The Richard Burton Diaries (136 page)

Louise, I'm told by Foot who is a great friend, so he says, of the Collingwoods, is a hopeless lush and is far far gone in the liver department. She is 50 or about to be and any minute now is going to look 70. She said she'd come on the waggon with me but, like Maureen Stapleton, it only lasted the night.
²⁰
She can't even stick to Vallartans like Elizabeth, though the latter exceeds her limit now and again.

As for E and I there is a kind of armistice. Both sides are fully armed, the bombs are ready to go off but so far nobody has pressed the button. The first six months of the sabbatical have been completely wasted. Except when we were alone we have bickered and quarrelled incessantly, and we have hardly ever been alone. Hawaii was a nightmare, Ivor's paralysis was a nightmare, Palm Springs and Los Angeles was a nightmare and there is more to come. I mean more Los Angeles nightmares. Anyway back to work soon thank God. Perhaps Europe and the
Kalizma
will rest us up for a bit after seeing Nevill off – if he can come, which now seems unlikely as his brother Paddy is dying.
²¹
And when
The Defector
starts [...] I am going to insist that everyone
must come to see me. I must have a look at Vietnam, just to see what it looks like and maybe I can get near enough to the DMZ to have a look at the famous bridge, but that shouldn't take more than a week or ten days.
²²
Then a look at Taiwan and other places that supposedly look like, or near enough look like Vietnam. [...]

Monday 30th
[...] Things seem to be more congenial around the house, largely because I kept out of the way of the family and guests practically all day. My teetotalism is inhibiting I can see. Every drink they take is almost apologetic which is silly. I am the one with the battered liver not they, though E will have to watch hers carefully by the time she's my age. [...] The dreaded trip to Los Angeles approaches fast. We leave on Friday and I present a prize to Army Archerd on Saturday at lunchtime.
²³
I have never done such a thing before and certainly not sober. I am followed by Bob Hope, not an easy man to precede with his vast experience as an international toastmaster.
²⁴
[...]

APRIL

Thursday 2nd
[...] I did nothing all day except stare at the ocean and occasionally memorize some irregular Spanish verbs. I am well over half way through the Grammar at the moment and, given a little peace in LA I will have practically finished it by the time we return. I will then go through it again fast and translate the editorials from the most reputable Mexico City papers every day, in the meantime finding some intelligent bilingual Spaniard to make conversation with for an hour a day. The best man in town they say is a doctor who has already attended some members of the family and seems young and nice. David the Tutor goes to him and says he's not a good teacher and that his English is somewhat broken but I don't want a teacher, I want someone who will listen to me read to him and correct my accent and who will ask me questions in Spanish to which I shall give painfully slow but, I hope, grammatically correct replies.
²⁵
I am pretty sure that in another month I shall be reasonably fluent. [...]

Another worry is that I have temporarily lost all sexual urge which is very frustrating for E. Presumably the terrific change in my body as a result of total abstinence for (now approaching) three weeks, after thirty years of steady and sometimes unsteady drinking is taking its time to re-assess itself. When it does come back it will be a vast explosion. If it does come back which it had better had.

I read last night Aaron's précis [...] of our respective financial positions. It seems that we have approx $5
¹
/
₄
million each but that our overheads are approx $600,000 a year. Insurance alone for jewellery and paintings is $200,000 a year. The
Kalizma
is 100,000. Vallarta is 20,000. Salaries and fees – lawyers etc. and agents Xmas bonuses et al. is 370,000. [...] I must find out from Aaron how we can cut down from $600,000 to about $400,000 a year. [...]

Friday 3rd, Beverly Hotels
That's as much as I was able to write yesterday. We arrived smoothly from Vallarta in Sinatra's jet in 2
¹
/
₂
hours. I have lost roughly 18lbs in two weeks on the Low Carbohydrate diet and have yet to have a drink in three weeks.

Saturday 4th, Beverly Hills Hotel
[...] Yesterday I went for my fitting with Ron Poston who is supposedly the #1 tailor in LA and he found, not to his dismay that I had lost 3
¹
/
₂
inches off my waist, and 1
¹
/
₂
ins off my chest. This morning I discovered that I had lost yet another lb. Another two or three lbs and I shall be at my lightest since
Hamlet
and almost as light as I was when I was hard and fit and played rugby in my teens and early twenties.

Yesterday I went to a press lunch where I presented an award to Army Archerd, the columnist, which was well received. Almost all the other people went on far too long, particularly Anthony Quinn who went on and on with a typically verbose extract from Wolfe's
Time and the River
.
²⁶
He also didn't know how to speak it. E made a surprise appearance at the end and had a standing ovation. Typical. We did all the work and she received all the applause. And where there had been no more than two or three photographers taking shots of the various candidates and donors, there were suddenly and from nowhere about forty or fifty of them. It must have astounded a French actress, said to be very good, called Jacqueline Bisset who had been sitting on my right throughout the proceedings on the dais, and who was also a giver of a prize.
²⁷
[...]

Sunday 5th
[...]I had a relentless and exhausting meeting with Lucy Ball who read out the script which we are going to do with her. The writing and situation will do and I shall change a great many of my own lines myself. Very nicely Brook is in it as well so will pick up a few dollars. Later that night we saw privately here at the B. H. projection room a film called
The Boys in the Band
.
²⁸
Full of four letter words but not too much so as to offend and the performances are all good but a bit ‘stagy’ which is not surprising as it was
played by the original Broadway Cast. I doubt whether, like
Staircase
, it will do very well.

[...] Jonah Ruddy came at six to interview me about ‘giving’ such enormous gifts to E like the Krupp and Burton-Taylor diamond.
²⁹
What did I think the taxi-driver and the bank teller think of such extravagance. It was boring and I could hardly defend myself by saying that we had given away or were owed nearly $2m, a half of which I doubt whether we will ever see again.

[...] We saw a film last night – one nominated for the Oscar – called
Z
.
³⁰
It's in French about the Greek military junta. Not really a very good film but smacks of the truth about present Greece. And is therefore impressive. [...]

Monday 6th
[...] I went this morning for a final fitting for my dinner jacket for the Oscars tomorrow night. There is apparently an outside chance I might win but I give it no mind or else I shall become morose if I'm a loser. I have now gone over 3 weeks without a drink and never give it a thought, though win or lose tomorrow night it's going to be another test of my will-power, because certainly everybody else will be intoxicated. It's one of those nights.

[...] My mind is obviously on other things because the preceding paragraph is about Saturday and not yesterday.

Now yesterday we sunbathed in the morning and at two o'clock Brook and I and E went to the rehearsals of the Oscars. There were a lot of people about, but I only knew a few by sight – Clint Eastwood was there and Jimmy Jones – the black actor of the great white hope and not Jimmy (
From Here To Eternity
) Jones.
³¹
Peck was charming and E found her speech for the presentation of the Best Picture Award too sententious and asked if she could re-write it herself, which she did last night so that they can put it onto the idiot boards.

[...] Later we watched the ‘viewers’ Oscars on TV horribly MC'd by Phyllis Diller – what a horror she is and Vincent Price who sounded terribly queer.
³²
I wouldn't have thought that a man of such obvious taste in everything else would have allowed himself to get associated with such a farce.
Anne
won nothing. I hope it won't be the same tomorrow night.

Tuesday 7th
Today is Hollywood's big day – the day of the Oscars. It's curious that the whole world makes fun of it, but that all actors want to win one and in the obituaries of actors it is invariably mentioned as the summit of their achievements. Even in
The Times
or the
Guardian
. For instance one of the reasons is that if the Oscar for leading actors is won tonight by John Wayne it will be out of pure sentimentality because, though I haven't seen his performance, I'm told
that it is little more than his usual walk through.
³³
His performance is not comparable with Voight's or Hoffman's.
³⁴
I haven't see O'Toole's and I am no judge myself.
³⁵
The supporting actress will probably be won by one Goldie Hawn because she is a famous TV personality.
³⁶
The leading actress will probably be Liza Minnelli because her mother died last year – Judy Garland a great and sentimental favourite here.
³⁷
And so on. That's what makes it absurd and still it's coveted, even by me! My only chance is that I am a Kennedy-Adlai Stevenson associate and a ‘Dove’ while Wayne is a Republican, ‘my country right or wrong’ Birchite Hawk, and the ‘artistic’ Hollywood fraternity is usually very liberal.
³⁸
Also, John Springer says that a great many people thought we wuz robbed when I didn't win for
Who's Afraid
. We shall see. [...] The rest of the day is going to be chaos and I look forward to Vallarta with longing. One more day.

Wednesday 8th
Richard is the BEST

That was written in his sups and cups last night – I mean this morning at 4.30 by a pixilated Brook. But cups or not I think he means it so shall leave it in. [...]

John Wayne won the Oscar as predicted. We went to the party afterwards and sat with George Cukor the Pecks and the Chandlers (owners of the
LA Times
) but were surrounded by scores of photographers, who, to my delight, took very little notice of anybody else including the winners.
³⁹
Barbra Streisand who fancies herself a big star was completely eclipsed. And a whole queue of people, literally hundreds, passed the table to stare at E and tell me that I was robbed and after all these protestations we began to wonder who in the world voted for Wayne.

We got out with a great difficulty because of the hordes of photographers, visiting Gig Young, who won best supporting actor, en route, who was stoned but sweet.
⁴⁰
Hawn won the supporting actress, also as predicted. We couldn't find Duke Wayne so came home, [...] Later still came Wayne himself also very drunk but, in his foul-mouthed way very affable. I survived another night without booze [...]

Anyway, I lost again, and am now the most nominated leading actor in the history of the Academy Awards who has never won. So I carved my tiny niche in the wall of Oscar's Wisden.
⁴¹

Friday 10th, Puerto Vallarta
We arrived yesterday [...] and are safe at home again. [...]

The day before yesterday was a right cock-up. We had arranged, win or lose, to have a ‘Thanksgiving’ dinner at 4.30 in the afternoon. This was to be for E's mother and Brook, Lilla, Norma, John Lee, Dick Hanley, Val Douglas, Jim Benton, George Davies, Aaron and so on. Afterwards, at six o'clock, we were to have a cocktail party for the ‘losers’. The thanksgiving was to be held in a small room at the hotel and the party in our Bungalow. However, this was not to be. Elizabeth didn't turn up for the dinner until six, which meant that the cocktail guests had to be shunted over from the Bungalow to the main hotel and willy-nilly join with us for a combinatory mess-up. [...] Most of the losers turned up. Jon Voight and his girl friend Jennifer Salt (daughter of Waldo Salt who won the best screenplay Oscar) who looks 15 and is actually 25.
⁴²
Rupert Crosse, negro supporting actor, Elliott Gould (didn't like him) Susannah York (very nice) Jane Fonda, who talked of nothing but the black panthers and got $3,000 each out of E and me, and Sylvia Miles, who was the only one I felt sorry for, a nice handsome negro called Otis Wilson and other people whose names I never found out.
⁴³
It went on until 9.30. By this time we all thankfully returned to the Bungalow with everybody drunk except me of course (still no drink) and E really sloshed. [...] I went to bed and Elizabeth went to the bathroom. Then I heard her calling me and she was bleeding from her rectum, it turned out she'd had a burst ‘pile’. I called Kennamer who told me to wrap some ice in a towel and for her to hold it against the bleeding. But she still wanted to see poor Kennamer, so I rousted the poor sod out of bed [...] and he came over within ten minutes. By this time naturally, it always happens, the bleeding had stopped. However he mucked about and put a bandage around her arse stayed for half an hour and talked about having just before us being sent for to the Hotel where John Lee, also pissed out of his mind, thought he was dying and Dick Hanley (drunk) had called for a priest to give the last rites. According to Kennamer the scene was so ludicrous that even the priest, a new young one, nearly laughed at the whole thing. What a lot.

We got off to Vallarta and the flight was quick [...]. And home in Vallarta, a game of ping-pong with Brook, fried fish for dinner, a few frames of Pool and off to bed with
Wellington: The years of the Sword
.
⁴⁴
[...] I didn't do as much Spanish in LA as I hoped. I have 15 lessons to go to finish
Madrigal's Magic Key
. [...]