The Richard Burton Diaries

by Richard Burton

  Tuesday 19th, Rome Another scintillating day. [...] We shot, on my second day an establishing shot which covered a wide area and included my two co-stars Delon and Schneider. The sky was overcast. This means that all the following shots have to be in similar weather until I get inside the house. But the weather continues to sparkle. [...]

  We were invited to have lunch with the King and Queen of Greece anytime we like this week or next Monday. I suppose they should be described as the ex-King and Queen.231 I said that E and I would be delighted to meet them and have a noggin but that going to a lunch was awkward as I was covered with false beard and moustache. I wonder why they want to meet us. I am very suspicious of political royalty. Perhaps like the Shahrina of Persia they are simply star-struck but usually royalty are not. They've usually met so many. Talking of the Shahrina it appears that she reads everything about E and knows all the children's names and where they go to school and all that publicity in the journals.232

  [...] My memory for words which has always been phenomenal had, in the last couple of years, become suspect. I found that I was taking longer than usual to learn lines but – probably as a result of abstinence – it has come back with all the tenacity of a steel trap. Very nice feeling. I have always said that if ever I got to the Noel Coward or Rex Harrison stage I would stop acting even if I wanted to.

  Powell is a great user of archaisms. Yesterday I read ‘the smell of eld’.233 I rather like their use them myself.

  The Soviet Premier, Kosygin, was physically attacked yesterday in Ottawa.234 What, I wonder, would have been the effect on Anglo-Russian politics if he had been assassinated? A lot of big-sounding threats I expect gradually simmering down to cold tea.

  Wednesday 20th, Grand Hotel I should not have spoken so soon about my memory being like a steel trap and all that mild boasting, as today I dried up in the middle of a long scene at least 15 times. Most unlike me. Actually the speech which threw me was an actual quote from Trotsky which Joe who has a predilection for such behaviour suddenly introduced into the scene. But that is no excuse really as I can normally learn a ten line speech in as many minutes. My real excuse is that it was a translation and the syntax was ‘throwing’. The speech itself was easy apart from one line ‘What aim could I possibly pursue in venturing on so monstrous so dangerous an enterprise.’ Every so often I am – and all actors are – defeated by a speech. For years and God knows it is years – I must have learned it when I was about 15 – I have never been sure that I ever got my favourite speech from Hamlet absolutely correct. ‘I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth foregone all custom of exercise etc.’ God knows too how often I've said it and been paid to say it. There must have been with both the Old Vic and Gielgud NY production around 400 performances. Let's see if I can write it out correctly now and I'll check up when I go down to the yacht.

  I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth, foregone all custom of exercise, and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame the earth look you, this brave o'er hanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why it seems no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man, in action how like an angel in apprehension how like a God in form in moving how express and admirable, the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals. And yet to me what is this quintessence of dust. How infinite in faculty in form in moving how express. should go after ‘is a man.’ Oh to hell with it. It should go after ‘... is a man. How infinite in faculty, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension.’ Now I really don't know.235

  We are now having a dreadful time with Michael [...] Now he has assured Beth that he has got everybody out of the house in Hampstead and that he wishes to live with Beth and the baby alone. So, the innocent and her baby are flying back to the new Michael tomorrow. Elizabeth doesn't trust Michael an inch when he's under the influence of drugs which is now practically all the time. Just hoping and praying is all we can do. We both talked to Beth in Portland tonight and gave her what advice and blessings we could. I suggested that she go with the baby to London (she was going anyway) and that if Mike and his friends started his shenanigans again, they should go – she and the baby – hop on a plane to Rome. E is in a far worse emotional state than I as I, unlike E, am more optimistic about Michael keeping his word. [...]

  And so to bed ere long. I feel very achy and I am expectorating great gobs.

  Thursday 21st, Rome [...] I read a script called The Savage is Loose last night.236 It is a very doable film but would need a very imaginative director with great patience with a boy actor and with many different animals including a panther, a python and a crane. A brilliant cameraman would also be top priority. E would have to lose weight and I would have to put on some muscle. The end is wrong but could be fixed. Will wait for E to read it and decide with her. It would certainly be a pleasant film to make and we could, according to Heyman, shoot it at home in P.V. [Puerta Vallarta] Having read the piece now I don't see why not. All you need is jungle a beach and an ocean all of which we have in abundance in P.V.

  Have just started another piece – the long-promised play for TV of John Osborne's called Separation. Actually it's two pieces, one called ‘His’ and the other ‘Hers’.237 I gather it's about a marriage break-up, one play of an hour from her point of view and the other from his. We must do something for Harlech especially as it's made us some money, though that's incidental, and see if we can help keep the franchise or consortium or whatever they call it. Off to work. In case I hadn't mentioned it before I hate my work. Too strong a word – I dislike it.

  Home from work at 6.00. Got through everything in takes one all day including a new scene with Valentine Cortese. Tomorrow I have yet another new scene to do with Cortese and two actors who play the Rosmers in the film.238 The ‘Rosmer’ couple brought my (Trotsky's) grandson from Europe to see me in Mexico.239

  There's been a man called Jeffrey Archer, MP plaguing the life out of me through Raymond for weeks.240 I've always refused to talk to him and have told Raymond to tell him to tell Raymond what he wants to talk to me about. This he has refused to do as it was very important stuff and had to do with Princess Margaret, HRH. Then would he write it as Mr Burton will not speak on the telephone? So the stuff comes. It is, if you please a Royal Command (according to Mr Archer) to appear in a TV play for Sir Lew Grade – a 90 minutes one – play under separate cover – and at the receipt of our agreement to perform this so far unread play, which incidentally we hear is dreadful, Sir Lew Grade would make over a cheque for £100,000 to the St John's Ambulance lot.241 We would be paid nothing. Grade would have the right to sell it all over the world. I am absolutely staggered by Grade's effrontery. I await the play and John Heyman on Sunday. Her Majesty and His Royal Highness will find that they have commanded the wrong couple. I shall say that I'll do it for a KBE! Mr Archer hinted at it apparently to Raymond over the phone. He sounds a very ambitious little MP. We shall see.

  Friday 22nd, Rome I am a very ignorant man. The front page of the Rome Daily American announces that the Nobel Prize for Literature for 1971 goes to a poet-politician called Pablo Neruda. He is 67 years old and the Chilean ambassador to Paris. A Communist and has the usual revolutionary's awful luck and life until of course the Communists under Allende attained power in Chile.242 Having read a description of his poetry I have an idea that it wouldn't interest me very much – the content I mean. I can never really understand the poetry of another language, Welsh and English only. I suppose few men who are not genuinely bi or multi-lingual from birth can. I generally know the important writers of other cultures even if I've never read them but Signor Neruda is a new one. I was surprised to read that only 6 S. Americans have won Nobel Prizes. That includes that vast half continent from Mexico down and I seem to remember that the Americans and British between them have won over 200. I lump them together because frequently the British
and Americans have shared Nobel Prizes like the two British and one Yank who created or discovered the design of a molecule or whatever it was about 10 years ago.243 The Nobel Prize is a very funny one from the start. First of all Alfred Nobel, who started it all, was a Swede, I think, who invented gun-powder!244 It has given some hilarious awards. One of the funniest was to Winston Churchill. He won the ‘Peace Prize’. Never has a politician, despite his outraged protestations, loved war as much as the old man. Peace Prize indeed!245

  Sunday 23rd, Rome246 We worked late last night and I didn't get home til after 7. E very impatient to see me as she'd had news that she valued from Brian Hutton who directed her in XYZ. He is normally a wry pessimist and not given, as most Americans in the film business are, to superlatives but E says that exhibitors are fighting for the privilege to show XYZ and that Harry Saltzman who had the taste to produce Anger and the lucky judgement to produce the James Bond films, has offered $6m for the film.247 All this according to Hutton. I trust they won't accept the offer from Saltzman – I don't think that they can anyway without E's agreement – for if he offers 6 he must think it will gross more. Perhaps much more. At a sale of $6m I think that E could get about $1m guaranteed but at the end, since her percentage is of the gross absolute and for ever, Saltzman would still have to pay E the percentage. I must ask Aaron if E should persuade them to sell, pick up her guaranteed million and then sit back and – hopefully – watch the money roll in. We'll watch the outcome with great interest. There is even talk of Oscars and my lady must – if one can believe this pre-showing enthusiasm – should at least be nominated. That will bring her level with me said he with a sneering and somewhat bitter laugh. It is interesting to think that if one – only one – of the films we have made in the last 12 months or so hits the jackpot, the rewards will be fantastic. If XYZ, Hammersmith, Tito or Trotsky are blockbusters like Cleo, Woolf and Eagles the returns will have to be counted, for us, in many millions. Even if they are merely very big grossers – in the 10 to 20 million bracket – like Becket, Sandpiper, Shrew, VIPs it will still be considerable – far more than the old days of a million in front and 10% against the gross. I've worked out that if we'd no money in front and the same percentage deals as we've been having in the last 12 months, we would have made more money than we did on the old deals even with non-huge-grossing pics like Ceremony, Spy and Iguana all of which did 8–10 mils. It's more exciting this way all around. Against this argument is of course that for Staircase and Only Game we would only have received, as they were both massive flops, our expenses and, with luck a couple of 100 thousand.

  The halcyon days for almost all actors except for the very very big stars or somebody who's had a recent big smash hit are over. I am being paid 5 thousand more in expenses for this film Trotsky than Rex Harrison is being paid in salary with no expenses and no percentage. This latter is an enormous drop from Rex's high time which was as recent as Staircase for which he was paid 3/4 of a million and 10 against the gross. Rex is by no means alone. Anybody who is not in the ‘superstar’ category is getting the same kind of money or even less than the norm in the middle fifties – 150 to 250 thousand and no percentage.

  The most important thing of all from our point of view is of course that we try to do, at least, rewarding films in terms of the films themselves and not their financial returns. We are both rich enough for ever even despite an economic world-catastrophe. I would much prefer, for instance, that E and I won Oscars than that a film should gross like Eagles and have no importance at all. The fact is though that Oscars also, almost inevitably, go hand in hand with good box-office. Of all the films we've done since we were free of contracts, only two can I remember that we knew before starting were not serious. Sandpiper for both of us and Raid on Rommel for me. All the rest have been honest attempts at good movies including the flops au cinema like Boom!, Staircase, Comedians and Only Game. Sandpiper we did because we were afraid that we were going to be out of work and we wanted to work together, while Raid on Rommel was a joke. A joke that paid though. So did the other joke Sandpiper.

  So enough of films. This was prompted by my excitement about XYZ [that it] will be a ‘big one’ for E. By talk of distinction and by talk of Oscars. I know she is brilliant in the film and I know the film is good but I thought almost as highly of Boom! and that went BOOM. [...]

  Reading the Times this morning I came across a, to me, strange use of the word utter. In effect ‘to utter’ is to pass counterfeit coins. He uttered a lie now takes on more meaning.

  [...] Yesterday's work was very strange as again – I thought I'd left all that kind of thing in Jugoslavia – for the second time this week I played a scene with two people who couldn't speak a word of English and who were found to be incapable of learning, even like parrots, the few lines they had to say. It was an all day agony of frayed nerves for everybody, including Joe, though we all kept our tempers and were very patient. But why did Joe cast them in the first place. Usually he is so keen on even the extras being accurate. Very odd indeed. I don't know whether Joe is ill or regards this piece as a failure before it starts or has simply run out of gas, but he is passing performances in this film which an amateur director of the annual church pageant would turn down with a shudder. With judicious cutting I don't suppose it will matter but it would be so much more professional not to have to depend on that. It is bad enough with Valentina Cortese who is a good enough actress but acts in clichés and because of her discomfort with the language makes the quoted banalities she is forced to utter even more banal. A line like the following when the Rosmers lament the fall of France becomes yawning chasm of boresville as a result of her infinitely slow and yet uncertain reading. ‘Neither Weep Nor Laugh But Understand.‘248 I am beginning to wonder if the stuff they shot in Mexico with Delon and Schneider is equally bad. And that Joe has sort of given up. Because of its very nature the piece is rife with communist catch-phrases and the actors’ job is to make them sound fresh and desperately intense. You can't do this unless your command of English is complete. I hope to God I'm being unduly pessimistic.

  There was one very funny incident. Joe came in to me while I was being made up and said that the English of the two French actors was so bad that we might have to do it all in French or partly in French. A soon as he'd gone I translated my lines very quickly into French and with Gaston's help got the idioms and grammar right. When, about an hour later, Joe called me to shoot after rehearsing I told him that I knew it in French now. OK. So I started off in that language, going at a mile a minute, which is the way apparently Trotsky talked and was astounded to find that the French people were as bad in French as in English. Finally we stuck to English completely which they failed to get right. It is not even good enough to dub. They will have to [be] off-camera for almost every line they speak and on presumably when I speak. Shit and unnecessary shit and Joe Losey's mother. Anyway, it's a gorgeous day and we are off to lunch on the Via Appia Antica at L'escargot where they have a very good starter dish called Bouchee Caruso which is not too good for diets but undeniably this is a day off and I can watch waists tomorrow. Anyway I am back down to 165 and a bit. I might have a couple of glasses of Mouton or Lafitte or something.

  Monday 25th, Rome I talked to Princess Margaret last night at about 7.25 – she had said 7.15 but not too bad for royalty, and amazingly for the Italian Telephone Service which gave us a very good line. She asked me whether [the]Lew Grade thing was acceptable and I told her that in principle the idea was fine though we thought the plays were not very good and we had two far better ones by John Osborne (I hope we have) and that we would do them in March next year and that the £100,000 would come anyway only simply from a different source. What did I mean? she asked. Well, I said, we had already contracted to do the two Osborne plays for Harlech TV and therefore Harlech had a prior call on our services and the plays were being, had already been financed by USA TV and that the 100,000 would come from us and not Lew Grade. Do you mean from Harlech, she asked? No,
I said, from Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Good Heavens, M said, how very generous of you. I am absolutely staggered. Not at all, I said feebly. Pleasure I assure you. Delighted I'm sure and other fatuities. Then we went on to talk banalities about Tito and we must simply spend some time together when we were all back in England swap family albums and stories about Tito and Jugoslavia. She told me she had lost her voice and I thought that it was rather a good idea as she sounded so gentle and long-suffering. That's how I feel, she said. She sent her love to Elizabeth and I sent E's and mine back and to Tony as well I said. I shall give it to him when he comes back from America she said. Well goodbye I still can't get over your extraordinary generosity. Not at all. Goodbye. It was nice talking to you. Nice talking to you too. Goodbye then. Goodbye your Highness.249

  I read a review in the Paris Tribune of a marvellous new-old book. Someone has published the entire Oxford Dictionary – all 17 volumes or whatever it is – in two microscopic volumes with a pull-out magnifier so that one can read the minute print.250 E is buying me three sets for my birthday. One for Mexico, one for the yacht and one for Gstaad. I am genuinely excited. What a superb idea. The review goes on to say that the page titles can be seen with the naked eye and it's only the definitions that need magnification. What an even better idea if someone could do the Britannica as well. One would need nothing else on a desert island. I am waiting to see the OED with all the anticipatory pleasure of a small boy waiting for that engine-and-rails or this pair of ball-bearing roller-skates.

  Suddenly bethought me that a few days ago the papers all carried front-page announcements that the royals were to get increases in salary and that Maggie's was to go up to £100,000. So we nonchalantly give away without so much as a wrinkled brow the equivalent of her annual income. I wonder if that crossed her mind and whether there might be a little pique that two commoners could be that rich.