The Richard Burton Diaries (148 page)

Thursday 6th
The newspapers made front page stuff yesterday of the fact that this hotel was robbed at 3 in the morning the night before – saying that the bandits were after E's Cartier-Burton and Krupp. Now we just so happened to have them with us up here on the 20th floor, every room of which is taken by guards etc. The strong boxes from the hotel vault had been brought up by the manager the day we arrived and were probably observed in the lobby by a member of the gang. What he didn't wait to see was that they were not taken back down again. The Krupp and Peregrina and lots of other pieces were in Dug's room in the strongbox under his bed where slept he and his son – also a cop. E was wearing the Cartier-Burton. So foiled again. I wonder how long we can keep up running this hideous risk without having genuine trouble one of these days.

The famed new white Cadillac containing every mod con for which we've been waiting for 18 months is a write-off before we've even seen it. It was badly smashed with Gaston driving it. His reasons all sound very dubious – the brakes went he says which seems unlikely in a brand new car – while the press say he crashed going the wrong way in a one-way street. We shall see. We don't even know where it occurred but it seems as if it were in the country around London. He'll have a volubly glib explanation and it wasn't his fault I bet. No use being angry about it but I am. Insurance will pay for it but it means another 18 months to get a new one so will abandon the idea.

We went to lunch at the Colony restaurant which is just around the corner from here.
²⁴⁸
We took Aaron and James Wishart with us. Aaron's sclerosis seems much worse while James has had a couple of mild heart attacks so we were with a right couple of athletes. [...] Today we're off to the
QE2
and looking forward to it. Shall go out and buy some books this morning. Letter from Alan Jay Lerner asking if I would be interested in doing the
Little Prince
of St Exupéry.
²⁴⁹
Might see him today on the ship to find out how he plans to do it. Might be good. Suggestion that Clint Eastwood might play in
Hammersmith
. Said yes if agreeable to Ustinov.
²⁵⁰

Friday 7th,
Queen Elizabeth We sailed yesterday at 5 o'clock. The ship is fine but horribly decorated. The British really have no sense of style, no sense of colour, no sense of line, of proportion, even of simple utilitarian sense. For instance, the door to the bedroom will not close unless you move the bed. The bed is fixed so the door remains permanently open. In both the bathrooms there are
three
sets of lavatory papers with the fitting fixed into the wall. In a desperate attempt to be ‘with it’ the decor has only succeeded in looking like 1925 German exhibition. It looks not unlike our little
Kalizma
before Elizabeth had it re-done. The tables in the Grill room are decorated with lamps about a foot high that look like blocks of box-flats lighted on the inside. The famous
Daily Telegraph
newspaper is a flimsy couple of sheets without even the virtue of the crossword puzzle which was a feature of the ship's paper on the old
Queens
. The passengers so far fit the decor – nobody seems first-class and we got the impression this morning when we went exploring around the deck at 7 o'clock that we were eternally wandering into the tourist section from the look of the passengers and the way they were dressed. We are still not sure. It may be a classless ship and we must ask and find out. She sails beautifully so far and there isn't a tremor from the engines and E became very nostalgic last night saying how unglamoured the whole thing was compared from her early journeys when First Class contained fabulous film stars and famous writers and crowned heads etc. And the engines really made the ship quiver and shudder. She became quite misty-eyed. I remember of course that the old
Queens
were pretty horribly decorated too, but at least it was substantial and expensively so. This ship gives the impression of being shoddy. But the rooms are pleasant and there are two little bars with all kinds of cute fittings and two small fridges – one in each bathroom. [...]

We both took a nap this morning mine unintended and short E's intended and long. I am reading a book by Le Carré called the
Looking-Glass-War
which is infinitely sad and depressing.
²⁵¹
Le Carré writes about that clubby class of Englishmen as well as anybody I've ever read and I think him to be as good as Graham Greene without the mystic Roman Catholic stuff but with the dying mystique of Empire and fading old-school-tie virtues as a substitute. He really writes like an angel and understands his victims very well and has a marvellous ear for common speech.

Wednesday 26th, Portofino
Yesterday was a day of frantic evasion tactics. We discovered that the bushes and road above our anchorage were infested with paparazzi – a mass of long-focus lenses everywhere one looked. They in turn must have passed the word around, though we were on the front page of the Genoa newspaper as well, with the result being that we were surrounded by
craft of every conceivable description from about 10 in the morning until nightfall. Pedal-boats, smart and powerful Rivas, hard-rubber boats with outboard motors, boats from Santa Marguerita and Genoa and Rapallo, row-boats and even swimmers. If the novelty has not worn off today and we are not left alone, then we shall move tomorrow to Elba which we have never visited and where we should be tranquil enough. We were so ignored in Corsica and Sardinia a couple or three years ago and we may be lucky again.

[...] Last night we showed on board Elizabeth at 12 years old in a film called
National Velvet
.
²⁵²
An utterly improbable story about a horse winning the Grand National – never having run against anybody before – with E riding it. But nevertheless utterly enthralling and timeless. Elizabeth was enchanting with a face of such intensity and such love for the horse that it was almost heart-breaking at times. Though, oddly enough, the face remains the same twenty years later. By some trick of bone-work it still is the same face though the present one is more character-full with its over-lay of experience.

Interrupted by the necessity to have my hair dyed much darker than it has been, the reason being that everyone seems to think that in the next piece
Villain
I should be a black rather than a blond villain. [...]

Thursday 27th, Portofino – Elba
6.45 in the morning and we are about 2 hours out of Portofino en route to Elba. [...] The ship ploughs sturdily and I suppose steadily on to the beginning of Boney's One Hundred Days.
²⁵³
Have just finished reading White's
The Making of the President 1968
which I found very readable.
²⁵⁴
He, White, is obviously a good man. I am at the moment re-reading Machiavelli and it is extraordinary how all his dicta apply to the letter to the American Elections. A man must never lie to himself but must, if necessary, lie to the people if he thinks it is good for them. This both Humphrey, Nixon and Wallace did time and time again if only by omission. Lies that are lies repeated endlessly with adulatory listeners who believe the lies even if they were told the same lies in a bar by a friend who know them to be lies. [...] Elizabeth has gone back to bed reading Coward's
Hay Fever
which they've asked us to play on the stage and then make a film of. I've never read the play or seen it but Coward doesn't sound like our cup of tea. Mugs of beer or should I say ales are more in my line as an actor than pink champagne which is what Noel produces so beautifully. Still, I shall read it after Elizabeth and see if I can compromise and be black velvet.
²⁵⁵

Thursday 27th continued, at Sea
[...] Yesterday was as mad as usual in Portofino – scores of small craft and one biggish one – about fifty feet, a largeish cabin-cruiser with a decadent looking white haired Italian owner about 55 years old or perhaps a well preserved 65 with lots of young girls – women – in bikinis, all very brown who had obviously come to look us over. We retreated inside to the salon. They got fed up in about an hour and a half and left. No people look quite as dissipated dissolute and handsomely debased as the rich middle-aged Latin. Vulpine creatures all coldly arrogant and generally with seedy titles and a powerful ambience of orgy. The women too with their lithe hard-eyed gigolos in disdainful condescending tow. They are virtually incapable of being affronted except by a whispered enormity from me in my vilest Italian as I pass within muttering distance. They are great fun to insult, because men of that age (I'm now talking only of the French and Italian Roués) remember only too painfully still the humiliations of the 39–45 war.

Gianni had a nasty little accident yesterday. He saw what he thought was a new kind of ball-point pen and fiddled with it to see how it worked. It was ‘Mace’ and he gave himself a faceful of it.
²⁵⁶
He cried gas tears for about an hour. It was our fault for leaving it lying about without telling everybody what it was. It was the kind that ladies carry in their handbags and had been accidentally unpacked by the stewardess Eugenie. Could have been much nastier. [...]

Friday 28th, San Ferraio, Elba
²⁵⁷
I slept for 10 hours last night. I have rarely felt so tired. We got here about 3 o'clock after a smooth journey. [...] This is the little place from which Napoleon set out for Waterloo. It's a bustling, beautifully sheltered little port with not a throttle of tourists but enough to make the stroll past the yacht and the stare at its occupants worth a walk they think. There are lots of those gaily decorated horse and carriages which trot back and forth which afford the dogs – our dogs – great opportunities for barking. I was so tired last night that I had a vodka martini but it was of no avail and I struggled through a modest dinner almost too tired to eat and went to bed at nine! We are moored right opposite a Bar Roma which is next door to a Hotel Darsena Ristorante announcing itself in large yellow letters. Higher above are the words ‘Grand Hotel Darsena.’ I love the little port already and hopefully we will only have people and no paparazzi which will make it a little heaven, and we must go and see Napoleon's Prison or whatever they call it.
²⁵⁸
Almost all the houses are pale yellow and all the shutters are green – without exception.

John Heyman found us here last night having come by Motoscafola from Piombino.
²⁵⁹
His news was that he had commissioned John Osborne to write
two plays – a sort of
Rashomon
1970 for E and I to do on TV for Harlech, which should get that lot off my back.
²⁶⁰
Osborne starts work on Monday. I wrote him a short delighted note. I hope it's some good. We passed a barren little rock half way here yesterday called Gargoni a most inhospitable looking place and a place of terror I've no doubt in earlier days and a haven for pirate vessels.
²⁶¹
[...]

Saturday 29th, Portoferraio
[...] We had lunch yesterday in a charming sea-side trattoria called very originally Ristorante della Mare – unhonoured by the Michelin Guide. The food was magnificent. We all decided to go off our various diets and to hell with it. We had mussels to start, dipping into hearts of artichoke, button-mushrooms, salami and other sausages the while, followed by a sort of thick clam and tomato soup followed by spaghetti with a sauce called something like ‘pesti’ – I mean something that sounded like that. It is a local herb, apparently, this ‘pesti’ slightly bitter but delicious – quite unlike any other taste that I can think of. I had four glasses of the local wine.

We bought in Portofino an immobile bicycle – one of those contraptions which when assembled presents you with a little bicycle on its own stand. One can adjust the height of handlebars and seat to one's own satisfaction. It has a kilometre attached which records your speed and after you've finished how much you have theoretically travelled.
²⁶²
Also attached is a clock which you set before you begin at the amount of time you wish to travel. When that time is up a bell rings. I started off four days ago with five minutes and am now doing 15 minutes. It seems a long and boring time and I am trying to find a music stand or something of that sort here in town which I can set up in front of the bike so that I can read. The problem is that as you pedal so the handlebars move forward and back. I might try reading by holding a book with one hand for five minutes and then changing to the other, in order to give each arm its own work-out. Because the arms work too. But more satisfactorily it would be a stand from which to read turning over the occasional page. I will try something this evening. Am now reading in tandem
The Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson
with Machiavelli.
²⁶³
The parallels are again very amusing. I will try and record some. [...]

Sunday 30th
The sun is temporarily out but generally it looks like a continuation of yesterday, grey and dull. We went dutifully to Napoleon's house which was very pleasant and middle-class, not at all grand. A garden that could be lovely and a magnificent view of the ocean. The only place of real interest to
me was the library but naturally, as in all such musées it was roped off. The bike is a marvellous idea. I ‘rode’ for twenty minutes this morning, sweated like a bull, and hot and cold showered for a further twenty. Makes one feel magnificently virtuous and fit. We are going by car, not our own – hired Hertz – to Rio Marina today and stopping somewhere en route for lunch.
²⁶⁴
[...] I have read so many books recently about Lyndon Johnson and nowhere does he seem a likeable man, with an ego so vast that it almost approaches mania, genuine madness. We are getting the English papers again and as before, after a long absence, they seem so stiflingly parochial. Huge headlines announce ‘Mutiny in the Navy’ and it turns out to be
¹
/
₂
dozen seamen who got stoned drunk and refused to obey orders and re-enacted Bligh and the
Bounty
taking all the parts between them.
²⁶⁵
Mutiny indeed. Picture of Onassis kissing Callas and a snidey-snidey article accompanying it. It is monstrous that such a magnificent pulpit as the press could be has such moronic preachers. Apart from a couple of sportswriters and the occasional political article and the literary critics there is hardly anybody who can write a plain English sentence. Even the
Times
has become a bit of a rag with gossipy columns yet! One can always rely of course on the crossword puzzles which maintain their standards!