The Richard Burton Diaries

by Richard Burton

  We have been invited to stay with Mrs Armstrong-Jones (how reminiscent the name is of Dylan's Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard) and Lord Snowdon and Princess Margaret at Plas Newydd during the investiture of Prince Charles as Prince of Wales at Caernarvon.78 I would rather have been an onlooker on TV than be on TV myself for the proceedings, but words have been pledged, and anyway it will be something to write about unless some shambling, drivel-mouthed, sideways-moving, sly-boots of a North Welsh imitation of an Irishman might decide to blow everybody to bits.79

  [...] Both E and I went mad last night and started eating Callard and Bowsers Liquorice Fingers. I must have eaten a pound or so and E somewhat less. The results were evident this morning. I had put on 31/2lbs and E 2lbs. Today we are unrepentant but determined to redress the balance. E longs to be 129lbs and I to be 170. It can be done. But not perhaps by us. [...]

  Tuesday 29th We drove out to the airport to pick up Caroline expecting the usual hanging around [...] when lo! and behold! There was our eldest daughter coming out of the terminal as we arrived. [...] We then hustled her off immediately to the Posada Vallarta where we stayed her with a Mai Tai. We stayed only for one drink as the place was, unlike the last time we went, agog with your American tourists who took endless photographs. If the Origin of Species is valid then we are certain to see within the next few hundred years American tourists born with built-in cameras.80 Anyway, by the time we'd got Caroline home and comforted her with a vodka and limeade the two ladies were off and running in a torrent of gossip and reminiscence. You would have thought that they hadn't seen each other for several years. And that they'd grown up together and not that they'd only met last August.

  [...] A letter and a cheque have just arrived. The letter from Jimmy Baldwin which I enclose and the money order from a lady called Mira L. Waters, also enclosed.81 Now what does he mean when he says that he doesn't hold a bank account in California? I mean, any old bank account will do. Nova Scotia, National Provincial, The Federal Bank of Dahomey, Calabria, Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychchwyrndrobwllllanfisiliogogogoch, The Chase Manhattan or a postal order.82 Funny chap. We all, as I've said before, owe him a living because he is black and we are white. Off-White. [...]

  Wednesday 30th [...] It's the last day of the month and reminds us of the dreaded date of departure. I am going to loathe London I suspect. And the film. Why am I doing a film that I so patently am bored by? Why do I allow myself to be talked into doing the mediocre when I could have a choice of the choicest properties on the market? I cannot even bring myself to read the script, let alone learn it. I must! I must! Otherwise I shall feel guilty.

  [...] Last evening as we were having dinner a school choir stood outside the house in the street and sang to us. It was very pretty and touching. I was particularly pleased that they chose to do so while Caroline was visiting. We wondered why they'd come and E reminded me that we had recently given $2,000 to the school fund. So perhaps it was a thank-you serenade. Jim says that the amount of money needed to make a good school here is about $100,000. How the devil are we going to find that kind of money? And yet we must. [...]

  MAY

  Thursday 1st E not feeling very well and last night had a temperature of about 102 and a bit. A bit worrying as she doesn't have much resistance, and as I've preached and preached she never takes any exercise. And E is the kind of person who turns a cold of the head nose and throat and common variety into near-death from double-pneumonia. Take out a tooth and she's laid up for a fortnight. Graze her knee and it suppurates for a month. [...]

  Last night's sleep seemed to be one continuous dream of great vividness. Most of it was actors’ dream, forgetting lines, having the wrong costume on and sometimes none at all. Everybody it seems was in it. A ghost of thousands one might say. John Huston was the director who loomed most large and the action swung from films to stage and back again in the twinkling of an eye. I walked down a long street crowded with extras with Pamela Brown, several times, and could not at the last moment remember the lines which were quite simple. I insisted that I could only do the scene with E and so they were forced to re-write the script so that E could be in that one scene. Then it changed to 73, Caradog Street and the whole family in which, for some reason, my sister Cassie figured predominantly, stood outside the house and implored me to go down to what I think was the Eastern Council School for a booze-up or something.83 It was the middle of the night and I refused saying that I was going to learn a sonnet or perhaps even write one. Everything and everybody was as vivid as a gaunt tree at the black of night lit by lightning. What does it all mean? I hope my brain hasn't let me down and that when I slope off from this vale of tears I will find that there are dreams after death. Now that would be hell.

  So I awoke and lay staring at the ceiling with Elizabeth as quiet as death beside me and reached out for the cool comfort of a cigarette and lighted it and puffed away and tried to decide which period of my life had been most satisfactory. The childhood and teen years I dismissed as total agony. The twenties, riddled with ambition and fear I decided I wouldn't like to live through again. I finally opted for the middle-thirties until now. I'll have another look when I'm 50 and another at 60 and 70. If, of course I don't get killed this afternoon.

  Money is a potent old bastard and a great friend of mine. This morning I had a letter from Aaron Frosch saying that Bernard Greenford, Syb's brother-in-law, wanted me to back him to the extent of £45-50,000 with his chain of hairdressing shops. I may well do so. Can't let the family down!

  Friday 2nd Spent the whole day lazing about as usual, while E stayed in bed with a book about the Mafia or Cosa Nostra called The Valachi Papers.84 They are supposed to be the edited confessions of a former ‘lieutenant’ in that crime syndicate who is the first to talk about the Sicilianos. The first, they claim to break ‘omerta’ which is the silence unto death or something equally schoolboyish. The ramblings of this Joe Valachi are so casually brutal that the book is almost comical instead of being frightening. They seem so stupid that it can only be graft on a high scale in the police forces which can possibly have sustained them. If the police of the US were properly, even lavishly paid so that bribery ceased to be attractive, the Cosa Nostra would die overnight and decline back into ordinary crime with every gang or man for itself. I have read several books lately on the ‘hoods’, and their grip on American money is something extraordinary. The sums involved apparently go into the hundreds of billions annually. The bribed go from beat-pounding cops right up to the Senate according to all these books. [...]

  My guilty conscience about the next film and learning the script has now reached an all-time high. I will read it today if I have to stay up all night. It is absolutely disgraceful and very rare for me, and I would be shocked if I discovered such laziness in another actor. I did once, not so long ago when I played Hamlet last. I was amazed at rehearsals in Toronto that Alfred Drake who was playing Claudius did not know a line at the first rehearsals, and while everybody else was bookless at the second rehearsal, he was still muttering around with a book in his hand three weeks later.85 It meant that he never caught up. The results were obvious in his performance.

  Saturday 3rd I've decided that I don't know what poetry is. Last night, in a glut of gloom, I ploughed through the ‘collected’ poetry, ‘all he wishes to preserve’, of W. H. Auden. In ten thousand there is hardly one memorable line. Most of it is type-writing. Some of it is scribble. Much of it is indifferent prose cut up. Almost totally it is formless. When is a poem a poem? I will slash away again at Auden since his aura glitters, and find out. I remember reading poetry in tandem with him at Oxford. About three years ago, it was.86 Among other things I read Dunbar's ‘Timor Mortis Conturbat Me’ and ‘the Boast of Dai’ from David Jones’ In Parenthesis. I doubt if it had ever been heard before at the Union. It was well received. As we walked away afterwards for a drink Auden, a little piqued, asked ‘How on earth did you learn to speak Cockney so brilliantly?’ His own reading was the usual toneless monoton
y of the poet reciting his own stuff. Dylan was an exception. But listen to Yeats or T. S. Eliot. Or listen, as we had to once, to Archie MacLeish moan without sense or sound his own lovely verse. E and Ivor and I listened in a tortured agony in a house on a hill in Massachusetts, longing to smash the book out of his hands and read it ourselves. I think that once the mould of form was smashed by a master or series of masters, Pound and Eliot perhaps in poetry and the Impressionists even more perhaps (since I know little about painting) in art, anybody can fool you.87 And will. And we will never know if they're mucking us about.

  The Mexicans today are having a holiday and have decided to fire off explosives all day long. It is almost impossible to speak because of the noise. It is the day of Santa Cruz. The noise is so great that unquestionably they are trying to shoot the Cross to pieces. It is faintly reminiscent of a wartime blitz. There is to be a procession later on at 5 o'clock from one church to another. It has to cross the bridge. What's the betting that somebody is going to blow up the pont when it is packed with small children? Child-chops for dinner with chips? Grilled babies bums. Charcoal-broiled infant with basted brains? Terrine of doting mothers washed down with a sweet liqueur of drunken fathers? I mean Charcoal, of course. A bloody great explosion a second ago has nearly taken my head off. I am essentially unpopular today – everybody has left me and gone to the upper house – which pleases me.

  There goes another tremendous explosion, and now we have a brass band playing some god-awful tune with interruptions from a choir and the ineluctable and occasional reply to the atom-bomb. Now a band is playing ‘John Brown's Body’. Will somebody tell me why?

  There goes another big bang. And another. And another. And me.

  Sunday 4th [...] Charlie, a divine dirty little cheeky shoe-shine boy from the village came and had a swim in the pool last evening and stayed to have supper with his minute brother. This massive mite is known as Jim. We had tacos with all the trimmings, frijoles and guacamole lettuce and sundry hot sauces. Jim firmly refused all vegetables. Tacos and chicken only thank you. Charlie cleaned my boots for his supper. He is very bright and has picked up English quite well. I would love to pay for his education but we tried that before and the parents are useless. They are so ignorant that they can only see to next week and the handful of pathetic pesos it brings in from boot polish. The working class here have none of the self-sacrificing fanaticism of the Welsh or Scots to get their children educated. David Jones, who lived next door to Gwen in Cunard Cottages worked himself to the bone, denied himself all pleasures except chewing-bacco, went into unpayable debt to put his five or six children in college and then quietly slit his throat.88 The schools system here is pretty hopeless. The school is so overcrowded that no child gets a full day at school but everyone has a half day. [...] The nuns tell us that the school needs roughly $100,000. I wonder if we can arrange this somehow. How odd it is that all Roman Catholic countries, including the gifted Irish, are so badly educated. Latin America, Spain, Italy. And yet it was Spanish priests who first brought what we consider to be ‘learning’ into Latin America for instance. In the last few years two new churches have been built in P.V. but the school has remained the same. So the Lord giveth and he also taketh away.

  I have been very unsociable for the last two or three days and recognize it all very well. I am about to start work. Once I'm going all will be fine but from now on until about the fourth of June when the first rushes have been seen and hopefully found adequate, (Will I like the girl? Will I like the Director? Will they bore me? Will I be any good?) I shall be, in E's words, a basket case. [...]

  Monday 5th [...] Some malicious and dangerous little people put sugar in the petrol tank of the B-Buggy and did something to the brakes the night before last. George was putting it away into the garage when he lost control of the Bug, he was driving it in reverse down the hill from the house, and was forced to run it into the house at the bottom of the hill which, though steep, is quite short thank God. Our suspicions are directed towards a couple of men from Guadalahara who came up to the house on Saturday night and said they represented Volks-Vagon [sic] cars and were having an exhibition or show in the town, and would we, E and I, pose by exhibits for photographs. Jim said no and they were much piqued. It appears that they bought sugar from La Altena next door. If any of us had been driving the car the other way down where the descent is really precipitous, something like 1 in 4, there could very easily have been a death. Especially as there are usually quite a lot of children playing around at night in these streets. Well the luck holds, but malevolence of that kind is frightening and the world is full of it.

  I remember a small incident at Paddington Station during the War. I was on my way home to Port Talbot and had arrived very early at the Station to be sure of a seat. It was the late train leaving about midnight as I remember. I was travelling 3rd Class of course in those days, coming down, I think, from Oxford. I got me a seat and settled down to read a book by the light of a torch. All seats except one were soon taken. Then a soldier, private, arrived followed by a tiny porter who was carrying his kit-bag a suitcase and sundry brown paper parcels. The soldier was of medium height and I suppose in his early twenties. He stood by while the porter stacked his bags on the rack. The Porter waited for the tip and the soldier said in a horrible towny Cardiff accent: ‘That's bloody ‘ad yew, ‘asn't it? You getting no bloody tip from me boyo. Bugger off.’ The Porter shrugged and walked away. My hatred for the soldier was so overwhelming that I felt like murdering him. I made myself cool down and then very deliberately and without haste stood up and in total silence opened the door of the carriage and one by one threw all his bags and parcels onto the platform. He looked at me with the hatred of a nightmare but he said nothing and went out to pick up his bags. I closed the door behind him and held it so he couldn't get back in. He must have found a seat elsewhere and I never saw him again. The other occupants of the carriage with typical British taciturnity never referred to the incident at all though we were all together in that compartment for several hours. Odd incident.

  Tuesday 6th Well, I broke the ice yesterday and plunged into learning the lines of Anne. I learned about ten pages which I will have to re-learn today, while learning another then. By tomorrow yesterday's ten will have fixed themselves in my memory, more or less, while I revise today's ten, and so on. There are quite a few pages of course which contain only a line or two while others, especially in a wordy costume piece of this kind have long uninterrupted monologues. The script is 144 pages long. I do not speak on about 35 of them. That leaves 109. At ten a day that theoretically gives me the whole part of eleven days, though in actual fact it is generally about twice as long because the period of study becomes longer and longer as more and more is committed to memory and the revision extends itself day by day. Also, there are some days when the memory refuses to take in anything at all, and one can only revise.

  The script itself is robust and unsubtle but sweeps along at a spanking pace. I hope the direction matches it. Henry is mad, I think. If I continue to think so after I've really got the part into my bones, I shall play him that way. He is certainly demonic. Great charm and stupendous outbursts of rage all co-mixed up with a brilliant cynical intelligence. I might be able to make something of it. Especially if the director and girl are good and help it all along. Since I gather that the other parts, Wolsey, Cromwell, Howard, Thomas Boleyn etc. etc. are being played by Hordern, Colicos and people of their stature I have no worries on that score.89 Especially Michael Hordern. I think him to be one of the best actors in the world and a rough adversary in a two-handed scene and hard to beat. I don't mean a selfish, spoiled actor like Rex who tries silly old-fashioned things like up-staging, and trying to distract the eye of the audience during a moment which should be yours, but someone who is so deadly perfect and precisely timed that, unless you are too, he is likely to over-balance you.

  Just before lunch as we were sitting down here in the lower house George came in looking very
apologetic and said that the Governor of Jalisco's daughter was outside with the Director of Tourism for P.V. and would we have a drink with her etc.90 We said, with a huge groan from E, Caroline and I, ‘ OK’. It was as smile-fixed a meeting as one could imagine. Platitudes came out from both sides with unfailing and desperate regularity. ‘And do you like our country?’ ‘We love it, that's why we live here.’ ‘Are you here to rest.’ ‘Yes, I wear a beard because I'm just about to play the English King Henry VIII.’ ‘My father, the Governor, says to say "Hello" to you.’ ‘Would you say "Hello" back for us?’ ‘Well I see that you are going to have lunch. It was nice meeting you. If there's anything you need do not hesitate to let us know.’ ‘Thank you. How kind. We shall.’

  She had a face like a double-chinned scimitar. [...]

  Wednesday 7th [...] I went to bed early last night, about 9 and read Waugh's Put out more Flags for the umpty-ninth time.91 I shall have it by heart if I'm not careful. It is astonishing for such a careful writer how often, for a comic effect, he uses the word ‘distaste’. The first time he used it was I think in Decline and Fall and the line is something like: ‘"This is my daughter," said the headmaster, with some distaste.‘92 I remember being convulsed as a small boy. It is a good trick that he uses a lot. ‘The Brigadier looked at Basil with revulsion.‘93 But these little lapses apart, he is the writer I'd like to write like most. See Tom Thumb wanting to play Goliath, or the Elephant who dreams of being a ballerina. Anyway I'll never write anything except occasional pieces for the magazines unless I spend four or five hours a day on this diary alone, and not 30 minutes.