Word: mcphee
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Congratulations on John McPhee's cover story [April 26] on Richard Burton. I read it with mounting excitement-would he fall off the tightrope stretched between ruthless factual reporting and sensitive (and sophisticated) interpretation? He didn't; the subject was rendered in the round; and the subordination of the Elizabeth Taylor episode at the end was exactly right. Without either apologizing or moralizing, Mr. McPhee conveyed the pathos (tragedy would be too big a word) and the self-destructiveness (selling-out would be too small a word) of Richard Burton's career...
...note that Mr. Burton agreed to the story "on the condition that McPhee do all the interviewing of him as well as the writing." Perhaps the peculiar excellence of this article may be due to nothing more complicated than its being the product of one writer as against that of a committee of editors. May I suggest, tactlessly, that the "collective journalism" which TIME invented is sometimes inferior to the old-fashioned kind...
Move over, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Shakespeare, and make room for John McPhee. He well deserves a place among you, for in his penetrating study of Richard Burton, he has created a character in the heroic, tragic tradition of Prometheus, Oedipus, Orestes, and Hamlet...
...journalist is expected to observe with sympathy, but write what he must. McPhee, admiring Burton immensely but finding himself writing of him at a negative time in the actor's life, wound up feeling about his task as Burton did when he first saw the script of Camelot. "I think it can be done," Burton told his wife. "I think that I can just about tightrope...
...railing is narrow, and the gorge below is deep, but readers can test how well McPhee succeeded in "The Man on the Billboard" in SHOW BUSINESS. He was helped immeasurably by the candor of that most complicated and honest man, Richard Burton. At one point, Elizabeth Taylor warned her friend that he was putting himself in peril by talking so freely to McPhee. By way of answer, Burton turned to McPhee. "You may be as vicious about me as you please. You will only do me justice...