Richard Burton's Love Letters to Elizabeth Taylor Unveiled in July Issue of "Vanity Fair"
NEW YORK (CBS) Hollywood legend Elizabeth Taylor has released a series of love letters that reveal the late actor Richard Burton's incessant love and infatuation for her.
PICTURES: Elizabeth TaylorPICTURES: Legendary Couples
The never-before-seen letters, which are excerpted in the upcoming July issue of Vanity Fair magazine, offer new insight into a tumultuous relationship that extended over 20 years and two marriages.
The 78-year-old actress released love letters that go back more than four decades to when the two met on the set of "Cleopatra" in Rome in 1962.
All but one letter will be showcased in her upcoming memoir, "Furious Love: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and the Marriage of the Century." Taylor chose to not publish Burton's final letter to her, which she says she keeps at her bedside table. The letter was written just days before Burton died after suffering a sudden brain hemorrhage in 1984.
In it, Burton confesses that he was happiest when he was with Taylor and wonders what they would be like if they were given another chance to be together.
The July issue of Vanity Fair will be on newsstands June 8. But, read on for more highlights of Burton's love letters:
On acting: "I have never quite got over the fact that I thought and I'm afraid I still do think, that 'acting' for a man--a really proper man--is sissified and faintly ridiculous. I will do this film with Ponti and Loren out of sheer cupidity--desire for money. I will unquestionably do many more. But my heart, unlike yours, is not in it."
On his love for Taylor: "One of these days I will wake up--which I think I have done already--and realize to myself that I really do love. I find it very difficult to allow my whole life to rest on the existence of another creature. I find it equally difficult, because of my innate arrogance, to believe in the idea of love. There is no such thing, I say to myself. There is lust, of course, and usage, and jealousy, and desire and spent powers, but no such thing as the idiocy of love. Who invented that concept? I have wracked my shabby brains and can find no answer."
On their relationship: "You must know, of course, how much I love you. You must know, of course, how badly I treat you. But the fundamental and most vicious, swinish, murderous, and unchangeable fact is that we totally misunderstand each other ... we operate on alien wave-lengths. You are as distant as Venus--planet, I mean--and I am tone-deaf to the music of the spheres. But how-so-be-it nevertheless. (a cliche among Welsh politicians.) I love you and I always will. Come back to me as soon as you can ...