MEETING MRS. JENKINS

Report repeated from p. 1108, 1965 when first scheduled for publication as follows: ""It probably won't be more than 25 pages long when it's bound, but sometimes that's enough to drive a reviewer into the prophet business. After all, you don't need a big crystal ball or a vat full of tea leaves...) So, here it comes -- if Richard Burton ever gets around to doing a full dress autobiography, it will be one of the few great ones. He takes joy in the embroidery of recollections and he's got the words. His wife (Elizabeth Taylor, for Pete's sake) has her autobiography in print and if she'd borrowed some talent from her husband, it would have been a better book. This is about how Burton met her when she was Mrs. Somebody Else and just a few moments at some poolside boozer in Hollywood knocked him sideways. He was '...the only living actor in the world who hadn't been asked ...to act...' in Around the World in Eighty Days when he saw her next with third husband Mike Todd, who also resorted to mass media to tell the world what a lot of woman she is. He hymns the incidents with a true Welsh intoxication with cadenced phrasing and never mentions Cleopatra once. Its commercial potential would be recognized by any magazine, which is its length. Consider it a tantalizer, a preview of a coming attraction worth waiting for.