The Richard Burton Diaries

by Richard Burton

  Went into the studio (Sat) with Nevill. Had a fitting and saw the rushes twice, once to show them to Nevill, second time to show them to J. Springer who has been here for a couple of days. I arranged to have them to lunch tomorrow, Sunday. Bought a bike for Maria and skate board for Liza.

  Took the children on Sunday morning to Luna Park and a good time was had by all except when I was plagued by Gypsies even after I'd given away something between 15 and 20,000 Lire.72 How utterly charmless they are.

  Nevill and John duly came to lunch after which I took them around the grounds. [...] A beautiful day with scudding clouds. England and Wales blanketed with snow!

  I read the Sunday papers for the rest of the day.

  E. now better and the nurse Alex left on Saturday so I am back in my bed again. E said she was sorry she married me on Sat night and all because I said she was a conyn. (Welsh for moaning hypochondriac) She deserves a good hammering for hurting me like that!

  Monday 18th Had the first call for today. I wore the new costume which probably looks splendid on me mounted on the horse but, I think, looks indifferent on the ground. The sheer bulk of it dwarfs my legs from the knee down.

  I rode up the street with everyone – extras shouting Petruchio and hurling flowers, cabbage leaves water etc. at me and my poor Rosa, the horse. She, Rosa, made up to look even uglier than she is, behaved splendidly. Mike and Christopher were dressed and also appeared in the scene. [...]

  Had dinner at home with M. Todd Junior, the two boys and E. Was fairly uproarious and told endless stories. i.e. literally stories without an ending. Several times the two boys pretended to fall asleep from sheer boredom at my jokes. At least I hope they were pretending.

  And so to bed.

  Tuesday 19th They shot the TV show on M. Todd today at last. E was very good I thought. I went to the studio about 4.00 to have Nevill see some of the stuff roughly cut in order. Discussed Faustus with Nevill. It seems we'll be able to pull it off. He wonders if his younger brother could possibly play in it as an extra and thereby be given an equity card? His younger brother is 60 and does odd-jobs. Nevill said that at the moment he was cleaning lavatories.73 I said I would do what I could. Poor dab.

  Wednesday 20th What a bloody awful day. E was to be tested and into the studio we went. She looked like death. Again some filthy doctor had given her some shot to which she was allergic and therefore she was poisoned instead of helped. I quietly got sloshed, made up, tested with E and got sloshed some more.

  I'm sick of these bloody doctors. I'll have to have a really insupportable smash before I'll ever send for one of these ill-trained, drunken, condescending, semi-literate sods. The only pain I'd like them to remove is the pain in the arse they give me.

  Thursday 21st E much better today – notice that it was achieved without any assistance from a doctor. Again we went to the Studio for further tests on her. I appeared in the test briefly, unmade up and not in costume. In the meantime I worked a little and read a book by Lewes the Victorian dramatic critic on Kean, Macready, Lemaitre, Rachel, Salvini etc.74 That's the first book about acting and actors I've read since I was about 18. Such books are not really interesting. [...]

  I'm not sure I like Zeffirelli. I think he's a coward and devious with it. He cannot look you in the eye either physically or mentally. As a mind and personality he's not a patch on M. Nichols. But he has flair shall we say. He has a sense of the spectacular. He will succeed. Yesterday he was worried again about his billing. I told him for the umpty ninth time to fix it with Columbia and that whatever was mutually agreeable to them was also so to us.75 But his grumbling was put into letter form. He couldn't tell me direct.

  It was a long day. I didn't drink at all and we had supper at home with the boys.

  I read until about 12 – took a long bath and shower and was asleep by 1.00 approx. I may have to work tomorrow. I look forward to it.

  You ill tempered bastard! So do I at least you'll be out of my hair! [Elizabeth Taylor's hand.]

  Wednesday 27th Here is the longest gap in the diary yet – six days. And what days! Crisis after crisis with Zero a Sharaff over the costumes.76 E now really loathes him (Z) largely because he is a ruthless selfish multi-faced ego-mad COWARD. It is this last that both of us find most objectionable. I am by no means heroic morally but I can make decisions and accept advice. This chap can do neither.

  Some of the scenes have been hilarious. The normally nervous but dignified Irene Sharaff opened a meeting with Alexandre, R. Hanley, E and Franco Z with these immortal peace-loving and diplomatic words: ‘I would like to say before we go any further that you Franco are a fucking liar.’ Good for starters. Later out of the mittel European mask of her face came another qualifier for Bartlett's Dictionary of Quotations – ‘You are nothing but a fucking fag.‘77 That's my Leslie!78 Pots and kettles turned over in the kitchen of their own accord recognising kinship when they saw it.

  Next day on Monday I had a go at Mr Z. It exhausted me spiritually and emotionally (as it did E yesterday) to be so brutally honest with such a tissue of evasions as Franco. But it had to be done.

  Yesterday we sort of made up. E hasn't yet but will I suppose for the sake of the film.

  Later in the morning Mike Frankovich arrived.79 Good timing for the situation though it wasn't planned. He was thrilled with the film. The only redeeming thing about Franco Z is that the film seems very good. It's also, perversely, infuriating.

  Liza brought a little girl home from school to stay the night. Her name is Jodi Lowell. I asked her what her father did. I had already asked her father's first name which is Robert. She said ‘he is a writer and poet.’ Could it be the Robert Lowell.80 Must be I suppose. [...]

  The cat Charlie disappeared on Sunday evening about 6.00 pm. We called for him in vain. [...] At about 4.30–5.00am I thought I heard him cry. [...] I found him up a tree and terrified. It was a pine tree and therefore unclimbable. [...] Finally after a frustrated 1/2 hour looking for a ladder we woke Enzo.81 He found the ladder on the roof of the potting shed – it had been hidden there to stop the boys climbing, with its aid, onto the roof of the house.

  I held the ladder. Enzo climbed. [...] At last Enzo got him, descended a few steps and hurled him to the ground. I dived on the cat, Enzo dived from the ladder and the ladder, untended, fell accurately on to E's head. She will have a headache for several days. There was no blood. Phew!

  Thursday 28th By our standards of late, today was peaceful. We saw the rushes including E's first shot in the picture. It wasn't very satisfactory. E was fine but the whole set-up is undramatic. She should appear violently like a snarling beast. They will reshoot it.

  And they did. In the flesh it looks good. Now we'll wait to see the rushes.

  I didn't work today before the camera. I watched E in the re-shooting mentioned above and took her to lunch at a farm house about 1km from the Studio. It was very pleasant.

  After lunch Wolf Mankovitz came and we talked of Faustus.82 It will be a good thing to do. [...]

  Life’s Tommy Thomas was sneaked in to see V. Woolf and was overwhelmingly impressed.83 Or so he says. I wonder what will happen when an audience sees it. Will they laugh in the wrong places? Will it disintegrate before derision? We are anxious to know.

  We dined at home quietly and made lovely love. The first time for a month because of E's condition. What a magnificent relief and release.

  Friday 29th I was called in for make-up at 12.00 noon. E was called for 10.30. But Alexandre didn't get her hairpiece ready till 11.30 and she managed one shot before lunch. As a result of this late start I didn't work at all. I read Auden's latest collection of verse About the House.84 [...]

  M. Hordern came to dinner with us. [...] We work tomorrow. It will be E's only Saturday performance I fancy. I feel dog-tired and need a long sleep but obviously shan't get it for some time.

  Tomorrow we shall, out of duty, go and see Chas Beal play his piano.

  The film is going smoothly now and E. is begi
nning to enjoy herself. An wot I says is if yer don't enjoy yerself in yer job wot's the point of it all. That's what I says.

  Saturday 30th A hard day picking up E in the pouring film rain and dumping her on a donkey. Not easy but we managed to do it more or less correctly each time.

  Went into town to The Chianti for dinner – took Pamela Brown who is in Rome for a few days because ‘the ceilings of my house fell down’ – with Bob and Sally Wilson, John Lee, R. Hanley, Frank and Agnes Flanagan.85 Then on to ‘Le Pub’ where in the din that always goes on at such places we pretended to listen to Chas Beal play the piano. It is a dull place. Saw Dave Crowley who is very sweet and his ‘sportsy’ wife who is not.86 Persuaded P. Brown to stay ‘till Tuesday and so see some of the film.

  Boy I do not much like Zeff. He didn't want Cyril and Maureen Cusack to come to the party tomorrow night.87 All the other actors are invited. What a petty little bastard. Some fancied slight from Cyril is behind it I suppose.

  Saw E's close-ups etc. at the window. She is splendid now and is bringing up her big guns (no offence). It is one hundred per cent more effective than the previous shots. She is going to be Kate.

  I am very worried about Webb's, Lynch's – Biondelle's audibility.88 It will create ructions among the more ‘quality’ critics.

  MAY

  Sunday 1st Having not gone to bed until 5.30 a.m we woke at 9.30 and had a large brunchy breakfast. Fried eggs, bacon, chips, tomatoes and tottered back to bed about 1.00. We slept fitfully till party time. [...] The padrone of the restaurant in the Studio came to cook for us. It was a nice enough party though Cyril became very drunk and at one point threatened to shoot Eliz because she told him that of course Maureen, his wife, loved him and that indeed he was generally loved by all. He was however drunkenly determined to be unloved even to the extent of shooting my wife. M. Hordern took them home.

  Paul Dehn and friend were very nice.89 Franco despite the presence of his ‘godson’ – who looks to be about 104 – was seen kissing and cuddling with Natasha Pyne.90 Spinetti told E and Maureen that he liked women and men as lovers and would never get married for that reason. What is the world coming to?

  I told stories and laughed a lot. E very sweet to everybody. She's a good old thing – fair dues.

  Liza has 48 hour flu and Maria is very proud that she was able to come to the party while Liza stayed in bed.

  Thursday 5th It's actually 10.00 in the morning. [...] It is a glorious day. Indeed all the week we have had glorious weather. I've just come back from a walk. [...] The fallow field is now hip-high with weeds and grass. Poppies, daises, buttercups and an unidentifiable whitish weed that looks like cow parsley or baby's breath but isn't, and a pale blue tiny flower, make a splendid rebellion of colour.

  Yesterday E worked but I didn't. She did the mad whipping scene with Natasha Pyne. I sat around all day in my dressing room having first gone to the mini-max (a supermarket) to buy sweets for everybody, particularly me. E was worn out at the end of the day and in the car on the way home she suddenly asked if we could possibly stop at a Trattoria (a sort of roadside cafe restaurant) for a bottle of wine. Gaston, who was driving, stopped at the next one. It was a perfect choice, the kind of place where chickens brood under the table, though there were none here. There was the usual arbour of vines. Two men there intrigued E. One was a distinguished oldish man, well dressed, who sat alone at a terraced table and neither ate nor drank nor moved. The other looked like a mendicant monk of some obscure order. He read from a parchment and ate bread. He didn't look up at all. He had a large beard. At seven-thirty just at dusk a Mass began at the church on the hill the other side of the road. The Church of the Madonna of the Divine Love. The voices of the choir drifted on the air like an invisible mist, like unseen tumbleweed, like a dream. We stopped eating our fave (raw kidney beans) and rough cheese and we stopped drinking the vin de pays to listen. It was one of those moments which are nostalgic before they're over. The two men had gone, the tramp monk maybe to the Mass and the other who knows where. We drove home feeling holy and clean while the moon bright as I've ever seen her and with a whisp of chiffon cloud around her throat (E's image not mine) shone on us from the cloudless night.

  On Tuesday I worked in the morning – a couple of extra close-ups – in one costume and then changed to another for our entrance into Baptista's house for the finale.

  On Monday we did interminable scenes of entry after pipers etc. Very boring.

  Later today I went in to have lunch with E and horror of horrors Kurt Frings was also there.91 I dislike him a lot [...] but E says she's amused by him. Anyway he hung around till we finished [...]. I arranged for him to see the rushes and a few bits stuck together.[...]

  I turned into one of my mad moods last night and went into the spare room to sleep alone. Woke at 4.00 shivering and cold and went back to our bed. [...]

  Sunday 8th It's 11.00 o'clock in the morning of Sunday. There is a storm going on. We've had thunder and lightning and now there is a high wind and it's raining heavily. We've decided to stay in for the day.

  Last night we went to see The Bible.92 I expected to be thoroughly bored but I wasn't. It is a good honest film though it failed to move me at all except at the very opening at the creation of order out of chaos. I hope it's successful. The kids should see it if only for the Noah section with all those animals. Sweetly done.

  After it was over we left very quickly. Before it started we met Gore Vidal, a tall dark and handsome fellow.93 Too handsome, I would have thought, to be a good writer which he is. Also that spoiled Princess Ira von Furstenberg with that feller Patrick O'Neill.94 I must write a letter to De Laurentiis. His pride in his film is far more touching than anything in the film itself.

  We dined at the Fontanella in Rome, E had a turkey slice in batter.95 I had tripe. Very good too. We drank Frascati and Zambucca with coffee. On the way home we stopped at L'Escargot for another drink. [...]

  On Friday we began my entrance into Baptista's house. We didn't get very far with it. Saw E in the rushes. She is very good and I'm very proud of her. [...]

  Tuesday 10th I drank steadily all day long yesterday. Today I shall not drink at all while working. I don't know why I drink so much. I'm not unhappy and I really don't like it very much – I mean the booze itself.

  We shot until about 7.00. I allowed it to go so far because I suppose I felt guilty about drinking – not that it affected my performance. And anyway Petruchio in this version is supposed to be semi-sloshed all the time.

  We received the third letter from Chris and still not a word from Michael. I must write to them both today. Also to Kate.

  We spent Sunday afternoon down at the beach. It was patchy kind of weather but high summer compared with Wales. The kids and Karen came with us. We ran into Stephen Grimes.96 He seems prematurely old and hunched.

  [...] E. thought she had lost her dragon pin when we arrived home. She had forgotten that she'd given it to R. Hanley. I shouted quite a lot and insisted that the fried chicken and mashed pots tasted like soap. We made up later.

  Wednesday 11th Sometimes it is good to write late at night [...]. Out of the idiocy of despair and from lack of discrimination, as I was drunkenly informed by that model of decorum C. Cusack earlier today, one can be ashamed and red-faced, but nevertheless there may be a catchable idea that can in sobriety be expanded into a virtue.

  I worked until 10.30 and didn't work again all day [...]. There was a splendidly idiotic memo from that tedious Franco Zeffirelli about his authority to show rushes and/or any part of the film to anybody as he thought within his discretion. It was a puzzling missive. ‘Snapshot’ guessed immediately that McWhorter had stopped Zeffirelli from showing the ‘rushes’ and the portions of ‘rough cut’ to Italian members of the Press. She was absolutely right. [...] It tends, as I used to observe when I was ten, to take one's breath away. What can one do? So at the end of the day we laboured to a Trattoria. We eat some food and we fed the dogs and we drank some wi
ne and we talked about the film. I'm starting to feel afeard about it. We chose, possibly, a bad one. Snapshot is fine, and I think I'm alright, but I worry about the other performers almost all of whom are brilliant but ill-served by the director.

  After much thought and many misgivings it seems that there is not one single idea that he has about any one thing that is not mime. After all, as one might say, for Christ's sake, the most important thing about this exercise is that the words are Shakespeare's. And, so far, the only language I'm sure about are my wife's speaking and my own. Everybody else is so busy not being real that the voices die.

  Now a great deal of it we can fix or re-arrange but, Arglwydd Mawr, what do we do if only donkey and myself are legitimate.97

  I worry about the sound. I worry about actors that I think are good and who, if we're not there, descend into inarticulation. And who are also bored. Which is, of course, the greatest sin of all.

  Never again, if ever I have the chance, will I permit anybody to direct something that I know I am better qualified to do.

  And anyway it's time to blow my ego. And I have been accused, quite justly, of being bored by films and indeed about and by acting generally but this film is oddly important. I shouldn't care, and of course I don't, but I do.

  I watch with exasperation Ossie's and Elaine's continual advice to Zeffirelli that such and such a shot is not necessary because ‘Franco you have it already’ and ‘in any case you must be outside at this point.‘98 But to no, as they say, avail. Might as well fill up the page. We were asked today by M. Cacoyannis to speak poetry at the Acropolis in, guess? Athens.99 I don't think we can but we will do it, if possible, as a splendid joke. ‘I have, of course, played the Acropolis’, says milady.

  Sunday 15th The gaps in this daily dribble are increasing. On Friday we worked from 9 till 4 without a break for lunch. Zeffirelli worked exclusively on me without Snapshot's being there as she had [...] a monumental period. I was eager to work but a combination of a head cold [...] and the tedium of close-up after close-up into as ‘twere a vacuum bored me to the screaming point. Hovering over us both too was the thought that we must, out of deference to Franco, go into Rome that night by 9.30 to see Anna Magnani in La Lupa.100 She was good we thought but the part was too undonog for her.101 She turned out, when we met her afterwards to be a charming woman but forthright and not easy. We had not intended to go to the restaurant afterwards but we did and after the initial awkwardness which all such events cause we enjoyed ourselves reasonably well.