WHEN TIME'S John McPhee telephoned London to notify Richard Burton that he would be on our cover, Burton agreed on the condition that McPhee do all the interviewing of him as well as the writing. The proposition was unique, but not unprecedented, so off to London went McPhee, who as a student at Cambridge University had watched Burton play Caliban, Sir Toby Belch and Hamlet. They came to know each other during the out-of-town tryouts of Camelot, while McPhee was doing the cover story on Playwright Lerner and Composer Lowe, and after the New York opening McPhee would drop in occasionally at Burton's dressing room, liking to listen to the actor's vividly intelligent views on everything from baseball to bad 19th century poets.

In London, spending hours on the set or at the Dorchester Hotel inter viewing Burton, McPhee became a competitor with Elizabeth Taylor for Burton's time. She retaliated by making herself what McPhee calls "an amiable nuisance. Her behavior reminded me of my middle daughter--not the older one, who is nearly five--but the middle one, Sarah, who is nearly three." Curling up her nose, Elizabeth Taylor would say, "I was on the cover of TIME when I was 16 years old" (actually when she was 17).

Burton obligingly called up his family in Pontrhydyfen and told them to look after his journalist friend, and in hospitable Welsh fashion they did. Burton had told him how "boys proved their manhood" in Pontrhydyfen by walking across a bridge on an inverted V railing over a 120-ft. gorge and the

Avon River. To prove something or other McPhee had himself photographed on the same railing (see cut) to send to Burton.

A journalist is expected to observe with sympathy, but write what he must. McPhee, admiring Burton immensely but finding himself writing of him at a negative time in the actor's life, wound up feeling about his task as Burton did when he first saw the script of Camelot. "I think it can be done," Burton told his wife. "I think that I can just about tightrope it."

The railing is narrow, and the gorge below is deep, but readers can test how well McPhee succeeded in "The Man on the Billboard" in SHOW BUSINESS. He was helped immeasurably by the candor of that most complicated and honest man, Richard Burton. At one point, Elizabeth Taylor warned her friend that he was putting himself in peril by talking so freely to McPhee. By way of answer, Burton turned to McPhee. "You may be as vicious about me as you please. You will only do me justice."

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