Something to Write Home About

Dear Mother,

I'm sorry I haven't written, but it has taken me days to get over the wonderful thing that happened. Earlier this week, I saw Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton do a poetry reading at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater on Broadway. Mother, I don't care what you say about them, I want to tell you it was really beautiful.

A man at the office took me with him because his wife was sick. The reading was a benefit performance for the American Musical and Dramatic Academy, an acting school which is run by Mr. Philip Burton, the foster father who gave Richard Burton his name and trained him as an actor. We sat in $50 seats. All the ones in front of us were worth $100. If that sounds like a lot of money to you, it sure does to me, too, but in retrospect, I guess it seems worth it. Not only did the theater academy get more than $30,000 out of it, but also these two really courageous people really proved themselves before everybody.

And I mean everybody. It was the glossiest audience you could imagine. Everyone was tan and nifty, and half of them seemed to have put their evening clothes on over their bathing suits. I alone saw Dina Merrill, Carroll Baker, Lauren Bacall, Hume Cronyn, Red Buttons, Bea Lillie, Lee Remick, Montgomery Clift, and Kitty Carlisle with a man I didn't recognize, but I heard someone say it was Alan Jay Lerner. Carol Channing was there in a white stovepipe hat two feet high and an enormous pair of wrap-around sunglasses that would embarrass a Greyhound bus driver. I learned later that President Kennedy's sisters Pat and Jean were there, Anita Loos, Walter Wanger, Myrna Loy, Adolph Green, and Elizabeth Taylor's mother and father. Some of the other women there were really risque in those new gowns that show so much.

The Burtons read verses alternately in a sort of ping-poem match (hah-hah!). Many of the items had apparently been selected for their meaning to the Burtons. Richard, for example, started off by reciting To His Coy Mistress by Andrew Marvell, and one of the poems Elizabeth read was Thomas Hardy's The Ruined Maid:

"And now you've gay bracelets and bright feathers three!" "Yes, that's how we dress when we're ruined," said she.

Elizabeth read that one in a very accomplished cockney accent and showed herself to be more of an actress than I thought she was. She read William Butler Yeats's Three Bushes, about two women who loved the same man, and really belted out the line, "What could I do but drop down dead if I lost my chastity?" All evening, as she read, Richard's foster father sat behind her mouthing every word she said. He was just afraid she would make a mistake, but he looked like a ventriloquist.

Together, the Burtons read T. S. Eliot's Portrait of a Lady, which, in case you have forgotten, Mother, starts off with a quote from an Elizabethan play: "Thou has committed fornication, but that was in another country." You see what I mean about courage.

Very tenderly, Elizabeth read, "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways," by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Philip Sidney's beautiful sonnet which begins: My truelove hath my heart, and I have his, By just exchange one for the other given.

Richard was even better than she was. He did the "death of kings" speech from Richard II and the St. Crispin's Day speech from Henry V, and he really sounded like an orchestra, although he stumbled over an unbelievable number of lines. Oddly, he was at his best reading not Shakespeare but D. H. Lawrence--a poem called Snake, which is one of his favorites in all literature. But the high point of the evening came when he and Elizabeth read the 23rd Psalm. He would read a line in Welsh, then she would read a line in English, and they went through the whole psalm that way. The man with me said they sounded like a Paiute Indian and an acolyte, which surprised me, because I was really moved.

Elizabeth wore two gowns, both the same sort of Roman-matron style, one blue and the other white. She changed offstage. This was the first time she had ever faced a theater audience. She looks heavier than she does in movies but not nearly as old as she is. She is 32. She was beautiful, but not as beautiful as she is supposed to be, if you know what I mean. But how could anybody be that beautiful?

The evening was especially fun because there was so much pleasant banter between Richard and Elizabeth. Once she stopped a poem and said, "Sorry, may I start again? I got all screwed up."

"I could say that in Hamlet every night," said Richard.

After she finished reading one poem (near the beginning), he said, "I didn't know she was going to be this good." A little later, she said to the audience, "See--you did get something for your money." That said it for me, and it wasn't even my money.

Afterwards, outside in the street, the crowds were as big as they always are (the theater is the same one where Burton plays Hamlet), trying to glimpse Richard and Elizabeth. I read in the paper that Richard said it is a mystery to him why the crowds are there every night. "At first I thought the somewhat illicit quality of our relationship before we were married was bringing them," he told a reporter from the Times. "We assumed that once we were married it would stop."

At this point Elizabeth Taylor apparently popped in and said, "That doesn't have anything to do with it, darling. You're the one they're coming to see. You're the Frank Sinatra of Shakespeare."

"The what?" said Richard. "I said the Frank Sinatra of Shakespeare," said Elizabeth. "Oh come now," he said, "get ahold of yourself, luv."

All for now-- Agnes P.S. I don't miss college one bit.

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