The Richard Burton Diaries (153 page)

Sunday 15th, Capri
[...] E saw
Cleopatra
last night with all the kids. I popped in at one point for about ten seconds and went away and slept for another couple of hours. No reflection on the film! As a matter of fact E said this morning that the film is not at all bad – marvellous spectacle and all that. My lack of interest in my own career, past present or future is almost total. All my life I think I have been secretly ashamed of being an actor and the older I get the more ashamed I get. And I think it resolves itself into a firm belief that the person who's doing the acting is somebody else. That accounts presumably for my fury if anybody shows me anything about my acting in the magazines and journals. I don't mind the gossip stuff like ‘seen walking on the Via Veneto last night’ or ‘The Burtons on their luxury yacht’ etc. And I am equally angry whether I am praised or damned though mostly I'm praised. The press have been sounding the same note for many years – ever since I went to Hollywood in the early fifties, in fact – that I am or was potentially the greatest actor in the world and the successor to Gielgud Olivier etc. but that I had dissipated my genius etc. and ‘sold out’ to films and booze and women. An interesting reputation to have and by no means dull but by all means untrue. [...]

Monday 16th, Ischia-Messina
Sitting on the poop with a mug of real coffee [...] and the
Kalizma
steaming flat out with not a quiver on the waves. [...] Italians are shrieking on the radio and E is sitting opposite me having her ‘breakfast’ consisting of vodka and orange juice. A habit she picked up from me in my drinking days. A good start to the day if confined to one. In my case, sadly it had become as much as three and even more if there was anyone game
enough to join me. A bottle before lunchtime was by no means unusual and a pleasant but ruined morning behind me.

We left Capri, the Marina Grande, about 4 o'clock [in the] afternoon and sailed to Ischia where we parked off-shore from the Isabella Regina where we used to live in sin while locating for
Cleopatra
.
⁷¹
We went ashore to the pizzeria which we used to do then. Everybody had his or her pizza and then we attempted to do some shopping. I say attempted because the crowds became so great that we had to abandon it and run for the Riva and the
Kalizma
. [...]

As usual I am beginning to have butterflies in the belly at the thought of starting work again and don't even have the nerve-deadener of a script to learn as I know it is being entirely re-written. At least, I hope it is. So I continue with Italian and French and Frances Stevenson's [diary] re Lloyd George and Trotsky's life.
⁷²
My ignorance of the latter was monumental. I didn't know that he was one of the Mensheviks, for instance, or that he vilified Lenin so harshly.
⁷³
As for Frances Stevenson, her diary is sweet but she sometimes makes Lloyd George sound like a boastful little nothing.
⁷⁴
Writing only his version of events and being constantly challenged by history in the shape of dry little footnotes by the editor, A. J. P. Taylor. [...]

Tuesday 17th, Ionian Sea
[...] E read the diary yesterday and said I'd forgotten to mention the cig-holder given to her by Tito. It is the famous one, much cartooned, which he used to flourish a lot at the UN and other convocations holding it as if it were a pencil with hot end up. She passed many many remarks on its unusual beauty assuring him it must be a Fabergé.
⁷⁵
It seems to me that no one there knew what a Fabergé was or is. However after two days of subtle brow-beating he gave it to her. She kissed him on both cheeks which gratified him enormously. He gave me a bunch of flowers. He also gave us a lot of his own home-produced wine made in his own vineyards. [...] There is some trouble brewing up again on his borders with Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. Doubtless he'll be able to handle it. Geographically of course, he has that coveted access to the sea which all the land-locked have greedy eyes on. I understand a sight more about Russia's behaviour between the wars since reading
Trotsky
and for the first time Stalin's pogroms and purges take on a kind of historical inevitability. [...]

Wednesday 18th, Adriatic
[...] Am still deep in
Trotsky
and so far the man who comes out as the most enigmatically fascinating is Stalin. I must get
Deutscher's book about him as soon as I get back to an English library.
⁷⁶
I could order it to be sent to Rome for the start of the Trotsky film.

[...] We are due in Dubrovnik in about four hours and am beginning to feel nervous again about Tito. Jesus I hope they have a part for me to get hold of. I have all rights outside Jug[oslavia] so I must do my best to get things done so that I can re-cut and if necessary cut out some of the things they might get up to. That is, if the director is as average as he seems to be. We shall soon find out. How splendid it will be if the director is very good.

I want to persuade them – I have done so partially – to included a great [deal] more stuff about the British Military mission's reaction to Tito and his struggle. A lot more emphasis on his refusal to try and merely talk the British – Deakin principally – into getting Allied support but to
show
them by the deeds of his partisans that they were really fighting the German and Italian and Bulgarian armies. I also want to show in as low-key a fashion as possible Tito's life-long refusal to shoot captured enemies, even
etnik traitors. He told me of one terribly bitter story. He had a few hundred German prisoners and was at a point where he was forced to retreat. To carry the prisoners with him would have been a tremendous strain on his ever-slender resources. So he informed the senior German officer that he was releasing them to find their own way back to their commands. They were astonished but delighted, naturally. The usual treatment in that kind of warfare was to shoot all prisoners. He also hid his own injured men who were not able to move in what he thought was a safe place. He found out later that the released Germans returned as soon as he had disappeared and slaughtered the helpless partisans. Even so, he never wreaked vengeance. The other day, I noticed that Mihaaelovic [
sic
], the Royalist
etnik leader died of old age.
⁷⁷
He had not been shot when he was caught but given a trial, found justly guilty of collaboration with the enemy and sentenced to life imprisonment (I believe)
but not shot
. When we were with Tito he said how sorrowful he was that one of his favourites in the Sudan coup which was happening then had shot out of hand scores of political and military prisoners.
⁷⁸
This had turned him off completely. I asked him if he had ever lost his temper during those harrowing years of ravenous warfare. He said he had only done so twice. Once when he and some of his men were trapped in a cave and one by one tried to break out against heavy and concealed enemy fire. He said he blazed away at a helplessly trapped company of Germans who were in a captured jeep. Once when Deakin came to him to tell him that, after the capitulation of Italy, all captured Italian arms, ammunition, tanks etc. should be held and handled over to the Allies. Deakin mentions this in his
book too saying it was the first time he, Deakin had seen the Marshal go mad with rage.
⁷⁹
Among many little oddities I found from Tito [was] that he shaved everyday of the war except one day, the one day, when he was wounded in the left upper arm by bomb splinters. And that he dressed as impeccably as was possible throughout the whole madness. Another bit: he had sent a message to Stalin telling him of his release of the German prisoners. He received a brutally nasty telegram from Stalin in reply to which he sent a cold reply saying the unless Stalin could send him, Tito, material assistance, or at least the morale-lifting presence of a military mission, he should mind his own business. When later Tito went to Moscow to see Stalin there was a small party at which, among many others, was the dreaded Beria, chief of the Secret Police.
⁸⁰
Many toasts were drunk and all inevitably to Stalin. Tito had not had a drink of any alcoholic kind during four years and the eternal vodka was hitting him very hard. When his turn to toast came he toasted the inevitable Stalin, whereupon Stalin said with deadliness ‘Why do you toast me now after sending me that insulting telegram?’ Tito mumbled some placatory answer but the atmosphere was charged with menace. Later feeling sick from the vodka Tito went out into the grounds to throw up. A shadow appeared among the trees. It was Beria who said: ‘Don't worry, it is only your friendly policeman!’

Thursday 19th, Dubrovnik
We arrived off Dubrovnik at 5.15 yesterday afternoon and waited for the pilot for whom we continued to wait and wait. [...] When the pilot finally appeared before our puzzled eyes he explained that there was an hour time difference between Italian and Jugoslavian time. Hence the muck-up.

To our surprise, puzzlement and delight there wasn't a soul to meet us. The wharf was a desert [...] After about half an hour the inevitable little John Howard appeared telling us that everybody was on tenterhooks waiting for us to come.
⁸¹
The radio and TV had been on about it for days. Were we coming by jet, private, or our yacht. We were due on Wednesday morning, Wednesday evening, we were coming by sea-plane on Thursday! Within half an hour they descended on us like Assyrians. Popovi
, Deli
, Stepanjek, yet another interpreter a General in full get-up – didn't get his name but sounded like Vuko something – the press representative.
⁸²
[...] The Slavs seem unexpectedly to have a manana sense of time except so far Tito.
⁸³
He was as fanatically on the dot as I am. [...]

Friday 20th
[...] The house is enormous and totally impersonal and it seems that we are the first people to sleep [there]. Despite its vastness it only contains four bedrooms, two of them gigantic and containing two equally gargantuan study-offices adjoining. The other two are your large but not awe-inspiring bedrooms. The groundfloor ‘lounge’ and dining-room which leads off from it is about the size of a tennis court. There are 17 servants only one of whom speaks English or Italian and badly at that. So I have temporarily married my Serbo-Croat phrase book. Have you ... and nouns nouns nouns. Coffee, tea, onions, tomatoes.