The Richard Burton Diaries (111 page)

Every encounter indeed that day was so dispiriting that it put me in a foul mood. I went into the spare room and played the song over and over to myself singing with it until I thought I'd got it. Despite all that concentration however I can't remember a phrase of it this morning. It will all come back of course as soon as I listen to it once more. Elizabeth was as bare-toothed as a tigress when I went into the other room and said ‘Surely you must know it by now!’ This was delivered with sullen venom and set my ill-temper even more firmly. Thereafter we played an absurd game of Musical Rooms. I refused to be in the same room as E and she with me, but we kept on running into each other. Finally she went to bed in the spare room while I read in the other bedroom until the doctor came. I then woke her up, told her I was going to take two sleeping pills, that I was going straight to bed and not to bother me! And with that he swep’ aht! What a fool I am.

How I could very well do without W. Vaughan Thomas. A pushy little man, though very bright. He means well but his ebullience makes me embarrassed. He's getting old of course. I remember how Dylan loathed him. [...]

Friday 23rd, London
I did the song at 11 o'clock with no difficulty. [...] I was thinking yesterday, not for the first time of the fuss everyone makes of E and I. There are other so-called superstars but nobody, as a couple, get paid so much attention. At Shepperton they have given us the boardroom in the ‘old house’ with a private kitchen across the corridor.
¹¹⁵
The boardroom has been changed into the most elegant nineteenth century dining room with French windows leading onto one of those incomparable stretches of English lawn dotted with magnificent old trees. There, on fine days – and who knows that we might not be due for a good summer – the experts say it's due – E can hold court in the afternoons and retain her suntan for the winter ahead. In addition, they have supplied E with a private dressing room one floor up from the dining room if she wants to sleep. And they have knocked down three walls in the main block to make a more than adequate ‘practical’ dressing room for me.
And we didn't ask
!!

Everybody assured me that the run from Shepperton to Aston Clinton to meet Gwen and so on to Ivor, was only
¹
/
₂
hour to 35 minutes.
¹¹⁶
After an hour's hard driving we were nowhere near the place. When I finally did arrive at 1.15 instead of 12.20 I was a charming chap. I scowled at Norma Heyman who had been one of the informants and then called R. McWhorter and told him that by the time I returned after spending an hour with Ivor the working day would practically be over. He agreed and said that they all (Wallis, Jarrott) agreed that it was more important that I see Ivor.
¹¹⁷
So they rehearsed without me. [...]

The improvement in Ivor is considerable. He can wheel himself about in a motorized chair and seemed in very good spirits. We told various and sundry stories some of which made him laugh so much that we had to wipe the tears away from his eyes. Gwen's selfless devotion to him verges on the saint-like. What a marvellous woman. Old-fashioned self discipline, old-fashioned virtue, old-fashioned devotion to a loved one is not often seen. There's none of that ‘fuck you Jack, I'm alright’ stuff about her.

We go on the yacht tonight and stay for the week-end. [...]

Sunday 25th Princess Steps,
Kalizma
And they say that the world lacks romance. Ya Falaheen, Queen of the Islands, Denaud, White Sapphire, Rondoran, Makhala, Oranje, Shoshana, Silver Heron, Billet Doux [
sic
], Four rivers, Thelmarie, Painted Lady, Roding, White, Heron, Charade, Leonid, Minsquee, Corannanna [
sic
], Lady Holland
II
, Nordsee, La Sirena II, Eight Bells, Charis, Eros, Fordson, Pleasure Bound, The Joanne – a message for John Heyman perhaps – Minden Rose, Quicksilver, Kedidi IV, Poio, Olive Branch, Rowena, Nicomaa, Blackbird C., Perso, Druid Stone, Cassata, Oranya, Lady Tuht, London Pride, Jandora, Freeth, Tressares, Tara, Bankstone, Lilliana II, and erotically, Nun's Honey. All these are boats or ships that passed our ship in one hour between 9.15 and 10.15 yesterday morning.

What an extraordinary world it is. How do you live with one person for 13 years, and another for 8 and find both as alien as strangers. Elizabeth is an eternal one night stand. She is my private and personal bought mistress. And lascivious with it. It is impossible to tell you what is consisted in the act of love. Well I'll tell you, E is a receiver, a perpetual returner of the ball! I don't write about sex very often, because it embarrasses me, but, but, for some reason who knows why, whatever, is spared, original, strange. Counter. Felix Randall who hooved the horse his bright and battering sandal. Praise him.
¹¹⁸

It's 7.30 in the morning and the world, little knowing that I am dying will persist in carrying on as usual. I watched two films with the baby last night.
¹¹⁹
They were not good, but they were cosy like bad but readable books. I love Elizabeth.

I love Joe Losey, not because he is a genius, but because he loves my wife. I love Patricia, not because she's a genius, but simply that she is a pleasure to be accommodated with.
¹²⁰
I could spend a long time with her without a single interruption. They are coming to lunch today, which is not a fearsome idea. I think it's a diabolical idea.

How would you like to die on a boat on the Thames – a privilege not granted to many. I am stupefied with nostalgia. I am madly in love with the idea of remaining alive. I am agog with desire to see Elizabeth and Joe and that infinitely removed and eclectic Patricia. It's very rough in this world to find anybody that loves you, or anybody that you love. I think I'd better go back to bed. Don't you?

Where did they find the names. What funny people funny people are! Oh Bugger it. And my brother. And so to bed.

I never lie when I write. Honest. Though I'm not sure of that!

Whit Monday, 26th,
Kalizma
, Thames

Yesterday's entry, as any man of discernment can tell at a glance, was written while under the strong influence of several vodkas. T. H. (Tim) White once wrote a poem for me and about me called ‘Vodka Poem to Richard Burton.‘
¹²¹
One night in New York when we [were] both suitably and idiotically drunk and I had given him the sword ‘Excalibur’ which I used in the play written from his
The Once and Future King
, and after he had insisted on knighting with full accolade many and various and bewildered New York cabbies, we repaired to my apartment on 81st Street on the West Park. There we wrote poems to each other. He kept both and some time later to my surprise and delight he had included the one to me in his last book of Poems.
¹²²
Mine must be in his papers somewhere. Vodka is the operative word. Tim died in his late fifties. If I don't watch myself I'll be lucky to see my late forties. With his huge stature and white hair and beard it was some sight, as they say, to see Tim give the accolade to Harry Schwartz, and Sol Schmuck. Arise Sir Harry. Arise Sir Sol. A few of them actually knelt on the pavement! A barman, used to drunken eccentricity, knelt to be knighted with a glass of vodka in each hand. Quite a lot of actors were knighted also [on] that long-ago wild night. Jason Robards is about the only one I can remember.
¹²³
He didn't bother to knight me he said, because ever since we had first met he had conferred a mental baronetcy on me. What a crying pity that he is dead. How E would have adored that madman. And he her. And what a maniacal and lovely mind! I once sat there bewitched while he spoke for a couple of hours on the subject of worms, how each wriggling thing had locked in side him the beginning and end of man, and that without worms we would all die. When you die, he said, give your body to the worms, they will be grateful. There is absolutely no reason to give it to fire, even the atmosphere might reject the noxious fumes from your burning body.

[...] The boat is a giggle. Almost everywhere one looks is a delight to the eye. Books in rows. Van Gogh and Picasso and Vlaminck and Howard behind the bar, I mean his painting, not the man himself, the only pretty TV set I've ever seen, the new carpet from Mexico, the pretty sheets on the bed, the immaculate and very gay bathroom, the cosy cabins down below. I tell you it's a floating palace. [...]

Tuesday 27th
For the first time I enjoyed rehearsals of this epic, probably because there were a lot of actors there instead of the eternal girl and Quayle and Colicos only. Denis Quilley (who was my understudy in the dim days of
The Lady's not for Burning
and eventually took over), T. P. O'Connor, that marvellous Irish actor and in looks and manner a natural successor of Cusack's of whom he is a great friend I found out.
¹²⁴
A splendid young man called, I think, Gary Bond, who is almost certain to become a very important actor and another good actor with whom I've worked before but cannot remember his name, he has a bitten, bitter, pock-marked face.
¹²⁵
All cream and none of your skimmed milk. The girl too of course who boasted that she was taller than Elizabeth. T. P. O'Connor said: ‘And so, d'you know, is Tina Louise.‘
¹²⁶
I think I'm going to like that chap a lot. [...]

Bernard (Greenford), Syb's brother-in-law was waiting for me when I finished. He has been squeezed out by his partner from the very lucrative chain of ‘hairdressing salons’ by his snake-in-the-grass partner André. This infuriates me, not simply because I like old Bernard, but because, without my backing in the early years the business would have folded. It was I who with a thousand quid here and a thousand quid there sustained the operation in its infancy. It was all paid back, but without the luck of the association, André and Bernard would have been Charlie and Harry back in Whitechapel where they started from. And I'm sodded if I allow Bernard, who mortgaged his mother's house to keep the thing going, to be struck off the register because of a sneaky jumped-up-jack of a fellow whose only desire in life is to belong to golf-clubs that don't allow Jews. I shall cable Aaron today to get our own back in operation. My darling girl, and why should she care?, has volunteered $50,000. [...]

I brought Bernard back on the boat without warning E. I took a chance that with her weakness for Jews he would be acceptable. She came up trumps as usual and asked him to stay for lunch as well as the offer of 50,000 smackeroos. He must have danced all night.

Today I rehearse in the morning and this afternoon Ron is going to muck about with my face and beard and try to make me look Tudorian. At the moment, with luck, I look like Sir Henry Morgan about to make someone walk the plank.
¹²⁷

I shall now sit here patiently and wait for her to get up. I am madly in love with the woman – even after 8 and getting on for 9 years. Now isn't that funny?

Wednesday 28th, Dorchester [hotel]
[...] I sent a telegram off to Aaron asking him to fix up Bernard's financial predicament. I think it will cost about £50,000. Still, fly-on-the-wall as I would like to be, the thought of André's face when faced with implacable money-power does already in my imagination please me a great deal. I could, though I would not, be present at the confrontation with the board. Chuckle. Chuckle. Gurgle. Gurgle. Snigger. Snigger. V-Sign. V-Sign. Up Yours. Up Yours. I don't think that I am a nice man. But kick my dog, kick me.

I am drinking too much again and though I like to drink I have a fear that eventually it might affect my brain. Already, I've noticed, it has affected my memory. Or maybe I am getting old. Anyway I shall now, and hopefully for the rest of the film, slow down, and again hopefully, to a stop.

The film is important despite the fact that both Elizabeth's and my latest films are enormous financial successes. That is to say
Secret Ceremony
and
Where Eagles Dare
. Elizabeth, if you please and with her usual insouciance, impertinence and cheek has managed to win the French ‘Oscar’ for the former.
¹²⁸
I am very proud of her because it was an immensely difficult part. I love the old girl very badly nowadays, though I've exactly been indifferent. The last phrase should read ‘though I've
never
exactly been indifferent.’ What the hell – it's very early in the morning.

I am very jealous of E. I'm even jealous of her affection for Dick Hanley, a 60 year old homosexual, and anybody she has lunch with. Girls, dogs – I'm even jealous of the kitten because her adoration of it is so paramount. They'll all die before me though, so I'll win in the end. [...]

Thursday 29th
I danced all the morning with Gin [Bujold] and two ballet dancers. I must learn the elegant arrogance of the male ballet dancer. It could be very effective. As a result perhaps of an essentially masculine upbringing, surrounded by roaring miners, dinned with stories of feats of strength, I find myself slightly put out by the idea of doing a basse dance, with feline hand on the hip and swaying queerly from side to side. It will though, it must, be right on the night.

How drab people are, especially people from the Press. I lunched with a lady who calls herself Margaret Hinxman and who writes for the
Sunday Telegraph
.
¹²⁹
I promised her the so far un-awarded Taylor-Burton ‘Oscar’ if she could ask me a question that neither E nor I had ever been asked before. She failed. Why didn't she take up the challenge and ask for instance: ‘How often do you and your fabulous wife fuck? Do you confine it to weekends or do you have a fetish for Tuesdays?’ Or ‘How often do you masturbate?’ Or ‘Who do you think is most normal, you or John Gielgud?’ Or ‘Do you think, in the
words of Carlyle, that we are living in the conflux of two eternities?‘
¹³⁰
Or ‘bugger you baby, I find actors interminably boring, and you more than most, and now Lord Millionaire Richard, what do you have to say to that?’ Anything would do of that nature, anything other than ‘have you sold your soul to the films for the sake of filthy lucre?’ Or ‘what does it feel like to be famous, to have an even more famous wife, a private jet, a yacht on the Thames, a suite at the Dorchester, to have power, to be the compulsive centre of all eyes?’ ‘Do you believe in God?’ ‘What do you think when you read about yourself in the papers?’ ‘Are the Welsh people, and in particular your vast family, proud of you?’ How does one reply to these inevitable banalities? Shit over the lot of them.