The Richard Burton Diaries

by Richard Burton

  Sunday 5th, Ritz386 Back at last at the Ritz though I could stay forever at Ferrières, and am feeling rather as if we've been on a personal appearance tour for the promotion of a film. This I supposed because one feels when there are a few strangers about, even though perfectly amiable, that something is expected of one and there is a slight suggestion of mildly self-conscious projection of oneself. There was a late lunch today – one of those splendid upper-class English brunches complete with small sausages on plats chauffand and big sausages and eggs labelled 2 minutes or 3 or 4 or 5, boiled of course and haddock poche a l'anglaise though the English could never do them so well and endless varieties of breads and biscuits and toasts (very un-Anglo-Saxon except for the last) and confitures – marmalade, strawberry – and fried bacon and fried bread but in croutons (also non English) and coffee and tea. Alex Rede and a beautiful Eurasian-looking lady was there as well as Etienne (reputedly M-H's lover though he may just be ‘a good friend') and the blonde man – Olivier?387 We talked of poetry again. Possibly because last night after dinner in the cosy corner room they asked me to speak some and I did and E says they were very impressed and talked of it when I left the room to go to the lavatory to pee which I seemed to be doing all evening. They seem, apart from the man called Etienne, to enjoy poetry when it is spoken for them but rarely to search it out themselves. I was a little cautious of speaking even a minute snippet from Hamlet with an audience consisting, among others, of two professional actresses – David's girlfriend, Marisa and Marisa's friend Charlotte – but E assured me that they too were held and agog. So that's alright. Also, both E and I are mean customers if there's ever the slightest suggestion of ‘singing for our suppers’. Which there never is at the Rothschilds’. They really have – every one of them, including Philip (16) and the other 14 year old one – exquisite manners.388 We discussed manners as an art in itself the night before for a time and we all agreed that the man with the most exquisite manners of any person we all of us knew was the Duke of Windsor. It was Guy who put him forward as the claimant. And, though I'd never thought of him before as being so superbly well-mannered, I immediately agreed. It is a fact said I that manners are not the result of good breeding or intelligence for we know many well born and highly intelligent people who are boors, and that I personally knew many miners who have superb and quite un-self-conscious good manners and that manners, true good manners like charm you have or you don't. You cannot teach people to be charming and though manners may seem to be a question of opening and closing doors and holding chairs and standing up when a lady comes into the room etc. merely it is something that has to be done with an indefinably unobtrusive grace. Tim Hardy, for instance, whose manners are meticulous nevertheless manages to make himself faintly obtrusive, you are aware of his manners. So delicious were the Duke's that I hadn't thought of his being so until Guy pointed it out. I myself am incapable of such behaviour – and I am not being false cavalier – for I am simply not made properly. In fact, both Elizabeth's and my manners are appalling but E's obvious good nature and natural charm (if she likes you) and of course stunning beauty carry her through whereas I pretend to a gruff peasantness which (if I like you) carries me through. I hope. [...]

  Monday 6th, Ritz389 After having arrived back last afternoon I read papers and did yesterday's entry and read a book by Ross MacDonald and half watched TV and talked to Kurt Frings agreeing to see him and his lot today at 5 o'clock downstairs to ‘discuss the script and read a note from a boy called Richard Sterne who addressed his note ‘Most noble Richard of Burton’ and ended ‘Richard of Sterne’.390 Surprising, this, as he has always struck me as being a most solemn feller and not given to even mild flights of fancy of this kind but he has been in Paris for a year or so as he says ‘a great year here in Paris at the school of Marcel Marceau’. That's the mime chap I think.391 And perhaps the air of Paris has gone to his head. He kept a diary and tape-recorded a book called John Gielgud directs Richard Burton which I couldn't read but which other people obviously could as he says it is going into a second edition. He said he was below with ‘Joanna the Piana’ whoever that may be. Was there a girl in Hamlet called Joanna. Don't think so. The Sterne man played an infinitely small part but I can't remember which. He left his tel no. and I shall call him sometime if we stay longer in Paris as we may now as Losey wants me to do dubbing on Trot on the 13th in Rome and we are trying to get him to change it to here. Going home to Gstaad and then packing again for Rome a couple of days later would be another trauma and drama. [...]

  Tuesday 7th, Ritz392 We shall be going to Rome, tomorrow night on the sleeper train leaving here at 6 and arriving in Rome at 9 the following morning. The motto is ‘Bon soir, Paris – Bonjour Rome.’ The Roman people said that they couldn't possibly get the loops ready by Thursday whereupon E said then very well he won't be able to come until the middle of January. Promptly they called back and said they'd be ready by Thursday.

  Yesterday was one of those bitty days and today promises to be the same. [...] I went downstairs at 5 o'clock to talk to Dmytryk and about six other people including Frings who was the only one I knew and I said that E thought the end of the film too portentous and idiotic but that I didn't think a horror film should be taken too seriously either way as long as it was well done. We agreed on a venue outside Budapest and that we would live in a house if possible and a hotel if not. And they told me they had Virna Lisi and almost had Andress and Ann-Margret.393 I couldn't care less but just to test their veracity Gianni called Lisi and I asked her if indeed she was in the film as I didn't trust anyone and she said yes but that she wanted to play the biggest part but they had said they had to have an American star for that because the man was probably going to be unknown and they needed Box Office but that now that I was the star who needed, she said and wanted an American star and would I mind if she tried for the biggest part now. Go ahead. Go ahead. And then there was talk about Brian doing a film with E and the TV films of Osborne's seem to be very confused. Nobody seems to know what is going on and there's a TV thing about Tennessee Williams directed by Hutton who is rapidly becoming a part of our lives and he wants and we want him to do the Osborne plays so we are all three likely to walk down the aisle before long and plight eternal troth.394 And Stanley Donen of the squeaky voice called on the phone asking Comment va tu and I said Bene gracie and he's coming today at 2 o'clock for discussion re Little Prince which they want to do in the Spring and it all has to be fitted in with E and then there's also Absolution and I may kill myself on Christmas Day and screw everybody.395

  We went to the Duke and Duchess’ house last night for dinner with half a dozen of the most consummate bores in Paris. I don't know their names but I shall never need to remember them for I have an idea they are people who only go to the Windsors and one of them – probably the old Duke – must die very soon – though it is she who is now nearly completely ga-ga. It was a sad and painful evening and needs a long time to write about and I haven't got the time. They both referred continually to the fact that he was once the King. ‘And Emperor,’ I said at one point. ‘And Emperor,’ she repeated after me, ‘And Emperor, we always forget that. And Emperor.’ He is physically falling apart, his left eye completely closed and a tremendous limp and walks with a stick. Her memory has gone completely and then comes back vividly in flashes. She derided Grace Kelly all night as being a boring snob. I defended but she would have none of it. I finally gave up as I knew that half the time she didn't know what she was saying. There was one woman there a French woman who protested violently that she was not Swiss – what's so wrong with being Swiss – and who is married to a Hungarian Count who obviously didn't realize that the Duchess was gone away from us and attempted pathetic rational argument. I gave the word. Her husband said that Tito was the natural son of a Hungarian Count who had exercised his Droit de Seignor or whatever that's called over Tito's mother's family. I said I would tease him with it when next we saw him. I doubt it. Both the allegation and that I woul
d tease him.396

  Wednesday 8th, Ritz397 The Hungarian and his French wife were quite serious about Tito's illegitimacy and his being the natural son of a Hungarian nobleman as last night at Baron de Rede's supper for Liza Minnelli the wife slipped me a note with the name of Tito's father on it.398 The father was a Count Erdody with an umlaut above the o, and he had fancied Tito's mother who supposedly a maid at Erdody chateau or castle or whatever the hell Hungarians have, was a pretty little thing, and was snapped up by the lechy count. Josip Erdody Tito. Pronounced Err-durdy. It might be possible to introduce it into conversation with Tito by saying something like ‘My God, the Capitalist West and its decaying aristocracy claim even the foremost living Communist. D'you know sir, that they said of you quite seriously that ...’ and then duck or wait for the firing squad. The Count, the Parisian one I mean and not the dirty one who fathered Tito, said to me ‘Has it ever occurred to you to wonder why these peasants, these Brozzes, managed to have such a beautiful family home? You must have seen it.’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘I haven't seen it but on reflection it does seem to be rather grand for poor people but I assumed that it had been tarted up by Tito after he became President. I have only seen still snaps of it in books.’ ‘My dear Burton, go and look at the house the next time you and Mrs Burton are in Jugoslavia. It's an easy trip after all. It has the best road in Jugoslavia leading to the god's birthplace. And it is not smartened up at all, except perhaps its immediate surroundings. It is as it was.’ We will go if we have the chance. I'm sure that the Slavs will lay it on for us. It would weaken Tito immensely with the out and out extremely Lenin-Stalin Marxists to find him so tainted but I have an idea that any documentation will have been erased from all slates including living memory, if any. [...]

  We went, E in a Caftan of Slav-Turkish origin and as heavy as lead with me in a dinner jacket with an all-black ruffled shirt with one brilliant diamond pin borrowed from Van Cleef mounting firmly to the chin. [...] Liza's opening numbers were frighteningly and intensely nervous and with the exception of Lena Horne (and possibly myself when boozing in a heat-wave) I have never seen anybody sweat so much.399 After a time she settled down though I suffered agonies for the first 15 minutes. Rocky Brynner (Yul's son) sat in front of me and was so nervous for her, being her follower since childhood apparently, that he made me more nervous. However her shattering nervous energy finally communicated itself to her hopelessly dull audience until they went too far and would not let her leave the stage with a steady unisonic handclap and she did another number and still the now really silly audience asked for more and I told Rocky to wave her off – she was right near him – and off she went.

  Alex de Rede's house is a museum and ought to be in one.400 It was as intimate as a Maples show-window, but all done with superb and detailed taste.401 It's a shame as well as a surprise to find out that it's not his house but is leased by him for 60 years so all that labour, and labour it is – he must have spent millions and travelled the world – will eventually fall under the auctioneer. Apart from some very discreet ceiling lights the whole place was lighted by candles and these were endlessly multiplied by mirrors. I sought the far room as soon as I arrived and sat there alone for ten minutes savouring a glass of Perrier – still liquor-less after an intensive 6 days of society – and I mean ‘savouring’ as I was terribly thirsty for some reason – and but for those concealed ceiling lights I could have been back in time a couple of hundred years. The same faces appear at all the parties. We talked to Salvador Dali for a time who clowned about charmingly as usual giving us his Catalanese pronunciation of ‘butterfly’ which cannot be impersonated in print.402 The English live in fogs and therefore everything, including their language is rife with imprecision, including their language, he said, but our Catalan is sharp-edged and everywhere defined and sharply dominant, like our language. Nonsense I said. Your language with all its esses elided in eths sounds is liquid but not limpid, it is muddy like your minds. He left saying ‘butterfly’. With him was a striking looking blonde, tall and thin, who stared at me all the time while at dinner and Guy (blonde hair always falling over his forehead) Barrault(?) was helpless with stoned laughter saying Tu as ton ticket, c'est drôle, tu as ton ticket et la dame est un homme.403 And so she was. The girl was a man. [...]

  We are off to Rome tonight on the train and I'm looking forward to it. I've had enough of French society. Also their faces were beginning to become familiar to me and indeed some of them began to acquire names as the same faces are seen at all parties. I want to retreat now into the silent world of the Alps and bury myself in walks and books and dogs and hibernate until the holidays, so loathed by me, are over. Messy Xmas trees that shed and the house running with people.

  And now to meet someone called Robert (I think) Hakim, one of the innumerable Hakim (Egyptian) bros re Under the Volcano.404

  Friday 10th, Grand405 To work at 9 this a.m. and with a bit of luck I might be finished by lunchtime but I may become word-drunk around midday and it might be better to take a break before the final and last lap. Also I remember I have to do a lot of off-stage talking – nothing specific but the sort of diatribic stuff that Joe can shove in anywhere. Joe says that the visions over my shoulder things don't work and that he has cut them all out. Just badly done he says, the machine incompetently handled as he saw the same technique used on British TV only two nights ago absolutely brilliantly. Comes to something when the poor relation does technically better stuff than the rich Uncle. I thought at the time that the technical boys on the process were all too familiar to me, faces that I'd seen around for years in Italian films and guessed then that such a new process would demand, normally, new men – particularly the men who invented it, and usually young men. They were all old. That is at least my age – middle aged-ish.

  E is eating as if she is about to acquire some dreadful disease which will include a loss of appetite, and so that while she is hungry she will eat and eat and eat. I keep on telling her that she is as round as she is tall which is a complete lie as apart from her impossible stomach and her hereditary double chin she is not really all that tubby. She is well covered though. She is one of those who can only diet when the mood takes her and then she goes too far. Since she doesn't have a weight problem of any consequence she could eat very well, not dieting and still remain trim without too much trouble, but milady has all the discipline of a mountain pony. I enjoy self imposed discipline, there must be a masochist hidden here somewhere, though in the matter of dieting I find it hardly any trouble at all. [...]

  Evening

  I finished my so called two days’ work in less than a day since yesterday we worked only from three ‘til 5.45 and today I cleared the lot by lunchtime. Much private rejoicing as I hate that aspect of the work. After it was over I saw a reel of the film leading up to and including the assassination. It will look good I'm sure when all the thuds and noises are put in and the blood is very effective and will be more so in a good print.

  Trap and Joe [Joseph and Patricia Losey] and the children are coming for dinner and I have just seen a pair of diamond earrings for a cool million dollars. They were two pendant diamonds 30 carats each and very beautiful and superbly cut but I told Gianni Bulgari's man that the price was outrageous and that I would find it nasty to buy them even at 1/2 half that cost.406 Bet you an offer nearer the latter than the former will come through ere long.

  Saturday 18th, Ariel407 I stayed in bed for as long as I could bear it but finally – foot or no foot – I got me up and with cunning contortions managed to dress myself, sat me in a chair in the bedroom, placed another chair as a table and wrote yesterday's entry. I then began [...] the article for the Mail. I have a vague shape of it in my head and I did about 200 words though they have yet to be polished and balanced. At the moment I have only the vaguest idea as to how long it will be – anything from 1000 words to 3000 would be my guess.408 [...]

  Chris arrived last night very late and I was so bushed that I simply couldn't wait up for
him. [...] Chris looks magnificent and is his usual sarcastic denigrating nothing-is-any-good self. Ron and E say that last night he excelled himself and Ron said, ‘You'd better get him the hell out of that school in Krautland Richard – they're turning him into a Nazi.’ I replied that nobody had to worry about his turning into Attila the Hun but Attila was the bloke to worry about. What did he say or do, I asked. They said that after he arrived Vicky asked him if he wanted to play Yahtsee and he replied: No, it's a boring repetitive and stupid game. Well, said I, in Chris’ defence he's right and it is. However, I agreed he might have been slightly more non-committal as everybody else there was obviously enjoying the game. In any case I would prefer, in anybody, more jaundice and cynicism than over-sentimentality.

  Sunday 19th, Gstaad409 I went out last night to the Olden which was very crowded [...] Ron became sweetly and uncomfortably drunk very quickly and by uncomfortable I mean that I was afraid he was going to do something disastrous like fall off his chair or something. [...] we limped out and home in the car. Astonishingly after about 15 minutes at home and two games of table-tennis with Mike, Ron became merely pissed again instead of paralysed. [...]

  Tuesday 21st, Ariel410 Yesterday's entry is missing because I worked all day long, as I had most of the previous day and far into the night, on the story for the Mail. I read the first rough unhesitant plunging in up to the neck to Elizabeth who told me, though I was piqued at the time, but only for a second, that I must simplify it. So back I went to work, balancing and measuring and for the only time in my nothing writing life I looked up something in Roget's which I have never done before except for crossword puzzles and amusement. I can't remember what the word was that I was having difficulty with but in any case Roget's was no help and I ploughed on with my own built in one. I did almost all the work in long-hand, and not having written with pen and ink or pencil for many years I had the forgotten writer's cramp. It's very evident in the script, the writing starting off so neat and trim and mathematical and ending in huge drunken sprawling hieroglyphics. The deadline was this morning and assuming that I could send it by telex from the Palace Hotel I typed it laboriously out. Inevitably as I typed I deleted and added and changed the structure of sentences. I have never written anything so long (for publication I mean) in so short a time. The previous shortest for 2 or 3 thousand words was about 6 weeks. This one was 3,400 approx and in 3 days. Phew. I would have liked another week on it. E thinks it marvellous so that's ok and the Editor was bubbling over with words like Scoop. We all think it is a scoop. The staff are delighted etc. which is ok too. [...] I am worried about my sweet E. She doesn't seem to be at all well and her back is kicking up again like fury. It's a dreadful thing to think when we love this house so much but I am beginning to have the horrifying suspicion that the altitude is too much for her. She sparkled in Dubrovnik, she was radiant in Rome, she was a young girl in Paris but here she seems listless and slightly bored all the time, not just with me, but with everybody and everything. I think that already she is wishing that we were here just the two of us. We must use this time as a testing period for if it is the altitude then we must simply go lower down.