The Richard Burton Diaries (74 page)

High Tea was a feast. Chicken in the pot with all kinds of vegetables followed by endless cheeses and desserts. Roasted chestnuts. Raisins. fresh figs, mandarins, oranges, apples, and obviously and deliciously home made preserves. There were about twenty-five people sitting at the table. The minister of the interior whose name I've forgotten talked to me a lot.
¹⁴⁶
He said that his job was more important and onerous than our Home Secretary's. He couldn't explain why satisfactorily. I must find out. My ignorance of French politics is pretty stupendous. Perhaps because, all my life until de Gaulle, they seemed so irresponsibly droll. A new Prime Minister every three weeks and one only for a weekend.

Then upstairs to read and sleep a little and take a bath and so dinner in honour of Marie Helene and her birthday. This meal was at many tables instead of one large one. I sat between the Countess of Bardolini(?) and Madame Pompidou wife of de Gaulle's former Prime Minister.
¹⁴⁷
She believes, she said, that Georges, her husband, must denounce de Gaulle so that he will stand a chance of returning to power after de Gaulle dies, which she said, perhaps hopefully, cannot be long now. Georges didn't seem very impressive. I took just three words for each and impersonated everyone at our table, vocally that is, which Mme Pompidou found remarkable. So I was told afterwards by Marie Helene and others. They were very easy voices. The Brazilian Ambassador's daughter with a husky voice and a Portuguese French accent, two people with Italian-French accents, an hysterical gent with a very high pitched voice. A German-French accent. It was a piece of glottal cake.

[...] Practically everyone left for Paris after the party, but we sat up with the German Rothschilds and Marie Helene and Alexis Redé and Lili until 3.00 in the morning. I spoke Shakespeare and E and I sang them a Welsh song, ‘Ar lan y mor mae rhosys cochion.‘
¹⁴⁸
Elizabeth looked so beautiful that strong men were awed, and the children came to sit at her feet. She sang sweetly and unaffectedly and impressed everybody, including me. I'm not blasé yet.

Tuesday 19th, Paris
We left Ferrières late because of my dilatory Liz but miraculously despite driving slowly because of the snow-slushed and verglassed roads, we arrived on time. A man called Flink from
Look
magazine stayed for about an hour in my dressing room.
¹⁴⁹
He asked endless questions about homosexuality which I answered traditionally: Live and let live. It takes all sorts to make a world. Judge not lest ye be judged. Cast not the first stone lest ye be stoned. Some of my best friends are homosexuals etc. etc.

Two stories about Sunday's party which I omitted, ommited, ommitted – one of them must be right – from yesterday's entry: There were about perhaps sixty or more people in the room waiting to go in to dinner and cock-tailing, and Elizabeth and I were sitting in a corner of the room with Lili and other assorted odds and sods when Marie Helene came over and said to me: ‘Richard will you go over and talk to the dark lady in the corner?’ I said, ‘For God's sake Marie Helene I don't know her etc. and why should I etc? And Marie-H said, ‘She only wants to listen to your voice, which she thinks is heavenly.’ And my Elizabeth said in a powerful American accent: ‘Tell her I'll be over in a minute and give her an impersonation.’ My Broad doesn't muck around. Later when the children, after dinner, had gone up one by one to the head of the head table and made rather self-conscious little speeches, a man sitting next to E said ‘How boringly middle-class.’ E and I decided that if the Rothschilds and Ferrières and eighty guests for dinner in one wing of the house, where trees in the avenues had been planted by reigning monarchs, where there are a hundred servants, was middle class, then we had just crawled out from underneath a stone. How bored is bored and how middle-class can you be to describe the Rothschilds as middle-class? They are aristos my friend. It's like Syb once describing the Johnsons (President and Lady Bird) as ‘suburban’.
¹⁵⁰
What the hell does she think Ferndale was?
¹⁵¹
Buck House? Anyway, bugger you stranger, Elizabeth and I, famed as we are, rich as we are, courted and insulted as we are, overpaid as we are, centre of a great deal of attention as we are and have been for nearly a quarter of a century, are not bored or blasé. We are not envious. We are merely lucky.

I have been inordinately lucky all my life but the greatest luck of all has been Elizabeth. She has turned me into a moral man but not a prig, she is a wildly exciting lover-mistress, she is shy and witty, she is nobody's fool, she is a brilliant actress, she is beautiful beyond the dreams of pornography, she can be arrogant and wilful, she is clement and loving, Dulcis Imperatrix, she is Sunday's child, she can tolerate my impossibilities and my drunkenness, she is
an ache in the stomach when I am away from her,
and she loves me
!
¹⁵²
She is a prospectus that can never be entirely catalogued, an almanack for Poor Richard.
¹⁵³
And I'll love her ‘till I die.

Aaron, Bob Wilson and I went back to the Hotel together and went down to the basement bar for a drink. Hebe Dorsey of the
Tribune
came in and said that she and an American called Dwyer, who she says might be the next Mayor of New York, have fallen in love.
¹⁵⁴
She is perhaps 45 and he 61. He is married and she says he says that she transformed his sex life. So there. Later we went to Aaron's room where a woman said, looking at Elizabeth, she's not so beautiful, what's all the fuss about. I asked her why she didn't marry a hatchet and make a perfect match. She was Sam Pisar's the lawyer's wife.
¹⁵⁵

Wednesday 20th
It's 7 in the morning, I've been up since 6, and it's still dark. Not, of course as dark as I. Doomed and damned and dissolute and desperate and dull and dying. Alliterative despair. I get a few days off soon. I need them. I was in a mad mood last night and accused E of talking too suspiciously much about Warren Beatty and his various middle-aged amours. She said it was because she loved a good gossip. A likely story, I cackled venomously, you don't have a very good record sweetheart. Christ if you can marry Eddie Fisher you can marry anybody, I said, and having created wounds, rubbed the salt in nicely for an hour or so. The trouble is of course that I love the old bag too much. I must try and be dispassionate. That, of course, will be the day. But it is perfectly obvious to me, I am after all an old hand at the game, that one way to attract a woman is to pay a lot of attention to
other
women. It drives them mad. I remember screwing everybody in a large company over a year or so to get one woman. I got her. I wish I hadn't now because she was an evil virtuous bitch and filthy minded. But, he said with pride, I got her. There was another woman in a film with me which contained hundreds of good-looking extras. It must have cost me fifty ‘crowd artistes’ to get the one well-married beautiful lamentable girl. But I got her, he said defiantly. I know them, Dylanesquely, by the thousands. Anyway since
this
leopard can and has changed his spots I have to believe that the other one can ... and has. Better bloody had.

I had a letter from Kate yesterday. It was sweet and repetitive of my letter to her. She must be a good student, little ape, as she picks up other people's ideas so quickly. I wish I was her teacher. I wish I had the patience. I'd teach
her to avoid all the pitfalls of my half-baked education. As it is she is stuck with Syb's eighth-baked variety. That won't help. But Syb is as good as gold, fair dues.

[...] So now having written myself into an even more melancholy mood I will spritz myself up with a letter to Kate.

I've written a letter to Kate but it hasn't spritzed me up. So bugger it. It was Elizabeth's saint's day yesterday and since so many French people gave her presents she felt obliged to give a party. It was pleasant too and good to see how everybody adores her. She's a good old thing and not bad-looking. She'll be awake in a minute so that's something to look forward to.

Thursday 21st
Elizabeth's father died yesterday afternoon and I had to break the news to her. She was like a wild animal even though we've been expecting his death for some years. But of course there is no love comparable to a man's love for his daughter or vicky verka.
¹⁵⁶
I know to my cost. My passion for my daughters is ludicrous. Whether it's reciprocated as in Elizabeth's case, is another matter. I feel like one who, stabbed in the back, is dying of his wounds. If you know what I mean. I cannot bear suffering in others. I'd much rather have it myself and I'm no masochist, but suffering at second hand is rough enough in its way. Despite all E's protestations about her mother over the years, like the good girl she is, she now only wants to protect and cherish her. Me too. Death is a son-of-a-bitch. The swinish unpredictable, uncharitable, thoughtless, fuck-pig enemy. [...] He's done a lot of mindless damage. One day we'll cure the waster.

We fly over the Pole this afternoon. Francis will probably be buried on Saturday, and we'll probably come back on Sunday. There is, thank God, work to be done. We'll bring Sara back with us. That is if she wants to. I think, after the initial shock, that Sara could find herself a fairly congenial life. That is, I think she might enjoy being with us because we lead relatively exciting lives, and there's my vast family who would consider it an honour to fuss and pamper her. She could very easily be elected, unanimously, on the first count, as Chairwoman of the local whist-drive in any place she wishes to go. Including Pontrhydyfen.

Last night when Elizabeth was talking to her mother, I kept on screaming at her drunkenly and hopelessly to tell her mother to come back to Paris with us after the funeral. Elizabeth ignored me, which infuriated me. What I didn't realize was that Sara was telling E how she'd woken up to find Francis dead, and how she'd massaged his heart frantically, and given him the last agonising kiss-of-life. He'd been dead for an hour. I am illegitimately self-centred and take all tragedy and sins upon myself. Elizabeth's worth glows gooder all the
time. She might even make me good one day. Jesus, I sound like a latter-day Christ, if the pun is pardoned.

[...] I wish our children were with us. They would distract us a bit perhaps, or perhaps they wouldn't. Children and pups are very good value. Sometimes. I'll be acerbic to the death. That rotten latter bastard.

Ah! what it must feel like to have somebody die, somebody that you genuinely love, somebody of your own blood and bone that you worship with an intensity near to madness, what it must be like. Much worse than one's own death because I'll wrestle with the bastard. But when Ivor or Cis die, somebody hold me down boys. I cannot conceive of life without the knowledge that Ivor and Cis are not [sic] at the end of some tenuous cabled line. And chaps it will be alright if I die, but what's going to happen to me if she dies. I think I'll turn into a tyre on a bus and roll forever and forever over innocent feet.

Friday 22nd, Beverly Hills Hotel
¹⁵⁷
[...] It's now half past eight in the evening. Howard and Ron and I went to the funeral parlour and picked out the coffin, they call them caskets here, and did it by simply asking which is the most expensive. This one, said the man who was lugubriously invented of course by Charles Dickens. It is copper-lined, he said, to afford protection. Against what? Worms? They are already stirring inside poor Francis. Damp? Graham just arrived from Wales as a combined family representative from the family. I don't know what the hell they think I am. But after all it's a good and typically genereous gesture. Whoops there goes my spelling again. [...]

DECEMBER

Sunday 1st, Plaza Athenee [Paris]
I really must keep this diary up every day. It's hell to start up again once you've missed a few days.

Gaston's youngest brother was killed yesterday in a road accident which completes a splendid ten days. This has been a terrible year so far. Our films have done less well than usual. There was my fracas with Tony Richardson over
Laughter in the Dark
.
¹⁵⁸
There was André's suicide. There was and is Ivor's paralysis. There was E's operation which she's still suffering the side effects from. There was her father's death last week. I shan't be sorry when those wild bells ring out the old and ring in the new.
¹⁵⁹
And there is a month to go!

The week has been a mixed nightmare. It has taken us both until today to partially recover from the two murderous flights over the Poles. The flight going was long in time – it took about 12 hours – but it was smooth. The flight
back was shorter, about ten hours, but the seat belts were on practically all the way. What frightening drunken bores those long flights are. I shall never do one again unless it's, as it was last weekend, a matter of life and death.

We worked well enough last week and are either on or ahead of schedule so I'm told. Rex is a bit worrying latterly. He's become much less queer. In fact he's hardly queer at all – he's almost professor Higgins.
¹⁶⁰
However his natural lightness will probably carry him through.

People have been very kind to Sara and Elizabeth about Francis's death. Hundreds of letters telegrams wreaths for the funeral and flowers for suite etc. (Francis received short but good obits in most of the papers.) A notable exception was Frank Sinatra. What a petulant little sod he is. Edie Goetz says that he was annoyed because E had called him on Mia's behalf!
¹⁶¹
‘Bleah,’ as Peanuts would say.
¹⁶²

However, there was some good news even if it was only professional. It appears that
Where Eagles Dare
, a film I made earlier this year is a thrilling film and is likely to be a huge grosser. The few people who've seen it are enraptured. It's a
Boy's Own Paper
fantasy with a vengeance. I kill half the German Army.