The Richard Burton Diaries

by Richard Burton

  From the very beginning Richard Burton had pursued a dual acting career, on stage and in film, as well as appearing on radio, and all of this continued as his career prospered. He was highly successful in Christopher Fry's plays The Boy with a Cart and The Lady's not for Burning, the last of which enjoyed a successful run in New York as well as in London. He received lucrative sums for appearances in British film productions such as Now Barabbas, Waterfront, The Woman with No Name and Green Grow the Rushes. But what truly propelled Burton into the ranks of great actors were the Shakespearean parts that he took – first at Stratford-upon-Avon, later at the Old Vic in London – from 1951 onwards. Burton made his mark as Prince Hal and Henry V in the history cycle under Anthony Quayle at Stratford in 1951, and this brought him to the attention of Twentieth Century-Fox, who subsequently secured his services from Alexander Korda.

  Burton went to Hollywood in 1952, playing opposite Olivia de Havilland in My Cousin Rachel, which earned him his first Academy Award nomination. This was followed by The Desert Rats and then another Academy Award nomination (this one for Best Actor rather than Best Supporting Actor) for The Robe. It was at this time that Burton first met Elizabeth Taylor, then married to fellow actor Michael Wilding.

  For the next three years Burton juggled his film career with a continuing commitment to the stage. He was immensely successful in the Old Vic productions of Hamlet and Coriolanus in 1953 and 1954, of Henry V in 1955, and of Othello in 1956. His record on film was more mixed: the series of films he made with Twentieth Century-Fox between 1954 and 1956 – Prince of Players, Alexander the Great, The Rains of Ranchipur, Sea Wife and Bitter Victory – were not as successful as had been anticipated and he failed to establish himself as a Hollywood ‘leading man’. Perhaps his greatest tangible achievement from this period (tangible in that we still have a record of it, unlike his stage performances), was his performance in his friend Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood, first broadcast in January 1954.

  The year 1957 was one of major changes in Burton's life. Early in the year he and Sybil moved to the small Swiss village of Céligny, near Geneva, where they bought a villa, naming it Le Pays de Galles (‘Wales’ in French). This would remain Burton's home to his death, notwithstanding that he would often live elsewhere. The move was undertaken for tax reasons, and ensured that he could henceforth spend just 90 days in any given year in the United Kingdom. Effectively this curtailed his stage career in Britain and committed him more firmly to film projects, especially those that could be shot outside the UK. In March 1957 his natural father Richard died (at the age of eighty-one) back in Wales, but Richard did not attend the funeral. Six months later and, after some years of frustrated waiting, Richard and Sybil became parents: daughter Kate was born on 10 September. A second child, Jessica, would be born on 26 November 1959.

  Though resident in Switzerland Burton would continue to work mainly in the USA and, to a lesser extent, in Britain. There were more undistinguished films – The Bramble Bush, Ice Palace – but also a notable success: the part of Jimmy Porter in the film adaptation of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger. Osborne wrote the play A Subject of Scandal and Concern in which Burton played the lead for BBC Television in 1960, mentioned in the brief diary he kept during the early months of that year.

  What is not covered in the 1960 diary is any of Burton's work for the production of the musical Camelot, in which he would play King Arthur, and which opened on Broadway, following some weeks in Toronto and Boston, on 3 December. This was an enormous success, chiming with the zeitgeist of the presidency of John F. Kennedy (Burton was invited to the White House and became particularly friendly with Bobby Kennedy). It gave Burton a level of public exposure in the USA (including an appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show) that he had not enjoyed since 1953, and he won a New York Drama Critics’ Circle award (a Tony) in 1961 for the best performance in a musical. Burton's credentials for ‘star quality’ and panache were effectively re-established, and his prowess in Camelot led directly to an approach from Twentieth Century-Fox to take the part of Mark Antony (originally allocated to Stephen Boyd) in the troubled mega-production of Cleopatra.

  In September 1961 Burton flew out to Rome to join the cast, which included Elizabeth Taylor in the title role and Rex Harrison as Julius Caesar. Sybil and the children joined him, the family sharing a villa with Roddy McDowall, who had also made the transition from Camelot. In January 1962 Burton played his first scenes opposite Taylor, and a romance swiftly developed between them.

  Taylor, six and a half years younger than Burton, was the supreme female Hollywood star of the moment, rivalled only by Marilyn Monroe. She was in the third year of her marriage to her fourth husband, the singer Eddie Fisher. Previously she had been married to Conrad ‘Nicky’ Hilton (1950–1), Michael Wilding (1952–6) and Mike Todd (1957–8), the last marriage ending with Todd's death in a plane crash in March 1958. She was a mother of three children: Michael (born 1953) and Christopher (born 1955) by Michael Wilding; and Liza (born 1957) by Mike Todd. She and Fisher were in the process of trying to adopt a German girl, Maria.

  Burton was certainly no stranger to extramarital liaisons, some of which, such as those with Claire Bloom and Susan Strasberg, had been quite serious. Sybil had apparently tolerated this state of affairs, confident that Richard would never leave the security of his marriage, or risk losing his children. This time, however, things turned out differently. The Taylor–Fisher marriage was more brittle, and Taylor did not hesitate long before effectively ending it. Burton was undoubtedly torn. Racked by guilt, yet captivated by Taylor, he lived a very public double life throughout the first half of 1962, repeatedly making public statements that denied any serious intention in his relationship with Taylor, yet equally repeatedly being caught on camera in her company.

  Contemporary and subsequent accounts of the Burton–Taylor romance are legion. Biographers’ accounts are often more sympathetic to, or indulgent of, their subject's position during this time. Various levels of calculation are ascribed to the protagonists. Burton's diaries offer virtually no comment on, or insight into, this phase in his relationship with Taylor, but on the evidence therein it is difficult to agree with those who see his choice of Elizabeth over Sybil as motivated by a desire for fame and fortune. Quite what Burton's state of mind was at any given point in what was eventually a fifteen-month period when he hovered between his wife, his children and his lover is probably impossible to judge. It would appear, however, that his hesitation, vacillation and apparently heavy drinking were all indications of his recognition that the decision he would have to take would be momentous.

  The decision was finally taken, and Burton chose Taylor. They had separated at the end of the filming of Cleopatra in July 1962, but after some weeks began meeting again in Switzerland (Taylor having recently taken possession of a chalet in Gstaad). Their liaison continued throughout the autumn and winter in London, where they occupied adjoining suites at the Dorchester Hotel while filming The V.I.P.s. By this time Sybil, Kate and Jessica were also in London, living at the house Burton had bought in Squire's Mount, on the edge of Hampstead Heath. Only in April 1963 were matters resolved, when Sybil left with her children for New York. On 5 December she divorced Richard on the grounds of abandonment and cruel and inhuman treatment, took custody of Kate and Jessica, and obtained a $1 million settlement.

  In the meantime Burton had made two of his best films – Becket, alongside Peter O'Toole, in London, and The Night of the Iguana, alongside Ava Gardner and Deborah Kerr, in Mexico. Taylor, putting her career temporarily on hold, had been at his side throughout both productions. While in Mexico they had lived in the small town of Puerto Vallarta, and subsequently they bought the property they had rented – Casa Kimberley – renovating it and adding to it over the months and years that followed. The adoption procedures for Maria continued, with Burton as adoptive father in place of Eddie Fisher, from whom Elizabeth obtained a divorce in March 1964.

  By this time Burton and Taylor
were in Toronto, where Burton was rehearsing for the role of Hamlet in a production directed by John Gielgud. On 15 March, a week after Taylor's divorce from Fisher was granted, Burton and Taylor married in Montreal. By early April Hamlet was playing on Broadway, beginning a record run of seventeen weeks, and attracting enormous publicity. A filmed version – the only record of Burton in a Shakespearean stage performance – survives. When the run was over, in August 1964, Burton and Taylor appeared in their third film together: The Sandpiper, shot in California and Paris. Although this was forgettable, they also laid plans to work jointly once more in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

  It is at this point, between The Sandpiper and Woolf, that what one might term Richard Burton's ‘diary years’ begin, in January 1965. Burton himself is about to play one of his finest screen roles – Alec Leamas in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold – shot in London, Dublin, Germany and the Netherlands. After this Burton and Taylor would take a delayed honeymoon in France and Switzerland before travelling to the USA to make Woolf. For the next seven and a quarter years Burton kept a diary, and it is through his words that we may best follow his continuing adventure.

  The Provenance and Purpose of the Diaries

  For whom, it suddenly occurred to him to wonder, was he writing this diary? For the future, for the unborn.

  George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four4

  ‘no one ever kept a diary for just himself’

  Thomas Mallon, A Book of One's Own5

  Richard Burton kept diaries that cover all or part of fifteen years of his life. They do not form a consecutive sequence.6 The first is a pocket diary given to the then Richard Walter Jenkins when he was fourteen, in November 1939, and kept until the end of 1940. The next, that of 1960, when Burton was living in Switzerland with his first wife, Sybil, is little more than an incomplete appointments diary, some entries written in (rather imperfect) French. Then, 1965 sees the first of a series of diaries running up to March 1972. The earlier ones are handwritten, the later typed. The first is in a bound volume, the others loose-leaved and kept together in folders or binders. In total this sequence amounts to almost 350,000 words and constitutes the central core of Burton's writing. After 1972 there are fragments: one diary running for eight months in 1975, a couple of pages from March 1977, a more substantial diary covering the latter half of 1980, and one for the early spring of 1983. Taken together, from November 1939 to April 1983 there are approximately 390,000 words covering 93 months, spread over 44 years.

  The phrase ‘taken together’ imposes an artificial coherence on disparate bodies of work. The 1940 diary was kept not by Richard Burton but by Richard Walter Jenkins, who had little idea at the age of fourteen what awaited him in life. That, naturally, is the source of its charm and its power, but it was not part of any conscious series. While the 1965 to 1972 diaries do form a coherent whole, they vary enormously from year to year: that of 1965 totals fewer than 5,000 words; that of 1971 runs to more than 105,000. And as for those that come after, they may not be the only ones ever to have existed, even if it appears that they are the only ones to have survived.7

  The diaries that are published here were given to Swansea University in 2006 by Richard Burton's widow Sally. They form the core of the Richard Burton collection, which also includes correspondence, film posters, press cuttings, photographs, a collection of Burton's books, and a variety of audio-visual materials.

  An important consideration in assessing the diaries is the extent to which their existence was known to others, and whether their contents were kept entirely private.

  As to the first question, it seems highly unlikely that anyone close to Richard would not have known that he was keeping a diary. It may well be that his 1940 diary was a birthday gift, and we know that Elfed James wrote (abusively) in it. The 1960 diary was probably viewed by Burton's wife Sybil. The 1965 diary was a gift from Elizabeth Taylor, who also contributed some entries. Thereafter, although Burton remains almost the only person to write in his diaries (Elizabeth Taylor contributes a handful more entries, and there is one – ‘Richard is the best’ – by Brook Williams in 1970) he usually typed up his day's account on one of his portable typewriters, often in full view of family and household members. The fact that Richard kept a diary, for certain periods of his life at least, was a matter of public record – commented on in interviews and noted in correspondence.

  If Burton was disinclined to secrecy in the matter of diary-keeping, to what degree did he seek to keep their contents private? As already noted, Elizabeth Taylor herself wrote in some of the diaries. Thereafter, there is no evidence that Richard sought to conceal the contents of his diaries from his second wife. In fact he appears to have encouraged her to dip in and out as she wished, remarking on 31 December 1968 that Taylor had ‘free access’ and that the diary's contents ‘normally gave her a giggle’. And, in August 1980, we find Burton reading passages from his diary out to his third wife Susan.

  If Burton's diaries were open, at least to his wives, then one would think this must have affected what he chose to include in them. We have some evidence of self-censorship: in August 1971 he refrained from committing to paper his worries about Elizabeth's mother's state of health for fear of Elizabeth coming across his entries. Yet at the same time Burton could be remarkably frank about the state of his relationship with Taylor, and unabashed about detailing some of her medical conditions. The explanation may be that Burton felt comfortable with a ‘warts and all’ portrait of his marriage, providing he was reassured that his writing would not be studied by anyone other than himself and Taylor. There is very little evidence, for example, of the children, members of the entourage, or of friends reading the diaries.8

  In January 1969 Burton noted that he could not find ‘the last volume of my diary’, and thinks he must have put it ‘in such a safe place ... that I cannot remember’. This turns out to be the case – the diaries were in the wine cellar at Chalet Ariel. But he worried ‘[i]t wouldn't be very nice if it got into the wrong hands. It's too revealing about other people, but above all about myself. It's supposed to be for the old age of E and myself.‘9

  If this suggests that Burton had a very restricted sense of the audience for the diaries, at least at the time of writing, and perhaps for the foreseeable future, it also raises the question of why Burton was keeping a diary in the first place. The answer here necessarily excludes the 1940 and 1960 diaries, which would not appear to have been kept as part of any grand design. And there is very little direct evidence: when Burton starts the 1965 diary he does not open with any kind of prospectus or justification. This raises the possibility that there was an earlier diary begun in 1964, perhaps following his marriage to Taylor, but we have no evidence of that. Perhaps, rather than attempting to set out a rationale for what he was doing, Burton just got on and did it. He may well not have been entirely clear in his own mind precisely what his objective was.

  If one confines oneself to the ‘diary years’ sequence of 1965 to 1972, then it may be argued that they were not kept with a view to being published in their raw state. They were written in relatively fluent English (though with typing errors and a surprisingly haphazard grasp of spelling), substantially free of abbreviations or coded messages, and, as a consequence, are rarely difficult to decipher. But they were not written in the polished, carefully crafted style of Burton's published articles for newspapers and magazines. Instead they read as rough notes, ideas, memories, a daily catalogue of people and places, meals and conversations. They functioned as a private record of his life, an aide-memoire to which he presumably intended to return at some future, unspecified date.

  For precisely what purpose he would return was nowhere made explicit – but it seems that Burton regarded writing the diary as a good habit, a corrective to what he believed was his latent idleness, a way of forcing himself to ‘keep my mind in some kind of untidy order’ (9 January 1969). In such comments we may discern an awareness of the redemptive value of labour, and an obeisan
ce to a Nonconformist work ethic. Burton was not someone who was content with his personality, with his achievements or his prospects. He was undeniably restless, predominantly dissatisfied, measuring himself against his ambitions and against the achievements of others. Diary-keeping was one record of that persistent itch, that yearning to achieve, to become, to realize.

  But Burton could also be dismissive of his diary-writing efforts, referring to ‘today's entry for the idiot stakes’ (13 November 1968), ‘this pathetic journal’ (20 March 1969) which was ‘stupendously tedious’ (15 June 1970). Sometimes he struggled to complete a single page of typescript; on other days the words kept flowing. When he stopped keeping the diary the reasons were occasionally given in retrospect – too many things happening (‘when events tumble over each other I don't write it down’ – 1 November 1969), ‘acute unhappiness’ (20 March 1969), drinking too much, sleeping too late, not feeling he had anything worth recording (‘[w]hen faced with this machine latterly I feel as dull as drinkwater’ – 31 May 1970). But often there was no explanation provided for the gaps, and there is no comment at all in the diaries from 1975 or later in the more substantial run of diaries dating from 1965 to 1972. The only extraneous evidence in these later years comes from an interview conducted by the talk-show host Dick Cavett in 1980. Asked about his diaries, Burton responded:

  They are virtually unreadable ... I have occasionally had a glance back ... but in actual fact I haven't only very sporadically [sic] written the diary for the last three or four years ... and I said to a great friend of mine he said ‘how's the journal?’ because occasionally I take bits from the journal and elaborate on them and they get published you know Ladies’ Home Journal, Vogue magazine, the people who pay the most money, Cosmopolitan, that stuff, but very rarely, I've only published about ten pieces in my life. But I said ... why do you think the impulse to write has temporarily I hope just died, and he said it's perfectly obvious, you're too happy. And I thought but I've been happy before and I kept on writing and I still can't work it out it. Anyway it does continue occasionally.