The madness of King Richard

He was famous for his tempestuous relationships, but at the height of his success, was Richard Burton really having a secret affair with a girl of 14? David Thomson examines a new allegation about one of our greatest stars

Very well, if you insist, let's try it: "Rosemary, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Rose-ma-ry: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Rose. Rose. Ah."

No, I'm sorry, it doesn't do anything for me. For whereas the name "Lolita" does begin to give the mouth a feline workout, "Rosemary" (just try it) might be the start of some panting exercise in a new scheme for pain-free childbirth.

And so, I suppose – and one gives up on these things with a heavy heart – we will have to consign to "mere coincidence" the neat observation that the great Vladimir Nabokov was, in 1955 and 56, taking his first playful steps with Dolores Haze, while Richard Burton, actor and Welshman, was, according to gleeful reports in the Sunday papers, making occasional bed with one Rosemary Kingsland, who was 14 and 15 at the time (he was 29 and 30).

It's a pity, I grant, if you have a mind disposed to take pleasure in reports of coincidental stirrings in unconnected parts of the world, over man's many mysteries. (I had a threesome rather nicely lined up – not just Nabokov and his Lolita, Richard and Rosemary, but in Los Angeles, Nicholas Ray making a mistress out of his teen star, Natalie Wood, as they made Rebel Without a Cause together around the same time.)

On the other hand, if you see rape instead of celebrity games, then what are we to make of Richard Burton and this story? Not that I mean to challenge Ms Kingsland, but her book – Hold Back the Night – is not published until July, and no manuscript has been made available yet. (There's still time enough, perhaps, to get a better title, though Hold Back the Night is suitably redolent of those British movies from the Fifties – Yield to the Night, Is Your Honeymoon Really Necessary? and Tread Softly Stranger – all of which starred the incomparable Diana Dors, whose real name, of course, was "Fluck".)

Word games firmly aside, the intriguing thing about Ms Kingsland's story as it broke was that no one was surprised. Indeed, there was a general air of knowingness, about the very crowded beds that Richard Burton had known at that time, and the likelihood that someone could have slipped in and out without so much as a parking fee.

Richard Burton, you see, was in his first prime in 1953 (the year in which Ms Kingsland says that they had met – I'll come back to that later, if you don't mind, Monsieur Poirot). He was 28 in 1953, a very beautiful boy still, even if possessed of a man's voice. He was married, to Sybil Williams (had been since 1949), but she seems to have held to the policy, with his flings and affairs, that if she didn't notice, he might not. And, like all great stars, he was often far away – a light so bright that it was hard to see what he was doing.

He had only just made his Hollywood debut. There had been a few films in Britain in the late Forties and early Fifties, but breakthrough came with the call to go to America to star opposite Olivia de Havilland in My Cousin Rachel (adapted from Daphne du Maurier's novel). That had led to an Academy Award nomination, even if it proved far from his best work.

But in the same sojourn, Fox seized on him to play Marcellus, the Roman centurion, in The Robe, a film of ponderous importance for the studio in that it introduced their CinemaScope process. There were stories that Burton had beaten out Laurence Olivier and Tyrone Power in the casting. But perhaps those two had enough experience at reading scripts to take defeat gracefully. Which left Burton to co-star with Jean Simmons. It is not really film criticism, I know, but I have often followed the policy of looking for Ms Simmons's naughty grin as a sign of her happiness. Her character suffers lamentably in The Robe, but the smile is there. Take it or leave it.

Then, after The Desert Rats, in which he was trying to beat James Mason's Rommel, Burton returned to Britain for the Old Vic season that inspired many young women in London, and which established him as the great young actor of the moment. (Alas, moment was the word, which reminds me that a few months earlier, in Los Angeles, Burton had had his first meeting with Elizabeth Taylor. He wrote in his diary: "She was lavish. She was a dark unyielding largesse. She was, in short, too bloody much, and not only that, she was totally ignoring me.")

With that to dream on, Burton took over the theatre in Waterloo Road. In one winter season there, he played Coriolanus; he was Caliban in The Tempest to Michael Hordern's Prospero; he was Philip the Bastard in King John, and Toby Belch in Twelfth Night. He was also Hamlet, with Claire Bloom as his Ophelia.

Bloom was intensely dark and beautiful. She had just done Limelight with Charlie Chaplin. And, if Elizabeth Taylor was a destroyer in his dreams, Bloom was a very lively frigate. The actress knew her co-star's reputation, and she was vulnerable to his looks. She came to the Old Vic asking other actors to protect her, and, of course, she succumbed. I would not be surprised if Rosemary Kingsland, queueing for seats in the Old Vic gallery, did not go home and stick voodoo pins in Claire Bloom dolls.

One of the details so far released about Kingsland's claimed romance with Burton is that she first heard him, in 1953, in a reading of Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood. Well, perhaps, but in 1953 (the year that the long poem was finished, and the year of Thomas's death), the most likely venue for such a reading would have been in a public house. And many will remember how strictly the licensing laws were applied against under-age admission.

I can find no mention of a public performance, though Under Milk Wood was produced on radio in 1954, with Burton as the narrator. Millions heard that – and were the more attached to Burton because of it. I think it coincided with the Old Vic season, and I am certainly not saying that there was not a meeting and an affair. But sometimes, great radio leaves you feeling that you heard a thing live.

Are we to credit the affair? Melvyn Bragg, the author of a good book on Burton (published in 1988), says that he had no knowledge of the relationship. And Bragg had access to Burton's diaries, which seem to be full and candid, just as they are terrific reading. Which only raises the point, if, in the mid-1950s, Burton had a sexual affair with an underage girl, would he have kept it even from his diary?

I don't raise this point idly. Burton was born and raised in Pontrhydfen, and he was a chapel-going son to an alcoholic father in times of great poverty and hardship. There was guilt among working men, and I'm sure this was passed down to Burton. Later on in life, when rich, he was famously generous with money to family and friends. And I don't think it's going too far to see Burton as someone scarred by guilt and ruefulness. It's there in his face (just as Jean Simmons has her smile), and it was strengthened later on by that burden of the greatest actor of his moment being dragged through the tabloids by Liz Taylor, and compelled to play in some atrocious movies.

Now, you can read that stricken look in two ways. You can say that the religious spirit in him would have been shocked at the idea of an affair with a young girl – and he plainly had as much opportunity for adult sex as he could handle. Or you can say that he was especially stricken because he knew that he could never overcome the gravest of temptations.

Of course, we are minus the best witness, until Hold Back the Night is published. If Ms Kingsland can write, she might move us in her story, and add a lot to our sense of a troubled man. On the other hand, even her fuller version of what happened may end up sounding hollow or far-fetched. Rosemary was older than Lolita when her affair took place. But if she meant something profound to the actor, why is she not in the diary? I think it's fair to say that in his worst times, Burton took some real pride in writing, and the fact of the diary. It was a standard for him.

But if it happened, it was rape – and no justification gets over that, unless one is prepared to abandon the principle of sexual protection for minors under the law. Burton was promiscuous, and one can also explain that haggard look on his face by saying that he could not care sufficiently about things – including his own crimes. Yet mature men are often attracted to women who are not of age. In Hollywood, the tradition is built into the social structure – which is not quite the same as saying that rape is common there. What does prevail is the notion that successful men, with money and power, may command a succession of very young consorts. Their superstition that somehow they are protected from dying, or growing old, is not that far removed from the habit.

But they do die, and plenty of the marriages or relationships end up in the divorce court. The women will tell you that there are always ways in which men grow older but stay young, while women grow wiser and lose their looks.

Richard Burton is a significant example just because of those very humble and "ordinary" beginnings. He knew life about as tough and simple as it was in the British Isles in the Thirties. And he lived to become tragically extravagant with the money he had and with his own talent.

Ms Kingsland has said one other thing: that she and Burton were never seen together. It's easy to understand that pressure, for in the 1950s, that kind of affair was as glaring as race. But suppose that the relationship was utterly secret over a period of a couple of years, and then it becomes something that nearly begs to be seen now. In other words, the people most likely to condemn the affair on principle may flock to a movie telling its story. That hypocrisy was apparent when the recent remake of Lolita appeared, when there were even notions that getting an under-age actress to pretend in such scenes was an offence.

So, truly, it is a serious matter, and I keep coming back to Richard Burton's face and that look, ready for a mercy that he couldn't quite believe in.