The Richard Burton Diaries

by Richard Burton

  I'd forgotten to say that Robin Stafford of the Express came to visit us at the same time as Sellers.331 He was the only journalist allowed at our wedding, not because he was a particular friend but because he was so quietly and charmingly persistent. It wasn't until we'd chatted for a long time that I thought to ask him if he were on a job or purely social visit. He is normally a diplomatic correspondent, political, and if there's a war, a war correspondent. It was clear that the job he's proudest of was the Six Day War. He told me many funny stories about it. The Israelis are a frighteningly pragmatic lot.

  Thursday 7th, Yacht332 [...] Sellers and ‘Bert’ whose other name is Mortimer and Zoe came on board as expected and dined and chatted a lot about Yoga.333 Peter is surprisingly hard going to me with a strange self deprecation when telling a story – not necessarily about himself – in which he says things like, ‘My boat is small, you know, and so I don't bother to have an extension for the telephone into the like this you know the thing where we're sitting now you know the er er salon because my boat well the er bridge is so er er thing you know and when Sam Spiegel came on the yacht he said can you get NY and thing and so on and how quick are you getting through to thing and thing ...’ and so on. Oddly irritating and smacking of false modesty as if to say I could of course speak with classic syntax and superb vocabulary but you know I could so I take that as read. It is now though a manner which he probably cannot get out of and therefore perfectly natural. I must deep down be a two-faced prude as I've quite gone off Zoe Sallis since she seems to be a lady of fairly easy virtue and is quite obviously having a er thing er you er know with er thing you know. Peter and Bert made a lot of sense about Yoga and we must try and find out more about it from a professional teacher when we get the chance – probably next year in Vallarta. He demonstrated a slow head-stand for us which seems absolutely beyond us both at this stage and possibly at any stage. Must try though.

  Under Milk Wood came through as something mysteriously else called Daybreak at Sundown or something equally funny and we consequently saw no film. [...]

  Saturday 20th, Rome [...] This is our last few hours here in Rome. We leave at midday for Paris and from the airport straight to the clinic where the good doctor will remove a cyst from E's nose and a mole from my cheek. [...] After that to the Ritz at which we have never stayed as far as we can remember.334 Since we have the original diamond as big as the Ritz it will be interesting to see if we can get inside.335 We shall stay in Paris until Tuesday and then do a run for Gstaad which I'm longing to see.

  A late birthday present arrived from Liza. Two books – one called Roman Mythology and one called the Age of Revolution. The first hard cover and expensive and the second a paperback. I was very moved and went around showing it to everyone. I was absurdly pleased that the return address was – in her own hand – Todd-Burton. The second has a note inside from Liza saying: See page 237. It was an index to Trotsky. I love that child surpassingly.

  [...] I have put the title of this page in black since E is so anticipatorily anxious about her operation that I decided she should have the occasional drink until the ordeal is over. And yesterday I had a bloody mary and the day before a martini and a couple of glasses of wine.

  Am reading for the first time for twenty years or more A la recherche du temps perdu. In English. I shall find a paperback French version in Paris and read them side by side. Scott Moncrieff together with the lesser known Gerard Hopkins are the best French translators I've come across.336 I am enjoying the Proust far more than I remember from the last time – and I think it must have been at Oxford when I ploughed through him before. And ‘ploughed through’ is the operative word. It was deliberate labour as part of my education and all I can remember is that the only person I knew who had the complete set was Emlyn Williams who said I had to read them in his house as he was not letting them out of his sight. Under those circumstances it is not surprising perhaps that I thought the work pedestrian. They are anything but that as I read them now.

  Bob has just brought me a telegram from Tony Richardson asking me to play with Vanessa Redgrave in Antony and Cleopatra ‘early next year’. I said no. Politely. That man must have the thickest skin in and out of Christendom. This is his 2nd offer to me this year – the other being to do the film of I, Claudius.337 After our bitter debacle about Nabokov's Laughter in the Dark one would think that he would be scared witless to approach me to play Scrabble.338 But not our Tony. It's almost admirable. The fact that I was right about Laughter and he was shown to be catastrophically wrong should have made him even more shy in approaching me for anything else ever again as my attitude to him in any future co-labour would be savagely contemptuous. But ever since he first emerged from the OUDS he has shown total and ruthless selfishness in everything he has ever done. I know of no one who confesses either admiration or affection for him. Everyone is convinced that his good films have been accidents and that his bad ones are a just reflection of his abysmal talent. The cutter saved Tom Jones, they say while Ossie Morris and the continuity girl directed Anger.339 He is slightly better than that. Totally unworthy of anyone's serious consideration, however, I would say. Certainly mine. [...]

  Sunday 21st, Ritz Hotel, Paris340 [...] E looks as if she's had a long gruelling 15 rounds with Clay while I simply have a bandage on my face which makes me look as if I have a huge wound when in actual fact – apart from the stitch there is nothing except a little hole to see. [...] We dined off ‘Haddock poche a l'Anglaise et des pommes nature’ and delicious it was.

  Monday 22nd341 [...] For the third time in my life I began to learn Spanish yesterday. Third time lucky I hope. It means wiping Italian out of my mind. No easy task. I am doing a grammar which is differently pronounced from Mexican but I can transfer the noises as I go along. I shall have every opportunity to use it at the new place in Bucerias and this time I shall do sternly what I do with the other tongues – which is to read a newspaper a day. Painful at first it soon becomes fluent.

  There has been increasing pressure on me of late to play the last days of Mussolini and there are three different firms vying with each other. One neo-fascisti lot are after me and another lot Shaftel are running after me and Marlon while a third are trying for George Scott.342 Soldati is writing one for me, he says, with Elizabeth for Clara Petacci.343 Presumably nothing will come out of my participation. Tito, Trotsky and Mussolini would be a bit much in one year I guess. It would certainly be foolish to have three different Mussolinis come out together. The comparisons would give those covetous critics a field day.

  I am going through one of my non-fiction-reading moods again and apart from the always with me Fleurs du Mal I have nothing but fiction to read. Today, if E thinks my face good enough I shall dive across to W. H. Smith's and do one of my raids. There may be something downstairs in the foyer of this hotel. This is the first time I've ever stayed here so I know little about it. E too. So far I find it better than the Plaza Athenée and the Lancaster. The service is swift and the food, so far, of a good standard. I shall order me another cuppa immediately.

  A letter was given us when we arrived from Hebe Dorsey who is an Arab French lady we have known for some time and who writes fashion columns for the Herald Trib here and ‘fashionable’ articles for many magazines about Princess Grace and Jackie Onassis and E and a few others. The letter complains of non-payments from a firm called Forum which is Gianni Bozzacchi's. She complains of non payments. She appeals to us as mutual friends to sort it out. Now, dear lady, what can I do?

  [...] I have decided that Sunday Papers must arrive fairly early in the morning to be properly accorded the title – Sunday Papers. When they arrive, as they did yesterday, in the afternoon, they lose their status and are simply newspapers. One should read nothing but the Sundays on Sunday. The day is lost if one has started reading all manner of other things before they've arrived. The only Sundayish thing about yesterday's Sunday was that I turned on the hotel, in-built radio and found the BBC and a terrible voi
ce saying: ‘It is no use saying to one's conscience "go away you silly person, I have no wish to listen to you" because you are saying in effect "go away God, you are too awkward a customer and make too many demands on me."’ For God's sake, said E, turn that bloody thing off. And so I did. It's hard to believe that such drivel is still being pumped out by the mile all over the country. The message is banal enough but the language it's clothed in is unspeakably arch, knowing and coy and stupendously vulgar. [...]

  Tuesday 23rd344 [...] Kurt (Stormtrooper) Frings came in about 6 and we discussed the script which I'd read in the afternoon. It's rubbish but it's something I've never done which is a ‘horror film’ and which the kids have been anxious for one or the other of us to do for many years. I play Bluebeard, a German or mittel-European Count or Marchese or something complete with Ruritanian or perhaps Transylvanian would be better castle. Booted and spurred and tails-clothed and impotent and kill eight wives – all of great beauty – the moment they expect me to go bed with them. There is a great deal of horror though everywhere. Can't make up my mind whether I should do it or not. Any road, if they wish to do it in January as they say they do, I must decline. Its other attraction is that they shoot in Hungary, to which country I've never been, and I could do with a little lightness after Tit and Trot. Am supposed to have lunch at Fouquet's with the director – one called Dmytryk who – I've only just discovered this morning – I've been confusing for years with a man called Siodmak.345 Both have their similarities in that they started off well and then tapered off into the usual mediocrity.

  I ambled through my Spanish lessons both in the morning and late at night – both of those times being the best possible time for me to learn things as I discovered in my examination-riddled childhood and youth. I should be able to read newspapers in about a month though probably the best thing to do would be to get hold of one of those Penguin dual language books which save you a hell of a lot of dictionary work. I love the latter so much that they are dangerous for me to use if I am really ‘working’ as I cannot resist scanning the page for another interesting word which may be lying around. This kills the pace. I shall go to Smith's after lunch perhaps and search me around. While I'm at it I might as well get a stock of holiday reading for Gstaad. [...]

  Dirty Brian Hutton also popped in with Oscar Mayer bacon from the States. [...] He has brought a script for E by a man called Gibson – a better than average playwright who has written a couple of successful pieces or more the only one of which I can remember being Two for the Seesaw – called A Cry of Players.346 I'm sure it was first written as a play and was sent to me 15 years ago perhaps with a view to my playing William Shakespeare and is indeed a play about Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway. Will and Anne. It has obviously been rewritten with modern ‘permissiveness’ in mind for E tells me that some of the dialogue is somewhat blue. I shall read this morn after my Spanish. Now, he sobbed, I am too old.

  Frings wants to represent E again and me too now. We said he can go ahead with Bluebeard and Under the Volcano – the latter of particular import if there is a reasonable script.347 The latter would be a good velocipede for us both. If well adapted, acted and directed, it could be a film of major interest – even perhaps as good as Lowry's novel which is a massive piece of work and, as I discovered when reading it again this year, ages magnificently. It needs a very fine director. [...]

  Thursday 25th A pleasant enough day. I read E's script by W. W. Gibson.348 It is the one I was sent 15 years ago and it is still not worth E's attention as it wasn't mine then. We went to lunch at the grill here in the hotel called L'Espadon which is a cosy little restaurant and the food is very good. We had a superb Coquille St Jaques to start which almost spoiled the equally splendid steak au poivre which followed. We had forgotten the joys of people-watching since we've been out so seldom. It is not easy to be a personality-watcher actually if you yourselves are so intently watched but there are some good things to be seen before you go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green.349 There was a nervous high-pitched English, frightfully English lady of a certain age who talked out of nerves at the top of her voice. Unfortunately we were, I mean she was alone so we didn't hear as much as we should. She was placed in the middle of the room, having come in after us. After a time the waiter suggested that she should change her table to one against the window. She greeted this suggestion with a high pitched almost breathless enthusiasm – ‘What a good idea, most frightfully thoughtful of you, my nerves were beginning to shriek, positively shriek, there in the midst of everybody and I did send a telex from London reserving my table. It's awfully good of you and frightfully intelligent. I shall enjoy myself so much more here. You are so terribly kind and I did send a telex all the way from London.’ Why had she sent a telex to reserve a table in a not very popular and therefore hardly likely to be full restaurant. Why indeed had she flown from London to have lunch alone in L'Espadon, The Swordfish, in the Ritz Hotel Paris. She was about my age, brunette, with an aquiline nose that might have been Jewish but I don't think she was a Hebrew, and she used a lorgnette to study the menu. She was expensively but quietly dressed and was unquestionably a lady. E guessed she was a writer, and I agree that she looked very like all those unattractive lady-writers whose photos one sees on the backs of Penguins. Not unattractive exactly but one guesses at the unused flesh, the untidy bathing, the Times Crossword, and shrill conversations on the telephone and literary luncheons and all angularly sharp and feminist. Ugh somehow. There was another woman, American we guessed, with a ferocious face-lift, hard and predatory, vulpine and totally ignoring her husband staring, staring staring at E with malevolence, meanness, and murderous, envious hatred. E said that the loathing was so intense that it was tangible. She would have felt it, E went on, even were her back turned. Then there was a comic turn which E couldn't really see. A party of six came in dominated by a tall, dew-lapped loud-mouthed 60 year old central European speaking perfect and idiomatic English and French with a barely noticeable accent who said something like ‘I guess we'll have one woman there and a guy there and another woman there and you Phil go there and that should about do it.’ One of the women, a girl actually, writhed and suiggled and manoeuvred herself desperately towards a chair where she would be breathtakingly close to a profile shot of my fabled E. But there was another woman, ruthlessly middle-aged, very American, who stolidly held her ground. So at the next table were these two women, one in the awful position of being able to lust her eyes on E's profile but in doing so would look me straight in the eyes, while the other tried to turn into rubber to get fugitive glimpses at the back of E's head. Each time they managed either, they were faced with a knowing half-smile from me. At about this time, the Basilisk with the ignored and indifferent husband, she of the tight skull and the vicious envy left her husband calculating the pourboire and walked very deliberately and with no attempt at dissembling, straight across the room and turned the full glare of her gorgon gaze on Elizabeth. She left expressionlessly, her impassivity only matched by Elizabeth's.

  [...] I am on my fifth Spanish lesson as well as listening to discs from the Assimil method.

  Friday 26th, Ritz It was Thanksgiving Day yesterday and, foreign as I am, I eat turkey and giblet gravy and sweet corn and yams but not cranberry sauce. Delicious. Much debate as to whether the Americas had any original food. They argued that turkey, potatoes corn and cranberries were indigenous to the States and unknown in Europe. I agree with potato and corn but disagreed with turkey and cranberries. Must look it up at home. I seem to remember that ‘cranberry’ is originally Greek. My new Oxford will tell me all – and the Britannica. Brian Hutton and his girlfriend Tamara something came to dinner with us. Nice girl and surprisingly unflashy and that rare thing to me – a native Californian. I know only one other and that's Val Douglas. Ah yes, Budd Schulberg too but I don't count him as he has lived away from there so long.350 Tamara who inevitably in this literate family creeps in with petty pace from day to day is that thoroughly nice thing
– a well-educated clean looking intelligent middle-class girl finished educationally in Paris.351 Almost old-fashioned. I would have thought that Brian would have more sultry ladies around, more obviously sexy and faintly dirty looking. I suspect though that underneath his talk of pot and ‘taking trips’ etc. that he is as square as a board. He says that the teaching system in his school in NY was so abominable that he was more or less illiterate until he was about 17 and didn't read his first book until he was 18. For somebody of his obvious intelligence it seems incredible to me. By that age I'd read and sometimes learned by heart half the world's classics. Perhaps he exaggerates a bit but he also averred that he was given an IQ test when he was about 15 and got a score of 5 points below ‘Moron’. That I find hard to believe too. He may be over-compensating for slightly below average marks in exams by pretending he was an idiot. He failed to get his first job because he could not spell the opening words of an application ‘To whom it may concern’. He got through ‘whom’ all right but couldn't be certain of ‘may’. Was it ‘mae’ like Mae West or ‘may’ like the month or was it sneaky and neither of those but ‘mai’. He gave up and left. [...]

  I drank several glasses of nouveau Beaujolais last night at the Thanksgiving and though it seems innocuous it is not. I feel ghastly this morning despite tea and toast and copious swallows of coffee. Just had the bill from the hotel – $3000 approx. Staggering for just less than a week. They put up a buffet in Gianni's room for all the visiting couturiers and Van Cleef's and Alexandre etc. and it cost $500! Granted there were about 15 or 20 people but how could they eat and drink $500 worth of viands and vins especially when you think they barely had time to eat at all. Daylight bleeding robbery!

  I wouldn't have had E's day yesterday for anything. She spent the entire day being dressed in what seems countless dresses and innumerable hair-dos. She looks dishy though and I pity those other poor bastards like Marie Helene. The latter is, if you please flying in Di Rossi from Italy (Rome) to do her make-up.352 Nothing can help druan Rothschild – dim ond yr arglwydd.353 A hopeless task.