The Richard Burton Diaries

by Richard Burton

  Saturday 13th311 [...] Awoke at 8 ordered tea and finished a long letter to Liza who has cleverly chosen Tito as her historical character for this term. She asked me for ‘any information’ on him so I tapped out three pages or so of a rough outline. Also told her that her penmanship was appalling and would alienate any examiner regardless of the excellence of her writing otherwise. A very slapdash young woman.

  [...] Every day here seems to be a day of demonstrations. Yesterday it was something to do with the Coca-Cola factories which, presumably in despair with the endless strikes, have closed down entirely. This morning there was a tremendous hullaballoo about ‘no repression in schools’ which I don't understand and, since the local papers never or hardly ever mention the demonstrations (so many of them I suppose) I don't know what the protest marches are about. Italian friends confess to being equally baffled though one can hardly expect couturiers like Valentino and Tiziani to be much interested in social disputes. They only deal with the very rich. I must ask Carlo Cotti tonight when he comes.312 He is the second assistant on the film and appears to be a cut above the average in intelligence. He wants to talk to me re Benito Mussolini I think for whom, I'm told, he has a great and relatively unfashionable admiration. He is anxious for me to play the last days of Mussolini in a film. Never know, it might be interesting and with E possibly playing his mistress Clara Petacci it would certainly set all Italy by the ears.313 If we shot it cheaply and if it was well done it might be a knock-out. Why not one asks oneself? Why not? This Carlo is reputedly a very rich young man. He is certainly very richly dressed for a 2nd Assistant. [...]

  Sunday 14th A black day again. E and I had martinis before lunch though E only drank half of hers and we shared a bottle of Gewarstraminer at lunch [...] with which [...] we washed down caviar blinis in my case, and some sort of delicious veal with mushrooms in Elizabeth's.314 After that I drank no more for the rest of the day while E had a Jack Daniels and some wine at Joe Losey's where we went for dinner. E is in rare form acting the goat and mucking about and is generally very droll. [...]

  Carlo Cotti came to see me yesterday to talk of Mussolini and he obviously does know his subject and he is a neo-fascist. He made the point that since Mussolini left us the Italians have not been governed at all and that Italy really does need a strong central character, another Mussolini, another benevolent dictator for they, the Italians, understand nothing else. He said that the cupidity and villainy of his race demanded a police state and that the people demanded by their very nature an organization which instilled fear. He wouldn't mind, he said, if there was a strongly repressive Communist Government if only they promised ruthlessness to tax evaders, brought back the death penalty and more importantly corporal punishment – the lash, the cat, the birch. All this from a young man of 32 with a sweet round face and curly hair and eyes of liquid brown and a charming self-deprecating grin. The communists however had behaved so stupidly and were so utterly alien to the Italian temperament and, as a consequence, so weak, that he was constrained to advocate more drastic means. He loved his people but they were en masse a silly mob of disorganized undisciplined schoolchildren and like schoolchildren must be threatened by dire punishment.

  I sat back aghast. So much so that it took me 10 minutes to marshal my liberal arguments against his. Better, I said, to have the economy collapse and millions out of work and near starvation than the knout and the boot in the face and the dreadful raid on your house in the small hours and imprisonment without trial and back to the torture chambers and the kneeling position and the bullet through the brain in secret executions. He was unmoved.

  Deep in my heart of course I know he has a ruthless point but, like Communism, it is inapplicable to the Italians. I pointed out to him something that he had conveniently forgotten which is that Mussolini's Italy was as corrupt as the present Italy and that like this country today the Italy of the late thirties was also on the edge of bankruptcy.

  Carlo later showed us a mink overcoat he'd made for himself and was not sure how his mother would take it and whether she would allow him to wear it. This information, together with his confession of wry idolatory for Franco Zeffirelli and his age and his bachelor status led us to suspect that he is either a Mama's boy or a homosexual. Oddly and perversely enough, with every pun intended, this belief was further strengthened by his political statements. Torture and manacling and gagged mouths being quite unfairly associated in my mind with sexual inversion.

  We went to Joe Losey's last night for dinner. They live quite near the Tiber in a dark narrow street, three floors up which we laboriously climbed only to discover that there was a spanking new lift. It was a typical Roman apartment with very large rooms and glazed terra-cotta tiles, two feet square, on the floor, sparsely furnished and lofty ceilinged and as chilly as a hospital corridor. We imagined it being very cold in winter, for me uncomfortably cold and especially as Joe said the fireplace was ornamental only. They had a charming bearded long-haired male cook who went, as is the wont of all servants everywhere, into conniptions at sight of Elizabeth. He was a very good cook though and why can't we ever find a cook like that instead of either lousy ones like the chap on the yacht or fellers who can only stay for 3 months and then have to go to the army or back to college or something equally frustrating. Mind you, I would rather not have a cook at all as one of us is always dickering with a diet and cooks become very put out if their creations are not eaten. Another thing with cooks is that they find it impossible to believe that one only wants one course. Their only virtue is when one has a large family gathering or a lot of people coming to eat. Eating with the Loseys alone or simply going to their home for a drink is always, to me, sort of Chekhovian. The conversation seems to have undertones and strange experiences between the lines, unspoken but guessed at. Joe is a bad conversationalist, a slow speech pattern with many pauses while he searches his vocabulary for the bon mot and a great deal of er-er-ers while Trapicia (E's spoonerism for Patricia years ago and which has stuck) talks in a mellifluous monotone the whole time with that kind of delivery that puts me – if I'm in a certain mood – into a species of trance where one listens, doesn't want the speaker to stop and where one doesn't want to interrupt in case the trance is broken. One gets it sometimes from a barber while one is getting a short-back-and-sides and the barber babbles cosily on and on. Minute and pleasant pulses tick softly in the temples as if there's pressure, very slight and euphoric pressure from soft strong fingers. I am very susceptible to this kind of mesmerism this kind of removal from the world. [...]

  Joe has great charm despite his lack of humour especially about himself, a lack which was perfectly exemplified last night when he told us of a very savage telegram which he's sent off to a man called Bernard Delfont who ‘produced’ The Go-Between and who had put on the bill-boards his name in GIGANTIC LETTERS while Joe's name was tiny and Harold Pinter's wasn't on at all.315 The telegram was something like ‘What is the use of spending one's life producing artistic creations if in the end a shit like you has control etc.’ Joe, like other humourless gents like Bill Wilder and Joe Manciewicz, will not realize that the general public do emphatically not go to see a Joe Losey Picture or a Joe Mank Picture or a Billy Wilder Picture but go to see that marvellous actor so-and-so or that great actress such-and-such or that screamingly funny whatchermaycallit.316 It is true that there is a minute percentage who go more to see the director's work, the intelligentsia and other people in the profession who go more to see the director's work, the sort of people who belong to film clubs and love movies in foreign languages, than the actor's, but they don't need to see bill-boards to know it's a Losey picture. They will have read the information in Sight and Sound.317 But there's no persuading them otherwise and I've long given up.

  Monday 15th318 A completely lazy day yesterday. Only 4 newspapers arrived: News of the World, Express, Observer and Telegraph. We always have bad luck with the Observer and wherever we are abroad we invariably seem to get the Scottish and Ir
ish editions which means that the sports pages are devoted to Linfield versus Shamrock or whatever and not Arsenal v Leeds and Glasgow Academicals v Heriot F.P. instead of Harlequins v London Welsh or Blackheath. Very irritating. The Sunday Times is the most satisfying buy seeming to have more body to it than any other papers and I don't mean bulk but a way of presenting news in a chunkier form. There seem to be more solid columns and fewer snippets than others. Wilfred Wooller for instance in the Telegraph was given yesterday no more space than I have occupied writing this entry this morning.319 That means, unless you write a sonnet, no space at all. But Parkinson and Longhurst and others have a thousand words and the political columns and literary boys a fair space too. The Express also is a cut above the other rags and for the same reason. Hoby and Blanchflower have sizeable portions though I do wish they'd get someone other than Danny Boy to occupy that very desirable space – he so bristles with mediocrity and holier-than-thou humourless pretentiousness, pretending to a long range long viewed wisdom and a tedious philosophy where he is forever comparing the game of soccer with the ‘game of life’.320 Whereas Hoby is straightforward purple adjectived sensationalism. Peregrine Worsthorne has a beautiful lump in the Sunday Telegraph and is worth reading because of his almost amateur enthusiasm. A week ago he exultantly announced and explained the ‘Death of the Labour Party’ and that, short of a miracle, the Tories were going to be the masters for several generations. This week he threatened the Irish with Britain's hatred if they continued to tar and feather young girls who went a-courting with British soldiers. The British, he said, didn't hate easily but when they did ... Oh Boy look out! Astonishingly, he said that during the last war the British didn't hate the Germans – quote – until we heard of the atrocities of the prison camps. Indeed, Worsthorne, indeed. Then, Cyril Connolly has a lot of space in the Sunday Times and Brandon from Washington while Toynbee and A. J. P. Taylor and Muggeridge get fair cracks of the whip too.321 I wish though that the ‘qualities’ had proper, separate books sections like the NY Times and the old Herald-Tribune. The sort of thing you can keep in volumes and not the flimsy 4 pages the British have which includes travel and good food and wines and TV and theatre and films and art and ballet. The Express always has the unbelievable Mrs Grundy yclept John Gordon who is so ineffably self-righteous that he has the funniest column of the lot.322 He has had several ‘gos’ at me over the years and I find it well-nigh impossible to be angry with him. ‘Must we have again and again so much space in our newspapers devoted to the unimportant doings of Mr Richard Burton and his wife the much married Elizabeth Taylor. What are they after all but film stars who don't even have the sense of duty to pay their taxes. Who, after all, cares that Miss Taylor has a million dollar ring. I, for one and all of my friends find such ostentation boring and vulgar.’ And then I'm very fond of Cross-Bencher in the Express who gnat-bites here thither and yon at front and back benchers alike with snide innuendo and arch imputation. ‘Who is John Parrish who has been creating so much excitement in the drawing rooms of Conservative salons with his “I will stake my whole political future on the blazing belief that we must, if we are not to commit political suicide, go whole heartedly into Europe.” Why it is none other than Lord Ass-hole who before rejecting his hereditary title to sit in the Commons said on a famous occasion “As far as I'm concerned the Wogs begin at Calais.”’

  We are going to have dinner tonight with Peter Sellers and an Indian Mystic who tells the future and who, Peter says, is called Gandhi.

  Tuesday 16th, Rome We both fell off the waggon yesterday, me with a profound bump resulting in a pretty enjoyable but silly evening on my part. The usual drunken devil of impish perversity dominated my talk which since I didn't allow other people to talk much meant that I teetered on the edge of spoiling the night. However I wrote a letter of apology to Sellers and friends this morning together with the micro-Oxford Dictionary which E had promised to Peter last night.

  Mr Gandhi was short and dark and spoke with the classic Indian-Welsh accent so outrageously impersonated by Peter in that record years ago.323 I find it hard to believe that Peter cannot go back into England to see his wife in hospital who is suffering apparently from a severe attack of cerebral meningitis.324 I told him that he should go ahead and do it quickly – in and out before anybody knows it – but I have a suspicion that he didn't want that advice. I hope I'm wrong but that marriage like his other two looks on the rocks. There was one startling moment which was missed unfortunately by E who was in the bedroom when, talking about the various legal suits we have all had against us he said that he and his former wife, Britt Ekland, were sued by Fox for breaking her contract which, he said, she broke at his insistence because ‘I told her that I needed at least a year to educate her and teach her how to act and give her a knowledge of great world drama, before she was fit to face a major career.‘325 Neither E nor I think that little Miss Ekland needed much instruction from M. Sellers.

  They talked, when I allowed them to, a lot about Yoga and meditation and vegetarianism and I told Pietro that I wanted to talk more about it and we are meeting tomorrow night on the yacht and will show, if we have it – it's in customs – Under Milk Wood which we have yet to see and which has been received so well. [...] I am genuinely interested in Yoga having read 3 or 4 books on the subject – only primitive stuff about weight and physical well being and diet and stuff – and would like to know more.

  Zoe Sallis came too to the little party and it seems that she and Sellers hit it off very well indeed as we've just discovered from a phone conversation with Peter as he asked if she could be invited also tomorrow night.

  I had a vodka and orange and a bloody mary at lunch time and have a martini in the fridge to titch me up before dinner – it's about 7.30 – and will revert to my sober behaviour tomorrow. I really don't like drinking at yesterday's pace and I'm silly to do it.

  Zoe Sallis is a very attractive girl who has been John Huston's mistress for 10 years or so and we have known her since doing the film Night of the Iguana when she was living with John and their baby – then about 6 months old and now getting on for 9 and a breathless reminder of tempus will fugit – in Vallarta.326 She now looks like a grown-up and not the child she looked then. She is about 30 I suppose and very dark and Indian looking. I think she said last night that she was Eurasian or perhaps she was only saying that to impress Sellers and ‘Bert’ (Seller's companion) and Ganh, Gandhi rather, who obviously are Indian lovers.327 Shades of Anna Kashfi who used to be Marlon's wife and firmly convinced him that she was Indian when it turned out – to Marlon's fury and immediate divorce – that she was Cardiff Welsh.328 I knew the minute I met her just after Marlon had married her that she was Welsh and said so to her and Marlon. She affected not to know what ‘Welsh’ was and asked if we were like the Irish and all that kind of rubbish. Marlon wasn't interested and only became so when he found out that he had been lied to – a heinous crime in Marlon's book. I still smile when I remember a picture of Kashfi's mother in the Daily Express or Mail with a real Celtic peasant look and wearing a ‘pinny’ and formidably Welsh look, sort of arms akimbo, with the caption ‘Do I look Indian?’ I laughed for a week. Later I teased Marlon about it until I realized that old fatty was not inclined to regard it or her in a humorous light. I haven't tried him on that affair since. I wonder how he would take it now. [...]

  Wednesday 17th, Grand [...] There has been a great deal of fuss and bother around the hotel for the last couple of days because President Franz Jonas of Austria is here on a state visit which consists of tea at the Quirinale with Saragat and tremendous traffic jams.329 The streets around the hotel are one continuous cacophony of despairing horns and policemen's whistles and remarkably often the penetrating screams of ambulances. The Romans it seems are always in a rush to the grave. Yesterday too the sound of many horses set our dogs a-barking and there indeed was a pretty sight as one would want to see – several hundred horses riding four abreast caparisoned with riders dressed by Ivor N
ovello and all of them placed as to colour, a mass of whites, a mass of blacks and a mass of browns.330 E and Jane Swanson were watching it with delight from our balcony when Jane realized that all the onlookers had their binoculars trained on E and not the horses. Since E was in a dressing gown she fled inside. The concourse was endless and created, of course, the mother and father of all traffic jams. It was typical, I remarked to Jane, of the Romans to have a procession during the peak of the rush hour. She said that it was probably deliberate and that Italians love a mess so that they can have an excuse for tantrums. They are all natural thespians she said. Orson [Welles] once said that the Italians were the best actors in the world but unfortunately only the worst of them became professionals.