How Taylor’s Life Became a Parable

If you had to pinpoint the start of the 1960s — that is, the counterculture revolution — two events are almost universally agreed on as the era’s formative earthquakes. One was the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The other (the real spark to the tinderbox) was the first appearance of the Beatles on “Ed Sullivan,” which happened only 11 weeks later, and which all but answered the assassination by saying, “Here is joy. Here is hope. Here’s a new way to be.”

Yet there was another global media phenomenon that took place over a slightly longer period of time, and it was one that was just as defining of the era’s new energy. That was the scandalous romance of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. We tend to think of that saga as, simply, the apotheosis of celebrity gossip. Yet as it plays out in Nanette Burstein’s luscious and enveloping documentary “Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes,” we see how this love story was bigger than that. It was mythological.

Why? For decades, there had been adulterous movie-star romances. Taylor and Burton were the first to see their private lives played out in the new international mass media; the idea of “paparazzi” literally came into being around them. (They were chased for miles, and photographers would pose as priests or plumbers to stake them out.) But it wasn’t merely the unprecedented exposure. The Liz-and-Dick story happened as the new age of divorce was coming into being, and this saga had one foot in each epoch. Taylor had been a movie star since the early ’40s, with an otherworldly beauty comparable to that of Vivien Leigh or Marilyn Monroe. She was from that larger-than-life place; that’s partly why, for “Cleopatra,” she had become the first actor in history to be paid $1 million for a movie role.

The fact that she abandoned her husband, Eddie Fisher, to be with Burton, her “Cleopatra” costar, was treated as the height of sin (it was denounced by the Vatican)….