Casa
Kimberly
long before Puerto Vallarta, Mexico was on the map,
when it was still just a quiet port town with some 10,000 residents,
a young fellow by the name of Richard Burton came here with John
Houston and Ava Gardner to begin filming a story called the Night of
the Iguana that had been written by Tennessee Williams, and during
the filming, Burton would bring his soon to be wife, Elizabeth
Taylor to the quiet town so that they could have some privacy,
without the prying eyes of the paparazzi that had followed them
every where they went back in the United States. Burton purchased
the Casa Kimberley, in the middle of the old part of town, for Liz's
34th birthday, and she would continue to own it through two of her
marriages and some ten years after Burton passed on in the early
1990s. Rumor has it that Liz couldn't spend the night here without
feeling strange, since Burton wasn't around anymore to talk or
reminisce about the old days here, and she stopped coming to the
house after Burton died. When Liz sold off the property in the 90s,
she left everything the way it had been, with her old clothes still
hanging in the closet, magazines on the coffee table, a heart shaped
bathtub, and the photographs, that anyone would want for posterity
and history, about the most publicized romance in the 20th century;
it was as if she left all that behind, the memories might stay there
as well, but we'll never know. The couple that purchased it would
convert it into a bed and breakfast, with each of the guest rooms
named after a Taylor or Burton movie, while the remainder was kept
as a kind of memorializing museum. The house was actually two
houses, with one for Liz and one for Richard, with a gorgeous bridge
spanning the space between them, giving them both a little extra
room for any problems that might arise.
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