The Richard Burton Diaries

by Richard Burton

  Thursday 28th, Rome254 What an enchanting evening yesterday's was. It was as if we'd turned the calendar back five years and Michael was himself again. He was loving with the baby, fun to talk to and to listen to. Elizabeth was as happy as only a grandmother can be. Beth was in good form. Even I was pleasant and though I longed to I daren't touch the baby as my cold [...] might have been given to her. She is the kind of baby that everyone should have. It kicks little legs and makes minute fists and blows spit-bubbles and smiles a lot but hardly ever cries. Everybody hates a crying baby – in fact distraught mothers, generally from the working classes have been known to kill them – and everybody loves a charmer as Leyla unquestionably is.

  Elizabeth stopped her drinking dead in its tracks – or practically, as she did have one beer but that was not out of crying despair for alcohol but because it fitted with her food. You can't, after all, have orange juice or Pepsi Cola with pizza. I am marking the diary headings in red for every day she refrains from the demon drink. I am delighted. I've always wanted her to stop drinking occasionally as it must be good for the health and the mental well-being. The latter because it's good to know that one can stop, that one hasn't become an alcoholic, that one does not live by for and through booze. Usually, I take several days of cutting down before I stop altogether but E seems to be able to do it in one.

  In addition to all yesterday's pleasantness came the news from New York and California that the showing of XYZ was received smashingly and all the distributors fought for it.

  Another brilliant day and my call is for rehearsal at 9.30 and a continuation of the scene we did yesterday and then presumably I go into the first of my two scenes with Delon in the first of which he comes to kill me but doesn't, and the second when he does. Joe is definitely not himself. He doesn't seem to know the script as well as he usually does. Time and time again I, or the continuity girl, have to remind him of things that are very obvious. For instance: in one of the scenes I am pacing up and down and around the garden dictating. Every so often I pause as I hear myself talking to the now dead Sheldon Harte, killed in my defence.255 I am remembering my last conversation with him. Joe asked me why I was pausing. I told him why. Oh really let me look at the script. Yes you're quite right. Yes. Very Odd.

  Thursday 28th, Rome Worked all day until the light went. It's now 8.10am and delight of delights our Liza is arriving tonight at 10 o'clock and should be here about 11ish. Shall wait up. E has had three beers so far today but since I don't really consider beer a ‘drink’ unless many pints are taken I am allowing her a ‘red’ titled day. Mike and Beth and the luminous Leyla are still here and everything seems to go swimmingly. Oddly enough E had had only two beers when she saw that I had written three and decided to make the presumption a fact. Right now I mean.

  Friday 29th, Rome E had a long heart-to-heart talk with Michael yesterday. Perhaps that's too intimate a word when one considers that Mike is in such a potentially explosive state that Elizabeth has to play him like a fish and every conversation has to be extremely circuitous and thin-ice-skating. [...]

  Saturday 30th, Rome Very short entries. Largely because I'm not getting up early enough in the morning. [...] I worked with Delon all day yesterday. He is a much better actor than I believed. Quite sensitive and all that. Pleasurable surprise. Liza is here a little overweight with puppy-fat and a trifle spotty but all part of puberty or is it adolescence? Giggles a lot at bluish jokes which for some reason eggs me on to make endless juvenile and harmless and very bad sex jokes. Yesterday, I found a Time mag for April 1940 which was fascinating to read. Winston Churchill was described as ‘Sandy Winston Churchill’.256 One never thinks of Churchill with any particular hair or that it would be described as ‘sandy’. One realizes what a silly magazine Time is. Their attitudes, even then, were of the most superficial. They had no more idea of the coming holocaust than I did. Just had a long talk with Liza about masturbation – prompted by a Dear Abby column she is just reading.257 I told her that it was a perfectly normal part of growing up – especially I said in boys. Why especially in boys? Because I said I knew about boys, having been one believe it or not but never having been a girl I wasn't too sure. I told her some of the frightful and stupid things I was told and heard as a kid. That you'd go blind and bald before you're 21 etc. All rubbish. Also told her that excessive masturbation might lead to an onanism which might spoil one for more normal sex though I wasn't too sure about that either.

  NOVEMBER

  Monday 1st, Anzio [...] I wonder if this film I'm doing is any good? I am not possessed by its success as E is with XYZ but would like it nevertheless. Don't really care though. Dangerous attitude to have. Where's your ambition man? Went and lost it a long time ago, sir. Tut-tut.

  We moped around all day reading and eating and talking. We took a nap in the afternoon. I asked Liza whether, since she was so enamoured of horses, she would or had consider or considered spending the rest of her life with them. Would she like to breed them for instance? Or train them? I said that we could probably see her to a farm and stake her to a few livestock. I would rather, I said, like a farm in the family. Nice to visit. Smell of horses and brass and leather and a book-lined room for Dad and a large quiet bedroom for Liz and me with a good shower for Dad, very important a good shower, and walks along the woodland ride wearing white for Eastertide, and the morning men stumble out with their spades and all the woken farm at its white trades, and tea and crumpets and cucumber sandwiches in the summer, and a local quiet pub with cool beer frothed and quaffable and a nice walk before dinner and doubtless dogs in the yard, and a couple of superior cats, and why not have a farmhouse of mellowed brick with a chiming clock over the stables, and a rich smell of dung, and could we, do you think, get a couple of giant slow-moving dray horses and harness them up on occasions to some sort of shafted car and go for rides drawn by Dobbin and Robbin, with a market town nearby associated with minor history, with a wide main street and a graveyard beside the church where I could sit and read while waiting for E to finish shopping or examine the headstones and ponder on the monotony of death, and it would be nice to have a bustling W.H. Smith's with a serious nervous young man, thin with an Adam's Apple, weak-chinned and a-bristle with insignificance, a bad second at Oxford writing articles for the country newspaper. And a lot of local gossip and a scandal or two to titillate and who would have thought that the vicar's wife would have run away with a garage-hand 10 years her junior. He wasn't giving it to her, the vicar, couldn't get it up. Don't be disgusting from E and Oh Dad from Liza. There ought to be a train to London to see a play and the last train home after supper at the Savoy Grill or maybe we'll take the Harlequin Suite at the Dorchester and stay for a week while E raids Harrods and Selfridges and Cartiers with Liza and I rape Foyles and Cecil Gees looking for a second hand copy of the sermons of John Elias o Fon, and back to the farm and 7 o'clock breakfasts with the accentless tones of the BBC news at 7 and old films on the telly and Frankie Howerd getting older and dirtier with his odd air of soiled innocence, and Liza might get a child or two for me to shout at and spoil.258

  Liza, in fact, has just arrived from the bowels of the ship and I've read her out the bit about the farm. I hope I've put the right idea into her head. [...]

  Tuesday 2nd, Rome Worked a full day yesterday [...]. Bettina and her boy friend and Roddy Mann from the Sunday Express came to lunch with, as usual, E not turning up ‘til 2pm. Fortunately I was able to squeeze in enough time between shots to go with them. [...] Today I do a scene with Val Cortese and then the mucky assassination starts with Delon. False blood all over the place.

  We had one of those evenings yesterday. Liza was going back to school. She was arriving at London airport at 11 o'clock. Liz (Williams) was going to be there to meet her. Wouldn't it be better, E said, since Liza was going on a later plane than expected by Liz to have Charles Simpson pick her up in the chauffeured Rolls as Lil was a very busy woman and London airport was a monstrous thief of time making Dickens’
procrastination a mere petty thief in comparison.259 No, it's alright, said Liza flippantly, Lil will wait for me. She has to go up to London anyhow. But, we said, the airport is not in London, it is a long way from London. The upshot was that she became so adamant that she wanted Lil to pick her up that E became incensed and pinched Liza's arm. Liza dissolved in tears and left the room to sulk. She continued to sulk for 3 hours. Tear-stained face. Monosyllabic answers. Air of Tragedy. The only thing in this world I find totally unforgivable is the silent sulks. The sulker only looks a fool, and a stupid one, gets – from me at least – no sympathy at all after the 1st five minutes, and generally speaking is a crashing bore. E and I made a long-ago pact that regardless how flaming the quarrel, how bitter the recriminations that neither of us would ever mope and sulk. I remember Joy Parker telling me in the days of our friendship that she once had a quarrel with her husband Paul (Scofield) and that he sulked for a whole year. A whole year in which he never said anything outside the absolute necessities. Good morning. Good night. Shan't be home for supper. I would have shot him dead. Once I had a quarrel with E so vicious that I went for a long walk to cool my anger. I didn't sulk though. When I went back, we made it up immediately. That was in Aston Clinton, I think, at the Bell Inn. [...]

  Wednesday 3rd [...] Yesterday, had, as per usual its little crisis: Liza boarded a plane at Fumicino after a prolonged delay while officials went through every piece of baggage meticulously in the search for an IRA bomb.260 Nothing found and off they went to England but not London airport. More IRA threats to blow up London airport had forced its closure so planes were being diverted to Stansted instead.261 Widespread fury and I fancy the IRA are rapidly losing their romantic aura of Freedom Fighters for the ould sod.262 Nobody likes a coward and the popular myth of fighting a merciless tyrant – the poor ineffectual English, if you please – is somewhat tarnished by acts of distant time-bombing. The Post Office tower was blown about a bit a couple of days ago, and shops and post offices in Ulster are forever going up in atoms.263 I often wonder what I'd do if my Welsh extremists started the same thing. I wouldn't object very much to blowing up installations though I think it pretty childish but if they hurt anybody except themselves I would be red fury. I don't expect much from the Irish – a lot that I know so well that I despise them, everything about them, their posturing, the silly soft accents, their literature, especially Joyce, Synge but not including Yeats who writes like a great anglo – original spare strange – yes Hopkins – and I hate their genius for self-advertisement, their mock-belligerence, their obvious charm.264 For the opposite of all these reasons I love the Scots and the South Welsh and even prefer the English b'god, especially the taciturn midlands and north country.

  [...] With every excuse yesterday, E only had a beer and a glass of wine and so after a week of ‘wagon’ she has had a total of one glass of wine, one delicious Martini on Sunday as a reward from her proud spouse and about 10 bottles of beer. Somewhat of a drop from 1/2 or more of a bottle of hard liquor a day. As she says, the habit of drinking had become simply that – an odious habit in which the excitement of a good old booze-up was dissipated by the habit. We both agreed that the ice-cold vodka Martini on Sunday before lunch was all the better for being looked forward to and so on. E has just corrected me and reminded me that she had a vodka and orange sometime yesterday. So it's two vodkas in a week. Big deal.

  [...] Tonight when I came home about 6 E was waiting for me and aglow with contentment. She had been out shopping to Gucci's and had a good time and there we were as happy as you like and looking forward to a nothing lovely evening, me with a crossword and E with a book and discussing whether we should go to Gstaad, Vallarta or – a sudden idea of mine – Quogue for Xmas. We also agreed to go the Rothschilds’ (Ferrières) for a party on November 2nd which Guy and Marie-Hélène were giving, one of their truly posh ones which can be very amusing. Last time I sat with Madame Pompidou at dinner and drank with President Pompidou afterwards in the days of course when he was merely an ex-Prime Minister and in mild disfavour with De Gaulle. That night too I saw Brigitte Bardot for the first time since she was a young girl and married to or living with Vadim and not even remotely as famous as she is now.265 I told Ron afterwards that I found it hard to believe that it was the same girl, so much so that I was almost tempted to think I had mis-remembered her name and that it was some other starlet of the time. Ah, Ron said, I expect you knew her when she still had projecting teeth. And that, of course, was probably the answer.

  Thursday 4th, Grand Hotel [...] I read Les Fleurs du Mal of Baudelaire ... Tout là-haut, tout là-haut, loin de la route sûre ... Sous mes pieds, sur ma tête et partout, le silence, le silence qui fait qu'on voudrait se sauver, Le silence éternel ... I slept fitfully and awoke every hour but I must have slept happily as E reports that I laughed a lot in my dreams.266 I awoke to the alarm clock – a new and very expensive one which Frank Sinatra gave us for last Xmas. It makes a strange ullulating noise which is not very pleasant and is yet not harsh. I was very very sleepy and practically slept under the shower. I am dressed in outrageously expensive new trousers from some posh shop here in Rome. That's money that I do not like to spend – my idea of clothes is Ohrbachs or Vallarta where you can clothe yourself from top to toe, white thin shirt, white thin trousers and white sandals for an extravagant $8.267 I wonder why Sinatra gave us so unexpectedly that expensive clock? What motive prompted the gift? What was going on in the poor man's Mafia mind? Had he realized perhaps at last that the painting we gave him – I've forgotten what it was – cost a great deal of money and told himself that he hadn't thanked us with sufficient grace? Whatever it was, the reason is likely to be vulgar.

  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.

&nbs
p; 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.