Actors: A Beginning Writer

Richard Burton has long insisted that he would rather be a writer than an actor. Last summer, Condé Nast’s Glamour magazine sent him a timid feeler asking if he might like to write a story for the Christmas issue. The idea appealed to Burton’s repressed ambition, and he set to work in longhand. The result, which will next month become his first published short story, is anything but an embarrassment. It is worth every farthing he was paid for it. “He gets $500,” says Glamour’s Feature Editor Marilyn Mercer, “which is a very good price for a beginning writer.”

Harbinger of Death. Burton’s tale is about a Christmas in his village in Wales. It is written in the first person and is so faithfully autobiographical that he does not even bother to change his own name. On this Christmas Eve, old Mad Dan, “the local agnostic,” has deliberately kept his little nephew Richard out with a group of miners until the hour is so late that the boy grows suspicious.

At home, he remembers, Mrs. Tabor T.B. has been visiting all day. Mrs. Tabor is called T.B. because all of her eight children died of tuberculosis in their teens. She is a local harbinger of death. Surely the reason he has been kept out so late is that death is coming to his family too.

“Is my sister dying, Mad Dan?” I said.

“We are all dying. She’ll last the night.”

Green-Eyed Gypsy. Burton handles his narrative with considerable storytelling skill. The revelation it turns on is that, despite the fateful presence of Mrs. Tabor T.B., a birth is occurring in his home rather than the death he suspects. Along the way he flashes a prose that is occasionally quite memorable, as when he explains why any boy in the valley would want to grow up to be a miner: “There was, you understand, the ambition for the walk of the miners in corduroy trousers, with yorks under the knees to stop the loose coal running down into your boots and the rats from running up inside your trousers, and the lamp in the cap on the head, and the bandy muscle-bound strut of the lords of the coalface.”

Curiously, he even manages to work Elizabeth Taylor into the story. It comes in the form of a fond description of the hero’s sister. “When my mother died, she, my sister, had become my mother, and more mother to me than any mother could ever have been. I was immensely proud of her. I shone in the reflection of her green-eyed black-haired gypsy beauty . . . She was innocent and guileless and infinitely protectable. She was naive to the point of saintliness and wept a lot at the misery of others. She felt all tragedies except her own. I knew that I had a bounden duty to protect her above all other creatures. It wasn’t until thirty years later, when I saw her in another woman, that I realized I had been searching for her all my life.”