The Richard Burton Diaries (92 page)

[...] Tomorrow two people arrive from England to fit me for my costumes for
Anne of the Thousand Days
. The day after, I believe, we are to be given the freedom of Jalisco or whatever it is.
⁶⁸
So two horrid days loom ahead.

Chas and Louise Collingwood came for a drink before going off to dinner somewhere. I like them both very much when they are sober but both get a little malicious when they've had a few. They come out with the not uncommon resentment of our fame or notoriety when sufficiently into their cups. I wonder if we'll feel the same when our fame has diminished and we are in the company of somebody more known. I don't think so. I have been in the company of your Churchill and Picasso and didn't feel any particular resentment that people stepped on my toes in a blind effort to get near the two ‘great’ men, and ignored me. [...]

Sunday 20th
The costume people arrived from London yesterday and I did the fittings in about
¹
/
₂
an hour. Imagine if I'd flown 7000 miles to London for a half hour fitting. I'd have been a pretty picture of a feller, especially, as it turned out that the two fitters
had
to be in Hollywood anyway to do something for Barbara Streisand.
⁶⁹

I have been going through one of my periodic moods of depression for the last three days. Periods when the very thought of seeing anyone except Elizabeth gives me a real physical pain. And when I'm not drinking which I've not been for the last three days it is at its worst. Actually during the last 12 months or so I have become increasingly anti-social and am only really at comparative ease when fairly drunk. [...] The fact remains [...] I simply don't want people, including my own children whom I love, around. The first two or three weeks here without anyone except E were happy-as-sandboy days. It is the damnedest paradox. I miss the children terribly when they're not here, especially Liza. My heart does several varieties of dance when I first see them coming off the plane or whatever, and within three days I wish them gone. It is very puzzling. [...] Time was when my chiefest enjoyment after love-making
and a good poem was standing at a bar with a convivial few and rambling around poetry and politics and ideas of all kinds – generally second-hand of course – and talking of every subject except the loathed one of acting. And now ... nothing except to be crouched over a book in our bedroom with the air-conditioning turned on to drown the noises of the outside world. The mood is only temporary of course and even this illiterate apologia may go some way towards dissipating the gloom. [...]

The pool is a green pool. Unswimmable. A combination, they say, of acid, chlorine and copper coins dropped into the pool by our intelligent children. The green mantle of the standing pool. Who wrote that?
⁷⁰

Monday 21st
[...] I am reading anything and everything. Most days I read at least 3 books and one day recently I read 5! I read Gavin Maxwell's latest book about his house and otters.
⁷¹
Vastly entertaining but a life so alien from urbanized me as to be unthinkable. Who, in the name of God, wants to walk, sometimes through snow and ice and pot-holes up to your behind, two miles to pick up your mail? I suspect that Maxwell is an admirable but not very comfortable or nice man. Still I envy his rapport with animals and his infinite patience with them. Perhaps, in person, he is not as know-allish as he sounds, though I must confess to a weakness for pedagogues. [...]

Thursday 24th
The children left yesterday at 11 o'clock on time. There was a lot of suspiciously wet eye and the three hugs I had from Liza verged on the desperate, especially the last. E wept freely as we drove to have a drink at the Posada Vallarta to stay our sorrow.
⁷²
I snarled at her to try and stop the flood with a little harshness. It backfired and I was accused of not liking the children as much as she, and it would all have been different if it were Kate who was leaving, blood is thicker than water etc. etc. I left her to ramble on until she ran out of gas. She was alright in a few hours.

The hotel Posada Vallarta is a revelation. It looks as big as the Beverly Hills hotel and is very handsomely appointed. There are little boutiques and acres of space, a large swimming pool and of course the ocean is right at the door with what looks like a fine sand beach. Oddly enough the clientele didn't look as if they could afford the place, and the barmen were slow and all their white jackets were soiled and sweat-marked under the arms. [...]

The house is odd without the thunder of children's feet and Liza's exaggerated screams and the periodic braying of the donkey. The burro was rented for
Liza while she was here.
⁷³
His name is what sounds like Pamphilio or Pamphilo. We kept it in what was in the garage of the old house.

[...] Yesterday we had a letter from Prof Truetta now retired and living in his native Spain saying that he had read in a Spanish paper that as a result of his ‘saving Maria's leg’ (which he did) that we were contributing large lumps of money to the Haemophilia foundation at Oxford.
⁷⁴
I must write back and tell him that it's true. Lately, as a result of the charity opening of
Eagles
for said Fund we were able to realize something over £3,000. We must do more. Since Uncle Ben's Invalid Miners is now in good shape I think we shall transfer all our British earnings to Haemophilia.
⁷⁵
[...]

Saturday 26th
[...] I read practically all night a biography of Queen Victoria by a lady called Elizabeth Longford (?) who is Lady Longford (?) in private life.
⁷⁶
I put the question marks because I'm too lazy to go up three flights of stairs in this heat to find out. Anyway, it's a book that has stood on the shelves for a long time staring at me and for a long time I have averted my eyes, since the subject hasn't exactly intrigued me. To my astonishment I find the book, written very racily, and the subject, absolutely absorbing. I am about a third of the way through. I must, when I get to London, read Lytton Strachey's
Victoria
.
⁷⁷
There was more, obviously, to the dwarf Queen than met the eye. I'd forgotten how German they all were. [...]

We have been invited to stay with Mrs Armstrong-Jones (how reminiscent the name is of Dylan's Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard) and Lord Snowdon and Princess Margaret at Plas Newydd during the investiture of Prince Charles as Prince of Wales at Caernarvon.
⁷⁸
I would rather have been an onlooker on TV than be on TV myself for the proceedings, but words have been pledged, and anyway it will be something to write about unless some shambling, drivel-mouthed, sideways-moving, sly-boots of a North Welsh imitation of an Irishman might decide to blow everybody to bits.
⁷⁹

[...] Both E and I went mad last night and started eating Callard and Bowsers Liquorice Fingers. I must have eaten a pound or so and E somewhat less. The results were evident this morning. I had put on 3
¹
/
₂
lbs and E 2lbs. Today we are unrepentant but determined to redress the balance. E longs to be 129lbs and I to be 170. It can be done. But not perhaps by us. [...]

Tuesday 29th
We drove out to the airport to pick up Caroline expecting the usual hanging around [...] when lo! and behold! There was our eldest daughter coming out of the terminal as we arrived. [...] We then hustled her off immediately to the Posada Vallarta where we stayed her with a Mai Tai. We stayed only for one drink as the place was, unlike the last time we went, agog with your American tourists who took endless photographs. If the
Origin of Species
is valid then we are certain to see within the next few hundred years American tourists born with built-in cameras.
⁸⁰
Anyway, by the time we'd got Caroline home and comforted her with a vodka and limeade the two ladies were off and running in a torrent of gossip and reminiscence. You would have thought that they hadn't seen each other for several years. And that they'd grown up together and
not
that they'd only met last August.

[...] A letter and a cheque have just arrived. The letter from Jimmy Baldwin which I enclose and the money order from a lady called Mira L. Waters, also enclosed.
⁸¹
Now what does he mean when he says that he doesn't hold a bank account in California? I mean, any old bank account will do. Nova Scotia, National Provincial, The Federal Bank of Dahomey, Calabria, Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychchwyrndrobwllllanfisiliogogogoch, The Chase Manhattan or a postal order.
⁸²
Funny chap. We all, as I've said before, owe him a living because he is black and we are white. Off-White. [...]

Wednesday 30th
[...] It's the last day of the month and reminds us of the dreaded date of departure. I am going to loathe London I suspect. And the film. Why am I doing a film that I so patently am bored by? Why do I allow myself to be talked into doing the mediocre when I could have a choice of the choicest properties on the market? I cannot even bring myself to read the script, let alone learn it. I must! I must! Otherwise I shall feel guilty.

[...] Last evening as we were having dinner a school choir stood outside the house in the street and sang to us. It was very pretty and touching. I was particularly pleased that they chose to do so while Caroline was visiting. We wondered why they'd come and E reminded me that we had recently given $2,000 to the school fund. So perhaps it was a thank-you serenade. Jim says that the amount of money needed to make a good school here is
about $100,000. How the devil are we going to find that kind of money? And yet we must. [...]

MAY

Thursday 1st
E not feeling very well and last night had a temperature of about 102 and a bit. A bit worrying as she doesn't have much resistance, and as I've preached and preached she never takes any exercise. And E is the kind of person who turns a cold of the head nose and throat and common variety into near-death from double-pneumonia. Take out a tooth and she's laid up for a fortnight. Graze her knee and it suppurates for a month. [...]

Last night's sleep seemed to be one continuous dream of great vividness. Most of it was actors’ dream, forgetting lines, having the wrong costume on and sometimes none at all. Everybody it seems was in it. A ghost of thousands one might say. John Huston was the director who loomed most large and the action swung from films to stage and back again in the twinkling of an eye. I walked down a long street crowded with extras with Pamela Brown, several times, and could not at the last moment remember the lines which were quite simple. I insisted that I could only do the scene with E and so they were forced to re-write the script so that E could be in that one scene. Then it changed to 73, Caradog Street and the whole family in which, for some reason, my sister Cassie figured predominantly, stood outside the house and implored me to go down to what I think was the Eastern Council School for a booze-up or something.
⁸³
It was the middle of the night and I refused saying that I was going to learn a sonnet or perhaps even write one. Everything and everybody was as vivid as a gaunt tree at the black of night lit by lightning. What does it all mean? I hope my brain hasn't let me down and that when I slope off from this vale of tears I will find that there are dreams after death. Now that would be hell.

So I awoke and lay staring at the ceiling with Elizabeth as quiet as death beside me and reached out for the cool comfort of a cigarette and lighted it and puffed away and tried to decide which period of my life had been most satisfactory. The childhood and teen years I dismissed as total agony. The twenties, riddled with ambition and fear I decided I wouldn't like to live through again. I finally opted for the middle-thirties until now. I'll have another look when I'm 50 and another at 60 and 70. If, of course I don't get killed this afternoon.

Money is a potent old bastard and a great friend of mine. This morning I had a letter from Aaron Frosch saying that Bernard Greenford, Syb's brother-in-law, wanted me to back him to the extent of
£45-50,000
with his chain of hairdressing shops. I may well do so. Can't let the family down!

Friday 2nd
Spent the whole day lazing about as usual, while E stayed in bed with a book about the Mafia or Cosa Nostra called
The Valachi Papers
.
⁸⁴
They are supposed to be the edited confessions of a former ‘lieutenant’ in that crime syndicate who is the first to talk about the Sicilianos. The first, they claim to break ‘omerta’ which is the silence unto death or something equally schoolboyish. The ramblings of this Joe Valachi are so casually brutal that the book is almost comical instead of being frightening. They seem so stupid that it can only be graft on a high scale in the police forces which can possibly have sustained them. If the police of the US were properly, even lavishly paid so that bribery ceased to be attractive, the Cosa Nostra would die overnight and decline back into ordinary crime with every gang or man for itself. I have read several books lately on the ‘hoods’, and their grip on American money is something extraordinary. The sums involved apparently go into the hundreds of billions annually. The bribed go from beat-pounding cops right up to the Senate according to all these books. [...]

My guilty conscience about the next film and learning the script has now reached an all-time high. I will read it today if I have to stay up all night. It is absolutely disgraceful and very rare for me, and I would be shocked if I discovered such laziness in another actor. I did once, not so long ago when I played Hamlet last. I was amazed at rehearsals in Toronto that Alfred Drake who was playing Claudius did not know a line at the first rehearsals, and while everybody else was bookless at the second rehearsal, he was still muttering around with a book in his hand three weeks later.
⁸⁵
It meant that he never caught up. The results were obvious in his performance.