The actress Raquel Welch had a book out about Burton early in 2010, and apparently hinted (in an American tv interview) that she had an affair with him in the distant past. Not that it matters much anyway. But his biographers, of whom I was one – nearly thirty years ago – were inevitably interested in his love-life, though we never got to know much about it, except that it was crowded.
Most of his women were (perhaps) too fond of him to gossip. Not that there’s any reason to doubt Miss Welch. He was a charming, lecherous Welshman, enviably successful with women.
I never met the man himself, only family, friends and actors – all too many actors – and, best of the lot, a former schoolmaster called Philip H. Burton. He brought me closer to Richard than all the rest put together.
In the early 1940s PHB taught at a school in Port Talbot, the steel-making town on Swansea Bay where Richard was born. He was fond of the boys he taught. Unmarried and living alone in lodgings, he was described to me by former pupils as a teacher who liked to put an arm around you. Or, if you were both sitting down, his palm might encounter your knee and give it a friendly rub. Friendly rubs would be repeated at intervals.
It didn’t worry anyone, but it served to categorise him. He was ‘queer’, in the language of the time, thought I doubt if he ever risked being active in that direction within a small community like Port Talbot’s, more than sixty years ago. His passion was the theatre. He dreamt of finding a talented boy he could make famous, and in the end he did.
The boy was Richard Jenkins, born 1925, son of a coal-miner with too many children. He left school at sixteen and went to work in a local shop, from which Philip Burton, who had been his school-teacher and had recognised a depth of character as well as a striking voice and face, helped rescue him, then got him back into the educational system.
Within a year or two, PHB tried formally to adopt him. The difference between their ages was insufficient by a matter of weeks to allow this, so a legal agreement was drawn up, making him a ‘ward’ of the schoolmaster, and changing his surname from Jenkins to Burton. His family agreed to this. They were poor; they stood aside, not without dark murmurings, and let the magician frame the future.
PHB’s ambition was to mould his ‘son’ into a Shakespearian actor. This didn’t quite work. Films were quicker and made more money, and that was the direction that Richard would take. PHB, meanwhile, gave up teaching and joined the BBC in Cardiff as a radio producer (one of the writers he worked with was Dylan Thomas). I happened to meet him in 1948 or 49, when I was a post-war conscript in the RAF and send the Welsh BBC a playlet I’d written about an imaginary drama-group that was staging a production in a village. It found its way to PHB, who accepted it, and it was duly broadcast.
Richard Burton hadn’t yet come on the scene, beyond small parts on the stage in London. I had never heard of him. Nor had anyone else.
Much later, PHB went to live in America, at first in New York, then in Key West, where he had settled by the time I went to talk to him about Richard. It was November 1978. I stayed two or three days at his wood-built house, cool and single-storied, recording him for a radio programme I was making, and ultimately for the Richard Burton biography I would write.
The walls were decorated with photographs. Several were of Richard in stage dress, Richard as Hamlet, Richard as Coriolanus.
PHB, bald, kindly, and inclined to fuss, could have been a retired bank manager. He had a wide circle of friends. ‘Lonely?’ he said. ‘I’ve never been lonely in my life.’ He also had a lively sense of his own worth. When he was first in Key West, guides on tour buses that passed the house used to announce that it was occupied by the father of the famous Richard Burton. He had that stopped, or so he said. He was Phil Burton, a figure in his own right.
There was a trace of sadness in the way he spoke of Richard, the boy he had cherished and taken such pains with, who starred in unsatisfactory films, drank and womanised, let his talent by diluted, and derived much of his fame from his antics with the gaudy star of stars, Elizabeth Taylor. PHB hinted at his own uneasiness. He told me a long story of going to an airport to meet Richard and Elizabeth. Richard was on his way to do Hamlet in Canada in 1960, and was in urgent need of his mentor’s guidance.
PHB went to get his diary of the time. It was one of those five-year jobs with a lock. He found the date and looked at the entry, and his face changed. ‘I fear it didn’t happen at all as I told you,’ he said, and changed the subject.
He was a diligent host, with not more than a hint of other things. The only shower was in his bedroom. There wasn’t a towel within reach, so when I emerged, dripping, he had to bring me one. Doors that might have been better closed were inclined to be left open.
The morning I left, he insisted on making me a big breakfast. He stood outside, waving me off. He lived another sixteen years, dying in January 1995, aged ninety. I never saw him again.
