The Richard Burton Diaries (174 page)

Meanwhile at the other table E and Grace were having a marvellous time. The lucky bastards had Guy, the Duchess of Windsor, Maurice Herzog, Jean-Paul Binet and a few others.
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The star turn according to E and Grace was the Duchess who is perhaps getting slightly ga-ga. She has an enormous feather in her hair which got into everything, the soup, the gravy, the ice-cream, and at every vivacious turn of her head it smacked Guy sharply in the eyes or the mouth and at one time threatened to get stuck in Guy's false moustache which was glued on. She made one bon mot which had Grace in tears. After having got her incredible feather into everything possible she then called in her very penetrating voice, having a desire to write down her tel no for E and me which has changed since they sold their house, Est-ce-que quelle-qu'n qui a une plume?
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She was most insistent that E and I should see the Duke before we left for Gstaad giving E the feeling that he is probably on his last legs. We are going to dine with them on Monday night. Binet flirted blatantly with E but in the best French manner and they had the same hysteria with the serving of the food – Grace being the hander-over.

After the dinner, Guy asked E if she would help him remove his moustache which was now becoming a bore. They went into a gents lav, or rather a lav for either sex while a servant stood on guard outside. Bettina elected to choose this time to try and get into the same loo not knowing that E and Guy were inside. E had removed the moustache and was cleaning around Guy's mouth when Bettina finally burst past the servant and found them in this situation. It looked for all the world as if E and Guy had been having a necking session and E was now removing the evidence. Bettina was delighted by the whole thing.

By this time the rest of the guests, as it were the ‘b’ list were arriving. They were announced in a stentor voice by a gentleman with a large voice and a large intricately carved staff – I've forgotten what they call those things – with which he pounded the floor and boomed that Madame et Monsieur Harry Dogface to which fascinating information nobody except the people who had just whispered their names to him paid the slightest attention. I squeezed past them followed by Mme Malle and her friend and Elsa Martinelli and somebody else (uninvited) to take them to the lav of our room.
³⁷⁴
E was already in the room repairing her maquillage with Bettina. I sat thankfully and smoked before we went back into the whirlpool below. We both sat for a time with Grace and Ricardo? of Madrid in the normally intimate corner of the first room. Scores, perhaps hundreds of people flocked past on some pretext or other to view E and Grace. I wandered about after a time talking to this one and that including Jaqueline de Ribes, Pierre Salinger and wife, Sam Spiegel and M-H's lovely big brother that we call ‘Broken-nose’ and occasionally I caught glimpses of E being avidly though covertly gazed at wherever she went.
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And I congratulated Salinger on the success of his book and how much I'd enjoyed it and that I had read it in one sitting and had he yet sold it for a film and he had – to CBS – and we then talked of the splendid night in LA when Bobby Kennedy and I insulted each other's races bloody Irish v bloody Welsh and the usual Kennedy–Burton quotation match, and Rudi Nureyev and his wickedness and how horrified and struck dumb we all were by Bobby's assassination and how much we all loved him and later I found de Ribes flinging herself flatteringly into my arms socially acting as ever the Grande Dame with lovers and asked her how her love life was and she said she had a fantastic new lover and where was he said I and she looked and couldn't find him and how he had made her feel 18 again and I didn't say that 18 she might feel but 80 she looked, beautiful 80 but 80, and Broken-nose told me that Sam's film
Nicholas and Alexandra
was a slow film and very long but nevertheless very beautiful in it.
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[...]

Have had a lunch, a too-much lunch for me of soup, lamb cutlets and boiled new pots in their jackets and string beans followed by a splendid gateau, and a sit-down. I told a lot of stories about the theatre and about British royalty. And after tisane which I drink here all the time, E and I and a lovely young girl, an English actress called Charlotte something went for a walk around the lake.
³⁷⁷
It was lovely and there were millions of birds chattering in a copse –
what kind of birds I have no way of knowing and the walk though pleasant didn't succeed in burning away my dinner.

... many other people told me of Sam's film and all of them reacted in more or less the same way. It is quite clearly an honest but rather dull film.

After a time wandering about Grace asked me to see her upstairs and help her remove her borrowed choker and get her to her car. I suppose it was about 1.30. This I did nearly strangling Grace to death while trying to get the necklace off. For a minute she was in bad trouble as the necklace got twisted up as a result of my inept handling of the clasp as the bloody thing was too tight in the first place and, in fact, I had told her before we went down to the ball that she ought to remove it telling her she didn't need it. However, we finally twisted it around so that she herself could see it in the mirror and finally we released her. Even when off it took considerable strength to unclasp it. So down the stairs we went together. At the bottom, alone, was Sam Spiegel. ‘Where are you going you two?’ ‘For God's sake’, said G, ‘don't Sam say a word to Elizabeth. She's at the Ball, she's dancing, she's happy, let us go. Richard will let Elizabeth know. It's going to be a shock but ... these things happen.’ Etc. For a full
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/
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minute Sam, because of Grace's normal seriousness and because of her very good piece of acting and my deliberately stricken-with-guilt face, was taken in. We made off. Found Grace's car after a lot of waiting in the piercing cold and she was gone. She was quite the nicest she's ever been and David Rothschild expressed astonishment that she could be so gay.
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She had always he said been a bit of a dead weight. On the contrary, we said, but she does need a little drawing out. Actually it is the nicest she has been in all the years since we've known her as a Princess. At one moment during the choking choker episode I saw mental front-pages in
France Soir
’s and
News of the World
’s lurid headlines. Famed Actor Strangles Princess in Bedroom at Rothschild Mansion During Grand Ball.

For the rest of the evening we wandered about and ran into Audrey Hepburn and her ludicrously named Italian psychiatrist husband Doctor Dotti who is not very nice I think.
³⁷⁹
We had snaps taken of us by Cecil Beaton who is also not very nice in a different way.
³⁸⁰
Then in another room we had snaps with Audrey Hepburn and M Dotti and Doctor Troques and his wife and after an encounter, very strange, with M-H's sister-in-law Gabby Van Svillen who insisted that she was the Tsarina of All the Russias.
³⁸¹
Did she, I asked politely feel this because she had in fact some Romanov blood – Mike Romanov blood, I added. No, she said, everybody is someone else and I am the Tsarinevitch. What about you? she said. I want to be a fellow of All Souls,
I said.
³⁸²
A what? she asked and lost interest. I was saved by a man called Valery who is the son of the poet.
³⁸³
He was charming and again we discussed poetry. He told me of the time when everybody assured his father that he was a dead certainty to win the Nobel Prize for Literature that year and with what excitement, sitting in the garden, the maid came out in a hurry to say there was a long-distance call from Stockholm for him, he went bounding into the house to hear the great news only to find it was a wrong number. He never did get the Nobel Prize.

Then there was a young man with long blonde curly hair who followed E everywhere struck all of a heap with a mighty passion, dog-like in his adoration, looking a bit I thought like the American Pianist Van Cyburn, slavering at the jowls – of which he had none – in hopeless lust and writing her a note promising to dedicate his next novel to her.
³⁸⁴
His name is Francois-Marie Banier who has already made something of a stir with his second novel which he promised to send me or bring me I can't remember which to the Ritz on Monday.
³⁸⁵
He was engagingly eager and I shall read with interest.

At one moment Marie-Hélène came up to me at the bar where I was talking to Salinger's wife about Tours and the surrounding country which I love and blind as a bat as she looked me straight in the face at a distance of 1
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/
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feet and said ‘Where's Richard? There's a woman who's dying to meet him.’ ‘It is I, Hamlet, the Dane,’ said I whereupon she screamed a little and went off at a tremendous pace forgetting to take me with her, and I never did meet the woman who was dying to meet me and Marie-Hélène has already forgotten who it was and indeed the entire incident. Salinger's wife asked me if people were always so cruel to Marie-Hélène. Cruel in what way, I asked, puzzled. Oh you know, she said, everybody thinks that she's a tremendous hypochondriac and once she fainted and fell off a chair in a restaurant and everybody carried on eating and talking as if nothing had happened and nobody picked her up. How, I said, extraordinary. Where did this happen? But then we were interrupted by someone and I never heard the details. I must find out next time I see her or Pierre.

Then at an earlier point of the evening that stupendous bore who is married to the sister of Guy's first wife I think came up to us and kissed E's hand with great unction and then Grace's very condescendingly and said – and there is nothing so intimidating – do you remember me, the many times we used to go to Lulatch's house. Who? asked Grace, genuinely puzzled. Lulatch, Lulatch, Lulatch, she loved you more than life, Lulatch, I'm terribly sorry said Grace but I'm sure I would remember that name. Lulatch, Lulatch, Lulatch, he said, she
loved you and she died a terrible death eight years ago on the 27th of July but you have forgotten, it doesn't matter, ah if only we were here for 2000 years. Rather than just 1000 I said. Yes Yes Yes and I remember the night you and your superbe wife came to Eli Rothschild's house and we stayed up all night. And you made passes at me, said Elizabeth. And you and your superbe wife argued about poetry and she was right and you were wrong and it was a memorable evening. And you cried about the German Economic Miracle, I said. My god you're right, he said. What a memory. Quelle Memoire extraordinaire. What a memory, what a memory, the German economic miracle. What a memory. We got away from him somehow. A loathsome feller.

Sunday 5th, Ritz
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Back at last at the Ritz though I could stay forever at Ferrières, and am feeling rather as if we've been on a personal appearance tour for the promotion of a film. This I supposed because one feels when there are a few strangers about, even though perfectly amiable, that something is expected of one and there is a slight suggestion of mildly self-conscious projection of oneself. There was a late lunch today – one of those splendid upper-class English brunches complete with small sausages on plats chauffand and big sausages and eggs labelled 2 minutes or 3 or 4 or 5, boiled of course and haddock poche a l'anglaise though the English could never do them so well and endless varieties of breads and biscuits and toasts (very un-Anglo-Saxon except for the last) and confitures – marmalade, strawberry – and fried bacon and fried bread but in croutons (also non English) and coffee and tea. Alex Rede and a beautiful Eurasian-looking lady was there as well as Etienne (reputedly M-H's lover though he may just be ‘a good friend') and the blonde man – Olivier?
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We talked of poetry again. Possibly because last night after dinner in the cosy corner room they asked me to speak some and I did and E says they were very impressed and talked of it when I left the room to go to the lavatory to pee which I seemed to be doing all evening. They seem, apart from the man called Etienne, to enjoy poetry when it is spoken for them but rarely to search it out themselves. I was a little cautious of speaking even a minute snippet from
Hamlet
with an audience consisting, among others, of two professional actresses – David's girlfriend, Marisa and Marisa's friend Charlotte – but E assured me that they too were held and agog. So that's alright. Also, both E and I are mean customers if there's ever the slightest suggestion of ‘singing for our suppers’. Which there never is at the Rothschilds’. They really have – every one of them, including Philip (16) and the other 14 year old one – exquisite manners.
³⁸⁸
We discussed manners as an art in itself the night
before for a time and we all agreed that the man with the most exquisite manners of any person we all of us knew was the Duke of Windsor. It was Guy who put him forward as the claimant. And, though I'd never thought of him before as being so superbly well-mannered, I immediately agreed. It is a fact said I that manners are not the result of good breeding or intelligence for we know many well born and highly intelligent people who are boors, and that I personally knew many miners who have superb and quite un-self-conscious good manners and that manners, true good manners like charm you have or you don't. You cannot teach people to be charming and though manners may seem to be a question of opening and closing doors and holding chairs and standing up when a lady comes into the room etc. merely it is something that has to be done with an indefinably unobtrusive grace. Tim Hardy, for instance, whose manners are meticulous nevertheless manages to make himself faintly obtrusive, you are aware of his manners. So delicious were the Duke's that I hadn't thought of his being so until Guy pointed it out. I myself am incapable of such behaviour – and I am not being false cavalier – for I am simply not made properly. In fact, both Elizabeth's and my manners are appalling but E's obvious good nature and natural charm (if she likes you) and of course stunning beauty carry her through whereas I pretend to a gruff peasantness which (if I like you) carries me through. I hope. [...]