The Richard Burton Diaries (140 page)

Saw Charles Collingwood interviewing Speer about war crimes – his in particular.
¹⁰⁹
Charles seemed a bit holier than thou to me and Speer came out of it better and made no excuses. He seemed thoroughly likeable. There was a slight air of kicking a man when he's down in Charles’ attitude and more than a touch of self-righteousness. [...]

Tuesday 9th
[...] I talked to Kate yesterday and she comes out to stay with us after school finishes, which is Friday so she'll be here on Saturday for which many thanks and general rejoicing. She is still a little girl and hasn't become a long-haired unkempt pot-smoking hippie yet at least. I also talked to Aaron re
Don Quixote
and
Defector
and the documentary
Becket
.
¹¹⁰
All as nebulous as ever. For
Quixote
I can get $
¹
/
₂
m in front as they say. The market is looking up a bit but nowhere near what it was.

I expect another couple of bad days from E before we turn the corner but nothing short of a catastrophe can be as bad as yesterday. The nervous tension created in me when she's in pain is quite extraordinary. I am incapable of dispassion and keep on thinking how nice it would be if I had the burden of pain instead, except that I'd be far worse than she.

Wednesday 10th
Elizabeth in a complete reversal of form was bubbling over with joie de vivre all day yesterday and wanted to go out to a movie and/or go out for a drink. With memories of the last week's nightmares, fresh with haemorrhages and possible blood transfusions and hospitals and helpless pain, new in my mind, I said no. But perhaps, I said, tomorrow. [...] So if all proceeds at an even pace today we will go out to the cinema tonight. We have a choice of
Airport,
Mash
or
Marooned
.
¹¹¹
It looks like
Airport
. I read a long piece in
Time
mag about Mike Nichols and
Catch 22
in which I am, as ever, misquoted.
¹¹²
I therefore assume that everybody else is. Mike, for instance, doesn't sound like Mike at all though if the writer is right Mike may have changed his attitudes to life and all that because of the profound impact on it of
Catch 22
’s despairing black humour. A book I couldn't abide and I have a treacherous feeling that I won't be able to abide the film either. We must get it run when we're back in LA. [...]

[...] Apart from my Spanish I cannot settle down to what is known as ‘serious reading’ but gobble up thrillers at the rate of knots. Have got some lovely books too, hanging around.

Thursday 11th
[...] Received telegram from Cliff Morgan [...].
¹¹³
Gratifying. Cliff is no Connolly but gratifying.
¹¹⁴
[...] The best part of the day for me is usually the very early mornings – from 5.30–6.00 to about 9, but now the whole family has taken to getting up about 6.30–7.00 and it's bedlam. Lamentably here there is no place to hide, the house being so small. It'll be worse when Kate arrives. [...] Must learn to concentrate regardless of distractions. And they
will
read extracts from the newspapers to me in the middle of my typing. [...] I shall try typing outside on the patio beside the swimming pool tomorrow and see if I can get away that way.

Just had bacon and eggs and bangers which I didn't really want, but as I'm feeling churlish I took them with a reluctant ‘thank-you’. Why don't they go back to sleep – they've got nothing else to do. I have heaps of things to do, heaps and heaps. [...]

Friday 12th
[...] I awoke at 4.45 this morn. Got up and made coffee. A quiet silver dawn. Dogs all sleeping and all the family. The lights in this house are so low and so few that at this hour of the morning I type in semi-darkness, a gloom. Had a reply from Emlyn Williams yesterday to my avuncular letter of advice and sympathy re his mental and physical collapse last year.
¹¹⁵
The letter [...] is very chipper and would seem to indicate that he's around the corner. His bad-taste revue number is not, however, up to standard. Of course, those numbers have to be acted not written. How long it is since Noel and Emlyn created the revue. The late King George VI singing ‘K-K-K-Katie from the c-c-c-cowshed’ and Kenneth Kent, Radie Harris and Herbert Marshall (all wooden-legged) doing a dance number called ‘Touch Wood.‘
¹¹⁶
Esmond Knight and Esmé Percy (both one-eyed) doing a number called ‘I've got my eye on you.‘
¹¹⁷
A chorus of skeletons dancing and singing ‘Take me back to dear old Belsen, take me back to good old Buchenwald.’ Those were the early ones, or some of them, and there have been hundreds since.

E had a good day, so much so that we decided to go out to dinner in the evening at a ‘Steak House’ but after ten minutes or so it was obvious that she was only barely hanging on and so I took her home and went back later to pick up Liz and a very drunken Brook. He had had a lot of Napa Valley claret during the ten minutes I was away – anyway, a huge jug of it was practically empty. He looks ugly when he's drunk, speaks very loudly and repeats himself a lot. Also he looks uncannily like Emlyn at such times and his mannerisms become absolutely and frighteningly the same. The rat-tat-tat nodding of the head before the witticism or the didactic finger-wag. The pursed lips. He went on and on about a British actor called Wilfred Hyde Whyte – who lives here in Palm Springs with his new and rich young wife – and what a swine he is to act with.
¹¹⁸
A laugh-killer and up-stager etc. He sounds a nasty piece of work to work with. All this cut-throatedness done with ‘my dear boy’ bonhomie. Oddly enough I have always defeated such actors by giving them everything and ultimately stealing every march on them. Instance Rex in
Staircase
. Rex was so busy getting his face into the camera that he forgot to play the part as well as he could. On the stage it's even easier than on the screen to break the back of such petty performers. Just give them their heads and they chop themselves off. I've always found it so childish anyway. [...] Kate arrives tomorrow at 2.15 LA time at LA. I shall drive in to pick her up. Longing to see her. Watched Mexico play Belgium in soccer at Azteca Stadium, Mexico City. It's
the world cup. Mexico won on a penalty.
¹¹⁹
I wanted to have the Belgians win. Silly. Just because they were Europeans I suppose and had to put up with the mindless antagonism of 100,000 screaming Mexicans. There might be trouble down there on a big scale before this competition is over. International sport on that level brings out the most virulent hatreds. I wouldn't enter myself. Soccer fans seem particularly idiotic even in England. I myself become a nervous wreck when watching Wales play rugby, though it expresses itself in silent writings internally with an occasional roar of relief or arbitrary remarks to perfect strangers and lots of pulls at the flask of whiskey or brandy. I'd rather not go any more. I cannot even read the accounts of a Welsh loss!

Saturday 13th
[...] [Elizabeth] watched me in an old film last night –
The Rains of Ranchipur
– and said I was very handsome and sexy-looking and that the film was nothing like as bad as I said it was.
¹²⁰
Perhaps it's mellowed with age. [...]

The
LA Times
today announce that Larry has been made a life peer [and] that Sybil Thorndike has been made a CH. Freddie Ashton the same. I am a CBE and David Frost an OBE.
¹²¹
Nothing still for Emlyn and he could have done with one. Larry told me years ago that he was determined to be the first ‘actor-peer’. It was a reply to my asking him what worlds did he have left to conquer in our profession. He was in his cups and we were living together at Tower Road in Bev Hills and he was doing
Spartacus
and I was doing
Ice Palace
and neither of our careers were sparkling which is why we were doing such bad films.
¹²²
Larry was tearful because he couldn't get backing for a film of
Macbeth
which he lusted to do, and I was contemplating retirement from acting and writing instead – not for a living, not for money. I was already a dollar millionaire and with the inexpensive Syb could have lived like a prince for the rest of my life. I wanted to write because I sought for some kind of permanence, a cover-bound shot at immortality and not a rapidly dating film and acting to match.
¹²³
Well he's made his ambition to be a peer but not to film
Macbeth
. Perhaps one will follow the other now, but not if I can get in first. I'll be interested to see the reaction of the British Press to both Larry's peerage and my CBE. Larry's is so sensational an elevation that he might take the heat off my award and the stuff about me being a traitor to Britain for running away to Switzerland and not paying taxes. I remember being lumped with Chaplin and
Noel and somebody else as instances of rats leaving a sinking ship and all that. If the press is quiet about this I might nip a knighthood one of these days. A couple of seasons at the Old Vic and a stint or two at Oxford and I could swing one fairly easily with a Labour government in power. We might however have all died of asphyxiation or world poison by then.

Shall send a cable to Olivier today.
¹²⁴
It is a remarkable achievement considering that he has never been a ‘clubbable’ man in the Wolfit, Richardson or Guinness sense.
¹²⁵
He has remarkable stamina and it's about time they separated him from the herd.

Sunday 14th
Drove with Brook to LA yesterday to pick up Kate at the airport and it proved to be an eventful and very tiring journey. [...] At a place called Banning I was gonged down by a Highway Patrolman for exceeding the speed limit.
¹²⁶
He said I was doing 80mph in a 70 zone. I didn't argue because I was actually going faster than that. Unfortunately I had no licence and no means of identification at all. Nothing in my pockets at all except cigarettes a lighter and about $300 in cash. I was forced to tell him that ‘I'm quite a well-known actor, my name is Richard Burton.’ He recognized me and I did have Dick Hanley's car-hire form and explained that he was my secretary. The boy was very polite but gave me a ticket nevertheless. [...]

Kate is already 5 ft 4 ins in height and is not yet 13 years old. She is as tall as Elizabeth. She is very white like all easterners and tells me to my surprise that she takes the sun very badly. Odd that, as both Syb and I take it very well. Throw-back to some funny gene somewhere.

E had had a rough day what with Sisler sticking a finger up her behind and wiggling it about to make sure that the passage was kept open. She shouted, she tells me, a great deal. Glad I wasn't here.

[...] Looks as if the film will start about the 25th–30th. Talk of P. Scofield playing the doctor.
¹²⁷
He's quite wrong for it but he will help to give it ‘class’ as they say here. Will again make it ‘a different ball of wax.’

[...] Will try to do some Spanish. Kate is reading
Jane Eyre
and announced fifteen minutes ago ‘Rochester has just kissed Jane. Wow.‘
¹²⁸

Monday 15th
Have been up since 5.45 and for once was beaten to it by Kate and E and we all went to breakfast at the Dunes Hotel Coffee Shop driven by E in the golf-cart.
¹²⁹
[...]

Have read through some of the entries in this thing. It is stupendously tedious. But If I didn't do it I would feel guilty of something or other. So will slog away even though it is unreadable. It's some sort of writing at least. Perhaps I should do a daily thing like this and then write a Sunday précis in proper and considered English. Leave it till the end of the year and then turn it into one large book for my eyes only. Then there would be some purpose to these meanderings. Perhaps write my recollections of the year from memory alone. And then write what this book says and compare the two. Compare the anger of the day after with the dispassion of a year after. Recollect like Aunty Wordsworth in tranquillity.
¹³⁰

[...] I want to go to work for a time now, more than anything to find how I react in a sober way to the tedium of film-making. No drink to kill the pain. And an indifferent film to boot.

Tuesday 16th
7.30 and out on the concrete beside the pool in bathing costume and back to the sun. [...] Kate asleep still therefore am writing on this notepaper as my diary is in her room. I sleep tremendously heavily nowadays since the booze is working or has worked perhaps out of my system. The sleep is not long – 5 hours or 7 at the very most – but it is very concentrated. No dreams or nightmares or at least none that I can remember. I wonder if death is like that? If so it won't be at all bad. [...] Shopped at the bookstore and bought mags and a French/English version of Rimbaud.
¹³¹
Have never read him in the original. She [Kate] bought one for Jordan Xtoph Syb's husband.
¹³²
I suspect she calls him ‘Dad’. And feels guilty about it. I also suspect that he does not read poetry, though I may be wrong. Nobody has any opinion of the fellow at all, neither for nor against. He's nice and quiet, is about the only reaction I can get out of anybody. [...]

Dr Sisler's son watched me on
The David Frost Show
and heard me say that I used to learn the major classics of Shakespeare's by heart when I was a small boy.
¹³³
Fired with ambition he has learned ‘To be or not to be’ or something and wishes to recite it to me. What can I say except yes? He is 12 years old. I shrink I flee I die but it has to be done. Marvellous what the public and press will persuade themselves of. I have this marvellous reputation as an actor of incredible potential who has lazed his talent away. A reputation which I enjoy, but which I acquired even when I was at the Old Vic those many years ago.

And unless I go back to England or the National Theatre in Cardiff etc. and slog away at the classics for a decade, that is the reputation I shall die with.
‘Will you ever go back to your first love, the theatre?’ they ask all the time. ‘It's not my first love,’ I snap. The theatre, apart from the meretricious excitement of the first night and the sometimes interesting rehearsals has always bored me and reading scripts has always bored me. I haven't read Shakespeare for years, except an occasional dip into
Lear
and a glance at
Macbeth
, though I will speak him for your entertainment endlessly. I do not wish to compete with Olivier or Gielgud and Scofield and Redgrave etc. as they are too ‘actory’ for my liking. Apart from occasional performances, few and far between, I don't believe a word they say. Larry is the past-master of professional artificiality. A mass of affectations. So is Paul. John is always the same and when it fits the part he is very watchable, but when it doesn't it can only be described as regrettable. They have splendid presences and are very hard-working and genuinely love their jobs. I cannot match the two latter qualities. And do not wish to. [...]