The Richard Burton Diaries

by Richard Burton

  Friday 15th Yesterday passed well enough, though I had a rough time with Aaron who is so sorry for himself that it prevents one from having, temporarily at any rate, any sympathy for him. He has the beginnings of multiple sclerosis, which so the Oxford Dictionary says is a ‘morbid hardening of tissue’. Lovely. If he turns his head quickly, he loses his balance and is likely to fall down. If I had it, even mildly like Aaron, it would mean the end of my career. One could hardly act if one was going to fall over every time one turned one's head. Aaron can still function and will continue to do so for an ordinary lifetime. So he's lucky in an unlucky way. But it frightens me to see people frightened. I don't think I'll be frightened when the call comes. I hope.

  As most days my dressing room was a fishbowl, open to everyone's view. There was Aaron and a drunk James Wishart, and a reporter called Jim Bacon.135 Cathleen Nesbitt came in for a drink. [...] Rex was in splendid form, giggling and chortling and gurgly. We had the umpty-ninth telegram from Dick Zanuck saying that though he knew he sounded like a broken record he had to tell us again that the latest batch of film was superb etc. In his telegrams he calls Rex and myself ‘the boys.’ Sixty and Forty-three.

  I dread today. First I have to act, which I like doing sometimes, but not today. Second I have Aaron and his endless questions about legal nothings. Third, I'm likely to have a room full of people again. Fourth, I'd like to be alone with E for about two hundred years but can't even get two days – we're off to Guy and Marie-Hélène Rothschild's house for the weekend. I love the house and love them so maybe it will be alright. We don't go until tomorrow and we'll probably come back on Monday morning.

  [...] On reflection I realize how dreadful Aaron's disease is. Caroline, who is wise as an old woman, told me that from her experience of it the worst thing is the gradual loss of independence. You have to be guided and manoeuvred [...] wherever you go. I don't think I'd fancy that much.

  Saturday 16th Yesterday was alright after all. I pleaded pressure of work and ‘important scenes coming up’ to cut down Aaron's sesquipedalian questions. Eventually he went off to E's studio but told me later that all he received was a vague and charming smile and the offer of a drink. So he and James Wishart came back to my place and eventually came home with me in the car. [...] They had a drink with me while I waited for E to come home.

  The day went better than expected and I think my acting was good, my weariness giving it a sort of nervous intensity that compensated for lack of enthusiasm. Rex was very good and the sailor too. He doesn't have a word to say but he says them very well, as ‘twere. His name is Stephen Lewis, very tall and very cockney.136 I asked him if my accent was authentic enough. He said it was perfect.

  E told me that Princess E called her up yesterday and said that she missed E so much that she was wondering if she could come over next week. E said, ‘Come off it, Elisheba, it's not me you miss but Warren Beatty.’ My E then turned into the den-mother and dished out advice to the effect that W.B. was a player of the field, and purported at least, to be in love with a film actress called Julie Christie.137 And that Neil, Elisheba's manfriend of the moment was an infinitely better deal etc. etc., but naturally when a woman is set on a certain course of action, order turns into chaos and logic to insanity.138 [...] Perhaps we should explain to her that the six million dollars he realized out of Bonnie and Clyde, as I heard yesterday, because of ill-advice from lawyers, has virtually disappeared like the morning mist before the rising sun.139 [...]

  As mentioned before in this writing, I'm not quite sure about Elisheba. Bess says I'm wrong, but I think for a time, until I get to know her, I shall wear armour on my back, where the daggers go in. [...]

  Aaron said in his cups last night that I was the most intelligent man he'd ever met! And he'd met them all, he went on wildly. Supreme court judges, philosophers, Jack Kennedy, eminent doctors, great actor and Uncle Tom Cobbley and all. I curtsied sweetly but I like the flattery so much that I've gone to the trouble of putting it down in this diary, haven't I? A pebble on the shore of the great sea of knowledge and thank you Sir Isaac Newton.140 I think I'll try sleeping for an hour to succour my massive brain. [...]

  Sunday 17th, Chateau de Ferrières, Seine et Marne Sunday morning in my favourite house, it is almost midday and the first snow has come in the night [...]. Yesterday was a bit wearing with a great deal of talk and oddly enough I was not in a very talky mood but was forced to. We brought Caroline with us to show her the house and grounds, and E says that she was very thrilled, as well she might be. [...]

  Guy and David were here when we arrived, we met the latter coming out of the trees with a shot rabbit in one hand and a pheasant in the other.141 The two young boys and a pretty little girl cousin were with. Philippe the youngest had shot the rabbit.142 It was the first bag of his young life. Also here on arrival was Guy's daughter Lili who has to lie down a great deal as she had a clot on the brain about two months ago.143 She says that the whole thing was brought on by the unhappy coincidence of a malfunctioning kidney and the famous ‘Pill.’ The pill that orally taken every day prevents women from having babies. She also said that young girls of eighteen and twenty are struck down by the pill and not having her luck, have died.

  The elevator refused to work at the end of the day so Lili's husband and I carried her, fireman fashion, up to her room.144 I was puffing a bit as it is two floors up.

  Most of the conversation before Marie Hélène arrived, was about sexual aberrations. Guy says he knew a man who could only make love if the woman was naked except for bottines-a-boutons, that is old-fashioned fin-de-siecle button-up boots like one's granny used to wear. Sam Spiegel, he said that poor Sam can only get excited if a woman defecates onto his face. [...]

  Marie Helene arrived in a great state of excitement having had her make-up done for four hours by Alberto de Rossi.145 It wasn't received very well. She is quite an ugly woman with a large hooked nose and an almost negroid mouth but very beautiful blind eyes, and the vivacity of her manner and her machine gun delivery in both languages makes her very attractive.

  I don't know why I find it surprising when rich people are intelligent, after all they have the advantages from birth of superb educations, and the money to hire the best tutors etc., but Guy and his son David are as bright as buttons, especially the former. And they both have a very witty turn of phrase. David makes bad puns which I adore. [...]

  There were thirteen for dinner so two tables were made up side by side to allay any superstition. At one point I mentioned Onassis's name and a bitter quarrel sprang up between Marie-Hélène and Lili. The former adamant that the Onassises would never be invited to her house, and Lili and myself saying that they would be invited to ours.

  Monday 18th Yesterday was a dream day. We slept until noon and discovered to our delight that lunch was a high tea at 4.30. So we ordered breakfast in our rooms. Bacon and eggs and brioche, homemade, toast from homemade bread, little apples, home grown. Then for me, while E stayed in bed and read a book, a long walk through the woods and the snow. Distantly and occasionally I could hear sounds of the shoot. E waved to me from the window. The lake was starting to freeze over and the ducks and swans were slowly swimming along the still unfrozen channels, very slowly and for some reason, comically.

  High Tea was a feast. Chicken in the pot with all kinds of vegetables followed by endless cheeses and desserts. Roasted chestnuts. Raisins. fresh figs, mandarins, oranges, apples, and obviously and deliciously home made preserves. There were about twenty-five people sitting at the table. The minister of the interior whose name I've forgotten talked to me a lot.146 He said that his job was more important and onerous than our Home Secretary's. He couldn't explain why satisfactorily. I must find out. My ignorance of French politics is pretty stupendous. Perhaps because, all my life until de Gaulle, they seemed so irresponsibly droll. A new Prime Minister every three weeks and one only for a weekend.

  Then upstairs to read and sleep a little and take a bath and so dinner i
n honour of Marie Helene and her birthday. This meal was at many tables instead of one large one. I sat between the Countess of Bardolini(?) and Madame Pompidou wife of de Gaulle's former Prime Minister.147 She believes, she said, that Georges, her husband, must denounce de Gaulle so that he will stand a chance of returning to power after de Gaulle dies, which she said, perhaps hopefully, cannot be long now. Georges didn't seem very impressive. I took just three words for each and impersonated everyone at our table, vocally that is, which Mme Pompidou found remarkable. So I was told afterwards by Marie Helene and others. They were very easy voices. The Brazilian Ambassador's daughter with a husky voice and a Portuguese French accent, two people with Italian-French accents, an hysterical gent with a very high pitched voice. A German-French accent. It was a piece of glottal cake.

  [...] Practically everyone left for Paris after the party, but we sat up with the German Rothschilds and Marie Helene and Alexis Redé and Lili until 3.00 in the morning. I spoke Shakespeare and E and I sang them a Welsh song, ‘Ar lan y mor mae rhosys cochion.‘148 Elizabeth looked so beautiful that strong men were awed, and the children came to sit at her feet. She sang sweetly and unaffectedly and impressed everybody, including me. I'm not blasé yet.

  Tuesday 19th, Paris We left Ferrières late because of my dilatory Liz but miraculously despite driving slowly because of the snow-slushed and verglassed roads, we arrived on time. A man called Flink from Look magazine stayed for about an hour in my dressing room.149 He asked endless questions about homosexuality which I answered traditionally: Live and let live. It takes all sorts to make a world. Judge not lest ye be judged. Cast not the first stone lest ye be stoned. Some of my best friends are homosexuals etc. etc.

  Two stories about Sunday's party which I omitted, ommited, ommitted – one of them must be right – from yesterday's entry: There were about perhaps sixty or more people in the room waiting to go in to dinner and cock-tailing, and Elizabeth and I were sitting in a corner of the room with Lili and other assorted odds and sods when Marie Helene came over and said to me: ‘Richard will you go over and talk to the dark lady in the corner?’ I said, ‘For God's sake Marie Helene I don't know her etc. and why should I etc? And Marie-H said, ‘She only wants to listen to your voice, which she thinks is heavenly.’ And my Elizabeth said in a powerful American accent: ‘Tell her I'll be over in a minute and give her an impersonation.’ My Broad doesn't muck around. Later when the children, after dinner, had gone up one by one to the head of the head table and made rather self-conscious little speeches, a man sitting next to E said ‘How boringly middle-class.’ E and I decided that if the Rothschilds and Ferrières and eighty guests for dinner in one wing of the house, where trees in the avenues had been planted by reigning monarchs, where there are a hundred servants, was middle class, then we had just crawled out from underneath a stone. How bored is bored and how middle-class can you be to describe the Rothschilds as middle-class? They are aristos my friend. It's like Syb once describing the Johnsons (President and Lady Bird) as ‘suburban’.150 What the hell does she think Ferndale was?151 Buck House? Anyway, bugger you stranger, Elizabeth and I, famed as we are, rich as we are, courted and insulted as we are, overpaid as we are, centre of a great deal of attention as we are and have been for nearly a quarter of a century, are not bored or blasé. We are not envious. We are merely lucky.

  I have been inordinately lucky all my life but the greatest luck of all has been Elizabeth. She has turned me into a moral man but not a prig, she is a wildly exciting lover-mistress, she is shy and witty, she is nobody's fool, she is a brilliant actress, she is beautiful beyond the dreams of pornography, she can be arrogant and wilful, she is clement and loving, Dulcis Imperatrix, she is Sunday's child, she can tolerate my impossibilities and my drunkenness, she is an ache in the stomach when I am away from her, and she loves me!152 She is a prospectus that can never be entirely catalogued, an almanack for Poor Richard.153 And I'll love her ‘till I die.

  Aaron, Bob Wilson and I went back to the Hotel together and went down to the basement bar for a drink. Hebe Dorsey of the Tribune came in and said that she and an American called Dwyer, who she says might be the next Mayor of New York, have fallen in love.154 She is perhaps 45 and he 61. He is married and she says he says that she transformed his sex life. So there. Later we went to Aaron's room where a woman said, looking at Elizabeth, she's not so beautiful, what's all the fuss about. I asked her why she didn't marry a hatchet and make a perfect match. She was Sam Pisar's the lawyer's wife.155

  Wednesday 20th It's 7 in the morning, I've been up since 6, and it's still dark. Not, of course as dark as I. Doomed and damned and dissolute and desperate and dull and dying. Alliterative despair. I get a few days off soon. I need them. I was in a mad mood last night and accused E of talking too suspiciously much about Warren Beatty and his various middle-aged amours. She said it was because she loved a good gossip. A likely story, I cackled venomously, you don't have a very good record sweetheart. Christ if you can marry Eddie Fisher you can marry anybody, I said, and having created wounds, rubbed the salt in nicely for an hour or so. The trouble is of course that I love the old bag too much. I must try and be dispassionate. That, of course, will be the day. But it is perfectly obvious to me, I am after all an old hand at the game, that one way to attract a woman is to pay a lot of attention to other women. It drives them mad. I remember screwing everybody in a large company over a year or so to get one woman. I got her. I wish I hadn't now because she was an evil virtuous bitch and filthy minded. But, he said with pride, I got her. There was another woman in a film with me which contained hundreds of good-looking extras. It must have cost me fifty ‘crowd artistes’ to get the one well-married beautiful lamentable girl. But I got her, he said defiantly. I know them, Dylanesquely, by the thousands. Anyway since this leopard can and has changed his spots I have to believe that the other one can ... and has. Better bloody had.

  I had a letter from Kate yesterday. It was sweet and repetitive of my letter to her. She must be a good student, little ape, as she picks up other people's ideas so quickly. I wish I was her teacher. I wish I had the patience. I'd teach her to avoid all the pitfalls of my half-baked education. As it is she is stuck with Syb's eighth-baked variety. That won't help. But Syb is as good as gold, fair dues.

  [...] So now having written myself into an even more melancholy mood I will spritz myself up with a letter to Kate.

  I've written a letter to Kate but it hasn't spritzed me up. So bugger it. It was Elizabeth's saint's day yesterday and since so many French people gave her presents she felt obliged to give a party. It was pleasant too and good to see how everybody adores her. She's a good old thing and not bad-looking. She'll be awake in a minute so that's something to look forward to.

  Thursday 21st Elizabeth's father died yesterday afternoon and I had to break the news to her. She was like a wild animal even though we've been expecting his death for some years. But of course there is no love comparable to a man's love for his daughter or vicky verka.156 I know to my cost. My passion for my daughters is ludicrous. Whether it's reciprocated as in Elizabeth's case, is another matter. I feel like one who, stabbed in the back, is dying of his wounds. If you know what I mean. I cannot bear suffering in others. I'd much rather have it myself and I'm no masochist, but suffering at second hand is rough enough in its way. Despite all E's protestations about her mother over the years, like the good girl she is, she now only wants to protect and cherish her. Me too. Death is a son-of-a-bitch. The swinish unpredictable, uncharitable, thoughtless, fuck-pig enemy. [...] He's done a lot of mindless damage. One day we'll cure the waster.

  We fly over the Pole this afternoon. Francis will probably be buried on Saturday, and we'll probably come back on Sunday. There is, thank God, work to be done. We'll bring Sara back with us. That is if she wants to. I think, after the initial shock, that Sara could find herself a fairly congenial life. That is, I think she might enjoy being with us because we lead relatively exciting lives, and there's my vast
family who would consider it an honour to fuss and pamper her. She could very easily be elected, unanimously, on the first count, as Chairwoman of the local whist-drive in any place she wishes to go. Including Pontrhydyfen.

  Last night when Elizabeth was talking to her mother, I kept on screaming at her drunkenly and hopelessly to tell her mother to come back to Paris with us after the funeral. Elizabeth ignored me, which infuriated me. What I didn't realize was that Sara was telling E how she'd woken up to find Francis dead, and how she'd massaged his heart frantically, and given him the last agonising kiss-of-life. He'd been dead for an hour. I am illegitimately self-centred and take all tragedy and sins upon myself. Elizabeth's worth glows gooder all the time. She might even make me good one day. Jesus, I sound like a latter-day Christ, if the pun is pardoned.

  [...] I wish our children were with us. They would distract us a bit perhaps, or perhaps they wouldn't. Children and pups are very good value. Sometimes. I'll be acerbic to the death. That rotten latter bastard.

  Ah! what it must feel like to have somebody die, somebody that you genuinely love, somebody of your own blood and bone that you worship with an intensity near to madness, what it must be like. Much worse than one's own death because I'll wrestle with the bastard. But when Ivor or Cis die, somebody hold me down boys. I cannot conceive of life without the knowledge that Ivor and Cis are not [sic] at the end of some tenuous cabled line. And chaps it will be alright if I die, but what's going to happen to me if she dies. I think I'll turn into a tyre on a bus and roll forever and forever over innocent feet.

  Friday 22nd, Beverly Hills Hotel157 [...] It's now half past eight in the evening. Howard and Ron and I went to the funeral parlour and picked out the coffin, they call them caskets here, and did it by simply asking which is the most expensive. This one, said the man who was lugubriously invented of course by Charles Dickens. It is copper-lined, he said, to afford protection. Against what? Worms? They are already stirring inside poor Francis. Damp? Graham just arrived from Wales as a combined family representative from the family. I don't know what the hell they think I am. But after all it's a good and typically genereous gesture. Whoops there goes my spelling again. [...]