The Richard Burton Diaries (69 page)

I received telegrams threatening to sue me in ‘six countries’ if I didn't agree to do
Anne of The Thousand Days
. I am so sick of being sued that I shall probably agree today. But I shall never work with that lot again. [...]

Terry O'Neill, the photographer, told me yesterday that the most rigid professional he knows is Lester Piggott, the Jockey.
⁵²
He wears a rubber sweat-suit permanently, and drinks nothing but coffee, whereas famous footballers like Bobby Charlton of Manchester United and Billy Bremner of Leeds, I think, drink very heavily after having reached a certain peak of physical fitness.
⁵³
Apparently they confine themselves to beer but nevertheless it's amazing to me that they are able to keep running around for two non-stop periods of 45 minutes. I've seen them on TV and it's tiring just to watch them. [...]

Friday 11th
[...] Yesterday we shot outside on the ‘London’ lot in the morning and I tested my alopecic bald wig in the afternoon. It's horrifying but effective. I've accepted Henry VIII so there will be no suit. However I may sue them for not doing
The Man From Nowhere
later on. It does mean however that we will have a four or five month holiday, which is something we've fondly dreamed of for years. Might even go to Mexico for a couple of months and roast in the sun.

Or do a trip around the world like Bettina [Krahmer] has just done. [...]

I have worked out that with average luck we should, at the end of 1969, be worth about $12 million between us. About $3 million of that is in diamonds, emeralds, property, paintings (Van Gogh, Picasso, Monet, Utrillo, John etc.) so our annual income will be in the region of a $million.
⁵⁴
That is God Willing, and no wars, and no ‘29!
⁵⁵

We are flying, in the small jet (it's a Hawker-Siddeley De Havilland 125 twin jet) to Nice tonight and going on the
Kalizma
for the weekend. I'm longing to see it again. We could come back on Monday morning. Sheran and Simon Hornby are flying in the same plane from London and picking us up.
⁵⁶
They are a charming couple. Off to work and more later possibly.

Saturday 12th, St Jean Cap Ferrat
Aboard the
Kalizma
. We flew last night from Paris. [...] We shall go ashore later and probably go to La Ferme Blanche for lunch. Simon and Sheran are with us. They are delightful and so is the boat. The Monet is in the living room or salon, the Picasso and the Van Gogh are in the dining room. The Epstein bust of Churchill is brooding over the salon and there is a Vlaminck on the wall of the stairwell to the kids’ cabins.
⁵⁷
[...] we finished early, about 6.45, and I went to pick up E and the guests at the Boulogne Studios. I saw W. Beatty who gave me a drink and was extremely flattering about Elizabeth. He said how remarkably beautiful she was and great a film actress. [...] The flight was as smooth as smooth, and took about an hour and a quarter. No one seemed to be nervous but of course we were stiffened by a few drinks. [...]

We didn't go to bed until 3.30 because we were so excited at the joy of the boat. I can't as ‘twere stop touching it and staring at it, as if it were a beautiful baby or a puppy-dog. Something you can't believe is your very own.

Kevin McCarthy just appeared swimming, if you please, from the Voile d'Or.
⁵⁸
[...] He is coming for lunch tomorrow. [...]

It's fascinating to hear the upper-class English accent. When Sheran told me a story this morning about the Dukes of Abercorn which I will again relate tomorrow. And of course when she says Girl she says not Gel but Geal no it's Geall with the accent on the a.

What a sexy girl, gell, geall, she is. And Good as gold.

Sunday 13th, Kalizma, Cap Ferrat
Yesterday was a very good day. I'm afraid that I was semi-sloshed for most of the day [...] but I don't think I was particularly offensive. What a splendidly intelligent couple the Hornbys are. And he particularly is very well read, in some areas as they say, better read than I. There is lots of delicious space left for delicious books. I must too find a corner for reference books and albums etc., which are very large, and will demand height and depth. The new
Times Atlas of the World
for instance is a couple of square feet or so.

[...] Elizabeth has great worries about becoming a cripple because her feet sometimes have no feeling in them. She asked if I would stop loving her if she had to spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair. I told her that I didn't care if her legs bum and bosoms fell off and her teeth turned yellow. And she went bald. I love that woman so much sometimes that I cannot believe my luck. She has given me so much.

It's a day of incomparable beauty. A couple of vagrant clouds, church bells from Beaulieu, half a dozen fishing boats, the ship swinging imperceptibly on her anchor, now towards the Voile d'Or now away. There is a very slight breeze. The flag is as lazy as a cat. There won't be many days as memorable as this. You have to recount them, as young Christopher once said, like diamonds in your pocket.

We are going to Rory Cameron's for a drink before lunch.
⁵⁹
We were going to ask Lana Turner and her husband to lunch but Kevin said the man is a nasty sort of bloke, and so we changed our minds.
⁶⁰
Kevin is coming and an actor-socialite called George Hamilton.
⁶¹
Very charming they say.

Monday 14th, Studio, Paris
This morning [...] when we arrived at E's studio we heard the mind-shattering news that Ivor, my brother who is paralysed, is able to move his toenails [...] on his left foot. This might mean, and we don't ask much, that he will be able to manipulate himself around in a wheelchair, and go to the lav etc. It is the most exciting news I've heard since I received a letter saying I was going up to Oxford. Even more!

We had quite a lot of people for lunch at Saint Jean Cap Ferrat. George Hamilton [...] Hal Polaire and his future wife who seemed out of her depth a bit and was ill to boot, a man called Mr Tinker, who has something to do with Universal Pictures, and is the trouble-shooter for them, and his wife with whom we all fell in love, Mary her name is.
⁶²
And of course one of the nicest
fuddliest men in the world, who always reminds me of Eliz's brother, Kevin McCarthy. Mary is the girl we saw in
Thoroughly Modern Millie
. One of these days I'll try to spell when I typewrite. She was also in a TV Series with Dick Van Dyke.
⁶³

Before lunch I went in the Riva to La Fiorentina with Simon and Sheran to visit with Rory Cameron. He was charming as ever, and said that he thought he was going to sell the house sometime in the Spring to a German, but would keep the house, and change it, presently rented by our metteur-en-scene, Stanley Donen.
⁶⁴
[...] Simon didn't fancy George Hamilton, though we didn't mind him much but on reflection we tended to agree with Simon. E. and Sheran thought he was greasy looking, and I thought he was bit big-headed. [...]

Tuesday 15th, Plaza, Paris
Well yesterday was a practically lost day. I wandered about like a stray cat in a dream or under water, but I managed to get through the work OK. Elizabeth felt similarly and out of pure altruism we were joined towards the end of the nightmare by a certain young nurse called Caroline, who at various and unpredictable times would burst into tears, lament about the injustices in the world and pass out against my knee and repeat all those actions at the drop of a cat. And of course we were all so sloshed that the cat was dropped all night.

Walking Caroline down the corridor to her room was like negotiating the
Kalizma
into a narrow berth. She protested endlessly how much she loved us all and how sweet we were. To make this point clear to us she repeated it several hundred times. John Springer to his astonished delight was included in this vast love-affair. She is a dear girl.

At the end of the day we, Rex, Cathleen Nesbitt (who started work yesterday and is marvellous) and I had to attend a sort of press conference.
⁶⁵
It was the usual ghastly performance. The idolatrous, the contemptuous, the silly question and the sarcastic and scornful. They are of course for the most part the dregs of their own profession and are here only because it's a free trip provided by Fox. Elizabeth has to face them on Thursday.

I am at the studio and have just done one shot with Cathleen. She is brave enough to take out her teeth for the scene. And this concession from one of the great beauties. She looks remarkable despite her nearly 80 years.

James Earl Jones has just had an enormous success in a play on Broadway called the
Great White Hope
.
⁶⁶
We are all delighted for him and the author Howard Sackler.
⁶⁷
Jimmy is in his 50s so it's about time.
⁶⁸

[...] I have been drinking too much recently and will slow down.

Wednesday 16th
[...] Liz Smith sat most of the afternoon in my dressing-room, and we all swapped stories of English malice etc. particularly in the theatre.
⁶⁹
[...]

Another letter from Liza which we've been puzzling over. She has a word in the letter which is ‘irastosable'! I don't know what it means but I shall use it for the rest of my life. A new word has been added to the Anglo-Welsh vocabulary. ‘What an irastosable day. I found the film absolutely irastosable.’ etc. ‘What an irastosable performance.’ [...]

Friday 18th
Yesterday I did a scene in the barber shop in which I blow-waved Rex's hair, steam-towelled and massaged his face. Rex became quite hysterical at my ineptitude but finally after endless takes I got it right. It takes place in total silence. And hopefully will send the film off on a good funny start.

I was a bit harassed yesterday by the number of visitors I had. There were two journalists, Tommy Thompson of yesterday, a round lady called Joan Crosby, a photographer, Collette Victor, Christianne and her daughter Anne, Pat Newcomb who always strikes me as being slightly sinister, and somebody who's name I never got.
⁷⁰

[...] My typing, hunt and peck, as it is, is getting faster and faster. I reckon that I do about forty words and inaccuracies a minute. I wonder why my spelling which is generally very good falls apart when I type. Perhaps because I don't look at the page when I'm hunting and pecking.

[...] We have to go to the first night of Rex's film
A Flea in your Ear
tonight.
⁷¹
I hear the film is a bit of a bore and the party afterwards is likely to be even more so. Everybody is dressing up to the nines, whatever that may mean, and the Rainiers, Windsors and every Rothschild in Europe will, so I'm told, be there. [...]

Sunday 20th
What a curious two days. [...] I met my future leading lady, a girl called Geneviève Godjot or something like that.
⁷²
She seems pert and attractive though I suspect somewhat opinionated and not overbright. She'll have to
do I suppose though I wish E were playing Anne, but I suppose she is too mature for it. Arne Lindroth came to see me and said that it would take 3 to 5 months to have stabilizers put on the boat, so we'll wait.
⁷³
I was also offered the part of Amundsen (the explorer) in a joint Russo-Italian film which they have been filming since last February.
⁷⁴
[...]

Friday began with the English newspapers and the news in headlines that Jackie Kennedy is to marry Ari Onassis. Everybody is intrigued. He is 69, he claims 62, and she is 39. The youngish Queen of the USA and the aging Greek bandit. He is pretty vulgar and one suspects him of orgies and other dubious things whereas the Kennedy woman seems, though I've never met her, to be a lady. On Friday night I sat beside La Callas who very bravely faced the evening and the Press with a bright if rather forced face. I hugged her when I saw her and said in her ear that he was a son of a bitch. This I said not out of moral outrage or because he'd abandoned her but because she learned the news from the newspapers and he'd left her broke. In all those 10 years he, with all his reputed millions, had not given her a cent. Marie-Hélène said he would never be invited to her house again but I told her that she was fibbing and that after a time they, the Onassises, would be the toast of Europe. Even we would go to see them, I said, out of pure curiosity. Guy de Rothschild agreed.

I am ridiculously (I hope) jealous of E nowadays because I suppose she's working with a young and attractive man who obviously adores her. She tells me I'm a fool and that he's like a younger brother. Ah I say but there have been cases of incest. They have been known. Oh Yes. But of course I trust her as much as I trust myself [...]

We are going out tonight with Maria Callas and Warren Beatty. It appears that the former needs our company and comfort and perhaps the attention we attract [...]. But I noticed on Friday night that most attention was paid by the Press and Public to Ebeth. She, my girl, looked stunning in a white dress by Dior and, to my surprise as I discovered later, wore for the first time in Paris the great emerald necklace and earrings etc. which I gave her 3 or 4 years ago. My God she's a beauty. Sometimes even now, after nearly 8 years of marriage I look at her when she's asleep at the first light of a grey dawn and wonder at her.

Inevitably this capacity of Ebeth's to attract oohs and ahs didn't go down well with Rex and Rachel Harrison, and inexorably as the evening ground on and as they got drunker and drunker the dam broke. They got into our car by mistake with Rachel screaming at our driver Gaston and shouting insults at us tho’ we were out of sight and sound. Then still hustled and bustled by the photographers and carefully protecting Bettina and Cathleen Nesbitt as we made slow progress towards the car, Rex came storming up to us and said
something like: Come on you Burtons you're deliberately holding everyone up. Get yourselves and your lot into your car and home. Since they were in our car this was not easy so we compromised and went home in theirs. This kind of behaviour from drunken Rex and sotted Rachel is so common now that it is no surprise. What a pair of bores they are when they're drunk. At one point during the evening Rachel who was sitting opposite me and beside Alexis Redé picked up a knife and said that she was going to kill Rex because he had left the table at the same time as an Italian actress called Virna Lisi beside whom he was sitting. I tried to calm her but she took no notice of me. Eventually a very nice girl called Elizabeth Harris, who is the daughter of the Labour no Liberal Peer Lord Ogmore, got the knife away from her.
⁷⁵
Marie-Hélène was genuinely frightened and said how much she feared drunken people. That endearing young bitch Jacqueline de Ribes was the other side of me during this demonstration of Rachel's and of course enjoyed every minute of it.