The Richard Burton Diaries

by Richard Burton

  I've had a bellyful of the USA already and am ripe to go back to Europe though I will doubtless regret that after a few days behind the curtain and be lusting for the States again. Phoenix was a tremendous disappointment. I had a totally different picture of it in my mind. And I had no idea that it was such a huge city. I thought in terms of a 150,000 and not a million population as it is. When we left it we could see its great sprawl and there was the unmistakable smog. I had visions of Norman Rockwell far west with local drugstores and shops on the corner and the Town Hall with a church and a square and a drugstore and all that Andy Hardy stuff.

  I talked to Kate last night. She sounded flip and cocky and I soon found out that the reason for that was that there was a girlfriend there so a little showing-off was going on. We will probably see her on Wednesday [...].

  FEBRUARY

  Tuesday 1st, Los Angeles A nice day yesterday. Howard and Mara arrived safely and I read and wrote practically all day long. The only cessation was in the afternoon when I talked with McWhorter and later with Alex Lucas. The first about the Canterbury Tales and the second about Hammersmith.15 The former says he has three millions to do the former and the latter wants to get some control of Hammersmith. Good luck to both.

  I popped up for about 15 minutes to see Sara with Elizabeth. The lady is still bonkers without any question. The entire bungalow apart from Sara's bedroom and sitting room [...] is stacked to the ceilings with bric a brac in boxes. And what rubbish! E found a packing case that appeared to contain nothing but tin-foil TV dinner plates [...]. Staggering idiocy. When E remonstrated with her about this she burst into large and, if E knows her, crocodile tears. [...] I told E last night that we must regard her as if she were a child of 10 years old and a very spoiled one. She must do what we – her parents say – and not what she whimsically feels like doing. [...] Val says that Robbie is weaving a web – his own words – around Sara to get her back to Phoenix. Well, in the immortal words of Zee, Scarlett, I couldn't give a sheeit.16 [...]

  Wednesday 2nd, Beverly Hills Hotel [...] We leave at 11 for NY and tomorrow night we leave NY for Rome in the evening. So we haul our indifferent bodies from yet one more continent to another. In a few days we shall be in Budapest and I am agog with curiosity. What will Hungary be like? It is impossible to find any literature on modern Hungary. Only a Fodor travel book which is hopeless and stops at ‘56. Will try again in NY. I can't believe that there is so little stuff about a famous modern state. Lack of interest must be the answer. Books on the impenetrable Red Chinese are all over the stalls, two of which I bought yesterday together with $150 worth of other books, mostly paperbacks with at least half being whodunits for the long stay in Budapest. The Cadogan diaries, the closing circle, the something foxes – highly recommended tome on international espionage – ecological books.17 Barbara Tuchman's Stilwell and the American experience in China or some such title and a mass of Simenons and Creaseys and Helen Macguiness and A. A. Fairs and godknows what other readable rubbish.18 But I guess that if there's so little about Hungary outside the country there'll be little about the West inside Hungary and without books of some kind E and I pine.

  The one possible pleasure of the journey is that we may get a few hours of Kate in NY if Aaron can spring her from school for tomorrow. [...]

  I am getting nearer and nearer to an attempt to give up cigarettes, not out of fear of cancer but simply because a) it's a filthy habit and b) I want to try and prove to myself that – as with booze – I am Henley and the master of my fate etc.19 As for the fear of cancer I am one of those who believes they will either have found a cure by the time I get it or that, like my heavily smoking father, I won't get it at all but die like him at 83 of a stroke. I am determined to do it and will decide, after a suitable time period not yet decided precisely whether the effort is worth it. With alcohol it unquestionably is. [...]

  Both of us are very glad to be on our way out of the States. Phoenix was the final straw that broke our camel's back. We had thought the American malaise to be possibly confined to big industrial centres, business centres, NY, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles etc. But it's everywhere. [...]

  Thursday 3rd, New York Airport We are at something called the International Hotel five minutes from the airport [...]. We are surrounded by a mass of Aaron's Praetorian guards, Tom Horan, Steve, Dug senior and junior and Rosemary, taking all the rooms around us and making sure that no wicked ones from the terrible city of NY will attack the Burtons. With justice too. The last time we were here we were very lucky to get safely away with our baubles intact. The gang – still at large and still operating – have pulled several jobs since they missed on us.

  The journey was smooth [...]. There was a film called Kotch on which I could only watch for a time though E watched it all the way and said afterwards that it was beautifully done. After ten minutes however I could see the whole course of the movie and found reading more congenial.20 [...] There were hordes of snappers when we came off the ship and they backed and clicked and attracted crowds so that the journey to the car went on and on for about what seems a good 1/2 mile but was probably only a 1/4. I would have become angry in the old days were I drunk but I merely looked blank instead.

  Tonight we're off again to Rome. [...] Have just read some more notices for XYZ which are all highly praised stuff for E but not so much for the film. The film is good so don't understand the carping at the film.

  Have just been sent the script of a horrifying book of police corruption which I was sent to read three or four months ago. Will read it and decide. Rather like playing cockney thugs even though this one is supposed to be a policeman.

  Friday 4th, Rome Late afternoon in a raining Rome. We flew from NY last night into the teeth of a howling 90mph gale. [...] The film we saw was called The French Connection which was done in a very mystifying fashion.21 Elizabeth, who hadn't like me read the book, confessed herself utterly lost in the plot from time to time and because of the looseness of the direction wasn't sure sometimes who were cops and who were the baddies. Also the director having obviously decided that the original story was too quiet and tame, quite arbitrarily put in two episodes – a hair raising car versus electric train race with a mad killer aboard the latter, which had nothing to do with the film, and the final showdown was the olde classical gun-fight while in the original documented book, as I remember, there was no gunfight at all. Not one single shot fired as far as I can remember. Still, it was fast moving and interesting enough.

  [...] I feel better already since coming back. I really am a little old European. We leave on Monday for Budapest. [...] I also have to ice skate, a little exercise I haven't done for years, and the return to that mildish form of exercise and balance is going to be very interesting.

  Damnedest thing about E's chimerical looks. She looked, in the USA the worst I've ever seen her. Tending to bloat, uncertain complexion, bags under the eyes – particularly the left, probably as a result of the cyst operation which is developing an internal keloid, and now suddenly this morning, in the plane she was back to being ravishing again when after two days of nightmarish travel she should have looked her all time worst. Funny woman. Actually I think that, at last, E now shows the effects of heavy drinking whereas Howard – apart from slightly bloodshot eyes in the first waking – still looks as if he's just come back from a health farm. Mara and I still look – as we always have – like the end of the earth. [...]

  Saturday 5th [...] The top ten box office things have just come out in the States where I am not No 1 as in Europe but number 6 or 7.22 E is ahead of me there so there must have been releases of some of her previous pictures. Any way the old firm is still way up there. My phraseology is becoming more and more transatlantic. That's what comes from being married to an American and being in America for ten days and reading American books.

  I read a script in NY – the book of which I have already read – called Sir, you bastard and which is very and horribly compelling (about police corruption)
but suffers from the same weakness as Villain.23 It will not be understood by the yanks. And one can't make pictures nowadays for London only. [...]

  Sunday 6th [...] I have so lost count of time and days that I had a lovely surprise – paradoxically an expected surprise if I'd known what day it was and that we were playing Scotland at Cardiff yesterday. Anyway, there were the lovely headlines. ‘Welsh Crush Scots’, ‘King For A Day Gareth smashes Scotland’, etc. We had beaten the Scots, strongly fancied in some quarters after beating the French by 20 points 4 weeks ago, by 35 to 12. Wales scored 5 tries to Scotland's one and three of the Welsh tries, one by Gerald Davies and two by Gareth Edwards had to be seen apparently to be believed.24 I feel very strange about this Welsh team. It would appear that they are the greatest all round team since the ‘Golden Age’ from about 1900 to 1910 and like the golden men of that age, talked about with breathless awe by those who saw them, and again like those immortal ghosts, I have never seen them play.25 I believe that I saw Gareth Edwards play for Millfield in a ‘Sevens’ many years ago but apart from him and possibly John Dawes playing for London Welsh I have never even seen them play as individuals.26 The Welsh this century, apart from a mediocre patch in the 20s, have always been able to produce very sound teams and nearly always hard to beat with an occasional match winner or two in the side, men out of the common mould like Bleddyn and the Cliffs Morgan and Jones, Tanner, Wooller, Watkins the forward before the 2nd War and Watkins the fly-half since, but since the Golden Age I cannot remember – on paper at least – a team that contained such a heavy percentage of ‘geniuses’ at the same time.27 Morris of Neath, Mervyn Davies and John Taylor in the pack, Edwards and John at half back, John Williams at fullback, Gerald Davies on the wing and – in full cry – a virtually unstoppable Bevan on the other wing.28 I have to guess that Bergiers and Lewis in the centre are sound, especially in defence.29 What I should do is write to Cliff Jones and ask if I can buy 16mm copies of the matches played in the last 3 years including the tests against New Zealand and have myself a punny ball.30 Must do so.

  Tomorrow to Hungary. I am looking forward to it with excitement. The very name Budapest smacks of romance and tragedy and wild Magyar music. It cannot, simply cannot be dull, regardless of friends’ warnings that it is the most depressing capital in Europe. I shall start out, at least, refusing to be talked into disliking it before I find out for myself. And again the Communist experiment is eternally fascinating. There must be some alternative to the idiocy and rat-race murderousness of ‘democracy’ and I'm pretty sure that Communism is not it but it is different so one more look at one more communist country.

  I went to the ‘Lion’ book shop yesterday and bought yet another pile of books for the ten week stay in Buda and Pest. Cadogan's diaries, A. L. Rowse's two vols The Early Churchills and The Later Churchills, Solzhenitsyn's Full Circle, Chosen Words by Ivor Brown.31 Two dual-language Penguins of Mallarmé and French Poetry of the 19th Century.32 A book by Auberon Waugh – son of Evelyn.33 Isaac Deutscher Red China Russia and the USA – I think it's called.34 A Hungarian Grammar. And a handful of thrillers. So we should have more than enough to get through ten weeks.

  Monday 7th We leave this afternoon for Budapest flying at 3.30. The people are so adamant that we depart and arrive at the border, at the exact time over the border rather, that one gets the impression that if we are too early or too late we will be buzzed or shot down. This must be a very nervous frontier anyway since 1956 but particularly since they have a very nervous Jugoslavia nearby.35 Joe and Patricia came for drinks and dinner last night and Joe, who has just come back from Jugland, said that the talk is that the dissident communists in Croatia are being financed and armed by either Nazi Jugoslavian exiles operating behind great wealth from South America or by Russia or both.36 [...] I wonder if the old man is going to be forced to start shooting a few blokes at last.37 If he doesn't and things get worse the Russians may come over the border ‘to help out’ as they did in Hungary in 56. Who knows? Merely taking political prisoners may not be enough. A few public trials and death sentences or forced exile may be called for. I hope the old man clears everything up shortly for out of sheer affection I'd not like to see his majestic and reasonably humane leadership of his marvellous little country fizzle out into a bewildered and helpless kow-tow to the Muscovites. Taking the long view it won't much matter historically if Jugoslavia becomes yet another satellite of the Kremlin's for nobody is going to be able to keep those people down for long.38 It is writ down in corporal in the books for all to read, They cannot be a subject race for long. With the Mexicans I have never fallen so violently in love with a nation at first sight, as I have with the Jugoslavians. As for Hungarians, the only ones I have consciously known have been successful exiles – George Tabori and he who gave me his word and a contract for £100 per week while I was still slogging away in the theatre – the incomparable Alex Korda.39 When I think of Hungarians I emblematize them in the person of that great scoundrel of ineffable charm, huge generosity and large lies, of living grandiosely beyond his means, of telling me of poverty in Paris where he lived at one time – he solemnly assured me – on one gigantic cake sent him by his mother, for 6 weeks. When, out of the blue, I was invited to have lunch with him at 146 Piccadilly which turned out not to be lunch at all but coffee and cigars, and he said in his growling Hoongarrian English, ‘Would you like to work with me?’ I stammered a sort of ‘Yes, but of course I have to...’ ‘It will hardly inconvenience your stage career. In fact I insist that the theatre must come first. I am going to give you £100 a week for five years. I have never seen you act but I have heard from a friend or two that you are going to be an actor of importance. My friend and colleague Laurence Olivier told me that you are a natural aristocrat and now that I have seen you I know that he is right. I am therefore investing £5000 on a belief that Olivier and I are right. So learn all you can in the theatre. Try not to get in long runs, do as many plays as you can. Go to Stratford. Buy a car, get your wife a mink. Enjoy yourself.’ I was in a daze of delight. I was about 24 – no 23 years old – and the most I'd ever earned was £12 a week. ‘Sign this,’ he said indicating one sheet of paper with only one side worded. I began to read it. ‘Good,’ he said: ‘never sign any paper you haven't read and understood.’ It said roughly that I was to be available to Sir Alexander Korda for a maximum of 12 weeks a year at my convenience, for a maximum of 5 years during which time – if I did a film for anyone else – I was to get my usual 5000 plus half of whatever price the other film company were prepared to pay. The other half was to go to Korda's company ‘London Films’. I danced down Piccadilly to the nearest pub and phone. I called home and told Syb. I called Stanley Baker. I told the publican – a complete stranger. I called Ivor through Dai John Philips.40 When the pub closed at 3 I suppose it was, I took a taxi, undreamt of extravagance, to the ML Club near the BBC where I was sure that there would be a few congenial well-wishing friends. To cap it all the late and beloved Dylan was there and the even later and equally beloved Louis MacNeice both of them well on the way to stupefaction. Vague figures loomed in the haze of smoke and alcohol and I had pretty well run through my first week's salary by the time I arrived home in the little hours.

  This was an astonishing step forward. Many young actors, some of them good like Dirk Bogarde, Donald Houston, Andrew Crawford, Jimmy Granger – I think – and Jean Simmons were under horrible contracts to the Rank Organization but I was under contract to Sir Alexander Korda and his other contract actors were Olivier, Vivien Leigh, Ralph Richardson and a host of other giant names. A very much posher and distinguished lot than the Rank ‘stable’. In the end I never did do a film for Alex. He loaned me out to Emlyn Williams and Tolly de Grunwald and then to Fox for a film called My Cousin Rachel with Olivia de Havilland as my leading lady.41 I was still agent-less (unless one considers Korda as my agent) and Fox offered me $50,000. I had told Syb and the family that I was going to stick out for £7000. When the Fox representative, whose na
me oddly enough was Freddie Fox, offered me roughly twice what I was so ruthlessly determined to hold out for I agreed at once. I must confess to lying about it all to my friends and saying that I had fought them every inch of the way to get that enormous sum. To ice the cake Korda said he was not going to take his cut but that I should go out and buy a Rolls-Bentley immediately. I bought a Mark 8 Jaguar instead.

  But there was more to come. The man who insisted I played in the film was George Cukor, an infinitely wicked and loveable man as well as being, at his best, one of the very fine directors. He has seen me and was seeing me in a play of Lillian Hellman's yclept Montserrat.42 I didn't think much of the book or the script but I thought a lot of Cukor and my leading lady was, he assured me, to be either Garbo (who told me mendaciously but charmingly some months later, having seen the film, that she would have done it had she known I was so good) or Vivien.43 So I left with Syb and her brother Dai Mogs – just down from Cambridge with a deliberately indifferent degree – who was supposed to be my secretary though I ended up answering not only my own post but his too – on the Queen Mary first call and all found.44

  By the time we got to NY 51/2 days later Cukor had been either fired or had withdrawn (I never did find out which) and my leading lady was Olivia de Havilland who had just won two Oscars in three years and was in the language of Hollywood ‘hot, hot, hot.‘45 She was married to a very eccentric man, very forgettable, who thought that his wife was the mid-century Duse and had a notice put on the board that all members of the crew and cast were no longer to call Olivia ‘Livvy’ which was her long-established diminutive in the industry, but as Miss De Havilland at all times.46 I was also told by Zanuck's hatchet man [...] Lew Schreiber that Miss De Havilland would not permit me to have co-starring billing with her. I didn't mind about the billing a bit and to this day I have never cared about it but I did get the impression, later confirmed, that they were hoping I would do a Rex Harrison and arrogantly walk out as they wanted somebody else, or Miss De Havilland wanted somebody else – I seem to remember it was Greg Peck – to play my part.47 I said somewhat testily to Schreiber that I had worked with the greatest living actors and actresses and they hadn't fussed about billing. So I stayed but with a little murder in my heart for Miss De H. The film, for some forgotten reason was delayed for 7 weeks and we lived in a small – large to us – duplex apartment on Charleville Boulevard. It was during those seven weeks that I started the hunt for Jean.48 It didn't take long. What has this to do with Hungary? Well, eventually it will lead back to the loveable larcenous Sir Alex Korda. [...]