The Richard Burton Diaries (104 page)

We arrived back last Tuesday from M.C. and waited for Ivor and Gwen to arrive from Stoke Mandeville.
²⁷⁰
[...] Ivor goes up and down, but catastrophically he had a stroke in his sleep last September, which was hidden from us. He has great difficulty in speaking and has retreated more and more into himself. Apart from an occasional spirited flash as of old, he has changed into another person. He is mortally afraid, he tells me, not of death itself but of leaving this
world and all its varying excitements. The physical pain of death he discounts. ‘I will die in my sleep for sure anyway and won't know anything about it. My stroke in my sleep at Stoke Mandeville didn't wake me up and I didn't know anything had happened until the orderlies came in in the morning and I found I couldn't speak.’ What a blow on a blow. He'd have lived until he was 90 were it not for that trip in the dark at Céligny. [...]

Wednesday 10th
A choice of new furniture has arrived for the library. E and I are still in the top tens of the box-office which surprises me somewhat as, apart from
Secret Ceremony
for E and
Eagles
for me we didn't have anything out.
Staircase
hasn't been on general release yet so doesn't count. [...]

I am hovering around 176lbs in weight and it feels splendid but will try for 172 before I leave for New York next week. E is 127lbs. Lithe and limber we both are with murderous games of ping-pong to keep us that way.

Cocktail-time approaches, the fire roars, it is cold as cold can be outside.

Friday 12th
Today we received a telegram from Ed Henry of Universal Pics saying that
Anne of the Thousand Days
has been shown to the press in NY and LA and the reaction is ‘nothing short of sensational’. And ‘superior to
Man for all Seasons
and
Lion in Winter
’.
²⁷¹
We shall see Mr Henry, we shall see. It would be rather nice if it was a blockbuster as I have a hefty percentage of the gross. And rings and farthingales and things and hospital wings could be bought. It would be a good thing if Gin Bujold won an Oscar which, since she's unknown and if the film is as successful as Universal believe it's going to be and if she keeps her trap shut about how horrible a place Hollywood is, she is quite likely to do. If she does, or even if she doesn't come to think of it, I'd hate to be her next director or leading man. I think she firmly believes herself to be the legitimate heir to Rachelle and Bernhardt and Duse. She has all the power of a gnat. A dying one. I could whisper louder than her screams.

[...] We leave for New York in five days and I dread the journey or journeys involved. We go from there to LA, and from there to Hawaii. I long to see Hawaii but I loathe the means of getting there. It means in my case an entirely lost week before I have been able to re-adjust myself so I'm likely to be a moron through Xmas. I'll keep quiet and sleep in the sun, if any, and hide in corners with a bad book.

JANUARY

Saturday 4th, Gstaad
We leave in a couple of hours for Geneva by helicopter and from there to Paris by Mystere. [...] There are six of us travelling together – Mike, Chris, Sara, Caroline and the two of us. Simmy and John Gross, her intended are staying behind until she has to go to school in about five or six days. E tells me that the former hasn't had a single bath since we arrived and only one hasty shower. Last night Simmy cooked us an Hawaiian dish which was delicious. Some sort of marinated steak and guacamole [...]

We stayed in all day and read. I read three books: A history of the
Daily News
journalistically written by somebody called John Chapman ‘the distinguished theatre critic'!!!!
¹
Lord Hornblower
by C. S. Forester, and
Fair Stood the Wind for France
, by H. E. Bates.
²
I was fascinated by Bates’ notices, quoted on the front and back covers. One would have thought he'd written a towering masterpiece. It is abjectly readable and that's about all. I read it only yesterday and already it's forgotten. Competent as the devil but totally without reality. Christ, one has to beware of critics – good or bad, one might be constrained to believe them. [...]

Sunday 5th, Paris
We arrived back at the Plaza Athenée yesterday. We shall be here for about a month or a bit I suppose, depending on how quickly they set about finishing this monumental film of Elizabeth's. So far, including stoppages for illnesses etc. it has been going on since last September. [...] In future, we must try and make sure that, if we work at all, the director is a young man, and if possible, a
new
young man. They can't afford to muck around. And under no circumstances should they be called by others or themselves ‘geniuses’ or ‘significant’ or ‘artists in movement’. One ends up with a picture that's over-written by the critics and underseen by the audience.

I cannot find the last volume of my diary which covers about 18 months from last September. Presumably I put it in such a safe place before I left that I cannot remember. It wouldn't be very nice if it got into the wrong hands.
It's too revealing about other people, but above all about myself. It's supposed to be for the old age of E and myself.

When we arrived back yesterday we found a present and a couple of notes from The Duchess of Windsor. The letter is rather sad. [...] Also was a little china box of two children in bed together. With it the note said that it reminded herself and the Duke of
Staircase
. This was the day that Rex left the set in a huff and I pretended to do a scene with no film in the camera to give the Duke and Duchess something, at least, to see.

I lost my temper with the French Customs and Passport Authorities yesterday in Geneva. A stream of bloodcurdling insults came streaming out of my mouth with infinitely greater fluency in French than I normally command. They said nothing but looked at me with such implacable hatred out of their obsidian French eyes that I was constrained to go further. I told them that they were a nation of women and that without the assistance of Anglo-Saxon men they would have lost three wars instead of just the war of 1871. I doubt that I will be received with Ça va biens the next time I go through Geneva. What a mean avare the normal Frenchman is.
³
I prefer the Italians with all their venality. At least they do not believe in the glory of arms. The French do and fail to practise it except under a foreigner like Napoleon. A Corsican Italian.

Tuesday 7th
[...] I did stills with Rex yesterday, all of which seem to me to be eminently silly or needless or undignified and all three. However rather than hold things up we went through with them. Rex has a cold and is going back to Portofino until it's better. [...]

On Sunday last I took the two boys to Fouquet's for lunch together with Bertrand, E's chauffeur. We then pub-crawled all the way home which meant that we were all pretty squiffy by the time we arrived back at the hotel. To compound matters Kevin McCarthy (actor and brother of Mary, the writer) suddenly hove into view with his future wife, a rather hard little Scandinavian.
⁴
E wasn't too pleased. I promised I wouldn't do it again, but of course I inevitably will.

[...] An odd thing happened last weekend at this hotel which after all is one of the most reputable in Paris. In the lobby beside the lift on the 1st floor John Lee and a friend of his observed, lying on the divan, a completely naked man with a clothed woman ‘going down on him.’ That is to say she was orally masturbating him. John called the Night Manager (it was quite early – about 10.30 at night) who called the police. After a tremendous struggle in which the naked man threw vases and flower pots etc. into the well of the hotel he was finally overpowered and carried away in a strait-jacket. It turned out that the
man was high on drugs, probably LSD and the lady was of the streets. It is just the kind of thing that one wishes Liza, Maria and Kate to see. What a world.

I read last night in bed some collected articles of Henry Longhurst, the golf correspondent of the
Sunday Times
.
⁵
I laughed until the tears poured down my face and became quite uncontrollable.

Wednesday 8th
[...] Last night I read about a third of a book, which I didn't know he'd written, by Harold Nicolson called
The Age of Reason
.
⁶
It is very readable, often very funny but also I suspect too easily written. He repeats himself quite a bit which I know his fastidious sense of economy and style would have rejected if he'd had more time, or given it more time. But nevertheless very enjoyable. What a monstrous set of characters the Age of Reason produced. It might have been called the Age of Monomaniacal Monarchs: Fred the Great of Prussia, Catherine the Great of Muscovy and Peter the Great and the Roi de Solieul.
⁷
Cor! My spelling. Murder and torture, regicide, suicide, infanticide, banishment and all the vices in the book. Catherine the Great had a lady-in-waiting who was known as the ‘eprouveuse’ who as her name implies tried out the Guards officers in bed first to find out if they would be satisfactory to the Empress of all the Russias. Imagine being found wanting. On second thoughts, imagine being wanted by that raddled old gummy collection of jaded appetites. Peter the Great liked chopping people's heads off and had a long tree trunk laid on the ground so that decapitation of heads as they lay in a row was facilitated. None of that hanging about saying ‘next please.’ He also fancied orgies and defecated and urinated where he stood. Peter the third, I think, used to tie his Dachsund to the roof-beam with a rope and have a servant hold the hind legs while he flogged the poor little thing. Fragrant lot. Frederick the Great's father used to beat the bejasus out of him with a knout and drag him through mud with his face in it, by the hair. No wonder the man was a screaming homosexual. This, if you please, Fred's father would do to the crown prince in front of the officers. When of course his father died Fred the Great was just as bad. He would rush screaming down the corridors of his castle with a heavy knotted stick and beat anybody who stood within reach. All those servants, there were hundreds, running like mad looking for a hiding place. It must have made the Crazy Gang look sane.
⁸

I am also reading a book about the French Resistance and so I am fairly up to the knees in blood. There were a lot of old scores paid off there too I'm sure. My God the amount of blood that has been needlessly spilt. [...]

Thursday 9th
Yesterday was a lovely day cold and sparkling. Today is badger-grey and tired again. I started to dream of Puerto Vallarta and the bedroom patio and sun-bathing and tacos and frijoles and tequila, and walks through the cobbled town at dusk and boating to deserted beaches with tuna sandwiches and ice-cold home-made lemon juice and fishing for Dorado and baby sharks.
⁹
And the memory of being salt-cleaned and clear-skinned and even slim. We'll go to Mismaloya and swim in the warm sea and plunge immediately afterwards into the cold, by comparison
very
cold fresh water river.
¹⁰
I even look forward to the noise and it must surely be the noisiest town per head of population in the world, church bells and a gun instead of a bell for the poor church across the river, steel bands, donkeys braying, cocks crowing – the latter never seeming to know what time of day it is. Serenaders staggering on marijuana coming to do homage to Elizabeth at four in the morning, children dancing in the street outside to the rhythm of a fiddle played by the man who runs the delicatessen next door. But not of course at four in the morning, more like 8 to 10. And jeeping towards the airport and then up into the hills where the rivers have to be forded in the jeep as there are no bridges. Once E and I were temporarily stuck in the middle of such a river and only after waiting patiently for the engine to dry out were we able to proceed cautiously to the other bank. Then back to Jack Keyward's bar which is at sand level and only half a stone's throw from the edge of the sea which is relatively tideless.
¹¹
Lots of books to read and Spanish Grammars and perhaps the iguanas have come back to live on the roof. You never know.

I've decided to go on a mild diet, one known as the ‘Drinking Man's Diet’ to see if I can lose a few pounds gently. This morning in pyjamas I was [...] 13 stone 3 pounds. I'd like to be about 12 stone 7. [...]

I took the boys and Sara to lunch at D'Chez Eux and ate myself silly on the hors d'oeuvres, salami of three different kinds, several terrines and patés and sweet onions in a sauce and peas and beans and black bread with butter washed down by the locally made cold sweet wine. [...] I returned home and ate half a pound of liquorice allsorts, a pint of milk. No wonder I'm a little over-weight. [...]

This diary is really no good to anyone but me. It forces me to keep my mind in some kind of untidy order and is better than nothing for my laziness.

Friday 10th
Yesterday was a day of funny moods. It began well enough with a blue sky and the promise of taking E to lunch. She finished early and we had a late lunch at La Cascade in the Bois de Boulogne.
¹²
I stuck to my diet and had a whisky and soda before lunch followed by
¹
/
₂
dozen belons,
¹³
a steak au poivre, a salad with French dressing and a hefty lump of cheese. I drank Lafite ‘60, about two glasses, and two or three brandies after the cheese with sugarless and creamless coffee. Later that night I had a couple more whiskies and soda. Apart from water that's all I took in all day. This morning the scale showed a loss of between four and five pounds. I was very surprised. A couple of weeks of this and I shall be belsenic.
¹⁴
[...] E was astonishingly drunk even as I got to lunch. I don't recollect her before ever being incoherent from drink. I expect it from the drugs she's forced to take, but not from the booze. Christ I hope she's alright. It would be frightful to live the rest of our lives in an alcoholic haze, seeing the world through fumes of spirits and cigarette smoke. Never quite sure what you did or said the day before, or what you read, whether wise or foolish, tardy or too soon. Good I'm going to have a whisky and soda right now. There are few pleasures to match tipsiness in this murderous world especially if, like me, you believe in your bones that it, the world as we know it, is not going to last much longer. This is the age of the abyss and any minute now or dark day we could tumble over the edge into primal chaos. Some frigging foreigner will press a button and gone it will all be. Even the Miners Arms in Pontrhydyfen.
¹⁵
Our little lives will be shattered with a cosmic bang. ‘These millions of white faces,’ as Archie MacLeish says, and then ‘nothing, nothing, nothing at all.‘
¹⁶
But don't let's be stoned all the time. Let's have days and days of brilliant clarity, etched and limpid, cool and surgical.