How two superstars’ extramarital affair gave birth to paparazzi, earned Vatican’s ire and almost got them banned from US

Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton’s infamous affair

In the early 60s, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were the world’s two most popular film stars. As the highest-paid actor and actress in the world, they were practically royalty. They were working together on the period epic Cleopatra and rumour mills were abuzz that they were having an affair. This was a more conservative America than the one of today, and since both the stars were married to other people – Burton to Sybil Williams and Taylor to Eddie Fisher – they denied these rumours. In 1963, Burton and Taylor took a secret holiday to Italy. Here, a paparazzo clicked a few now-iconic shots of the two, wearing swimming suits, relaxing on a yacht and engaging in some PDA. The grainy black-and-white pictures blew up, and a scandal erupted worldwide.

How America’s sweethearts became world’s most-hated

The affair and the fallout that followed were covered by world media for weeks. Even the press in South Asia and Africa, which usually stayed away from Hollywood gossip, gave newsprint to Burton and Taylor’s scandal. Since their actions were seen as immoral, the Catholic Church had to get involved. The Vatican publicly condemned the actors for their ‘erotic vagrancy’. And even as the two stars stayed in Italy, the US Congress mulled a ban on them. There were calls from several Congressmen for a vote to bar them from re-entering the US and ban them from the country forever.

The cultural impact of Liz and Dick’s affair

Many have described the affair as the first showbiz scandal that galvanised the entire world. Prior to this, celebrities’ private lives were largely hidden from public consumption. Audiences were more interested in what their favourite stars did in front of the camera. Sociologist Ellis Cashmore has called the publication of the photograph a “turning point” in modern history, after which celebrities could never fully separate their private lives from their public roles.

Another change the incident brought about was the popularisation of paparazzi. The word was invented by Federico Fellini for his film La Dolce Vita (1960) in which a news photographer was named Paparazzo. The media used the word as a pseudonym for the photographer who clicked Burton and Taylor and eventually for all such photographers. As soon as photographers in Hollywood realised that magazines and newspapers were willing to shell out thousands of dollars for one perfectly timed shot of a star, everyone wanted to be a ‘paparazzo’. And the rest, as they say, is history.