The Man on the Billboard

ACTORS

(See Cover)

The posters are rising everywhere. The Egyptian lies on her right side in a gold nightgown with a gold snake in her jet-black hair. The Roman leans broodingly over her, dressed for war in his deep purple cuirass.

On the half-acre billboard above Manhattan's Times Square, there are no names. There is no title. There is no need for one, for the billboard is instantly recognizable as 20th Century-Fox's proclamation of its $40 million movie Cleopatra, by far the most expensive picture ever made, which opens a few weeks hence. Nor do the two lovers need an introduction. The tabloids have taken care of that.

There is some difference in the familiarity of the two faces. Hers is widely recognizable. His is not. But it would be hard to find anyone who could not identify that Roman. He is Richard Burton as Mark Antony. In the short space of a year or so, his name has become about as well-known as a name can be.

Everyone, in short, knows who Richard Burton is, or at least what he is at the moment. He is the demi-Atlas of this earth, the arm and burgonet of men, the fellow who is living with Elizabeth Taylor. Stevedores admire him. Movie idols envy him. He is a kind of folk hero out of nowhere, with an odd name like Richard instead of Tab, Rock, or Rip, who has out-tabbed, outrocked, and outripped the lot of them. He is the new Mr. Box Office.

If only he were indeed from nowhere--a sort of Priapus ex machina--his dazzle would be unshadowed. But beyond the flaring headlines of the past year, few are aware of who Richard Burton really is, what he has done, and what he is throwing away by gulping down his past and then smashing the glass.

Superb & Definitive. Not too long ago, Richard Burton was considered one of the half-dozen great actors in the English-speaking world. Other men equally select --Paul Scofield, Sir Laurence Olivier-recognized this; so did critics like Kenneth Tynan; so did a growing public, aware that Burton was young and that most of his major work was still to be done. He has not done it, and there is more than a slight possibility that he never will. But no one can take from him, at least, the achievements that are already behind him.

Only four actors in history have played Prince Hamlet more than 100 times in a single production--Sir Henry Irving, Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, Sir John Gielgud, and Richard Burton. Moreover, Burton was the longest-running Hamlet in the history of the late Old Vic, where Hamlets were kept in the repertory only as long as the box office remained strong.

Between Stratford-upon-Avon and the Old Vic, he has delivered some nine or ten major Shakespearean performances, including a shining Prince Hal, a superb lago, and the definitive Coriolanus.

He was first seen on Broadway in a small but memorable part in The Lady's Not for Burning. He scored high a few years later opposite Helen Hayes in Jean Anouilh's Time Remembered. His movie performances have mainly been journeyman labors in poor films, with a few exceptions such as Look Back in Anger. His talents were wastefully poured into Game-lot, like a cataract into a thimble, but he was a more than magical king, giving a performance of rigor, charm, gaiety, melancholy, and controlled dash that made every audience fall in love with him. He was like a highly practiced athlete playing brilliantly for the losing side.

Two Gods. Today, his profession views Burton with melancholy. "When the movie career is finished," sighs Gielgud, "he will have lost his romantic years, his vigorous years." His friend and agent, Harvey Orkin, says roughly, "This is a man who sold out. He's trying to get recognition on a trick. He could have been the greatest actor on this planet." It was Olivier who first warned Burton, "Make up your mind. Do you wish to be a household word or a great actor?" Paul Scofield renders judgment, gauging his language with extreme care: "Richard professionally is the most interesting actor to have emerged since the war. I think his qualities of heroic presence are not seen to their full advantage in movies. He appears not to be attracted by the best that there is in the cinema. As for his future, he should return quietly to the theater."

Whether Burton ever does return to the theater-- in more than a token way--will be determined by something considerably deeper than the fate of the liaison he has recently formed. Two little 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.

Either way, he is a man and a half. He has a wild mind with a living education in it. He is bright and perceptive to an alarming degree, a rare and dangerous thing in an actor. He laughs honestly. He lies winningly. He trusts absolutely, and he is as pretty as a hill of granite. He can make anyone laugh. He can talk a man under the table about literature, displaying huge sophistication and no cant. He reads rapidly, but he gives a book its due: a novel like Anglo-Saxon Attitudes costs him only two hours, but Moby Dick is worth four days, and Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy took him "just over three months." He is a walking concordance to Shakespeare. His mind rings with English verse from all centuries and of all qualities, both great and frivolous.

"Edward VII was ill," he will say with a brooding smile, "and the poet laureate--this bloody fool--wrote:

Along the wires the electric message came: 'He is no better, he is much the same.'"

Primal Gloom. He can drink almost anyone under the table too. When Burton's emotional life was particularly eruptive one day earlier this month, he drank half a gallon of cognac, being careful not to let it interfere with his work before the cameras in a new picture called The VIPs. His heroes are Scofield, Olivier, Gielgud, Alec Guinness--and a Lancastrian he once met who could down twelve pints of beer while Big Ben was announcing midnight. "I am one of the few people I know," says Burton, "who drinks only when he works." And this is true. Between plays or films, his intake dwindles toward zero. But when he is working, he has "to burn up the flatness--the stale, empty, flat, dull deadness that one feels when one comes off a stage."

He is 37. He stands 5 ft. 10 1/2 in., has broad, heavy shoulders and a deep chest that is 45 in. around. This accounts for the tympanic resonance of his voice, which is so rich and overpowering that it could give an air of verse to a recipe for stewed hare. His head is large. In fact, it has a common circumference with Elizabeth Taylor's waist, which he demonstrates by buckling one of her belts around his forehead. Because of his big chest, head, and shoulders, he has been told that he looks short. This worries him. His imagination takes hold and he sees himself as the world's most conspicuous dwarf. Hence, he has a short man's height complex although he is well above the average height of men. He has pale blue-green eyes, finely textured brown hair, and a coarse complexion, which is said to contribute to his enormous appeal to women. But even more, women lose their balance over his look of essential melancholy. His face can light suddenly with a smile, but it always returns to its primal gloom.

"Beautiful Man." He talks to everyone as if they matter. It is his special gift, seldom found in actors, or, for all that, in clergymen. Burton's secret is simpie. Everyone actually does matter to him. He tells more stones than Scheherazade, but between them he listens. He really wants to hear about one man's children or another's Sunday football match. He can make people feel larger than life. Men appreciate him for it; but women write him letters, chase him around tables, and follow him overseas.

"He has a terrific way with women," says Fredric March. "I don't think he has missed more than half a dozen." Amateur statisticians would have it that he has probably given some sort of lasting memory to roughly 75,000 women in the past 20 years, few as articulate as Tammy Grimes. "He called me 'shining,' " she remembers, "and I was madly in love with him for at least four days. Strictly an infatuation. He makes women feel beautiful. He is a genius. His acting has such a tragic quality. It comes from a completely unsentimental nature, a pure wonderment, and a deep loneliness. His life is a kaleidoscope. Turn him and you see 50 different patterns. Every time you meet him, you see a million different colors. He is a vodka man with a quicksilver mind and a violent temper. He's moody, completely unpredictable, always fascinating, very frugal, extremely shrewd, a tremendous snob, and a beautiful, beautiful man."

Sleepless & Slangless. Making a film called The Last Days of Dolwyn in the late '405, Richard met a beautiful, 19-year-old Welsh actress named Sybil Williams. She came from the Rhondda Valley, not far from his own home. They were married five months later, and she became a wife unparalleled--"impeccable" is Richard's word for her--with a total devotion to him, a mind quick enough to keep up with him, and a limitless tolerance. Her father was a miner, too, but he had risen to managerial status. "Her family was a fairly gifted lot," says Richard. "We have a little joke to the effect that she, as it were, represents the bosses, whereas I represent those men who crawl between heaven and earth." Richard and Sybil call each other "Boot," a Welsh diminutive for "beautiful." They have two daughters, Kate, 5, and Jessica, 3.

Life with Burton was never quiet. He sleeps five hours, no more, and he has the energy to skip sleep altogether and work steadily the following day. He can sit at a piano all night flogging Welsh songs or playing miscellaneous mood pieces, usually incongruous, while he recites poetry, now mocking the voice of Gielgud, now mimicking Olivier, slipping into the tongue of Richard Burton when he does something that holds particular gravity for him. He doesn't swear like a trouper (he barks at Taylor for her vulgarisms), being too much in love with words to settle for slang.

He says he wants more than anything else to be alone, but--in the pre-Taylor era--his dressing-room door was always open to cronies of all ages and sexes. People not only like him, they come near to worshiping him, often for a good reason. Once, in Camelot, a young boy was put into the show green and frightened, and during his first rehearsal with Burton he froze. Burton purposely began to stutter, stumble, turn white and quiver. It was one of his most adroit performances. The boy's nerves receded; his voice coughed into life. He still writes to Burton once a month; Burton has no idea why.

Glamorganshire. Once, after fluffing the same line repeatedly on a movie set, Burton lowered his head and rammed it into a wall. It is impossible to imagine an English actor doing that, but Burton of course is not English. He is Welsh. In fact, he is so thoroughly, defensively, and patriotically Welsh that it costs him some loss of perspective. His gallery of great Welshmen includes Louis XIV, Christopher Columbus and Alexander the Great.

He remembers James Joyce's belief that every man spends his life looking for the place he wants to belong to. "I think I grew up in the place I have dreamed of all my life," he says. It is a village in a valley between high loaves of bald green mountains, split by a small river of rushing white water--called, oddly enough, the Avon--and spanned by a high, narrow stone bridge that was once an aqueduct. Poverty has seldom had a more graceful setting. The village even has a euphonically romantic name--Pontrhydy-fen (pontra de venne)--and, particularly in Richard Burton's view, it is a kind of Glamorganshire Brigadoon. "When I go home," he says, "as I go around the lip of the mountain, my heart races."

Which Child? He was born in Pont-rhydyfen on the loth of November, 1925. His father--Richard Jenkins--was a miner with little more to his name than a No. 6 shovel and a massive gift for words. Richard was the twelfth of thirteen children. His mother died when he was not quite two, just after giving birth to Richard's brother Graham. In Taibach, a suburb of the coastal town Port Talbot, at the foot of the Avon, Richard was devotedly raised by his eldest sister, Cecilia. He went to school in Port Talbot, but he spent his weekends in Pontrhydyfen. The town spoke English and the village spoke Welsh; hence Richard was raised bilingual. He was also raised with a powerful sense of belonging to a village where he could not live.

"My father was a self-taught man," says Richard, "demoniacal in debate, agnostic, with a divine gift of the tongue in both languages. He used hyperbole. He was not afraid of the octosyllabic word. He had a sort of maxim--'Never use a short word where a long one will do.' He was a Welsh Conrad in conversation. He would go off on jags that would make John Barrymore look sedate. He never knew which son I was. He was 50 when I was born. We called him Daddy Ni, which means 'our father.' He sometimes frightened me. His mind was extraordinarily perverse. No one quite knew what he was going to do next, which can be quite frightening to a child, you know."

Daddy Ni died six years ago, never having seen Richard in a play or movie. He tried once--setting out to see My Cousin Rachel when it was playing in a Port Talbot cinema. On the way down the valley he stopped in 17 pubs. Finally settled in the theater, he watched the film begin. One of the first things Richard did on the screen was to pour himself a drink. "That's it," said Daddy Ni, and he was up and off to pub No. 18.

Two Fathers. Daddy Ni cared more about education than anything else, even Rugby football, and from Richard's earliest memory, Daddy Ni and Richard's brothers Ivor, Tom, Will and Dai fixed their attention on Richard and said, "You shall go to Oxford." All the brothers save Graham had worked the coal face (Richard himself never worked in the '""s), and some of them went on to other positions in local government, the police, and the army. In Richard, however, the family planted its dream of something better beyond the valley. "The idea of a Welsh miner's son going to Oxford University," says Richard Burton, "was ridiculous beyond the realm of possibility."

First, Richard was one of 30 who were admitted to grammar school out of some 600 applicants. He was also a natural athlete and, of all things, a gifted soprano who took prizes in the eisteddfod, singing, as his sister put it, as if "he had a bell in every tooth." In a sense, he outgrew his family, being something more than life-size even then. A teacher-writer named Philip Burton, drama coach and English master at the Port Talbot grammar school, offered him a room in his lodgings. Cecilia and her husband agreed.

Richard describes himself as "mock tough" when he first knew Philip Burton. Burton, for his part, was chiefly impressed--in Richard's first awkward go on a stage--by the boy's "astonishing audience control. He could do anything he wanted with the audience." This is one talent that can only be found, never developed, and since Richard had it, Phil Burton trained him dramatically, put an English polish on his voice without obscuring the Welsh vitality, fed him a reading list of great books, prepared him for his try for Oxford, and directed him in all his early plays. In 1943, Richard officially became Phil Burton's ward, taking his name. Years later when Richard was told that his father was dead, he asked: "Which one?"

Druid Wanted. Phil Burton, now director of the Musical and Dramatic Theater Academy of America (in Manhattan), trained Richard with some novel devices. He made him talk on five telephones at once, doing a scene from a play about a busy bank manager who could hold five separate conversations, darting from phone to phone. The exercise was repeated a thousand times to teach the boy coordination and mathematical precision in speaking. Today, Richard understandably hates telephones; but he speaks with fantastic precision. Also, Phil Burton would take Richard to the summit of Mynydd Margam, the last high mountain between Pontrhydyfen and the sea, and have him loft arias from Shakespeare into the wind. As Phil Burton moved farther and farther away from the spot on which Richard stood, he kept calling, "Make me hear you. Don't shout; but make me hear you." Ten years later, as Richard would all but whisper, "O! what a rogue and peasant slave am I," every princely syllable went special-delivery to the outermost rafters of the Old Vic.

The academic training succeeded as well. Richard was accepted by Exeter College, Oxford. The R.A.F. conveniently provided a scholarship, indenturing him to air service later on. He had to wait two terms before he would actually be in statu pupillari, so he answered an ad in Wales's Western Mail, placed by Actor Emlyn Williams, seeking a young Welsh actor for a play called The Druid's Rest. He got the part and spent five months in the West End, going up to Oxford as a slightly seasoned professional.

Up at Exeter. It was wartime Oxford, but no war to date has changed the ways of the university, and Burton was soon climbing into the college after late and beery forays. He boasts that he broke the Exeter sconce record, a complicated dining-hall punishment for bad etiquette in which the offender was forced to drink nearly two pints of beer in 30 seconds or pay for it. He learned to drink without swallowing and could put down a sconce in ten seconds. "So far as I know," he says, "no one has ever whacked that feat."

He was ostensibly reading English Literature and Italian, and he even went to lectures "with all those pustular, sweaty, hockey-playing, earnest, big-breasted girls"; but he found his real interest in the Oxford University Dramatic Society. Nevill Coghill, don, critic, and man of the theater, was directing Measure for Measure. When Burton asked for a part, Coghill said he was sorry but the play was all cast. Burton's native aggressiveness flashed to the surface. "Let me understudy the leading man," he said wickedly. Undermine would have been a better word. When Measure for Measure opened--with people like John Gielgud and Terence Rattigan in the audience, for the O.U.D.S. was as important then as now--guess who was striding the boards as Angelo.- Binky Beaumont of H. M. Tennent Ltd., London's most powerful theatrical producer, was also there. He told Richard to stay alive and look him up when his Oxford and R.A.F. days were done.

"Absolute Natural." Burton trained as a navigator, but the war ended before he could fly missions. He spent the next two years playing rugger for the R.A.F. He has never saved a single theatrical notice, but he will unblinkingly refer anyone to "page 37, paragraph i of Rugger, My Life" a book by Wales's own Bleddyn Williams, the Red Grange of Rugby. "I played with a wing-forward," writes Williams, "who soon caught the eye for his general proficiency and tireless zeal. His name: Richard Burton. But it was in CinemaScope that he caught the eye after the war. A pity, because I think Richard would have made as good a wing-forward as any we have produced in Wales."

Binky Beaumont gave Burton a contract when he was demobbed in 1947, and within a year he was an established actor. "I would like to be recognized as a great actor on the stage," he was saying before long. "The chances of that coming off are extremely remote, but it's a chance I'll take, which is why I don't want to sign film contracts. It impedes, it gets in the way. It seems to me that coming from where I come from, from the very depths of the working class, if I'm going anywhere, I must go as high as I possibly can."

His main technical asset was his in comparable voice. He hardly needed to do anything more than speak, and he became more skillful at using language as gesture than gesture as language. He was noted for his repose on stage; Philip Burton had taught him that if he kept still, attention would flow in his direction. He also had a faculty for staring unblinkingly at the audience or another actor until everyone on both sides of the footlights was hypnotized.

John Gielgud thought he was "an absolute natural." Laurence Olivier, seeing Burton's Coriolanus, said: "Nobody else can ever again play Coriolanus now." He was a perfect Prince Hal, the sort of youth who really would take up with Falstaff. His lago was so subtle that it provoked a commentary letter from Freudian Psychoanalyst Ernest Jones, and Terence Rattigan says it was the best lago he has ever seen. "We all thought he was the natural successor to Olivier," says Kenneth Tynan now. "We thought he could be another Edmund Kean, that he was going to be the greatest classical actor living."

Then as now, opening nights petrified him. He does not sleep at all before them. One evening in 1953 he left his home in Hampstead to walk, he thought, aimlessly; but toward 4 a.m. he was crossing Waterloo Bridge, beyond which was the Old Vic, some ten miles from his home. A policeman stopped him on the bridge and wanted to know who he was. Richard ex plained that he was a terrified actor. On the following night he was going to open as Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, at the Old Vic. "Oh, come now," said the bobby. "They won't know in Peckham Rye, will they? They won't know in St. John's Wood." Burton relaxed slightly and walked out the night with the bobby, making the rounds of Waterloo.

That his performance would be recorded far beyond St. John's Wood was largely due to a critical remark made more than midway in Hamlet's run. Burton's Hamlet was something like a corrida, good one night, disappointing the next. But when he had his color and gave it the full Welsh timbre, he thrilled audiences long accustomed to the tremulous Gielgud reading. He had completed about 60 performances and the box office was beginning to slide when the house manager came to his dressing room one evening and said, "Be especially good tonight. The old man's out front."

"What old man?"

"He comes once a year," said the house manager. "He stays for one act and he leaves."

"For God's sake, what old man?"

"Churchill."

As Burton spoke his first line--"A little more than kin, and less than kind"--he was startled to hear deep identical mutterings from the front row. Churchill continued to follow him line for line, a dramaturgical beagle, his face a thunderhead when something had been cut. "I tried to shake him off," remembers Burton. "I went fast and I went slow, but he was right there." Churchill was right there to the end, in fact, when Burton took 18 curtain calls and Churchill told a re porter that "it was as exciting and virile a performance of Hamlet as I can remember." Years later, when Winston Churchill--The Valiant Years was under preparation for television, its producers asked Sir Winston who he thought should do the voice of Churchill. "Get that boy from the Old Vic," said the old man.*

Wince & Wait. By that time, Richard Burton was a long way from the Old Vic. As his stage career fanned to promise and even moments of greatness, he salted his interludes with movies. Everyone does this. Sir Laurence Olivier was in Spartacus. But Burton's serious work on the stage began to atrophy as he gave himself increasingly to films, playing opposite an odd assortment of ladies--Lana Turner, Olivia de Havilland, Jean Simmons--in weak pictures wherein he was miscast. Given his professional fears and the economic spareness of his beginnings, it is not hard to understand why he would shy from the stage toward the greater money and simpler disciplines of pictures, even though his strongest characteristics--controlled flamboyance and overwhelming physical presence--are stunted and sealed off on film.

He hates his movies. "In a film, you are a puppet," he says. "On a stage, you are the boss." Significantly, he was the tribune Marcellus in The Robe, the first CinemaScope spectacle. "It is the bane of my life," he says. "Whenever a fan comes up to me and says, 'I enjoyed you in ..." I wince, and wait. It's almost always The Robe. The picture was rubbish. It was written as if for Peg's Paper*It was tastelessly sentimental, and badly acted by me." How did he like The Rains of Ran-chipur? "Beyond human belief." Bitter Victory? "Anonymous." Edna Ferber's Ice Palace? "A cold Giant"

Overshadowed Antony. Hence, he was not exactly a virgin when he tumbled for Cleopatra. He was bored with Camelot, and 20th Century-Fox paid $50,000 to get him out of it; also, Writer-Director Joe Mankiewicz promised him "a playable part." Fox's $40 million movie has been seen by no one and will not be until its release in June. But judging by the script, Mankiewicz did indeed give Burton a playable part. Since most of the scripting took place as Cleopatra was being shot, Writer Mankiewicz--in his approach to each character--knew just whose brain, tongue, and talent he was writing for, and it is not surprising that Burton has the most interesting role. Much of the time, too, Mankiewicz appears to be describing Burton as well as the Antony of history. "There is something about Antony which escapes you and me," says one character, "but for which women will forsake the living and forget the dead." Poor Rex Harrison, who went off to Rome a sex symbol and came away an old man, plays Julius Caesar and is actually the dominant figure in the first half of the film--but his beetly brow has ended up in a postage-stamp insert in a remote corner of that celebrated advertising poster.*

Mankiewicz constantly wrote around Elizabeth Taylor, although she is supposed to be the picture's heroine. The early hours of the film also seem to give rather heavy emphasis to spectacle--everything from a 2 2-ton rolling sphinx to an acre of skin, dancing. Mark Antony is essentially absent until after the intermission, but then the level of the writing rises. The dialogue edges toward the Elizabethan, Richard Burton's adoptive world, and the study of character develops an interesting flair with Mankiewicz' concept of a long-overshadow Antony who comes to hate the very name of Caesar.

Richard Burton tries to avoid seeing his own movies. Will he see Cleopatra'?

"No."

"Why?"

"Well, I don't want to kill myself."

Wife of Bath. Any reminder of Rome offends his sensibilities. "I never want to see the place again as long as I live," he says. He has had his fill of flashbulbs in the dead of night, visiting "priests" with cameras under their cassocks, spoiled beans, stomach pumps, sleeping pills, Jewish singers, German orphans, and old friends who mail him headlines that say FUN--BURTON. But he has come away with an interesting souvenir--this riggish, Anglo-Egyptian dish of his, whom he has installed in a rooftop suite in London's Dorchester. He is not at all sure what to do with her.

Some people think she has installed him there. He seems chained in taffeta. But it was Burton who made the first move. The question is: If he had known he was stumbling into a fight to the death, would he have done it anyway?

The answer is probably yes. "Show a Welshman i.ooi exits, one of which is marked SELF-DESTRUCTION," says Mankiewicz, "and he will go right through that door." The outcome of the Taylor-Burton game must inevitably yield up a loser. If he should ever marry her, he will be the Oxford boy who became the fifth husband of the Wife of Bath. If she loses him, she loses her reputation as a fatal beauty, an all-consuming maneater, the Cleopatra of the 20th century.

Darryl Zanuck, president of 2Oth Century-Fox, is pleased with them. "I think the Taylor-Burton association is quite constructive for our organization," he says. But what if the Taylor-Burton association were to collapse before Cleopatra opens? The picture would be an anachronism while it is still in the can.

Playing Adonis. It is possible that Burton cares more about Cleopatra than he admits. "What if the first kiss isn't up to scratch?" he worries. "We're finished." With Taylor's assistance, Cleopatra has made him a big-money star and its success could keep him there. He has new power, not to mention fame. Before Cleopatra, Burton got $125,000 a picture; today his price is $500,000, most of which he banks. His own term for his emotional world today is "suspended animation." He has never asked for a divorce from Sybil and apparently never intends to. Meanwhile, the service is good in the Dorchester. For an actor of his accomplishments, a few more months in the role of Adonis is an easy price to pay.

"Elizabeth is capable of great, violent, tempestuous hates," he observes; but in brighter moods she calls him "Richard Bursnips" and combs his silken hair, saying it is "soft as a baby's bum." Her parents stop in from time to time to sip black velvets with their new fun-in-law. null or without company, Elizabeth tries to stay close by him 25 hours a day, filling poor Richard's almanac with some dull stretches of prose as well as short bursts of poetry. During most of the winter, he would slip out to see his family several times a week, playing happily with his children, taking Sybil out to dinner or the theater, and enjoying himself thoroughly before heading back to the Dorchester.

In his less insouciant moments, he tears himself to pieces, maddened with guilt. "Anonymous," he says is the word that describes him, for he has given up evejry-thing that truly matters to him. Borrowing Keats's epitaph, he says again and again, "My name is writ in water." Now that Sybil has gone to New York, he sits quandaried in London. Does he want to be the richest actor in the world, the most famous actor in the world, or the best actor in the world--and in what order? Or just a household word?

*Of whom Shakespeare prophetically wrote: Well, heaven forgive him! and forgive us all! Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall. -Burton's voice and Welsh background also made him a natural for the documentary, A Tribute to Dylan Thomas, winner of a Hollywood Oscar a fortnight ago. *A housemaid's journal in Britain, now defunct. -Rex is suing.

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