Pete Hamill - Piecework

Although Williams had set his play in Acapulco, Huston thought that the port city had become too modernized, too sleek; he chose Vallarta. Huston knew the country; he’d been coming to Mexico since the 1920s and set one of his greatest films there, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. The set for Iguana — a run-down hotel — was built by a team of almost 300 Mexican workers in the jungle above Mismaloya Beach, seven miles south of town, and some of the ruins can be seen today. But much of the action was around the bar of the Oceano Hotel, still at the corner of Paseo Diaz Ordaz and Calle Galeana. The bar is gone now, but the ghosts of Burton and Taylor remain.

“Burton was the greatest single drinker I ever saw,” said a man named Jeffrey Smith, who claimed to have been here during the shooting. “He could drink anything and never get drunk.”

Among the potions that Burton downed was raicilla, a Mexican form of moonshine, made from cactus, as mind-bending as absinthe and still available at the older bars outside of town. Burton told one interviewer, “If you drink it straight down, you can feel it going into each individual intestine.” Taylor was tolerant. She told one reporter, “Richard lives each of his roles. In this film he’s an alcoholic and an unshaven bum, which goes a long way toward explaining his appearance and liquid intake.”

Burton and Taylor took a house called the Casa Kimberley, up the side of the hill beside the Rio Cuale, and by all accounts they fell in love with Puerto Vallarta with only slightly less passion than they felt for each other. The movie company eventually finished its work and moved on, with no casualties from Huston’s derringers. But Taylor and Burton bought the Casa Kimberley and added a house across the narrow street and built a bridge to connect them. It would be nice to say that they lived happily ever after. Almost nobody does, least of all movie stars.

Still, they had good years in Puerto Vallarta. They came down with great crowds of children and staff, spent holidays there, too often recuperated there from the bruising life of celebrity. The Mexicans loved them. The Burtons created scholarships for local children. They were an attraction that validated the town, and its population exploded (it is now about 250,000). By 1970, even Richard Nixon had come to Puerto Vallarta, for a state visit with the Mexican president. The Burtons had various celebrities as guests, but often they were alone. From the testimony of Burton’s diaries (quoted by his biographer Melvyn Bragg), Puerto Vallarta also helped him heal. Sometimes Burton hid out in the top floor of one of the houses, reading and writing. He read eclectically, Octavio Paz, W. H. Auden, Ian Fleming, Philip Roth; he came back again and again to the work of his Welsh compatriot Dylan Thomas. Burton was an excellent writer, a self-punishing diarist, and a good, sly, open-eyed observer.

“Elizabeth is now looking ravishingly sun-tanned,” he wrote in 1969, “though the lazy little bugger ought to lose a few pounds or so to look her absolute best.”

In the late 1970s John Huston was to come back to Puerto Vallarta too, hauling his aging bones from the drizzly disappointments of a long sojourn in Ireland. He built a house in the jungle near Las Caletas, 30 miles from the town’s center. It could be reached only from the sea. He didn’t see much of Burton and Taylor. When the Burtons divorced, Taylor got the houses. For a while Burton lived in another Vallarta house with a new wife. Her name was Susan. The house was called, after half of each, Casa Bursus. Today nobody can tell you its location.

But the old Burton-Taylor houses, with their connecting bridge, are still there. They’ve been sold and converted into a bed-and-break-fast. One afternoon my wife and I went to visit. A long flight of stone steps begins at a now dry fountain, where we saw a Domino’s Pizza carton darkening in the sun. At the top of the steps you can see in the distance the fabled bridge, painted the color of strawberry ice cream. We rang the bell of a wooden door at 445 Calle Zaragoza, and a lean, tanned man named Jacques gave us a tour. He said he had worked in many places, from St. Bart’s to Polynesia, but was entranced with Puerto Vallarta.

“The people are very pure,” he said, “and the town is very romantic. It has everything you don’t find in the United States now. Puerto Vallarta is 1938. You can regenerate yourself here. It’s very charming and not damaged.”

Stairs led us to an open, white-tiled floor with a bar and couches and a cool breeze off the ocean. There were photographs of Taylor and Burton, posters for Butterfield 8 and Becket, other reminders of lives once lived here. Off to the side (and in the house across the little bridge, beside the small swimming pool) we saw rooms named for various Burton-Taylor movies: the VIPS Room and the Comedians Room, the Sandpiper Room and the Night of the Iguana Room, the Taming of the Shrew Room and the Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Room. Some were excellent movies; others were among the worst ever made. I found a bookcase against a wall, and among the weathered books was a copy of Sanctuary V, by my friend Budd Schulberg, dedicated to Burton and Taylor and dated December 17, 1969 — a remnant of some lost Christmas. The place is clean and bright and pleasant. It also made me melancholy.

A vagrant feeling of waste and loss followed me to the top floor, where a bedroom is now called the Cleopatra Room. According to the Bragg biography, this is where Burton came to do his writing, where he tried to make sense of his life, to find some center among the swirling currents of celebrity and alcohol. He never found it. He knew that once he had been a serious actor but had been transformed into a cartoon figure, part of a team called Dick ’n’ Liz. Here, where there are now tasteful wicker chairs and fresh-cut flowers, he could walk onto the balcony and look out over the town to the sea. Too often he saw only the waste of his own talent and his life. We looked around, feeling oddly like intruders at the scene of some private tragedy, and then we fled.

The town that Huston, Burton, and Taylor saw in 1963 has been enveloped by the much larger Puerto Vallarta that is here now. It has the usual transcultural clutter that you see in places designed to give pleasure to strangers from El Norte: Denny’s and McDonald’s and a lot of boutiques. But it’s still a good town for walking. In the mornings we strolled along the beaches, often pausing on the one called Los Muertos (The Dead), named for a group of silver miners who were murdered here by pirates long ago. The sea is clear and translucent; the city fathers have worked hard to avoid the calamity that ruined Acapulco. On most days the leaves of the palm trees drooped in the heat. We saw a lean brown horse tethered to a lone palm tree on a spit of shore, waiting for riders. Mexican men contentedly sold blankets and hats.

“I have the best job in the world,” said a brown-skinned man named Marcos Villasenor, who was 44. “I come on my horse in the morning from there, up by Nayarit. I give people rides. They pay me. Then I go home.” He smiled broadly. “And all day while I am working I am in a beautiful place.”

His feelings were clearly shared by others. On each day of our stay the beach was crowded with a mixture of tourists and Mexican families. The Americans looked pink and awkward and lonely. The Mexicans were friendly, even sweet, but they were more concerned with children than with visitors. Here, as everywhere in Puerto Vallarta, a visitor sensed a relaxed manner among the Mexicans. Among workers and visitors, no one felt the seething hostility that poisons so many resorts, particularly in the Caribbean.