The Richard Burton Diaries

by Richard Burton

  But for a life-time! Ah no. It is fascinating to watch her reaction to Elizabeth. She calls her for the most part Mrs Burton or Miss Taylor and occasionally Elizabeth but corrects it to the more formal immediately. She calls me in the third person His Highness or Mr Burton and sometimes Mia. This is a joke that E made on the first day when she, E, said that I had become so thin – I am now about 160lbs – that sleeping with me was like sleeping with Mia Farrow who is first cousin to a match-stick. She asked E yesterday how she felt. ‘Fine thank you,’ said E., ‘today my ass is not hanging out.’ Miss Balls then went into an embarrassing convulsion of hysterical laughter which terminated in her throwing herself helplessly over the back of a sofa and drumming her legs against the floor in a false ecstasy of amusement. It was acutely un-watchable and we all avoided each other's eyes. At another point Lucy said to me ‘We had Ruthy Berle over to dinner last night – he wasn't there thank Christ, he's such a goddam bore – and boy do you have a fan in her.54 She went on and on about you. Great actor. Great person and so on. Other people too. Roz Russell and people.55 Why do they do that?’ She ignores Brook and her brilliant straight man who's on, poor soul, week after week with her, a man called Gale Gordon, and Cliff Norton who plays a small part and the director.56 They don't exist off camera. Sometimes on. Between shots yesterday she summoned us Norton, Brook and myself to her dressing-room with a tap on each forehead – we were all sitting down chatting with Hugh French – and proceeded to tell us how to play the scene which we had just walked through. With faces as straight as freeways we then all proceeded to shout every line at each other in ludicrously loud voices. ‘That's better, Richard, now I can hear that word, you're making me laugh.’ And laugh she did, every time we did it and we did it about three times. Brook's face was a study in disbelief. The other actor was obviously used to it and took it all as if this were normal for an actor to tell other actors how to do a scene without the director being there. I warned the director to warn Jingle-Balls that if she tried any of that stuff on Elizabeth she would see, in person, what a thousand megaton hydrogen bomb does when the warhead is attached and exploded. It will all be over tonight and again Lucy will be lucky that I am temporarily such a little saint as normally I would probably let her have what the Yanks call ‘the full shot’ of my contempt. [...]

  Dear Rich

  I hit the sack at 3:30 – so lets sleep late, please!

  You were so right on, so proud-making last nite – everything you did made everyone (like Lucy) look like peasants – Love you

  [Elizabeth Taylor's hand]

  Saturday 16th, Malibu We are staying here – with the inevitable Liz and Brook – for the week-end. It is Hugh French's house in the ‘Colony’ as it is known.57 It is a Norman Rockwell cover of a place with a comfortably middle-class atmosphere.58 [...]

  We did the Lucy show to great acclaim from Lucy and the rest of the people and the audience. We were all apprehensive as to exactly what was going to happen. Ron and indeed all of us were firmly fearful that Lucy, with her superior experience with this kind of medium would swamp us with changes of pace and/or ad libs and other cheap tricks of that kind. Nothing of the sort happened. We swamped her. She was intensely nervous and I found immediately that I was in total control of the audience and her from the moment we appeared together. The same happened when E appeared – Lucy's timing and assurance which we had assumed was a built-in mechanism which was faultless went skew-whiff and E, as ever, took everything in her stride. Everything she did – E that is – worked like a charm, and the audience quite clearly adored her. Her stage presence (this the third time I've felt it happen) is quite electrifying. She held the audience like a vice in Faustus at Oxford, at the Poetry Reading in New York and now in the Lucy Show.59 Now that we can afford it though I will be as tense as a tigress with her young, she should try the living legitimate stage as they call it. Since she has decided to do it anyway there is no point in my getting in the way of a juggernaut. I talked to Ernie Gann yesterday about a stage adaptation of his forthcoming novel The Antagonists which is about the Masada, and it might be a good vehicle for her – and for me.60 [...]

  As a reaction from the nerve-rack of the Lucy show combined with E's fears of the surgical knife on Monday and my fears of her fears and my natural irascibility and impatience when not drinking led to two bitter exchanges yesterday. E's telling me to ‘fuck off and get out of my sight’ and me replying in kind. My disappointment at being offered a CBE (which nevertheless I accepted, though E wanted me to turn it down thinking only a knighthood good enough) and not the bigger prize. The trouble with a CBE is that it is so easily confused with the pathetic MBE and OBE in the public mind though it is a much more important honour. Like the OM and the CM it means nothing because though it is a title – I suppose one is entitled to be called ‘Commander’ – it doesn't have the nice rolling sound of Sir Richard and Lady.61 I am nevertheless immensely pleased. Pleased that it wasn't a ‘Beatles’ award.62 Pleased that it was obtained without any attempt on our part to get it. Pleased that it means we are no longer notorious but officially posh. Pleased that it will please the family. Pleased by the fact that a knighthood is not after all out of reach of a divorcee and a non-tax-paying citizen. [...] We might, in effect, have our cake and eat it at the same time. [...]

  I was immensely pleased too – to revert back to the Lucy show, [...] that Brook had a success with his one scene in the Lucy Show. [...] He is terribly nervous, which worked in this part, but will have to learn very hard not to show it in other parts. Both E and I were too – particularly E as she had to wait for more than an hour before getting on stage, but it doesn't show. Everybody was amazed at our apparent relaxedness. James Stewart and Henry Fonda were overwhelmed by E's ability as a clown.63 Since they didn't over-praise me I can only assume that they meant it! She was the star again. A bit sickening.

  [...] It turns out that Frankenstein's first name was Richard.64 This has been puzzling us for some time. Very odd timing to discover that, just when I'm behaving like his monstrous creation, we all thought. [...]

  Sunday 17th [...] So far little attention has been paid to us and certainly no mob scenes. On Friday a big blonde woman or large girl passed us on a bike and said ‘Look there's Kate's Daddy and this is her bicycle.’ She said it to herself loudly as we took no notice of her. I talked to Kate on the phone yesterday and told her about it and she knew exactly who it was. She can be with us for a month this year so that's ok. I wonder if Liza will overlap with Kate's holidays. I love to see them together and to watch the competition.

  Rex dined with us and told many fascinating stories of some of his patients and some who were not. An account of a few days with Nick Hilton a few months before he died was particularly hair-raising.65 It seems that Hilton, towards the end of his relatively short life [...] became dominated by [...] a sort of quack trick-cyclist who had quit his medical training and turned psychiatrist when still an intern. Rex knew the analyst noddingly but had never met Nick Hilton. One day the quack called Rex and said that he had to leave town for a week or so and would he, Rex, act as locum while he was gone especially Hilton. This being apparently a common thing among doctors Rex agreed. Within a few hours of the psychiatrist's phone call there was another from the Hilton Mansion in Holmby Hills. The voice on the other end of the line asked him to come to the house immediately. Rex asked who was calling and the voice identified itself as a male nurse who was in attendance on Hilton. This surprised Rex who had been given no indication by the Hilton doctor that Nick was sick enough to warrant a male nurse. Off went Rex to the house and was met by Hilton's wife a woman or girl called Tricia who told him, again without a warning of any kind to go immediately to the bedroom.66 Rex did so unaccompanied, knocked on the door, a voice told him to come in and in he went to find Nick Hilton sitting up in bed with a loaded gun pointing at him. There was no question, according to Rex, that Hilton was a lunatic – one glance was enough – and that the slightest mistake on Rex's
part would have meant that he would be killed. There were three male nurses, not just one. There was nothing Rex could do except shiver in his shoes, stand there and suffer a torrent of vile abuse from the raving idiot in the bed. He got out as quickly as he could and sought information from the wife who said that Hilton had been like this for a long time, that there were loaded guns of all kinds all over the place and that the vanished head-shrinker was a terrible and evil influence over Hilton and stayed with him only to get his money. Rex went away convinced that Nick should be locked up as soon as possible. Thereafter he was called every hour or so by the wife or the male nurses until Rex himself began to think he was going to go mad. Eventually he called for assistance from a very famous and also very great LA psychiatrist who had given up his practice to teach at the University. Reluctantly and only as a favour to Rex the great man went along with Kennamer to the house and, like Rex took one look at the patient and knew that he was far gone almost to the point of no return but that there was a chance that he could be helped. He told the wife that he was prepared to go into court the next morning and testify that the patient not only should but must be removed immediately to Menningers – the top place in the States apparently – by private plane.67 That he should be either strong-armed into this and if necessary knocked out to get him there as soon as possible. The father Conrad Hilton was called who sent over his doctor.68 This doctor in turn said that they shouldn't do this without consulting the doctor in nominal charge, i.e. the missing psychiatrist. ‘But,’ said Rex, ‘nobody knows where he is.’ ‘I do,’ pipes up Mrs Tricia Hilton the wife, ‘he's here in town. He didn't go away at all. He just wanted to get away from Nick for a time.’ So the dubious quack was called and eventually came over to the house. All this incidentally was taking place in the middle of the night. The arguments by the great doctor and the wife and Rex and to a lesser extent Conrad's doctor were presented to the vanishing doctor who replied coldly and precisely leaving no room for arguments that if these men and that woman went through that procedure the first thing that would happen would be that they would be slapped for millions of dollars of law-suits by his lawyers and Conrad Hilton's. The great one blew his top and threatened to have the man barred from the psychiatrics panel etc. or whatever it's called. The man however remained unmoved. The man was barred and is now according to rumour the private psychiatrist of Howard Hughes.69

  Nick Hilton died six months later from unspecified causes.

  Monday 18th [...] [Elizabeth] dreads hospitals so much and after 27 operations who wouldn't. Her greatest fear of all is the anaesthetics shoved into her body. And she tends to fight them like mad. I stayed with her in hospital until about 11.30 [...] I had a cup of tea and went straight to bed. I asked the operator to call me at 4.30am but awoke before the call [...] I [...] left for the hospital about 5.40, [...] I went in immediately to see E who was already awake. She told me that they had given her a sleeping pill or shot at about 4.30 and promptly woke her again to give her an enema. [...] Held Elizabeth's hand while she was given two or three pre-operative shots, [...] She gradually, while I held her hand sloped off into a semi-coma but awoke immediately when they came to take her away. That was ten minutes ago and presumably they are now hard at it. They said it would take no longer than a 1/2 hour and that she would be a further hour in the ‘recovery room’. [...] I wonder how everything is going? The waiting after the endless wait in London when she had her hysterectomy, is the worst part for me. Always terrified that they'll make a mistake and all the stories of simple errors made by surgeons – eminent ones, some of them, come flooding back into my mind.

  [...] The half-hour is up and over but no sign from Dr Swerdlow or Rex. So keep on typing Rich Bach with crossed fingers. It's a lovely day, he said with trembling chin and he has just noticed that a thriller story by John D. Macdonald which he brought in for his wife to read when she is recuperating is called One Monday We Killed Them All.70 It is Monday today. Happiness is a successful operation.

  Dr Swerdlow has just come in to say that everything is perfect. I'm off to have breakfast. Hip. Hip. Hooray. [...]

  Tuesday 19th, Beverly Hills Hotel [...] PM Harold Wilson, finding himself and party ahead on the public opinion polls, has announced an election for the middle of June.71 I wonder whether Emlyn will get a KBE in the birthday honours announced just before and if so, whether my CBE and Emlyn's KBE, if he is to have one, is some attempt to placate the Welsh Nationalist Movement in Wales where at the last two elections they ate away at the labour hegemony and even stole a seat in Carmarthen.72 There are roughly 40 Welsh constituencies I think and a switch of ten or so in a tight election could be decisive.73 Shall watch with interest. A win by Wilson would be the first time this century that a PM has gone successfully three times to the country and won. I hope he wins as he has taken a lot of stick from our loathsome Press, predominantly Tory. If he wins he will prove himself the most adroit politician of our time. The Tories have no real alternatives and Heath lacks even what little stature as a world figure etc. that Wilson has.74 They're all full of rubbish of course and I love the hatred that the Tories must have for the unflappable smugness of clever little Wilson. My hatred of Tories is unabated by long-term membership of the rich class, and I hope they howl in the wilderness another five years. It would pleasure me Aloysius, it would pleasure me to read the outraged screams of the Tory Press, it would really pleasure me.75 No legislation they might enact – the Tories – could ever make up for their intolerable air of superiority over us lot in the years and years gone by. I hope they grovel for evermore. [...]

  Wednesday 20th [...] I spoke to Aaron for an hour yesterday about business and he told me that we were as usual overspending but no more than standard but this time without working and with no earned income and expenses. For the first time he may have to go into the income from the trusts we have set up for ourselves. I don't like that so therefore will go out and earn some more money. Next time we take a sabbatical and perhaps even when not I will squeeze in some time to write a book. If I write it in a certain way I can perhaps compromise with my conscience and deliberately write a best-seller. Have just talked to Elizabeth who has just had her first bowel movement since the operation. She says it is unbelievably painful and unfortunately occurred before anticipated by the doctors so she, as it were, did it all by herself without the assistance of lubricants and soothing laxatives etc. Result: Screaming agony. [...]

  Must write an article for a book to be published marking the anniversary (100th) of the Rugby Union. Cliff Morgan is the demon-agent for this.76 I know so much about rugby and so many stories that I don't know where to begin.

  Thursday 21st [...] I wrote the first draft of the rugby article yesterday and shall try and complete it today. It looks awful in the cold light of dawn. Perhaps it will look better when it's all typed and neat. I have written a sort of account of the last game of rugby I ever played but have introduced elements from a lifetime of games in just such places. The place I physically think of is the awfulness of Tonmawr though I have never actually played there.77

  Saturday 23rd This is a brand new Olivetti typewriter upon which I am writing given to me by Lil and Brook. It is sparkling and very loose compared with the Hermes Baby and it will take me a little time to bang away on it with the same abandon as I do on the old one which I shall keep anyway out of loyalty for many years of battered service. I shall retire the Baby to the library on the boat or at Gstaad. The machine is fire-engine red and I've pasted on it a Welsh dragon sent to us by a Welsh American firm that specializes in producing stickers for the various groups of Irish Scots English French Italian etc. descendants who like to remember their origins in Europe. [...]

  I had lunch with Hugh French after having had my hair-cut by Ron B and after having signed and initialled lots of bumf for Aaron who, poor chap, is an old man 20 years before his time. [...] He will be a helpless cripple before long I'm sure. The forties are an odd and sad time because going going going are th
e old familiar faces. Indeed I am frequently surprised to find that people like Binkie and John Perry and Dick Clowes and Stephen Mitchell are still alive.78 All ghosts from my early years in the theatre. Even Emlyn can no longer remember his lines and had a sort of nervous breakdown last year. [...]

  Sunday 24th

  [Letter of farewell from Michael Wilding pasted in]

  I wonder what the poor little bugger is going through – if anything. Is he or is he not a feckless cop-out? Time will tell if time will give us a chance to wait. This is a Sunday that feels like a Sunday. [...] I read Reader's Digest for half an hour – a publication I haven't looked at for years.79 I read the sporting page and my favourite Jim Murray on Hank Aaron and have not even got round to the political pages which I hardly ever miss.80 Re: politics: Brook was commenting yesterday on how the mighty had fallen in this case the mighty being the British. The announcement that Wilson had decided on a June election which was a front page photograph of Wilson in the Times with a hundred words on the subject, has not been followed up at all and on the news on TV that night was not even mentioned. Nobody gives a bugger. Pompidou and the French elections, Willy Brandt and the West Germans, received much much more attention.81 Both of them lost the war and we won it. It is passing strange and a passing world. Always has been of course. I can imagine the various and vicious political machinations that are going on in the British press and the mud-slinging, not one smidgeon of which crosses the Atlantic to the ordinary papers or to the TV. The Times of NY doubtless has a column or two as will Time and Newsweek, but Wilson or Heath are not going to make the covers. [...]

  Monday 25th [...] I watched a lot of television yesterday mostly sport. The Angels v The Twins (won 6–5 by the former) and golf from Atlanta (won by Tommy Aaron.)82 I saw a much younger Clint Eastwood playing the piano and singing a love-song in a re-run of a series he used to do called Rawhide.83 A rare sight. I wrote painfully inadequate letters to Liza and Maria – one page each – caught a glimpse of Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi in a horror film.84 The series is called Creature Features.85 Ate two trout for lunch, raisin bran for breakfast and turkey with all the trimmings for dinner. Liquorice for dessert in bed while I tried to read a book, the One Monday We Killed Them All book I mentioned taking to the hospital last Monday. I read the political pages and found a spot about the British Elections. We came next after the Dominican Republic and the article says that it is likely to be the dirtiest election in modern times. It was very short. I read about Nixon [...], Cambodia, Kent State and the four students killed by the National Guard.86 I read that all food regardless of how purely grown – even the much loved potato – contains powerfully toxic elements which in excess could kill us all. Air pollution and hard drugs and the population explosion and the trip-wire tension in the middle-east between Israel and its neighbours. And there is nothing about all these things that I can do anything at all about. I could, I suppose, buy an electric car to make my own personal protest against gasoline, but nobody has made one yet that is effective. That should be a simple matter I would have thought with modern technology, but what would Standard Oil think of such treachery? They wouldn't like that would they? The stock market is bad enough as it is. Perhaps I could buy a horse and cart and try the freeways, go only by train – electric of course and not fuel-burning – and nuclear submarine. Shit on the world. I'll sit on my hands and pray.