The Richard Burton Diaries

by Richard Burton

  Evening

  Sitting on the poop deck with my infinitely beloved wife who has acquired an even greater weight of love. I keep on mentally looking around to make sure she's there. For why this new and massive re-affirmation of adoration and worship and a promise to myself that I shall never be nasty to her ever again? I will tell you for why. For because for about three minutes this afternoon I thought that I was about to be killed instantaneously and at once, without time to re-tell her how much I love her, to apologize for breaking my contract to look after her forever, for letting her down with a bang (hysterical pun intended), and for having no time to tell her the million things yet to be told and for not realizing and demonstrating my full potential as husband, provider, lover and all.

  I did not work today which is rapidly becoming the norm for this piece [...] finally and of course inevitably word came that work was over for the day and that it was ‘a wrap’ and so we set off back to the copter and Kupari. I settled in on the port side right behind the pilot while Vessna, the interpreter, sat beside me with Brook on her other side. Ron sat in the rear row with Gianni. And off we went. There was a low cloud ceiling which we went into immediately we'd gained some height and, as so many times before, we threaded our way through the vicious peaks to right and left. Suddenly and without warning we were completely blacked-out though I believe the technical description is ‘whited out’. There was nothing to be seen outside the cabin of the chopper except nothing. A white nothing. On top of this it began to rain torrentially and the windscreen wipers whipped back and fore like insane crickets sharpening their legs. The co-pilot frantically tried to turn himself into a human demister. We flew like this for perhaps half a minute though it seemed like half an hour when there it was! We were going at an angle of about 45 degrees into a peak. The pilot, god bless his marvellous reflexes, flung the copter to the right and there appallingly was another rock face. The co-pilot slapped the pilot on the arm and we pulled away again to the left. I don't know how close we actually were but it seemed to be the length of a rotor-arm and six feet. Whatever the distance it must have been very very close otherwise we wouldn't have seen the two peaks at all. Still we ploughed on with everyone except Gianni and I – and the pilots of course – with their eyes closed tight. Ron I saw curl himself into a ball and cover his head and ears, with his knees on the floor waiting in what they say is the classical position for a plane crash. I stared to the side with hand ready poised to warn the pilot if anything appeared on our side. The pilot was straining his eyes forward. The co-pilot was rubbing his side window with hand also poised to warn the pilot. Gianni just stared over Ron's semi-kneeling position like a man who saw nothing except eternity. Apart from my saying Holy Shit in a strangled whisper nobody uttered a sound. No sound, at least, that could be heard. So we continued to fly blind for another aeon (possibly a minute, possibly two, who knows?) dreading the head-on how-de-do from which there would be [no] way of turning. Then, the machine began to lose height pretty quickly. I could feel it though I daren't take my eyes away from the window to check the altimeter. I thought the pilot had gone mad. Later I found out why and how right he was. We dropped and dropped until there suddenly and miraculously was the much maligned road curling around the mountains. Rarely have I ever seen such a beautiful road, a masterpiece of the roadmaker's art, an example to the Romans of ancient time, I could not think how I had ever said that the road was a fucking nightmare and an elongated version of a shit-house, a ruined shit-house. I could have gladly apologized to every kilometre of its lovely length. The pilot had lost height, he said, to be able to see, to try and go above the clouds was certain suicide because in order to gain height quickly he would have had to circle and he knew, as indeed we all knew, that there were a hundred peaks of a different height width [sic] and also there was no knowing how high the cloud was. He was however fairly sure that the cloud base would not cover the bed of the valley. What is nightmarish on recollection is how many close shaves we must have had during those two or three minutes. Glimpses of eternity we have never seen.

  What is also frighteningly revelationary [sic] too is the number of levels on which the mind functions at moments of imminent catastrophe. ‘Believe me sir,’ said Dr Johnson, ‘when a man knows he is to be hanged tomorrow morning it concentrates the mind wonderfully.‘135 There was one blazing mental image that seemed to last right through the enormity. It was E lying in bed on the yacht with a book open at the page where she'd stopped reading with the title front cover and publisher's blurb on the other face up on the bed near her right hand which was out of the covers. She was wearing one of my favourite nightgowns, a blue thing and shorty which she may have been wearing this morning when I said good bye to her. (I've just asked her and she was.) She had one leg bent and the other straight. On another level I was telling her over and over again that I loved her, I loved her. At one fractioned [sic] point I kept trying to remember a line of Alun Lewis’ – ‘If I should go away, beloved, do not say ...’ and I couldn't remember the rest which I've known for 25 years or so. Immediately the crisis was over I remembered it immediately.

  If I should go away,

  Beloved,

  Do not say,

  He has forgotten me.

  Forever you abide.

  A singing rib within my dreaming side.136

  The mind is a remarkable instrument. If I wrote down everything I could remember from those interminable seconds it would be a million words. It is in fact what James Joyce's Ulysses is all about except he took a whole day for Bloom while he could have taken three minutes because the mind concentrates so wonderfully.137 A shorter catastrophe of this kind happened to me before when I was perhaps 19–20 years old but I hadn't learned to love then and to love obsessively. Going to stop now until tomorrow morning. I must read Ulysses again.

  Wednesday 15th, Kalizma–Cavtat Spent most of yesterday in a car – the Rolls-Royce. The weather was too bad to land in Tjentiste so we drove up. I sat in the back, put up the partition and settled down to The Gingerbread Lady a successful play by Neil Simon.138 Simon is one of those playwrights who rarely is considered ‘significant’ by the critics, largely because he isn't, but who writes success after success. He also writes ‘well-made plays’ à la Rattigan.139 In fact, he might be loosely described as a younger American version of Terry but much funnier. Some of the stuff I read in the car yesterday made me laugh out loud, which is very rare for me. They want E to it [sic] and she could have a good time in it and be very good to boot and also people forget how very funny her comedy is. Beloved old Maureen Stapleton played it on the stage and very brilliantly apparently and I can imagine her being very good. It's very sad that she photographs like a sack of potatoes. The story too is the story more or less of Maureen's life. A woman of superb talent – if she were British she would become an automatic dame – she is also a drunk and, like the woman in the play, it kills her career. Like the woman in the play she also becomes enormously fat and also has to go to a home to have a rest cure. Orkin and I watched her in and out of more alcoholic crises than one can imagine. I remember too, many years ago in Hollywood, her discovery of the joys of masturbation. ‘Why the hell didn't someone teach me all about it when I was in that fucking convent?’ she demanded. ‘Think of all the emotional involvements I could have saved myself instead of having to get myself laid by guys I didn't even like just because I was horny. For Christ's sake I spent my youth looking for big cocks when I could have screwed myself with a brush handle.’ And so on. All this revelationary [sic] talk took place in an apartment hotel, rather shabby, where most of the New York actors used to stay, on Sunset Boulevard. I think it's still going and is called the Sunset Towers.140 In the middle fifties it was the thing to do if you were a New York stage actor, and to show your contempt for the contract stars, to stay there in that stucco monstrosity making it quite clear that you were your own man and not owned by some studio and the minute the fucking lousy film you were in was over you were going bac
k to the great New York THEATRE where you re-found your soul as an artist and where the Real Work was done. I, because I was a real stage actor and had played your standard classics, was accepted there despite the fact that I had a million-dollar contract with Fox. Marlon and Monty Clift were habituees too for a time because they were always going to go back on the stage (and actually did for a second – Marlon did a couple of months in summer stock playing Arms and the man and Monty went back off-Broadway to do The Seagull) but gradually Marlon shifted further and further away until he eventually had a permanent house of his own.141 For Marlon, it must have been a harrowing time because he was their natural leader. They all worshipped him and comforted their own failure with ‘Marlon is the greatest goddamn actor in the world and the greatest goddamn film star too but he's one of us and next season for Chrissake he'll be playing Richard III and Hamlet and fuck ‘em all here in this shitty phony town.’ But he never did and slowly he also began to fail even as a film star and the great disillusionment set in. Then it became fashionable to denigrate Marlon. ‘He's sold out.’ ‘Let's face it, Marlon isn't any good unless Gadge [Kazan] is there to tell him what to do.’ Etc. Arguments with which I'm only too familiar because I was the British version of Marlon. In my case it was even worse because I was, from the beginning, held up against Paul Scofield. We were the natural heirs to Gielgud and Olivier. Paul being Gielgud and me being Larry. ‘But Burton let the side down etc.’ What they don't seem to realize is that Paul tried like mad to be a film star. I remember him testing for film after film and being turned down largely because nobody knew how to photograph that magnificent face. It was the era of pretty boys: Rock Hudson, Jimmy Dean, Paul Newman and even Marlon and myself.142 But, largely out of a kind of obligation to my background and because I felt that I owed it to Phil Burton to become a great classical actor I continually destroyed my film career by going back again and again to the theatre. And I did it against all odds. It was still, up to my middle thirties, ‘Scofield and Burton’. But then everything changed. I went to live in Geneva, made me a million dollars quickly, did anything to get out of the contract with Fox even to the extent of doing two truly appalling films called Bramble Bush and Ice-Palace and, at last I was free to do anything I wanted and, more importantly, not do anything I didn't want to do. I spent a whole summer in Céligny blackening in the sun – it was a particularly splendid summer all over Europe – turning down film after film. I remember turning down an offer of $350,000 to play Christ in a film called The King of Kings that summer.143 It was very tempting. Five months in my beloved Spain and though the script was unspeakable it was to be directed by Nick Ray who had after all made one good film Rebel without a cause and might pull it off again.144 But I turned it down and just as well. Both Stratford and The Old Vic offered me whole seasons to myself. Play anything you like. Turned them down. I was offered plays by the score. The only thing I did for a whole year was the film of Look Back in Anger which was a flop and a TV special of another short Osborne play called A Subject of Scandal and Concern for the BBC. I stayed at the Savoy during rehearsals. It was for BBC TV and it seems ludicrous now to think that we had to hold a press conference with Tony Richardson, Osborne and myself while we defended the BBC against the fact that they were paying me £1000 – £1000 indeed to God – for an hour's play and three weeks rehearsal. The most ever paid before was 500. The thing was a huge success and I must try and get a copy for the boat. It seems odd too nowadays to think that the BBC solemnly warned all its viewers that the play was being put on deliberately late at night to give them, the viewers, a chance to put their young ones to bed as the play was about a man ‘who didn't believe in God’.145 Wow!

  The fact is that I was in a very enviable position. Though I was knocked about by the press – British press particularly – for being a bloated millionaire and a traitor to my country for deserting a sinking British Empire on which the sun was at last setting, I was more courted than almost any actor in the world. I knew bloody well that I was not considered box-office after Bramble Bush, Ice Palace and Anger but I also knew that any film submitted to Marlon and turned down was automatically submitted to me and of course any play of significance came to me first and then went down another line of stage actors. I had an adorable girl baby, I was very fond of my wife, I was a millionaire, I had a sweet estate in Céligny. I had a superb convertible Cadillac (still among the favourite cars I ever had) a large library, an insatiable thirst for knowledge and the means to satisfy it and every opportunity to play anything I wanted and I was terribly unhappy.

  And it was nothing to do with anything that I could fathom. Though the possibilities were endless, I had no ambitions at all in my own field of drama. I wrote a lot but never submitted anything for publication though I was asked to. The only piece I published was a couple of thousand words on Meredith Jones for the Sunday Times and I'm not sure whether I wrote that before or after my self-imposed exile.146 Did I, deep down, regret having left England and all the things that would automatically come from a steady series of jobs in theatre and films? The inevitable knighthood perhaps. It, whatever it was, was not despair, nothing as dramatic as that. It was a strange vacuum. I wasn't interested in anything ordinary. That is to say that I wasn't interested in playing, shall we say, Richard III but might have been in Richard II in which I would have been very mis-cast. I did the Prince in Anouilh's Time Remembered in New York simply because everybody said that I didn't have the elegance to play a top-hat-and-tails part and because Paul had played it in London with considerable success.147 I lost weight, cut down on my drinking, insisted on Sullivan and Williams flying over from London to make me the tails (I was sufficiently clever not to wear the top-hat) and the black riding-breeches and jacket. I went every morning to the New York Athletic Club and ‘worked out’ and the play, which was supposed to be a vehicle for the new American Duse, Susan Strasberg, was a success for me but certainly not for her (in fact, it ended her career on the spot) and was a success for everyone except her.148 Even Helen Hayes, who must be among the worst ‘great’ actresses ever, had good notices and I was nominated for a ‘Tony’ etc. and I was the only one who knew that ‘they’ were quite right. I am not a top-hat-and-tails actor.

  My sense of chronology is hopeless and sometimes I put some plays and films in the wrong order but the next step I think was a film called Bitter Victory – a very good script – to be done with Alec Guinness and again Nick Ray directing. This was to be done in Libya, for the most part, with the studio work in Nice. Apart from its being a good script and a good director and the magnificent Guinness as co-star I had never been to the Sahara. So we were on. Alec couldn't do it at the last moment. I must ask him one of these days if he was ever offered it as people are so devious. Curt Jurgens stupendously miscast did it instead. There, at one stroke, went the film and following closely on Anger. I was at my lowest ebb as a film star. I didn't care very much – I won best-actor-of-the-year award somewhere, I think Venice – though I wasn't exactly pleased and was heart-broken by Anger’s failure – and then one day Lerner and Loewe and Moss Hart came en masse to see me. It was in Hollywood. Tower Road. They said they wanted me to play the lead in their new musical. It was based on T. H. White's The Once and Future King one volume of which – The Sword and the Stone – was and is among my favourite books.149 With the condescension that seems axiomatic when writers talk to actors they started to tell me about the story. Quick as a flash I told them also saying that I personally knew Tim White. ‘Tim?’ they said. ‘Why yes,’ I said. ‘His full name is Terence Hanbury White, but to his friends he is known as "Tim".’ Squelch. In fact, I had never met Tim White but I knew a great deal about him from friends who knew him. I knew that he lived on the Channel Isle of Alderney. That he was a melancholic, that he drank himself into a stupor throughout the winters and sobered up in the Spring, started to bath again, and wrote during the summer. And that he was poor. I said that I would do it. They were thrilled. They asked me if I would sing som
ething for them so that Fritz Loewe could note the range of my voice. I said sure thing and sat down very poshily at the piano and played a Welsh song and sang to my own accompaniment. They were pleased and said I was a natural baritone and the potential of my singing voice was immense and indeed I could have, with proper vocal training, made a living as a classical opera singer. ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Sure, kiddoes’. Would I go to so-and-so in London, or whassisname in Geneva, or ditto in Paris etc. wherever I might be in the next couple of years? It would be a good idea too, since my voice was so rich so superbly natural Christ what a gift, an actor with such extraordinary vocal gift, such warmth such colour. So would I undergo voice training with any or all of the various names they had suggested? They would pay, of course. Would I do this as Rex Harrison had done.150 ‘NO’ I said.

  Now, two years later, not having heard a note of the music and not having read a word of the script, I was on my way to New York on the Queen Mary to play the piece.151 I arrived in Manhattan to find (five weeks before the opening night in the O'Keefe Centre in Toronto) no script except a sort of treatment with occasional bits of dialogue thrown in. I went raving mad. Moss, sweet man that he was, tried his damnedest to calm me down. I called them every vile name I could think of. And it seems to me, even now, that I had justification. Lerner, Loewe and Hart's last collaboration had been My Fair Lady – the greatest success on any level and by any standards that had ever been. Rex had made the greatest success in his life. My leading lady was Julie who had also made the success of her life in Lady.152 Our poor bloody piece, for God's sake, didn't even have a title!