He once went on a boat cruise with Richard Burton and his wife Elizabeth Taylor. The occasion was a poetry recitation session. Mr. Burton observed that, hopefully, unlike most present there, Mr. Moraes was more interested in poetry than looking at his wife's teats! (I couldn't access the exact quote of Mr. Moraes. My apologies if it differs a lot from my paraphrasing of it.)
Mr. Burton himself once described Ms. Taylor’s breasts as “apocalyptic.”
He would write to Elizabeth well into their marriage. “You don't realize of course E. B. how fantastically beautiful you have always been, and how strangely you have acquired an added and special and dangerous loveliness. Your breasts jutting out from that half-asleep languid lingering body, the remote eyes, the parted lips.”
Reading this, I am sure, it must have been hard to concentrate on poetry, even for Mr. Moraes.
But there was a lot more to Ms. Taylor than just breasts. I thought she was a very good actor.
For me, she becomes Maggie in Tennessee Williams's "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof". Her voice disturbs me deeply at a fundamental level. Then, I stop looking at her breasts.
An iconic shot of Taylor splashing in the ocean, from the set of Suddenly Last Summer (1959). Vanity Fair used this image for the July 2010 cover.© Sunset Boulevard/Corbis.