The Richard Burton Diaries

by Richard Burton

  What an extraordinary world it is. How do you live with one person for 13 years, and another for 8 and find both as alien as strangers. Elizabeth is an eternal one night stand. She is my private and personal bought mistress. And lascivious with it. It is impossible to tell you what is consisted in the act of love. Well I'll tell you, E is a receiver, a perpetual returner of the ball! I don't write about sex very often, because it embarrasses me, but, but, for some reason who knows why, whatever, is spared, original, strange. Counter. Felix Randall who hooved the horse his bright and battering sandal. Praise him.118

  It's 7.30 in the morning and the world, little knowing that I am dying will persist in carrying on as usual. I watched two films with the baby last night.119 They were not good, but they were cosy like bad but readable books. I love Elizabeth.

  I love Joe Losey, not because he is a genius, but because he loves my wife. I love Patricia, not because she's a genius, but simply that she is a pleasure to be accommodated with.120 I could spend a long time with her without a single interruption. They are coming to lunch today, which is not a fearsome idea. I think it's a diabolical idea.

  How would you like to die on a boat on the Thames – a privilege not granted to many. I am stupefied with nostalgia. I am madly in love with the idea of remaining alive. I am agog with desire to see Elizabeth and Joe and that infinitely removed and eclectic Patricia. It's very rough in this world to find anybody that loves you, or anybody that you love. I think I'd better go back to bed. Don't you?

  Where did they find the names. What funny people funny people are! Oh Bugger it. And my brother. And so to bed.

  I never lie when I write. Honest. Though I'm not sure of that!

  Whit Monday, 26th, Kalizma, Thames

  Yesterday's entry, as any man of discernment can tell at a glance, was written while under the strong influence of several vodkas. T. H. (Tim) White once wrote a poem for me and about me called ‘Vodka Poem to Richard Burton.‘121 One night in New York when we [were] both suitably and idiotically drunk and I had given him the sword ‘Excalibur’ which I used in the play written from his The Once and Future King, and after he had insisted on knighting with full accolade many and various and bewildered New York cabbies, we repaired to my apartment on 81st Street on the West Park. There we wrote poems to each other. He kept both and some time later to my surprise and delight he had included the one to me in his last book of Poems.122 Mine must be in his papers somewhere. Vodka is the operative word. Tim died in his late fifties. If I don't watch myself I'll be lucky to see my late forties. With his huge stature and white hair and beard it was some sight, as they say, to see Tim give the accolade to Harry Schwartz, and Sol Schmuck. Arise Sir Harry. Arise Sir Sol. A few of them actually knelt on the pavement! A barman, used to drunken eccentricity, knelt to be knighted with a glass of vodka in each hand. Quite a lot of actors were knighted also [on] that long-ago wild night. Jason Robards is about the only one I can remember.123 He didn't bother to knight me he said, because ever since we had first met he had conferred a mental baronetcy on me. What a crying pity that he is dead. How E would have adored that madman. And he her. And what a maniacal and lovely mind! I once sat there bewitched while he spoke for a couple of hours on the subject of worms, how each wriggling thing had locked in side him the beginning and end of man, and that without worms we would all die. When you die, he said, give your body to the worms, they will be grateful. There is absolutely no reason to give it to fire, even the atmosphere might reject the noxious fumes from your burning body.

  [...] The boat is a giggle. Almost everywhere one looks is a delight to the eye. Books in rows. Van Gogh and Picasso and Vlaminck and Howard behind the bar, I mean his painting, not the man himself, the only pretty TV set I've ever seen, the new carpet from Mexico, the pretty sheets on the bed, the immaculate and very gay bathroom, the cosy cabins down below. I tell you it's a floating palace. [...]

  Tuesday 27th For the first time I enjoyed rehearsals of this epic, probably because there were a lot of actors there instead of the eternal girl and Quayle and Colicos only. Denis Quilley (who was my understudy in the dim days of The Lady's not for Burning and eventually took over), T. P. O'Connor, that marvellous Irish actor and in looks and manner a natural successor of Cusack's of whom he is a great friend I found out.124 A splendid young man called, I think, Gary Bond, who is almost certain to become a very important actor and another good actor with whom I've worked before but cannot remember his name, he has a bitten, bitter, pock-marked face.125 All cream and none of your skimmed milk. The girl too of course who boasted that she was taller than Elizabeth. T. P. O'Connor said: ‘And so, d'you know, is Tina Louise.‘126 I think I'm going to like that chap a lot. [...]

  Bernard (Greenford), Syb's brother-in-law was waiting for me when I finished. He has been squeezed out by his partner from the very lucrative chain of ‘hairdressing salons’ by his snake-in-the-grass partner André. This infuriates me, not simply because I like old Bernard, but because, without my backing in the early years the business would have folded. It was I who with a thousand quid here and a thousand quid there sustained the operation in its infancy. It was all paid back, but without the luck of the association, André and Bernard would have been Charlie and Harry back in Whitechapel where they started from. And I'm sodded if I allow Bernard, who mortgaged his mother's house to keep the thing going, to be struck off the register because of a sneaky jumped-up-jack of a fellow whose only desire in life is to belong to golf-clubs that don't allow Jews. I shall cable Aaron today to get our own back in operation. My darling girl, and why should she care?, has volunteered $50,000. [...]

  I brought Bernard back on the boat without warning E. I took a chance that with her weakness for Jews he would be acceptable. She came up trumps as usual and asked him to stay for lunch as well as the offer of 50,000 smackeroos. He must have danced all night.

  Today I rehearse in the morning and this afternoon Ron is going to muck about with my face and beard and try to make me look Tudorian. At the moment, with luck, I look like Sir Henry Morgan about to make someone walk the plank.127

  I shall now sit here patiently and wait for her to get up. I am madly in love with the woman – even after 8 and getting on for 9 years. Now isn't that funny?

  Wednesday 28th, Dorchester [hotel] [...] I sent a telegram off to Aaron asking him to fix up Bernard's financial predicament. I think it will cost about £50,000. Still, fly-on-the-wall as I would like to be, the thought of André's face when faced with implacable money-power does already in my imagination please me a great deal. I could, though I would not, be present at the confrontation with the board. Chuckle. Chuckle. Gurgle. Gurgle. Snigger. Snigger. V-Sign. V-Sign. Up Yours. Up Yours. I don't think that I am a nice man. But kick my dog, kick me.

  I am drinking too much again and though I like to drink I have a fear that eventually it might affect my brain. Already, I've noticed, it has affected my memory. Or maybe I am getting old. Anyway I shall now, and hopefully for the rest of the film, slow down, and again hopefully, to a stop.

  The film is important despite the fact that both Elizabeth's and my latest films are enormous financial successes. That is to say Secret Ceremony and Where Eagles Dare. Elizabeth, if you please and with her usual insouciance, impertinence and cheek has managed to win the French ‘Oscar’ for the former.128 I am very proud of her because it was an immensely difficult part. I love the old girl very badly nowadays, though I've exactly been indifferent. The last phrase should read ‘though I've never exactly been indifferent.’ What the hell – it's very early in the morning.

  I am very jealous of E. I'm even jealous of her affection for Dick Hanley, a 60 year old homosexual, and anybody she has lunch with. Girls, dogs – I'm even jealous of the kitten because her adoration of it is so paramount. They'll all die before me though, so I'll win in the end. [...]

  Thursday 29th I danced all the morning with Gin [Bujold] and two ballet dancers. I must learn the elegant arrogance of the male ballet dancer. I
t could be very effective. As a result perhaps of an essentially masculine upbringing, surrounded by roaring miners, dinned with stories of feats of strength, I find myself slightly put out by the idea of doing a basse dance, with feline hand on the hip and swaying queerly from side to side. It will though, it must, be right on the night.

  How drab people are, especially people from the Press. I lunched with a lady who calls herself Margaret Hinxman and who writes for the Sunday Telegraph.129 I promised her the so far un-awarded Taylor-Burton ‘Oscar’ if she could ask me a question that neither E nor I had ever been asked before. She failed. Why didn't she take up the challenge and ask for instance: ‘How often do you and your fabulous wife fuck? Do you confine it to weekends or do you have a fetish for Tuesdays?’ Or ‘How often do you masturbate?’ Or ‘Who do you think is most normal, you or John Gielgud?’ Or ‘Do you think, in the words of Carlyle, that we are living in the conflux of two eternities?‘130 Or ‘bugger you baby, I find actors interminably boring, and you more than most, and now Lord Millionaire Richard, what do you have to say to that?’ Anything would do of that nature, anything other than ‘have you sold your soul to the films for the sake of filthy lucre?’ Or ‘what does it feel like to be famous, to have an even more famous wife, a private jet, a yacht on the Thames, a suite at the Dorchester, to have power, to be the compulsive centre of all eyes?’ ‘Do you believe in God?’ ‘What do you think when you read about yourself in the papers?’ ‘Are the Welsh people, and in particular your vast family, proud of you?’ How does one reply to these inevitable banalities? Shit over the lot of them.

  Barry Norman, another writer, for the Daily Mail and bright as a button, asked the unavoidable question. ‘Why don't you come back to the theatre?’ For some reason English people adamantly believe that acting in the theatre is superior (what a funny word) to acting in the films or TV. I've done all three with considerable success, and I'll tell you, Baby Barry, that they are all difficult but with the difference that after, shall we say, 10 weeks of playing Hamlet on the sage one's soul staggers with tedium and one's mind rejects the series of quotations that Hamlet now is. Has there ever been a more boring speech, after 400 years of constant repetition, than ‘To be or not to be'? I have never played that particular speech, and I've played the part hundreds and hundreds of times, without knowing that everybody settles down to a nice old nap the minute the first fatal words start. E was quite savage with Norman, in defence of me, so much so that he perforce had tears in his eyes. So she gave him a kiss! Nobody will understand that I am unlike every actor I've ever met with the exception of Marlon Brando, without his extraordinary talent, but we are both bored!

  [...] Marlon's and Elizabeth's personalities, to say nothing of their physical beauty, are so vast that they can and have got away with murder, but Elizabeth – unlike Marlon – has acquired almost by proximity to the camera, by osmosis, a powerful technique. Marlon has yet to learn to speak. Christ knows how often I've watched Marlon ruin his performance by under-articulation. He should have been born two generations before and acted in silent films. The worst thing that ever happened to him was Gadge Kazan, The Actors’ Studio, and fantastic over-publicity when he was a baby.131 I love the chap (though the reverse is lamentably not true) and I long to take him in my teeth and shake enthusiasm into him. But deep down in his desperate bowels he knows that like Elizabeth and myself it is all a farce. All three of us, in our disparate ways, know that we are cosmic jokes. And all three know that ‘dedication’ to the idea of the performing arts is an invention of envious journalists. It's alright for your Paul Scofield, or Gielgud or Larry Olivier or John Neville to ‘dedicate’ their lives to the ‘theatre’ but, poor sods, no other fucker will allow them on the phone.132 I think essentially that if something comes too easily to you, you dismiss it as an accident. Marlon made that mistake. E didn't.

  I love Elizabeth.

  Friday 30th [...] We ‘made’ all the papers yesterday and Gin looked splendid in all of them, and apart from that idiot Fergus Cashin in the un-read Sketch, from which, I understand, he is being fired, the comments were universally favourable.133 He never was much of a writer but being permanently drunk has made him worse. He has the lined and debauched face of an old man and he is, I believe, younger than I. Ah well, every man to his own destruction. I have to approve and correct an interview that I had with Ken Tynan some 3 or 4 years ago.134 It is odd reading it how very pompous Ken sounds. Witty and devastating as he has been in print I wonder now if he has any sense of humour. He certainly doesn't have it about himself. He's always been very earnest of course. And star-struck. I remember introducing him to Humphrey Bogart at the now existless Pen and Ink Club, with the words: ‘Bogie, this is a Mr Ken Tynan who wrote about you recently in the Evening Standard, and described your face as "a triumph of plastic surgery".’ Ken was devastated and though Bogie was easy on him he never recovered his aplomb and remained for the rest of the evening a stammering and stuttering skeletonic death's head. Ken has always looked like Belsen with a suit on. Dachau in Daks. Buchenwald in brown velvet.135 An impedimented bone. John Heyman said yesterday that Ken has always written with a pen in one hand and Roget's Thesaurus in the other. And he may be right at that.

  John himself, at the moment looks pretty emaciated. They recently had to remove a perforated ulcer and it became very dangerous. He had nearly destroyed himself over a girl called Joanna Shimkus, an actress who had left him for the Negro actor Sidney Poitier.136 Sometimes I think that Jews are instinctive masochists, much as I admire them. Holy God, I could see what that girl was after five minutes. It took him three years and a smashed stomach. And almost his life. He is though a lovely man and loves my wife, in the best sense of the word of course, and is going to take her out to the cinema when I'm at work. Isn't it strange that the only two enthusiasms we do not share are fried chicken and films. I have learned to love bagels and Lox and hot dogs and she has learned to love caviare and rarish steaks.137 But no accord have with fried chicken and films. I like her though, and God knows, she has a lot to put up with. I mean, there are times when I think I am slightly out of my mind. And there are times when I am. [...]

  Saturday 31st, Kalizma, Thames [...] Yesterday was what one might call eventful. I tested at the studio, I danced with Gin who is, perhaps out of nerves, turning into a bit of a tiresome bore; I had lunch with E and C at the ‘Guinea’, I went to Berman's and fitted costumes; I went on the yacht; I was told by Gaston who was crying proper tears that ‘Madame’ didn't like him anymore because the Cadillac which she had given him and which he has apparently gone into business with Ron Ringer ensemble was being rented out to Elliott Kastner who in turn was assigning it to, of all people, the ineffable Claire Bloom.138 E was in a rare tear. Gaston is a good chap but he made the fatal error of lying to her, I suppose. The French, with all their pretence to a perpetual renaissance of the brilliance in all forms of art etc. etc. really have never taken their eyes off the franc. It is, of course, fairly ridiculous that with four cars one has not been available to Mabel [Elizabeth] at all times. If I survive the day, which I doubt, I will start laying down the law. I mean, after all, that Bob Wilson, whom I love but is perfectly useless, has eternal use of E's Rolls. He shall be forced to ride in an Austin Princess.139 Hardship. I'll give him black power. I'll give him Welsh Power. Note the difference in capitals.

  Fortunately, towards the close of the day, Tim Hardy came on board.140 His mind delights me and I forget, every so often, how much I adore and miss him. He talks as good as you can get, and has the charm of the angels. I think that I am, despite my ferocious attachment to the working-class, an admirer of the true aristocrat, particularly if he is cleverer than I am. And Tim after all is a direct descendant of Richard III. Honest. And he is cleverer than I am. What a terrible admission from a son of the soil. He is, I think, the 135th direct descendant of Alfred the Great, whereas the present Queen is only the 135th indirect descendant. He had come on board simply to tell me that Henry VIII
was a great archer and show me exactly how to do it. Greater love hath no actor than that. Most people, he said last night when I expressed distaste for Buck's Club, love a Lord, but I love Dukes.141 It gives me, he said, great pleasure to dine at Buck's with a Duke in one corner and a Duke over my shoulder, and another Duke asking me if I could spare him a fiver. So there you are. Every man to his pleasure. I, personally, would prefer Welsh miners. But I'm perverse. Caroline stayed on the yacht. I love that child and forced to choose between a Duke and Caroline, I would take the latter. I'm not sure about a miner.

  JUNE

  Saturday 7th [...] I had a hard day yesterday. Gareth had come aboard with us the night before and we spent half the night sitting up and talking and drinking with me insulting E for most of the time.142 Then off to work at the crack of dawn to face a long scene with Gin Bujold in which I had to do most of the talking. She'll be alright I suppose though she doesn't have enough dynamite and spit and venom and arrogance for the part, but of course I always am thinking in the remote rear of my cranium how marvellous E would be and how much better. I got through it well enough and then, Oh blessed relief, I had to work with Tony Quayle and Michael Hordern. Marvellous pair of pros and no rubbish and cunning as snakes. I held my own I think. They have every shrug, nod, beck, sideways glance and shifting of eyes ever invented. I said to the director that it was somewhat akin to playing between the frying-pan and the fire. All Michael Hordern had to say was ‘Yes, your Grace.’ He must have said four hesitant ‘yours’ and the three words, uttered in his inimitable way became slightly longer than Hamlet. Uncut. They both varied the time of their readings in an unconscious effort to ‘throw’ each other off, and me. But I'm too old a hand. I ‘threw’ them a couple of times too. None said a word to each other about it but all three old bastards knew bloody well that when that camera is purring it's every man for himself. Of course if you are the ‘star’ or the ‘money’ as the technicians call it you can afford to be magnanimous because the ‘money’ is almost automatically protected but it's as well to know what the hell you're up to. And to let them know that you know what they are up to. There is of course nothing malicious about it, but it is deep in the subconscious.