Richards Galore

Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, 1965

Everett Collection

Hellraisers

The Life and Inebriated Times
of Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Peter O’Toole, and Oliver Reed

by Robert Sellers

St. Martin’s, 286 pp., $25.99

The chapter headings tell all you really need to know about this book: The Plastered Fifties, The Soused Sixties, The Sozzled Seventies, The Blotto Eighties, The Pickled Nineties. The final chapter is sadly and fittingly enough titled: Last Man Standing—referring, of course, to Peter O’Toole, the only survivor of these four highly talented and demon-accursed actors.

I got to know some of these worthies in varying degrees of acquaintanceship during the sixties and seventies. The Burtons because some tax arrangement found them in Paris shooting The Sandpiper, supposedly situated in California, a film for which both stars had infinite contempt. At that time I wrote a column reviewing films and theater three times weekly in the International Herald Tribune. Burton read me, found he agreed mostly with what I had had to say, and began passing me scripts he was receiving practically every day to get my reactions.

Friendship with Elizabeth was slower to develop, but before long, we two females were merrily referring to “your Richard” and “my Richard” (Grenier). Our two Richards found quite a bit in common—apart from drink—and Burton wound up giving “my Richard” a very fine jacket blurb for his first novel, Yes And Back Again. (It was Elizabeth, however, who saw to it that her Richard’s text got to the publishers on time.)