The Richard Burton Diaries

by Richard Burton

  At one point I asked him what he would have done had Churchill had his way and instead of opening a Second Front gone straight up through the Balkans and Austria etc. and cut off the Russian advance.50 He answered without hesitation: ‘We would have stopped you. We had, by this time, 35 divisions, all battle trained, and a great deal of arms taken from the Italians and Germans.’ I suppose he would have, at that and another war would have developed. Almost in the same breath he said that he trusted Churchill but not the British. Nobody it seems trusts the British. We really are, to the foreigner, ‘perfidious albion.‘51

  We finally got home about seven and had yet another enormous meal. This time I weakened and had some ice-cream. Later, having already weakened, I ate two bars of choc while watching S. Tracy in a film – rather good – called Bad Day at Black Rock.52 Scales show 79kg this morning 174lbs nearly. Saw many stills this morning. I looked very haggard. Perhaps I'm getting too thin. Tito looked rubicund and toby-juggish in comparison. I should film well though. Will certainly look hungry!

  Monday 2nd Another day spent almost entirely with the President. I woke late – for me, 7.40. – and had breakfast down by the sea. As usual it was too much. Cold meats, ham, salami etc. Tea. An omelette. Hot sausage. Many sweet cakes. More tea. Then at 9.30 saw Deli , Popovi and a P.R. man who asked me a lot of questions about why I was doing it all etc. For the umpteenth time I went through my stock verbiage. ‘Great man’, ‘great opportunity’. ‘Hope I can do justice’ etc. I hope, more aptly, that they can do justice to me. Give me the tools, i.e. part, and I'll get on with the job.53 Were it not, actually, for E's delight in the power and glory of it all I would do my best to cut and run – so great is the strain of boredom – especially the interminable translated conversation. Both Tito and Madame Broz tell long stories which they don't allow the interpreters to interrupt result being that by the time the latter have finished one couldn't care less what the story is about. Madame has a very penetrating voice which, after a time, becomes extremely tiresome. And protocol demands that I'm always with her and the President with E. And they have a professional interpreter whereas I have a minister's wife whose English leaves a lot to be desired. Mrs Broz smiles all the time and so does the interpreter.

  In the morning at precisely 9.50 we left the house for the President's villa. Then straight on to a small powerful yacht – 35 knots top speed, 160 tons, 120 feet – and went belting off down through all the hundreds of islands in this part of the world. Lovely towns and hundreds of spanking new hotels. The beaches, mostly rock, were crawling with tourists. They average 30,000,000 a year they kept on saying. Almost everybody waved at the Presidential Yacht and he waved back. So did E and Raymond. As soon as we were aboard drinks were served – whisky for the President and wife and E and local red wine for the others and a gin marguerita for some and the inevitable water for me. From then on the same booze was produced at regular intervals for the rest of the day. We disembarked at the President's villa after about two hours at sea during all of which time we were escorted by two torpedo boats and a police launch. The President proudly told me that his coast was the best defended in Europe and that guns, submarines and gunboats were hidden under all the cave-infested islands.

  Occasionally through the binoculars which were amply supplied I would glimpse a sailor at attention on some remote hillock rigidly saluting. We had lunch on a little island facing Brioni, not without the excruciating examination of the house and grounds. ‘This is from Indonesia from Sukarno himself.‘54 ‘This is work from the people of Macedonia.’ ‘This is from the Sudan.’ I noticed that most faces bore fixed smiles of boredom long before the end of lunch and despite the fact that they were drinking. E's face of course, was an exception. She is having a ball. It is as well that I'm not drinking or I might be asking some very awkward questions. There were occasional bright moments. Tito in English: ‘I was very glad when my grandmother died.’ E: ‘Why?’ Tito: ‘Because it meant she stopped beating me.’ E: ‘That's an awful thing to say.’ Tito: ‘She was small but strong and always angry.’ He met Churchill who was in the vicinity on Onassis's yacht. Winston C. accepted a very small whisky. Tito had his usual large one. ‘Why so small a portion?’ asked Tito. ‘You taught me to drink large ones.’ ‘That was when we both had power,’ said Winston C. ‘Now I have none and you still have yours.’

  Power does corrupt. I doubt whether Tito sees the ordinary Joe Soap from whom he came except when the latter waves a flag and carries a banner. At least he doesn't keep his people waiting. Last night we went to see a film in the Roman Theatre at Pula. The streets were lined with sailors rigidly at attention behind them being masses of people who applauded the whole route. E was the star of the evening – much more so, or at least equal to Tito. When we entered the coliseum – 6000 people capacity – they all stood up and gave an ovation. E deeply thrilled. Me cynical as ever. The film was fun. The inevitable tray of drinks was presented at the same intervals throughout the film. We had earphones with an English translation. [...]

  Tuesday 3rd Have just come back from the minute island of ‘La Madonna’ which is just off the front of our villa which I discover is called ‘Jadaranda’ I think. We see the President and Madame for the last time this trip at noon. It is now 11.30. We had a swim and breakfast on Madonna. I eat nothing and have, in fact, eaten nothing since lunch yesterday except one plum and a vitamin pill. Rarely have I stuffed myself as much as I did at lunch yesterday on the President's island – not Brioni, the other little retreat. Madame Broz likes to play practical jokes, so I understand but is restrained by the Marshal.

  Had a 3 hour discussion with Tito about Sutjeska, Mihailovi , etniks, British, Churchill, Allies, Stalin and Uncle T. Cob. which I will type up later when I get back to the Kaliz this afternoon.55 [...] Am still worried by the atmosphere of dread which surrounds Tito. Cannot understand it. Neither can the rest of us.

  Thursday 5th, Villefranche Have been back since Tuesday. [Monte] Carlo a nuisance as usual so nipped over here for a slice of quiet. Michael Caine on board from his rented yacht – a veritable tub that bobs like a cork.56 He has a nice girl with him called Suzy Kendall who is married and presumably separated from her husband who is a comedian called Dudley Moore.57 Michael speaks in a shout which becomes a bit hard in a small room. He is very funny and very cockney most of his ‘wit’ being a regular and repeated pattern of catch-phrases. ‘Black as your hat,’ ‘A turkish religion with a tip-up seat’ etc. All repeated at various times during the day. Spends his time going to discotheques and parties of which, down here, there are hundreds. Many good reports of XYZ from all kinds of sources so E might have a big one again. [...]

  Wednesday 11th, Kalizma We left Monte Carlo two or three days ago and went to Portofino which is as enchanting as ever and where of course we inevitably met Rex Harrison and his future wife Elizabeth Rees-Williams. She was married to an actor – very good I believe, though I have never met him or seen him – called Richard Harris. Professional Irish type I gather, getting drunk and fighting when sufficiently so. Rex came on the K at cocktail time and was already paralysed with booze. So was the Rees-Williams. Acutely painful hour or so with Rex being endlessly repetitive and eventually tottering on the brink of outright rudeness. We all agreed after they had left that this couple were among the most unattractive we'd come across in a long time and the thought of their getting married before the end of the month a monstrous joke. She is a kind of brazen blonde type with a veneer of finishing school. I feel very protective about Rex as I fear this woman is not just a harum-scarum shouter and bawler like Rache but a devious minx on the make. She looked ugly with dissipation and so did Rex. His casual elegance was noticeably lacking and he has put on a lot of weight – tremendous pot and jowls. E and I sat up in bed after they had gone and after dinner and had a smug hour telling each other how lucky we are in that we have each other and that we like each other. And so on. And by god we are lucky in virtually every way. E kept on saying: How lucky we
are to love each other. Too right.

  We were hoping to get away from M.C. days before we did because there is no peace there and we were inundated with visitors. Niven, Van Cleef and Arpels from whom I bought a ‘Leo’ necklace with a lion pendant for E as a ‘granny present’. It is very pretty and cost $27,000. She loves it. ‘Leo’ is the child's Zodiac sign. M. Caine and Suzy Kendall. Messages from Grace and Rainier asking us to come to the Red Cross Ball held outside the Opera. Tried like mad to get out of it but couldn't very well and anyway it turned out to be an entertaining evening. I had Grace one side of me and a young baroness the other who is Paul Gallico's daughter – or rather step-daughter – who was very sweet and thrilled and is going to be an actress.58 She calls herself, for the stage, Ludmilla Kova I think.59 Shouldn't think she'll get anywhere. Gallico, who is 74 and looks 55, impressed E very much but her favourite Rainier was as much fun as ever she tells me. He is an extraordinarily nice man and very bright which for some reason always surprises me in royalty.

  We are half way between Portofino and Porto Santo Stefano where I shall see Losey as I've decided to do Trotsky. Absolution, for which I had high hopes has fallen through financially and I was forced to give it up and do Trotsky in between ‘Tito’ shooting. Got rid of Hugh French in as nice a way as possible and asked John Heyman to revert to his old job of agent for a while. He is in Belgrade at this moment chatting the Slav money boys up.

  Thursday 12th En route to Porto Santo Stefano where we should have some or will have some word from Heyman. If all goes well I shall be playing Tito on Monday though I'm so lazy and enjoying the bateau so much that wouldn't be averse to a few days or even a couple of weeks postponement. Wouldn't actually be suicidal if the whole thing were scrapped until next Spring, say, or scrapped altogether for that matter.

  [...] Children and E watched a film of mine called Prince of Players which I made about seventeen years ago.60 [...] I remember the high hopes I had of that film and my disappointment at its indifferent reception. The original script by Moss Hart was very good when I agreed to do it but a year later when I actually did it had been murdered by Zanuck and his hacks.61 Some of it was saveable however which accounts for what little success we had. It seems to me that I was outrageously pretty in those days and much prefer my present hard and ravaged countenance. [...] Like last year, I am enjoying not drinking though there have been one or two close calls. [...] It is easy when I am alone with E as she rarely gets drunk. About the only time I get testy with E is when she has had a couple of drinks and has taken a ‘pink’ pill (a pain-killer) or prematurely taken a sleeping pill which are mild enough but in conjunction with the booze makes her speech funny and gives her a kind of false euphoria and she becomes sentimental and a bit reminiscent of her mother. Since her mother is the bore of all epochs this can be a bit hard.

  We have had a tremendous amount of unsought for publicity in the last few weeks and publicity of the world-wide kind. The daggers incident.62 The grandchild, Tito – which was news-reeled all over the world I understand – and guests-of-honour at Grace and Rainier's Red Cross Ball. One Italian newspaper yesterday said that La Taylor continues to astonish the world and can say to all her rivals that she is still the greatest headline maker of them all. Rubbish but pleasant. It is phenomenal the continued attention we get. Literally there must be millions of words written about us and hundreds of thousands of photographs. Once the girls thought that they would save all the photos of E or me or both on the covers of magazines and plaster them all over the wall of the games room in Gstaad – but there were so many, even in a short time, that they abandoned the idea as they decided they, the covers, would cover the whole house. [...]

  Friday 13th, Porto Santo Stefano63 Confusing telegram and messages from John Heyman. [...] Cable from Heyman says something like Expect conclude satisfactory deal this weekend. Popovi says you (meaning me, RB) not interested in money and doing film because you are such a great fan of Tito's. You expected Dubrovnik Monday, and then four question marks. ???? [...] We are parked outside Stefano Harbour – there are two actually –and will go in with E and Raymond at 9 o'clock to phone [...] and find out what I can.

  The other reason for going in is to visit the café where we had our first and near-fatal drink one near-dawn morning on our way to the next bay for a clandestine weekend. I had driven E from Rome in the small hours in a rented car – a small two-seater Fiat as I remember – in order to escape the paparazzi. The town was a grave at that hour and in the bar-cafe were only a couple of people and a boy and a dog and a waiter. All the world press were searching for us. We thought we had got clean away. One of the anonymous gentlemen in the bar was a newspaper man on a humdrum assignment to cover the arrival of Dutch royalty. And lo and behold there in front of his eyes were the ‘hottest’ and most scandalous couple in the world. We left the place after a coffee and cognac apiece or perhaps we had two and drove in smug blissfulness to the hotel who had set aside for us a half-finished and small villa which was half a mile from the hotel, looked stupendously over the sea and was completely isolated. We gambolled like children, scrambling down the rocks to the sea and enjoying ourselves as if it was the last holiday. We found out soon enough that every bush – and there were hundreds of them – contained a paparazzo. We were well and thoroughly trapped. The weekend turned immediately from an idyll into a nightmare. We drank to the point of stupefaction and idiocy. We couldn't go outside. We were not married. We were impregnated with guilt. We tried to read. We failed. We couldn't go out. We made a desperate kind of love. We played gin rummy. E kept on winning and oddly enough out of this silly game came the crisis. For some reason – who knows or remembers the conversation that led up to it? – E said that she was prepared to kill herself for me. Easy to say, I said, but no woman would kill herself for me etc. with oodlings of self-pity. Who knows what other kind of rubbish was said. Who remembers from so long ago with everything shrouded in a miasma of alcohol what was said. Out of it all came E standing over me with a bottle or box of sleeping pills in her hand saying that she could do it. Go ahead, I said, or words along those lines, whereupon she took a handful and swallowed them with gusto and no dramatics. I didn't believe that they were sleeping pills at first. For all I knew they could be Vitamin C or anything else. She then, I think, took herself off to bed in an adjoining room. From then I hardly remember any detail. Vague memories of trying to get her awake, of realizing that she wasn't joking, running around looking for that awful ‘contessa’ who, I discovered later was having an affair with our sometimes chauffeur Mario, searching also for the latter. Loading E into a car and a hair-raising drive to Rome and a hospital and hiding at home because officially E had a tummy complaint or some other excuse which the press told immediately to the Marines. Not being able to go to the hospital because of the snappers and not answering the telephone to all the disaster-lovers like Roddy McDowall and Manciewicz and almost everybody.64

  So now we have just come back from the very same café where E had a cafe latte and a cognac as she did that time ago, and I noticed that it was Friday the 13th. I mean today and decided that I didn't want any repetition of that awful Easter. By God, what if she'd died. Worse, what if she'd lived with an impaired brain? I'm perfectly sure that I am incapable of suicide so presumably I would still be alive. What would I be doing? Maybe I would have drowned myself in booze by this time. Anyway, it's all over though never forgotten. It certainly has cured any thoughts of suicide from this family. In that year also Sybil had a go at knocking herself off. I was furious with her but not furious oddly enough with E. I suppose I must have been thinking of Kate being motherless and didn't think similarly of Liza, Maria et al. being likewise because they were still little-seen-known or loved by me at the time. [...]

  Still Friday 13th, Approaching Anzio65 [...] Tito told me that he never ever raised his voice above ordinary conversational level during his whole life, except where distances were involved – shouting across a valley for instance �
�� and that he had always found it infinitely more effective and on occasions much deadlier than a Hitlerian or Mussolinian storm.

  Kate and I discussed the day-to-day aspect of our lives and how strange it must be for people in ordinary jobs with a regular pay-packet to understand a life where, like today, we don't know whether we shall be in Jugoslavia tomorrow or Naples or both. Hopefully it will be Naples, or rather Ischia which is or was one of our favourite places.66 I'm told though that it is now over-run with German tourists.

  Almost in Anzio. Lovely dirty little port. And a working one to boot which I always love.

  Saturday 14th, Anzio So at last the Tito deal has been fixed. I start a week on Monday – i.e. the 23rd of August and I am to be paid $50,000 expenses and $250,000 cash and vast percentages, starting at 10% of the first dollar and working up to 50% of the world grosses. I should end up with several hundred thousand dollars with an average return. A big hit of course could bring in untold monies though we are perfectly content with what we have. Heyman had just flown from the States which means that in less than a week, a week which he considers normal, he has flown from London to Nice, Nice to Rome, Rome to Belgrade, Belgrade to NY and New York to Rome and to us.67 He flies back to Belgrade today and then from there to Messina (where we shall be) on Monday.68 He is a very fast moving young man. He said the other day that he wants to retire from this business at 45, he is about 35, go into politics when his aim will be to abolish all forms of prejudice by way of a complete top to bottom revolution in education.69 You might say he is a little ambitious.