The Richard Burton Diaries (118 page)

Thursday 11th, Bell Inn, Aston Clinton
Missed yesterday. I suppose when you reach an oasis you don't write.

The children arrived in a heap and a tumble and we had a faintly hysterical lunch where everybody wanted to eat everybody's food except their own. Plates were exchanged, forksful of ‘try this bit’ were handed around and we generally left the bemused waiters cross-eyed. [...]

I read most of the day and half the night (4.30 am) a book by Carlos Baker about Ernest Hemingway.
²³⁹
I have always loathed E.H.’s writing ever since I was a boy of about 14 I suppose and read
For Whom the Bell Tolls
.
²⁴⁰
The gross sentimentality of the man offended me, and still does. I cannot understand why ‘critics’ describe his ‘harsh realism etc.’. It seems to me he was a romantic shit. But this book, though too lyrical at times to be considered a work of scholarship, shows the man was the work. He himself was a shit of the first order and an Oscar winning sentimentalist. And yet everybody I know who
knew him adored him – even the mystic Archie MacLeish. I feel alternately sorry for him and contemptuous as I read this book and still, as they quote extracts from his writings as I go through the book feel slightly nauseated. I'll finish it today. One day, perhaps soon, I'll get all his works in paperback (he doesn't deserve hard-covers) and plough through him again. I'll choose a time when I'm constipated.

My shakes have practically gone! Ah what discipline! What Discipline? You may well ask. Well now, instead of 1
¹
/
₂
bottles of vodka a day, it is now cut down to
¹
/
₂
a bottle. What's the next move? A descent and return to beer I think. Especially as I've lost my taste for it. I wonder if I can find barrelled beer in Suisse to keep in the house. I will ask the lady called ‘Hedy’ in Olden auberge in Gstaad if this is possible. I shall become fat but jolly and not frighten children no more. Any more. No more.

Friday 12th
We leave today for London and on Monday for Paris and on Wednesday for Gstaad. What we do after that it is undecided but deliciously so. If the Med is nice and enjoying an Indian summer we will drive down in slow stages to the yacht at Cannes and cruise around for a bit. We may go to the party for ‘Scorpions’ given by the Rainiers at Monaco and live on the yacht and go by mini-moke to La Ferme, or La Réserve, or you name it. St Trop should be quiet at this time of year.
²⁴¹
Corsica maybe? Calvi, Bonifacio, Costa Smeralda, Cappo Caccia? Potofino, Ischia, Porto Santo Stephano, Positano, Portofino?
²⁴²
Or other places we haven't discovered yet. All fair-weather or perhaps even to Mexico and the old regime. And in the new year, who knows?

Ivor came to have dinner and we ate in Michael Harris’ mother's cottage (Harris is the owner of the Bell) and watched a ghastly but very enjoyable English film with Peggy Mount and David Kossoff etc. about cockneys taking over a country pub.
²⁴³
We had things called Bell Inn Smokies which are pieces of smoked haddock in a sauce with cheese on top in tiny individual casseroles. Mouth-watering. We must come back, if only for those.

Ivor will be coming over to Gstaad around about November with Robbie and the other girl. I must see Rossier in Geneva about getting all the equipment we can find to make life easier for everybody all round.
²⁴⁴
Electrical beds, pulleys and grips and any gadgets which will make everyone happier. If only we can get the strength back into Ivor's arms. He can move them now to a limited extent, which is a miracle in itself. We shall see what the year will bring. [...]

Sunday 28th, Gstaad
We have been here for about two weeks – I will look up the exact date later – and already it has done me a world of good. Shortly after we'd arrived Lillabetta and Brook arrived with Maria. And we, i.e. B and I, have played badminton every day in the morning and occasionally in the afternoons. We have taken long fast five-mile walks and for about a week I was so still that I could barely turn over in bed and my hands shook so badly that drinks had to be held up to my lips by E. Now however I am as steady as a rock and [...] I am infinitely more limber than I have been for a long time. I have reduced my boozing to practically zero – by my standards. A vodka martini before lunch, and wine with dinner. And I frequently don't touch the wine. I have taken up the drinking man's diet again about three days ago. [...]

I have just finished a very readable Life of Mussolini, which depressed me so much that I hurriedly re-read Waugh's
Vile Bodies
to put me in a good frame of mind for sleep last night.
²⁴⁵
Poor man. What he lacked, it would seem when the chips were down, was moral fibre. L.M.F. He was a born coward with a woolly mind, a poseur, and a lousy actor if the many photos of him are to be taken as evidence. I sort of like him though, which one could hardly say of Hitler. It gave me a vindictive satisfaction to see the balloon of his pomposity pricked by the British and Yanks, both of which nations he had contemptuously dismissed in the days of his power before the Second World War as decadent layabouts. Never, I suppose, in the history of warfare has a nation been so derided for its inadequacy and general cowardice. Not only by its enemies, but by its allies.

Monday 29th
[...] I fell off my disciplined waggon last night with a thunderous crash and sat up with Brook until 5.30 in the a.m. drinking in the mean-time a whole bottle of Scotch alone. I am feeling it today but have abandoned the diet and stopped all alcohol. I am topped up with milk and chocolate and two veganins and lots of water and health salts. And I had chips and fried eggs and grilled tomatoes and crunchy bread and butter for lunch and slept for about three hours while E was being massaged. I feel distant and distrait but not too bad, and I don't have the shakes. [...]

Brook became quite maudlin and lamented the fact that he had grown up in the shadow of his famous father, that it had crippled his spiritual and material life etc. I was fairly curt and told him not to blame his life on others, but to become his own boss. I suggested that he went into the garage business which he owns as a
working
partner with acting as a hobby. He says he couldn't afford it, but of course he could if he buckled down to it. Lillabetta is, I suspect a very good business manager and could, and does, I believe handle all the business side. Otherwise, even more than I have, he will suddenly find himself middle aged and looking back on a life-time of self-indulgent waste. I think Brook's ambition was and is to be a golf pro. He never keeps off the subject for long. Though he knows, good a golfer as he is, that he is not that good. He is such a marvellous chap and I hate to see his unhappiness. I think he could write too, far better than his boring brother Alan who writes ‘tough’ diluted James Bond novels, with a touch of Ambler and Graham Greene.
²⁴⁶
And with no shred of humour. But he cannot bring himself to settle before that awful blank sheet of paper. Anything is better than the indignity of being in effect a sort of super-extra with a few lines here and there as in
Eagles
and
Anne
. Even being a major actor like myself finds the profession insulting at times. [...] I am using Maria's room as a study until my room is ready downstairs. The book shelves have been made and in two or three days having shaved and polished the floor I shall start using it. Some years ago I was talking with E in the middle of the night about this and that and she asked me if I had any ambitions, minor, realizable ones. I thought and said that yes I had a small one but it was too late now. What was it she asked? I told her that it had been a childhood ambition to own the entire Everyman's Library. One thousand, numbered, gleaming, uniform books and from the age of about 12 I began to collect them. By the time I was in my twenties I had about 300 or so, and then, to my dismay Dent-Dutton changed the format and they were no longer uniform. Some were tall some were medium and some were the old size. Some, I said, must be in New York [...], some with Ivor in Hampstead, some in II Squire's Mount. Without saying a word to me she wrote to Dent-Dutton and asked if they could find all the books with the first pocket-sized uniformity. It took them a long time but they found them all. She then had them bound in several different colours of calf – red for novels, yellow for biography, green for poetry etc. etc. The whole thing cost her about £2,600. This was done five years ago and the books have been in packing cases ever since, but in two or three days they will be out and home on the shelves. It will be thrilling for me to see them again, especially the poetry section as it was from Everyman's that I first learned a body of poetry entirely on my own and without benefit of having it rammed down my throat for exams etc. in school. I know which sides of the pages my favourites lie on. It is a fantastic reference library with the index in my head. I shall browse in that place for the rest of my life. They will take up at least one wall of the room, and they should be a splendid sight.

I told E that while up at Oxford and in the RAF I would, when ever I could, go to London for the weekends and steal books from the giant Foyle's in Charing Cross Road. I told her how I used to do it. During the war, when I did my best stealing, there was an acute shortage of paper and Foyle's couldn't wrap the books up as they do nowadays. I would buy one book and pay for it.
The assistant would give a receipt which I would ostentatiously leave hanging out of the pages of the legitimate purchase. Now whether one bought one book or ten you still had only the one slip of paper to show for it. I would then pick up one or two Everyman's, taking a long long time – as much as an hour sometimes before I sauntered quietly out of the shop. I must have stolen scores of Everyman's in this way. One day I was up to my usual tricks in Foyles when an Irish friend of mine called Mannock Quinn was doing likewise in the corner. I had been bold this day and had about five books in addition to the one I'd bought, when Mannock came and stood casually beside me. Out of the corner of his mouth he said softly: ‘Put all the books back, Taffy. Put ‘em all back.’ Very slowly and acting the part of a man who could not make up his mind I, one by one, put them all back. Later on when we were safely away from the shop Mannock told me that he'd seen one of the male assistants go into the little glass walled office that Foyle's used to have then, put on a raincoat and follow me around. I never stole a book again, and indeed, within a year, having almost immediately become a ‘star’, I didn't need to anymore. But the story doesn't end there. After having told E the story of my only thieving she said that the next time we were in London we must go to Foyle's together. I said we would. And we did. Working there temporarily was Sybil's niece Helen Greenford. The shop had become bigger than ever and it was difficult to find her. Word, however had spread through the store like wildfire that we were there and she found us through the good offices of a shop detective. Nobody in our section was buying books anymore – they just stood and stared at us. Eventually when the press became too great and embarrassing I asked the manager if I might take my ‘niece’ around the corner for a cup of coffee for ten minutes. He agreed. People will agree to anything if you're famous enough. Helen left and we went home to the Dorchester. In the car, E opened her bag, and handed me a book. It was an old edition of the
Shropshire Lad
.
²⁴⁷
With all those hundreds of people around, to say nothing of store detectives watching for our safety, all of them staring and oohing and aahing over her beauty, she
had stolen a book!
I burst into a cold sweat. I could see the headlines. ‘Millionaire Couple Steal Book From Foyle's. "Book not worth more than five bob," says manager.’ Christ. I gave her a terrible and rather pompous row but her delight was not to be crushed. It's the first and last thing she ever stole in her life, except of course husbands! [...]

OCTOBER

Wednesday 1st, Gstaad
[...] Brook and Mike (on his motor bicycle) and I went down to the village to walk around Cadonau's where I ordered a
table-tennis table and all the trimmings, where we bought a dozen books, all paperbacks. [...]

I did not know quite how significant the phrase ‘blind drunk’ was until a couple of weeks ago. I have played badminton since I was a boy in the secondary school and have no doubt that if I'd wanted to and had the proper coaching I could have become a champion of some minor sort. In fact nobody, except champions, has ever beaten me in thirty years. But the first few days here, playing Brook, I was continually beaten.
I could not see the shuttle
. Since stopping drinking however I can now see the shuttle right onto the racquet and am beating him more and more confidently every day. This ties in with Esmond Knight's telling me that the doctors had told him that he was losing what little sight he had in his one eye through booze.
²⁴⁸
(Teddy lost one eye during the war and the sight of the other was badly affected.) And Teddy has never been a heavy drinker – certainly not in my class. So ‘blind drunk’ means something after all. [...]

Thursday 2nd
[...] I read a book called
The Center
by the Yankee political columnist Stewart Alsop, but fell asleep over it and slept for a couple of hours.
²⁴⁹
I finished the book later that day and learned even more about the mad intangibles of Washington politics. So haphazard is the choice of representatives of the people, not only in the USA, but elsewhere that it seems to me we are very lucky that some maniac hasn't had his finger on the button and sent us all into oblivion a long time ago.

[...] Today I am driving B and E to Geneva where we will spend the night at the Hotel President. This afternoon we shall visit the Art Gallery where they display some of E's collection and then to the Hospital to see Dr Rossier to arrange when he wants us to officially open the new apparatus which we bought for the Paraplegics ward – it cost us $50,000 I think – and to ask him if he can help us get the proper beds, pulleys etc. for Ivor's room here in Chalet Ariel.
²⁵⁰
It will give me a funny feeling going back to that hospital where we spent so many horrified and anxious days. [...]