The Richard Burton Diaries

by Richard Burton

  Thursday 3rd, Grand268 I wonder how long Frank will stay ‘retired’.269 What is he planning? I doubt that he can write and he doesn't have the sort of mind that makes you think so. Some people, Bob Mitchum and Marlon and Monty Clift and sometimes O'Toole in my profession, give me the feeling – in Monty's case past tense – that were they to set their minds to it and if they had discipline – that they are natural writers but the old Sinatra, the old sinner will I bet have to be ghosted though if I know Francis as I think I do the ghost will be the most ephemeral of all his craft. Nobody will claim well actually I wrote it, it wasn't Frank at all. It is odd that Frank who interprets lyrics from common songs better than any of his rivals and is as I call him a fine interpreter of street corners poetry – one for my baby and one more for the road and other such good songs he can trick in such a way that they seem brilliant minor poetry but when faced with something massive – like for instance Hamlet – he is completely bewildered. I mention Hamlet because once when he was in the doldrums, becalmed in the ocean of Hollywood and unable to get work (somewhere in the early 50s) he asked me to read Hamlet with him as he was going to make a comeback through the classics yet and he'd show the mother-fuckers.

  Friday 5th E said last night that I am very snobby about Sinatra and that he's really nice and means well. [...]

  I had a most uncomfortable day yesterday. I did the assassination scene which involves a lot of blood. Ron clipped and concealed in my hair a thin rubber tube which went down my back to the floor. Delon strikes the blow and as I stand up and start screaming Ron, lying on the floor pumps the artificial blood through the tube. After one false start when Joe foolishly called cut after the false red stuff started to come through which meant an infuriating hour of cleaning up and re-doing the make-up, we did the whole bloody business in one. During it of course – because I am so lazily unfit – I pulled a muscle in my back or strained something with the result that this morning I am barely able to move. In addition the blood got into my eyes and I also swallowed some so that for a few hours afterwards my eyes were inflamed and my voice was practically lost and my throat was very sore. My eyes and throat are still sore this morning but not too badly. There will be more blood this morning though I fervently hope I don't have to do what we did yesterday all over again.

  A group of Italians want me to play Mussolini!

  I have been reading, in the last few weeks a lot of novels and enjoying them which is unusual for me – I mean the reading of novels not so much their enjoyment. The set which is a copy of Trotsky's house contains hundreds of books bought, I'm sure, in lots. I started reading them, some of them, at work between shots. I read for the first time Adventures of The Scarlet Pimpernel which I discovered is not the same as the famous book by Baroness Orczy which is simply The Scarlet Pimpernel.270 Very entertaining, supremely snobbish rubbish. Romance, by Conrad and Ford Maddox Hueffer (later Ford Madox Ford), Many Latitudes by a vaguely familiar name F. Tennyson Jesse, a book of novelettes.271 Adam Bede of Geo Eliot, Malice Aforethought by Francis Iles and at home I've read a novel by Oxford colleague – we once played Shakespeare together – John Wain.272 Another by the lady who wrote The Severed Head – a name I can never remember, Anglo-Irish, fiercesome looking – and a novel so old-fashioned, so Woman's Own and Peg's Paper that I found it hard to believe that anybody would seriously publish it, called Virginia Perfect.273 Honest to God. My reading of novels is a change for me. Apart from reading my few modern favourites – Waugh, Greene, Powell, Huxley and Snow – my novel-reading is generally confined to re-reading books that I knew years ago. But now suddenly I want to read again books that I found unsympathetic to me but considered masterpieces by everybody else. I want to read, and will, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Proust, and I want to read, and will, Balzac, Dumas, Stendhal in the original.274 Perhaps I will find the first three more to my liking than hitherto while the others I enjoyed in English and I thrill to the thought of reading them in the writer's own tongue. So much to do and not so little a time. I hope.

  Just remembered the lady-writer's name. It is Iris Murdoch.

  My chief joy at the moment is in reading Baudelaire. It is a magnificent thing to discover poetry in middle age. Most men take their quota of verse before the age of 25 and live on it for the rest of their lives – those, that is, who have a feeling for it at all. I mean, of course, to discover new poetry, new at least to them and not simply regurgitate the old and well-known. Baudelaire I had, of course, read in English, in which language he is unrecognizable. Why was I not properly educated in French in my early years though perhaps I should prefer it this way round. It is pretty astounding to find a whole new world of literature, discovering it, I may say, with all the enthusiasm of an undergraduate, at the ripe old age of 46 next week. Think of all those unworked seams of gold. Think of the incomparable treasure-trove to be still discovered in the immense store-house of French Literature. I can't wait for my next day off to augment my library. [...]

  The blood didn't get into my eyes today so much though they are smarting again, and managed to keep it out of my mouth too so am in far better order than yesterday. [...] The screaming scene and the wrestle with Delon seems to be very effective so, thank the Lord, we don't have to do it again. [...]

  Saturday 6th [...] Had lunch in a place called Passetto's. We apparently chose badly. My lamb – grilled and tasteless and dry. E's calf's liver and bacon – uninspired. I had cozze marinera to begin which was delicious. We shared a bottle of Lafite 63. That was good. We had a couple of glasses each. It would seem that I have got the problem of drink licked, as they say. Yesterday is the fourth time in a month that I've had a glass or two of wine at lunch, and on one occasion a martini, without feeling it necessary to go on and drink down the day as in the old days.

  The book about me by Cottrell and Cashin entitled simply Richard Burton arrived yesterday.275 Again I tried to read it but could do no more than flick through the snaps and make fun of Claire Bloom. With the book came a letter from their agent suggesting that I might like to review it for a ‘quality’ weekly. I shall write back and say that from the bits I've looked at I feel certain that my review would be unfavourable and since I like the two writers and want them to have a success, it would be better if I kept silent. From the pictures in the book I found that the tiny boy in the middle of the back row in the under-14s Sec School Rugby Team is Freddy Williams who was the Speedway Motorbike Champion of the world some years ago. I'd forgotten that he was at the Sec. I thought we were at the Elementary School together – The Eastern. The only effect the book has had on me is to make me mildly determined to write my own story one of these days – in several volumes. I often think, when I'm reminded of my schooldays of a boy in school who seemed to us all at the time to be a god-given actor. His name was Morgan Griffiths I think. He was tall I believe and had a beautiful mellifluous voice, a real ‘actor's voice’ as we thought, tho there is no such thing of course. Actors’ voices are as wide in variety as other people's and are equally badly produced from the lungs. Other than his acting, the boy was totally unmemorable, as dull as dust and as square as a table-top. But he played Magnus in The Apple Cart and Richard II with remarkable authority. At least, so it seemed to us. He had the look of someone who would go bald young. I wonder if he did. I believe he became a bank clerk. I believe also that he wrote to me about 10 years or so ago, no more than that, say 15, asking me to help him become an actor. I believe I replied as I've replied to all such letters that I would not encourage him to take the plunge and give up his security and pensions etc. but that once he had made the plunge I would help him in every way I could. The plunge was obviously never made as I would have heard from him again. But what dreams does that boy dream? What impossibilities disturb that middle-aged, bald gentleman. Is he the manager of the bank now. Did he continue to act with the YMCA or The Strolling Players or The Thespian Society. Does he dream of holding a great house in the palm of his hand and reducing it to his creature as he tots up the acc
ounts. Does he lust for the standing ovation after a particularly electrifying performance as he stands in magnificent solitude against the front curtain of The Old Vic as a dirty old man lusts for the caress of voluptuous hands and the succulence of young breasts. Perhaps not. I hope not. I wonder if he knows how monstrously unfair the business is. The man of thirty, his ambition still burning, bewildered by frustration when tall and graceful and full-voiced and handsome stands well-lighted on the stage and realizes, knows, that the audience are totally uninterested in him but in that other man, that thick graceless pockmarked man with a cracked voice. Why do the audience look at Alec Guinness and not me? Or Marlon Brando. Or Alan Badel. Or Paul Scofield. I mean look at Scofield. He walks like a pimp, he's got a patently false voice, he's elephant-arsed and thin-chested and minute-shouldered and here stand I the shining and superb son of a hundred earls and yet they look at Scofield and his apology for acting. And Larry, my dear, a Lord yet. I mean it's absurd. He's practically a dwarf. He has the most contrived voice, all affectation. And that vulgar streak in him is shaming. As Othello I couldn't look at him. The audience could, of course. But then audiences are sheep, they believe the critics. Fools. And Brando. Have you honestly ever understood a word he's ever said? Be honest now. And as for Burton. Words almost fail me.

  Sunday 7th, Rome [...] The virtual cessation of drink has made a terrific difference to E. She is more active, more spirited and at the same time more relaxed. And she looks even more beautiful than before. Her face has thinned very subtly and her ever present baby double chin is much less. Even with E there is bound to be a certain amount of bloat from booze. If she loses 5 or 6lbs with the diet she will look 25 again. And there is no doubt that less grey in the hair takes a few years off too. (For the first time in her life and after years of my refusing to let her have it done she has dyed her hair a bit, that is to say it has been ‘streaked’ leaving some of the grey). In the last two or three years and for the first time in her life E has looked a bit blotchy in the mornings when she first awoke. I told her so and for the first times ever had to suggest that she put some make-up on if someone was coming to visit us early. But now again the morning face is as fresh and glowing as the one that went to bed. I was going to say ‘as a young girl's’ but remembered that Liza and Kate too, both a mere 14 years old, look pretty ghastly in the mornings. We have to tell Liza frequently to go and splash water on her face. Mind you, in all fairness Liza's complexion is very different from E's, for E, tho she is Celtic dark has an underlying pigmentation of red whereas Liza tends to sallowness. Faintly yellow. Most women look fairly diabolical in the a.m. Syb was pretty good but a lot of other ladies I knew under those circumstances looked awful, even in their teens. Jean [Simmons] was alright, as I remember, and like E had no need of make-up at all tho she did wear it. Clara Cluck had to wear make-up all the time and not just in the morning.276 She had, like so many women, a faintly ‘bald’ look without it. Some girls I knew looked so frightful under those circumstances that the ‘intimacy’ stopped right there. Hasty retreats in the cold cruel light of morning was often-times the order of the day. The most rebarbative I ever remember was in Winnipeg, Canada. I had been stationed for 6 months at a place called Portage la Prairie, some 60 miles from Winnipeg.277 I was 20 years old and it seemed to me that I had a permanent erection and could think of little else. Since a bad education had given me a guilt-fear of masturbation I only allowed myself recourse to it when I was truly desperate as, apart from the fore-written guilt fear, my own dignity screamed ‘shame’ at the prospect of frantically stroking myself in the squalid communal lavatory or in the RAF bed with thirty other men asleep around me. And the few women that were available were already spoken for. The WAAFs on the station and the women in the town, those who were ready and willing, had been serving the RAF for five years – it was 1945 – and were not likely to change a permanent member of the Station staff for chaps like us who were there only for a short course and then sent back to England.278 It didn't matter that the girls were almost all vilely unattractive, all they had to be was clean and not actually cross-eyed and they were considered to be Hedy Lamarr.279 Even with this collection of affronts to their own sex there was no hope. The incumbents exercised their territorial imperative with ruthlessness, and we hot boys had to content ourselves with wet dreams. Every 10 days we were given a 36 hour pass to Winnipeg and 60 panting young men walking on three legs would invade the infinitely dull city of Peg. Why, Oh Why could we not be stationed near Montreal. Why this town, clean and wide-avenued and built on grain, a great deal of which the citizens must have eaten as they all looked unattractively healthy, glowing with good thoughts and all descended from the British, not nice and dirty and hairy like French Canada. Since we were almost all Oxford and Cambridge undergrads we were ‘placed’ with good rich families who lived in wealthy suburbs with ‘Aunties’. These were generally pretty well-to-do Canadian ladies with lovely Norman Rockwell houses with porches and rocking chairs and unfenced lawns sweeping down to the side-road on which they lived, mail-box on a pole, mosquito screens around the porch, decent ‘best seller’ libraries with, in one house, bound copies of the Reader's Digest, and they would invite round pretty blonde undergraduettes from the University who invariably either wanted to talk seriously about college subjects or – death of deaths and hell's destruction – would bring their boy-friends around with them.280 It was a dry province so there was never any alcohol to help reduce any defences and in any case there was simply no time. Thirty-six hours was cruelly inadequate. Once, at Aunt Elinor's – I had two aunts and alternated between them, the other one being Aunt Sally. Swear to God – she had a girl from the University who during the vac was jobbing as Elinor's maid – a nice sexy looking girl that I nearly managed to seduce but at the crucial moment she started to cry and I realized that the whole thing was too near home and gave up. One weekend however I decided to ignore Sally and Elinor and prowled the streets. Nothing, absolutely nothing doing. I tried parks and cinemas and the main streets. About 11 at night when I finally decided that the fucking town was hopeless and that it was the bloody YMCA after all I was walking down a side street of pretty lower-class houses when I heard the astonishing sound of revelry at night. Winnipeg went to bed at 10 o'clock in those days and was never given to revelry at any time and therefore the sound of singing and laughing at 11 at night was the equivalent of a wild party at 3 o'clock anywhere else. I located the heady sound finding that it came from a house with the blinds down but the lights on. I decided to ‘crash’ the party. There were about 8 people, all drunk and all older than grass – in those days that was about my age now, 45 or so – all soft with that peculiar North American obesity – and they greeted me with delight. I hadn't had a drink since arriving in Canada and was delirious with delight too when they told me to help myself. They were all drinking beer out of quart bottles. I was of course wearing my RAF uniform with a forage cap with the white band informing anyone that I was air-crew and a cadet officer. Usually Canadians hated RAF bods as we had been there for five years and like the GIs in Britain had more money and more glamour than the stay-at-homes and were thoroughly detested so I was surprised at their welcoming me so cordially. The reason for this change of heart was soon realized. We were sitting in a kitchen on kitchen chairs and a couple of chairs were brought in from another room. I was sitting on the draining board with my feet dangling. I asked what they were celebrating, whose birthday or what. Well we just fired off our new little 22 Browning, he said. I was completely bewildered though I pretended to know what they were talking about. Finally it dawned on me that we had dropped the Atom Bomb.281 They then told me, when I asked, some of the details. I was delighted and wished I'd learned the news in better company the Canadians in that house being loathsome. I had only a vague idea of course in those days of its true horror. The evening wore on and eventually, about 12.30 I suppose I left and walked towards the city centre. I was fairly drunk. In one of the main streets I saw a woman alo
ne. With the false effrontery of the drunk and the relieved – on the whole I decided that not having to fight the Japs was a good idea. A guaranteed life was somewhat more on the cards than a guaranteed medal to go with it. I don't remember the exchange with the lady but I seem to remember that she looked reasonable enough and was I thought about 30. Old but not all that old. I had been told that there were no whores in Winnipeg and she was probably one of the many servicemen's wives who were celebrating the atom bomb and the imminence of the war's end. She took me home. It was a bed-sitter. We screwed. Can't very well say ‘made love’ under the circumstances. And slept. She also had some beer I think. The room was small and it was a double bed that dwarfed the room and there was no room for any other furniture except an upright chair. I awoke to the crying of a baby. It was very early in the morning and still only 1/2 light. I was for a long time unable to work out where I was. I then remembered. I turned and looked at the creature lying beside me. She was horrifically filthy. Vile. And old. Not thirty but fifty. And an old fifty. Under the dim street lights of the street and the darkness of her room she hadn't looked too bad. Also, I suppose, booze and indiscriminating lust had seen her with distorted myopia. Also she was heavily layered with a pound or so of make-up. Now there she lay in nightmare vomit, unspeakably repulsive. There was a minute bathroom which I had used the night before. I arrived there in time to be sick. After that and after dressing I pretended to a bonhomie that I didn't have and asked where the sound of the baby's crying had been coming from, it seemed very near. One corner of the room was curtained off. She withdrew the curtain. Behind the curtain was a cradle on a stand. In the cradle was her baby. I gave her some money and left.