There is a photograph from the summer of 1962 that shows a man and a woman stretched out on the deck of a boat off the Italian island of Ischia, wrapped in each other’s arms. Neither of them knew a photographer was hiding nearby. Within days the picture was on front pages around the world, and two marriages were finished. Before the scandal had a name, before the world had turned their names into a single word, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were simply two people who had made a terrible, beautiful mistake.

Long before he was a movie star, Richard Burton was a coal miner’s son named Richard Walter Jenkins. He was born on November 10th, 1925, in Pontrhydyfen, a small mining village in the hills of South Wales, the twelfth of thirteen children. His father worked in the pits and was fond of drink. His mother died when Richard was just two years old, and he was sent to live with his older sister Cecilia and her husband in the nearby town of Port Talbot.

It was a poor, crowded, working-class childhood, full of chapel hymns, rugby, and the Welsh language, which was the first language he spoke. Everyone who knew him as a boy remembered his voice. Even as a teenager, he could hold a room simply by speaking. That voice caught the attention of a school teacher named Philip Burton, who saw something extraordinary in the restless, clever boy.

Philip Burton took him in, trained him in literature and speech, coached him for hours on the hills above town, and eventually became his legal guardian. In gratitude, the boy took his teacher’s last name. Richard Jenkins became Richard Burton. He won a scholarship to study at Oxford, served in the Royal Air Force, and by the early 1950s he was being hailed as one of the most gifted young stage actors in Britain, the natural heir to Laurence Olivier.

His performances in Shakespeare at the Old Vic in London were the talk of the theater world. In 1949 he married a young Welsh actress named Sybil Williams, and together they became a much-loved couple in London’s theater circles. Hollywood came calling soon after. In 1953, Burton traveled to California to make films, and at a party around the swimming pool of the actor Stewart Granger’s home, he saw Elizabeth Taylor for the first time.

She was twenty-one, already one of the most famous actresses in the world, and married to her second husband, Michael Wilding. Burton later wrote about that first glimpse with a kind of awe. He described her as so beautiful that it was almost overwhelming. Taylor’s memory of that afternoon was very different.

She remembered a loud, talkative Welshman who seemed far too impressed with himself, and she made a point of ignoring him. Neither of them could have guessed what would happen when they met again. That second meeting would come nine years later on the set of the most expensive film ever made, and it would start the biggest scandal of the century. By 1962, the film Cleopatra had already become a disaster.

Production had begun in England in 1960, where cold, rainy weather made it almost impossible to film scenes set in ancient Egypt. Then Elizabeth Taylor, who had been paid one million dollars for the title role, the first actress ever to earn that much for a single film, fell desperately ill with pneumonia. In March 1961 she nearly died in a London clinic, and doctors had to perform an emergency operation on her throat to help her breathe. She carried the small scar for the rest of her life.

The production was shut down, moved to Rome, and largely restarted from scratch. A new director, Joseph Mankiewicz, was brought in, and a new actor was cast as Mark Antony, the Roman general who falls in love with Cleopatra. His name was Richard Burton. Taylor was then married to her fourth husband, the singer Eddie Fisher, who had come to Rome with her.

Burton was still married to Sybil, who also spent time in Rome with their two young daughters. The first day Taylor and Burton filmed together was in January 1962. Burton arrived on set badly hungover after a long night of drinking. His hands were shaking so much that he needed help holding a cup of coffee.

Taylor later said that this moment, the great Shakespearean actor trembling and vulnerable, was the instant she began to fall for him. She found it endearing. She felt a sudden urge to look after him. Burton, by most accounts, had expected nothing more than a flirtation.

He had been involved with leading ladies before, including the actress Claire Bloom in the 1950s, and each time he had gone home to Sybil. Friends said he assured them this would be no different. It would blow over when the cameras stopped rolling. Sybil, who had heard such things before, seems to have believed the same.

Meanwhile, the film itself was spiraling out of control. Executives at 20th Century Fox watched in horror as the budget soared, the schedule collapsed, and enormous sets, including a full-scale recreation of the Roman Forum, sat waiting while scenes were rewritten day by day. Taylor’s famous entrance into Rome, seated on a giant sphinx pulled by hundreds of extras, became one of the most expensive scenes ever filmed. The studio desperately needed the picture to succeed, and now its two stars were the subject of every gossip column on Earth.

Within weeks, everyone on the set knew something was happening between them. Mankiewicz reportedly told a studio executive that he was trying to direct a film while his two stars were living out a real-life romance in front of him. The Italian photographers who swarmed outside the studio gates every day began to hunt for proof. In Rome they were known as paparazzi, a word that had only recently been made famous by the Federico Fellini film La Dolce Vita.

The pressure was enormous for everyone involved. Eddie Fisher, humiliated, left Rome for a time. In February 1962, Taylor was rushed to a hospital. The official explanation was food poisoning, but rumors spread quickly that she had been in a state of deep emotional distress over the collapse of her marriage and the uncertainty of her future with Burton.

Whatever the truth, it was a frightening sign of how high the stakes had become. Then came the photographs. That summer, on a boat off the coast of Ischia, a photographer captured the two of them together, unmistakably intimate. The pictures were published across Europe and America, and the world exploded.

By then, a Vatican-affiliated newspaper had already published an open letter attacking Taylor, accusing her of drifting from one marriage to another without any regard for the families left behind. In Washington, a Georgia congresswoman named Iris Blitch called for the two stars to be barred from returning to the United States because of the damage their behavior was doing to American morals. Taylor and Burton were suddenly the most talked-about couple on Earth. Newspapers had a name for the affair.

They simply called it le scandale. But behind the headlines, there was a family in pain that very few people were paying attention to. And what happened to Burton’s wife and daughters was something Elizabeth Taylor would carry with her for the rest of her life. Sybil Burton had been married to Richard for thirteen years when the scandal broke.

She was a gentle, sociable woman, much loved by Burton’s friends and his large Welsh family. She had seen her husband through other romances over the years and had always believed he would come back to her. For a long time, he always had. But this time was different, and Sybil knew it.

The couple had two daughters. Kate was born in 1957. Jessica was born in 1959. And by the time of the affair, it had become clear that she was facing serious developmental challenges.

She was later diagnosed with autism at a time when very little was understood about the condition. She would spend most of her life in specialized care. For Burton, leaving Sybil meant leaving a little girl who did not understand where her father had gone. People close to him said that this was the one thing he never forgave himself for.

He would later admit that he could not bear to see Jessica because the guilt was too painful. Sybil handled the situation with remarkable dignity. She refused to speak to the press. She returned to London, then moved to New York with the girls.

For more than a year, Burton went back and forth, unable to fully let go of his wife and unable to give up Elizabeth Taylor. Friends described him as tortured by the choice. In the end, Sybil made the decision for him. In December 1963 she obtained a divorce in Mexico.

She went on to build a new life in New York, where she co-founded a famous nightclub called Arthur and later married a young musician. By most accounts, she found real happiness. She never spoke publicly about Richard Burton or Elizabeth Taylor for the rest of her life. Burton’s family back in Wales took Sybil’s side.

His sisters and brothers had known her for years and loved her as one of their own. And they found it hard to accept the glamorous American star who had taken her place. Taylor understood this. Over time, she worked hard to win them over, visiting the family in Wales, sitting in their small kitchens, and treating them with real warmth.

Some of them came to adore her. But in the beginning, she was the woman who had broken up their brother’s marriage, and she knew it. Taylor, meanwhile, finalized her divorce from Eddie Fisher in March 1964. She later admitted in interviews that she had hurt people deeply during that time and that she was not proud of it.

Those close to her said that the image of Jessica, the daughter Burton could no longer bring himself to visit, stayed with her for years. Cleopatra was released in June 1963. It had cost around forty-four million dollars, an astonishing sum at the time, and it nearly bankrupted 20th Century Fox. Critics were mixed, but audiences lined up in huge numbers, largely to see the two people everyone had been reading about.

Before the wedding, the couple spent part of the winter of 1963 in Puerto Vallarta, then a quiet fishing village on Mexico’s Pacific coast, where Burton was filming The Night of the Iguana for the director John Huston. Taylor came with him, and the press followed. The two later bought a house there, which became one of the few places in the world where they could live something close to an ordinary life, with long afternoons by the water, simple meals, and no studio executives in sight. Years later, Taylor remembered it as one of the happiest places she had ever known.

Less than two weeks after Taylor’s divorce became final, she and Burton were married. And what happened on the night of their wedding and in the months right after would set the tone for their entire life together. On March 15th, 1964, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were married in a small ceremony in a hotel suite at the Ritz-Carlton in Montreal, Canada. She wore a yellow gown and had flowers woven into her hair.

It was her fifth marriage. It was his second. She was thirty-two and he was thirty-eight. At the time, Burton was in North America to play Hamlet in a new production directed by the great British actor John Gielgud.

After a trial run in Toronto, the show moved to Broadway in April 1964. It would become the longest-running production of Hamlet in Broadway history up to that time. But the play was not the only thing drawing crowds. Every night, thousands of people gathered outside the theater and outside the couple’s hotel hoping to catch a glimpse of the most famous husband and wife in the world.

Police had to hold back the crowds. People climbed onto cars and lamp posts. When the couple tried to leave, they were mobbed. Burton joked to friends that he was the only actor in history whose audience was waiting outside instead of inside.

At first, they found it thrilling. They were young, wealthy, and wildly in love. Burton adopted Taylor’s young daughters, Liza Todd and Maria, a little girl she had adopted from Germany, and he became a devoted stepfather to her two sons, Michael and Christopher Wilding. For a while, the household had the feeling of a large, noisy, affectionate family.

But there was another side to the life they were building. Neither of them could go anywhere without being followed. They needed security guards, secretaries, nannies, drivers, and a growing army of assistants. Their lives became a traveling circus, moving between hotels in London, Paris, Rome, and New York, never staying anywhere long enough to call it home.

And then, there was the drinking. Burton had always been a heavy drinker, a habit he had picked up in the pubs and clubs of Wales as a young man. Taylor had begun drinking more as well, partly to keep up with him, and partly to cope with the chronic back pain she had suffered since she was a teenager. In the early years, the drinking seemed like part of the fun.

Long, loud evenings full of laughter and poetry and arguments that ended in kisses. It did not stay that way. In 1965, Taylor was offered the lead role in a film version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Edward Albee’s explosive play about a middle-aged college professor and his wife who spend one long, drunken night tearing each other apart in front of two young guests.

Many people thought she was wrong for the part. Martha, the wife, was supposed to be in her fifties, loud, bitter, and heavy. Taylor was in her early thirties and still considered the most beautiful woman in the world. But she wanted it badly.

She gained weight, wore an aging wig, and changed her voice. And she insisted that Burton play her husband, George. The director was Mike Nichols, a young comedian and theater director making his very first film. Nichols later said that working with the two of them was like watching a real marriage unfold under the lights.

They knew exactly how to wound each other. They knew each other’s weaknesses. On screen, it was electrifying. People on the set sometimes found it hard to tell where the performances ended and the real couple began.

The film was shot in black and white, much of it at night, and the long, exhausting scenes of drinking and shouting took their toll on everyone involved. When audiences finally saw it, many were shocked. This was not the glamorous Elizabeth Taylor of the fan magazines. She looked tired, heavy, and furious, and she was brilliant.

The film was released in June 1966. Its language was so frank for its time that it challenged the strict rules Hollywood had followed for decades about what could be said on screen. And within a couple of years, those old rules were replaced by the modern film rating system. It was a major success and received thirteen Academy Award nominations.

Taylor won the Oscar for Best Actress, her second. Burton was nominated for Best Actor and lost. Over the course of his career, he would be nominated seven times without ever winning, a disappointment that friends said hurt him more than he admitted. There was a certain tension in that, too.

Taylor was the bigger movie star. She earned more money, and she won the awards. Burton, the man once seen as the greatest stage actor of his generation, was increasingly known to the world simply as Mr. Elizabeth Taylor.

He joked about it in public. In private, it seemed to eat at him. In 1967 they made The Taming of the Shrew together, directed by Franco Zeffirelli, a lively version of Shakespeare’s comedy about a fiery woman and the man determined to tame her. It was a hit, and audiences once again enjoyed watching the two of them fight on screen.

But after that, their films together became weaker and weaker. And as the movies grew worse, the money grew bigger, and the gifts grew so extravagant that they became legend. Richard Burton loved to give Elizabeth Taylor jewelry. It was partly romance and partly theater, a way of showing the world and himself that the coal miner’s son from Wales could give the most beautiful woman in the world anything she wanted.

In 1968 he bought her the Krupp diamond, a stone of more than thirty-three carats that had once belonged to the wealthy German Krupp family. Taylor wore it almost every day for the rest of her life. She liked to tell a story about the time Princess Margaret of Britain saw the ring at a social event and remarked that it seemed rather vulgar. Taylor smiled, slipped it off, and offered to let the princess try it on.

Margaret did and admired it on her own hand. Taylor took obvious pleasure in pointing out that it did not look so vulgar after all. In early 1969 he bought her La Peregrina, a famous pearl that had once belonged to Queen Mary the First of England in the 1500s. Taylor later told a story about it that became one of her favorite anecdotes.

Shortly after Burton gave it to her, she realized it had fallen off its chain in their hotel suite. She searched frantically and finally noticed one of their puppies chewing on something. It was the priceless pearl. Somehow, it had survived without a scratch.

Then, in October 1969, Burton outbid others to buy a magnificent pear-shaped diamond of nearly seventy carats from the jeweler Cartier, paying more than one million dollars. It became known as the Taylor-Burton diamond. Huge crowds lined up in New York and Chicago just to see it displayed before it was delivered to her. They also bought a yacht, which they named Kalizma after three of their daughters, Kate, Liza, and Maria.

They bought a private jet. They traveled with dozens of suitcases and an entourage of staff, family, and pets. All of this cost an enormous amount of money, and to keep it flowing, they kept making films, many of them poor. Boom, released in 1968, was a notorious flop.

The Comedians, Doctor Faustus, Hammersmith Is Out, and others failed to excite critics or audiences. In total, they would make eleven films together. Burton knew what was happening. In the private diaries he kept for much of his life, published decades later, he wrote again and again about his fear that he was wasting his gift, that he had abandoned serious acting for easy money and fame.

He admired Taylor’s talent and adored her, but he also seemed to blame their life together for pulling him away from the man he might have become. And through all of it, the drinking grew heavier. Friends described evenings that began with laughter and ended in cruel arguments. Burton could be brilliantly funny when drunk, but he could also be vicious, mocking Taylor in front of guests, criticizing her looks or her intelligence.

Taylor, never one to back down, would give as good as she got. Then, in 1968, something happened to Burton’s family that would push his drinking to a new and dangerous level. Ivor Jenkins was Richard Burton’s older brother, nearly twenty years his senior, a big, strong, former rugby player who had been like a second father to him. As Burton became rich, he brought Ivor into his life, giving him work and a place in his household.

In 1968, Ivor was staying at Burton’s house in Céligny, a small village near Geneva in Switzerland. One night, he slipped and fell, badly injuring his neck. The injury left him paralyzed from the neck down. He lived for several more years, unable to move, before dying in 1972.

Burton was devastated. He felt responsible, believing the accident had happened because of his household and his way of life. People close to him said that from that moment on, something inside him broke. His drinking, already heavy, became almost constant.

By some accounts, during the worst periods, he was consuming astonishing amounts of alcohol every day. Taylor, too, was struggling. Her physical health was a constant problem, with repeated surgeries, back pain, and long hospital stays. She depended on painkillers and sleeping pills, and, like Burton, she drank heavily.

In the years that followed, both of them would later speak openly about their struggles with addiction. But at the time, they were living inside those struggles together, and neither one was strong enough to pull the other out. The marriage began to feel less like a romance and more like a storm that never ended. They fought in hotel rooms, on film sets, and on the deck of their yacht.

They reconciled with grand gestures and new jewels. Then they fought again. For Taylor’s children, who were now growing up in this strange, glamorous, unsettled world, it could be frightening and confusing. They spent their childhoods moving between boarding schools, hotel suites, film locations, and the yacht, surrounded by staff and photographers.

Birthdays and holidays were often celebrated wherever their parents happened to be working. Years later, some of them would speak about that time with real affection, and also with the honest admission that it had been anything but a normal upbringing. For her fortieth birthday in 1972, Burton threw a lavish party in Budapest, where he was filming, flying in friends from around the world. He gave her a heart-shaped diamond pendant that had once belonged to the Mughal royal family of India.

From the outside, it looked like the high point of a great love story. Taylor herself had undergone major surgery in 1968, and the long recovery left her in pain and dependent on medication for months. Burton, at one point, told friends he was tired of acting and might simply stop. He never did.

There were always bills to pay, and always another offer waiting. But by then, the people closest to them could see the marriage was coming apart. And a year later, Elizabeth Taylor would do something no one expected. She would announce the end of her marriage herself in a handwritten letter to the world.

In the summer of 1973, Elizabeth Taylor was staying at the Regency Hotel in New York. She and Burton had been fighting for months, and his drinking had become impossible to live with. On July 4th, she sat down and wrote a statement by hand, which was then released to the press. In it, she announced that she and Richard were separating.

She explained that perhaps they had loved each other too much, more than anyone should. She said that being apart might be good for them both, and she asked people to pray for them. It was an extraordinary thing for a star of her fame to do, so personal and so honest, and it made headlines all over the world. Then, within weeks, they were back together.

Their friends were not surprised. This was how it had always worked. They could not live with each other, and they could not live without each other. But the reconciliation did not last.

In early 1974 the fighting resumed. Burton’s drinking had reached a point where his health was failing. At one point in the mid-1970s, he collapsed and was hospitalized, and doctors warned him bluntly that if he did not stop drinking, he would not survive much longer. On June 26th, 1974, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were divorced in Switzerland.

After ten years of marriage, it was over. Taylor appeared briefly before the judge in the small mountain town of Saanen and explained that life with her husband had become impossible to bear. The hearing lasted only minutes. Burton did not attend.

Taylor, who had stood beside him through every scandal and every bottle, later described feeling hollowed out, as if a part of her own body had been removed. People who saw her in the months that followed said she was lonely, restless, and unhappy. She dated other men, but none of them seemed to hold her interest. Burton, meanwhile, became engaged to Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia, a relationship that ended within months.

They kept talking. They kept writing letters to each other. Burton’s letters to Taylor, many of which were later published, were full of tenderness, longing, and regret. He told her that he could not imagine life without her, that she was his whole world, even as he admitted that he did not know how they could be together without destroying each other.

Then, in the summer of 1975, they met again in Switzerland, and within weeks they made a decision that almost everyone around them believed was a terrible mistake. Their reunion was intense and emotional. Burton had stopped drinking for a while, and he seemed healthier and calmer than he had been in years. Taylor saw in him the man she had first fallen in love with in Rome.

They decided to marry again. On October 10th, 1975, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were remarried in a simple ceremony on the banks of the Chobe River in Botswana in Southern Africa. It was performed by a local district official. According to the stories they later told, wild animals wandered nearby, including a pair of hippos and a rhinoceros.

It was a romantic, almost fairytale setting, completely unlike the hotel suite in Montreal eleven years earlier. For a few weeks afterward, they traveled together through the Botswana wilderness, sleeping in simple camps, watching elephants come down to the river at dusk, and spending long evenings under enormous African skies. Taylor fell in love with the country and its people, and she would remain connected to it for the rest of her life. For a short while, far from cameras, hotel lobbies, and film sets, they seem to have found the peace that had always escaped them.

Many of their friends were privately worried. They had watched the first marriage fall apart and could not see what had changed. The answer, it turned out, was very little. Within weeks, Burton was drinking again.

Taylor’s health problems returned. The old arguments came back, louder than ever. And then, in early 1976, while spending the winter in the Swiss ski resort of Gstaad, Burton met a tall young British model named Suzy Hunt, the wife of the racing driver James Hunt. Suzy was about twenty-seven years old.

Burton fell for her quickly, and he made little effort to hide it. For Taylor, it was a deeply painful humiliation. She had remarried him against everyone’s advice, and now he was in love with someone else. By the summer of 1976, the second marriage was over after less than a year.

Burton married Suzy Hunt shortly afterward. Taylor, in December 1976, married John Warner, a Virginia politician who would later become a United States senator. It was during these years that Taylor’s private regrets began to surface most clearly. Friends who were close to her said she sometimes spoke about the price she had paid for loving Burton.

Not just the scandal in Rome, or the families that had been broken, but the years lost to alcohol, illness, fighting, and constant public attention. She had given the marriage everything, twice. And twice it had nearly destroyed her. There was also the guilt she carried about how it had all begun.

Sybil Burton, little Jessica, Eddie Fisher publicly humiliated, her own children who had grown up inside the chaos. In quiet moments, those close to her said, she wondered whether the great love story the world had celebrated had been worth what it had cost everyone else. In 1978 she sold the Taylor-Burton diamond. With part of the money, she helped fund a hospital in Botswana, near the place where she and Burton had been married for the second time.

But even then, the story was not over. Because seven years after their second divorce, the two of them would stand on a Broadway stage together, playing a divorced couple who cannot stay away from each other. In 1983, Taylor and Burton surprised everyone by agreeing to appear together on Broadway in a revival of Private Lives, a comedy by Noel Coward. The play tells the story of a divorced couple who meet by chance while on honeymoon with their new partners, and who quickly realize they are still hopelessly in love and still completely unable to get along.

Audiences did not miss the parallels. Tickets sold quickly, and crowds once again filled the streets. Though they were older now, many of them people who had followed the couple’s story for twenty years. Some had stood outside the Hamlet stage door back in 1964 as teenagers.

Now they came back with their own husbands and wives, their own children, and their own complicated marriages, hoping to see the old magic one more time. The production opened in May 1983. Critics were not kind. Many felt the stars seemed tired and out of step with the play’s light, quick humor.

Taylor was struggling with her health and with addiction. Burton, now in his late fifties, looked far older than his age, weakened by decades of hard drinking. And there was a final twist. During the run of the play in July 1983, Burton married his fourth wife, a young British production assistant named Sally Hay in Las Vegas.

Taylor was reportedly hurt, though by then she had come to expect almost anything from him. Later that year, she checked herself into the Betty Ford Center in California for treatment, the first of her public steps toward recovery. Even so, those who watched them on stage night after night said there were moments when the old spark flickered. A look, a laugh, a line that seemed to land a little too close to home.

For a few seconds at a time, the audience could see the couple that had once stopped the world. Some nights, Taylor missed performances because of illness, and understudies had to step in to the disappointment of the crowds. The production went on tour after Broadway, but it limped to its close. Two people who had once filled theaters simply by walking past them were now struggling to get through the evening.

It would be the last time they worked together. And within a year, Elizabeth Taylor would receive news that changed everything she thought she understood about the man she had married twice. On August 5th, 1984, Richard Burton died of a brain hemorrhage at his home in Céligny, Switzerland. He was fifty-eight years old.

He was married to Sally Hay at the time, and she was at his side. Taylor was devastated. People who saw her said she was overcome with grief in a way that reminded them of how she had mourned Mike Todd, the husband she had lost in a plane crash in 1958. She did not attend Burton’s funeral, reportedly to avoid turning it into a media spectacle that would hurt his widow.

Instead, in the days afterward, she visited his grave privately, surrounded by security. Then came the letter. Shortly before he died, Burton had written to Taylor. The letter reached her after his death.

In the years that followed, Taylor told friends and interviewers that in it, he had said he wanted to come home to her. She kept that letter close for the rest of her life. According to those who knew her, she kept it by her bedside. She never revealed every word.

But to the people closest to her, she suggested that if he had lived, they might have married a third time. His daughter Kate, the little girl he had left behind in 1963, grew up to become an acclaimed stage and screen actress in her own right. Over the years, she spoke kindly about Taylor, remembering the warmth she had shown her during childhood visits, long after the headlines about her parents’ broken marriage had faded. It was a quiet sign that not every wound from those years had stayed open forever.

In her later years, Taylor spoke about Burton with enormous love. She called him the great love of her life. She also spoke with clear eyes about how much their love had cost. The scandal, the broken families, the drinking, the years of fighting.

She seemed to hold both truths at once, that she had loved him more than anyone, and that loving him had come close to destroying them both. Richard Burton’s diaries, published in 2012, a year after Taylor’s death, filled in the rest of the picture. In page after page, he wrote about her beauty, her humor, her courage, and her temper. He also wrote about his own failings and the damage he knew he was doing.

Readers who had grown up with the fairy tale of the most glamorous couple in the world discovered a far more complicated story of two people who adored each other, admired each other, and hurt each other, often all in the same day. Some passages were tender enough to bring readers to tears. Others were so harsh that it was hard to believe they had been written about the same woman. Elizabeth Taylor died on March 23rd, 2011, at the age of seventy-nine in Los Angeles.

She had been married eight times to seven different men. But only one of them was ever married to her twice. In the decades after Burton’s death, she built a very different kind of life. She became one of the most important voices in the fight against AIDS, raising enormous sums of money, and speaking out at a time when much of Hollywood was afraid to.

She launched a successful line of perfumes. She outlived most of the people who had once surrounded her in Rome. And whenever interviewers brought up Richard Burton, her voice changed. She would smile, then grow quiet, then talk about him as though he had only just left the room.

Somewhere in the archives of a Roman photo agency, the old pictures from the summer of 1962 still exist. Two people on the deck of a boat, wrapped in each other’s arms, not yet knowing what the world was about to do to them, or what they were about to do to each other. They look young, careless, and happy.

And for that one afternoon off the coast of Ischia, perhaps they were.