The Richard Burton Diaries

by Richard Burton

  Saturday 11th 6.20 and the children are already over from their rooms so the usual morning peace is shattered. Liza wants to come to work with me principally I suppose because I said that yesterday I saw a mare with its foal standing under the shade of a tree in the desert on the road to the location. I took Kate to the plane – the airstrip is a dirt strip between the town and the mountains – and off she went. I felt a bit funny as ever. [...]

  [...] A letter arrived from Cis saying how pleased she was with the CBE and saying that she enjoyed the ‘Frost’ show but that her grandchildren were annoyed that I described her as ‘old’. [...]

  It seems that we've been here for ten weeks and not ten days. The heat to which we are all thoroughly acclimatized is tremendous. And humid with it. Were it not for air-conditioning it would be a case of continual sweat morning noon and night. [...] The work consisted of throwing a German across a truck while four or five of my men render him unconscious. Next stint was jumping off the back of the lorry. Today there will be knifing in the back and lots of firing etc. Might even get to say a few jokes.

  We dined at ‘Arnold's’ but almost as soon as we sat down to eat the main fuse blew and we ate in candlelight and air-conditionless until it became too insufferable.207 As the waiters brought in the candles a cockney man called John Orchard sang ‘Ave Maria’.208

  Sunday 12th Woke early [...] from a dream in which E and I could not get anybody to put up money for any film we wanted to do. Refused to put up and actually withdrew money already committed if we had anything to do with a film. We were outcasts and were forced to go to the theatre, where again we were refused employment. The dream or nightmare wasn't as coherent as that and vivid faces came and went and was obviously prompted by ‘producer's talk’ yesterday with Harry Tatelman and Hathaway, but I was relieved to wake up.209

  Yesterday was my first really full day on the film. I shot all day long, killing a man, firing machine-guns, jumping off half-tracks, jumping on lorries, running across the sand in the boiling heat. It was an early day as the Mexicans insist on a straight through no-stopping-for-lunch-only-a-grabbed-sandwich day until 2.00. Starting shooting at 8am. This is a good day, and could well be done every day. A no-lunch day starting on the set at 8 in the morning and finishing at 3 in the afternoon would suit me fine. [...]

  As for the nightmare – it cannot exist in reality for either of us – we are both too good at our jobs, and too rich and too famous. The producers are starting to line up again and ‘stars’ are coming back into fashion, after several failed attempts to repeat Easy Rider and other small-budget pictures.210 Actually for people with our command we are just coming into the millennium. If this pic or the next or the one after gross an average of $4 million each which is pessimistic, I could ‘walk away with’ 3 or 4 million dollars. If they were biggish grossers I could take 5 or 6. If one of them was a smash I would make 7 or 8 millions. There is, in fact, no known series of accidents that I can think of that could impoverish us even if we never worked again. Even a large war – as long as it wasn't the ultimate catastrophe – if we survived it, would leave us rich, perhaps even richer in this insane world. Even if we both died this afternoon our children would be more than adequately provided for. Materialistically, we could hardly have done any better for our families. He said, smugly.

  The present state of the industry is bad luck on the johnny-come-latelies unless they are quickly and enormously established. The latest ‘stars’ like Elliott Gould and Hoffman etc. have had bad luck in starting to hit the jackpot while it is empty. Hoffman of course is so brilliant that the state of the industry is a matter of indifference to him but people like Elliott Gould are by no means so clever and smack of being one-shot artists and might well fall on their asses. [...]

  Liza is growing up into a sweet little lady and is going through a heart-breakingly vulnerable stage, very aware of boys and thinks she's ugly and unattractive and so on. I feel enormously protective and am worrying already that she is going to be hurt before long by some dashing idiot. She came to work with me yesterday and stayed the whole time despite the boredom and the fact that we couldn't find the horse and foal. She is frequently in day-dreams of some kind and has to be brought back to attention with an affectionate snap of the fingers. I wonder what she thinks about apart from the beloved Derby Day the VII.211

  E is fat but happy. I suppose she'll have to start watching her weight before she starts the next film, but she's very jolly as she is. The camera is cruel however so five or ten pounds will have to come off.

  Monday 13th [...] The rest of yesterday was a classical Sunday – a read and a doze and love in the afternoon, a crossword puzzle (Penguin Sunday Telegraph Collection) grapplesnaps and tea and an early dinner over in the restaurant and to bed about 9.00 with a John D. MacDonald and asleep by 10.30.

  [...] There is a terrific amount of drunkenness in the bar after work is over, I'm told and two separate cliques have quickly formed. The Germans on one side and the British-Americans on the other. Brook says he wouldn't be surprised if there was a bit of a punch-up one of these days. Neither would I. Even in Stratford-upon-Avon I remember tempers getting frayed and a lot of snarling after the actors had been stuck together for ten months in one small town. Lucky it's only another three weeks or less here. I remember too in Tripoli doing Bitter Victory that I ended up by knocking Nigel Green about a bit, and he me.212

  Elizabeth took the sun very well yesterday [...]. She has remarkable recuperative powers and has confounded the doctors [...]. When she loses a little flab she'll also look fitter than she has for years. Her sexual appetite is as eager as ever and so is mine though I don't think either of us attaches the urgent importance to it that we used to. I had a fear that the complete cessation of drink would decrease my sex desire, and so it did for a time probably because I concentrated so much on stopping the alcohol that everything else became diffuse – I had difficulty in concentrating on reading for instance – and I found that my mind raced and flitted from thing to object to idea at a bewildering speed. Now that the poison is nearly out of my system – I'm told it takes six months to dry out totally – I can think clearly again. I don't see the world whole, but I see it steadily. I have lost the hungover nightmarish fear of imminent disaster and early deaths and all its concomitants and am better balanced. [...] I think that in about two or three months I'll be able to settle down to a sustained piece of writing and in this new sober world I don't have the desperate urgency that I used to have that I would never do anything with any permanence, even semi-permanence. Now slowly, I believe I can, and not through writing novels which is a most unreal form to me. Novels are tricky and artificial and contrived and apart from the very great ones are all bedside reading. When I finish this piece I will try again.

  Tuesday 14th [...] I worked until lunch-time yesterday [...]. I spoke my first German in the film and had a film-long speech and scene with Clinton Greyn who is not a very good actor I'm afraid. He is tall and good-looking in a kind of weak way with a voice that threatens to become prissy when he presses. I wish Hathaway would let him be more casual. I play my part with a ping-pong-no-damned-nonsense rapidity and he cannot match me when he tries to do it. His voice is sibilant when he has a few esses flying about a sentence. Hathaway however is asking him to do things that don't accord with his personality – it's like asking the late Leslie Howard to be dynamic and harsh and clipped and furious.213

  Today the film gets hot with guns firing, flame-throwers flaming hand-grenades grenading as I and the commandos teach the medics how to be men at arms. I heard good news yesterday that I may be out of here by the 26th of this month. That's a couple of weeks and will get us out of this long hot American summer and home to cool Europe. I am looking forward to going by train and lunch in the Pump Room in the Ambassador East in Chicago and paperbacks on the train and stupendous breakfasts while the States wheel by the windows. Read the various regional papers and all that and what comics do they have and which politic
al boys do they syndicate.

  [...] Last night I was lying on the bed doing a double-crostic and looked up a quotation in the paperbacked Quotation Dictionary that I carry around with me specifically for that purpose. I immediately became lost in the book and read all the Shakespeare ones right through very slowly. There was hardly a line there that I didn't immediately know but seeing the miraculous words in print again doomed me to a long trance of nostalgia, a stupor of melancholy, like listening to really massive music, music that moans and thunders and plumbs fathomless depths. I wandered through the book for a long time but no other writer hit me with quite the same impact as William S. What a stupendous God he was, he is. What chance combination of genes went to the making of that towering imagination, that brilliant gift of words, that staggering compassion, that understanding of all human frailty, that total absence of pomposity, that wit, that pun, that joy in words and the later agony. It seems that he wrote everything worth writing and the rest of his fraternity have merely fugued on his million themes. [...]

  Wednesday 15th [...] Showered and shampooed after work and had an early dinner (7 o'clock) with Liza and Maria and Brook. [...] Then read on the bed while Maria did some sums in arithmetic and then read me a few pages from a book. She really does read now, not just remember from previous readings. I shall work with her every day and try to turn her into a bookworm. It would be nice to have a fellow bookworm in the family. She is a darling little child. I don't know why I worry about her so much.

  I read yesterday in the LA Times that Frankie Sinatra has ‘come out for Reagan’.214 That's like Laurel coming out for Hardy. I shouldn't think either of them has had a thought of their own in their lives except about themselves. Frank was asked by Haber of the Times, ‘Knowing your justly deserved magnanimity and interest in charitable organizations and support for ethnic minorities and the under-privileged etc., how do you feel about Governor Reagan's slashing of the funds for the aged and the blind by $10 million?’ ‘Has he done that?’ said Frankie, ‘I must talk to him about that.‘215 Big, as they say, fuckin’ deal. If we hear shortly that Reagan has only cut the aid-fund to $9,900,000 we shall know that Francis Albert Sinatra's fine Sicilian hand has been behind it again. All either of ‘em can do is count – using their fingers of course. Hathaway suggests that it's pique on Frankie's part. He was given the brush-off by Jack Kennedy. ‘Don't call us Frankie, we'll call you,’ he is reputed to have said to Frankie who had been plaguing him with phone-calls after he was President. Even Frankie however, despite his monomania, should be able to see that Reagan is patched cardboard and dangerously stupid. Now let's hope that Jesse Unruh beats him in November and leaves Frank with egg on his face again.216 Silly sod.

  Read the first act of Much Ado about Nothing last night before turning out the lights. Delightful. I must read William more often and not merely quote him to myself. There is a peculiar and tangible satisfaction from actually seeing the words on the page defying mortality.

  Thursday 16th [...] I worked steadily from 7.45 until just before 3 after noon, driving endlessly up and down a desert road chatting away to Clinton Greyn and John Colicos. It's odd that I cannot define what a good actor has, what quality or style but I can tell a bad actor immediately, and Clinton Greyn is bad. Colicos is slightly above average good and could in the right part be more than that, but Greyn is difficult to imagine good or forceful in anything. [...]

  Elizabeth has been away for two days now and doesn't come back ‘til Saturday and I miss her all the time. I love getting up in the morns and typing or reading to suddenly find that she's got up too and is having a screwdriver or a Bloody Mary or a salty dog. And generally making a nuisance of herself. [...]

  Friday 17th [...] The acting in this film is very bad and I can only hope that there are enough explosions to kill the worst of it, or at least to take the attention away from it. Something better could be done with Greyn who is the worst offender but there is simply no time in a piece of this kind and there is the suspicion that it wouldn't improve things much anyway. He is, as Brook points out, a typically mediocre Rep actor and there's nowt one can do about that except re-write the entire thing to suit Greyn's personality. He should never have been cast in the first place. But nobody expects a masterpiece and by the time it's out I shall have forgottenabout it. Colicos is heavily dramatic all the time though he is much better than Greyn and can be directed quite quickly into a more casual approach. He'll be alright I suppose. Brook did a couple of good bits yesterday and I was very pleased.

  Tomorrow comes Snapshot back to me and life will be richer again and a bit more mad. Without her I could quite easily become a recluse and be seen only fugitively, half glimpsed in distant villages like the Scholar Gypsy.217 I dined with Liza, Brook and Maria (who forgot to come and do her lessons last night) and read The Arms of Krupp in bed until lights out at 10 o'clock.218 The Krupp story is a fascinating story and in a sense is the history of modern Germany but Manchester, the writer, is a vulgarian and a cheap writer and the book suffers. A pity as it could have been a superb work and William Manchester obviously did extensive research. It's a shame when a man capable of such labour as Manchester is hasn't learned to write and doesn't have a friend who could edit it ruthlessly for him. Example: ‘This Alfred (Krupp) found as funny as a crutch.‘219 Infuriatingly silly.

  I was thinking yesterday as I saw everyone wilting in the heat and complaining about it how much stronger I feel than other people. I feel that I could go on for days while others fall beside the wayside, and have always thought so. I wonder if that accounts for Ivor's and my contempt and intolerance of weakness in others. Ivor's belief that one is ill only because one is mentally weak or masochistic has had a terrible retribution in his paralysis, but hasn't changed his belief. It hasn't changed mine either. But it is such a profoundly delicate subject that it is impossible to be adamant about it. Ivor's fall was an accident, or was it? Elizabeth's illnesses are bad luck or are they? If Ivor wasn't drunk he would not have broken his neck, or would he? Elizabeth's endless operations are the natural successors of indifferent eating and drinking habits and no exercise at all, or are they? There is no way of proving it one way or the other – one cannot set the clock back and say ‘Try that walk again tomorrow night in the same conditions and without the booze and see what happens this time Ivor,’ or, ‘Let's go back ten years Elizabeth and run a mile every morning and play tennis or something or ride a horse for an hour a day and take no pills of any kind and only moderate drink and eat to a proper weight level and then let's see how you go.’ If I have cancer of the lungs or throat tomorrow I have induced it by smoking too heavily haven't I? Or would I get it anyway? My father smoked all his life and didn't get it. Why should I? He lived ‘til he was over 80. Why shouldn't I? We shall never know. [...]

  Saturday 18th Last day of the working week and it should be an early day, perhaps very early if Hathaway gives the new German actor who plays Rommel half a chance to speak his speeches trippingly off the tongue.220 I wonder if I should intercede on the German's behalf this morning before Hank destroys him before my eyes. I have no sympathy for any Germans but simply don't want to be bored by endless takes and mistakes from the actor – a Hun by the name of Wolfgang Preiss – pronounced Price.221 I can tell that he's a good actor I think just by instinct. Hathaway said yesterday: ‘Fuckin’ Germans either want to be the bosses or kiss yer ass.’ Churchill said the same thing about the odd humble-arrogance of the German people but in somewhat more classical terms: ‘Germans are either at your throat or at your feet.‘222 Anyway, Hank's hatred of the Germans is not minced. He but hates them. I find them highly comical but as I would find the more amiable lunatics in an asylum comical, a laughter containing not a little pity and not a little fear that I may chortle myself to death. Of all the nations I have come to know reasonably well over the years the Germans are the nation who seem most the same, the most like each other, the most conformist. It is easy to see how they can become easily led. I cannot
, simply cannot, like them though I have tried ever since Maria came into the family. Even when they are at their fat chuckling meerschaum-smoking jolly best I see the jew-baiting death's head under the jiggling flesh and the goose-step and the gas-chambers.223

  Hathaway told me yesterday that many years ago he had an idea for a film – ‘Christ as the unknown soldier’. He needed a writer to write it. He saw William Faulkner who thought it was a ‘hell of an idea’. Faulkner went away and months later he called Hank and said I will write it as a book first, because I don't know how to write scripts and then we'll do it as a film. ‘Great,’ said Hank. 15 years later the book came out dedicated to Hathaway called Fable.224 Hank asked me if I'd read it and I said yes. He had read it, he said, but couldn't get through it because ‘it didn't have one, one single one of my goddamn ideas in it’. I told him I couldn't remember the book at all but remember only that it was very hard going. [...]

  Sunday 19th Yesterday was a very early day indeed. We had four pages in the can, as they say, by 11 o'clock and I was back, showered and dressed by 12.30. I went to the airport 3 times in an hour before I met the right plane which disgorged Elizabeth. She looked fine but seemed from her talk to be a little squiffy but I am now hyper-sensitive about drink. Anyway, one should have a drink before a tedious trip. Among other things she brought a tabloid newspaper which has a snap of us on the front page with a headline saying Elizabeth Taylor flies to save Burton's life. There was a magazine called Look containing letters about the ‘Cojah’ coat I am supposed to have bought E. I amused myself for a couple of hours writing a reply but it has become very long and could be developed into an article about money.225 I'll keep on with it just for amusement. Might even place it somewhere. Perhaps even in Look magazine. Or I could incorporate it into the lectures in Oxford. Might amuse the lads. That's three ‘amuses’ in 5 lines. [...]