Not all the stories we heard in Puerto Vallarta contained such elements of melodrama and redemption. But there were other tales of healing — the woman from Minnesota, broken by a difficult divorce, who wandered south with a vague hope for escape. Now the gray years were erased by the sun and sea and the sound of children laughing in the still hours of the siesta; she worked in a clothing store and was catching up on two decades of lost laughter. There was a man broken by the culture of greed during the American eighties; back in Boston he had left a bankrupt company, a ruined marriage, a defaulted mortgage; now in the mornings he took a boat out on the blue water to fish for shark. Another man had lost a much loved son to drugs; another had lost a career to whiskey; a third had postponed an old dream of becoming a painter. All had come to Puerto Vallarta to live a little longer or, perhaps, for the first time.
For centuries it was a fishing village, a few huts thatched with palm dozing along the shore of the great natural harbor called the Bahia de Banderas, which is 25 miles wide. The town was built around the Rio Cuale, one of the four streams that now traverse the city. It never became a major port, because the merchants of Mexico preferred to greet their Manila galleons in Acapulco, 800 miles to the south and a much shorter journey to the capital, Mexico City. For years no roads connected the tiny village to the large cities of the interior; mule trains labored for weeks to travel the 220 miles due east to Guadalajara. And Mexico City, 550 mountainous miles to the southeast, was beyond reach.
In 1851 a man named Guadalupe Sanchez settled his family on the edge of the Rio Cuale, which divides the present Vallarta into north and south, and he is usually credited with transforming the cluster of fishing shacks into a town. But it did not prosper, and the locals apparently preferred it that way. They lived out their lives in its quiet cobblestoned streets to the familiar rhythms of day and night, rainy summers and balmy winters. Even the great upheaval of the Mexican revolution had little effect on the fishermen and small farmers who lived on the adjoining coastal plains. Occasionally cruise ships or tramp steamers would drop anchor in the empty bay, and locals went out in dugout canoes to sell chili and beans. The ships would vanish and leave Vallarta in its solitude. After World War II some of the Guadalajara upper classes discovered the town. A rough road was built, followed by a small airstrip. By the end of the 1950s the population was about 5,000.
Then, in 1963, everything changed. That year John Huston arrived with a crew of 130 to direct the movie version of Tennessee Williams’s The Night of the Iguana. This produced one of the most amusing scenes in movie history and the true beginning of modern Puerto Vallarta. The star of the movie was Richard Burton, out of Wales and Shakespeare. His female costars were Ava Gardner, Deborah Kerr, and Sue Lyon. Miss Gardner had abandoned Hollywood for Europe after disastrous marriages to Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw, and Frank Sinatra. She arrived with a personal entourage and her Ferrari and soon became interested in a beachboy named Tony. Miss Kerr was married to Peter Viertel, who had written a scathing novel about Huston and was once involved with Ava. The 17-year-old Miss Lyon, who had become a star as the nymphet in Lolita, was there with her boyfriend, while the boyfriend’s wife shared quarters with Miss Lyon’s mother. The cinematographer was the splendid Gabriel Figueroa, who burst into operatic song while drinking, and Huston was supported in his work by the Mexican director Indio Fernandez, who had shot his last producer. For good measure, Tennessee Williams was there with his lover and his dog.
The movie set leaped into fantasy with the early arrival of Elizabeth Taylor, who was not in the movie. She and Burton had begun their great love affair on the set of Cleopatra the year before, and when she showed up, presumably to protect Burton from his female costars, a media riot broke out. Taylor was a gigantic star in the Hollywood galaxy, and her presence was a monument to the old style. She brought with her dozens of trunks and suitcases, an ex-fighter to serve as bodyguard, her own secretary and one for Burton, a British cook, a chauffeur, and three children by two ex-husbands. One of these ex-husbands, Michael Wilding, was also on hand, reduced to working as an assistant to Burton’s agent. And back in the States her current husband, the singer Eddie Fisher, was pouting and working on a divorce. The film’s producer, Ray Stark, loved it (a few years ago he told me, “It was the greatest single movie location in the history of movies”). And Huston had grand fun. At one point he gave each of the players — Burton, Taylor, Gardner, Kerr, Lyon, plus Stark — a gold-plated derringer, laid in a velvet-lined box. Each box contained five golden bullets, engraved with the names of each of the others. He left his own name off the bullets.
Within weeks reporters and photographers from all over the world were making their way to the obscure little town of Puerto Vallarta. This was not easy; only one small plane a day flew in. Until then, few people had ever heard of the place. “They’re giving us ten million dollars’ worth of free publicity,” the exultant Stark said. “We’ve got more reporters up here than iguanas.” The Mexican tourist board was equally excited.
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.