“Elizabeth is now looking ravishingly sun-tanned,” he wrote in 1969, “though the lazy little bugger ought to lose a few pounds or so to look her absolute best.”
In the late 1970s John Huston was to come back to Puerto Vallarta too, hauling his aging bones from the drizzly disappointments of a long sojourn in Ireland. He built a house in the jungle near Las Caletas, 30 miles from the town’s center. It could be reached only from the sea. He didn’t see much of Burton and Taylor. When the Burtons divorced, Taylor got the houses. For a while Burton lived in another Vallarta house with a new wife. Her name was Susan. The house was called, after half of each, Casa Bursus. Today nobody can tell you its location.
But the old Burton-Taylor houses, with their connecting bridge, are still there. They’ve been sold and converted into a bed-and-break-fast. One afternoon my wife and I went to visit. A long flight of stone steps begins at a now dry fountain, where we saw a Domino’s Pizza carton darkening in the sun. At the top of the steps you can see in the distance the fabled bridge, painted the color of strawberry ice cream. We rang the bell of a wooden door at 445 Calle Zaragoza, and a lean, tanned man named Jacques gave us a tour. He said he had worked in many places, from St. Bart’s to Polynesia, but was entranced with Puerto Vallarta.
“The people are very pure,” he said, “and the town is very romantic. It has everything you don’t find in the United States now. Puerto Vallarta is 1938. You can regenerate yourself here. It’s very charming and not damaged.”
Stairs led us to an open, white-tiled floor with a bar and couches and a cool breeze off the ocean. There were photographs of Taylor and Burton, posters for Butterfield 8 and Becket, other reminders of lives once lived here. Off to the side (and in the house across the little bridge, beside the small swimming pool) we saw rooms named for various Burton-Taylor movies: the VIPS Room and the Comedians Room, the Sandpiper Room and the Night of the Iguana Room, the Taming of the Shrew Room and the Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Room. Some were excellent movies; others were among the worst ever made. I found a bookcase against a wall, and among the weathered books was a copy of Sanctuary V, by my friend Budd Schulberg, dedicated to Burton and Taylor and dated December 17, 1969 — a remnant of some lost Christmas. The place is clean and bright and pleasant. It also made me melancholy.
A vagrant feeling of waste and loss followed me to the top floor, where a bedroom is now called the Cleopatra Room. According to the Bragg biography, this is where Burton came to do his writing, where he tried to make sense of his life, to find some center among the swirling currents of celebrity and alcohol. He never found it. He knew that once he had been a serious actor but had been transformed into a cartoon figure, part of a team called Dick ’n’ Liz. Here, where there are now tasteful wicker chairs and fresh-cut flowers, he could walk onto the balcony and look out over the town to the sea. Too often he saw only the waste of his own talent and his life. We looked around, feeling oddly like intruders at the scene of some private tragedy, and then we fled.
The town that Huston, Burton, and Taylor saw in 1963 has been enveloped by the much larger Puerto Vallarta that is here now. It has the usual transcultural clutter that you see in places designed to give pleasure to strangers from El Norte: Denny’s and McDonald’s and a lot of boutiques. But it’s still a good town for walking. In the mornings we strolled along the beaches, often pausing on the one called Los Muertos (The Dead), named for a group of silver miners who were murdered here by pirates long ago. The sea is clear and translucent; the city fathers have worked hard to avoid the calamity that ruined Acapulco. On most days the leaves of the palm trees drooped in the heat. We saw a lean brown horse tethered to a lone palm tree on a spit of shore, waiting for riders. Mexican men contentedly sold blankets and hats.
“I have the best job in the world,” said a brown-skinned man named Marcos Villasenor, who was 44. “I come on my horse in the morning from there, up by Nayarit. I give people rides. They pay me. Then I go home.” He smiled broadly. “And all day while I am working I am in a beautiful place.”
His feelings were clearly shared by others. On each day of our stay the beach was crowded with a mixture of tourists and Mexican families. The Americans looked pink and awkward and lonely. The Mexicans were friendly, even sweet, but they were more concerned with children than with visitors. Here, as everywhere in Puerto Vallarta, a visitor sensed a relaxed manner among the Mexicans. Among workers and visitors, no one felt the seething hostility that poisons so many resorts, particularly in the Caribbean.
But there were irritations. In our hotel the prices of newspapers, aspirin, and candies were extortionate. At night the bands sometimes played at poolside; the acoustical setup was arranged as if our room were part of the walls of Jericho. The music in the hotel bars was the usual international soft-rock pap: watered-down Beatles, creaky Barry Manilow. Instead of the glorious, vibrant music of Mexico, we were greeted each evening by the dead products of Area Code 800.
“That is what the Americans want,” a waiter said to me one night. “It’s terrible, no? But they want this. They want to feel at home”
Far and away the worst irritation in Puerto Vallarta was the insistent, driven, obsessive selling of time shares. In the lobby of our hotel, on the beaches, in the streets, the time-share sellers came upon us like piranhas. Many of them were displaced Americans or Canadians, trying to look respectable; others were young Mexicans; in either language, their song was an infuriating hustle.
In the hotel, the Buganvilias Sheraton, staff members steered us to restaurants. We suspected that this was probably a racket, with the restaurant owners kicking back money to the steerers (you were supposed to hand over a printed “discount” card when you arrived). But on our first, innocent day in town, we tried one of the recommended places anyway, a seafood joint called the Andariego. The sound system insisted that we listen to banal versions of “My Way” and the theme from A Man and a Woman and, God help us, “Feelings.” The combination was so deadly that all additional appetite completely disappeared.
Among the ordinary Mexicans life was sweeter. We saw flowers growing everywhere: on the streets, on balconies, in small private gardens; a fragrant profusion of blue jacaranda, bougainvillea, jasmine, roses. There were wild orchids here, too, and in December, we were told, you can see African tulips. Scattered through the town we saw banana trees, mangos, papayas. The stalls of markets displayed a Tamayo-like profusion of all these and more: watermelon, guava, cantaloupe, avocado. Street vendors sold shaved ice, sugarcane, and coconut milk.
Not much of the Mexican past remained here. The cathedral dates only from the turn of the century, and in a land where brilliant artisans once worked with brick or stone it is made of concrete. No pyramids rise here, no ruins of the cultures that existed in Mexico before the arrival of the Europeans. There’s a small, badly lit museum on the island in the center of the Rio Cuale. We visited one afternoon and saw some fine pre-Columbian pieces and a few folk paintings by a man named Gilberto Grimaldi. But the place had an empty, forlorn feeling to it; nails in the wall marked where paintings had been removed, and I wondered if somehow the museum’s collection had been sacked while nobody was looking.