The Richard Burton Diaries

by Richard Burton

  [...] The two babies arrived from La Suisse and I suddenly realized that after work on the film I had to do the narration for the investiture of the Prince of Wales. And after that Winston Churchill and 5 Dukes of Marlborough for the Son et Lumiere at Blenheim Palace.143 Cor! Was I whacked. Liza is turning into a young lady and I don't think there's much wrong with Maria's intelligence. Thank God! It's the first time I've thought that she stands a chance in the rough world without us.

  Sunday 8th [...] Yesterday was a soporific day. We lazed about all day with the din of a factory pump thumping in our ears. I called it Gorgonzola, because it went to the rhythm of that aromatic cheese: GORGONZOLA, GOR-GON-ZOLA etc. all day long. [...]

  I cannot take my eyes off Liza. Her eyes are the most beautiful I've ever seen and I love her to the point of pain. Perhaps because she's so like her mother. And Maria, to repeat, is going to be alright, J'espere.

  I had the frights again yesterday – the second weekend in a row, God Blast It! E and I were going to make love in the afternoon and while cleaning herself on the bidet, she began to bleed from her bumsie. And I mean BLEED. Not your pale pink variety but thick clots of blood that had to be fingered into disappearing down the drain. I sat with her and stroked her and tried to comfort her as best as I could. It finally stopped but I nightmared a great deal. In fact, after two weekends of torment on the yacht, I have mentally re-named the place ‘Nightmare Stairs’ and not Princes.144 I searched E's bumsy very often to check up on its progress. It is an extraordinary thing to look up somebody's ass-hole, and a beautiful ass it is, and to do it not with lust or sex in mind, but with love.

  And a little fear. I mean a great deal of fear. She is better this morning and the excrescences have receded a considerable amount, but I shall not feel safe until she's seen a Doctor though, under no circumstances, is the knife to be employed. There are other ways.

  Wednesday 11th, Dorchester Yesterday the two girls, Liza and Maria, left to go back to school. Simmy has, in effect, been expelled from Montesano ‘for’ SHE SAYS ‘being late for Sunday dinner and not being on time for roll-call!‘145 A likely story. Now we will have to employ all what little charm we have to get the Headmaster to change his mind so that she can at least finish the term. [...] Raymond, the chief steward told E, who didn't tell me until last night that once last term Simmy asked if she could bring some friends up to the chalet for tea. He said OK and she arrived with a boy of about 18 and another girl of her own age, which is 19. By the time they went back to school Simmy had imbibed a whole bottle of vodka. Our vodka. And the best of Samoan luck.

  Scrumptious Kate is with us still and so far has come to work with me every morning, despite having to get up about 6 o'clock of a morning. All adore her and my leading lady in the film asked if she were for sale. I said that if she were I'd buy her myself.

  [...] E looked very exciting in the shortest mini-skirt. The slightest inclination from the vertical and her entire bum was revealed to the admiring gaze.

  Thursday 12th, Kalizma, Thames I have been up since 5.10. and obviously I caught the best part of the day since from 5 until 7 the boat was, and the river and shore, as quiet as a condemned cell, but now that infernal factory has started up again with its GOR-GON-ZOLA recurring and recurring. [...] Kate and Elizabeth are whole-fast asleep and it is hardly possible for any Prince to have greater love for a sleeping beauty than I have for them. Those. Two sleeping beauties.

  [...] Kate went to see Ivor yesterday. I finished a little early on the film and went straight back to the hotel where, a little later, Kate joined us, and Michael Todd, and we all repaired to the yacht. Michael is a very rewarding and good and funny man and is a pleasure to be around. I hope that before long he will make an enormous success in his own right and not in the shadow of his father. It's a hell of a burden, I imagine, to have a famous father who was also a famous personality. In my case I have only the private memory of my father to compete against. [...]

  [...] Elisheba, the dangerous woman, the Princess of Jugoslavia, is about to marry Neil Something-Or-Other, a charming English barrister, and they are due to come on board for lunch.146 I utterly approve of the marriage, but I wouldn't like to be in his shoes. She is beautiful – about the only Princess who is – but she has a dismissive mind and tongue to match which can only come from a childhood of immense disillusions. She is as cynical as a freed slave, who rid of his master, finds that he was poorer than he was before. She would never marry Neil if she were a true Princess. They wouldn't allow her to.

  Saturday 14th I love my wife. I love her dearly. Honest. Talk about the beauty, silent, bare ... Sitting on the Thames with the river imitating a blue-grey ghost. My God the very houses seem asleep. And all that mighty heart is ... lying still.147

  My God, again, how easy it must have been in the early days of this language to write poetry. How easy to impersonate the false feelings of a shepherd like Wordsworth's ‘Michael’.148 Or impassive massive indifferent passion of my favourite lines. And I have felt a passion, a sense sublime, or something far more deeply interfused, whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, and the round ocean, and the living air, and the blue sky, and in the mind of men.149

  Among the extraordinary things that happened to me daily since I was a chuckle from the womb, yesterday the sound man asked me for a voice level. There were several hundred people around. Quayle said nothing [...]. The girl doesn't have a mind. Colicos is an invention of Churchill and is equally bereft. I mean as Quayle. Churchill himself would have given one a voice level which would have started a revolution in Scandinavia. I simply said: He had the ploughman's strength in the grasp of his arms. He could see a crow three miles away.150 Did you ever look at Welsh mountains? We grow from sea-level. And one of them is a man. And the man happens to be a woman. And the woman is my wife. And she will sit there, eternally, forever, and hover over all of us.

  The silence among these assorted Dukes and Dustmen was absolute. Everybody was fascinated but acutely embarrassed. So was I.

  Sunday 15th I awoke this morning at about 7 o'clock. I stared at Elizabeth for a long time. I am worried about her and her little bum and the blood. I held her hand and kissed her very gently. Probably no woman sleeps with such childish beauty as my adorable difficult fractious intolerant wife. ‘When in sorrow,’ said T. H. (Tim) White, ‘learn something new.’ I decided to examine my reactions to all the men of talent I have ever met and which company would I prefer. After serious thought, lying on that silent bed, with that killing cigarette between my lips, how I love its round cool comfort, I dropped names all over my brain. Churchill? No! A monologist. Picasso? No! An egomaniac. Emlyn? No. A mind like a cut-throat razor and a tongue to match. Dylan? No! Brilliant but uncomfortable. William Maugham?151 No! He cared only about playing bridge with losers. Gwyn Thomas? No! An impersonation of a chap who would like to be big strong and tough and who is actually fat weak and febrile. Camus?152 Possibly. But he had the infernal impertinence to die young. John Osborne? No! No leavening of humour. Gielgud? A strong contender for the Burton stakes, but I have a feeling that he finds me uncomfortable. Edward Albee? No! A week with him would be a life-time, and he'd feel the same about me. Anyway, why go on? I reduced it to two people. Noel Coward and Mike Nichols. They both have the capacity to change the world when they walk into a room. They are instinctively and without effort and un-maliciously witty. They are both as bland as butter as brilliant as diamonds and never speak with the forked tongue. Noel is an old man and I think he plans to die shortly. Mike plans to out-last Methuselah. What they have, and what I envy, is their absolute assurance. They are totally unafraid. When Noel totters – and he actually does totter – into anyone's presence, their faces light up like lamps. Including mine. Including Elizabeth's. Both E and I have a remarkable capacity of inculcating the idea of fear into people. I have actually seen people shiver as they cross the room to be introduced to Elizabeth. What the hell is it? Who did it to us? I know that we are both dangerous peop
le but we are fundamentally very nice. I mean we only hurt each other. And we never hurt other persons unless they hurt us first. Somebody once wrote [...] that when Elizabeth walked into a room for a press conference which he happened to be attending, she gave the impression that nobody else was there. She answered, as it were, from outer-space.

  A tall slim beautiful girl has just decided to join me on deck and have some scrambled eggs. She happens to be my daughter I think, quite clearly, that she is no daughter, actually of mine but an invention, carved in living marble of Praxiteles.153

  Monday 16th, Dorchester I am slowly coming out of my pit of despair. I am greatly helped by Elizabeth's understanding. I think that my daughter Kate loves me but is afraid of me whereas my wife loves me, j'espere, but is not afraid of me. Just afraid for me. Christ! I'm beginning to write like Queen Victoria. We are not amused. Take away our underlinings and our exclamation marks and we are illiterate. [...]

  We went to Emma Jenkins’ christening yesterday. She is the daughter of Wendy and Derek Jenkins, who, despite his name, is an Englishman.154 She carried on like a she-wolf. The service was so banal that I approved of every scream and mentally applauded her total rejection of the vicar's platitudes. How can an intelligent man believe that tedious rubbish? I don't mean me. I mean the vicar. ‘You god-parents must realize that it's not the physical [sic] of the child but also the spiritual.’ The cracks were unquestionably directed at us. He was giving us a lesson. He was showing us that because we are rich and famous we are nevertheless not particularly desirable as parent in God. [...]

  How can anybody believe such nonsense? I vomit from my brain such self-indulgent shit. You are invited to swear that you are a Christian, which I'm not, and E is a Jewess. I noticed that the vicar looked only at and directed his homily only at our party. Another child was also being wetted but she and her family might as well not have been there. But otherwise it was a day of pleasure. The baby, Emma, is enchanting. Elizabeth was an angel and looked like one. She suits a mini-skirt very well and I lusted after her. It was a warm and sunny day, there was a green garden hanging on to the house, and all the friends of Derek and Wendy are amiable. Gwyneth was so proud and nervous – she's the grandmother – and said to me at one point: ‘If anything happens to one of those two,’ meaning Elizabeth and Emma, ‘I shan't know what to do.’ How sweet of her to include E. [...]

  Saturday 21st, Dorchester We arrived back in London last night after five pleasant days in Kent. We stayed at The Leicester Arms Penshurst.155 They had done very hasty alterations to make a suite for us with a private bathroom. We worked at Penshurst Castle and later at Hever Castle both of which are a delight and the hosts – Astors in one case and I've forgotten who in the other – were equally delightful.156 Kate was with us and was another delight. She was obviously fascinated by the whole business and was offered and accepted a role of a kitchen maid. [...]

  JULY

  Saturday 19th, Kalizma, Thames Christ Almighty, in whom I firmly believe not, what a week, what a fortnight, what a month. There is no question but that I must stop acting. It is dementing me. The thought of going to work in the intolerably early mornings is like a physical pain. It is all so perfectly boring. Anybody can play Henry VIII – I mean even Robert Shaw who should be consigned for the rest of his life to playing ping-pong against ageing former champions – has played it.157

  There have nevertheless been a few rewarding things. Gielgud gave E an enchanting dog the day before yesterday which is described, discribed [sic] as a Shidzoo – at least that it how it is vaguely pronounced.158 [...]

  It is funny that a man who pretends to no recognition of the Holy Trinity will still refer to Christ and God – that is, I suppose, the weakness of background. Even the Holy Ghost. I suppose there is some atavistic fear bred in the bones that gives one a ridiculous prop to lean on, despite the fact that one doesn't believe a word of it. The American astronauts are due to land on the moon tomorrow sometime. I think there are three of them. If you combined all of their three brains together I doubt whether they could solve a quadratic equation – brave and stupid like Columbus who was so great a navigator that he never found himself in the same place twice.159 He set out for Jamaica and found himself in Cuba. He set out for Cuba and found himself in somewhere like La Guaira.160 I think he only found his way back to Spain by running aground in the middle of the night against a land mass which he thought was a new passage to the East Indies and China, and turned out to be Cadiz. The Welsh, of course, discovered the Americas. You know that, don't you? Can one imagine a mankind that has produced a Christ (there I go again) a Da Vinci, an Einstein, a Newton, a Darwin, an Erasmus, a Turgenev, a Shakespeare, a Pushkin, an Aristotle, a Pythagoras, a Freud, a Strindberg, a Fleurs du Mal, a Mallarmé, a Socrates, and endless others, including the multitudinous Huxleys, producing a product into outer space that can say nothing except ‘A-O.K’.161 They are nothing but humanized monkeys. Their wives and children would not agree with that. And so they shouldn't. Get there and get back boys. You worry me. You are doing a perfectly useless and perfectly splendid thing. I envy you your stupendous courage.

  Liz, I mean Liz Williams, who is among the most delectable ladies in the world of being alive, tells me that her little baby, with the assistance of an operation might be alright.162 How I am jealous of her hope, and Brook's. I would give half a soul to have Jess have the same hope. But it's hopeless, in my case, I mean with Jess. Quite hopeless. [...]163

  Tuesday 22nd, Dorchester The whole world, it seems, has gone mad because the American couple, Aldrin and Armstrong, have landed on the moon and got away again.164 Myself included. I have read more about the moon and watched on TV more about the moon than in the rest of my life put together. The three moments of unforgettable tension were the count-down to the landing, the count-down to the blast-off and the coupling together of the moon-ship with the mother ship. Now all they have to do, all they have to do, is get home. In a week or less I suppose I shall be heartily sick of the whole thing as a great many people are already.

  I have more or less stopped drinking and the shock to my system is obviously pretty profound. It didn't matter in Puerto V where I didn't have to work, but the effect at the studios, I mean on me, is awful. I am fundamentally so bored with my job that only drink is capable of killing the pain. The thought of doing a whole day's work with, for instance, John Colicos, which is my chore tomorrow, without at least half a bottle of vodka to ease back the yawns is like deliberately inciting a nightmare. It must however be done if I wish to live through the next fortnight. [...]

  I have been like a mad and highly articulate bull in blinding flashes with all kinds of people that I normally have great respect for. I laid into Sheran yesterday at lunch for no good reason. I roughed up Brook and Bob Wilson and Jim Benton with a fine impartiality and to top it all I burned through and around E today at lunch, in front of the same Sheran, just after she had just come back from one of the most painful operations, the insertion of some dreadful machine up her behind. This is, or course, par for the course when I am drinking heavily, but I'm surprised that I still do it when sober. If it is still the same in a month I shall go back to old father booze and find out how long it will take him to kill me. I might as well enjoy what little might be left me. One of the oddities I've noticed before when I've stopped drinking is that when one starts again the smell of straight liquor is revolting, so much so that one either has to force it down like medicine to get over the initial shock, or mix it deeply with fruit juice or something that will camouflage the taste and smell. I made myself a martini before lunch today and could not drink it. I took one sip and shivered from top to toe. I've only been off it since Friday night and even now it is only withdrawal i.e. I still allow myself a couple of drinks a day. One forgets how delicious water is and milk. I shall continue these confessions of an alcoholic at a later date.

  Wednesday 23rd [...] The ‘moon-men’ are already out of the headlines and poor Teddy Kennedy is in th
em.165 I feel sorry for him and I suppose understand his panic and indeed it ‘could happen to anybody’ but unless he comes up with something extraordinary when he appears in court next week, he has had his presidential and possibly even his senatorial chips. The K family are of course notorious satyrs. (I was amazed when Bobby K took Margot Fonteyn off into a back bedroom at Pierre Salinger's house in B. H. and my asking Salinger, when they came back, ‘where the hell have they been?’ and Salinger's fat-faced reply which was a finger over the lips.)166 It was undoubtedly a hot party and Kennedy may have tried to save his friends. I doubt that he lacks courage, maybe brains though. We shall never know I suppose. Maybe they, the Kennedys do believe that they can get away with anything. Gawd Help him. The press are ready for the kill. (I know too that when Jack Kennedy was running for President and stayed with Sinatra at Palm Springs, that the place was like a whore-house with President Kennedy as chief customer. Christ the chances those fellers took.) But they all got away with it except the last remaining baby. Perhaps somehow or other he'll be able to get out of it. E and I like the Kennedys, though, except through a phone call and a couple of letters we do not know Teddy K.

  I am waiting for Alex Cohen, who produced my last Hamlet in New York, to arrive.167 I don't know what to say to him. I've changed my mind about doing another play. I don't deep in my heart want to do a play on the stage again for a long time, possibly never. I shall slide out with vague talk of other commitments etc.