The Richard Burton Diaries

by Richard Burton

  This is going to be a long entry presumably to be continued tomorrow. [...] I went into Hollywood Presbyterian hospital to have a complete check-up. And what a check-up! It took 24 hours which meant I had to stay the night in the hospital. By the time they had made me get into bed, taken what seemed like several pints of blood out of my [...] arm, [...] and Rex Kennamer, the doctor, assuring me just by feel that I unquestionably had an enlarged liver as a result of 30 years of excessive drinking. [...] Next day Kennamer came to see me and told me that I simply had to stop drinking for at least 3 months. Why, I asked? Because apparently, at my present rate of booze I would have sclerosis of the liver within about five years which would get progressively worse. Whether I drank or not. I mean after five more years. Very well, I said, I shall stop drinking totally. I have done so before for an occasional week and sometimes longer. This will be the longest time of the lot. This is my 10th day without booze of any kind and I must confess I feel immensely healthier. [...]

  Wednesday 25th We are going fishing today and stopping for lunch with a man who lives in an Indian village half way between here and Jalapa.7 He is a man called Richard Foot known to all as Don Ricardo. He is the only ‘gringo’ who lives in this particular village. He has reputedly built a school there and made a church. [...]

  Thursday 26th We left the house at 10.15 and boarded a fishing boat [...] towards Foot's village [...]. It is a small pueblo and all the houses are the usual palapa except his of course which has every mod con, [...] full of fascinating bits and pieces from various but almost entirely Asiatic places.8 Balinese, Japanese and Chinese and very fine copies of Spanish-Colonial cupboards and ‘Welsh-Dressers’ etc. with a garden, built on sand, which, were it not for the Bougainvillea could have been mistaken for an English garden in Kent. Beautiful roses etc. Much discussion on our return as to whether he was a genuinely good man, interested in the welfare, education etc. of his very backward village or whether he was merely playing God. He doesn't sound very intellectual and keeps on saying that he reads a great deal. I looked through his library which is small and contains very little that I haven't read and apart from a few pseudo-mystical books nothing that you wouldn't find in anybody's week-end cottage. On the table, opened and face down was a book called Famous Stories of Sherlock Holmes.9 [...] We had raw grated fish marinated in lime juice to start, followed by clam chowder followed by grilled sierra with a tomato and cucumber salad. The two Chrisses also had lasagna and finished with what they said was cheesecake of the best kind they'd ever had.10 [...] Elizabeth and Norma (Heyman that was), who has been staying with us for a couple of weeks escaping from her horrible lover [...] had had their ‘Vallartans’ which is the name we give to a drinking regime which means one drink before lunch and two before dinner. I am, of course, still not drinking anything at all except tea and occasionally coffee, which I don't normally drink except with brandy. [...] Since I stopped drinking I've become a bit of a gourmet myself, certainly were it not for stern self discipline, a gourmand. I have therefore formed the opinion that hard liquor in whatever form before eating is a taste-bud killer, though a burgundy rich and deep with beef and port with a powerful cheese is delectable. So is a good very dry light white wine with fish. [...]

  Friday 27th Brook, Lillabette, and the three children – Liza, Maria and Liza's friend, Jennie, arrived last night 5 minutes before time. They all looked compared with us like suckling pigs or soft underbellies of slugs but today already they are beginning to redden up. [...] I received a [...] letter from Tony Quayle who has a smash hit for himself in a play by one of the Shaeffer brothers called Sleuth.11 [...]

  I have decided to [do] an intensive 10 day course – self taught – in Spanish. I have avoided it for years in case it interfered with my beloved Italian, but since it seems that we shall be spending more time in Mexico than in Italy for the next few years I thought I would at least acquire the rudiments of the language, ‘menu-Spanish’ as they say. There are 45 lessons in my little book called Madrigal's Magic Book of Spanish and I did 5 lessons yesterday in an hour and got all the answers right.12 [...]

  I have heard nothing more about doing The Defector Charles Collingwood's book but doubtless a great deal will happen when I arrive in LA a week from today.13 Peck and Elizabeth have agreed to do it. [...]

  Today or tomorrow will make it a fortnight without drinking – the longest since I played Camelot and I haven't missed it at all but had a severe time at a party given by a family called the Gunsbergs, surprise luncheon birthday party for dear Phil Ober.14 Everybody was stoned when we arrived, everybody was repetitious. I was vastly tempted to down a huge dollop of vodka and join the general boredom but desisted and smiled and smiled and hope for the best.

  Saturday 28th It's a sod of a world today. I am extremely unhappy and as melancholy as a Sankey and Moody hymn.15 My instinctive aversion and distrust of the human race is brought to a head periodically, drunk or sober. [...] The people around me in the house are all engaging but today, at least, I don't want to see any of them. I am writing this on the top private patio of the house wearing a Mexican hat, Mexican fashion over my nose because at the moment I could easily play Bardolph without any makeup.16 It is Norma's birthday and she cried because everybody here had remembered it and kissed everybody indiscriminately, and each additional present wetted her eyes. She is 32 years old and a mess. But then so am I. So is practically everybody I know. Why do people weep on their birthdays. I noticed Phil Ober did the same the other day. The odd thing is that they seem to wail not out of self-pity at the miraculous addition of another year or the fear of old age, but out of happiness at being remembered. I remember that Dylan Thomas was almost embarrassingly sentimental about his birthday as indeed he shows in ‘Poem in October’. ‘His tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine.’ ‘The listening summertime of the dead.’ ‘It was my thirtieth year to heaven though the town below lay leaved with October blood.‘17 The trouble with total sobriety is that if you are a born misanthrope and if your base is an essential cynicism, and my birth and base are both, you do not see the world through a glass darkly (and in my case a glass of alcohol) but suddenly face to face. St Paul was talking about something on a slightly higher plane to put it mildly, he was looking for the face of God when he found the dark glass remove and the pure light of the love of God was revealed to him.18 So he says anyway, the self hypnotized phony. But I find that, alcoholess, I have become for me relatively silent. I do not as before tell incessant stories, most of the audience having heard them before, especially poor Elizabeth who has had to suffer them endlessly for 8 or 9 years. There was an outburst at lunch today. Norma said how marvellous I was looking since I gave up booze – it's only been a fortnight for God's sake – and that when she arrived I looked so awful that she burst into tears (which she didn't) and I am reputed to have said to her ‘It's only the booze love – I shall stop it.’ This she does with that irritating impersonation of what she fondly thinks is a Welsh accent and the way I speak. I said it costs me no effort except when I am so bored that I lust for a second or two for a whopper of a Martini to kill the pain and the waste of time. They had all had their ‘Vallartans’ and Elizabeth was busily making one of Ray's specials which consists of iced coffee and milk or cream or ice-cream and some mild (55 proof) sweet Kalua – a dash of – and some rum to titch it up, because it was Norma's birthday. And I said ‘there's someone who could never give up drink’ pointing at E. Whereupon she said she (E) hated my guts and further more disliked me savagely. ‘Ah,’ said little stirrer-up Norma, ‘but you do love him don't you? ‘No,’ said E, ‘and I wish to Christ he'd get out of my life. It's been growing on me for a long time.’ ‘Piss off out of my sight,’ she added. So like the Arab I picked up my tent and stole silently away up here – my tent being the type-writer, my sombrero and Madrigal's Magic Key to Spanish. She has said all those things before and I to her, but never before, as I recall, when sober and in front of people. If, of course she was sober. Raymo
nd makes extremely powerful drinks. She has had the above outburst so often recently – going back about a year I would say that it undoubtedly smacks of the truth. The eyes blaze with genuine hatred and contempt and her lovely face becomes ugly with loathing. This hasn't happened for a long time, but I didn't care about the other girl much so it had very little impact on my vast ego except relief. I have to face the fact that E may be going to take off one of these days and perhaps sooner than I expect. I have known it deep down for some time but have never allowed it to surface. Well perhaps when we have all come out of this slough of despond we can still make it work. Tomorrow is always a surprise. Our quarrel sounded like the quarrels one hears from the next room in a cheap hotel by two middle-aged people, 20 years married and bored witless by each other. A good shouting match is sometimes good for the soul, cathartic, emetic, but I can't be bothered to shout back when I'm sober. Pity.

  The woman who wrote Tim White's biography – and there was if you like a profound melancholic – wrote that he once said ‘If you are unhappy, learn something.‘19 So I will learn some Spanish from Madrigal's Magic Key to same, and screw everybody.

  Sunday 29th [...] I have now done 20 lecciones of the Madrigal Spanish. This morning [...] I shall revise and then take their examination, which is taken against time and is quite fun. So far according to the speed and accuracy which they deem average, above average, and superior, I am superior. It is a primitive grammar of course and the real work will start after I've finished the course, but I hear from other gringos around here who go to have Spanish lessons from a tutor that it takes them six months to do this particular book. [...]

  Louise, I'm told by Foot who is a great friend, so he says, of the Collingwoods, is a hopeless lush and is far far gone in the liver department. She is 50 or about to be and any minute now is going to look 70. She said she'd come on the waggon with me but, like Maureen Stapleton, it only lasted the night.20 She can't even stick to Vallartans like Elizabeth, though the latter exceeds her limit now and again.

  As for E and I there is a kind of armistice. Both sides are fully armed, the bombs are ready to go off but so far nobody has pressed the button. The first six months of the sabbatical have been completely wasted. Except when we were alone we have bickered and quarrelled incessantly, and we have hardly ever been alone. Hawaii was a nightmare, Ivor's paralysis was a nightmare, Palm Springs and Los Angeles was a nightmare and there is more to come. I mean more Los Angeles nightmares. Anyway back to work soon thank God. Perhaps Europe and the Kalizma will rest us up for a bit after seeing Nevill off – if he can come, which now seems unlikely as his brother Paddy is dying.21 And when The Defector starts [...] I am going to insist that everyone must come to see me. I must have a look at Vietnam, just to see what it looks like and maybe I can get near enough to the DMZ to have a look at the famous bridge, but that shouldn't take more than a week or ten days.22 Then a look at Taiwan and other places that supposedly look like, or near enough look like Vietnam. [...]

  Monday 30th [...] Things seem to be more congenial around the house, largely because I kept out of the way of the family and guests practically all day. My teetotalism is inhibiting I can see. Every drink they take is almost apologetic which is silly. I am the one with the battered liver not they, though E will have to watch hers carefully by the time she's my age. [...] The dreaded trip to Los Angeles approaches fast. We leave on Friday and I present a prize to Army Archerd on Saturday at lunchtime.23 I have never done such a thing before and certainly not sober. I am followed by Bob Hope, not an easy man to precede with his vast experience as an international toastmaster.24 [...]

  APRIL

  Thursday 2nd [...] I did nothing all day except stare at the ocean and occasionally memorize some irregular Spanish verbs. I am well over half way through the Grammar at the moment and, given a little peace in LA I will have practically finished it by the time we return. I will then go through it again fast and translate the editorials from the most reputable Mexico City papers every day, in the meantime finding some intelligent bilingual Spaniard to make conversation with for an hour a day. The best man in town they say is a doctor who has already attended some members of the family and seems young and nice. David the Tutor goes to him and says he's not a good teacher and that his English is somewhat broken but I don't want a teacher, I want someone who will listen to me read to him and correct my accent and who will ask me questions in Spanish to which I shall give painfully slow but, I hope, grammatically correct replies.25 I am pretty sure that in another month I shall be reasonably fluent. [...]

  Another worry is that I have temporarily lost all sexual urge which is very frustrating for E. Presumably the terrific change in my body as a result of total abstinence for (now approaching) three weeks, after thirty years of steady and sometimes unsteady drinking is taking its time to re-assess itself. When it does come back it will be a vast explosion. If it does come back which it had better had.

  I read last night Aaron's précis [...] of our respective financial positions. It seems that we have approx $51/4 million each but that our overheads are approx $600,000 a year. Insurance alone for jewellery and paintings is $200,000 a year. The Kalizma is 100,000. Vallarta is 20,000. Salaries and fees – lawyers etc. and agents Xmas bonuses et al. is 370,000. [...] I must find out from Aaron how we can cut down from $600,000 to about $400,000 a year. [...]

  Friday 3rd, Beverly Hotels That's as much as I was able to write yesterday. We arrived smoothly from Vallarta in Sinatra's jet in 21/2 hours. I have lost roughly 18lbs in two weeks on the Low Carbohydrate diet and have yet to have a drink in three weeks.

  Saturday 4th, Beverly Hills Hotel [...] Yesterday I went for my fitting with Ron Poston who is supposedly the #1 tailor in LA and he found, not to his dismay that I had lost 31/2 inches off my waist, and 11/2 ins off my chest. This morning I discovered that I had lost yet another lb. Another two or three lbs and I shall be at my lightest since Hamlet and almost as light as I was when I was hard and fit and played rugby in my teens and early twenties.

  Yesterday I went to a press lunch where I presented an award to Army Archerd, the columnist, which was well received. Almost all the other people went on far too long, particularly Anthony Quinn who went on and on with a typically verbose extract from Wolfe's Time and the River.26 He also didn't know how to speak it. E made a surprise appearance at the end and had a standing ovation. Typical. We did all the work and she received all the applause. And where there had been no more than two or three photographers taking shots of the various candidates and donors, there were suddenly and from nowhere about forty or fifty of them. It must have astounded a French actress, said to be very good, called Jacqueline Bisset who had been sitting on my right throughout the proceedings on the dais, and who was also a giver of a prize.27 [...]

  Sunday 5th [...]I had a relentless and exhausting meeting with Lucy Ball who read out the script which we are going to do with her. The writing and situation will do and I shall change a great many of my own lines myself. Very nicely Brook is in it as well so will pick up a few dollars. Later that night we saw privately here at the B. H. projection room a film called The Boys in the Band.28 Full of four letter words but not too much so as to offend and the performances are all good but a bit ‘stagy’ which is not surprising as it was played by the original Broadway Cast. I doubt whether, like Staircase, it will do very well.

  [...] Jonah Ruddy came at six to interview me about ‘giving’ such enormous gifts to E like the Krupp and Burton-Taylor diamond.29 What did I think the taxi-driver and the bank teller think of such extravagance. It was boring and I could hardly defend myself by saying that we had given away or were owed nearly $2m, a half of which I doubt whether we will ever see again.

  [...] We saw a film last night – one nominated for the Oscar – called Z.30 It's in French about the Greek military junta. Not really a very good film but smacks of the truth about present Greece. And is therefore impressive. [...]

  Monday 6th [...] I went this m
orning for a final fitting for my dinner jacket for the Oscars tomorrow night. There is apparently an outside chance I might win but I give it no mind or else I shall become morose if I'm a loser. I have now gone over 3 weeks without a drink and never give it a thought, though win or lose tomorrow night it's going to be another test of my will-power, because certainly everybody else will be intoxicated. It's one of those nights.

  [...] My mind is obviously on other things because the preceding paragraph is about Saturday and not yesterday.

  Now yesterday we sunbathed in the morning and at two o'clock Brook and I and E went to the rehearsals of the Oscars. There were a lot of people about, but I only knew a few by sight – Clint Eastwood was there and Jimmy Jones – the black actor of the great white hope and not Jimmy (From Here To Eternity) Jones.31 Peck was charming and E found her speech for the presentation of the Best Picture Award too sententious and asked if she could re-write it herself, which she did last night so that they can put it onto the idiot boards.