Book Review: Comparing and contrasting the lives of Britney Spears and Elizabeth Taylor
L: Britney Spears, left, is joined by boyfriend Justin Timberlake of the group N'Sync as they arrive for the 29th American Music Awards in Los Angeles, Wednesday, Jan. 9, 2002. R: March 15, 1964: Elizabeth Taylor marries Richard Burton, her fifth husband, for the first time.
- The Woman In Me, Britney Spears, Gallery UK, €24
- Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, Roger Lewis, Riverrun, €42
On the surface these two books look pretty different. is Britney Spears’ memoir, tracks a rise to global superstardom, travails with relationships and family, substance abuse problems, medical issues, all of it dominated by a male figure who casts a long, long shadow over her life.
by Roger Lewis tracks a rise to global superstardom, travails with relationships and family, substance abuse problems, medical issues, all of it dominated by a male figure who casts a long, long shadow over her life.
The big difference is that most of the above is true of both Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.
There are marked differences between the books, of course.
Spears’ memoir is often difficult to read, given how candid she is about her struggles. A sample: “I am willing to admit that in the throes of severe postpartum depression, abandonment by my husband, the torture of being separated from my two babies, the death of my adored aunt Sandra, and the constant drumbeat of pressure from paparazzi, I’d begin to think in some ways like a child.”
Her one-time boyfriend Justin Timberlake doesn’t emerge from this book with much credit. When Spears had an abortion at 19 with Timberlake’s baby — he said they were too young to have children — she was left alone, in agony, on her bathroom floor.
That is, until Timberlake “thought maybe music would help, so he got his guitar and he lay there with me, strumming it”.
The true villain is Spears’ father Jamie, however. When Spears began acting irrationally in public the state of California appointed her father as conservator of her finances and personal life, an arrangement which lasted from 2008 to 2021.
She sums it up as follows: “Too sick to choose my own boyfriend and yet somehow healthy enough to appear on sitcoms and morning shows, and to perform for thousands of people in a different part of the world every week.”
She says of her father: “From that point on, I began to think that he saw me as put on the earth for no other reason than to help their cash flow.”
This is a harrowing read in many ways, though it’s also instructive. It takes music fans backstage to see the reality of the business for one of the most famous singers in the world, with business being the operative word.
Even the title is significant: Britney Spears is now 41, and a long way from the teenager who launched her career back in the nineties.
The lucrative afterlife of that image — Spears as a schoolgirl in her breakout video — was one of the reasons it was so profitable to keep her on the hamster wheel of performing even when she was manifestly unwell.
Roger Lewis’s book is very different. It’s not a traditional biography of the two cinema stars of the sixties and the seventies, nor is it an academic treatise on the movie performances.
It is, however, a massively enjoyable romp through the lives of the two great avatars of what we called long ago ‘the jet set’: people who enjoyed the unimaginable luxury of extravagant hotels, international travel, exclusive restaurants (you can hear Alan Whicker renounce the words).
Lewis takes us behind the curtain but in a different way to the Spears book, with a pleasurable nugget or two on every page. Take this, offered as background to Taylor’s complete in difference to cleaning up after herself, or her pets.
“The dogs, cats and ducks roamed freely, crapping at will. When, after staying at the Plaza, in New York, Taylor was presented with a $2,500 surcharge, she summoned Roddy McDowall and Montgomery Clift and the three of them ransacked — or re-ransacked — the suite, chopping up the curtains and bedsheets and shoving pillows in the lavatory. Her treatment of the Park Lane Hotel, also in New York, was worse, because in addition to addle-pated Eddie Fisher, Taylor's room contained Matilda, a monkey which chewed the furniture.”
A couple of takeaways? A rough guess from your reviewer is that the surcharge imposed by the hotel would have bought one a house in Ireland at the time, with change left over; the dramatis personae here — Taylor, McDowall, and Clift — are sharply redolent of a particular time and place; and of course, we learn later in the book that Matilda the monkey was simply abandoned with McDowall. No wonder he starred later in .
Richard Burton features in the book also but Taylor’s should be the name above the title. Driven relentlessly by her mother to become a star, as a teenager she caught the eye in and before marrying and divorcing hotel heir Nicky Hilton before she was 20 (the shares in the Hilton hotel group she received as a wedding present were worth $21.7m in 1994). She then married actor Michael Wilding who was burned off by the jet trail of her soaring career, ended up as maitre d at a restaurant in Brighton, The Three Little Wilding Rooms.
The Burton-Taylor marriages are themselves an endless source of fun, with Lewis going into plenty of detail about the precise nature of their appetites — for money, sex, food, drink, travel.
Too much detail? Possibly, but to even think there might be too much detail divulged is to miss the point of Burton-Taylor entirely. When Lewis gets into with those details it can stop you in your tracks (“It has been estimated that Taylor cost Burton $1,000 an hour, between 22 January 1962, and their first scene in ... and their second divorce, in Haiti, on 1 August 1976.”)
Burton died at 58, raddled from drink. (“I go raving mad on gin. Uncontrollable. Vodka’s the thing. Or whiskey. Or tequila when I’m in Mexico.) One of his last roles was a cameo in with Lee Majors frowning woodenly nearby. Burton’s part involved an actor taking a trip on a regular train, which was harder to swallow than any of Majors’ line readings; he surely only travelled via the Orient Express.
Taylor passed away at 79 in 2011 — one of her last major roles was in movie of 1994, Pearl Slaghoople; a dead heat with Burton in terms of anticlimactic sign-offs.
However, she also enjoyed a late flowering of activity and relevance. In the eighties, she was an early advocate for HIV/Aids research following the death of close friend Rock Hudson, while she was one of the first celebrities to enter the fragrance market. Her perfume range generated much of her estate, which amounted to well over half a billion dollars at her passing.
An encouraging signpost for Britney Spears, perhaps, showing the possibility of remaking oneself after the first flush of career success. Though Spears was never condemned by the Vatican for ‘erotic vagrancy’, the charge against Taylor which gives Lewis’ humid book its title — and its underlying theme.
