The Richard Burton Diaries

by Richard Burton

  Zeffirelli [...] arrived about 3.30. He told us all about going to Florence to get his Auntie and her dog and the impact of the terrible floods on that lovely city. Cows, cats, cars, trees, tapestries, clothes, furniture etc. etc. all piled up in distorted corners of the city. A cow and a calf who had somehow fled before the flood or had been carried along by it finding refuge in the cemetery of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning which is apparently on highish ground.251 Whole family businesses wiped out and ironically a great shortage of drinking water. [...] I am to run Shrew again tomorrow at 3.00. I don't like making films. I don't like acting in them and I don't like cutting them – especially the latter.

  We dined with the children and Karen on lamb and artichokes and potatoes and salad followed by an apple tart. I made myself a martini before dinner just like a little old American. It tasted awful and put me in slightly bad temper. I read the whole of Anita Loos, A Girl like I in one sitting not because it was compulsive reading but feeling that if I stopped at any one place I wouldn't start up again.252 She tells stories well but they're a little too polished to be true – some of them. She is of course a determined feminist and is kind to her own kind, even going so far as to describe Margalo Gillmore as being one of the great ladies of the American theatre.253 Poor old talentless intoxicated Margalo. Anyway the book kept me awake until 2.00 in the morn. She is so determined to be witty and different that she succeeds only in becoming anticipated. My sighs punctuated the whole reading. And what a dreadful story she tells about dead defenceless Alex Woollcott even if it is true.254 It sounds terribly like what she would like to have happened. It was unforgivable to print it. [...]

  Wednesday 9th [...] E went reluctantly to work an hour ago. I am to join her for lunch.

  Tuesday 16th255 Haven't written for 5–6 days. Since that time I have become 41 years old. I don't seem to feel physically any older and tend to think Well thank God that's another year gone. I'll change my refrain later when I'm 60. If I reach that age.

  I received lots of presents, pullovers and shirts and books (one immensely valuable one from E.) a brief case, which I shall now use in preference to the other, a huge writing pad to encourage me to be an author etc. And a splendid movie camera from E.

  Sheran Cazalet who has been here since Friday left this morning for England.256 I wonder if she'll ever get married. It seems unlikely now. She is 33, I think, and is virtually a virgin (one to bed according to her) and probably does not like it much. Perhaps someone could teach her. She seems too not to have any ability in any other direction that could lead her to a career of any outstanding kind. She should be married and lead a life of social ease with a nice husband and a couple of children, a place in the country and a pied-à-terre in Town.

  Marlon B and Christian Marquand came to dinner on Saturday night.257 Everybody became sloshed to the gills and a thoroughly forgettable time (literally ‘forgettable’ as no two people remember what happened at the same time) was had by all.

  Meade Roberts, a writer that I've tried to help, is in an hysteria about something.258 Money and injured pride. I had asked him to do the screenplay on Falesa – Dylan Thomas – but had decided to abandon the project.259 Therefore he has threatened to kill himself etc. What can I do? [...]

  We've just heard from the Press that E. Fisher is suing E for divorce, for a property settlement and for custody of Liza.260 Over my dead body – the latter.

  I taught Liza to play Gin-Rummy the night before last and she immediately became very good. She is a very clever girl.

  I wrote the above [...] because she Liza was standing over my shoulder while I wrote. But she is very good at card games and it's all quite true.

  [...] I tried to comfort E re Eddie – She is so ashamed of herself for having married such an obvious fool. He really is beneath contempt – a gruesome little man and smug as a boot.

  Wednesday 17th Woke with Eliz this morning at 7.15. We both took baths in our separate bathrooms – she a short one and a long one for me. And off she went to work. I shaved, and dressed in my new sweater and cardigan (birthday present from E) fawn trousers and fawn desert boots with thick crepe soles [...]. I looked rather, I thought like a chocolate mousse. I ran back and asked [...] if we had any English kippers left. We did and I had one with salt, pepper and vinegar, toast and butter, and two cups of sweet tea. Delicious and followed by the first cigarette of the day. Equally delicious. I then sat in the sun and read an article in an American magazine by a man who, with a friend, rowed across the Atlantic.261 Their attitude is one that I think I understand but have no desire to try [...] to beat the physical body beyond human reason and still make it go on. But they say what they talked and dreamed of all the time was food and walks in country lanes and magnificent dinners in London etc. In short it must surely be masochistic, like the lunatic who when asked why he knocked his head so much against the wall said that it was so nice when he stopped. Now that they're safely on land and in warmth and comfort they probably think a great deal about the sea and its fascination. They'll try something hazardous again and doubtless one of these days kill themselves in the attempt. Good luck feller-me-lads – I'll content myself with reading about it.

  I have just read Tread Softly for You Tread on my Jokes – ghastly title by Malcolm Muggeridge.262 It's a series of articles collected over the years from newspapers and magazines and shows it. He repeats himself quite a bit and is peculiarly engrossed by pornography and sex. I have the feeling that he is not being honest in his reactions. Why does he not like pornography? because, according to the Oxford Dictionary it gives rise to lewd thoughts? So what? We'd have lewd thoughts anyway pornography or no pornography. If you're lonely and unwanted it can solace you, and with a companion to share it it can become unimaginably delightful. The unctuous rubbishy shit written about pornography is nonsense. Practically all good pornography is best selling so I understand, and yet I have never found anyone who when asked if they enjoyed it will ever admit so. They will say they've read it – Fanny Hill, Chatterley's Lover, Tropics of Capricorn, Cancer, Candy etc.263 But they're still too inhibited to say it gave them pleasure of a sexual kind. Blah. I know bloody well it did. I've heard too many men talk in too many barracks and Nissen huts and clubs not to know what they think, and too many honest women have confessed to me things they've thought and heard from other women not to know what they think either.264 There are, doubtless, pure souls who through some act of God are physically neuter, or who have had sexual normality scourged out of them in youth, or are too old to care, who may genuinely be horrified by pornography. I'm sorry for them. Journalists of course are pornography's greatest scourge, working for newspapers who wouldn't dream of having one issue without at least one scantily clad model or actress in the middle pages. Oh how they love to be superior. How they love to pontificate. How they play in the dark we'll never know. They are the real dirt.

  There is the argument that pornography can make a man a sex maniac or something perverted. Well now I am I understand a potently sexy man but it hasn't turned me into a sex fiend, a sex killer a sex sadist or a sex masochist and I've been reading the stuff for years – at least twenty. I knew a girl once married to an older man with whom she'd fallen out of physical love but still loved otherwise who relied upon reading pornography urgently and quickly in the bathroom before going in to his bed to satisfy his desires and to inflame her own. The moralists would flay her alive if she had left him for another man to marry. They would excoriate her if she had extra-marital affairs. So? And what's the difference between reading it and thinking it. I myself have had in my time to make love in the dark to women by whom I was bored, desperately trying to imagine they were somebody else. And doubtless some women have had to do the same with me. Muggeridge quotes Kingsmill as saying that the act of love is ludicrous and disgusting. Speak for yourself Kingsmill.265 I love its disgustingness and comicality. Put some jaundice in your eye and the act of walking is ludicrous and obscene, and swimming and, above all, eating.
All those muscles, in most people, 50% atrophied, sluggishly propelling people over land or through water or gulping oysters. Come off it.

  I've written the above carelessly but will elaborate on it one day. It is an important thing to kill cant and humbug even if one is a humbug oneself.

  I went to the studio for lunch. [...] At 2.30 I met Sheila Pickles and the Italian TV man re the documentary on Florence.266 I have agreed to do it on Friday here in Rome. I will try to do the narration in Italian for the Italians and in English for the UK and USA I fear I'll have to write it too – not in Italian of course, they'll translate that. I looked up Florence and flood in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations – there is practically nothing that is apt except from Inge.267 I read some more of the Disraeli biography by Robert Blake.268 I'd no idea he was quite so vain and quite so devious in petty things. So far I'm about up to his 35th year so there's a lot to go. [...]

  Thursday 18th Rose early bathed and breakfasted at 8.30. [...] Finished the diary entry for yesterday had a cup of tea and toast and jelly and took E'en So for a walk. A beautiful warm Autumn day. A horseman on, what looked to my untrained eye, a thoroughbred posted past on the outside hedge. I ran or rather jogged about 1/2 mile having already done my PT in a fury when I got up.269 Will my arms ever come back to what they were. I don't so much mean their looks but their strength. Four years of atrophy from pinched nerves? bursitis? arthritis is a long time to make up at 41. Well, keep on trying anyway. Perhaps I should pick up weights. [...]

  Went to the studio by 1.00 and waited until 2.45 before E came back from location for lunch. I ate like a fiend – roast turkey, beans-and-bacon-and-onions, mashed potatoes and gravy. Still felt bloated at midnight. We went into Rome after work to see the documentary on the disaster in Florence that I am to narrate tomorrow and next week. The force of water is unbelievable – cars bowled along like match boxes, the shops and houses on the Ponte Vecchio smashed to bits though the bridge held, a corpse floating down the street a dead drowned horse with his head over the stall door.270 Another horse upside down, manuscripts and pages from drowned books in the Uffici plastered to the ceilings.271 Awful. I drank a little today. One vodka and some Lafitte Roth 1962. Didn't taste like anything. [...]

  Friday 19th Went into the TV Studios in Rome and worked until 7.15 at night starting at mid-day. All day long – apart from lunch – I read Italian off a teleprompter. It was torture but I was very patient and so were they. Tomorrow to London.

  We lunched in a restaurant which was very Roman and cold of course, flagged floors and damp. It was pouring outside and the traffic was choked. Nauseous fumes from buses. We were stuck for minutes on end between two diesel-waste-vomiting species of them. The smell of petrol cities is becoming intolerable to me – and especially the diesel smell which is particularly foul. [...]

  I don't know quite what I shall do on the Sunday Show – it all seems so band waggoning – the poor people have already had £800,000 and are embarrassed. We can only add to it. The Mayor seems to be the only one who enjoys it.

  Went home with Ron Berkeley and B. Wilson, had some drinks and ate some food sole with croquettes and Fontana Candida. Became furious, nerves nerves nerves, because of what I considered to be over packing. For two nights in London we have two large suitcases. But that wasn't the reason really. It was nerves from a hard day and nerves about flying and nerves about the Aberfan show.

  Smoked myself furiously to sleep and before doing told E She was not to come with me to London. Leave me alone I screamed as I slammed doors. Give me some peace! What nerves and booze will do. I couldn't go without her.

  1966

  Richard stopped keeping his 1965 diary in July, and did not start making entries for 1966 until mid-March. From July to August 1965 he and Elizabeth lived on Carolwood Drive, in the Holmby Hills in Bel Air, while rehearsing and filming Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? In late August they moved from Los Angeles to Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, for location filming. In the meantime their film The Sandpiper was released. In late September they returned to Hollywood, where Richard celebrated his fortieth birthday on 10 November 1965. On this occasion Woolf’s producer and screenwriter Ernest Lehman (1915–2005) presented Richard with an original edition of the essays of Francis Bacon. Elizabeth gave him an Oldsmobile Toronado. Filming on Woolf ended on 13 December 1965, after which Richard and Elizabeth visited Elizabeth's brother Howard and his family in Del Mar, San Diego, before spending Christmas in Los Angeles. January saw both embroiled in legal proceedings with Twentieth Century-Fox. In February 1966 Richard and Elizabeth journeyed to Oxford, staying at the Randolph Hotel, to fulfil a promise they had made in 1963 to Richard's former tutor, Nevill Coghill. After ten days of rehearsals they appeared in an Oxford University Dramatic Society production of Christopher Marlowe's Dr Faustus, staged at the Oxford Playhouse. The production, which met with a mixed critical response, ran for just one week. Accounts vary of how much money it made – the lowest estimate is £3,000, the highest £17,000. The intention had been that monies raised from the performance (and from the film version that followed) would be put towards a fund-raising initiative (the University Theatre Appeal Fund) designed to provide the university with a new theatre and arts centre. Although these grander designs were not realized, in part because the film itself made a loss, in 1976 the Burton Taylor Studio was added to the Playhouse building.

  Following Faustus, Burton and Taylor moved on to Rome, where they would begin filming The Taming of the Shrew under the direction of Franco Zeffirelli. They stayed in a villa on the Via Appia Antica.

  MARCH

  Friday 18th, Rome1 Lunched at home with Franco Zeffirelli, Alexandre de Paris, Irene Sharaff and Dick McWhorter.2 Irene is a funny contradiction. And enormously concerned with her own dignity.

  After lunch [...] we had a press conference. The usual stupid answers to the inevitable stupid questions. What a bore they are.

  Dinner at home alone and fried chicken. Must read script and original version of Shrew again before Monday.3 De Sica coming to lunch tomorrow we think.4 We are to dine with Edward Albee on Sat (tomorrow) night.5 I hope he's more articulate than the last time I met him in NY.

  Saturday 19th We dawdled about all day until dinner in Rome at Ranieres (near Spanish Square) with Zeffirelli, Albee and his friend.6

  Albee was very flattering, especially to E!, about V. Woolf and, for him, was very talkative. They were doing a swift tour of Europe – a day here, a day there. He says that he is 2/3 through a new play which should be going on Broadway in the Autumn.7 It contains 4 men and 2 women. He said that it was ‘a very curious play, a very curious play indeed.’ After Tiny Alice and V. Woolf how curious can you, as they say, get.8 He told us that he thinks about a play for six months approx and then writes it in about three. There is no second draft. It is as it is, and so remains.

  We had a hair raising drive to Rome pursued by paparazzi all the way.9 I think Mario the driver takes too much notice of these butterflies of the gutter. They risk their lives too. Why don't they go where there's real risk. Like a war. Like Viet Nam. Like anywhere.

  I finished reading Ugo Betti's play The Queen and the Rebels.10 It is quite good and very actable but weakens quickly at the end. Perhaps they could do something about it. Also some of the dialogue is lamentably old fashioned but all that could be cured.

  Sunday 20th So far we had lunch with Vittorio De Sica and his wife and two children (boys).

  One boy played the guitar – what a horrible instrument, worse than a mouth-accordion, an accordion, a Jew's harp or a paper-and-comb. Worse than beating on nothing with a nought. But, however, fond parents love the idea of a noise – however absurd – made by their dearest and nearest. De Sica really looked on his son with admiration. He had, I mean the son (and the father too when he, the son, was playing) the face of a demented and somewhat stupefied fish. The Beatles have a lot to pay for. Even my own. Boys I mean. How dull I am.

  So. They came to lunch
and next Monday we dine with them and we shall also watch Umberto D.11 I must, somehow, get out of that.

  And so the day wore inevitably on to another regret in the lost and in future to be recalled days.

  What shall we do now. Why not if it's so intolerably wearying. Why not go to bye-byes?

  Bugger it then. Let's row.

  Tuesday 22nd On Monday, the missing day in this diary, we went to the studios at 6pm to have chat and drinks with crew and cast. We took Liza, Maria and Karen (their nurse) with us. Everybody seemed reasonably pleased and felt that it was a fairly good first day – especially as it was Franco Z's first film.

  I had been earlier in the morning, though I was not called, to wish good luck and see how things were. There was a long initial hold-up lasting about 11/2 hours waiting for a change of horse. [...] Later that morning I went over to the back-lot [...] to see the first of the glass shots.12 That looks good too.

  I had lunch with Mr Haggiag.13 I had been warned that he was a ‘wheeler and dealer.’ He is, I think, but appears to respond easily to flattery which is always a great weakness in negotiation and a strength if the other gent (for the other gent) can use it.

  I took Liza and Maria to school this morning and then went to the bookshop on the Via Veneto and bought some 20 or 30 paperbacks.14 1/2 dozen detective stories. Ludovic Kennedy's Trial of Stephen Ward a genuine establishment horror story.15 And a palpably unjust trial – nightmarishly so. Harry S. Truman's Memoirs.16 Ingenuous to the point of admiration, and also wonder that a man of such common (but tough) intellect could ever have become the President. And done so well. Perhaps office really can make the man.

  We sat quietly at home for the evening and read. We dined à deux and read and sometimes talked to each other and read out interesting bits to each other even while we ate. It has suddenly become quite summery. For the first time I had to open completely the car windows when driving.