The Richard Burton Diaries

by Richard Burton

  Friday 17th [...] I stayed in all day yesterday and read and read and read. E came home about 8.30 muttering at the idiocy of a director who wants to shoot a 17 minute scene all in one take and then covers it with umpty-nine different angles. It would seem to me to be an indication of monumental conceit on George's part or, more probably, that he doesn't know what he wants, that he is, in fact, insecure. I am not being wise after the event when I say that it was a mistake to do this film. Let's hope at least that it makes money. E and Caroline and everybody at the studio tell me that suddenly Beatty has suddenly started to come the big star act and is ordering people off the set etc. Ah well.

  Monday 20th Yesterday there was an article in the Daily Mirror or rather Sunday Mirror by that somewhat pompous and humourless Life magazine writer Tommy Thompson about E.26 Among other things, for the most part it was meant to be friendly I think, it said she was 38 while she still is 36, that she was ‘thickening’ while she's been the same weight for ten years, apart from Virginia Woolf period when she deliberately put on weight, and that she was ‘greying’. True, the latter but she's been greying for ten years. Ah well. He also says that we never talk about anything but money, so there I've been pouring out my knowledge into his tin ear for days on end in my dressing room and it appears that all I talked about was money. He drank my drinks all day long didn't he? That's money. There is a tendency among certain writers, especially the sententious, to create ‘fine’ pieces of writing about us. They are all the same. The rich couple, living their lives in a fishbowl glare of publicity, unable to take an ordinary walk in an ordinary city street, mobbed wherever we go, protected by a huge entourage. [...] What they don't understand and completely misinterpret is our life-long attitudes to our jobs. I think Mr Thompson was deeply shocked when I told him that acting on stage or films, apart from one or two high moments of nervous excitement, was sheer drudgery. That if I retired from acting professionally tomorrow that I would never appear in the local amateur dramatic society for the sheer love of it. Could he not understand the indignity and the boredom of having to learn the writings of another man, which nine times out of ten was indifferent, when you are 43 years old, are fairly widely read, drag yourself off to work day after day with a long lingering regretful look behind you at the book you're interested in. [...] They will never understand that E and I are not ‘dedicated’ and that my ‘first love’ (God how many times have I read that?) is not the stage. It is a book with lovely words in it. When I retire which I must do before long I shall write a screaming diatribe against the whole false world of journalism and show business. [...]

  Wednesday 22nd [...] I stayed in all day and read a lot of Time capsules. E arrived home from work crocked as a sock, sloshed as a Cossack. I was sober as a Presbyterian, which wasn't a good idea. My sense of humour was not at its best, which also was not a good idea. I have an idea that I am fighting a losing battle.

  We leave for London a quarter of an hour ago for the first night of Eagles. I couldn't care less but I like Kastner and it's a chance to see Ivor.

  I am to see David Harlech at 6 at the Dorchester.27 I will doubtless see a great many other people. I shall loathe it all. Give me a scallop shell of silence?28

  [There are no further entries in the diary until late March. During this time Richard and Elizabeth travelled to Caesar's Palace, Las Vegas where filming of The Only Game in Town was completed, before going on to Puerto Vallarta. On 26 January Richard bought the pearl La Peregrina for Elizabeth, when it was auctioned at Sotheby's. The jewel had a distinguished history, having been a gift from Philip of Spain to his bride, Mary Tudor, Queen of England, in 1554. In February Elizabeth's first husband, Nick Hilton, died. In March Elizabeth underwent tests in the Cedars of Lebanon hospital, Los Angeles for her chronic back problems.]

  MARCH

  Thursday 20th, Puerto Vallarta [...] Another long silence in this pathetic journal occasioned I suppose by acute unhappiness added to stupendous quantities of guilt, alcohol, laziness, fear for Elizabeth's health and reason, stirred up well with a pinch or two of Celtic pessimism and served as a first class recipe for suicide. It is by no means over. I am still as tightly drawn as a long bow by John of Gaunt, and as touchy as a fretful porpentine but it gets better every day.29

  The last six or eight months have been a nightmare. I created one half and Elizabeth the other. We grated on each other to the point of separation. I had thought of going to live alone in some remote shack in a rainy place and E had thought of going to stay with Howard in Hawaii. It is of course quite impossible. We are bound together. Hoop-steeled. Whither thou goest.30 He said hopefully.

  Elizabeth has started to read again and I have started to write so there's hopes isn't there boys? I dread the children coming down here. My temper is still fine-drawn on the edge of impatience and trying to accommodate that with the warring claims of Liza and Maria and, to a lesser extent, with the demands of Chris and Mike is going to stretch my nerves to the limit. The fact is that children bore me. I discovered after a couple of days of fairly close proximity with Kate in Beverly Hills – and after all I don't see very much of her – that I could do without her too. I long for them to grow up and come and see us only at Christmastime, during which festivities I shall build an igloo in the garden and not come out until the New Year. [...]

  Friday 21st [...] E's stay in hospital in Los Angeles started another and inevitable wave of rumours. The Detroit Free Press announced that she was in the Cedars of Lebanon because she had cancer of the spine.31 So much space in print and time of TV was accorded this rumour that I almost began to believe it myself. [...]

  I will try, as I've tried before in this diary, to fill in some of the things I missed as I write from day to day.

  Saturday 22nd [...] We were in Las Vegas for about five or six days about 3 weeks ago. It was a horrible place and, if possible, I will never go back there again. Caroline Elizabeth Jim and I seemed to me on reflection to have been permanently drunk from dawn ‘til dawn. I only went out once in five days. I suppose if I played golf or liked to gamble I might have enjoyed myself. In daytime it is among the most horrible places I've ever seen. A dirty beige desert with gimcrack houses and a long strip of neon-lighted places of entertainment called indeed ‘the Strip’. At night however it was very pretty with all the various coloured lights flashing and winking. But as Chesterton is reputed to have said when he saw Times Square for the first time and at night-time: ‘One of the prettiest places on earth if one couldn't read.‘32 A cascade of rippling lights miraculously changing colours and shapes eventually enjoins you to eat Planter's Peanuts. A cunningly contrived and eye-compelling neon fireworks display informs you eventually that it's ‘Joe's Diner’. The only time I went out I took E to the Desert Inn, which I remembered from 12 or 15 years ago to be rather elegant.33 It no longer is. The food was horrible, the service indifferent, the people automatons. In the whole place E and I decided, and it was a large restaurant called, I think, The Cactus Room, there was only one attractive person – possibly a show-girl walking through or a honeymoon bride. The rest were of an unsurpassable lower-middle-class vulgarity and softly ugly with it. A great many women, all around the forty-five to fifty mark, were dyed blondes with exactly the same hairdos. One of them, obviously thinking she was a dish, made many strutted journeys past our table, ostentatiously not looking at us. At least 50% of them were Jews. What an extraordinary thing that the race which produced Einstein, Marx, Freud and Jesus Christ should also produce these loud-mouthed dumb-bells.

  Monday 24th We went to Phil Ober's for drinks and a buffet dinner on Saturday night. The place was packed with the gringo drifters of this town, or perhaps ‘escapees’ is the word I mean. We must have been the youngest people there. There was a woman called Pantages of the famous Hollywood Pantages Cinema and her brother (a queen), Phil Ober himself, who is a well known character actor on TV etc. and his charming wife.34 There was a famous news commentator for CBS called Charles Collingwood and his sc
atty but enchanting wife who used to be quite a well-known actress I understand called Louise Allbritton.35 Jim and George tell us that though this whole community pretend indifference to these ‘movie stars’ as they describe us over their booze and drugs, nevertheless the whole room, for a second or two, lost its breath when we walked in and then talked frantically for the rest of the evening, trying desperately not to look at us [...].

  I became somewhat drunk and was glad to get home. I woke up next morning feeling dreadful and shaky [...] to find to my dismay that E had invited Collingwood and wife, the two Pantages and their friend for lunch. I downed two vodkas and limeade to sweeten my disposition. [...]

  Tuesday 25th It is 4.30 in the morning and I am typing this in the new lower house. Cocks are crowing and an occasional donkey brays. The town itself is silent and no traffic moves. There is a quite large pleasure steamer out in the bay with all its lights blazing. It looks very cosy and safe. The kettle is boiling and it's time for morning tea. [...]

  I went to the dentist and he X-Rayed my teeth. [...] The dentist's operating room was as neat and well equipped as any I have seen in Europe or the States, in complete contrast to the other rooms. This dentist looks as if he's overworked. If he is I think I will arrange to get him an assistant and a second operating room. I will find out these things through Ray Marshall.36 [...]

  After the dentist and before dinner I took E out for the first time in the Renault. It's a blue, enclosed car, very small and runs well except that it is much too hot in this climate. I shall sell it after this trip. I've seen a few little open cars around called beach-bugs. I shall get one of those. If possible. We drove down towards Mismaloya on the new road which, when paved is going to be superb. We stopped at a brand new Hotel called Garza Blanca (White Heron) and had a couple of tequilas.37 [...] E is looking gorgeous, though she's still a little tubby. How the sun suits her.

  Wednesday 26th [...] I worked off and on yesterday at the article for Look magazine about Wales.38 I wrote it in longhand and then laboriously typed it last night until about midnight, so, since I'd been up since 4o'clock the previous morning and awake for two hours before that, it was a weary man who dragged himself to bed. I'm afraid to look at it this morning in case I don't like it and have to do it all over again. It's about 2500–2600 words. I am falling into a trap as a writer that I should guard against very carefully if my ambitions as a minor scribe persist. The trap of talking myself out. I've always known it to be fatal for any writers but particularly the kind who are as glib and articulate as myself. I will frequently reject a fairly fine turn of phrase when writing because I've heard myself say it a couple of times and therefore seems to me to be a cliché. [...]

  Thursday 27th Got up this morning about nine, though I'd been awake again since 2.30. E and I chatted for three or four hours. [...] I told E lots of stories about the Romantic Poets. I dozed a little later, awoke from a frightful nightmare and got up and wrote a letter to Gwyneth asking her to get me some Welsh books and a Grammar and a Dictionary.39 Syb, who can't read a word of Welsh, took them all to NY when she left. Perhaps Jordan is learning Welsh!

  [...] Everybody found favour with my piece about Wales though E found the end rather lame so I wrote a more powerful ending. She likes it so there it is. Now we'll wait and see if it's too late for Look magazine – the deadline was two, no three weeks ago. If it is I'll sell it to some other mag. Life magazine have always said they will publish anything I write. So I could foist it on to them, though they're hardly likely to pay me Look’s price which is $2,500. Also they wanted caption writing to go under photographs of Wales rather than an article, so perhaps they'll reject it for that reason. Anyway we'll see.

  I am enjoying this holiday so much that I am beginning to think I really could retire from acting, and write occasional pieces. I will watch myself over the next five weeks and see how my restlessness goes. [...] Perhaps one film, at a reduced fee every three years. And only something really worthwhile.

  Friday 28th Another brilliant morning. I awoke at nine. I went to bed about 9 and read a book of Ian Fleming's called You only live twice.40 A clever schoolboy mind and atrociously vulgar. And every so often he stops his narrative to give little homilies about food drink national morals etc. all of excruciating banality. Yet ever since the phenomenal success of the films about his hero James Bond and the books, – I'm not sure which came first, and of course his death, he is actually being treated seriously by serious critics. I put the light out about midnight and slept for a couple of hours, woke and read a short novel by Nathaniel West Miss Lonelyhearts.41 What a contrast between that and Fleming. West's book is taut, spare and agonized while the other is diffuse, urbane and empty. West hates himself and postulates a theory that you are always killed by the thing you love, while Fleming loves only himself, his attraction to women, his sexual prowess, ‘the-hint-of-cruelty-in-the-mouth'-sadistic bit, his absurd and comically pompous attitude to food and cocktails ‘be sure the martini is shaken not stirred’. He has the cordon-bleu nerve to attack one of my favourite discoveries: American short-order cooking. I remember with watering mouth the soda fountain on 81st Street, one block west of the park in Manhattan, where in a blur of conjuring the cook would produce corned-beef hash with a fried egg on top and french fries on the side and a salad with a choice of about four or five dressings. All this magically produced and whipped on to the table, piping hot before you'd finished the comic strips in the Herald Tribune, or read Red Smith's wry column.42 Yet you cannot help liking Fleming. He is obviously enjoying the creation of his extroverted, Hemingwayese, sadistic, sexually-maniacal boy-scout that in the end he becomes likeable. I rather like him too for his death line, if the reports are true. He was about 57 and had known for some time that he had a diseased heart. He is reputed to have said: ‘Well, it's been a hell of a bloody lark.‘43 And of course, to that bonviveur, woman-chasing, intelligently-muscled mind it had been. [...]

  Saturday 29th [...] I received a letter, a note more, from Chas Collingwood, saying that he thought I had written a ‘hell of a good piece’ and enclosing an article by Denis Brogan in the Spectator anent Breton Independence.44 We are to dine with them in their casa tonight. [...]

  Elizabeth is now looking ravishingly sun-tanned though the lazy little bugger ought to lose a few pounds or so to look at her absolute best. Looking as critically as I can at her yesterday I could detect no sign of ageing in her at all, except that she has quite a few grey hairs, mostly at the temples. But the skin is as smooth and youthful and unwrinkled as ever it was. The breasts, despite their largeness and considerable weight, sag very slightly but no more than they did 10 years ago. Her bottom is firm and round. She needs weight off her stomach, not so much out of vanity, but because all the medical men say it will ease her bad back if she has less weight to carry for'ard. She swam quite a lot yesterday and if she keeps that up she should be quite firm by the time we get back to London. Dreadful thought, London. [...] However it will be a chance to see Ivor more often. And the kids. Might even be time to watch some cricket with Ivor on Sunday afternoons and read books to him and chat. [...]

  Sunday 30th We roasted in the sun all day and read. E read Portnoy's Complaint while I read a book translated from the Spanish called The Labyrinth of Solitude written by a poet called Octavio Paz.45 I am finding it very tough going and one of those assertive books which make me long to argue back. Like most books of self-conscious philosophy it is totally lacking in humour. I like merry philosophers. To relieve my mind I would read a fairly entertaining thriller-with-a-message by Simon Raven, between slabs of the Paz book.46 It is very difficult to understand how any man can seriously discuss Mexico and Mexicans as if they are all one unit. ‘The Mexican is impassive, he is such a prideful man that he will not reveal himself even to his closest friend. etc.’.47 Balls. I know a great many Mexicans and the impassive ones, though the word that is nearer the mark is ‘sullen’, are almost always uneducated and poor. The educated are like their count
erparts in Spain, vivacious and wild and romantic. He is equally sweeping about the Yanks. ‘Men and women are subjected from childhood to an inexorable process of adaptation; certain principles in brief formulas are endlessly repeated by the press, the radio, the churches, and the schools ... They become imprisoned by these schemes like a plant in a flowerpot too small for it: they cannot grow or mature.‘48 It may be so but it is also so here in Puerto Vallarta, if P.V. can be assumed to be a typical small town. The Church dominates everything, and from the endless radios that blare from every house as you take a walk the people are only interested in listening to endless noisy bad music. Wouldn't it be awful for Mr Paz if he ever found out that behind the immense ‘impassivity’ of the Mexican Indian, there was, as we have found in the American Red Indian, nothing nothing nothing at all. Or not very much. I'll keep on ploughing through it. I suppose I feel strongly about this mass lumping of races together from my teens in Oxford and the RAF. ‘Taffy was a Welshman, Taffy was a thief.’ It's like the myth of the ‘fighting Irish’. I was so obsessed by this romantic appellation as compared to ours ‘Sly, devious and untrustworthy’ that I picked fights with Irishmen wherever I was or whenever I could. It was amazing how few would stand up and fight unless they had the support of a lot of pals. Or again the fable of the cold reserved tight-upper-lip Englishman. Well read his books or his poetry and you'll find that he is riddled with woolly sentimental ideas, and a slush of snob-ridden self pity. I will elaborate on this thesis one day. Or about the crafty penny-pinching Scot and the avaricious Jew. In general I have found them to be generous to the point of folly. [...]

  Monday 31st [...] I am on the ‘Drinking Man's Diet’ or the ‘Low Carbo-hydrate diet’ to give it a more respectable title. I rather like dieting. It means I look forward to the next meal whereas normally I'm indifferent. It also means that I don't waste anything. [...] Now if only I can get down to what the books say is my proper weight for my height – I am about 5ft 101/2ins – and smoke ‘à-la-Liza’ I shall be among the fittest middle-aged actors in the business. Smokin’ ‘à-la-Liza’ is smoking without inhaling. Just before her last (11th) birthday, which is August 6th, I asked her what she wanted as a present. She said very solemnly that the only present she wanted was for me to give up smoking. I said that was impossible for me to do. I had tried, I said, and had once gone for five months without nicotine but that in the process I became impossible to live with, and even with cigarettes I am not very easy to have around, and found, like Sigmund Freud, who gave up smoking for thirty years and took it up again because he ‘couldn't concentrate’, that my work was suffering. So she suggested, very sensibly that I should smoke but not inhale. I agreed to try [...] The oddest result is that puffing without inhaling tends to give me a sore throat. She is due here any day now and I can't wait to see that determined little face when she sees the donkey which I've hired for her. [...]