They separated in December 1969, and Roberts went off her rocker. She started to swallow overdoses and was regularly having her stomach pumped. “I want to f—ing kill him,” she said of Harrison to a doctor at the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. When her agent Aaron Frosch sent a basket of cheese, she threw it out of the window, saying the gift was “vulgar and pretentious”. Roberts went on Russell Harty’s chat show, called the host “a silly c—” and said of her cats, “all they want to do is screw”. Harty’s other guests, Sir Peter Hall, Elton John and Barbara Cartland, fell into an embarrassed silence.
What are we to make of all this? First, Roberts was right to be indignant that, were she a man, her bad behaviour would have won applause, even admiration. It irked her she should be chastised as a nuisance and for not “obeying the rules of civilised behaviour. Yet Rex often doesn’t. Robert Shaw didn’t. Burton didn’t. O’Toole didn’t.” Very true. Secondly, Roberts is a warning about what can happen if you become overdependent: “I didn’t make a life of my own… I lived entirely through him,” she said of Harrison. Ten years after the divorce, she was still dreaming of a reconciliation: “I still love my special, dynamic, silly, crusty, unbearable Rex.”
Finally, there is her Welshness – the chippy Celtic strain uneasy with Anglo-Saxon cool. Comparing her fate with that of Burton, Roberts said they’d become “croppers in the eyes of the world” because they’d wanted to impress; “insecure, cursed with feelings of inadequacy”. Despite manifest gifts and public recognition (Roberts won BAFTAs and was nominated for Oscars), “underneath, the uncertainties and the instabilities bubbled away”. There were other resemblances between Roberts and Burton, too. Dissipation, frayed nerves, adrift from one’s origins, an inability to settle.
The Welsh are supreme at being actors and actresses because flamboyance is suppressed; it is the guilty secret, which bursts out now and again in lunatic ways, quick and fierce. There’s a sense of flight, dispersal, a splitting up of the emotions. Yet what is the alternative? To be respectful and dry? As Rachel Roberts said, “I still have emotional power, but it is locked up inside me, devastatingly, eating me alive.” Born in Glamorganshire, I’m not dissimilar.
