by John McPhee
Today, his profession views Burton with melancholy. “When the movie career is finished,” sighs Gielgud, “he will have lost his romantic years, his vigorous years.” His friend and agent, Harvey Orkin, has said roughly, “This is a man who sold out. He’s trying to get recognition on a trick. He could have been the greatest actor on this planet.” It was Olivier who first warned Burton, “Make up your mind. Do you wish to be a household word or a great actor?” Paul Scofield gauges his language with care: “Richard professionally is the most interesting actor to have emerged since the war. I think his qualities of heroic presence are not seen to their fullest advantage in movies. He appears not to be attracted by the best that there is in the cinema. As for his future, he should return quietly to the theatre.”
Whether Burton ever does return to the theatre—in more than a token way—will be determined by something considerably deeper than the fate of the liaison he has recently formed. Two little gods within his frame are warring—one that builds with sureness and power, and another that impels him, like his late companion and countryman Dylan Thomas, recklessly toward self-destruction.
Either way, he is a man and a half. He has a wild mind with a living education in it. He is bright and perceptive to an alarming degree, a rare and dangerous thing in an actor. He laughs honestly. He lies winningly. He trusts absolutely. He can make anyone laugh. He can talk a person under the table about literature, displaying huge sophistication and no cant. He reads rapidly, but he gives a book its due—a novel like Anglo-Saxon Attitudes costs him only two hours, but Moby-Dick is worth four days, and Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy took him “just over three months.” He is a walking concordance to Shakespeare. His mind rings with English verse from all centuries and of all qualities, both great and frivolous. “Edward VII was ill,” he will say with a brooding smile, “and the poet laureate—this bloody fool—wrote:
Along the wires the electric message came:
‘He is no better, he is much the same.’”
Burton has pale blue-green eyes, finely textured brown hair, and a coarse complexion, which is said to contribute to his enormous appeal to women. But even more, women lose their balance over his look of essential melancholy. His face can light suddenly with a smile, but it always returns to its primal gloom.
He talks to everyone as if they matter. It is his special gift, seldom found in actors, or, for all that, in clergymen. Burton’s secret is simple. Everyone actually does matter to him. He tells more stories than Scheherazade, but between them, he listens. He really wants to hear about one man’s children or another’s Sunday football match. He can make people feel larger than life. Men appreciate him for it; but women write him letters, chase him around tables, and follow him overseas.
Life with Burton was never quiet. He sleeps five hours, no more, and he has the energy to skip sleep altogether and work steadily the following day. He can sit at a piano all night flogging Welsh songs or playing miscellaneous mood pieces, usually incongruous, while he recites poetry, now mocking the voice of Gielgud, now mimicking Olivier, slipping into the tongue of Richard Burton when he does something that holds particular gravity for him. He doesn’t swear like a trooper (he barks at Taylor for her vulgarisms), being too much in love with words to settle for slang.
He says he wants more than anything else to be alone, but his dressing-room door is always open to cronies of all ages and sexes. People not only like him, they come near to worshipping him, often for a good reason. Once, in Camelot, a young boy was put into the show green and frightened, and during his first rehearsal with Burton he froze. Burton purposely began to stutter, stumble, and quiver. It was one of his most adroit performances. The boy’s nerves receded; his voice coughed into life. He still writes to Burton once a month.
Once, after fluffing the same line repeatedly on a movie set, Burton lowered his head and rammed it into a wall. It is impossible to imagine an English actor doing that, but Burton of course is not English. He is Welsh. In fact, he is so thoroughly, defensively, and patriotically Welsh that it costs him some loss of perspective. His gallery of great Welshmen includes Louis XIV, Christopher Columbus, and Alexander the Great.
He remembers James Joyce’s belief that every man spends his life looking for the place he wants to belong to. “I think I grew up in the place I have dreamed of all my life,” he says. It is a village in a valley between high loaves of bald green mountains, split by a small river of rushing white water—called, oddly enough, the Avon—and spanned by a high, narrow stone bridge that was once an aqueduct. Poverty has seldom had a more graceful setting. The village even has a euphonically romantic name—Pontrhydyfen (pontra de venne)—and, particularly in Richard Burton’s view, it is a kind of Glamorganshire Brigadoon. “When I go home,” he says, “as I go around the lip of the mountain, my heart races.”
He was born in Pontrhydyfen on the tenth of November, 1925. His father—Richard Jenkins—was a miner with little more to his name than a No. 6 shovel and a massive gift for words. Richard was the twelfth of thirteen children. His mother died when he was not quite two, just after giving birth to Richard’s brother Graham. In Taibach, a suburb of the coastal town Port Talbot, at the foot of the Avon, Richard was devotedly raised by his eldest sister, Cecilia. He went to school in Port Talbot, but he spent his weekends in Pontrhydyfen. The town spoke English and the village spoke Welsh; hence Richard was raised bilingual. He was also raised with a powerful sense of belonging to a village where he could not live.
“My father was a self-taught man, demoniacal in debate, agnostic, with a divine gift of the tongue in both languages. He used hyperbole. He was not afraid of the octosyllabic word. He had a sort of maxim—‘Never use a short word where a long one will do.’ He was a Welsh Pushkin in conversation. He would go off on jags that would make John Barrymore look sedate. He never knew which son I was. He was fifty when I was born. We called him Daddy Ni, which means ‘our father.’ He sometimes frightened me. His mind was extraordinarily perverse. No one quite knew what he was going to do next, which can be quite frightening to a child, you know.”
Daddy Ni died in 1957, never having seen Richard in a play or movie. He tried once—setting out to see My Cousin Rachel when it was playing in a Port Talbot cinema. On the way down the valley, he stopped in seventeen pubs. Finally settled in the theatre, he watched the film begin. One of the first things Richard did on the screen was to pour himself a drink. “That’s it,” said Daddy Ni, and he was up and off to pub No. 18.
Daddy Ni cared more about education than anything else, even Rugby football, and from Richard’s earliest memory Daddy Ni and Richard’s brothers Ivor, Tom, Will, and Dai fixed their attention on Richard and said, “You shall go to Oxford.” All the brothers save Graham had worked the coal face (Richard himself never worked in the mines), and some of them went on to other positions in local government, the police, and the army. In Richard, however, the family planted its dream of something better beyond the valley. “The idea of a Welsh miner’s son going to Oxford University,” Richard Burton says, “was ridiculous beyond the realm of possibility.”
First, Richard was one of thirty who were admitted to grammar school out of some six hundred applicants. He was also an athlete and, of all things, a gifted soprano who took prizes in the eisteddfod, singing, as his sister put it, as if “he had a bell in every tooth.” In a sense, he outgrew his family, being something more than life-size even then. A teacher-writer named Philip Burton, drama coach and English master at the Port Talbot grammar school, offered him a room in his lodgings. Cecilia and her husband agreed.
Richard describes himself as “mock tough” when he first knew Philip Burton. Burton, for his part, was chiefly impressed, in Richard’s first awkward go on a stage, by the boy’s “astonishing audience control—he could do anything he wanted with the audience.” This is one talent that can only be found, never developed, and since Richard had it, Phil Burton trained him dramatically, put an English polish on his voice
without obscuring the Welsh vitality, fed him a reading list of great books, prepared him for his try for Oxford, and directed him in all his early plays. In 1943, Richard officially became Phil Burton’s ward, taking his name. Years later, when Richard was told that his father was dead, he asked, “Which one?”
Phil Burton trained Richard with some novel devices. He made him talk on five telephones at once, doing a scene from a play about a busy bank manager who could hold five separate conversations, darting from phone to phone. The exercise was repeated a thousand times to teach the boy coordination and mathematical precision in speaking. Today, Richard understandably hates telephones, but he speaks with fantastic precision. Also, Phil Burton would take Richard to the summit of Mynydd Margam, the last high mountain between Pontrhydyfen and the sea, and have him loft arias from Shakespeare into the wind. As Phil Burton moved farther and farther from the spot on which Richard stood, he kept calling, “Make me hear you. Don’t shout, but make me hear you.” Ten years later, as Richard would all but whisper, “O! what a rogue and peasant slave am I,” every princely syllable went special delivery to the outermost rafters of the Old Vic.
The academic training succeeded as well. Richard was accepted by Exeter College, Oxford. The R.A.F. conveniently provided a scholarship, indenturing him to air service later on. He had to wait two terms before he would actually be in statu pupillari, so he answered an ad in Wales’s Western Mail, placed by the actor Emlyn Williams, seeking a young Welsh actor for a play called The Druid’s Rest. He got the part and spent five months in the West End, going up to Oxford as a slightly seasoned professional.
It was wartime Oxford, but no war to date has changed the ways of the university, and Burton was soon climbing into the college after late and beery forays. He boasts that he broke the Exeter sconce record, a complicated dining-hall punishment for bad etiquette, in which the offender was forced to drink nearly two pints of beer in thirty seconds or pay for it. He learned to drink without swallowing and could put down a sconce in ten seconds. “So far as I know,” he says, “no one has ever whacked that feat.”
He was ostensibly reading English literature and Italian, and he even went to lectures “with all those pustular, sweaty, hockey-playing, earnest, big-breasted girls”; but he found his real interest in the Oxford University Dramatic Society. Nevill Coghill—don, critic, and man of the theatre—was directing Measure for Measure. When Burton asked for a part, Coghill said he was sorry but the play was all cast. Burton’s native aggressiveness flashed to the surface. “Let me understudy the leading man,” he said wickedly. “Undermine” would have been a better word. When Measure for Measure opened—with people like John Gielgud and Terence Rattigan in the audience, for the O.U.D.S. was as important then as now—guess who was striding the boards as Angelo?
Well, heaven forgive him! and forgive us all!
Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall.
WHEN JENNY LIND entered New York Harbor on a paddle-wheel steamer in 1850, P. T. Barnum went out in a rowboat to greet her, carrying a spray of red roses in his arms. She was a plain young woman of twenty-nine, hair parted in the middle. Her nose was a Nordic spud. She had a wide mouth, and she wore no cosmetics. She was the most celebrated operatic soprano in the world.
Barnum was tone-deaf. But he had brought Jenny Lind to America because he hoped to change his image. When people thought of Barnum, they thought of sheer bazazz, while he wanted them to think of fine arts. This cost him a down payment of a hundred and eighty-seven thousand five hundred dollars before the Swedish singer would set foot on board ship. His investment paid off in cash if not in dignity, as Jenny Lind made a twelve-thousand-mile, hundred-and-sixty-five-concert sellout tour during which a single seat went for six hundred and fifty-three dollars. Another time, a thousand standing-room tickets were sold in fifteen minutes. The press went insane. Every other line might have been written by Barnum. Holden’s Dollar Magazine said, “Sell your old clothes, dispose of your antiquated boots, distribute your hats, hypothecate your jewelry, come on the canal, work your passage, walk, take up a collection to pay expenses, raise money on a mortgage, sell ‘Tom’ into perpetual slavery, dispose of ‘Mose’ to the highest bidder, stop smoking for a year, give up tea, coffee and sugar, dispense with bread, meat, garden sass and such like luxuries—and then come hear Jenny Lind.”
She sang Mozart, Weber, and Meyerbeer, offset by such additional items as “Comin’ Thro’ the Rye” and “The Last Rose of Summer.” Presenting a little-known song from an opera called Clari, she immortalized “Home, Sweet Home.” Her voice spanned nearly three octaves, topping out at G above high C. Her high F sharp was pure, and she had an incredible ability to sing very softly at that altitude. No one could match her messa di voce—the technique of holding a single note while increasing and diminishing its volume. She did it as if she were twirling a knob. It is possible that some of this was wasted on numbers like “Old Black Joe,” but she always sang parts from the operas in which she had won her fame, from Norma to Lucia di Lammermoor.
Washington Irving went down the Hudson to hear her, and was vastly impressed. So, in Boston, was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who declared, “She sings like the morning star.” Even Niagara Falls fell at her feet as she stood on a projecting boulder and sang an aria to the plunging cataract. Stephen Foster, of Pittsburgh, a young Northerner in love with the South, was forever grateful to her because she added his songs to her repertory, including the one she called “Mein Old Kentucky Home.” Nathaniel Hawthorne thought she was dull.
When Jenny Lind arrived in Washington, President and Mrs. Millard Fillmore hiked through the woods between the White House and the Willard Hotel to leave their calling card. She began her first Washington concert before an audience that included the Fillmores, Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, Henry Clay of Kentucky, and fourteen empty seats in the front row, reserved for the seven members of Fillmore’s Cabinet and their wives, who were at the Russian ministry soaking up vodka. Jenny Lind was singing “Hail, Columbia” when they swayed down the aisle and took their seats. Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, Secretary of State, stood up potted and sang along with her, while his wife tugged furiously at his long black tails.
When Jenny stayed with friends in Denmark, Hans Christian Andersen would come around to tell stories to the children of the house, a pretext for seeing her. He fell in love with her. He wrote “The Nightingale” for her. When she was cold toward him, he wrote “The Snow Queen.” When he begged her to marry him, she silently handed him a mirror. That night, he wrote “The Ugly Duckling.” Gladys Denny Shultz, the author of Jenny Lind: The Swedish Nightingale, offers a modified version of this famous anecdote. She claims that Lind really meant to impugn her own appearance, arguing that it is beyond belief that Lind could be that cruel.
Jenny Lind’s circle included Berlioz, Meyerbeer, Schumann, and Brahms. Her great friend Felix Mendelssohn loved to sit at his piano and explore her upper register. Frédéric Chopin referred to her affectionately as “this Swede.” She often rode along the trails of Wimbledon with the seventy-eight-year-old Duke of Wellington, who decorated his dotage with bright young ladies of the stage. Crowned potentates of the Continent, from Prince Metternich of Austria to King Frederick William of Prussia, competed for her friendship. She was a favorite of Queen Victoria. After Jenny Lind died, in 1887, at the age of sixty-seven, a memorial was inscribed to her in the Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey—the first time in the Abbey’s history that a woman had been so honored.
The Athapaskans are not much impressed that a young Princeton graduate on a prospecting adventure in the Susitna Valley in 1896 happened to learn, on his way out of the wilderness, that William McKinley had become the Republican nominee for President of the United States.
This sentence and several that followed it in Coming into the Country unexpectedly provoked an angry and bitter letter from a woman in Oregon. The passage in the book continued:
In this haphazard way, the
mountain got the name it would carry for at least the better part of a century, notwithstanding that it already had a name, for uncounted centuries had had a name, which in translation has been written, variously, as The Great One, The Mighty One, The High One. The Indians in their reverence had called it Denali. Toponymically, that is the mountain’s proper name.
The reader in Oregon railed vitriol at me and called me by names other than my own. She expressed thorough contempt toward anyone coarse enough even to hint at the thought of calling the mountain by a name other than McKinley. The mountain, she said, had been named by her late father.
What was I going to say to that?
I wrote to her on the stationery of the Council of the Humanities, Princeton University, and thanked her, and warmly congratulated her, and told her that I am the father of four daughters and it would be my fondest hope that someday, in some situation, after I am gone, one of them might rise up as nobly in defense of me.
(But I still think the mountain should be called Denali.)
BRIGHT AND NERVOUS, frenetic, full of quick smiles and dark moods, shouting “Onward, onward” between laughs, performing in a cashmere sweater, always tieless, Mort Sahl manages to suggest barbecue pits on the brink of doom. Holding a rolled newspaper in his right hand, with flashing blue eyes and a wolfish grin, he states his theme and takes off like a jazz musician on a flight of improvisation—or seeming improvisation. He does not tell jokes one by one, but carefully builds deceptively miscellaneous structures of jokes that are like verbal mobiles. He begins with the spine of a subject, then hooks thought onto thought, joke onto dangling joke, many of them totally unrelated to the main theme, until the whole structure is spinning but is nonetheless in balance. All the time he is building toward a final statement, which is too much a part of the whole to be called a punch line, but puts that particular theme away.