The Richard Burton Diaries

by Richard Burton

  I have more or less stopped drinking and the shock to my system is obviously pretty profound. It didn't matter in Puerto V where I didn't have to work, but the effect at the studios, I mean on me, is awful. I am fundamentally so bored with my job that only drink is capable of killing the pain. The thought of doing a whole day's work with, for instance, John Colicos, which is my chore tomorrow, without at least half a bottle of vodka to ease back the yawns is like deliberately inciting a nightmare. It must however be done if I wish to live through the next fortnight. [...]

  I have been like a mad and highly articulate bull in blinding flashes with all kinds of people that I normally have great respect for. I laid into Sheran yesterday at lunch for no good reason. I roughed up Brook and Bob Wilson and Jim Benton with a fine impartiality and to top it all I burned through and around E today at lunch, in front of the same Sheran, just after she had just come back from one of the most painful operations, the insertion of some dreadful machine up her behind. This is, or course, par for the course when I am drinking heavily, but I'm surprised that I still do it when sober. If it is still the same in a month I shall go back to old father booze and find out how long it will take him to kill me. I might as well enjoy what little might be left me. One of the oddities I've noticed before when I've stopped drinking is that when one starts again the smell of straight liquor is revolting, so much so that one either has to force it down like medicine to get over the initial shock, or mix it deeply with fruit juice or something that will camouflage the taste and smell. I made myself a martini before lunch today and could not drink it. I took one sip and shivered from top to toe. I've only been off it since Friday night and even now it is only withdrawal i.e. I still allow myself a couple of drinks a day. One forgets how delicious water is and milk. I shall continue these confessions of an alcoholic at a later date.

  Wednesday 23rd [...] The ‘moon-men’ are already out of the headlines and poor Teddy Kennedy is in them.165 I feel sorry for him and I suppose understand his panic and indeed it ‘could happen to anybody’ but unless he comes up with something extraordinary when he appears in court next week, he has had his presidential and possibly even his senatorial chips. The K family are of course notorious satyrs. (I was amazed when Bobby K took Margot Fonteyn off into a back bedroom at Pierre Salinger's house in B. H. and my asking Salinger, when they came back, ‘where the hell have they been?’ and Salinger's fat-faced reply which was a finger over the lips.)166 It was undoubtedly a hot party and Kennedy may have tried to save his friends. I doubt that he lacks courage, maybe brains though. We shall never know I suppose. Maybe they, the Kennedys do believe that they can get away with anything. Gawd Help him. The press are ready for the kill. (I know too that when Jack Kennedy was running for President and stayed with Sinatra at Palm Springs, that the place was like a whore-house with President Kennedy as chief customer. Christ the chances those fellers took.) But they all got away with it except the last remaining baby. Perhaps somehow or other he'll be able to get out of it. E and I like the Kennedys, though, except through a phone call and a couple of letters we do not know Teddy K.

  I am waiting for Alex Cohen, who produced my last Hamlet in New York, to arrive.167 I don't know what to say to him. I've changed my mind about doing another play. I don't deep in my heart want to do a play on the stage again for a long time, possibly never. I shall slide out with vague talk of other commitments etc.

  I must start putting this diary together. I just slide it into the nearest drawer and so can't look back and find out what I wrote or didn't write about what or who or which. I mean, have I written about Gielgud or the dog he gave E. About my first time as a patient in hospital since I was 7 or 8? If I'm not called today I'll start assembling it. [...]

  Thursday 24th [...] Confessions continued: Last night I fell by the wayside and became drunk. It didn't take much to make me so. Today I shall return to the pavement.

  Being (relatively) sober for the last three or four days I have learned a great deal. Drink, for instance, is a great anodyne. I had forgotten how boring people are. I'd forgotten how afraid people are. I'd forgotten how boring I am. And how all of us lead lives of quiet desperation, and bugger you Thoreau.168 [...]

  I have since the above paragraph, taken a shower and washed my hands of [...], cleaned myself of every orifice, laboured over the cleansing of a body which will never be clean, examined a brain, some cells of which will never function properly again, and, in general, have dismissed me as a completely lost cause. There is no going back. There is no Isaiah's burning coal to cauterize a lifetime of self-indulgence.169 What would you like to do Rich? You want a back room in Paddington with a gas-fire and bobs to put in it and no bath but a public one around the corner just off Praed Street? You want a good girl who thinks you are the world's best bank clerk and will defend you against any bank manager who cares to take you on at the staff party? Well, you won't find one, baby. You want Pontrhydyfen and the unbelievably bad weather and 10 quid a week and the lust for the pint that you can't afford and the other man has? You can't have it fellah. I mean you can have the pint but not the lust. Go home, said George Moore to John Millington Synge, Go home.170 Well, I got news for you Thomas Wolfe, you can't go home no more.171

  It's 6.30 and Liza has just arrived sleepy-eyed and looking like bad breath and has just gone in to see her mother. The poor little girl is going through a bad time, a time that I don't understand and can therefore do nothing about. I hope her mother can. Her mother is also going through a bad time, but that she can cure herself. I am going through a bad time and already I've started to cure myself. I had forgotten how alien Americans are from me. They speak the same language, more or less, but it is utterly foreign. They are loose somewhere in the centre. It will not hold.172 Rife with sentimentality, woolly-minded, and on the average, brilliant – at least their Jews are – like a vast race of Huns.

  Saturday 26th, Kalizma, Thames [...] Liza went to see Becket the night before last and was I think surprised to see that her father could, despite his dissipation, play a saint. Now she wanted to see all the other films that E and I had done. We explained that a vast percentage of them were rubbish and not worth anybody's attention but that, however, there were some that would bear re-watching. Which ones, we asked ourselves? Now E has made around 50 films and I have made around 30. Let us say a rough total of about 80. I guessed that about 10 would bear re-examination. We tried to sort them out. In E's case:

  National Velvet.

  A Place in the Sun.

  Cat on a hot tin roof.

  Butterfield 8. (for her performance only, I understand.)

  Suddenly Last Summer.

  Virginia Woolf.

  Boom!

  Secret Ceremony. (I think.)

  Shrew.

  Faustus. (For her eyes and her breasts alone.)

  I'll think of something else in a minute but what is odd is, since actors are considered to be stupid, how E's best films have been made OUTSIDE the studio to which she was contracted. And in my case the only films I've made that were any good were the films that I chose, again outside the influence of contracts. The only two watchable films that I ever made before the end of my 14 year contract with Fox and Warner Bros., were Look Back in Anger and Alexander the Great. After that, and because of the remarkable impact of E on my life, I have had virtually free choice. I have, except out of fear, hardly made a mistake. Since Elizabeth I have practically caught her up. I have done, now let's have a look:

  Becket.

  Woolf.

  Spy.

  Shrew.

  Boom! (Support)

  Iguana.

  Faustus.

  Staircase.

  Not, if you have a careful look, a bad record, for two people, who happen to be in love, and compete with each other, and who have the same temperament.

  So, in some way it proves that we have our own taste. And if they allow us free rein, we will manage not to let anybody down. I think we should revert to being splend
id amateurs, and if E wants to shoot the love life of a turtle, with herself as the vet, we shall do exactly that. I'll be the turtle.

  We are, for a minute or two, at the absolute zenith of our ragged professions. So they, before they start tearing us apart again, should gracefully withdraw. The last sentence does not make any kind of sense, so let us stop. NOW. It is still a beautiful morning. The Americans have arrived back safely from the moon. [...]

  Sunday 27th I read a most enjoyable book yesterday by Laurie Lee. An account of a walk through Spain in the middle thirties with nothing to support him but the playing of a fiddle.173 It showed remarkable enterprise in one so young – he was about 19 – and one who'd never been abroad and who moreover couldn't speak a word of the lingo. He has the same love for the Spanish people that I have. I once lived in and around Madrid for about six months and I remember that the minute I crossed the border from Lisbon driving alternately with Ivor a bright new red MG and a great grey ghost of a Jaguar, I felt at home.174 Perhaps because the Spanish working man is small dark with cavernous hollows under the cheek-bones and has a murderous death-wish humour. Just like my own people, and I don't mean the Welsh, I mean the South Welsh miner, the collier, or, as I discovered when I went to Somerset House to get a copy of my birth certificate, a ‘coal hewer’. Was that my father who was determined to change the cliché? Or was it a clerk who fancied himself in the English language? ‘Coal hewer’ indeed!175 It sounds like my father I'm afraid. Or me. Nine tailors make a man, said Tommy Roblin, and ninety clerks make a tailor.176 It therefore follows that ... Roblin had had some trouble with some clerks at the Municipal Offices in Port Talbot. Roblin was responsible for some memorable lines. He is now an old man and a retired headmaster. ‘How tall are you Mr Roblin?’ ‘ Five feet six and a half inches, but stand me on the slimmest volume of human suffering and I will overtop the Himalayas.’ ‘The encroachment of this foreigner (he was talking about a man who'd bought the house next door to him) his proximity, his adjacency, has torn the compact metabolism of my land.’ His ‘land’ was roughly 1/8th of an acre! The ‘foreigner’ came from Cardiff and was as Welsh as Llywellyn ap Olaf.177 But the poor sod couldn't speak Welsh. Roblin has red hair which stands up on end, even under water, with, as he says, ‘the fury of my permanent sense of injustice.’ Roblin was the local choir-master. In the choir were four, sometimes five, of my brothers. The choir was roughly forty strong. They used to practise twice a week, on Tuesday and Friday nights, in the local school in Cwmavon. And there, on his little podium with a thin baton in his hand stood the incomparable Roblin. I would sit with the bass section, oddly enough I am the only son of my father who has a bass voice, or a least a bass-baritone, – the rest are all tenors – and carefully watch myself in case I incurred the wrath of Sir Thomas Roblin. No shit was allowed by Roblin, none of those sickly ballads so beloved of drunks at closing-time, nothing but the best was allowed for Roblin and his ravaged nightingales. One Friday night, I must get E home to hear them one of these days before everybody dies, I sat there and listened and half joined in when I thought it was safe, as they sang the overture to the 3rd act of Lohengrin transposed by Roblin into human voice from German brass. ‘No! No! No!’ he roared, in his middle-of-the-night-dream of being Toscanini, ‘No! Because you have vulgar souls, even him,’ he said, pointing at me, ‘playing as he is the great Welsh King Henry the Fifth at that monument to mediocrity, the Old Vic, even he is pandering to his own inferiority. Let me make it simpler gentlemen to you and for you,’ and the forty colliers look at him with the sly half-smile of pure delight, ‘the last pause, despite the authority of baton was pure ostentation and self love’.178

  I do believe, rubbish as a great deal of it is, that the half educated South Welshman speaks English with a verve a love and a vivacity unmatched anywhere. The peasant Irishman is lovely and mellifluous but as a result perhaps of over-exposure has played himself out. He is no longer unexpected. He is as predictable as dese dem and dose. The Scots, despite their gaunt and iron constitutions, are still as wayward as Burns. ‘wee, slickit, timorous cowering beastie.’ Can you imagine a Welsh miner calling a mouse a ‘beastie'? Or a breast a ‘breestie'? He would feed it, I mean the first, and feed from it, I mean the second, but he would never insult them with such diminutives. Even ‘wee’ is wee.179

  But, to get back to the Spanish, the Spanish make me feel at home. They have the cruelty of children and the dumb acceptance of inevitability. Sitting in a desperate cafe once at a place called ‘El Molar’ about 30 or 40 miles outside Madrid, slightly drunk and in the company of the stunt-men from the film, we watched appalled as two Guardia came into the bar and started to beat a young man, sitting with a girl, about the head with their pistols.180 I went mad and leapt across the room frightened and blood-red in the brain and stupefied and immunized by this affront to human dignity. Were it not for the fact that stuntmen were not strictly averse to a punch-up I have no doubt that I would be sleeping out now at ‘El Molar’. The Molar. The Tooth. I remember Johnny Sullivan picking up one of the Guardia and slinging him through the door of the cafe which was a door made of long strings of coloured beads to keep out the flies (fat chance) and how one accidental string of beads nearly tore the man's lobe of his ear off.181 Later when the Guardia had been driven away, we asked the two youngsters why they had been picked on. Only because I am with a pretty girl, said the boy. Well, Indeed To Christ! Come back with us to Madrid, we said, before they come back. They won't come back, said the boy. They have seen your great Rollas Royce (pronounced something like Royath Royth – it was the battle-grey Jaguar, actually) and they will not come back. And they didn't. I crept home at dawn and, sleepless, dreamt of killing Franco.182

  Perhaps the feeling of helplessness and hopelessness of the Spanish, so reminiscent of the thirties in South Wales, endeared them to me. I dunno. Not that we were as badly off as the poor bloody Spanish. At this same El Molar we once employed most of the able-bodied as extras. They changed into Greek clothes in a large tent. The wardrobe man, a feller as queer as a river running up hill, came out ashen.183 ‘Come and have a look Richard,’ he said, ‘Come and have a look.’ I went. I looked. Everybody, male, female, child and teenager had running eczema from the knees down. I killed Franco a few more times. Why does nobody kill these swine? Lincolns and Kennedys and Luther-Kings get themselves assassinated, why not a Hitler or a Macarthy or a Stalin or even a fart like Wallace?184 What providence protects these pigs?

  Monday 28th [...] The weekend has been delightful. Brilliant hot sunshine, E and Liza watching TV, me reading books. I read yesterday a book by Lord Kinross called Between two Seas a racy history of the building of the Suez Canal.185 I had hazily got Lesseps all wrong.186 I had always thought that he was an engineer. It turns out he was a French diplomatist, a consul. He was however a sort of Renaissance man and understood engineering. One reads the pig-headed British reaction to the canal, how they held it up for at least a decade out of sheer stupidity and non-knowledge, with a kind of despair. No wonder the French hate us. We lunched on the top deck, or ‘brunched’ rather and I over-ate. I remained bloated and belchy for the rest of the day. The pleasure boats came past packed to their taff-rails with red tourists, once every 1/2 an hour or so [...].187 The ‘sweet and rotten, unforgettable, unforgotten river smell’ is certainly with us this morning.188 Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song, is a sewer.189 [...]

  I wrote a letter to the Sun newspaper yesterday offering to pay the expenses of a London boy who, a polio cripple, is walking on crutches from John O'Groats to Land's End.190 He is moving towards Gloucester I suppose at the moment. He had said to the reporter who interviewed him that ‘I hope somebody will be there to meet me when I arrive, just one or two. Nobody seems to know about me.’ I told the Editor that E and the two girls, and if it were possible, I, given a couple of days’ warning would be there to meet him. I hope to God the letter didn't sound unctuous. E says not. It will be interesting to see how the lad reacts and
how the newspaper, which appears to be on its last legs, handles it. [...]

  Tuesday 29th, Dorchester [...] It was an odd day. Sir Alan (A.P.) Herbert came to lunch with his grand-daughter, who is one of the ladies in waiting to Anne Boleyn.191 He is old – coming up for 79 – and according to Gin Bujold, made a pass at her. It was probably wishful thinking as I didn't notice anything, but that's what she believes anyway. He is what one might describe as an enlightened Victorian. He refused, for instance to let anybody smoke between courses at lunch. On the other hand he said that the British should change to right side of the lane driving. He objects violently, on the second hand, to the introduction into England of the metric system.192 Did you notice, he said, that over the weekend man achieved his greatest technological feat, that of landing on the moon, and everything was calculated in pounds feet, inches, miles and Fahrenheit and not in kilos, metres, centimetres, kilometres and centigrade. I hadn't thought of that and he was of course quite right. Note the reflectors that the Yanks put on the moon to catch the laser beams. When announcing the results, the Americans said that they could now measure distance from the Earth to the Moon within 7 inches. They didn't say 10 centimetres. So the old man has a point.

  Tony Quayle revealed himself to me in a way that I would not have thought possible. He talked of the formative years of his childhood, spent in Wales at Pontypridd.193 [...]

  Wednesday 30th I knew there was something wrong yesterday. I could feel it in my primitive Welsh bones. E had gone into the surgery for her 3rd and last injection for her ‘piles’, and when by 2.30 I had not heard from her (a mistake I understand) and I couldn't get through to her, all kinds of horror began to pile up on me, if you'll pardon the pun. The first word I had was from her doctor, a minute Welsh Jew called Rattner, who, twixt lines as ‘twere, made it blatantly clear that my baby child had nearly kicked it. Some doctor-idiot the last two words are virtually synonymous, had allowed the ‘shot’ to leak into her blood stream and the fools were standing by with heart shots etc. in case she started to die, which they feared she was actually doing. I can forgive a ‘panel’ doctor in South Wales making a mistake, seeing a miner every minute on the minute, because the pressures are so enormous, but I cannot forgive Harley and Wigmore Streets.194 They work hard of course, even they, but there is no excuse for treating so expensive and tender a mortal as Elizabeth with anything less than calculated care. I am still dazed by the potential enormities of their ill syringes. [...] Well she has defeated their best efforts to kill her many times. I wish she would realize, like me, that good doctors are as rare as good actors. I only know about ten of us, I mean actors, out of ten thousand, who are not derivative and repetitive and tedious and run-of-the-mill. Why should one expect a higher percentage from doctors? They continually make stupendous mistakes, mortal ones, and get away with it. The feller who buggered it up with E yesterday was already protesting that it was her fault not his! In case so celebrated a patient died as a result of his maladministration. I could beat him to death with an eye-lid.