Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in the appropriately named Divorce His, Divorce Hers in 1973

BLESSED with the gift of the gaffe, the current Mrs Griffin has a Gielgud-like ability to put her foot in it – incommoding the rich and famous being her speciality.

Over the years she’s sat on a Jane Asher cake, leaving in its wake a buttock-shaped indentation; unwittingly informed Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall that one of his recipes was – and I quote – “disgusting”; had her hair extinguished – it’s a long story – by a former Archbishop of Canterbury; asked Beryl Bainbridge if she could point out anyone famous; and all but hospitalised Blue Peter legend, Biddy Baxter.

The formidable children’s TV producer tripped on my wife’s discarded handbag, almost hurtling head-first down a flight of stairs. Quite understandably, Biddy wasn’t best pleased and my attempt to leaven the situation with “Here’s one I maimed earlier” didn’t exactly help matters.

The last two encounters, I feel obliged to point out, were at Roger Lewis book launches – one held in the big top on Hampstead Heath because, natch, his son was at clown school. Invited by a friend of a friend, such occasions were events you could always count on for an eclectic guest list. I mean, where else could you rub shoulders with a disgraced DJ, a pantomime dame, a circus ringmaster and Jeffrey Archer?

Lewis is clearly as much a collector of offbeat acquaintances as he is of offbeat facts. But he’s a magpie with brains, an effortlessly witty forensic social commentator who wears his learning lightly… as anyone who has devoured his books about Peter Sellers, Anthony Burgess, Laurence Olivier and Charles Hawtrey will attest.

And now, in Erotic Vagrancy: Everything About Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, he’s turned his quizzing glass on the 60s’ answer to the Beckhams or the Kardashians.

No, that’s wrong: Burton/Taylor (“Burtlor”? “Richabeth”?) were bigger than any contemporary so-called celebrities – they were fabulously wealthy demi-gods, their love-hate relationship generating not column inches but column yards.

Living by Max Bialystok’s mantra “If you got it, flaunt it”, they stalked the globe doing just that. When they flew they would buy up every first-class seat on the plane in order to guarantee privacy; Taylor would order hamburgers to be flown to London or Rome from Chasen’s in West Hollywood; When she flew to Leningrad to make The Blue Bird she took 2,800lbs of excess baggage; When they boarded at The Dorchester they had a boat moored on the Thames expressly for their cats and dogs, who were not permitted to come ashore due to quarantine restrictions; On a whim they bought an executive jet so they “could have lunch in Nice”; Chauffeured limos were kept on call 24 hours a day… and that doesn’t include the 33-carat Krupp diamond Burton bought for Taylor for what now equates to £3million.

The poster for 1963’s Cleopatra

But did this (very) conspicuous consumption make them happy?

It’s a bit of a cliché, but no. No more than Antony and Cleopatra. In fact, it’s hard to ascertain who was the sadder: the much-disappointed classical actor, Burton, dead at 58; or longer lived Liz?

Hampstead-born (or, according to Burton, Hendon-born – and he should know; he had a small property empire in Squire’s Mount) Taylor, like Lewis, was essentially a collector: in her case a collector of diamonds, husbands, ailments and adulation. But as gravity and the flown-in burgers took their toll, she metamorphosed from the incandescent beauty of A Place in the Sun into the bloated “honorary drag queen” who was Maid of Honour at Michael Jackson’s marriage to his chimp, Bubbles.

Burton’s tale, meanwhile, was one of fear and (self) loathing. Unlike Taylor, who from childhood was a stranger to the real world of grocery shopping, pension plans, housework and manilla envelopes, Burton came from a working-class Welsh mining background. He was, however, a loner. Nothing like his many siblings, the scholarly Burton was adopted – and abused, posits Lewis – by a schoolmaster, Philip Burton. Lewis goes further, inferring Burton was, like Taylor’s father, homosexual, staving off such leanings with alcohol and aggressive womanising.

Both married to others at the time, these two constellations first collided on the set of the film that brought 20th Century Fox to its knees, Cleopatra.

They proved an incendiary pair, living out their fiery passion in the public gaze. Twice.

As much a drama queen off-stage as on, masochistic Liz thrived on male dominance and beatings, and the third of her eight husbands, film producer Mike Todd, was more than happy to oblige… which left this reader with the impression that had he lived, she would hardly have bothered with Burton. Ava Gardner shared my feelings but Truman Capote took the opposing view, believing he used her to grease the wheels of his career – “He married her because he wanted to be a movie star.”

This is the tale of two immensely talented but spoilt, feral, damaged and deeply unpleasant people who bewitched – and evidently continue to bewitch – we plebs.

Brimming with contradictions, “Richabeth” is Taylor-made for Lewis – his subjects were rich, famous, glamorous, tawdry, common, cheap… but above all, dead.

Despite what Stephen Fry says on the cover, this is not a biography in the accepted sense; it’s more a bubbling cauldron of rants, observations, opinions, impressions, reflections and analysis. As Lewis points out in his 52-page prologue: “I am perhaps less interested in Burton and Taylor historically and biographically, than in isolating them culturally, as carnal and fantasy figures who floated about in a world of child stars, faded grandeur, alcoholism, promiscuity and Lassie.”

Lewis is that rare bird: an academic with the common touch, as comfortable referencing Mrs Slocombe as Lear or Keats.

His mode of writing is… shall we say, eccentric? One Amazon reviewer called this book – 13 years in the making – “a fever dream” but boy, this doorstop of a volume is catnip for fellow gossipmongers. Scuttlebutt with style, it comes highly recommended.

• Erotic Vagrancy: Everything About Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. By Roger Lewis, Quercus, £30