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.