The Richard Burton Diaries

by Richard Burton

  Much love Elizabeth, and I'm sorry.

  AUGUST

  Friday 1st, Dorchester E was going to go away for the weekend [...] but I persuaded her not to. After all we both know we would be in agony without each other around. Little Liza behaved superbly with her mother and (on the telephone) with me, trying to reconcile us. She ordered E around. She made her eat breakfast. She made me ring up and apologize to E. She was everybody's minute mother. Instant wisdom. She is a hell of a child and I may be forced to keep her. Also she is going to be, and indeed already is, a knock-out as a beauty. She is a bloody ‘Bramah’ as we say at home.197 Her teeth will have to be fixed one of these days otherwise she might become a little chinny and she walks like a duck but all those things can be corrected.’ But her eyes, oh God, her eyes, fresh fire-coal etc. ...‘198

  I suppose that deep down, though I hate to admit it, I am a proper actor and the parts I play do affect me slightly. There is always one part of me that is looking on and I am aware that I have become authoritative. Nobody is allowed to buy anything except me. I must give the drinks. I must pay for the lunch. My car, or one of them, must take you home. Mind, I've always been like that but playing a King, especially a man as demonic as Henry, has accentuated my natural assumption of superior means.

  Aaron arrived at the studios yesterday. [...] I asked him how much money we have. Could we really afford to retire. He told me that in ‘quick’ money I have roughly 4 to 41/2 to five million dollars, and E has slightly less. This is quick money and not to be confused with the various houses, the Kalizma, the paintings, the jewellery etc. which would amount to about 3 or 4 million more. If, I said, we stopped acting, what sort of income would we get without touching the principal. He said: At least 1/2 million dollars a year. Let us give away 100,000 of that in keeping R Hanley and Benton and Wilson in the style in which they are accustomed and all the godsons god-daughters nephews nieces and Howard and Sara and Will and schools. Let us give another 100,000 running the Kalizma. Let's allow another 50,000 for odds and ends and we, E and I, will have to make do on 250,000 a year. All the children are now rich, some more than other, and so we don't have to worry about them. Financially I mean. I think with some blank paper and a typewriter and some amiable but not furious vodka and Jack Daniels we could manage alright. [...]

  Money is very important, not all important, but it helps a lot. That's why I have written about it so much today because it, if it means that E and I have the strength of mind to give up being famous we can at least live in more than lavish comfort. I might even be able to buy her the odd jewel or two. We'll spread our time between Gstaad the Kalizma and Puerto Vallarta. We'll nip over to Paris occasionally and give a party for the Rothschilds. We'll take the Trans-Siberian Express across Russia from Moscow to Vladivostok. We'll go to the hill stations in Kashmir. We'll muck around among the Greek Islands. We'll visit Israel and bury dead Egyptians. We'll re-visit Dahomey again and look at the washing on the line at the Palace – we can slide down the coast there in the Kalizma. And Spain and the West Indies and Ecuador and Paraguay and Patagonia and go up the Amazon. We'll take a month and do the Michelin Guide of France. There are many elsewhere, Coriolanus.199 I can write pretty books with photos by E.

  Sunday 3rd I went through a bad time yesterday, a time of enormous lassitude and indifference. I could barely bring myself, though I eventually did, to revise the enormous verbiage contained in the scenes I have to do this week. I tried to read a book about General Custer of Custer's Last Stand fame but found it un-readable. It is as if the writer was not only bad but a homosexual madly in love with Custer. The number of times he writes things like ‘and so the American Murat stormed into battle with his golden locks flowing in the wind’, or ‘the impetuous young man his golden tresses flying with the urgency of his charge, this marvellous boy ...’ etc. Sick-making. How do writers like that get themselves published? The author's name is Van de Water.200 I must carefully avoid him in future. [...]

  Today, however, I have lost all sorrow for myself and am really thinking of stopping this acting lark altogether. I will go into it very carefully with Aaron this week and find out exactly where our various obligations lie. It may mean working for another year and picking up an extra couple of million or so to pay everybody off that we feel responsible for. [...]

  Acting is a funny thing. Yesterday I read an article by that tall girl, Philip Hope-Wallace about the Cleopatras he has seen.201 Every one he mentioned (he was talking about Shakespeare's of course) was or is as ugly as sin. Tony Quayle, oddly enough, had said the day before at lunch. ‘Why is it that all our so-called major actresses are so plain?’ Why indeed? Let's have a look at the dames: Edith Evans, Ashcroft, Flora Robson and those who are semi dames like Maggie Leighton, Pamela Brown and that woman whose name I can never remember who's married to Larry Olivier – ah I have it – she is called Joan Plowright.202 Vanessa Redgrave and Maggie Smith both tend to turn me agint sex.203 He doesn't mention the only one who had the power or personality and physical beauty to destroy a man's life – Vivien Leigh. My wife was not considered of course because she is too beautiful and sensual. He talks of Peggy Ashcroft's exquisite care for the speaking of verse. Well Peggy speaks verse like an English mistress from Kensington. Fair dues the Hope-Wallace was only talking about stage performances.

  Liza is quite hopelessly slap-dash. She has spent only two nights in the spare bedroom and where we share the bathroom and this morning it looked as if a tornado had hit it. Two pairs of under pants on the bathroom floor, her dress, shoes and socks in various corners of the bedroom, innumerable ‘Charlie Brown’ books scattered to the four winds.204 What is this disease of sluttishness that possesses our children, boys and all? Well they are all past the age of curing so bugger it. But nobody shares the spare room with me again. I remember Simmy's room at Gstaad – the smell and chaos was so revolting that I couldn't go into it.

  Monday 4th [...] I'm at my wit's end as to where to send Liza to school. She has the education of a child of 10 and is 12 years old. And she is very bright but wouldn't stand a chance of getting into any school where they demand the 11-Plus. I suppose we'll work something out.

  [...] I loathe loathe loathe acting. In studios. In England. I shudder at the thought of going to work with the same horror as a bank-clerk must loathe that stinking tube-journey every morning and the rush-hour madness at night. I loathe it, hate it, despise, despise, for Christ's sake, it.

  Well that has managed to get a little spleen out of [my] system.

  We must force ourselves to do something for Harlech TV though from all I hear from Stanley Baker, David Harlech and John Morgan the organization and the rivalry between the Welsh and English factions is as bad as I feared it would be when I first put E and my weight behind the effort to get the franchise. I should have had more sense. We'd better do something, much as I'd prefer to sell and get out. So far, every suggestion I've put to them not only has not been acted on but I've never even recieved, shit, received, that's better, any acknowledgement. They are quite hopeless.

  So off to work and another round of repetition. ‘I must have a son to rule England when I am dead. Find a way Cromwell. Find a way. The Pope. The Cardinal. Orvieto, My Lord Bishops. Divorce Katherine. Divorce Anne. Marry Jane Seymour.’ I use every trick I know to make it credible but it's a losing battle. It's all mediocre rubbish. [...]

  Tuesday 5th Yesterday was another depressing entry though it had a few rewarding moments. [...] I suppose I also found some pleasure in the discomfiture of a journalist-gossip-writer named David Lewin who has been so vicious to us, particularly Elizabeth, in the last few years. Actually I feel rather sorry for him. It seems that he's lost his job as head of the entertainment section of the Daily Mail and now tells me with a pathetic attempt at bluster that he is editing a magazine. ‘Ah What magazine?’ say I, with blue-eyed candour. ‘Film Trade Review,’ says he. ‘You really should subscribe to it.’ This will make its circulation up to about six, I fancy �
� the other readers being his wife mother and children. Someone told me some time ago, I think it was Peter Evans of the Express, that his decline began with the pounding he took from Elizabeth on a TV interview at which he was idiotically present in company with an American Professor or Eng. Lit. Lord, and delicious, David Cecil, and our beloved N. Coghill. I have written about this encounter elsewhere in this diary. Why did a TV interview start his slide? ‘Because,’ said Peter Evans, ‘the editor of the Mail presumably told him that he had disgraced the Mail by his persistent idiocy with me and E and that she had made a fool of him etc. etc.’ The interview, unfortunately for him, was shown throughout the world. We, as a matter of fact, put it out as publicity for Faustus. Everybody exulted in E's anhiilation, how does one spell that word?, of him, though at the time I had the cold horrors and thought that in her tigeressish defence of me she was making a fool of herself. If he's any good he'll come back. But of course he's not good, is he? He writes in invisible ink.

  We went to the Hornbys last night for dinner and took the kitten with us. Sheran took it bravely though apparently she doesn't like cats, at the same time not being an ailurophobe – pick the tad-pole out of that spawn. I was struck last night at the uncanny resemblance that Simon Hornby bore to Oscar Wilde. A taller version I suppose though not much, for Wilde was about 6 feet 2 inches tall. He has the same sort of hair, the same liquid eyes, the same long oval face, the same lavish lips and the same swaying elephantine hips. I never had the honour, of course, of being alive when the great Oscar was, but I've read endlessly about him and seen many cartoons and photographs.

  Quip from Tony Quayle: ‘Michael Redgrave is in love with himself but he's not sure if it's reciprocated. That's his problem.’ I laughed for a long time.

  Observation from John Colicos: ‘My wife gave me a row on Saturday night because she said I was using words she'd never heard or read before, and that my attitudes had totally changed. I said that Burton not only was dynamic in himself but created dynamite in others. I blamed it all on you.’

  I sound like that fool Richard Harris.205

  Wednesday 6th Liza's Birthday.

  We are confoundedly trying to find a hunter for L's birthday present. [...]

  E said this morning that I lacked loyalty – simply because I said that Sheran is a snob and cultivates people only because they're temporarily ‘in’. Now E is a bright bugger to talk about loyalty. The list of her dis-loyalties would fill the yellow pages of the New York Telephone Directory. Except of course to her children. And there she defeats me because I've been dis-loyal to mine.

  Liza is very excited because she's just been told about the prospect of the horse. She's a lovely old kid and, despite my temper, I could spoil her almost as much as I spoil her mother. And that would take some spoiling. She is growing up at a fantastic rate and is tending to mother us all. She has latterly acquired the admonitory wagging of the finger with me and the ‘now-you-relax-and-take-it-easy-he'll-come-to-his-senses-because-he-really-loves-you-and-cannot-live-without-you’ sort of dialogue. It's a hot race in this family as to which is the most spoiled. But we all have instincts of generosity so I suppose we'll be alright. [...]

  I muse that if the Hornbys had a child which seems to me to be unimaginable it would consist of one enormous buttock. All ass and no forehead. Their two bottoms side by side would fill the Albert Hall. We discussed sycophancy last night and nothing is as crawly as Simon's having to play golf with the new director of W. H. Smith's simply because he is the new director. He was also late for us at dinner and I cannot bear people being late. Except of course me.

  Thursday 7th Well, I'll tell you. Liza's birthday is over and the change in her has been remarkable in the last 12 months and when other people take notice of it and tell me, not how beautiful she is which is self-evident, but how gracious and thoughtful she has become and how carefully she looks after weaker members of the family – like me – me or her mother or her sister for instance, and when they say, which is quite clearly impossible, that she sounds and even looks like me, I beam like a lighthouse.

  I am in one of my idiotic moods and have kept the two little buggers awake far beyond their respective bedtimes. The two little buggers are E and L. When I say that she looks like me, or to be exact when they say she looks like, I don't mean for a second that it infers a physical resemblance but a trick of phrase, an oddity of expressions, a manner. She is vulnerable at this stage to any powerful influence and, I suppose, you could hardly come more powerfully than her mother and myself. If you know what I mean. We both have authority in our own rights and in very different ways. Anyway she is growing into a very special creature. Bill Squire said the other day, having met Liza for the first time, ‘Good God, I would know she's Welsh from anywhere, she looks like us, she talks like us, she is us.‘206 I pointed out very carefully that she was about as Welsh as Josef Broz.207 He was astonished. I suppose that is because one has forgotten how vast the changes are. The differences are day by day, week by week, month by month tiny but massive. And suddenly there is a different person.

  I had been a little bit worried because it was quite obvious that people found Kate easier to handle and have around than Liza. But miraculously it seems, in the last month, Liza is running neck-and-neck with Kate and will, I guess, because the influences on Liza are more positive and because Liza's instincts are more generous, beat her (Kate) to the post. Understand that I love both children to the point of idolatry. She will never have charm in the ordinary sense of the word, she will never be, as Ivor says, and which I am, a ‘shw'd ichi heddi’, but, like her mother, she has the great virtue of honesty.208 She enchants me because of course she is in any case a delightful child, she is her mother's daughter and because in the absence of her mother she lectures me exactly as if she were Elizabeth. She wags a self-conscious finger as portentously as Noel Coward. And she loves wicked and naughty words as innocently as her mother. She told me last night on her birthday if you please that she loved the word ‘Shit’. I just love it she said. I just love it.

  I remonstrated but to no avail.

  Just like her mother.

  Friday 8th, Kalizma, Thames It's 6 in the morning [...]. I am on a stand-by. I'd had very little sleep the night before (took a shower with my pyjamas on. Is't possible?) and for the rest of the day was like a somnambulist, drinking steadily under the water until the exhausted and drunken body was given a succession of rockets from E and L on this yacht and ordered to go bed below decks. Example of dialogue with the two witches:

  Me, in bed, with a book: Liza, bring E'en So downstairs.

  Elizabeth: Get her yourself.

  Liza: Get her yourself.

  Me: Get me a sandwich.

  Elizabeth: Get it yourself.

  Liza: Get it yourself.

  Outcome: A silent Liza appears with a tray of sandwiches and small exquisite tomatoes and spring onions with immense disapproval on the side. I gave her a sorrowful look with all the sly Celtic charm I could muster up, but it fell on deaf eyes. I think that child loves her mother. I hope she realizes that I do too. It's a shared privilege.

  What a revelation Tony Quayle is? He's a sly-boots and perhaps he's mellowed with age, or perhaps I never knew him well enough but I'd either forgotten or didn't know how bright he is. And he can almost match me, said he with immense conceit, in knowledge of poetry. And reacts to it as immediately as litmus paper dipped in acid. What a strange thing for a man like Quayle to do. To stop being the boss of a great national monument like the Memorial Theatre and descend, for a few thousand quid, to playing opposite Gordon Scott in Tarzan.209 And more than that. Stratford was a theatre that catered for actors who were not good enough for London, or amateurs straight down from the Marlowe Society or the OUDS.210 T.Q. changed all that. For a torn second or two Stratford became the poshest theatre in the world. The ripped moment lasted for about 10 years and Quayle was the man who did it. He got Larry there, and Vivien, and Ralph (for better or for worse) and the tallest
girl in the school Redgrave, and a host of unknowns who later became ‘stars’ like me for instance. And Gielgud. And Badel.211 And the best wearer of costumes in the world, Harry S. Andrews.212 It's quite something to have done. It's as, I think, Emile Zola said of a man's library: ‘It was not a library in the ordinary sense of the word. It was an act of faith. It was a passion.‘213 Even that anonymous librarian probably did not know how unconsciously well he'd wrought. You don't write wrought very often do you? There's something wrong with the syntax of the last but 7th sentence, but we'll let it go. It will amuse me to correct it in my old age which will arrive next week. It is the bloodiest thing but I am only at home with children of my own generation. If you don't know your Richard two-strokes or three or the Dane.214 If you don't know that fool Dowson, or that lusting dying homosexual Housman, or Alexander Macgonical, then we have to begin from the beginning and re-educate ourselves.215 Nothing will persuade me that accident is art. Don't give me your bloody Beatles.

  [...] Quayle told me yesterday at lunch, and it needs somebody to lay down the law because one forgets the obvious, that art must have form. J. Gielgud had seen that thing of Peter Brook's of Marat? Sade? and they were all having dinner or supper or whatever the hell it was at The Mirabelle with Alec Guinness and Simone Signoret.216 And Tony was in one of his recalcitrant moods. First: he hated the Mirabelle. Second: he wanted to find out something about Simone. Third: he hadn't seen the Brook thing. Fourth: he blew his top when J. G. said he'd been to see that particular production three or four times and though it was miraculous or marvellous or whatever the latest adjective was that he'd picked up that morning as he passed T. S. Eliot in St James’ Park on his way to the nearest public lavatory. Well to cut a long diary short, Tony asked: ‘But what was it about John?’ John didn't know and again Quayle blew his top and embarrassed his wife, the waiters, and gentle Alec and presumably the baffled Simone Signoret.217 And if I'd been there I would have blown my top too, except, of course that I wouldn't have the courage. But John, as Tony or I suggested, had deliberately become a send-up of himself. ‘I am just a child of nature, I don't know what I'm doing. Give me the words and I'll get on with the job. Is the war over, I'm so glaaaaad.’