The Richard Burton Diaries

by Richard Burton

  Enough of the car journey. As we approached the last few miles to Ferrières there were policemen, mostly motorbiked every few hundred yards and learned later that Guy had arranged for a policeman or van every 1/2 mile from Paris. All the way from Paris!

  Now President Pompidou used to be employed by Guy de Rothschild before and after he became Prime Minister and the new Prime Minister was also to be here last night but was unable to come and rang M-H this afternoon while we were there to apologize not only to M-H for not being able to come and telling the reason why but also asked the names of his two side by side companions in order to apologize to them too. Toujours la politesse. So it is no wonder that Guy can commandeer the entire Parisian Police force if he so wishes. As we turned into the drive the entire house faced us and for the first time since we've been coming here was lighted up. It looked magnificent and were it the clop-clop of horses and the smell of saddle leather and blankets round the knees and not the low hum of a heated Cadillac we could have been back a hundred years. The main entrance however was only for the herd – we entered by the side door as we usually do and went straight up to our rooms having some difficulty in finding out where was which and who was where. Sorted out finally we found ourselves in the Chambre Rose while Grace used the Chambres Balcon to change in and do her hair. We are changing from our chambre to the Balcon tonight while at dinner. The Rose while very nice and suitably rosy with all the decoration à la Wedgwood, panelling and all, has an outside bathroom which though exclusively for our use meant having to put on a dressing gown, if you happen to be in shorts in case of running into M. Olivier who lived next door and shared our little hallway. Also, to our surprise, we could hear everything in the two adjacent rooms quite clearly, it therefore following that everybody could hear us. So it will be nice to gossip at normal voice.

  I sat around and waited for the girls to be ready – my girls including the Duchess of Windsor and The Princess of Monaco and of course my very own ‘girl’. Grace was ready and waiting about 10 minutes before time and came to our room for a drink. E would have been ready but Alexandre, the hairdresser, took forever to arrive and longer to do M-H's hair-do. We had been told that we were to descend strictly at 9.10 and sit down to dinner at 9.30. We descended at 10.30 and sat down at 11pm. The great hall had been made into a dining room for the occasion and was impossible before we began. It took me 15 minutes to get to my table from the door – I timed it – and after having trod on endless trains and knocked aside several expensive coiffures, virtually climbing over half a dozen people, I found myself at table no 11 with madam de Montesquieu on my left and the former Mme Louis Malle on my right both of whom, thank God, I knew.368 Now for an hour or more of absolute agony. The waiters simply had no way of being able to get round the tables so most tables including ours elected one person to receive all the services and pass them on from hand to hand. The food was divine, or perhaps I was so hungry that it seemed better than it was, and I made an arrangement with Mme Malle who is a very beautiful but giant of a woman for her to pass me all her refills of water while I passed her all my wines. She must have a powerful head for she must have had well over a dozen glasses of various wines – champagne, a white wine, the inevitable Lafitte and a second white wine which I guessed from its viscousness was Chateau d'Yquem and it was. My attention was however riveted from the first by a man sitting opposite me.369 He looked like a cadaver when still and a failure of plastic surgery when he moved which was seldom. He was eyebrow-less and eyelash-less and atrociously wigged or dyed with snow white hair at the front of his head and to the crown and nondescript brownish, rather like mine, hair at the back. His face was hideously pasted with make-up and had odd lumps on it, a face made of funny putty by an inept child. I had just asked in Mme Malle's ear who was that extraordinary thing over there when he leaned forward and said ‘Where's my Elizabeth?’ Ah, I said, well now, she is ah, over the other end of this ah sitting and ah eating indeed at the ah corresponding table to this but ah at the ah other end if you know what I mean. I wish she was here, said he, the inference being that far better her than me. So, as a matter of fact, do I, I said with a speed which would have done the Rev Sydney Smith no harm to admire.370 [...]

  After the strangely delivered question from Andy Warhol for that is who the horror film gentleman was, we all settled down to the battle of the food. I discussed on my left with Madame de Montesquieu who is indeed descended from the great Charles Louis Secondat, Baron de la Brede et de Montesquieu who wrote L'Esprit des Lois, poetry which all started by her saying that she had been at somebody's house and they had played records of me speaking The Ancient Mariner and how this woman who had given the party and played the record said that she had heard me speak poetry at the Rothschilds’ ‘and even Guy listened’ and that she (the hostess) had gone out and found all the records she could find of me speaking verse.371 I asked Montesquieu twice who the woman was and twice she told me but I should have written it down as I have forgotten it already, but would like to know who this lady is. Just out of curiosity. It wasn't Lili Rothschild who I know has some of my poetry things. So we talked about French poetry which I told her I was only just beginning to read and enjoy. She was rife with platitudes and has quite clearly inherited nothing from the great Baron except his name. She was, is, tall and blonde and retrousse-nosed and about 35. Mme Malle and her sideman were much more amusing and I think that E would like Malle. She, the latter is nicely unhappy, almost desperate I would guess and she and I and the man on her right discussed painting. I said my usual and quite true things about Art, that I didn't understand it at all and derived pleasure only from the occasional picture but that, quite clearly, I was artistically ‘tone-deaf’. I said that we had what was by common consent a very fine Van Gogh but that though I was impressed by it I didn't know why it was remarkable and that to me the most impressive thing about it was its estimated value in cash which was enormous. Apart from the written and spoken word – preferably the former – the only other art-form that genuinely could disturb me was music, some cheap some deep. Malle and the man protested that music at its greatest was so much like painting at its greatest that I must try again with painting. I said I would.

  Meanwhile at the other table E and Grace were having a marvellous time. The lucky bastards had Guy, the Duchess of Windsor, Maurice Herzog, Jean-Paul Binet and a few others.372 The star turn according to E and Grace was the Duchess who is perhaps getting slightly ga-ga. She has an enormous feather in her hair which got into everything, the soup, the gravy, the ice-cream, and at every vivacious turn of her head it smacked Guy sharply in the eyes or the mouth and at one time threatened to get stuck in Guy's false moustache which was glued on. She made one bon mot which had Grace in tears. After having got her incredible feather into everything possible she then called in her very penetrating voice, having a desire to write down her tel no for E and me which has changed since they sold their house, Est-ce-que quelle-qu'n qui a une plume?373 She was most insistent that E and I should see the Duke before we left for Gstaad giving E the feeling that he is probably on his last legs. We are going to dine with them on Monday night. Binet flirted blatantly with E but in the best French manner and they had the same hysteria with the serving of the food – Grace being the hander-over.

  After the dinner, Guy asked E if she would help him remove his moustache which was now becoming a bore. They went into a gents lav, or rather a lav for either sex while a servant stood on guard outside. Bettina elected to choose this time to try and get into the same loo not knowing that E and Guy were inside. E had removed the moustache and was cleaning around Guy's mouth when Bettina finally burst past the servant and found them in this situation. It looked for all the world as if E and Guy had been having a necking session and E was now removing the evidence. Bettina was delighted by the whole thing.

  By this time the rest of the guests, as it were the ‘b’ list were arriving. They were announced in a stentor voice by a gentleman with a large voice and
a large intricately carved staff – I've forgotten what they call those things – with which he pounded the floor and boomed that Madame et Monsieur Harry Dogface to which fascinating information nobody except the people who had just whispered their names to him paid the slightest attention. I squeezed past them followed by Mme Malle and her friend and Elsa Martinelli and somebody else (uninvited) to take them to the lav of our room.374 E was already in the room repairing her maquillage with Bettina. I sat thankfully and smoked before we went back into the whirlpool below. We both sat for a time with Grace and Ricardo? of Madrid in the normally intimate corner of the first room. Scores, perhaps hundreds of people flocked past on some pretext or other to view E and Grace. I wandered about after a time talking to this one and that including Jaqueline de Ribes, Pierre Salinger and wife, Sam Spiegel and M-H's lovely big brother that we call ‘Broken-nose’ and occasionally I caught glimpses of E being avidly though covertly gazed at wherever she went.375 And I congratulated Salinger on the success of his book and how much I'd enjoyed it and that I had read it in one sitting and had he yet sold it for a film and he had – to CBS – and we then talked of the splendid night in LA when Bobby Kennedy and I insulted each other's races bloody Irish v bloody Welsh and the usual Kennedy–Burton quotation match, and Rudi Nureyev and his wickedness and how horrified and struck dumb we all were by Bobby's assassination and how much we all loved him and later I found de Ribes flinging herself flatteringly into my arms socially acting as ever the Grande Dame with lovers and asked her how her love life was and she said she had a fantastic new lover and where was he said I and she looked and couldn't find him and how he had made her feel 18 again and I didn't say that 18 she might feel but 80 she looked, beautiful 80 but 80, and Broken-nose told me that Sam's film Nicholas and Alexandra was a slow film and very long but nevertheless very beautiful in it.376 [...]

  Have had a lunch, a too-much lunch for me of soup, lamb cutlets and boiled new pots in their jackets and string beans followed by a splendid gateau, and a sit-down. I told a lot of stories about the theatre and about British royalty. And after tisane which I drink here all the time, E and I and a lovely young girl, an English actress called Charlotte something went for a walk around the lake.377 It was lovely and there were millions of birds chattering in a copse – what kind of birds I have no way of knowing and the walk though pleasant didn't succeed in burning away my dinner.

  ... many other people told me of Sam's film and all of them reacted in more or less the same way. It is quite clearly an honest but rather dull film.

  After a time wandering about Grace asked me to see her upstairs and help her remove her borrowed choker and get her to her car. I suppose it was about 1.30. This I did nearly strangling Grace to death while trying to get the necklace off. For a minute she was in bad trouble as the necklace got twisted up as a result of my inept handling of the clasp as the bloody thing was too tight in the first place and, in fact, I had told her before we went down to the ball that she ought to remove it telling her she didn't need it. However, we finally twisted it around so that she herself could see it in the mirror and finally we released her. Even when off it took considerable strength to unclasp it. So down the stairs we went together. At the bottom, alone, was Sam Spiegel. ‘Where are you going you two?’ ‘For God's sake’, said G, ‘don't Sam say a word to Elizabeth. She's at the Ball, she's dancing, she's happy, let us go. Richard will let Elizabeth know. It's going to be a shock but ... these things happen.’ Etc. For a full 1/2 minute Sam, because of Grace's normal seriousness and because of her very good piece of acting and my deliberately stricken-with-guilt face, was taken in. We made off. Found Grace's car after a lot of waiting in the piercing cold and she was gone. She was quite the nicest she's ever been and David Rothschild expressed astonishment that she could be so gay.378 She had always he said been a bit of a dead weight. On the contrary, we said, but she does need a little drawing out. Actually it is the nicest she has been in all the years since we've known her as a Princess. At one moment during the choking choker episode I saw mental front-pages in France Soir’s and News of the World’s lurid headlines. Famed Actor Strangles Princess in Bedroom at Rothschild Mansion During Grand Ball.

  For the rest of the evening we wandered about and ran into Audrey Hepburn and her ludicrously named Italian psychiatrist husband Doctor Dotti who is not very nice I think.379 We had snaps taken of us by Cecil Beaton who is also not very nice in a different way.380 Then in another room we had snaps with Audrey Hepburn and M Dotti and Doctor Troques and his wife and after an encounter, very strange, with M-H's sister-in-law Gabby Van Svillen who insisted that she was the Tsarina of All the Russias.381 Did she, I asked politely feel this because she had in fact some Romanov blood – Mike Romanov blood, I added. No, she said, everybody is someone else and I am the Tsarinevitch. What about you? she said. I want to be a fellow of All Souls, I said.382 A what? she asked and lost interest. I was saved by a man called Valery who is the son of the poet.383 He was charming and again we discussed poetry. He told me of the time when everybody assured his father that he was a dead certainty to win the Nobel Prize for Literature that year and with what excitement, sitting in the garden, the maid came out in a hurry to say there was a long-distance call from Stockholm for him, he went bounding into the house to hear the great news only to find it was a wrong number. He never did get the Nobel Prize.

  Then there was a young man with long blonde curly hair who followed E everywhere struck all of a heap with a mighty passion, dog-like in his adoration, looking a bit I thought like the American Pianist Van Cyburn, slavering at the jowls – of which he had none – in hopeless lust and writing her a note promising to dedicate his next novel to her.384 His name is Francois-Marie Banier who has already made something of a stir with his second novel which he promised to send me or bring me I can't remember which to the Ritz on Monday.385 He was engagingly eager and I shall read with interest.

  At one moment Marie-Hélène came up to me at the bar where I was talking to Salinger's wife about Tours and the surrounding country which I love and blind as a bat as she looked me straight in the face at a distance of 11/2 feet and said ‘Where's Richard? There's a woman who's dying to meet him.’ ‘It is I, Hamlet, the Dane,’ said I whereupon she screamed a little and went off at a tremendous pace forgetting to take me with her, and I never did meet the woman who was dying to meet me and Marie-Hélène has already forgotten who it was and indeed the entire incident. Salinger's wife asked me if people were always so cruel to Marie-Hélène. Cruel in what way, I asked, puzzled. Oh you know, she said, everybody thinks that she's a tremendous hypochondriac and once she fainted and fell off a chair in a restaurant and everybody carried on eating and talking as if nothing had happened and nobody picked her up. How, I said, extraordinary. Where did this happen? But then we were interrupted by someone and I never heard the details. I must find out next time I see her or Pierre.

  Then at an earlier point of the evening that stupendous bore who is married to the sister of Guy's first wife I think came up to us and kissed E's hand with great unction and then Grace's very condescendingly and said – and there is nothing so intimidating – do you remember me, the many times we used to go to Lulatch's house. Who? asked Grace, genuinely puzzled. Lulatch, Lulatch, Lulatch, she loved you more than life, Lulatch, I'm terribly sorry said Grace but I'm sure I would remember that name. Lulatch, Lulatch, Lulatch, he said, she loved you and she died a terrible death eight years ago on the 27th of July but you have forgotten, it doesn't matter, ah if only we were here for 2000 years. Rather than just 1000 I said. Yes Yes Yes and I remember the night you and your superbe wife came to Eli Rothschild's house and we stayed up all night. And you made passes at me, said Elizabeth. And you and your superbe wife argued about poetry and she was right and you were wrong and it was a memorable evening. And you cried about the German Economic Miracle, I said. My god you're right, he said. What a memory. Quelle Memoire extraordinaire. What a memory, what a memory, the German economic miracl
e. What a memory. We got away from him somehow. A loathsome feller.