The Richard Burton Diaries

by Richard Burton

  Wednesday 8th [...] Last night I read about a third of a book, which I didn't know he'd written, by Harold Nicolson called The Age of Reason.6 It is very readable, often very funny but also I suspect too easily written. He repeats himself quite a bit which I know his fastidious sense of economy and style would have rejected if he'd had more time, or given it more time. But nevertheless very enjoyable. What a monstrous set of characters the Age of Reason produced. It might have been called the Age of Monomaniacal Monarchs: Fred the Great of Prussia, Catherine the Great of Muscovy and Peter the Great and the Roi de Solieul.7 Cor! My spelling. Murder and torture, regicide, suicide, infanticide, banishment and all the vices in the book. Catherine the Great had a lady-in-waiting who was known as the ‘eprouveuse’ who as her name implies tried out the Guards officers in bed first to find out if they would be satisfactory to the Empress of all the Russias. Imagine being found wanting. On second thoughts, imagine being wanted by that raddled old gummy collection of jaded appetites. Peter the Great liked chopping people's heads off and had a long tree trunk laid on the ground so that decapitation of heads as they lay in a row was facilitated. None of that hanging about saying ‘next please.’ He also fancied orgies and defecated and urinated where he stood. Peter the third, I think, used to tie his Dachsund to the roof-beam with a rope and have a servant hold the hind legs while he flogged the poor little thing. Fragrant lot. Frederick the Great's father used to beat the bejasus out of him with a knout and drag him through mud with his face in it, by the hair. No wonder the man was a screaming homosexual. This, if you please, Fred's father would do to the crown prince in front of the officers. When of course his father died Fred the Great was just as bad. He would rush screaming down the corridors of his castle with a heavy knotted stick and beat anybody who stood within reach. All those servants, there were hundreds, running like mad looking for a hiding place. It must have made the Crazy Gang look sane.8

  I am also reading a book about the French Resistance and so I am fairly up to the knees in blood. There were a lot of old scores paid off there too I'm sure. My God the amount of blood that has been needlessly spilt. [...]

  Thursday 9th Yesterday was a lovely day cold and sparkling. Today is badger-grey and tired again. I started to dream of Puerto Vallarta and the bedroom patio and sun-bathing and tacos and frijoles and tequila, and walks through the cobbled town at dusk and boating to deserted beaches with tuna sandwiches and ice-cold home-made lemon juice and fishing for Dorado and baby sharks.9 And the memory of being salt-cleaned and clear-skinned and even slim. We'll go to Mismaloya and swim in the warm sea and plunge immediately afterwards into the cold, by comparison very cold fresh water river.10 I even look forward to the noise and it must surely be the noisiest town per head of population in the world, church bells and a gun instead of a bell for the poor church across the river, steel bands, donkeys braying, cocks crowing – the latter never seeming to know what time of day it is. Serenaders staggering on marijuana coming to do homage to Elizabeth at four in the morning, children dancing in the street outside to the rhythm of a fiddle played by the man who runs the delicatessen next door. But not of course at four in the morning, more like 8 to 10. And jeeping towards the airport and then up into the hills where the rivers have to be forded in the jeep as there are no bridges. Once E and I were temporarily stuck in the middle of such a river and only after waiting patiently for the engine to dry out were we able to proceed cautiously to the other bank. Then back to Jack Keyward's bar which is at sand level and only half a stone's throw from the edge of the sea which is relatively tideless.11 Lots of books to read and Spanish Grammars and perhaps the iguanas have come back to live on the roof. You never know.

  I've decided to go on a mild diet, one known as the ‘Drinking Man's Diet’ to see if I can lose a few pounds gently. This morning in pyjamas I was [...] 13 stone 3 pounds. I'd like to be about 12 stone 7. [...]

  I took the boys and Sara to lunch at D'Chez Eux and ate myself silly on the hors d'oeuvres, salami of three different kinds, several terrines and patés and sweet onions in a sauce and peas and beans and black bread with butter washed down by the locally made cold sweet wine. [...] I returned home and ate half a pound of liquorice allsorts, a pint of milk. No wonder I'm a little over-weight. [...]

  This diary is really no good to anyone but me. It forces me to keep my mind in some kind of untidy order and is better than nothing for my laziness.

  Friday 10th Yesterday was a day of funny moods. It began well enough with a blue sky and the promise of taking E to lunch. She finished early and we had a late lunch at La Cascade in the Bois de Boulogne.12 I stuck to my diet and had a whisky and soda before lunch followed by 1/2 dozen belons,13 a steak au poivre, a salad with French dressing and a hefty lump of cheese. I drank Lafite ‘60, about two glasses, and two or three brandies after the cheese with sugarless and creamless coffee. Later that night I had a couple more whiskies and soda. Apart from water that's all I took in all day. This morning the scale showed a loss of between four and five pounds. I was very surprised. A couple of weeks of this and I shall be belsenic.14 [...] E was astonishingly drunk even as I got to lunch. I don't recollect her before ever being incoherent from drink. I expect it from the drugs she's forced to take, but not from the booze. Christ I hope she's alright. It would be frightful to live the rest of our lives in an alcoholic haze, seeing the world through fumes of spirits and cigarette smoke. Never quite sure what you did or said the day before, or what you read, whether wise or foolish, tardy or too soon. Good I'm going to have a whisky and soda right now. There are few pleasures to match tipsiness in this murderous world especially if, like me, you believe in your bones that it, the world as we know it, is not going to last much longer. This is the age of the abyss and any minute now or dark day we could tumble over the edge into primal chaos. Some frigging foreigner will press a button and gone it will all be. Even the Miners Arms in Pontrhydyfen.15 Our little lives will be shattered with a cosmic bang. ‘These millions of white faces,’ as Archie MacLeish says, and then ‘nothing, nothing, nothing at all.‘16 But don't let's be stoned all the time. Let's have days and days of brilliant clarity, etched and limpid, cool and surgical.

  I think I had an overdose of History lately. The more I read about man and his maniacal ruthlessness and his murdering envious scatological soul the more I realize that he will never change. Our stupidity is immortal, nothing will change it. The same mistakes, the same prejudices, the same injustice, the same lusts wheel endlessly around the parade-ground of the centuries. Immutable and ineluctable. I wish I could believe in a God of some kind but I simply cannot. My intelligence is too muscular and my imagination stops at the horizon, and I have an idea that the last sound to be heard on this lovely planet will be a man screaming. In fear and terror. It might be me. Though I beg that I many go down into the awful dreadful night without a word, like my father Dic Bach Y Saer.17 Or perhaps just one admonitory and despairing ‘Fuck you.’

  Saturday 11th Yesterday I went to Alex Maguy's art gallery to try and help Sara to persuade him to take back a Vuillard which she and Francis had and have found unsaleable in California, and swap it for a couple of Kislings or Marquets.18 He agreed though he has consistently refused for the past few years. She says that this was entirely due to my presence, my gift of the gab, even in French, and my fame! [...] He's a tiny man who claims to be a great friend of Picasso's, and indeed he has in his own home an impressive collection of Picassos including one that makes Elizabeth's mouth water. It's a lady in a blue dress with a dark blue hat with light blue lights in it and she is holding up what appears to be a train of white feathers. We haven't seen the original, but he, Alex has promised to invite us to his home to see it. [...] Even I like it. I saw many other paintings and will obviously end up buying one. There is a charming little Picasso of a Harlequin on a horse for which he's asking $40,000. [...] There's also a medium-sized Marquet, a landscape of Algeria which I like very much for $24,000 dollars. But the most impressive was tw
o paintings by Van Gogh painted on both sides of the canvas – one of a man at a loom and one (the other side) of a man sitting in a chair near a fireplace it seems. But they are beyond even my purse. There was too, I thought, a very good-looking Vlaminck of a Cafe de la Gare, but nobody else was impressed.19 Michael was with us, he [...] unlike me, has a great feeling for art. I hope he becomes an artist. It seems to go with his dreamy personality. He doesn't seem to pack enough dynamite to be an actor and he is certainly not literary. He is only just beyond the comics stage. He wouldn't read Shakespeare or even Dickens from choice I know. Yesterday he asked me if he might choose a book to read – I have a small library here in the hotel of about 200 books excluding reference books – and he chose a History of the Movies. Full of pictures of course. [...]

  We stayed in, E didn't get home till 9 o'clock. Yesterday I had the following to eat and drink: Bloody Mary, Two Scotch and sodas, two softboiled eggs, for tea 1/2 dozen oysters with a glass of white wine, in the evening three cups of instant bouillon, for supper a chunk of Chateaubriand and a few stalks of Endive salad. And two vodka martinis. Result loss of a little less than a pound. Really to encourage weight losers they should calibrate weighing scales in ounces.

  Sunday 12th Yesterday I sustained myself as follows: 2 vodka martinis, 2 slices of calves liver and bacon, two rashers of bacon, 1/2 of Spanish Honeydew melon, two glasses of Riesling (Johannisberger, very good) salad with roquefort dressing. Result a loss in weight of about 3/4 of a pound. I am now something like 12 stone 11 or 179 pounds. [...] Fighting fit and hard as iron when I was playing rugby I was 12 stones 7, but that alas was 20 years ago and weight has shifted to the wrong parts of the body. [...]

  We stayed in all day and for the first time I watched French Television, though we've had the set here for three or four months. I watched Scotland play France in rugby (the former won against the run of the play by 6–3) [...]

  We had Sara for lunch. I cannot make up my mind whether she is a pin-head or very shrewd. She is certainly very aware of money. Tomorrow I go with her to some French Government ‘expert’ to decide whether an Utrillo she and Francis bought before the war for $1,800 is genuine or not.20 If he decides against he apparently has the right to burn it! I offered to buy it from her to save it at least from that fate but she has some muddled obligation to an art dealer in LA called Ruth Hatfield.21 [...] The people from whom she and Francis bought it were apparently all knocked off by the Nazis during the occupation. They were Jews. [...]

  Monday 13th My sins have come home to find me! Who would have thought that a man who had been known in his time to smash windows or fight against odds as a result of drunkenness should be appalled by it in others? At least others close to him. And who's closer than E? For the last month now, with very few exceptions she has gone to bed not merely sozzled or tipsy but stoned. And I mean stoned, unfocused, unable to walk straight, talking in a slow meaningless baby voice utterly without reason like a demented child. I thought, at first, that it was merely drugs but I understand that the stuff she's having now is merely vitamins so it has to be good old-fashioned booze. I made a desperate attempt this last weekend, when there was no pressure of work on her, to see if I could handle it. Result: the same. The awful thing is that it's turned me off drink! So perhaps it has its virtue. There is very little I can do about it. It would be a mistake to have a notorious old pet lecture, with much finger-wagging, a decaying kettle. So I'll continue to pray that it is a psychological reaction from that bloody removal of the uterus last summer, that it is only temporary, and that gradually she'll come back to normal. I'll have to be very careful that I don't allow myself to join her otherwise we'll have to get a keeper to look after us both. But the boredom, unless I'm drunk too, of being in the presence of someone to whom you have to repeat everything twice is like a physical pain in the stomach. If it was anyone else of course I'd pack my bags, head for the hills and go and live in a Trappist monastery, but this woman is my life. I cannot go to work with her though I will try this afternoon and see how she functions on the set. Last night I was so worried about her and us that I didn't get to sleep until well after dawn. I tried to imagine life without her but couldn't. The intolerable dreariness of her life in that studio is hard to watch. Endless long takes from a multitude of angles, surrounded with possibly the dullest collection of sycophants it has ever been my pain to come across. [...]

  We stayed in all day [...] I read a biog auto of Lord Egremont amusing but fatuous.22 His friends obviously think him a scream. And two detective stories by Michael Innes.23 [...]

  Tuesday 14th I went yesterday with Sara to see the ‘expert’ M. Paul C. Petrides.24 [...] he did his best to sell me a couple of paintings including a dreadful semi-nude by Picasso. It's of a lady with a disgusting figure wearing nothing but a pair of stockings half sitting on a divan. Such is the angle of her body that she appears to have no arms. Her dreadful pubic hairs are well in evidence and she is altogether, Picasso or not, a woman that I would well do without on my gallery wall. [...] He tore off the brown paper from Sara's ‘Utrillo’ and after one swift glance said ‘fake’. It was the first time I'd seen it and even I knew it was. [...]

  After the art gallery I took Sara over to E's studio where we played gin rummy and afterwards watched a scene. E was very good and in total command as usual. Warren Beatty seems very self-conscious and actory. He's not out of the top drawer. He doesn't give that feeling of vibrant power as Rex does or the lethargic dynamism of Marlon. I can feel the power of a top class actor or actress come out in almost palpable waves. I felt nothing from this chap. He is competent and pretty and is doing and will do well. Nice too with it, as they say. [...]

  Thursday 16th [...] [Elizabeth] has managed to persuade her company to give her next Wednesday off and work the following Saturday, so that she can come with me to London for the opening of Eagles. So we shall fly on Wednesday morning, see Ivor in the afternoon, attend the opening on Wednesday night and fly back in time for her to work on Thursday. [...]

  The boys left for Millfield yesterday with very long faces and a great many hints that a phone call from me could quite easily get them an extra couple of days. I thought about it but they are very bored here in Paris, they have no pals and despite their fluent French feel very lost. So it was just as well to pack them off.

  I recorded for the BBC the day before yesterday. Instead of four or five poems as promised there were more like fifteen.25 [...]

  [Elizabeth] seems to be crashingly bored with everything in the world at the moment. It is virtually impossible to excite her interest in anything: books, gossip, her own film, her mother, her children or me.

  Friday 17th [...] I stayed in all day yesterday and read and read and read. E came home about 8.30 muttering at the idiocy of a director who wants to shoot a 17 minute scene all in one take and then covers it with umpty-nine different angles. It would seem to me to be an indication of monumental conceit on George's part or, more probably, that he doesn't know what he wants, that he is, in fact, insecure. I am not being wise after the event when I say that it was a mistake to do this film. Let's hope at least that it makes money. E and Caroline and everybody at the studio tell me that suddenly Beatty has suddenly started to come the big star act and is ordering people off the set etc. Ah well.

  Monday 20th Yesterday there was an article in the Daily Mirror or rather Sunday Mirror by that somewhat pompous and humourless Life magazine writer Tommy Thompson about E.26 Among other things, for the most part it was meant to be friendly I think, it said she was 38 while she still is 36, that she was ‘thickening’ while she's been the same weight for ten years, apart from Virginia Woolf period when she deliberately put on weight, and that she was ‘greying’. True, the latter but she's been greying for ten years. Ah well. He also says that we never talk about anything but money, so there I've been pouring out my knowledge into his tin ear for days on end in my dressing room and it appears that all I talked about was money. He drank my drinks all day
long didn't he? That's money. There is a tendency among certain writers, especially the sententious, to create ‘fine’ pieces of writing about us. They are all the same. The rich couple, living their lives in a fishbowl glare of publicity, unable to take an ordinary walk in an ordinary city street, mobbed wherever we go, protected by a huge entourage. [...] What they don't understand and completely misinterpret is our life-long attitudes to our jobs. I think Mr Thompson was deeply shocked when I told him that acting on stage or films, apart from one or two high moments of nervous excitement, was sheer drudgery. That if I retired from acting professionally tomorrow that I would never appear in the local amateur dramatic society for the sheer love of it. Could he not understand the indignity and the boredom of having to learn the writings of another man, which nine times out of ten was indifferent, when you are 43 years old, are fairly widely read, drag yourself off to work day after day with a long lingering regretful look behind you at the book you're interested in. [...] They will never understand that E and I are not ‘dedicated’ and that my ‘first love’ (God how many times have I read that?) is not the stage. It is a book with lovely words in it. When I retire which I must do before long I shall write a screaming diatribe against the whole false world of journalism and show business. [...]

  Wednesday 22nd [...] I stayed in all day and read a lot of Time capsules. E arrived home from work crocked as a sock, sloshed as a Cossack. I was sober as a Presbyterian, which wasn't a good idea. My sense of humour was not at its best, which also was not a good idea. I have an idea that I am fighting a losing battle.

  We leave for London a quarter of an hour ago for the first night of Eagles. I couldn't care less but I like Kastner and it's a chance to see Ivor.

  I am to see David Harlech at 6 at the Dorchester.27 I will doubtless see a great many other people. I shall loathe it all. Give me a scallop shell of silence?28