The Richard Burton Diaries

by Richard Burton

  [...] Yesterday afternoon I took E'en So for a walk and was hailed by a man called Harry Guardino. He was in a car with two small girls. I had no idea who he was but he chatted with great familiarity. ‘Who's that?’ I asked. ‘Harry,’ he said ‘Harry Guardino.’ Who are the girls? My daughters. I was taking them for a drive as it's Father's Day. They don't remember me I said – meaning my daughters. ‘The eldest one does,’ he said, ‘she recognized you first.’ I went home and told the story and Brook said that this same Guardino is a well-known and very good actor and indeed he was on a TV re-run of a film that very night called Hell is for Heroes.87 So now I know. Guardino must have thought me very up-stage but he probably doesn't know that I see very few films and never read the show-business page unless someone points out something funny about E or me or others.

  Tuesday 26th [...] We will [...] God willing after this week-end, go to Palm Springs and sun there.88 [...]

  The party was horrible if like me you were sober. E was in pain in the bed-room for most of the time. George Davies was drunk and silly by 8 o'clock and got drunker and sillier, Val was smashed, Guilaroff was catastrophically boring as ever and kept on telling endless tales to Brook of his massive operations.89 Kennamer spent most of the time defending California's weather which I attacked and almost was reduced to tears at one point. His voice became very high.

  Thursday 28th Lil and Jim have gone to Palm Springs today to look at a house which is for rent for $1,500 a month or is it $1,800? and to which we may move on Monday next. [...]90

  The market went up yesterday by a record number of points to everyone's surprise except mine. That is to say, I knew that it had to go up before long or go to war though by such a vast number of points and actually a record number of points in one day was not to be foreseen except by Getty.91 A lot of people will be breathing a little easier today but I have an idea that it will drop again before it starts climbing steadily up hill.92

  I have barely left the house except to take the dog for a walk and twice to shop at a super-market and buy books at an enormous book-shop called Pickwick's in Hollywood. Among other books I bought a very fat paperback called University Hand-book for Readers and writers. Flipping over the pages I came to ‘Sir Henry Newbolt. (1862—)’. The book is the revised edition of 1965. Could Newbolt still be alive then? He must be sleeping there below by now surely.93

  I finished the rugby article three days ago and asked Jim or George to type it up. For some reason it took two days to do this. I read it again last night and hate it so will write it all again.

  Crisis or no crisis we are neck-deep in scripts some of which are not bad though none that are really worth doing. Haven't got through a third of them yet though there are two that sound interesting. The Devils of Aldous Huxley which was done as a play by the Stratford Company some years ago, and a script by Peter Shaffer's twin brother who is having a great success at the moment with a play in London called Sleuth.94 He is not as fancy as his brother apparently. Good.

  Friday 29th I cannot face the re-writing of the rugby piece, but it must be done. I must hypnotize myself into doing it somehow. I read somewhere once that all creation in art is induced by self-hypnosis which is almost sub-conscious. Well let's see if I can do it consciously and re-write 3000 lousy paroles about a game. [...] It must be done, Richard. I shall pretend that if I finish the piece and if it's good I shall be paid $2,000,000. That might get it done.

  [...] I talked to Gwen yesterday. Ivor is back in hospital in Geneva. One kidney is mal-functioning. I wish him to die now. I can't bear to see him so helpless and childlike – not in his mind, that's all right – but in his querulousness, his hatred of being helped. And he is in continual pain since a kind of moribund life came back into the body. Why did that slip in the dark have to happen? So slight a slip, so gigantic a fall. A nightmare night that will haunt me forever. That whatever Gods may be for money. At least we don't lack that. He will die in first class which is the only way he has ever wanted to travel – a Pullman to the grave.

  Saturday 30th Three men came to see me yesterday in the morning at 11 o'clock to discuss a sort of documentary of Becket in which I will be the story-teller and occasionally appear. It is to be anything from one to one-and-a-half hours long. It will take me 10 days in September. It will be an interesting bit of travelling at any rate. I shall own it for Great Britain and own 50% of it for the rest of the world. I shall insist too on the cassette rights. The plan is to take the itinerary that he took. [...] The men were Huw Davies, a very Welsh Welshman from the Gower, an American called Lou Solomon who started off his morning with the disastrous ‘You don't remember me do you?’ I didn't and said ‘Remind me.‘95 He did and it turned out that he had written the first draft of Elizabeth Taylor's London and I made a faux pas when I blurted out ‘but I thought Sid Perelman wrote that’.96 Clang. He had the nervous idiocy to say the same to E on introduction and had the same blank reaction from her. Why do they do that? Mr Solomon has been in the business all his life and should know better. Doubtless he had boasted to the other two about how well he knew us, Dick an’ Liz and all that, and had to get in fast. The third man is a very long haired dark eyed sallow Brooklyn boy who seems very nice, but I felt the smack of amateurism.

  Brook has gone to watch the ‘Indianapolis 500’ in a cinema where it is shown on closed-circuit TV and while typing I am listening to it on the radio.97 A dreadful cacophony, an assault on the ears. It is a very dangerous race apparently and is usually ignored by the great Grand Prix drivers though occasionally they have appeared here and won – the one I remember is Jim Clark the Scot, now dead.98 [...] There is very little movement from Hathaway and Ed Henry re Raid on Rommel.99 They must get cracking soon if they want to start on June 15th or thereabouts.

  Sunday 31st Rex came to dinner last night. I went to bed at 1130 and left the family chatting with him and Brook and Elizabeth told me this morn that he had said categorically that no American had ever been wrongfully sentenced to death and/or executed for murder. God he is a simpleton. And as self righteous as only the genuinely stupid can be. He talks of Nixon as if he were a God. [...] He is a perfect fascist in embryo. Were Hitler to arise here he would think him a great man and would join the Nazi party like a flash. A good lecture on Racism would make him virulently anti-Semitic overnight and he would categorize them enthusiastically for the prison camps.

  I lunched soberly with Harvey Orkin at the Cock n’ Bull. He is a good sweet man and terribly muddled but could never become a Nazi or an anything-baiter.

  I read all day apart from writing a couple of letters. When faced with this machine latterly I feel as dull as drinkwater. John.100

  JUNE

  Monday 1st, Beverly Hills Hotel We are flying to Palm Springs this morning at 11 o'clock though I won't believe it until we get there. Swerdlow and Kennamer came to probe around E and said she could ‘dig ditches’ now if she wanted to. I can't myself see E digging ditches but it's obviously doctors’ idea of the acme of human good health that one is able to dig ditches. How about starting with a nice walk one asks one-self. Work it up to a slight sweat as ‘twere. [...]

  Tuesday 2nd, 925 Crescent Drive, Palm Springs We flew here yesterday morning in a De Havilland jet in 28 minutes. [...] It's a cheap house and has clearly just been repainted [...]. It is a bit short on baths but has three showers, a large kitchen and four bedrooms, a master bedroom for us, another with twin beds for Liz and Brook one for Raymond and a spare one, sans toilet and bathroom for me and my typewriter and ‘quarrels’ as E says. She is actually there now in the ‘quarrel’ room but not from a quarrel. I was snoring last night she says and she couldn't stop me so sought sanctuary in the spare room. [...]

  Wednesday 3rd, Palm Springs [...] There was much ado yesterday from Jim Benton and Dick Hanley and Springer in NY about an article in the current Look magazine about the sickness of E the fading film star and her insatiable demands for the most expensive things in the world including now if you plea
se and above all things a $125,000 ‘coja'(?) mink given by the equally sick but presumably not fading husband, me. What a shame that I spoil the whole thing by not having given her the mink at all. It was paid for by posing for snaps for Neiman-Marcus and several cuts and bruises when E fell off a rock and landed awkwardly on a platinum beach location in Vallarta.101 [...] The article is written by a singularly nice but singularly mediocre middle-aged man called Jonah Ruddy.102 Nasty as the article is it only succeeds in perpetuating the legend of immense wealth and distant unattainability which is the very stuff of ‘glamour’. [...]

  Watched off and on the primary elections last night on TV. Politicians are really frightful people. God help us all.

  Thursday 4th Elizabeth started bleeding yesterday from her behind, great gouts of blood which were frightening to behold. I cleaned it up periodically – on one occasion the bathroom floor was awash with it – and thanked the Lord that I was a non-drinking man and felt no nausea at all. I am convinced that were I a drinker as I used to be I would have thrown up convulsively. [...] The poor little thing had about 8 of these emissions before we finally got her to hospital. The unfortunate doctor – named Sisler, a relation of the hall-of-famer – gave her a sedative which only succeeded in making her very jumpy and nervous.103 [...] Endless telephone calls were made to Kennamer and Swerdlow who both obviously thought that it was a minor thing and that she was trying to swing for some hard shots again. Finally we got Sisler, who has done a great deal of proctology and who is the doctor of and known to Dick Hanley to come over. After more phone calls it was decided to remove her to the Desert Hospital.104 Swerdlow drove from LA in what must have been a hair-raising 90 minutes and waited to examine another dollop of blood. It was not long in coming and he decided to knock her out and have a look at least and see if she was haemorrhaging and she was knocked out and they wheeled her in to the theatre and found out that one of the stitches was ripped out, re-stitched it and she was all out in 30 minutes. I aged another ten years. She was pathetically frightened and kept on saying like a child as she was being wheeled down the corridor, ‘I love you Richard.’ ‘I love you too, Baby.’ And a baby she was, and a father I was. [...]

  Friday 5th [...] E still in hospital but considerably more comfortable. She lost ‘a unit and a half’ of blood, i.e. about a pint-and-a-half, and is correspondingly weak and will have to take it nice and easy until she's built up her own blood again which will take from six to eight weeks.

  [...] Last night I had a vivid nightmare in which our Michael was dead. He was a skeleton in a desert. I must have guilt about Mike because I kept on calling him Absolom in the dream and E – a vague figure – was accusatory.105 What does it all mean. What's the meaning of this?

  Sunday 7th I pulled myself together took my courage in both hands leapt the chasm and finally sent off the rugby article to Cliff Morgan. I hope it's acceptable. Awful if it's not. Will have to sell it to some other paper to salvage my pride. [...]

  E still in hospital with her blood-count very low and weakening and depressing for her, but if the count has remained the same or gone up this morning she will come out today. She is to rest a lot and not strain herself or overtire herself etc. until the blood has been restored. This should take about 6–8 weeks. It means she won't be able to come to Mexico with me probably when I make the film.106 It will be very strange without her but perhaps it's not altogether a bad idea as I shall be working terrible hours and will hardly see her at all, going to bed early and up at the crack of [dawn] in intense heat and so on. She might as well take it easy with somebody congenial in LA or Malibu. Female of course. Also, unlike E, once I start a film I want to get it over as soon as possible and will work any hours and seven days a week if necessary to do so. E, having grown up inside the MGM machine, gives them nothing free and considers adding to their costs fair game. I couldn't care less about that but with all the energy of a profoundly lazy man wish to get it over as soon as possible so that I can laze again or go to fresh fields. There is no film or play that I've ever been in that hasn't bored me after about six weeks so I like to get them over fast.

  [...] I'm waiting anxiously for the phone call to find out if she's coming out or not. If not I shall sit there with her and do Spanish verbs. One a day keeps broken Spanish at bay. There are programmes on TV all day long here in that language but apart from the commercials, I have a terrible job trying to keep up.

  Monday 8th Elizabeth came home yesterday at 4 o'clock, thank God, looking pale and wan but beautiful. Now for a slow but sure recovery. [...]

  We watched the ‘Emmys’ on TV last night.107 Horrible and shaming. A girl called Patty Duke who, when a small girl, was in Wuthering Heights with me and Rosemary Harris.108 That enchanting child has turned into a dope-ridden idiot. Her acceptance of the Emmy was among the most embarrassing things I've ever seen. Clearly she was stoned witless. It made one want to crawl under the chair. What a mess.

  Saw Charles Collingwood interviewing Speer about war crimes – his in particular.109 Charles seemed a bit holier than thou to me and Speer came out of it better and made no excuses. He seemed thoroughly likeable. There was a slight air of kicking a man when he's down in Charles’ attitude and more than a touch of self-righteousness. [...]

  Tuesday 9th [...] I talked to Kate yesterday and she comes out to stay with us after school finishes, which is Friday so she'll be here on Saturday for which many thanks and general rejoicing. She is still a little girl and hasn't become a long-haired unkempt pot-smoking hippie yet at least. I also talked to Aaron re Don Quixote and Defector and the documentary Becket.110 All as nebulous as ever. For Quixote I can get $1/2m in front as they say. The market is looking up a bit but nowhere near what it was.

  I expect another couple of bad days from E before we turn the corner but nothing short of a catastrophe can be as bad as yesterday. The nervous tension created in me when she's in pain is quite extraordinary. I am incapable of dispassion and keep on thinking how nice it would be if I had the burden of pain instead, except that I'd be far worse than she.

  Wednesday 10th Elizabeth in a complete reversal of form was bubbling over with joie de vivre all day yesterday and wanted to go out to a movie and/or go out for a drink. With memories of the last week's nightmares, fresh with haemorrhages and possible blood transfusions and hospitals and helpless pain, new in my mind, I said no. But perhaps, I said, tomorrow. [...] So if all proceeds at an even pace today we will go out to the cinema tonight. We have a choice of Airport, Mash or Marooned.111 It looks like Airport. I read a long piece in Time mag about Mike Nichols and Catch 22 in which I am, as ever, misquoted.112 I therefore assume that everybody else is. Mike, for instance, doesn't sound like Mike at all though if the writer is right Mike may have changed his attitudes to life and all that because of the profound impact on it of Catch 22’s despairing black humour. A book I couldn't abide and I have a treacherous feeling that I won't be able to abide the film either. We must get it run when we're back in LA. [...]

  [...] Apart from my Spanish I cannot settle down to what is known as ‘serious reading’ but gobble up thrillers at the rate of knots. Have got some lovely books too, hanging around.

  Thursday 11th [...] Received telegram from Cliff Morgan [...].113 Gratifying. Cliff is no Connolly but gratifying.114 [...] The best part of the day for me is usually the very early mornings – from 5.30–6.00 to about 9, but now the whole family has taken to getting up about 6.30–7.00 and it's bedlam. Lamentably here there is no place to hide, the house being so small. It'll be worse when Kate arrives. [...] Must learn to concentrate regardless of distractions. And they will read extracts from the newspapers to me in the middle of my typing. [...] I shall try typing outside on the patio beside the swimming pool tomorrow and see if I can get away that way.

  Just had bacon and eggs and bangers which I didn't really want, but as I'm feeling churlish I took them with a reluctant ‘thank-you’. Why don't they go back to sleep – they've got nothing else to do. I have heap
s of things to do, heaps and heaps. [...]

  Friday 12th [...] I awoke at 4.45 this morn. Got up and made coffee. A quiet silver dawn. Dogs all sleeping and all the family. The lights in this house are so low and so few that at this hour of the morning I type in semi-darkness, a gloom. Had a reply from Emlyn Williams yesterday to my avuncular letter of advice and sympathy re his mental and physical collapse last year.115 The letter [...] is very chipper and would seem to indicate that he's around the corner. His bad-taste revue number is not, however, up to standard. Of course, those numbers have to be acted not written. How long it is since Noel and Emlyn created the revue. The late King George VI singing ‘K-K-K-Katie from the c-c-c-cowshed’ and Kenneth Kent, Radie Harris and Herbert Marshall (all wooden-legged) doing a dance number called ‘Touch Wood.‘116 Esmond Knight and Esmé Percy (both one-eyed) doing a number called ‘I've got my eye on you.‘117 A chorus of skeletons dancing and singing ‘Take me back to dear old Belsen, take me back to good old Buchenwald.’ Those were the early ones, or some of them, and there have been hundreds since.