The Richard Burton Diaries

by Richard Burton

  JULY

  Thursday 3rd, New York It's 4.15 in the morning. Last night we had our first NY preview. In the last 48 hours I have suffered an agony of brand-new costumes. John Barber of the London Telegraph and old friend and wisest and most compassionate of men (dispassionate too) David Rowe-Beddoe had (the former, Barber, by Frank Dunlop and the latter Rowe-Beddoe by Susan) been invited to look with new eyes at the production – we could no longer see the wood for the undergrowth.3 Their observations were invaluable. And neither were sweeping generalizations but detailed analyses, scene by scene. Costumes worried them both. So they were changed. Why was I the only male member of the cast who didn't wear tights? asked Rowe-Beddoe. Had my legs suddenly, in middle-age become scrim-shanked. No, said I, spluttering at the very thought. I'll show you all by damn. And last night I did. All costumes had to be tightened up as I've lost 12–14lbs since we opened in Toronto. [...] Proper sleep – oh sleep it is a gentle thing beloved from Pole to Pole, To Mary Queen the praise be give she sent the gentle sleep from heaven that slid into my soul shall try again to sleep.4 It's now 5.30. Come sealing night.5

  AUGUST

  Tuesday 12th So much for a daily report. The show is a super smash hit. Particularly, apparently, for me which is gratifying but surprising as only now, six weeks after the opening am I beginning to get the piece safely under my belt. We broke records week after week. [...] The show is still enjoyable. Long may it be so. I dread the time when I have exhausted its every possibility and go on automatic as ‘twere. Thus far I haven't given the same performance twice. It is always different. It's unplanned – something curious comes from the audience and I instinctively respond – always, of course, within the frame-work of the play [...]. There have been a great many distinguished or notorious audiences I'll get to them by and by. I had one cauchemar, an appalling catastrophe which hardly bears thinking about. That too I will try to explain.6 Politics are the talk of the times. Last night was the first night of the convention (Democratic) and Senator E. Kennedy is out!7 There is a line or two in Kafka's letters that haunts me.8 I read it years ago and was impressed by its perfection of style (even in translation) but only in the last four or five years has it meant anything to me – I mean only its horrifying and real meaning, personally applied, has it brutally come home to me after all these years in the smugness of the dark. [...] I am writing to please myself though there's a feeling in some place in my head [...] that this might be publishable. I haven't been writing for nothing. [...]

  Thursday 14th Two shows yesterday and was I tired. Lots of people to see after the second performance. [...] Henry Kissinger's son, David, and a friend, Arnold Weissburger and Milton Goldman, Lucy Kroll, and others.9 The dressing room is so small that I have to see them in the corridor outside. The newspapers – but nobody else I notice – agog with a ‘great’ speech by Edward Kennedy.10 I read it and it is the usual fustian and good for his political future perhaps in 4 or 8 years time. He's a mere stripling of 48. Despite the polls I have a feeling that Carter will be re-elected.11 Perhaps because I want him to be. Henry Kissinger who came to see the play with his wife Nancy a week or ten days ago said that the re-election of Carter would mean ‘a world catastrophe’ within a couple or three years.12 Why? Because he (Carter) was totally ignorant of foreign politics. He was a peanut farmer and a fool and a megalomaniac. So, he said, was everyone else. Anderson (he'd seen him the night before in Washington) had a funny crazed look in his eye.13 ‘Messianical?’ I asked. ‘Yes.’ Kissinger looked much the same as he did in Jerusalem in 1975 when we talked at the King David Hotel after one of his shuttle diplomacy days in the middle of the night.14 A little less rotund perhaps and as witty and intelligent as ever [...] We supped at the ‘21’.15 The Doctor had about 6 guards within shouting distance. I remembered the contrast. In Jerusalem I was told there were 750 guards. 250 Yanks, 250 Israelis, 250 Arabs – for one man. The conversation went on for hours (we closed the ‘21') although it was more a monologue by Kissinger. I was [...] the feed or stooge. ‘The presidency is now open for any unemployed megalomaniac,’ was one of his bon mots. He used the word megalomaniac many times. Anderson was, Carter was, everybody else was including, he said, for a short time, he himself. Nixon wasn't. Well-well.

  [...] When we left I made as if to pay the bill as no one else seemed to be offering – I'm so accustomed to picking up the bills anyway but a shake of the H. waiter indicated – I think – that the good Doctor had paid. We had paid for the house seats so it was a reasonable exchange. We later found out that the K's are very sensitive about this kind of thing as some actor had bitterly asked why he or the management always had to cough up money whenever Kissinger came to see a play.

  Outside in the street Henry and David Kissinger announced that they were walking home to River House.16 ‘Take a couple of guards for God's sake,’ I said. He did. [...]

  Last night I ate dinner, half watched a film called The Dam Busters, read a little while Susan talked on the phone endlessly to Valerie in California, took a Mogadon and died for 7 hours.17 Dreamless. Awoke at 9.30. Tonight we have what Susan calls a day off – meaning I don't have a matinee. After the show tonight we have supper with Richard Muenz and delightful girl Nana.18 Muenz is an interesting boy. (Boy! He's 32) One other fascinating member of the company. Robert Fox.19 Both heavily weighed down with chips on the epaulettes but interesting and moody. I barely know the rest of the cast, though I have a long time to get to do so. 40 weeks or more!

  Saturday 16th Went to the Muenz flat. Delightful place, lovely, clean, Nana and Rich very good hosts. Muenz darkly funny at times. We talked into the small hours – of ghosts. [...]

  Last night some strange man in the audience offered a thousand dollars if we would do the last act again as the audience had not understood me profoundly enough when I bellowed ‘Long live the King.’ Towards the very end of the play, when I had the boy Tom of Warwick (Thor) underneath my arm this same strange one came up on to the stage and tried to wrest the sword from one of the ‘knights’ saying ‘I must have his eyes ... I must have his eyes.‘20 And ‘I have a message from God,’ and finally ‘I've failed. I've failed.’ He was, apparently, taken away by the police. I kept on going willy-nilly. This almost child-like piece of Lerner and Loewe's has most extraordinary effects on people sometimes. Weirdly eerie. Some people, intelligent ones too, come backstage and are seemingly struck dumb, apparently speechless or incoherent with emotion. Others wait until they have stopped crying before they come to see me. Others though are untouched, or appear to be so and are as bland as bananas. One thing I've learned though or understood rather from personal experience: The emotional impact of a supple voice speaking lovely sounding banalities can shatter even the most cynical and blasé of audiences. They tell me that Lloyd George was a genius at it and I suppose too Senator Ed Kennedy's speech the other day was something of the same thing. Alex Cohen [...] said much the same thing. Oddly enough he (Alex) gave me a book by Tom Wicker which recalls that frightening Republican Convention when Eisenhower talked of the press and the ‘media’ as being enemies of ‘the Party.‘21 Wicker says that the mass hatred of the conventioners was appalling and frightening. But then it is and always has been a frightening world. I am convinced that the self congratulatory, self and modestly named ‘homo sapiens’ is stark mad. Raving. And the beautiful Earth's greatest enemy. I hope we are a dying species, like dinosaurs and mastodons and brontosauruses, and that we will disappear in a few years, a few hundred years, a few thousand years or whatever so that some other sane species will evolve and nurture this heavenly accident we live on.

  There is an idiotic amount of fuss going on twixt batteries of lawyers about the fact that the management are flogging T-shirts which bear my name and likeness and Camelot. [...] Lawyers are an abomination and should all be hurled into outer darkness.

  Two shows today, one today and every day until we leave for Chicago. God save the mark.22 Kafka and those lawyers haunt me still. I'll get on to Kafka
tonight perhaps instead of watching the Avengers or Bogart or Clark Gable or Cannon.23

  Sunday 17th, New York More strange behaviour in the audience yesterday afternoon at the matinee. Miss Linda Ronstadt a pop singer and her leading man, a Kevin Kline, came to see the play.24 They had Christine's (Guenevere's) house-seats.25 The cast were greatly excited. I am not much for pop singers but Miss Ronstadt sings one song which is very attractive called ‘Blue Bayou’ which I greatly admire so I was pleased too that she was in front. At the end of the performance when the tumult and shouting had died she apparently came to my dressing room door and was told I'd be ready in a few minutes. She stood there for a time [...] and suddenly turned and took to her heels, [...] on to the empty stage, leapt from the stage into the side aisle and ran through the theatre and out.26 Her leading man (they are doing the Pirates of Penzance in the Park) also fled but re-appeared some time later and came into the dressing room to pay the usual compliments. I told him to tell Ronstadt that she was my favourite pop singer [...]. Robert Fox told me later that Kevin Kline was an old friend of his who had recently become very successful but obviously regarded Fox as beneath him now that he, Kline, was a ‘star’. [...]

  My ‘pinched nerve’, now infamous in legend and story, went back on me last night and I played most of the play in considerable discomfort. It started when I was sitting off stage smoking a cigarette and waiting to go on for the chess scene with Paxton.27 I handed the cigarette to Susan at exactly the wrong angle and the arm went berserk and played Hamlet with me, taking on a life – a spasmodic life – of its own. It's still a bit suspect today but much better and at least I can write this. [...]

  Back to random wanderings: The audience reaction to the play: When we were in Toronto and we received without fail standing ovations at every performance I warned the cast not to take it for granted, that it would only happen occasionally, if at all, in NY. But I was wrong. The same thing happens here with unfaltering regularity. I used to get the occasional house to stand up for me in previous plays but now they always do. Will they in Chicago and the rest of the places? It's a phenomenon that I am puzzled by. Is it nostalgia? The roars I get when I take my second solo calls are almost exultantly savage. Is it a ferocious hunger for the past, a massive ‘hiraeth,’ a sort of murderous longing for ‘home’ and security and simple peace.28 I don't know. It cannot be simply the performance. Some nights unavoidably, though I try like the devil to climb to the audience's expectations every time I play, I am not so good – but the final reaction is exactly the same. Is it that the audience know so much about me – or think they do – from my highly publicized and infamous past? Is it because my performance is now truly dynamic but no, it can't be that because only in the last couple of weeks have I taken absolute control of myself on the stage. Is it a combination of all. I shall never know. But let me say at once that to this little shrinking Welsh violet it is highly gratifying. Today, a glorious one I may say, we have a matinee – a glorious summer Sunday matinee. Will the ovations continue? I will refer to them never again – unless they stop. [...]

  Tuesday 19th ‘Only our concept of time makes it possible for us to speak of the Day of Judgement by that name; in reality it is a summary court in perpetual session.‘29 That is from a letter of Kafka's. It haunts me. The supreme judge at that severe searching of the soul is oneself. It is I who act, I who do the deed or have the thought and it is I only who can judge the action or the thought. I am prosecutor and defender, Satan and Saint. I am totally responsible for all my sins and goodnesses. And I am alone. That great storehouse of knowledge and memory, ignorance and idiocy, brilliance and banality, good and evil is in my own brain and only my own brain can call itself to the bar for the agony of self examination. An endless, life-long viva voce. I wish I had more time to think. I wish I didn't have the nightly performance hovering over me day after day. Last night the audience was a phantom, now with you, now gone, a chimera of wrong responses. I felt angry with them and I'm afraid allowed it to show a few times. Afterwards we went to the John McClures’ flat for supper.30 We talked until 3.15am. Mostly about Lenny Bernstein.31 How much we all loved him and how we loathed some of the things he does to himself and to other people. For Bernstein is indeed a fascinating creature, genius and dolt, a man and a woman. A boy and a girl. There is no personal hell quite like the hell Lenny lives through. All the time, all the time night and day there is the battle between his super ego and his utter self loathing – a Mahatma Miserable. I think that master means to die shortly unless the will to live reasserts itself. [...] I've written and thought myself into a state of depression. Ah! How I'd love the panacea of a drink now. A double ice cold vodka martini, the glass fogged with condensation, straight up and then straight down and the warm flood the pain-killer hitting the stomach and then the brain and an hour of sweetly melancholy euphoria. I shall have a Tab instead. Disgusting.

  Friday 22nd Still finding new things in the play. We have had three ‘bad’ audiences in a row, ‘bad’ in the sense that they chuckle and don't laugh. But their silence which is sometimes very wearing explodes at the curtain calls into a roar. Rex's new Liza Doolittle (Miss Kennedy) who is British saw the play from the sound booth.32 [...] I whispered to her ‘Don't get upset when Rex (Harrison) loses his temper – he doesn't really mean it.’ She said ‘he's very charming and we have lots of laughs together.’ Maybe the incomparable Rex has mellowed. If so he is not the Rex we have loathed and loved, lo, these many years.33 He is coming to see Camelot on Saturday night. God save the mark!

  Yesterday was our wedding anniversary – the fourth. Susan gave me a life-saving present. A portable book-case, immensely durably strong which, at a rough calculation will hold a hundred or so really heavy thick tomes and I suppose twice that number of paperbacks. She had conspired with the stage hands; props man and carpenter to make it. Was it not Francis Bacon who said that books make the best furniture.34 He's right. I can't stop musing at it. It is painted my colour. Red. Very fetching and a delight. My beloved John Neville just phoned. He is coming to the play tonight. A remarkable man – brilliant actor, administrator, director and with the possible exception of John Gielgud and Larry Olivier knows more about the practical side of the theatre than anyone I know. I spoke in a whisper as Susan still asleep – she packed [...] yesterday and is very tired. [...] I am useless to help her as my right arm – which is now affecting my left arm as well – is dead for lifting the lightest weight beyond diaphragm height. After the show I can only eat food that is possible to lift to my mouth with one arm. Ridiculous.

  [...] I was intrigued last night when one of the Chinese waiters after having asked me if the theatre had been full that night and my saying ‘to the roof’ he knocked on wood. I asked him if that was general in China. He said that it was. I said, ‘How does one say "good luck" or "touch wood" "good health" in Chinese.’ He said something that sounded like ‘Hoo Toy’.35 I'll try it out elsewhere to find out if he was pulling my leg. Which reminds me that Kissinger told us that the Chinese will still treat you as a President or Prime Minister or (in his case) Secretary of State after you have lost power – for ever. He instanced Edward Heath who was received with precisely the same courtesy and privileged treatment long after his fall from the highest office to the back-benches. They seem a very attractive people. Must go there one day.

  There is something rotten in the State Theatre.36 We are announced in the weekly Variety as grossing 98 or 99% capacity when we can see with our own eyes standing-room-only customers, together with collapsible, folding chairs down the aisles.37 We know from Nancy Seltzer (who knows about such things) that people are sometimes paying $30 for standing-room night after night.38 So where is that non-existent one or two per cent going to? It doesn't affect me financially as I have a fixed weekly wage but no percentage. What do the letters IRS mean to you at the Box Office?39 Very curious. The two producers – Merrick and Gregory – plead, I believe honestly, that they cannot account for it. So who's robbing wh
o? [...]

  Talked to my younger brother Graham yesterday. Onllwyn Brace, famous ex-captain of Oxford and a Welsh International rugby player, is coming to Chicago to show me a documentary film of one hundred years of Welsh rugby.40 It's our centenary and I am to narrate the film. It should be evocatively, perhaps tearfully good.41 I look forward to it. Welsh rugby is a mystique arousing in the Welsh a sort of madness when they play. I will write about it at length some day soon. It elevates us into ecstasy when we are at our brilliantly arrogant best and drives us to near suicide when we're not. [...]

  Thursday 28th, Chicago Have been here since Monday. We have either stayed at home and slept and read [...] or rehearsed and played in this abysmal theatre.42 It is enormous – seating 4,200 I'm told – and is atrociously designed. Endlessly long and thin and the audience seem a million miles away. [...] We must seem like ants to them and they seem to be from outer space to us. I know my eyesight is indifferent but I cannot even see the front row of the stalls especially because of the seeming blaze of the light on the orchestra. The first night [...] was funereal. F. Dunlop and M. Merrick et al. all assured us that the mass was enjoying it and laughing etc. but there was no hint of it on the stage. [...] The matinee yesterday was a little better and the response last night was almost riotous compared with the night before. But still it's very hard work. Susan went to the back of the stalls to check on her make-up of me. Especially the eyes, so vitally important to my kind of acting. She couldn't, she said, even see the expressions on my face – I was just a white amorphous blob – like Ralph Richardson thinks he looks like. ‘I have seen better looking and more animated hot-cross buns,’ he once told me of himself. Curious man Ralph. The official first night is tonight. [...] Talking of Ralph I had a note from J. Gielgud on Sunday last, written in his small fastidiously minute hand-writing saying he was sorry he'd missed me, had heard I was ill etc. I felt very guilty and hastened to phone him and ask him to come with us to the Kissingers’ for drinks and dinner. He regretted that he couldn't come. There was a Cocteau film on that afternoon which he simply couldn't miss and there was dinner with friends which dear boy much as he'd love to .... and so on.43 I mustn't be so remiss in future.