The Richard Burton Diaries (116 page)

We went to the Hornbys last night for dinner and took the kitten with us. Sheran took it bravely though apparently she doesn't like cats, at the same time not being an ailurophobe – pick the tad-pole out of that spawn. I was struck last night at the uncanny resemblance that Simon Hornby bore to Oscar Wilde. A taller version I suppose though not much, for Wilde was about 6 feet 2 inches tall. He has the same sort of hair, the same liquid eyes, the same long
oval face, the same lavish lips and the same swaying elephantine hips. I never had the honour, of course, of being alive when the great Oscar was, but I've read endlessly about him and seen many cartoons and photographs.

Quip from Tony Quayle: ‘Michael Redgrave is in love with himself but he's not sure if it's reciprocated. That's his problem.’ I laughed for a long time.

Observation from John Colicos: ‘My wife gave me a row on Saturday night because she said I was using words she'd never heard or read before, and that my attitudes had totally changed. I said that Burton not only was dynamic in himself but created dynamite in others. I blamed it all on you.’

I sound like that fool Richard Harris.
²⁰⁵

Wednesday 6th
Liza's Birthday
.

We are confoundedly trying to find a hunter for L's birthday present. [...]

E said this morning that I lacked loyalty – simply because I said that Sheran is a snob and cultivates people only because they're temporarily ‘in’. Now E is a bright bugger to talk about loyalty. The list of her dis-loyalties would fill the yellow pages of the New York Telephone Directory. Except of course to her children. And there she defeats me because I've been dis-loyal to mine.

Liza is very excited because she's just been told about the prospect of the horse. She's a lovely old kid and, despite my temper, I could spoil her almost as much as I spoil her mother. And that would take some spoiling. She is growing up at a fantastic rate and is tending to mother us all. She has latterly acquired the admonitory wagging of the finger with me and the ‘now-you-relax-and-take-it-easy-he'll-come-to-his-senses-because-he-really-loves-you-and-cannot-live-without-you’ sort of dialogue. It's a hot race in this family as to which is the most spoiled. But we all have instincts of generosity so I suppose we'll be alright. [...]

I muse that if the Hornbys had a child which seems to me to be unimaginable it would consist of one enormous buttock. All ass and no forehead. Their two bottoms side by side would fill the Albert Hall. We discussed sycophancy last night and nothing is as crawly as Simon's having to play golf with the new director of W. H. Smith's simply because he is the new director. He was also late for us at dinner and I cannot bear people being late. Except of course me.

Thursday 7th
Well, I'll tell you. Liza's birthday is over and the change in her has been remarkable in the last 12 months and when other people take notice of it and tell me, not how beautiful she is which is self-evident, but how gracious and thoughtful she has become and how carefully she looks after weaker members of the family – like me – me or her mother or her sister for
instance, and when they say, which is quite clearly impossible, that she sounds and even looks like me, I beam like a lighthouse.

I am in one of my idiotic moods and have kept the two little buggers awake far beyond their respective bedtimes. The two little buggers are E and L. When I say that she looks like me, or to be exact when they say she looks like, I don't mean for a second that it infers a physical resemblance but a trick of phrase, an oddity of expressions, a manner. She is vulnerable at this stage to any powerful influence and, I suppose, you could hardly come more powerfully than her mother and myself. If you know what I mean. We both have authority in our own rights and in very different ways. Anyway she is growing into a very special creature. Bill Squire said the other day, having met Liza for the first time, ‘Good God, I would know she's Welsh from anywhere, she looks like us, she talks like us, she is us.‘
²⁰⁶
I pointed out very carefully that she was about as Welsh as Josef Broz.
²⁰⁷
He was astonished. I suppose that is because one has forgotten how vast the changes are. The differences are day by day, week by week, month by month tiny but massive. And suddenly there is a different person.

I had been a little bit worried because it was quite obvious that people found Kate easier to handle and have around than Liza. But miraculously it seems, in the last month, Liza is running neck-and-neck with Kate and will, I guess, because the influences on Liza are more positive and because Liza's instincts are more generous, beat her (Kate) to the post. Understand that I love both children to the point of idolatry. She will never have charm in the ordinary sense of the word, she will never be, as Ivor says, and which I am, a ‘shw'd ichi heddi’, but, like her mother, she has the great virtue of honesty.
²⁰⁸
She enchants me because of course she is in any case a delightful child, she is her mother's daughter and because in the absence of her mother she lectures me exactly as if she were Elizabeth. She wags a self-conscious finger as portentously as Noel Coward. And she loves wicked and naughty words as innocently as her mother. She told me last night on her birthday if you please that she loved the word ‘Shit’. I just love it she said. I just love it.

I remonstrated but to no avail.

Just like her mother.

Friday 8th,
Kalizma
, Thames
It's 6 in the morning [...]. I am on a stand-by. I'd had very little sleep the night before (took a shower with my pyjamas on. Is't possible?) and for the rest of the day was like a somnambulist, drinking
steadily under the water until the exhausted and drunken body was given a succession of rockets from E and L on this yacht and ordered to go bed below decks. Example of dialogue with the two witches:

Outcome: A silent Liza appears with a tray of sandwiches and small exquisite tomatoes and spring onions with immense disapproval on the side. I gave her a sorrowful look with all the sly Celtic charm I could muster up, but it fell on deaf eyes. I think that child loves her mother. I hope she realizes that I do too. It's a shared privilege.

What a revelation Tony Quayle is? He's a sly-boots and perhaps he's mellowed with age, or perhaps I never knew him well enough but I'd either forgotten or didn't know how bright he is. And he can almost match me, said he with immense conceit, in knowledge of poetry. And reacts to it as immediately as litmus paper dipped in acid. What a strange thing for a man like Quayle to do. To stop being the boss of a great national monument like the Memorial Theatre and descend, for a few thousand quid, to playing opposite Gordon Scott in Tarzan.
²⁰⁹
And more than that. Stratford was a theatre that catered for actors who were not good enough for London, or amateurs straight down from the Marlowe Society or the OUDS.
²¹⁰
T.Q. changed all that. For a torn second or two Stratford became the poshest theatre in the world. The ripped moment lasted for about 10 years and Quayle was the man who did it. He got Larry there, and Vivien, and Ralph (for better or for worse) and the tallest girl in the school Redgrave, and a host of unknowns who later became ‘stars’ like me for instance. And Gielgud. And Badel.
²¹¹
And the best wearer of costumes in the world, Harry S. Andrews.
²¹²
It's quite something to have done. It's as, I think, Emile Zola said of a man's library: ‘It was not a library in the ordinary sense of the word. It was an act of faith. It was a passion.‘
²¹³
Even that anonymous librarian probably did not know how unconsciously well he'd wrought. You don't write wrought very often do you? There's something wrong
with the syntax of the last but 7th sentence, but we'll let it go. It will amuse me to correct it in my old age which will arrive next week. It is the bloodiest thing but I am only at home with children of my own generation. If you don't know your Richard two-strokes or three or the Dane.
²¹⁴
If you don't know that fool Dowson, or that lusting dying homosexual Housman, or Alexander Macgonical, then we have to begin from the beginning and re-educate ourselves.
²¹⁵
Nothing will persuade me that accident is art. Don't give me your bloody Beatles.

[...] Quayle told me yesterday at lunch, and it needs somebody to lay down the law because one forgets the obvious, that art must have form. J. Gielgud had seen that thing of Peter Brook's of Marat? Sade? and they were all having dinner or supper or whatever the hell it was at The Mirabelle with Alec Guinness and Simone Signoret.
²¹⁶
And Tony was in one of his recalcitrant moods. First: he hated the Mirabelle. Second: he wanted to find out something about Simone. Third: he hadn't seen the Brook thing. Fourth: he blew his top when J. G. said he'd been to see that particular production three or four times and though it was miraculous or marvellous or whatever the latest adjective was that he'd picked up that morning as he passed T. S. Eliot in St James’ Park on his way to the nearest public lavatory. Well to cut a long diary short, Tony asked: ‘But what was it about John?’ John didn't know and again Quayle blew his top and embarrassed his wife, the waiters, and gentle Alec and presumably the baffled Simone Signoret.
²¹⁷
And if I'd been there I would have blown my top too, except, of course that I wouldn't have the courage. But John, as Tony or I suggested, had deliberately become a send-up of himself. ‘I am just a child of nature, I don't know what I'm doing. Give me the words and I'll get on with the job. Is the war over, I'm so glaaaaad.’

Elizabeth says that Tony does the best impersonation of Gielgud that's ever been, that's deliberate. Better than me. Better than the two Peters, Ustinov and Sellers. I promised that I would find for Quayle an observation of Bacon's. It goes like this: ‘Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.‘
²¹⁸

I am neither full, ready or exact this morning but I have created a base on which to work.

Saturday 9th, Dorchester
Sadly I was called to work yesterday after all, and just for one line. ‘All will be well now Anne, all will be well.’ Today is Bob
Wilson's and Gwladys's wedding.
²¹⁹
I am to be best man and E the matron-of-honour or whatever the title is at Registry Offices. It is to be at Caxton Hall. I hope to god I don't get the giggles as I did at my first marriage at Kensington and E did at her marriage to Michael Wilding.

[...] Word came yesterday from the States that the children's film
Eagles
has grossed over $21m and is still going strong. That is in the United States alone. I don't know quite what it means but McKenna told me yesterday that it's been running for months in Dublin and if it goes on running much longer he'll be forced to see it. Cheek. In London it has been returned to Leicester Square from Coventry Street and is the only film in the recent heat-wave, not only to hold its own but to actually out-gross itself by £700 a week. So maybe retirement is a feasible idea after all. The film was a disappointingly slow starter but it is snow-balling along. If
Staircase
does half the business, I can probably employ J. Paul Getty as a butler and Onassis as a Greek chef.
²²⁰
Elizabeth top-less and mini-skirted, will serve me food and call me ‘sir’. That'll be the day! Jackie Onassis can be the tweeny and get her orders from Elizabeth. Noel Coward will be brought in every night to be witty and sing us songs. We'll get us a defecting Russian pianist, one of the great ones, to play every night. In chains of course. We'll pour white confetti on his hair and tell him he's in Siberia. [...]

Sunday 10th,
Kalizma
, Thames
The wedding went off without a hitch and there were a few moist eyes here and there. Quite a lot of photographers to give a tiny air of importance to the whole proceedings and last night we were all on the TV in the news. All good stuff and very nice for Bob and Gwladys. Not very nice however was the news that lovely Sharon Tate, wife of film director Roman Polanski, was one of the victims of a mass-murder in LA.
²²¹
She was pregnant which somehow or other makes it worse. It is all very odd and perfectly like one of Polanski's films because all his films have bizarre sex killings etc. in them, and E wonders if it was some ‘nut’ who was carrying out in practice what Polanski preached in theory. In which case Elizabeth is due to be beheaded. The poor little thing was apparently strangled and then hung from a beam. We shall find out more details today from the newspapers. And then we must send off a letter of condolence to Polanski because E likes him very much and says he's a sweet little man. I do believe that Mrs Polanski is the only person I've ever met who was murdered. Friends of mine have been killed but not murdered.

I have arrived at the stage, which E tells me is predictable, of being thoroughly bored by what I'm doing. The next three weeks are going to be torture.
I have tried for several weeks, and all my friends have too, to make Gin Bujold feel like a desirable person. But it's a lost cause. It appears that she goes out to discotheques with her husband every night, ignores her child-son, and arrives at the studio looking like the end of the world. And smells like it. She is forever throwing up. She is only 27. She has re-invented biliousness. Why can't she learn to look splendid at 6 in the morning, even if she went to bed at 5.30. Elizabeth looks dew-dropped with 15 minutes sleep. [...]

Monday 11th
It has been very humidly hot again over the week-end and promises to be so again today. This too is the day when I lie in bed with Gin Bujold which is not going to be cool. In fact it's likely to be somewhat sweaty.