The Richard Burton Diaries (77 page)

Eventually I went to bed sulking at about 9.30 with Schlesinger's
1000 Days with Jack Kennedy
.
¹⁹⁴
I read until 5ish and slept until 1 o'clock after noon. [...]

Now for the long bore of Christmas.

Tuesday 24th
[...] Yesterday I went shopping. How I loathe the latter. Put me in a foul mood for the rest of the day. However I just walked around Cadonau's and bought about twenty things in about ten minutes.
¹⁹⁵
I may if they're good enough get a ruby or two for Eliz. They sent to Geneva or Zurich or both for all I know, for a selection for me yesterday and they've just phoned to say that they've arrived. So I shall pop down to the village after I've finished this and make my choice, if any. To match the diamonds and the emeralds they have to be pretty good.

There are three men on their way to the moon. Americans. What a hell of a time to send men to the moon.
¹⁹⁶
Two of them have ‘flu’ and one of them is vomiting and has the Tripoli Trots. What a lovely place to have the Aztec Two-Step. I've forgotten what they do with excrement in outer space. Can they jettison it?

Simmy and her boy-friend John Gross announced their engagement last night. He is an extraordinary chap and very likeable. I hope they both know what they're doing. Elisheba came for a drink around 6.30. She's very brittle. We are to have Xmas dinner with them tomorrow night. She said three times that her former husband is an American Jew and that she hoped I would be nice to him.
¹⁹⁷
Why the devil shouldn't I? Some of my best friends are Princesses. [...]

Tuesday 31st
The last day of the year and I'm not sorry. It's been an upsiddy-downy year, mostly down than up. The list of calamities I've recounted before. There is however one bit of news to welcome in the New Year which I hope
will prove to be propitious. Ivor in the last ten days has been able to stand up three times and has also been swimming three times. Always with assistance of course but at least it's a sign. Give us more signs Oh Lord! I have a bad chest nose and throat cold which I cannot shake off. I seem to be having colds much more frequently of late. I've stopped drinking and cut down on smoking to try and clear it up as it makes me, a cold I mean, very irritable and impatient and vile with everybody. I stayed in the bedroom all day yesterday and read or rather re-read Schlesinger's massive tome on JFK. I must have read without interruption including mealtimes and visits to the lavatory for about 16 hours. The result being that this morning my right eye was bright red. It's the legacy of that fight outside Paddington Station some seven years ago when my eye was so badly kicked by a winkle-pickered boot that I lost the conjunctiva and nearly lost the eye. In middle age those things begin to tell. The base of my spine too gives me hell sometimes, a result of the same fight but perhaps not of the same winkle-picker. There were six of these little monsters against Ivor and myself.
¹⁹⁸

Three days ago we went to Curt Jurgens’ house in Saanen for drinks and dinner. It was horrible, full of Germans. I cannot like the latter, much as I try. I feel fine about them for a time and then I meet them en masse or in a group and the old hatred returns. Fortunately David Niven was there and Caroline, Elisheba and of course my E. Everybody became thickly drunk except us and Niven at about midnight took me into the bedroom and said that it would be a good idea to get all my party out of there as he suspected that some sort of exhibitionism or orgy was going to start up any minute. I told him I had the same feeling myself and so we all scarpered fairly rapidly. However, I was now in a drinking mood having only had some very indifferent wine at Curt's, and so we stopped off at the Palace for a night-cap which in my case lasted until 8.15 in the morning. E was furious – she having gone home about 3.30. There was one hysterical interlude when we were joined by four of the squarest Americans I've ever met. The questions they asked were beyond belief. I replied with such seriousness but without their knowing it and for Mike's and Elisheba's benefit with such innuendo and nuance that M and Sheba laughed for about four hours. I spoke
Hamlet Macbeth Antony and Cleopatra Richard II
and
III
all deliberately tongue in cheek. Finally the father of the Americans turned on Elisheba when I'd left the room for a moment and roundly condemned her for giggling when I was speaking this immortal verse with this immortal voice! [...]

My chief worry for the New Year among the usual worries about children etc is E's health. It is getting no better and she does maddeningly little to help it. [...] If she survives this film she is not going to work for a long time. And if
she continues to be in trouble with sciatica I'll insist that she never works again. It's not fair to her and certainly not to the film companies who employ her. I stayed in bed all day yesterday for instance while she spent the entire day until well after midnight sitting in the main room gossiping etc. And of course inevitably sipping away at the drinks. I dread it at night when she has had her shots etc. of drugs and is only semi articulate. In addition to all this she is being given cortisone which apparently bloats you up and therefore you have to go on a fairly stringent salt free diet to combat it. She lasted two days on the diet. [...] The most frightening thing is that as a result of E's total self-indulgence that when she moans and groans in agony I simply become bored. And what is more frightening is she has become bored with everything in life. She never reads a book, at least not more than a couple of pages at a time. It took her over a month to read a cheap thriller by Carter Brown that I could have read in an hour.
¹⁹⁹
She hasn't asked to read this diary, to which she has free access and which normally gave her a giggle, for nearly two months. I have always been a heavy drinker but now as a result of this half-life we're leading I am drinking twice as much. The upshot will be that I'll die of drink while she'll go blithely on in her half world. Don't be so depressed Rich, the World will be new tomorrow. I am just praying now that she gets through this film relatively easily. After this one, and if by chance it turns out to be only moderately successful, she'll find it very hard for anybody to pay her a $million a picture again. [...]

Richard ceased making entries in his 1967 diary in early November, and did not start his 1968 diary until late July. During this period he played the part of Mephisto in
Candy
, filmed in Rome at the end of 1967. He then travelled to Austria and back to the United Kingdom, working on the adventure movie
Where Eagles Dare
. During studio shooting in London Burton and Taylor stayed on a yacht, the
Beatriz of Bolivia
, moored at Tower Pier, which they were renting while the
Kalizma
was being refitted. Early in February they flew to New York for the American premiere of
Doctor Faustus
, attended by Robert and Ethel Kennedy, and later that month they attended the opening of the Paris boutique co-owned by their friend Vicky Tiel, in which they had invested. Elizabeth started work at Elstree Studios in March 1968 for
Secret Ceremony
, other scenes being shot on location in London and in the Netherlands.

In May 1968 Richard purchased the 33.19 carat Krupp diamond for Elizabeth, at a price of $305,000, when it was auctioned in New York. Late that month
Boom!
was released, to poor reviews.

In June Richard was best man to Gianni Bozzacchi at his marriage to Claudye, for whom Elizabeth was maid of honour. The marriage took place at the home of Alexandre de Paris at Saints, to the east of Paris. In the same month Burton and Taylor attended the wedding of Elizabeth's friend Sheran Cazalet to Simon Hornby, held near Tonbridge, Kent. Late in June Burton began working on Tony Richardson's adaptation of Nabokov's
Laughter in the Dark
. In controversial circumstances, the details of which remain disputed, Burton was fired by Richardson on 8 July and subsequently replaced by Nicol Williamson (1938—). Richardson and Burton had worked together before – on
Look Back in Anger
and
A Subject of Scandal and Concern
. But on this occasion their relationship broke down, and an attempt by Taylor to repair the breach was unsuccessful. The diary resumes with Taylor in hospital.

JULY

Tuesday 23rd, Fitzroy-Nuffield Hospital, London
¹
I have just spent the two most horrible days of my adult life. There was nothing before, as I recall,
no shame inflicted or received, no injustice done to me or by me, no disappointment professional or private that I could not think away in a quarter of an hour. But this is the first time where I've seen a loved one in screaming agony for two days, hallucinated by drugs, sometimes knowing who I was and sometimes not, a virago one minute an angel the next and felt completely helpless.

Elizabeth had her uterus removed on Sunday morning. The operation began at 9.30 and ended at 1.00. Three hours and a half. I tried to read Holroyd's book about Lytton Strachey – what a vile, cruel, self-centred man he sounds – but during those hours I read about 5 pages and when I knew she was temporarily safe at least and back in the room I found I had to read them all over again.
²

But it's the nights that have been so harrowing. I took a room – next door to E's – to be near her until the pain had eased somewhat. The walls are like tissue paper and the first night I heard nothing but her groans throughout the night. It is not a normal hysterectomy – there were great complications – and she is suffering far more than normal. In addition they have given her a drug, which eases the pain, but gives her vivid hallucinations. And extraordinary shafts of clarity at the same time. She thought for a long time yesterday that she was on the yacht and, at one point, when flowers were brought in she told them to ‘put the flowers in Liza's room downstairs.’ She then sternly told me, looking up from her book (
Public Image
– M. Spark) that I must never shout at Raymond (the steward on the
Kalizma
) again.
³
I said that I wouldn't and she said, ‘Hush – he'll hear you.’ ‘Look’, she said at one point, ‘they're showing
Faustus
in colour on the TV.’ The screen was blank as a blind eye though a greetings telegram had reflected a red into the screen before which it was lying.

Last night she suddenly appeared in my room about midnight supported by a minute Latin nurse and said she was lonesome. She is not supposed to move at all except for the commode. I put her back to bed. Half an hour later I heard her scream ‘Jim’ – she was in the corridor. Back to bed again. I told her she was a naughty girl and she told me to fuck off. I said I would sit in the room with her. She told me to sit in the hall outside the door as she couldn't stand the sight of my face. She turned away from me. I waited 5 minutes and left the room. Then there was a shout of ‘Richard.’ The nurse and I arrived together. She was sitting on the edge of the bed. Another time she crashed against a chair in the next room. I shot up and out and she was sitting on the lavatory with the door closed.

I've asked them to give her a drug, if possible, that's not illusion-making. Christ I shall be glad when this week's over. And won't she. She finally fell asleep, or at least remained quiet, at about 4.00 in the a.m. I fell asleep but kept
waking with the sort of convulsive wide-awakeness of a man who's afraid of having a heart attack in his sleep.

[...]

The press has been pestering us night and day and we're in all the papers this morning. What a vile lot they are – especially the English. They're so smirky and sneaky and smug and provincial. They are not honestly scandalous with the awful dirty pornographic glee of the Italians. They are merely snide.

Kate is here – she arrived a week ago, and is as joyous as ever. Within a day Liza was calling me ‘Daddy!’ I must see her today sometime. Them days are slipping by and she has only 3 weeks left.

The most alarming lesson I learned about this whole thing was the extraordinary effect that hallucinatory drugs have on the brain. E looked at me on occasions yesterday with a malevolence that made a basilisk look like a blood hound. I can only hope that in vino veritas doesn't apply to drugs. She looked at a poster of the Mona Lisa on the wall and said very hostess-like, ‘Vicky would you like a drink?’ She called me a ‘stuffed shirt’ at one point – and she's right. That'll teach me to be smug in future.

[...] 2.45 and E is awake and perfectly normal. She is completely aware of everything she did last night! God save the mark!
⁴

Wednesday 24th, Dorchester [Hotel]
Have decided to change to typing this diary badly rather than that I should write so hurriedly that sometimes I have difficulty reading my own writing.

[...] Janine Filistorf rang today from Geneva with the shocking news that André Besançon, the gardener of Pays de Galles, Céligny and a very dear and honest man, had committed suicide. Poor bugger. How solitary can you get? We, Kate Ivor and I will fly in the jet to Geneva on Friday or Saturday to attend the funeral. He hanged himself. I remembered that he had suffered from a nervous breakdown some 12 or 13 years ago after the death of his wife and before we employed him in 1957. He was about to go into a home this morning at 10 o'clock but it was too late. He killed himself last night. I feel such a bloody fool for not even suspecting it. If I'd known I'm sure I could have helped. I could have had him transferred to Gstaad instead of that amiable but quite useless drunken musician of the mighty name, Johann Sebastian Bach.
⁵

K. has a desire to be left alone for a bit, I think, and so tonight she is going to stay in Hampstead with Ivor and Gwen while Liza, Maria and I will stay at the hotel. We took K to the Wells Pub in Hampstead before lunch today while Ivor and I had a couple of pints.
⁶
[...]

I am trying to persuade Elizabeth to postpone her film with F. Sinatra.
⁷
It starts in only 5 weeks time and it's hardly likely that she'll be properly prepared mentally for such a big job so soon. [...]