The Richard Burton Diaries

by Richard Burton

  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 call
ed 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.

  The whole evening was a fiasco for everyone except our party. First the film was mediocre. Then the dinner party was catastrophic. [...] The place, I still don't know where it is, was so overcrowded that the waiters had difficulty in getting between the tables. A great many people never were served at all. Hair-dos and Tiaras were knocked over or askew by desperately over-worked waiters. Rachel at one point having been jostled from behind by some poor sod of a waiter for the umpteenth time threated to kill him as well as Rex! At another point she started feeling and hugging Alexis de Redé who was aristocratically polite. [...] I wouldn't be disenchanted if I never saw Rex and Rachel drunk again. We got to bed about 7.30 in the morning and got up at 10 to go and visit Paul-Emile Victor and his family. We were naturally a bit shaky but they were very kind. We visited with them a houseboat which costs $70,000 and which we might buy. It would cost at least as much again to fix up Beth says. I still yearn for a converted power barge. Why shouldn't I? Life is very short and we give away a great deal of money. [...]

  Last night we had for what was supposed to be drinks but turned out to be supper as well and went on till 2 in the morning, Linda Mortimer and her husband Henry, an American and a nice young man called Bill who say that they can virtually guarantee us an average of 34% interest on our investments. It seems incredible. Should I give them a million dollars and see what they do with it in a year. An income of $340,000 a year from a million is staggering to the imagination. I told them that my idea of absolute financial bliss was an annual income of a million dollars a year. Without working. They thought that very reasonable. It's a far cry from 1925 and the helpless poverty of the valleys.

  A beautiful morning, Bessie still asleep, dogs and cat running around, so now to wake my blissly beautiful animal girl and read the Sunday newspapers together. I am fantastically lucky. Don't spoil it nobody, boys, fellers.

  Monday 21st Another beautiful but cold morning. Onassis married Jackie to what appears to be the general disapproval of the USA. At least that's what the papers say. We shall send them a telegram of congratulations today sometime. Dick Hanley says she will be declared a ‘public sinner.’ I said that she should be declared a public winner. In a comical world the Vatican is sometimes the most comical thing in it. I remember some years ago that the Osservatore Romano, however one spells it, recommended that Elizabeth was an unfit mother for her children and that they should be forcibly removed from her!76 Silly pompous asses.

  We spent the day quietly and got out of the Callas Beatty dinner. Three nights in a row for people who hardly dine with others or outside more than once a week when we're working is a bit strong. [...]

  I wrote a longish letter to Kate. The next two tasks are letters to Mike and Chris. I am very bad about letter writing and always have been. I have just acquired a four volume collection of Orwell's papers and he had the same problem but to an agonising degree.77 For an innately courteous man it is very hard on the conscience to find yourself hiding letters in drawers because of your feeling of guilt. Then suddenly I will write 20 in a morning and then perhaps nothing for a month except absolute musts like letters to the children, especially Kate in New York as I see her less than anyone. [...]

  Tuesday 22nd I went to work slightly apprehensive of Rex's reaction to Friday night's fiasco. I learned that Rachel and Rex were standing near their car after the supper was over being photographed when suddenly the photographers saw Eliz appearing and abandoned the two Harrisons. Rachel in a red Welsh fury screamed ‘I'm the star of this fucking show not that fucking Elizabeth Taylor etc.’ The photographers took no notice but it was in the cheaper French papers next day so Tommy Thompson told me. I can understand her feelings but the one way to attract indignity is to shout it to the Press. Ingrid Bergman who was there and who was equally ignored was as calm and regal as ever.78 She is still very beautiful. Thank God the Windsors and the Rainiers had the sense not to turn up. The film had bad notices. [...] Apart from our own first nights, and if possible, not even those, we are not going to such childish affairs again. [...]

  The Onassis Kennedy thing still fills the papers. It's odd that you have to search for the news of the three Yanks in orbit in the Apollo.79 The Vatican says that Mrs Onassis has sinned against her church etc as expected as ever. We sent Onassis a telegram of congratulations yesterday.

  Tommy Thompson told me an oddly flat little story yesterday. He said that the American Ambassador Shriver was shooting with the General on his estates with other Ambassadors, when he, Shriver, a self-confessed poor shot brought down a bird.80 It landed with a thud two feet from the General. And the General said, (wait for it!) ‘Splendide.’ Now the odd thing is that both Thompson, fairly hard-boiled and very cynical about other public figures and Shriver, who presumably has met a great many Kings and Counsellors of the earth, should consider this nothing story indicative of the courage, sagacity and wit of De Gaulle. The impact of this old fraud's personality must be enormous for that one word to receive the awed report of the head of Life Magazine in Europe and the American Ambassador. I'd kick him in the arse if I could reach that high. [...]

  Wednesday 23rd Elizabeth tells me that Jacqueline de Ribes, Marie Helene, and Baron Alexis are all mad for Warren Beatty. They continually phone E or Warren or each other scheming to get him. Poor bastard. The only really attractive one to my mind is Bettina. But what a world. One's read of the upper-class French morality but never really believed it, or thought it out of date. But not a bit of it. Jacqueline has several lovers and her husband knows it. He has a mistress and his wife knows it. Marie Helene has a lover who is Alexis who has a lover who is a man. Bettina has many lovers but she is rather square in that she is not married. Phew! All this gossip I get from Elizabeth in whom they confide. I have an idea that Marie Helene and Jacqueline were after me for a time about two years ago but gave me up as a bad job.

  [...] The Onassises have disappeared completely from the front-pages and for the most part from the papers altogether. I told Elizabeth that they didn't have our stamina. I also said with great smugness that he had given her a wedding present of only ‘slightly less than £100,000 of diamonds precious stones etc.’ whereas I had only recently given a £127,000 diamond ring simply because it was a Tuesday. I enjoy being outrageous with Beth. [...]

  Thursday 24th I have a very tedious couple of days ahead of me I suspect. It is likely to be so because I wear the completely bald alopecian wig. It is not porous and once on cannot be taken off, so I am going to sweat a great great deal. Still for a $1 [million] and a quarter a picture one mustn't grumble. But of course I will. Elizabeth also is receiving $11/4 [million] for her picture. That will mean that this year we will have earned in cash between us $41/2 [million]. Which is immoral. In addition to this there are many percentages coming in e.g. $1/2 m from Shrew. Roughly a million goes out on living and overheads, yacht and crew, plane and pilots, secretaries and staff chauffeurs. Aaron Frosch once said that between us we created as much business as a small African state. I can believe him. There is, however and plainly, quite a profit. Of course once we stop working the overheads will drop tremendously but even so it will cost about $1/4 [million] a year to live on our particular scale. [...]

  I have been drinking much less lately and feel much better for it. I wish I could stop smoking and get my taste-buds back in order again. It is a pity to be missing on one gastronomic cylinder with such largesse abroad in Paris. However we hardly ever go out to eat and the food in the hotel though splendid in the dining room downstairs is indifferent once carried upstairs. I noticed that at the Savoy and the Dorchester too. I'm told that they are different kitchens. We have now put in a tiny two-burner stove upon whic
h Beth can cook at the weekends and on which I can make my packaged soups and tea in the dead vast and middle of the night.81

  I awoke this morning at about 5.30, and got up after vainly trying to go back to sleep, at 6.30. I ran over the scenes I have to do today and tomorrow, read the Herald Tribune, and went back to bed about 8.30. I fell into a nightmared sleep so profound that E had difficulty in waking me at 10.15. I complained albeit gently that I didn't have to be in work until one o'clock. For some reason I dreamt about Herbert Humphrey and we were riding in a motor-cycle side-car to a place that I think on reflection was either Northampton, England, or an outer featureless suburb like Croydon.82 I must be worried about the American elections without being all that consciously aware. Cor mate.

  Friday 25th Yesterday, because I anticipated the worst, was better than expected and Ron did an excellent job with the bald wig. Judiciously lighted it looks absolutely authentic. Elizabeth thinks it looks lovely and that I look as good as Yul Brynner! [...]

  Despite being self warned about yesterday's discomforts I was still like a bear all day long, but kept myself under control for the most part until at the end of the day I had a few drinks and started being more and more sarcastic until in the end, by the time I arrived home I was downright boorish and did my usual trick of going to bed in the other room alone. Why, as Ivor says, do I do it?

  One of the actors in E's film called Charles Braswell called and had a drink in my room.83 [...] Obviously awed that he is acting opposite E, he told stories rather desperately about Lucille Ball and Angela Lansbury, trying to show, no doubt, that ETB was not the only starfish in the sea.84 I told him not to worry about my lady and that she was infinitely easy to work with. I suspect it is his first film role though he has been around Broadway for years. He is about 45 years old I guess, and that's late to begin in films.85