The Richard Burton Diaries

by Richard Burton

  I am reading My Life by Sir Oswald Mosley between shots at the Studio, but I fear that I shan't get much done today in that direction as I have John Morgan of the Sunday Times, John Sullivan, Elliott Kastner [...] all self-invited, coming to visit me at the dressing room.117 Are they on business, are they on pleasure? I wish they'd all go away.

  Yesterday was a hard day physically. Rex and I did innumerable shots fighting on the floor of the living room. Now film fighting is relatively easy because one can cheat on angles etc. but when you have to remember to fight like a queer it complicates things. In addition I had to keep in mind that I must keep my head covered at all costs. It follows that since we rolled around on the floor for most of the day that I am a little grazed and a little sore this morning. Not unpleasantly so. I hope it turns out to be as funny as it seemed to the crew.

  [...] I have compromised on smoking to the extent that, when I remember, which is most of the time, I don't inhale and only smoke about a 1/4 inch of the cigarette and throw it away. Costly, but I feel much better for it already. Occasionally, of course, I cannot resist a deep sensual drag right down to my ankles.

  So after this day is over we have three delicious days off. We plan to hide in the hotel and not go out at all, except perhaps for an occasional meal. I shall read and read and read.

  Saturday 9th Another rough day physically. I had to pick up a supine paralysed Cathleen Nesbitt saying to a disgusted Rex Harrison: ‘She's seized up tonight. I'll lift and you pull.’ Meaning of course that I would lift her from the sheet while he removed it. Well indeed to God, either Rex or the camera or I, buggered it up every time, so that I had to do it twenty times. I shall have arms like Marlon Brando on my birthday. Which is tomorrow. I'll be forty-three years old. [...]

  Anyway, John Morgan came to ask me to do an interview for Thames TV. I said I would. With him was a sort of slip of a girl called Foot. Dingle, I said, Michael and Ebbw Vale.118 [...] Give my love, I said to her as she left, give my love, though he will never remember me. We met, I said archly, a thousand years ago in a miners’ meeting during the wars of the roses. He'll remember you, she said. Who could forget you? Anyway give my love to Ebbw Vale. She was as mini-skirted as a Californian Palm tree. The hem was only slightly below the neck. [...]

  Then, in order, I had Shirley MacLaine and a friend, who purports to be a Swede and a Sexologist.119 That is to say she is a sort of psychologist, so Rex tells me, he knows her, and they show you filthy pornographic photographs and sort of register the mental size of your tink. [...]

  Then there was Elliott Kastner and somebody called Bick Something, and Bettina for lunch, and John Sullivan. The latter is in a desperate state. He is shrewdly lumpish and his wife is equally so. He cannot match her, except for physical beauty (they are both as handsome as hell) and she has the stamp of failed inordinate ambition written all over her like a Dead Sea scroll. So what does one do. I have given them $100,000 [...] about two years ago. So what does one do? Hide.

  Sunday 10th I am now 43. It's nine in the morning. The sky is grey but it has a look of turning into sunshine later on. Yesterday was wholly delightful. We drank vodka screwdrivers, but not too many. We taught Caroline to play ‘Yahtsee’ [...]. I'd forgotten how much fun it is. Later we, just E and I, played Gin Rummy for $1,000 a point! I won $648,000! I refused to accept a cheque. It has to be paid in kind, I said.

  I received some nice presents. From Gaston, which he can ill afford, a huge tome called Gloire de la France. From Ron, an oldish Oeuvres de Molières in eight exquisite little volumes.120 From Bob Wilson a twenty dollar bill when the Americans were still on the Gold Standard. From Jim Benton an old but beautifully preserved sword-stick. From Elliott Kastner an overcoat made out of some kind of leather. [...] From Claudye and Gianni a tweed pair of trousers which they had copied from a pair they had given me about a year ago. I shall get more today. I mean more presents, not trousers. [...]

  Two more delicious days off, the French take tomorrow, Armistice Day, as a national holiday. We don't I think. All I seem to remember is two minutes’ silence in school and selling penny poppies made out of wire and paper. They were made by blind people, I believe. How quickly the world forgets or doesn't even know. A group of children were recently asked what was the Battle of Britain.121 They not only didn't know, they didn't know with what weapons it was fought.

  Both E and I have had congratulatory telegrams from Richard Zanuck for our ‘great’ ‘brilliant’ ‘superb etc.’ performances in our respective films. Donen and Rex too. It's a long howl to that day in New York, it was actually Shakespeare's birthday, when just about to play Hamlet at the Lunt-Fontanne, I was served at the stage door with a writ suing us for $55 million.122 Settle out of court, of course, after three ghastly years and innumerable depositions.

  Monday 11th Armistice Day and cold and grey. We shall probably go out to lunch for the first time for ages, I mean in a restaurant. If open we'll go to Coq Hardy and have some chicken pie.123 E gave me a mink coat and I shall wear it. A mink coat! It's very dark brown and the nap is close and short and it gleams and catches light as only a mink can. It comes to half way down my thighs. I hope I don't look like a fool of a money-lender! E says not. Any way, short of being robbed, I shall keep it forever. Other presents were three books from Don Waugh, my stand-in, who gave me Castles of Europe and Palaces of Europe and A Pictorial History of the Silent Screen.124 Dick Hanley and John Lee gave me a thin zip-around briefcase from Hermes. Beautiful to the touch. Nella, E's maid, gave me a silver frame to keep the children's photographs in, and she worried if it was too small. Caroline and Jane clubbed together to give me a jacket, very with it, which zipped up into a roll-top collar. [...] Sara and Francis sent me a lovely thick cashmere sweater with a matching scarf. I really could start a boutique with the number of cardigans jumpers and sweaters I have, and yet I never stop giving them away.

  We stayed in all day and read. [...] I read all the political comment in the ‘quality’ papers about Nixon as President, Sunday Times, Observer and Sunday Telegraph. I then read in succession my two presents: Castles of Europe and Palaces of the same. Fascinating little pocket histories but mostly photographs and drawings and reproductions of tapestries like the Bayeux. A [...] book called The Double Helix by a scientist-physicist yclept James D. Watson.125 It is an account of the search for and discovery of DNA at Cambridge. According to the book DNA is a molecule of heredity and to ‘know its structure and method of reproduction enables science to know how the forms of life are ordered from one generation to the next.’ On the jacket is a quote from Lord Snow: ‘It opens a new world for the general non-scientific reader.’ I now append a quotation from the book.126 It is on p. 190. ‘Happily he let out that for years organic chemistry had been arbitrarily favouring particular tautomeric forms over their alternatives on only the flimsiest of grounds. In fact, organic-chemistry textbooks were littered with pictures of highly improbable tautomeric forms. The guanine picture I was thrusting towards him was almost certainly bogus. All his chemical intuition told him it would occur in the keto form. He was just as sure that thymine was also wrongly assigned an enol configuration. Again he strongly favoured the Keto alternative.’ Really milord! Still I stayed up until 2.30 reading it. [...]

  Tuesday 12th [...] We did indeed go to lunch at the Coq d'Or and have chicken pie. And wine, which was my undoing. I came home and slept for about five hours so my mate tells me. Disgraceful. Hence my being able to sit up half the night, writing. In addition, I was in a pub-crawling mood and insisted that we stop and have one. E was very good and complied. [...]

  I wore my mink coat to everyone's satisfaction, including my own. It really is a splendid fur. [...] I shall wear my mink to work and show off and try and make Rex jealous.

  E was funny last night. She must have come in to see me ten times during the course of the night, dog-tired as she was, because she said she couldn't sleep without me. She's a funny odd old thing and needs comfort. She could be easily lo
nely.

  I have either lost or mislaid Liza's irastosable letter. I shall go mad if I can't find it. [...]

  Wednesday 13th I said yesterday that the day might turn out to be irastosable, and it did. E said last night that I behaved just like Rachel Roberts. Probably I did, which is just as well as it means that we'll never be invited again to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor's soirées. And thank God, he said fervently. Rarely have I been so stupendously bored. There were 22 people for dinner and only two names did I know or remember, and that was from history – the Count and Countess of Bismarck.127 And he, the Count, looks as much like one's mental picture of the iron chancellor as spaghetti. Soft and round and irresolute. He couldn't carve modern Germany out of cardboard. The iron of his grandfather didn't enter his soul.128

  It is extraordinary how small the Duke and Duchess are. Two tiny figures like Toto and Nanette that you keep on the mantelpiece.129 Chipped around the edges. Something you keep in the front room for Sundays only. Marred Royalty. The awful majesty that doth hedge around a king is notably lacking in awfulness.130 Charming and feckless.

  I took my coat to work and Rex confessed that he was jealous. Latterly he has been calling me me ‘darling.’ I call everybody ‘love’ so I suppose it's rubbed off. He tried on the mink and I had difficulty getting it off him. It, of course, looks superb on him. He wears clothes as only a coathanger can. Clothes, no matter how dreadful, drape themselves around him, knowing that they have come home at last.

  E just reminded me that at one point I said to the Duchess last night: ‘You are, without any question, the most vulgar woman I've ever met.’ Waaaaash! She also just told me that we were the only people at the dinner party who didn't have titles. Little does she know that we've made her the Princess of Pontrhydyfen. The Duke, says E, was furious with everybody that he wasn't sitting next to her, and I was furious that I wasn't sitting next to the Duchess. I was surrounded by two American ladies, one was a Duchess and the other a Countess. They were hard-faced pretty and youngish like ads for Suzy Nickerbocker's column, which I've only read once.131 One of them said that she had seen me as Hamlet in New York, and actually asked me how could I possibly remember the lines. I told her that I never did actually get them straight and that some of my improvisations on speeches which I hated and therefore could never recall would have been approved by the lousy actor-writer himself. I told her that once I spoke ‘To be or not to be’ in German to an American audience, but she obviously didn't believe me. I told her there were certain aspects of Hamlet, I mean the man, so revolting that one could only do them when drunk. The frantic self-pity of ‘How all occasions do inform against me and spur my dull revenge.’ You have to be sloshed to get around that. At least I have to be. I think I must have shocked her.

  Another lady, not a day under seventy, who's face had been lifted so often that it was on top of her head asked me if it were true that all actors were queer. I said yes, which was the reason why I was married to Elizabeth who also, because of her profession, was queer, but that we had an arrangement. Her face, in its excitement, nearly joined her chin. ‘What,’ she said, ‘do you do?’ ‘Well,’ I said, as straight as a die, ‘she lives in one suite, and I in another, and we make love by telephone.’ If she believes that she'll believe anything.

  At another moment apparently I picked up the Duchess and swung and swung her around like a dancing singing dervish. Elizabeth was terrified that I'd drop her or fall down and kill her. Christ! I will arise and go now and go home to Welsh miners who understand drink and the idiocies that it arouses.132 Holy mother, they had to have licensing laws to cure us, and we were incurable. I shall die of drink and make-up.

  The reason why there are two pages, instead of one, in today's entry for the idiot stakes, is because I have nothing better to do. [...] I have been up since about eight, and Elizabeth tried to lock me in the spare bedroom, and so I was constrained to try and kick the door down, and nearly succeeded which meant that I spent some time on my hands and knees this morning picking up the battered plaster in the hope that the waiters wouldn't notice that the hotel had nearly lost a door in the middle of the night [...]

  Thursday 14th Yesterday was a day as doomed as the Hittites but more delightful, that is to say, nobody died. Many curious things happened. Rachel, who is always pretty good value for a diary, showed everybody her pubic hairs, and as a dessert lay down on the floor in a mini-skirt and showed her bum to anyone who cared to have a glance. Outrage, in Rachel's case, has now become normal. If she had a cup of tea with a ginger-snap and made polite conversation about modern poetry, we would all go mad and display our private parts to visiting tourists. I wasn't much help. She said at one point over my dying body to Rex, hooded-eyed and malevolent, ‘I don't care about his hard-faced blondes.’ No response. So she said again: ‘I don't care about his hard-faced blondes.’ ‘Neither,’ I said with a laugh as false as a dentist's assurance, ‘do I.’

  I've just received a letter from Cathleen Nesbitt with a poem, ‘in his own write’ as she says John Lennon would say, written about her by Rupert Brooke.133 I shall write a poem for her in the next short course of my life or pack in the idea of courtesy for ever. What a lady. They bred ‘em good in the old days. She is the only old lady, she is near 80 years old, that I could imagine making love to. [...]

  I'd better be off and to work because I behaved with a fair amount of disgrace yesterday. I drank, so I gather from my friends, three bottles of Vodka, during the course of the day. And that, naturally, doesn't include the evening when I think I slowed down. But it is not a good idea to drink so much. I shall miss all the marriages of all my various children, and they'll be angry because there'll be nobody around, apart from their mother, to make bad puns.

  Everybody was very kind about me. The director was nice and Rex, feeling himself in the ascendant superior and having received my confession, was good enough to say that with three Hail Marys and a smart visit to the lavatory and a touch of ipepacuana, I would stand a fairish chance of being absolved.134 [...]

  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 a
lright 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. [...]