together because we were mostly operating in different fields. Paul's was mainly commercial -- the West End and Shaftesbury Avenue: and mine, oddly enough, was noncommercial -- the Old Vic and Stratford-upon-Avon.

[Q] Playboy: Your Old Vic triumph as Coriolanus in 1954 was among the first of a succession of luminous Shakespearean portrayals which soon established you as one of the leading classical actors in the English-speaking world. Do you feel, as do some critics, that this was perhaps the finest performance of your career?

[A] Burton: Well, I enjoyed it enormously, for it demanded of me exactly what I was able to give. I felt quite at home in the role, for basically I'm a peasant actor, a proletarian actor, and Coriolanus, in a sense, is like a miners' leader who's reneged against his class. Though I've played kings and princes almost exclusively, I have an absolute knowledge of how the working class would behave on stage, and someday I'd actually like to play the part of a Welsh miner -- if it isn't one of those parts where the boy says things like, "I will take you where the corn is green."

[Q] Playboy: In what Shakespearean role have you felt least at home?

[A] Burton: As Ferdinand in The Tempest.

[Q] Playboy: Why?

[A] Burton: Because I decided I couldn't play it before I began. I think Ferdinand is utterly unplayable, dead from the word go.

[Q] Playboy: Do you often decide ahead of time that you can't play a part?

[A] Burton: Usually not before rehearsals start. But I've sometimes had terrible doubts once they're under way.

[Q] Playboy: It's been said that you're also petrified by opening nights and can't sleep the night before. Is that true?

[A] Burton: Yes. But it depends on what I'm playing. If it's Hamlet, you have to fiddle about with rapiers or épées or whatever they are, and it can be dreadfully important if you make a slip. On the second night or the 99th night it doesn't matter, because you can always cover up, but on the first night it can wreck the production. When you make your first entrance as Henry V, for example, coming down a long flight of stairs with an enormously long train on your back, all you can think of is: Will I get to that throne? Will I be able to swirl the cloak around and sit on it, as I endlessly did at rehearsals? What if I trip? What if I bugger it up? But there are worse things than that. What if you dry up in the middle of "To be or not to be"? The whole audience and the cast and the stagehands know what the next line is, but you go absolutely blank. Everyone jokes about drying up, and one tells stories about it: Olivier dries up, John Gielgud never stops drying up. But it can throw an actor for hours, maybe for days, or maybe forever. It's a harrowing business. And it's not much better in modern plays, except that the worry is more private: Only you and the cast and the author, who's pacing up and down at the back of the stalls, know exactly what you ought to say next. But the effect is the same, especially if you're the boss of the play, the dominating force. The slightest mistake, and the actor who speaks next is thrown, then somebody else, and so on: it becomes a chain reaction. When I first began playing enormously famous parts at the Old Vic and Stratford, I was terribly worried that I wouldn't get through the evening. There were times, for example, when Hamlet overawed me. But I soon found out that I could get through the evening and that hardly anyone else could. I had the stamina -- physical, intellectual or what-have-you -- and I would always survive.

[Q] Playboy: You mentioned feeling occasionally "overawed" by Hamlet. Were you, perhaps, daunted by the complexity of the role or the greatness of the play?

[A] Burton: On the contrary. I regard Hamlet as a play of the most primitive and elementary ideas, clothed in the most massive language. It's an elaborate, evocative, fabulous means of dressing up the obvious. It appears to be an obscure play merely because the author happened to be a verbal genius. The fact that the words are so convolved and curious is what makes Hamlet so fascinating to watch -- and so boring to perform; for there isn't a line in it that isn't infinitely, effortlessly speakable. It's much more fun to attempt something that isn't speakable.

[Q] Playboy: For example?

[A] Burton: Say you're confronted with a play that is clearly bad: it's like being challenged to solve some fascinating puzzle; you must discover how, by subtlety and skill, by pauses and variations of cadence and inflection, to use your own particular hurl and sweep with the English language to convince the audience that the speech you are making is heart-rending or funny or whatever you want it to be.

[Q] Playboy: Despite your boredom with the role, no less a critic than Sir Winston Churchill so admired your portrayal of Hamlet -- which he called "as exciting and virile as any I can remember" -- that he later selected you to impersonate his voice as the narrator of Winston Churchill -- The Valiant Years, a widely acclaimed TV documentary series based on his history of World War II. Do you return his high regard?

[A] Burton: There are other men I admire: Napoleon, Marlborough, the Duke of Wellington, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar -- all of whom actually did the things every one of us would like to do. But Churchill is a prize, heart-rending example of the kind of person I would most like to be. He has been called a permanent schoolboy, a kind of petrified adolescent, and it's probably true; but give or take a blow. I'd rather be him than practically anyone. Being a Socialist, of course, I also despise him: yet I only wish we could produce--in any party--another man who so dominates the imagination, who is powerful and good and absolute in his judgment of things. But we are all nobodies, like the chap we saw coming out of the lift today. As Hamlet said, "We are arrant knaves all. Believe none of us." Or even better: "What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?" As you can see, what interests me about the theater is that you can have extraordinary words to say.

[Q] Playboy: Are there any modern playwrights who offer words as extraordinary as those spoken by Hamlet?

[A] Burton: In Hamlet, as I said, the ideas are nil and the language is everything. But with the new playwrights, the ideas are nothing and the language also is nothing.

[Q] Playboy: You starred in the film version of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger. Does this apply to his work as well?

[A] Burton: Not if we're talking about Look Back in Anger, which is an elegant, passionate and highly articulate play. One is invited to say incredible things, to speak enormous speeches with tremendous gusto. It might have been written by a lesser Shakespeare. But the others are writing for a writers' theater, and I act for an actors' theater. Their performers are reduced to puppets who move about the stage at the will of an offstage voice. They're beyond my scope. Waiting for Godot is playable, I suppose; it doesn't make sense, but it's playable. And so is Albee's Zoo Story, regardless of what you may think of its content. But I get no intellectual nourishment from Ionesco and the others. What the hell is a rhinoceros doing in a theater? You can't play it, it's boring to watch, it has no ideas, it has no magic, it has no poetry.

[Q] Playboy: Do you derive any more nourishment from the works of the longer-established, less experimental modern playwrights?

[A] Burton: Such as whom?

[Q] Playboy: Let's start with Arthur Miller.

[A] Burton: He's a very able writer--but totally humorless, and therefore out of my ken.

[Q] Playboy: How about Tennessee Williams?

[A] Burton: There is only one line in all of his plays that I consider memorable, and that is a stage direction in A Streetcar Named Desire, where he writes about "a tinny piano being played with the infatuated fluency of brown fingers." Otherwise, Williams is simply too colloquial for me. I like extravagant flights of rhetoric, and he simply doesn't provide them.

[Q] Playboy: What do you think of Eugene O'Neill?

[A] Burton: Hopeless. No good. The phoniest playwright I've ever read. Verbally he's uninspired, and his situations are bizarre without the saving grace of poetry. In fact, a lot of O'Neill reads like a banal rewrite of Titus Andronicus. I can't understand why he's considered to be a major writer. Is it because he has an Irish name or something? I can't recall a single memorable moment in all his plays. As for acting in O'Neill--as I did once or twice when I was younger -- it's like walking a tightrope. It defeats me. I think he's unplayable.

[Q] Playboy: Do you share the esteem in which many critics and dramaphiles currently hold Bertolt Brecht?

[A] Burton: I'm aware that he's a tremendous person, but the language escapes me. I've read his Baal in English and found it intolerably self-conscious, but I understand that Brecht wrote originally in a rather poetic vein. I've acquired French, and enough Italian to know what Dante is about, and someday I'll have a go at German to find out what his virtues really are, because I don't quite get them in English. But you run into these language problems all the time. I'd read Anouilh's Becket in French before taking on the title role in the film version, which I'm now doing with Peter O'Toole; it wasn't until I read it in English that I realized there's a special kind of French wittiness which is totally untranslatable.

[Q] Playboy: Because of your increasing commitment to films, it's been several years since your last performance at Stratford or Old Vic. Though your repertoire of memorized roles is considered exceptionally large even for a classical actor, do you think you may have gotten a bit rusty with some of the standard repertory parts?

[A] Burton: Well, give or take a misquotation, I still know Richard II, Hamlet, Lear and Henry V, among others; and Angelo in Measure for Measure, which I've never played. Oddly enough, the parts I haven't played are the ones I remember best, because I work away at them when nobody's looking. I fancy I could have a fair go at Macbeth, for example; but I hate the play.

[Q] Playboy: Yet you've said you want to make a movie of it.

[A] Burton: I wouldn't want to do it on the stage, but I have a visual image of it as a film. And I have ideas about casting which some people would think were impossible: Elizabeth Taylor, for instance, as Lady Macbeth.

[Q] Playboy: Do you feel she's right for the part?

[A] Burton: Indeed I do. For one thing, she speaks poetry rather well. And for another, she's very receptive to big, imperious ideas.

[Q] Playboy: Apropos your plans to perform Shakespeare on film, many of your critics and admirers--including Paul Scofield -- feel that your impact on the screen is far less potent than on the stage. Time magazine said recently that your "strongest characteristics -- controlled flamboyance and overwhelming physical presence -- are stunted and sealed off on film." Do you feel that's true?

[A] Burton: It may well be. In films your power is strictly limited by the whim of the director and the cameraman. But it all depends on what you stick to as an actor. Most of the great stars of the cinema have spent their lives playing more or less the same part. Because the audience is so enormous, they've had to establish themselves in a certain way, so that the public will feel reassured when it sees them again. But if you're an actor like Olivier--well, look at his first two films. After Wuthering Heights and Rebecca he was an enormous film star. Then, with Henry V and Hamlet, he elected to become a Shakespearean film star, and suddenly the audience wasn't sure what he was going to give them. Was he going to be a chap with a long nose and a hunch-back, or was he going to be a Daphne du Maurier hero? He deliberately destroyed his public image. In my case, having no particular image worth preserving, I've played very different parts in every picture I've done, largely out of necessity.

[Q] Playboy: However varied your roles, you've been quoted as saying that you have disliked almost all the movies in which you've appeared. To shorten the list, which of them have you found un-objectionable?

[A] Burton: I haven't seen most of them, so I can't judge. I can only tell you the ones I liked being in and thought might be good. I enjoyed working in my first film, The Last Days of Dolwyn, and My Cousin Rachel and The Desert Rats, and Look Back in Anger. But I've disenjoyed almost every other film I've made.

[Q] Playboy: Including Cleopatra?

[A] Burton: Definitely. My decision to do Cleopatra was prompted by laziness and cupidity --I find money very interesting --and by the fact that 20th Century-Fox said they could buy me out of Camelot, which I'd been playing for nine months on Broadway and had signed to play for a year. Also, Joe Mankiewicz, who wrote and directed the film, was an old friend, and he promised me it would be all over in 20 weeks. I actually worked in it for 48 weeks. If I'd known I was going to spend nearly a year on it, I would never have signed. Life is very short.

[Q] Playboy: Well, the year is over and the reviews are in -- many of them panning both the film and your performance in it. Have they offended you?

[A] Burton: Critical reactions have never meant very much to me. But I'll be fascinated to see whether the public reaction justifies all that expenditure and publicity.

[Q] Playboy: You received a rave notice from at least one internationally known "critic": Elizabeth Taylor, who called your performance "marvelous." Would you care to modify or amplify that adjective?

[A] Burton: Let me answer this way. As time went by during the scriptwriting, I could tell that Joe Mankiewicz was getting more and more involved in the character of Antony. In his version, Antony is a man who talks excessively to excuse his own failure. By that I mean his failure to become a great conqueror like Caesar, a great lover like Caesar -- in fact, his failure to become a great man. He's extremely eloquent, but at times inarticulately eloquent. The fury is there and the sense of failure is there, but sometimes all that comes out is a series of splendid words without any particular meaning.

[Q] Playboy: How do you feel about the treatment you received at the hands of the Roman press during the filming of Cleopatra?

[A] Burton: The Roman press is vile and vulgar, possibly because the writers are so underpaid. They have to grub and root about for whatever they can get. What surprised me was that they were also ugly. I'd never lived in Italy before, and I expected to find gorgeous women and aristocratic, triangular-faced men with huge eyes and no chins. Instead I found dwarfs --dim, unintelligent dwarfs, and not just among the press corps. The Neapolitans in the south and the Florentines and Venetians higher up might have approximated the ideas I'd been given in books, but Rome was a fearful disappointment.

[Q] Playboy: If you had the last two years to live over again, would you still elect to follow the course you have followed, or would you be content to enjoy the more modest rewards of your former career?

[A] Burton: That's difficult to say. The recognition of your own immediate society of friends and fellow workers is always gratifying. Wider fame, however, is a curious thing: you're furious if you're recognized -- and you're equally furious if you're not. But it's reached the point where some illiterate, unthinkable idiot will come up to me in a bar and say: "Would you care for a drink, Mr. Burton?" Facetiously, I reply that I'd like a martini because you can't get them in Wales. And immediately an entire column is built on the fact that there are no martinis in Wales.

[Q] Playboy: You have said that unlike most people, you drink only when you work --"to burn up the flatness, the stale, empty dull deadness that one feels when one goes off a stage." Did you mean that?

[A] Burton: It has a basis of truth. But I only drink when the performance is over. And during an interview like this, which I count as work and which makes me appallingly nervous.

[Q] Playboy: Why?

[A] Burton: I don't know. I was terrified when I knew I had to see you today, although we've known each other for years. I had to brace myself. When I'm faced with the problem of talking to people, I withdraw immediately, I retreat, I want nothing to do with them --because they expect something from you that you're not prepared to give. Actors should keep their mouths shut and hope for the best. Mostly they're afraid to talk, and for very good reasons. How do you feel when you go to meet someone who expects you to be famously clever? You can either get drunk or keep quiet--in which case the fellow says to himself, "What a bloody dull man. I thought he'd be perfectly extraordinary." Well, the same sort of thing happens to me all the time. People expect me to be a wild man of some kind. What the hell can you do? My God, I don't know.

[Q] Playboy: In what kinds of social atmosphere do you feel comfortable?

[A] Burton: I suppose I feel most at home semidrunk, in a bar, with friends around me. I never drink at home, and I can't stand the empty, cocktail-hour kind of drinking. But I love drinking in pubs and bars and restaurants with congenial talkers. I really like talking less than listening--preferably to painters. Actors' talk is usually secondhand, and most writers are inarticulate, but painters talk marvelously, and I like them enormously. I think I must belong in an atmosphere of male companionship.

[Q] Playboy: Not female?

[A] Burton: Clever females inhibit me, and anyway they're generally very ugly--not so much bluestockings as thick stockings. The most intelligent and worrying and inhibiting woman I've ever met--though not the ugliest--is Elaine May. She's a devastating woman who frightens and fascinates me and I never want to see her again. She has a genius for saying something gorgeously flattering in such a way that you're not quite sure it isn't another recording with Mike Nichols. She knows exactly what I'm going to say before I say it.

[Q] Playboy: Would you call Elizabeth Taylor a clever woman?

[A] Burton: Yes, and she inhibits me dreadfully.

[Q] Playboy: Not noticeably, if we may say so. After almost two years with Miss Taylor, spent uninterruptedly in the glare of worldwide publicity, what are your views on the sanctity of marriage--particularly your own, which you have made no move either to revive or terminate?

[A] Burton: Monogamy is absolutely imperative. It's the one thing we must always abide by. The minute you start fiddling around outside the idea of monogamy, nothing satisfies anymore. Suppose you make love to an exciting woman other than your wife; make love to her twice, 30 times, 40 times. It can't remain enough just to go to bed with her; there must be something else, something more than the absolute compulsion of the body. But if there is something more, it will eventually destroy either you or your marriage. And if there isn't something more than sex, you're equally lost, for sex on its own is utterly meaningless. Then too, if one's involved with someone purely sexually outside marriage--whether it's a man or a woman or a swan--and that makes you deviate from your ideas of absolute right and wrong, then there's something intensely wrong with that involvement. Even if the marital relationship itself ceases sexually for any reason, you must never move outside it sexually. If you have an imaginative spouse, you may find other solutions, but certainly you must never physically violate the idea of monogamy. The moment you do, regardless of how sophisticated you may be, you must get a feeling of guilt, a feeling that something's not sitting properly on your shoulders. Speaking for myself, I couldn't be unfaithful to my wife without feeling a profound sense of guilt.

[Q] Playboy: Do you feel any guilt about your relationship with Elizabeth Taylor?

[A] Burton: No. Absolutely none. One of the things that annoyed me most about that Time magazine cover story about me was that the writer said I was unfaithful to my wife. I'm not unfaithful to my wife. I never have been, not for a moment.

[Q] Playboy: Physically or spiritually?

[A] Burton: Neither. This man assumes that I've been unfaithful simply because I happen to live in the same hotel as another woman. I'd like to see him prove it, that's all.

[Q] Playboy: May we presume to inquire just what is the nature of your relationship with Miss Taylor?

[A] Burton: What I have done is to move outside the accepted idea of monogamy without physically investing the other person with anything that makes me feel guilty. So that I remain inviolate, untouched.

[Q] Playboy: And does Miss Taylor?

[A] Burton: Yes. I'm a terrible puritan, you see, despite my attempts to be anything else.

[Q] Playboy: Many of your critics have claimed that an extramarital relationship--even one innocent of sexual infidelity -- in which the husband leaves his family to take up residence in a hotel suite adjoining the other woman, could be called something less than considerate of the wife. What is your reaction?

[A] Burton: The important thing is to look after the original partner, and not to let anyone else make any vital demands on you. All that matters is the person you're really involved with--the original person.

[Q] Playboy: How do you reconcile this avowal with recent reports in the London press--unexpectedly confirmed and then denied in a flurry of confusing statements from you and Miss Taylor--that marriage plans are in the offing?

[A] Burton: What I've been trying to explain doesn't necessarily mean that one shouldn't leave his wife under any circumstances. If you have to go, for heaven's sake go, and don't keep skipping back and forth. My point is that you mustn't use sex alone as a lever, as a kind of moral, intellectual, psychic crutch to get away from her. You can't say to her, "I'm terribly sorry, but I can't sleep in the same bed with you anymore because I simply have to run off with this infinitely more fascinating girl." There is no such thing as a more fascinating girl. They're all the same, because our appetites are all the same.

[Q] Playboy: Wouldn't you say that Elizabeth Taylor, as one of the world's great beauties, is more fascinating than most?

[A] Burton: All this stuff about Elizabeth being the most beautiful woman in the world is absolute nonsense. She's a pretty girl, of course, and she has wonderful eyes; but she has a double chin and an overdeveloped chest and she's rather short in the leg. So I can hardly describe her as the most beautiful creature I've ever seen. The other day I saw a foal in Kent that was wet from birth. It's hardly likely that a human being could be as incredibly beautiful as that.

[Q] Playboy: What, then, is the source of her enduring attraction for you?

[A] Burton: It always fascinates me to see what fascinates the public. I think Elizabeth has an extraordinary faculty for being dangerous. She gives you a sense of danger. When she's on the screen you're never quite sure that she might not be going to blow her lines at any second. She's one of a selected few who aren't actors by our standards, but if you put them on a screen they emanate something--something I frankly don't understand, although I recognize it when I see it. Brando has it, and of course he's a very considerable actor as well. Monty Clift used to have it; of course Garbo had it.

[Q] Playboy: At the time of your separation from Mrs. Burton, columnist Sheilah Graham ran an item suggesting that finance rather than fascination was the reason for your relationship with Miss Taylor; she intimated that the liaison had been planned and fanned both as a publicity gimmick to hypo Cleopatra's box office and as a device to raise your earning power. What is your reply?

[A] Burton: I find it totally offensive. When you think of the way Sheilah Graham exploited her relationship with that marvelous writer, Scott Fitzgerald--my God, she's hardly the person to talk. But what alarms me about statements like these is the ignorance behind them. As for the personal-profit motive, the fact is that I've always been careful with money, and for many years now I've been a fairly rich man, in the sense that I don't need to work again. On the matter of box-office-publicity gimmicks, I read somewhere that Darryl Zanuck had said, "The Taylor-Burton association is quite constructive for our organization," or words to that effect. Far from bringing two people together, as Graham implied, that's the kind of thing that could drive you to part from anyone. It's unspeakably cheap and vulgar.

[Q] Playboy: In the early years of your career, Laurence Olivier is said to have admonished you to "make up your mind--do you want to be a great actor or a household word?" Whatever your motives, you would seem, in the light of the last two years, to have made your choice--the wrong one, in the opinion of many. What's your own opinion?

[A] Burton: Just for the record, Larry didn't say that to me; it was someone else. At the time, my reply was: "Both." But I've since learned that you can't become a great actor nowadays; it's impossible. You aren't allowed to develop in peace. Public attention is too concentrated, too blazed, too lighted, too limned.

[Q] Playboy: Your agent, Harvey Orkin, has publicly proposed a somewhat different theory--which he later denied--to explain what he felt has been your failure to achieve greatness as an actor. He said, "Here is a man who sold out. He's trying to get recognition on a trick." In view of your earlier comment about becoming "spuriously, speciously, meretriciously successful" as an actor, do you feel there may be some truth to his accusation?

[A] Burton: No. You only say that sort of thing about someone if you've sold out yourself. I'm very fond of Harvey; he's a failed writer who became an agent because there was no other job he could get. He believes that certain people have a kind of holy virtue, and he sentimentally ascribed that kind of virtue to me. So now he takes out on me what he ought to take out on himself. I understand why he said it, so I'm not angry.

[Q] Playboy: Are you conscious of any disparity between the goal you set for yourself in 1948 --when you said, "I would like to be recognized as a great actor"-- and the global notoriety you have since attained as a great lover, and as co-star of history's most colossal superepic?

[A] Burton: Your question is curious and unanswerable. "A great lover"--does that mean I'm good in bed? Even if it does, I don't see why the one should cancel out the other.

[Q] Playboy: Many of your critics and colleagues disagree. And you yourself have been quoted as saying that you feel your present life--personal and professional --is in a state of "suspended animation," that your name "is writ in water." Do these quotes accurately reflect your current mood?

[A] Burton: They do not. In the first place, I have not said "My name is writ in water," because that was clearly the most ego-maniacal statement that a dying poet ever made, and I wouldn't want to compete with Keats for immodesty. As for suspended animation, I live from day to day as we all do, though for all I know the bomb may drop at midnight. I live a very exciting, perverse and not entirely satisfactory life; but it's certainly not suspended animation.

[Q] Playboy: An alternative possibility--that your life may be exciting, perverse and entirely unsatisfactory--was suggested in Time magazine's cover story about you, which said: "Two gods within his frame are warring --one that builds with sureness and power, and another that impels him, like his late companion and countryman, Dylan Thomas, recklessly toward self-destruction." Do you feel there may be some element of truth in this analysis?

[A] Burton: Joe Mankiewicz once said to me, with all the authority of Freud behind him, that if you gave a Welshman a thousand exits and one was marked "self-destruction," that was the one he would choose. Well, I told this to the man from Time as a joke; naturally he took it seriously and turned it into a Mankiewicz quote about me. It's true, of course, that one of us Celts occasionally bursts out like Dylan Thomas, who seemed to choose self-destruction as his right. But self-aggrandizement is more what I'm after.

[Q] Playboy: Thomas was one of your closest friends. What was he like?

[A] Burton: There were two Dylans--Dylan drunk and Dylan sober. I hardly knew the sober one, because I mostly saw him in London when he was living a social life, which meant that he was capable of anything. In Wales he was a very different man: gentle, kind and rather timid. But I think most artistic Celts lead this sort of double life: the drunk one dangerous and irresponsible, the sober one too responsible and too retiring.

[Q] Playboy: Which Burton--drunk or sober--has experienced those "semicomas of depression about the destruction of the world" into which Elizabeth Taylor has said you periodically plunge?

[A] Burton: Both have. Before I had children, I was convinced that the whole of our society had a mass death wish which the bomb would inevitably fulfill--and a bloody good thing, too, because we deserved it. But since I've had two baby daughters, my attitude has changed sentimentally. I want them to live, and when someone like Bertrand Russell says that the statistical chances of survival are minute, I desperately hope that my daughters will be in the fraction that survives. I sympathize with Gerard Manley Hopkins when he asks if there is any way "to keep back beauty, keep it from vanishing away." But as for the people among whom I've lived for 37 years--and I include myself, of course--they're pathetic and irredeemably frivolous, and I think they deserve to die--unless they do something active to preserve life. It's absurd that we let four men--Kennedy, Khrushchev, Macmillan and De Gaulle--decide whether my daughters or yours should remain alive. Ban-the-bomb marches are juvenile and ineffective, but at least they're an attempt. Nobody else does anything at all. Last year, when the Chinese were quarreling with the Indians, an English M.P. said publicly that we ought to drop H-bombs on one Chinese city a day until they withdraw from the Indian border. That's the sort of insanity that makes me sick with rage. The people of the world ought to rebel against any government that sets out to build bombs, let alone drop them--rebel and throw them out.

[Q] Playboy: Barring pacifist insurrections, do you foresee any realistic hope of averting a nuclear holocaust?

[A] Burton: World war may possibly be avoided--but perhaps only by the start of the war itself. The first bomb may go off--whether by accident or intent--but if everyone instantly lays down arms, millions of lives could be saved. Even at best, however, it's a terrifying prospect.

[Q] Playboy: Though you've said that most of us--including yourself--deserve to die in a nuclear war if we don't strive harder to avoid one--don't you fear the prospect of your own death?

[A] Burton: I don't think so. When I was about 19 in the R.A.F., I suppose I was a little frightened, but it was the pain of being killed that scared me, not the idea of dying. I'm prepared for that every day. But I must admit I sometimes wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, and I reach out for that cool, round cylinder of the cigarette, and I say to myself: "Ach y fi! What's going to happen to me?" It's not the fear of death--it's the fear of dying and being forgotten, the fear of being nothing, that keeps me awake.

[Q] Playboy: Do you believe in life after death?

[A] Burton: Well, religion is a thing my family didn't terribly approve of. My father was a very dominating man, and he considered that anyone who went to chapel and didn't drink alcohol was somebody not to be tolerated. I grew up in that belief, and I've hardly had to change my opinion. You must understand, of course, that you're talking to a very woolly thinker. But because of this attitude, which is basic in my bones, I don't think I shall survive after death, and I can't hold out too much hope for other people either. I've read extensively, however, and I can find flaws in any kind of argument--including the one for atheism. Bertrand Russell once wrote that you must never believe in anything you can't see, hear, smell or touch. My father agreed with him. But surely there's something in life a little more removed than that. There are too many things you can't logically account for. If you're very family-bound, as I am, very conscious of your brothers and your daughters and your wife, you get a funny feeling when something is wrong with them, even if you're thousands of miles away. You pick up the phone, and invariably you find that something bad has happened. That sort of thing tends to disturb one's atheistic assurance. So I guess I'd have to call myself an agnostic.

[Q] Playboy: Many people dread the prospect of old age almost as much as death itself. How do you feel about it?

[A] Burton: I'm not afraid of growing old. As a matter of fact, I rather look forward to being patriarchal and balding and boring everyone with my views on life. I think I shall do that very well, if they give me an armchair and a suitable stick. It's a part one plays, and we must all learn to play it.

[Q] Playboy: When the end finally comes, what epitaph would you like to have inscribed on your tomb?

[A] Burton: Off the cuff, just like that? Let me see. I think I'd pick a passage by Ernest Rhys, the man who founded the Everyman Library:

"He had the ploughman's strength in the grasp of his hand. He could see a crow three miles away. He could hear the green oats growing, and the southwest wind making rain. He could make a gate and dig a ditch and plough as straight as a stone can fall. And he is dead."

[Q] Playboy: If you had your life to live over again, would you change anything?

[A] Burton: Yes. I'd like to be born the son of a duke with £90,000 a year, on an enormous estate without having to allow the public in for three-and-sixpence a visit. I'd like to think that my ancestors were robber barons, that they were violent and vulgar and pustular and extraordinary, but that I was protected from violence and vulgarity myself by virtue of privìlege and class. And I'd like to have the most enormous library, and I'd like to think that I could read those books forever and forever, and die unlamented, unknown, unsung, unhonored--and packed with information.

[Q] Playboy: Finally, we'd like to experiment on you with a sort of party game. You meet a man at the end of the world, and he asks you three questions which you have to answer spontaneously and immediately. The first is: Who are you?

[A] Burton: Richard, son of Richard--for I am both my father and my son.

[Q] Playboy: The second question is: Apart from that, who are you?

[A] Burton: Devious, difficult and perverse.

[Q] Playboy: And the third is: Apart from that, who are you?

[A] Burton: A mass of contradictions. As Walt Whitman said, "Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. I am large, and I contain multitudes."