208 Romy Schneider (1938–82), who would play the part of Gita Samuels in The Assassination of Trotsky. Delon and Schneider had been engaged from 1959 to 1963.
209 The film is Bloomfield (1971), directed by Richard Harris and Uri Zohar (1934—).
210 Bay of Biscay.
211 A reference to Zeus as a swan seducing Lda.
212 Rocco and His Brothers (1960), directed by Luchino Visconti. Renato Salvatori (1934–88) won many plaudits for his part in the film.
213 Delon had been questioned in connection with a police investigation into the murder of Stevan Markovi (1937–68), one of his bodyguards, in 1968. Markovi 's body had been found outside Delon's Paris home. There had been a considerable press furore surrounding the murder, which had also involved Georges Pompidou.
214 Medea, Greek mythological princess of Colchis, with a reputation for hysteria vengeance and ruthlessness.
215 Liz: wife of Brook Williams. Mick: business partner of Brook Williams.
216 Friday was 8 October.
217 Victor Serge (1890–1947), Memoirs of a Revolutionary (1963). Serge's real name was Victor Lvovich Kibalchich.
218 The passage (reproduced accurately by Burton) is to be found on p. 195 of Serge's volume, and refers to Sergei Yesenin (1895–1925).
219 Burton is referring to the direction taken by the Russian Revolution of 1917.
220 Saturday was 9th October.
221 Marian, Richard's cousin, whose husband Carl Mastroianni died in 1971.
222 Burton may mean Sunningdale, near Ascot, in Berkshire, which is about 20 miles from Reading.
223 Mcdonald may refer to the art director on Boom!, Richard Macdonald, who was production designer on Secret Ceremony, would be production designer on The Assassination of Trotsky, and later on Exorcist II.
224 Losey had directed The Go-Between (1970).
225 Ho Chi Minh (1890–1969), Vietnamese revolutionary leader.
226 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), directed by Richard Brooks (1912–92).
227 Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In was an American television comedy show.
228 Valentina Cortese (1923—) played the part of Natalia or Natasha Trotsky.
229 This may be what appeared in Harper's Bazaar (April 1972), 126–9, as ‘Ten Years Since Scandal Time’.
230 Powell, The Military Philosophers (1968).
231 King Constantine II of Greece (1940—) and his wife Queen Anne-Marie (1946—), who had fled Greece in 1967. The Greek monarchy was abolished in 1973.
232 Farah Pahlavi (1938—), Shahbanu (rather than Shahrina) of Iran.
233 It may have been ‘the dust of eld’, used in the first chapter of The Military Philosophers.
234 Alexei Kosygin (1904–80) was attacked by Hungarian refugee Geza Matrai shouting ‘Freedom for Hungary!’
235 Hamlet, Act II, scene ii: ‘I have of late – but wherefore I know not – lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercise; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'er hanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals – and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?’
236 The Savage is Loose was made into a film in 1974, directed by George C. Slott (1927–99).
237 This would become the film Divorce His, Divorce Hers (1973).
238 Jean Desailly (1920–2008) played Alfred Rosmer and Simone Valère (1921–2010) played Marguerite Rosmer. Desailly and Valère were real life partners, later husband and wife.
239 In fact it was Seva Trotsky, Trotsky's nephew, played by Marco Lucantoni.
240 Jeffrey Archer (1940—), then MP for Louth.
241 Lew Grade (1906–98), of Associated Television (ATV). St John Ambulance, a charity teaching first aid and offering ambulance services.
242 Pablo Neruda (1904–73). Salvador Allende (1908–73), President of Chile.
243 In 1962 the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Francis Harry Compton Crick (1916–2004), James Dewey Watson (1928—) and Maurice Hugh Frederick Wilkins (1916–2004), ‘for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids’.
244 Alfred Nobel (1833–96) invented dynamite.
245 Winston Churchill actually won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953.
246 Sunday was 24 October.
247 Harry Saltzman (1915–94), producer of Look back in Anger, and then all the James Bond films up to The Man with the Golden Gun (1974).
248 Baruch Spinoza (1632–77), Tractatus Politicus (1677), ‘I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them.’
249 Burton was agreeing to perform in a production for Harlech Television of what would become Divorce His, Divorce Hers.
250 The Compact OED was published in 1971, reducing the original 13 volumes to two.
251 Michael Linnit, theatrical agent. Linnit & Dunfee was a theatre management company.
252 Hermann Hesse (1877–1962), Steppenwolf (1927; English translation 1929).
253 Robin: Friend of Michael Wilding.
254 The diary entries from this day until 10 November are either typed in red or underlined in red.
255 Sheldon Harte, the character played by Carlos Miranda.
256 Time, 8 April 1940.
257 ‘Dear Abby’ was a syndicated advice column written at the time by Pauline Phillips (1918—) using the pen name Abigail Van Buren.
258 Cecil Gee, a London menswear store. John Elias o Fon (1774–1841), a famous Welsh Nonconformist preacher. Frankie Howerd (1917–92), actor and comedian.
259 Mr Micawber, in chapter 12 of Dickens's David Copperfield, says, ‘My advice is, never do to-morrow what you can do to-day. Procrastination is the thief of time.’
260 Fiumicino airport, Rome.
261 Stansted airport, Essex.
262 The ‘ould sod’: Ireland.
263 The Post Office Tower in central London was bombed by the IRA on 31 October 1971.
264 James Joyce. Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘Pied Beauty’, includes the line ‘All things counter, original, spare, strange’.
265 Brigitte Bardot (1934—), actor and model. Roger Vadim (1928–2000), actor, director, husband of Bardot (1952–7), later of Jane Fonda (1965–73).
266 Charles Baudelaire (1821–67), Les Fleurs du Mal (1857). These lines do not appear to be a direct quotation from Les Fleurs du Mal, although they may owe something to Baudelaire's ‘Le Gouffre’.
267 Ohrbach's: an American department store.
268 Thursday was 4 November, as Burton had previously entered.
269 Frank Sinatra had announced his retirement on 12 June 1971. He returned in 1973.
270 Baroness Orczy (1865–1947), The Scarlet Pimpernel (1929). Adventures of the Scarlet Pimpernel was published in 1794.
271 Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) and Ford Hermann Hueffer (later Ford Madox Ford) (1873–1939), Romance (1903). F. Tennyson Jesse (1888–1958), Many Latitudes (1928).
272 George Eliot (1819–80), Adam Bede (1859). Francis Iles (1893–1971), Malice Aforethought (1931). John Wain (1925–94) had by this time published five novels.
273 Iris Murdoch (1919–99), A Severed Head (1961). Peggy Webling (1871–1949), The Story of Virginia Perfect (1909).
274 Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–81). Marcel Proust (1871–1922). Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850). Alexandre Dumas (1802–70) Gustave Stendhal (1783–1842).
275 John Cottrell and Fergus Cashin, Richard Burton (1971).
276 Clara Cluck is a Disney character but this may well be a reference to Claire Bloom.
277 Portage la Prairie, Man
itoba.
278 WAAF: Women's Auxiliary Air Force.
279 Hedy Lamarr (1914–2000), actor.
280 This would appear to be an inaccurate reference to a line from the hymn ‘Cwm Rhondda’: ‘death of death, and hell's damnation’, although it is possible that Burton was familiar with a different translation from the Welsh.
281 The first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, the second on Nagasaki on 9 August 1945.
282 Henry Longhurst (1909–78), golf columnist. Hugh McIlvanney (1933—), sports journalist. Michael Parkinson (1935—) wrote a sports column for the Sunday Times from 1965.
283 Sir Harold Hobson (1904–92), drama critic of the Sunday Times (1947–76). Dilys Powell (1901–95), film critic of the Sunday Times (1939–76).
284 James Agate (1877–1947), theatre and film critic.
285 Jack Hulbert (1892–1978), actor.
286 Neil Porter (1895–1944), actor and producer.
287 Anna Neagle (1904–86), actor.
288 Maxine Audley (1923–92), actor.
289 Kenneth Tynan had joined the National Theatre in 1963 as its literary manager. He wrote Oh! Calcutta! (1969).
290 David Niven, The Moon's a Balloon (1971).
291 This passage is described on p. 297 of The Moon's a Balloon.
292 The scene is described on pp. 292–3 of The Moon's a Balloon (1972). Niven uses the phrase ‘the awed and grateful audience’.
293 ‘Dumbum’ or ‘Dum Bum’ was Bogart's Danish crewman on his yacht the Santana.
294 Proust's A La Recherche du Temps Perdu was published between 1913 and 1927. Burton considered a screenplay based on the novel, written by Harold Pinter (1930–2008), in 1972, but the film was not made.
295 Constant Lambert (1905–51), composer and conductor.
296 Thomas Love Peacock (1785–1866), Nightmare Abbey (1818). Burton appeared in the BBC Radio production on 7 November 1949, playing the part of Scythrop Glowry, generally regarded as a depiction of Shelley.
297 John Dearth (1920–84), who had played with Burton in Look Back in Anger.
298 The George, Oxford Circus.
299 Robert Farquarson (1878–1966). Ernest Thesiger (1879–1961), who co-starred with Burton in The Robe. Andrew Cruikshank (1907–88). Robert Speaight (1904–76). James Stephens (1882–1950), author of The Crock of Gold (1912). James McKechnie (1911–64).
300 The Savile Club, Brook Street.
301 John Ford (c.1586–c.1640), ‘Tis Pity She's a Whore (1633). George Chapman (c.1559–c.1634), The Tragedy of Bussy D'Ambois (1607). Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1343–1400). David Jones (1895–1974), In Parenthesis (1937); idem, Anathemata (1952). James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (1939).
302 Burton's father was 81 when he died in 1957.
303 The Unforgiven (1960), directed by John Huston and starring Burt Lancaster (1913–94) and Audrey Hepburn. It was filmed in Durango, Mexico.
304 Battistoni's boutique, Via Condotti.
305 Grace Kelly's birthday was 12 November.
306 Donald Zec (1919—) would publish a biography of Elizabeth Taylor in 1982.
307 Valentino's, Via del Babuino.
308 Heading in red type.
309 We will stay at home quietly with books, newspapers and this typewriter.
310 Irving Paul ‘Swifty’ Lazar (1907–93), talent agent.
311 Heading in red type.
312 Carlo Cotti (1939—), who was proposing to act as director of a film on the last days of Mussolini.
313 Clara Petacci (1912–45).
314 Presumably Burton means Gewürztraminer.
315 Bernard Delfont (1909–94), theatrical impresario. Harold Pinter, playwright, who had written the screenplay of The Go-Between. John Heyman and Norman Priggen (1924–99) were credited as producers of the film.
316 Billy Wilder (1906–2002), producer.
317 Sight & Sound, a monthly film magazine (1932—).
318 Heading in red type.
319 Wilfred Wooller (1912–97), international rugby player and sports journalist for the Sunday Telegraph.
320 Alan Hoby (1914–2008), sports journalist for the Sunday Express. Danny Blanchflower (1926–93), international footballer and sports journalist.
321 Henry Brandon (1916–93), Washington correspondent for the Sunday Times. Philip Toynbee (1916–81), columnist for the Observer. A. J. P. Taylor (1906–90), historian, columnist for the Observer and the Daily Express.
322 Mrs Grundy, a character in Thomas Morton, Speed the Plough (1798), taken to mean someone who is extremely strait-laced and conventional. John Gordon (1890–1974), columnist in the Sunday Express.
323 A reference to the 1960 Peter Sellers and Sophia Loren single ‘Goodness Gracious Me’.
324 Peter Sellers's third wife was Miranda Quarry (1948—).
325 Sellers's marriage to Britt Ekland had ended in 1968.
326 Huston and Sallis's son Danny (now an actor) was born in 1962.
327 Sallis is of mixed English and Indian descent.
328 Anna Kashfi (1934—) was born Johanna O'Callaghan in Darjeeling, India. Her family moved to Cardiff in 1947. She and Brando were married from 1957 to 1959. She has claimed that her father William, a London Irishman, was her stepfather and that her biological father was Indian.
329 President Franz Jonas (1899–1974). Giuseppe Saragat (1898–1988), President of the Italian Republic. Hotel Quirinale, Via Nazionale, Rome.
330 Ivor Novello (1893–1951), composer, actor, singer, whose musicals were renowned for their spectacular aspect.
331 Robin Stafford, foreign correspondent for the Daily Express.
332 The date is wrong. Thursday was 18 November.
333 Bert Mortimer was Peter Sellers's valet and driver.
334 Ritz Hotel, Place Vendôme, Paris.
335 A reference to The Diamond as Big as the Ritz (1922) by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940).
336 Charles Kenneth Scott Moncrieff (1889–1930), translator of Proust. Gerard Hopkins, translator.
337 Robert Graves, (1895–1985) I, Claudius (1934).
338 The film project Laughter in the Dark from which Richardson had sacked Burton.
339 Tom Jones (1963), which was edited by Antony Gibbs (1925—).
340 Heading in red type.
341 Heading in red type.
342 Josef Shaftel (1919–96), director.
343 Mario Soldati (1906–99), director, was writing the screenplay for the film on Mussolini.
344 Heading in red type.
345 Edward Dmytryk (1908–99) would direct Bluebeard. Robert Siodmak (1900–73), director.
346 William Gibson (1914–2008), Two for the Seesaw (1958). A Cry of Players (1968).
347 Malcolm Lowry (1909–57), Under the Volcano (1947).
348 Burton is confusing William Gibson with Wilfrid Wilson Gibson (1878–1962), the poet.
349 A reference to the last line of the 1913 poem ‘The Rolling English Road’ by G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936).
350 Budd Schulberg (1914–2009), writer, producer. He was actually born in New York.
351 A reference to the line spoken by Macbeth in Macbeth, Act V, scene v: ‘Creeps in this petty pace from day to day / To the last syllable of recorded time.’
352 Possibly by Di Rossi Burton means Grazia De Rossi, the hair stylist who had worked on the Taming of the Shrew.
353 Druan is ‘poor’ in Welsh. Dim ond yr arglwydd is ‘only the lord’.
354 This appears to refer to the passage on p. 350 of Cottrell and Cashin's biography in which they write of Dan-y-bont coming on to the market.
355 The Port Talbot Guardian and Glamorgan Gazette newspapers.
356 J. R. R. Tolkien (1892–1973), novelist, literary critic.
357 Heading in red type.
358 Burton had bought the Peregrina pearl for Taylor in January 1969 at a cost of $37,000.
359 Mary, Queen of Scots (1542–87), Queen of Scotland 1542–67, mother of James VI of Scotland and
I of England.
360 Heading in red type.
361 Heading in red type.
362 César Ritz (1850–1918) built the Ritz Hotels in Paris and London. His son Charles C. Ritz (1891–1976) was President of the Ritz Chain from 1953 to 1976.
363 Malthea is the name of the nymph who nursed the infant Jupiter.
364 Mags: possibly means majesties.
365 Inter-Milan drew 0–0 with Borussia Mönchengladbach in the second leg of the quarter-final (played in West Berlin) on 1 December 1971.
366 Heading in red type.
367 The Shah of Iran (1919–80) had thrown a party in October 1971 to celebrate the 2,500th anniversary of the founding of the Persian Empire. It was estimated to have cost $100m.
368 Madame Louis Malle was Anne-Marie Deschodt who until 1967 had been married to the director Louis Malle (1932–95).
369 Andy Warhol (1928–87), the artist.
370 Sydney Smith (1771–1845), clergyman and essayist, whose character Lady Holland in Memoir (1855) states that marriage ‘resembles a pair of shears, so joined that they cannot be separated; often moving in opposite directions, yet always punishing anyone who comes between them’.
371 Montesquieu (1689–1755). De l'Esprit des lois (1748). Burton's reading of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798) had appeared on long-playing records in 1955 and 1960.
372 Maurice Herzog (1919—), Himalayan mountaineer and politician. Jean-Paul Binet (1917–86), eminent cardiovascular surgeon, pioneer of heart surgery, member of the Académie des Sciences and art collector.
373 ‘Est-ce-que quelle-qu'n qui a une plume?’ (Has anyone got a feather?) A joke meaning an old style pen.
374 Elsa Martinelli (1935—), who had played alongside Burton and Taylor in The V.I.P.s, and alongside Burton in Candy.
375 Jacqueline de Ribes (1931—), fashion designer. Pierre Salinger (1925–2004), White House Press Secretary to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. He had published With Kennedy (1966).
376 Nureyev was friendly with the Kennedy family, and was particularly close to Princess Lee Radziwill (1933—), sister of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Nicholas and Alexandra (1971), produced by Sam Spiegel, has a running time of 189 minutes.
377 Charlotte Rampling (1946—), actor.
378 David Rothschild (1942—).
379 Andrea Dotti (1938–2007), Hepburn's second husband.
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