The Richard Burton Diaries

by Richard Burton

  40 A version of the line spoken by Lady Macbeth of Duncan, in Macbeth Act V, scene i: ‘Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?’

  41 'Snapshot’: one of Richard's nicknames for Elizabeth.

  42 FZ: Franco Zeffirelli.

  43 'Shumdit’ was another nickname Richard had for Elizabeth.

  44 Mike Todd Jr (1929–2002), the son of Mike Todd by his marriage to Bertha Freeman (1927–46). Around the World of Mike Todd would screen in September 1968.

  45 The covering of the Spanish Steps or Piazza di Spagna with flowers is an annual ritual in spring.

  46 Possibly the Vineria Il Chianti, Via del Lavatore.

  47 Porto Santa Stefano is on the Promontorio dell'Argentario, some 125km from Rome. Burton and Taylor had spent a fraught weekend there in April 1962 during their affair. Burton returns to discuss that weekend's events in his diary for 13 August 1971.

  48 Charles Herbert Beal (1908–91), jazz pianist.

  49 Agnes Flanagan was Elizabeth's hairdresser on Taming of the Shrew and would repeat this role for Doctor Faustus. Frank Flanagan was her husband. Frank La Rue was Elizabeth's make-up man for Taming of the Shrew and for a number of other films.

  50 Ristorante L'Escargot, Via Appia Antica, Rome.

  51 Cyril Cusack (1910–93) was playing the part of Grumio. He had played alongside Richard in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and would do so again in Tristan and Isolde. Victor Spinetti (1933–2012), a Welsh actor, was playing the part of Hertensio.

  52 'Cantank’ is another nickname for Elizabeth Taylor.

  53 Mia Farrow (1945—), who was to act alongside Elizabeth Taylor in Secret Ceremony.

  54 Kenneth Tynan (1927–80), theatre critic, journalist, literary manager at the National Theatre (1963–73). Truman Capote (1924–84), author. Tynan had reviewed and known Burton since the beginnings of his stage career. Capote was a friend of Taylor.

  55 Tynan's hostile Observer review (13 March 1966) of Capote's In Cold Blood (1965) provoked Capote into a reply (27 March 1966).

  56 Barry Norman (1933—), film critic and, at this time, show business editor of the Daily Mail, in which the interview appeared.

  57 Curettage: a surgical procedure using a curette, a small instrument like a scoop. A rather old-fashioned method of inducing an abortion, but also (and, it seems likely, in this case) a therapeutic procedure that may improve chances of future conception.

  58 Welsh for ‘Thanks be to Him / For ever remembering the dust of the earth’, a line from the hymn ‘Diolch iddo’.

  59 The first, unedited film sequence.

  60 Michael Hordern was playing the part of Baptista. Alan Webb (1906–82) was playing the part of Gremio.

  61 To finagle – to fiddle etc.

  62 Joshua Logan (1908–88), director. He was to direct a film version of Camelot starring Richard Harris (1932–2002) for Warner Bros which appeared in 1967.

  63 Garmisch, a ski resort in Bavaria.

  64 Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay (1800–59), who is credited with the response (at the age of four), after having hot coffee spilt on his legs: ‘Thank you, madam, the agony is abated’.

  65 Milton ‘Mickey’ Rudin (1920–99), lawyer with Gang, Tyre, Rudin and Brown of Sunset Building, Hollywood. His client list included Elizabeth Taylor and Frank Sinatra. Burton had been using the firm since the early 1960s if not before.

  66 Nevill Coghill (1899–1980), academic. Coghill, then fellow and tutor in English Literature at Exeter College, Oxford, had directed Burton in the 1944 production of Measure for Measure and had remained a friend ever since. Coghill, from 1957 to 1966 Merton Professor of English Literature at Oxford, would co-direct Doctor Faustus with Richard, having written the screen adaptation.

  67 Bach gan – bachgen – Welsh for ‘boy’.

  68 The London Adventure (1924) was the third and final part of the autobiography of the Welsh writer Arthur Machen (1863–1947).

  69 At the Basilica San Pietro (St Peter's).

  70 'Why so pale and wan, fond lover?’ is the opening line of ‘Why so Pale and Wan’ by Sir John Suckling (1609–42).

  71 Michael York (real name Michael Hugh Johnson) (1942—) was playing the part of Lucentio. He had read English at Oxford University and had worked with Franco Zeffirelli in the National Theatre prior to making his screen debut in The Taming of the Shrew.

  72 Luna Park – Rome's amusement park and funfair.

  73 Ambrose Coghill would play the part in the film of Doctor Faustus (1968) of Avarice/First Professor.

  74 George Henry Lewes (1817–78), On Actors and the Art of Acting (1875).

  75 Columbia Pictures were financing The Taming of the Shrew.

  76 Zero meaning Zeffirelli.

  77 A reference to John Bartlett, Familiar Quotations, which first appeared in 1855. ‘Fag’ here being short for ‘faggot’, a derogatory term for a homosexual.

  78 It is possible that Burton is making a reference here to Sharaff's homosexuality.

  79 Mike Frankovich (1909–92), film producer.

  80 Richard is here referring to Robert Traill Spence Lowell (1917–77), the American poet. Lowell's daughter Harriet was born on 4 January 1957, making her the same age as Liza Todd.

  81 Enzo: presumably the housekeeper or caretaker.

  82 Wolf Mankovitz (1924–98), writer, was to write the screenplay for Faustus and also work on The Battle of Sutjeska.

  83 Burton means Tommy Thompson (1933–82), journalist with Life.

  84 W. H. Auden (1907–73), poet. About the House (1965).

  85 Pamela Brown (1917–75) had played alongside both Burton and Taylor in Cleopatra, Burton in Becket (1964) and would play alongside Taylor in Secret Ceremony (1968). She had also acted with Burton in the stage production of The Lady's Not for Burning (1949). Sally Wilson (d. 1967) was the wife of Bob Wilson (b. 1905), Richard Burton's dresser and assistant.

  86 Dave Crowley (1910–74), former British lightweight boxing champion, occasional film actor, and proprietor of ‘Le Pub’.

  87 Maureen Cusack (died 1977) was Cyril's wife.

  88 Alfred Lynch (1931–2003), playing the part of Tranio, and Roy Holder (1946—), playing the part of Biondello.

  89 Paul Dehn (1912–76), screenwriter for Taming of the Shrew. He had also written The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.

  90 Natasha Pyne (1946—) was playing the part of Bianca.

  91 Kurt Frings (1908–91) was Taylor's Hollywood agent.

  92 The Bible: In the Beginning (1966), directed by John Huston and produced by Dino de Laurentiis (1919–2010).

  93 Gore Vidal (1925–2012), novelist, playwright, essayist and satirist.

  94 Princess Virginia Carolina Theresa Pancrazia Galdina von Fürstenberg (1940—), and Patrick O'Neal (1927–94) were making the film Matchless (1967) in Italy at the time.

  95 Hotel Fontanella Borghese on the Via della Fontanella di Borghese.

  96 Stephen Grimes (1927–88), had been the (Academy Award nominated) art director on The Night of the Iguana and was also to work on Reflections in a Golden Eye.

  97 Arglwydd Mawr, Welsh literally for ‘great lord’, but equivalent here to ‘good lord’ or ‘god in heaven’.

  98 Ossie is Oswald Morris (1915—), Director of Photography on The Taming of the Shrew, who had also been photographer on Look Back in Anger, director of photography on The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and who would be director of photography on Equus. Elaine is Elaine Schreyeck (1924—), responsible for continuity on The Taming of the Shrew, who would perform the same role for Doctor Faustus. She had been a script supervisor on Cleopatra, and responsible for continuity on Alexander the Great.

  99 Michael Cacoyannis (or Kakogiannis) (1922—), filmmaker.

  100 La Lupa; play by Giovanni Verga, 1896. Anna Magnani (1907–73), actor.

  101 'Undonog’ – Welsh for monotonous.

  102 Petruchio's speech in Act II, scene i, including the lines, ‘Say that she rail,
why then I'll tell her plain / She sings as sweetly as a nightingale’.

  103 Tuesday was the 24th.

  104 Corsetti's is an apartment complex at Tor Vaianica, on the coast some 30km south of Rome.

  105 Henry Cooper (1934–2011) fought the world champion Cassius Clay (later Muhammad Ali) at Arsenal Stadium on 21 May 1966, Clay stopping Cooper in the sixth round. Burton and Taylor had attended the first (non-title) fight between Cooper and Clay at Wembley Stadium in London in 1963, in which Clay had stopped Cooper in the fifth.

  106 Carlo is probably Carlo Lastricati (1921—), Assistant Director on Taming of the Shrew, who would also fill this role on Boom! and The Assassination of Trotsky. But also working on the film were Carlo Fabianelli, an editor (who was also to work on Doctor Faustus), and Carlo Savina, the conductor.

  107 Russell Braddon (1921–95), novelist, journalist and broadcaster, was to publish ‘Richard Burton to Liz’ in the Saturday Evening Post, 3 December 1966. His most famous book was The Naked Island (1952), an account of his time as a Japanese prisoner of war.

  108 Sir John Guthrie Ward (1909—) was British Ambassador to Italy from 1962 to 1966. His wife was Daphne Norah Ward (née Mulholland (1915–83).

  109 Bosley Crowther (1905–81), film critic for the New York Times from 1940 to 1967, and his wife Florence (née Marks).

  110 'Booby’: one of Richard's nicknames for Elizabeth.

  111 Joseph E. Levine (1905–87), film producer and promoter.

  112 OUDS: Oxford University Dramatic Society.

  113 Rolle, on the north shore of Lake Geneva between Nyon and Lausanne, is the location of Institut Le Rosey, the prestigious boarding school attended by Michael and Christopher Wilding.

  114 Joe Roddy had written an article, ‘Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton: The Night of the Brawl’, which had appeared in Look on 8 February 1966.

  115 McCall's: an American monthly magazine aimed at women readers.

  116 Malheureusement: French for unfortunately.

  117 Frascati, the important wine-growing area to the south-east of Rome.

  118 Bon Apetito is presumably a nickname for Taylor.

  119 A Bloody Mary is a vodka based cocktail usually including tomato juice, lemon juice and a dash of Worcestershire sauce or Tabasco.

  120 Agatha Christie (1890–1976), a prolific author of detective fiction. Burton had played the part of the detective Hercule Poirot in a production of Christie's Alibi while a schoolboy in Port Talbot.

  121 A reference to the Divina Commedia by Dante Alighieri (1265–1321).

  122 Montgomery Clift (1920–66), actor. He had starred alongside Elizabeth Taylor in Suddenly Last Summer (1959) and had been due to act in Reflections in a Golden Eye.

  123 The Grande Raccordo Anulare is a motorway encircling Rome.

  124 Nicholas Young was Technical Assistant on Faustus.

  125 Roderick Mann (1922–2010), then film critic with the Sunday Express.

  126 Darryl Francis Zanuck, (1902–79), a major American film mogul, at this time Executive President of Twentieth Century-Fox, and a man with whom Burton's career had been intertwined since the early 1950s. Zanuck had launched litigation against Burton and Taylor after Cleopatra, alleging that their affair had damaged the film's commercial prospects. The case was eventually dropped.

  127 Peter Evans (1938—), journalist, biographer and novelist.

  128 David Frost (1939—), broadcast journalist, at this time producing The Frost Report for the BBC. Frost had had a cameo part as himself in The V.I.P.s.

  129 Zeffirelli's production of Samuel Barber's (1910–81) opera Antony and Cleopatra was first performed on 16 September at the opening of the new Metropolitan Opera House in New York. It was not well received.

  130 Peter Evans's biography, Peter Sellers: The Mask Behind the Mask, appeared in 1968.

  131 Two of Richard's sisters died in infancy, one in 1903 and the other in 1908. Both were named Margaret Hannah.

  132 Ron, Richard's brother-in-law.

  133 Andreas Teuber, actor: formerly an undergraduate at St John's College, Oxford, he had played the part of Mephistophilis in the OUDS production of Doctor Faustus earlier in the year, and was now playing the same part (albeit titled Mephistopheles) in the film version. He has since gone on to a distinguished career as a philosopher.

  134 Artist and cartoonist William Hogarth (1697–1764), whose depictions of individuals were often unflattering.

  135 Lionel Davidson, A Long Way to Shiloh (1966), a thriller.

  136 Hugh Wray McCann, Utmost Fish (1965), a work of fiction (albeit based on a true incident), set during the First World War.

  137 Randolph S. Churchill, Winston S. Churchill, Vol. I: Youth, 1874–1900 (1966).

  138 'The Child is father of the man’: a line from the poem ‘My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold’ (1802), by William Wordsworth (1770–1850).

  139 Richard was considering the part of Napoleon in Waterloo (1970), eventually played by Rod Steiger (1925–2002), who, like Richard, had appeared in The Longest Day. They would both appear in Breakthrough (1979).

  140 Reflections in a Golden Eye appeared in 1967, directed by John Huston, produced by Ray Stark and starring Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor.

  141 This became the film A Guide for the Married Man (1967), directed by Gene Kelly (1912–96) and starring Walter Matthau (1920–2000).

  142 Burton means Prosper Mérimée's Carmen, (1845).

  143 The official cause of death was ‘occlusive coronary artery disease’, although it is thought that addiction to alcohol and drugs exacerbated Clift's health problems.

  144 Lorenzo James was Clift's secretary.

  145 The part of Lucifer was played by David McIntosh and that of Belzebub by Jeremy Eccles.

  146 Lionel Davidson (1922–2009) at this point had published two other books (under that name): The Night of Wenceslas (1960) and The Rose of Tibet (1962), both of which had been very well received.

  147 His past knowledge of Italian had been presumably acquired when in Rome shooting Cleopatra.

  148 Basil Fenton Smith (sometimes hyphenated as Fenton-Smith) had been sound mixer on Sea Wife, ‘sound’ on The Night of the Iguana and would perform that role again for Reflections in a Golden Eye. He would be sound recordist for Candy. Dave Hildyard (1916–2008) had been sound mixer on The Taming of the Shrew and was performing that role again for Faustus. He would later be ‘sound’ on Breakthrough. Robert L. Jacks (1927–87) was a film producer who had worked with Burton on The Desert Rats and was the son-in-law of Darryl F. Zanuck.

  149 Gwydion Thomas (1945—) who played ‘Lechery’ and ‘Third Scholar’ in Doctor Faustus was the son of the Welsh poet R. S. Thomas (1913–2000).

  150 Ronald A. Lublin (1918–2004), film producer. Lawrence George Durrell (1912–90), poet, novelist, dramatist. Oedipus the King was made into a film in 1968, although Durrell is not credited as a scriptwriter.

  151 Carl Foreman (1914–84) would produce MacKenna's Gold (1968) starring Gregory Peck (1916–2003) and Omar Sharif (1932—).

  152 This is a paraphrase of the lines spoken by the character Sir Stephen Scroop in Shakespeare's Richard II, Act III, scene ii: ‘Sweet love, I see, changing his property,/Turns to the sourest and most deadly hate’, and of the line spoken by the character Zara in Act III Scene viii of William Congreve's The Mourning Bride (1697) ‘Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned’.

  153 A part played by Elizabeth Taylor.

  154 The Fixer (1966) by Bernard Malamud (1914–86). It won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

  155 Federico Fellini (1920–93), director.

  156 On 24 September De Laurentiis had begun to take legal action against Fellini over the future of the film project Il viaggio di G. Mastorna. This dispute would be resolved early in 1967, although the film was never made.

  157 Vanessa Redgrave (1937—), actor. Married to Tony Richardson from 1962 to 1967, she
was to play alongside Richard Burton in Wagner (1983).

  158 Burton means Neil Hartley (1916–94).

  159 The ‘Greek gigolo’ was Thodoros ‘Theo’ Roubanis, in 1967 to become the third husband of Lady Sarah Consuelo Spencer-Churchill (1921–2000). They divorced in 1981. Roubanis had a minor acting part in the Richardson-directed film, The Sailor from Gibraltar (1967), which is the context referred to here.

  160 Burton presumably means posizione – position.

  161 Hugh Williams was playing Second Scholar and Richard Heffer (1946—) First Scholar.

  162 Sheila Pickles was Zeffirelli's personal assistant.

  163 'Cargoes’ (1910) by John Masefield (1878–1967). Should be ‘Quinquereme’.

  164 Elmo Williams (1913—), President's Representative for Foreign Productions, Twentieth Century-Fox.

  165 Ruth Blackmore was the granddaughter of Philip Burton's half-brother (18 years older than he), Will Wilson. Wilson's daughter Megan, a lecturer, had married Fred Blackmore, a school headmaster.

  166 Richard Alderson, known professionally as Christian Alderson, actor, friend and one-time companion of Philip Burton.

  167 The Christian Science Monitor is the newspaper of the Church of Christ, Scientist.

  168 My Dog Tulip by J[oe] R[andolph] Ackerley (1956). A film version was released in 2010.

  169 The Comedians was Burton's next film project.

  170 Burton was anticipating the role of Arthur Chipping in the musical version of Goodbye Mr Chips, which eventually came out in 1969 with Peter O'Toole (1932—) as the lead.

  171 Pipo the donkey appeared in the film.

  172 Jack Hildyard (1908–90), cinematographer, brother of Dave Hildyard. He had been director of photography on Suddenly Last Summer and The V.I.P.s, and would perform the same role on The Wild Geese and Ellis Island.

  173 Roy Thomson (1894–76), had become Lord Thomson of Fleet in 1964.

  174 Peregrine Worsthorne (1923—), deputy editor and columnist for the Sunday Telegraph.

  175 Silver Masks are the annual Italian awards for achievement in the theatre, cinema, opera and television.