The Richard Burton Diaries

by Richard Burton

  Tuesday 23rd Another grey mist-enwrapped morning. Have just taken the girls to breakfast in the drugstore. Maria is a chatter-box, a 1000 words a minute type. When I remember that we were frightened that she would never speak. [...] She is a delight and as warm as kittens. She is nine years old. And not 10 as I thought. [...]

  B and I went to be fitted for our uniforms for the film yesterday at Western Costume co. in Hollywood. Hathaway was there. I have always thought of this film as a giggle but now that it gets nearer and nearer I am beginning to have qualms. I shall read what is supposed to be the final script today and see what I can salvage for myself from it. That's what comes of wanting to work for the sake of working and not for better reasons. [...]

  Wednesday 24th [...] Went to see a bigger house along the beach. We have taken it. [...] We are moving in today. I read most of my next epic. I shall finish it today sometime. It is very laboured but I bet can be very watchable. I shudder to think what the posh critics will say. Well actually I don't shudder. I shall rather enjoy them. They are so serious or in a desperate attempt to send it all up they become comi-serio and snappish. There is a man called Morgenstern who writes for Time or Newsweek who is so pompous that he is a sure fire party piece when read aloud, especially about almost any foreign film.150 He fairly bristles with insignificance, as indeed they all do. I suppose as a result of hob-nobbing with famous or notorious household words most of whom are incredibly stupid and having to see several films a week and writing about them must eventually stultify what small growths their minute minds are capable of.151 Tynan started out with such a fine acerbic astringent flurry that I read his notices with glee and could even quote them. But the splendid frenzy is all but dead. He has become a plodder, a hack. Has no creative sense at all. I used to read them all and over all they have been excessively complimentary to me, but I have become perhaps so blasé in my old age that I find them unbearably tedious to read nowadays about anything or anybody. Somebody sent a me a long and breathtakingly adulatory article recently by Cecil Smith of the LA Times about me, and I couldn't get through it though the legend is that actors will read favourable notices about themselves for ever.152 Not so in my case. I think I was badly hurt by my first batch of bad notices when I first played Henry V at Stratford and the callousing began then. That's twenty years ago and actually the notices weren't bad at all, but they didn't say I was the greatest etc. therefore they were bad as far as I was concerned. When notices are good they're not good enough and when they're bad they upset you. The worst notice of all of course is not to be noticed. Or ‘Also in the cast were.....’

  I must strip my part in Rommel down to the bone. I talk too much in it and destroy what little mystery the part might be invested with.

  Brook read the script yesterday and said he wanted to play Reilly, a nothing part, a man who drives the half-track and is in all the action and said ‘The part of the C.O. disappears after one speech in the early pages. Says he won't be involved in killing anyone and walks out of the film.’ On the contrary I discovered that the C.O. seduces the Italian girl etc. and has the only ‘love-interest’ in the piece.153 Reminds me of Jimmy Granger being sent the script of Odd Man Out by Carol Reed and flipping through the pages where he had dialogue, deciding that the part wasn't long enough.154 He didn't notice the stage directions so turned it down and James Mason played it instead and made a career out of it. It's probably the best thing that Mason has ever done and certainly the best film he's ever been in while poor Granger has never been in a good classic film at all. Or, as far as I remember, in a good film of any kind. You could after all have a ‘James Mason Festival’ but you couldn't have a ‘Stewart Granger’ one. Except as a joke. Granger tells the story ruefully against himself. [...]

  Thursday 25th This was our first night in the newly rented house and not a nice one. [...] There was a show on called the Des O'Connor Show which is enough to put you off to start with.155 Immediately there was a reference to me. ‘The crown jewels have been stolen.’ Only one man can have done it. ‘Who?’ Richard Burton. ‘He doesn't need them, he's got his own.’ I had a shouting match with Ed Henry of Universal about Brook's pay for the film. They will not pay him more than $600 a week which is insulting. [...] I said how Brook had hung around to do the film and had turned down a play. Henry: ‘Why didn't he take it?’ Why not indeed. I understand that Colicos is in it.156 I wonder how he'll like the non-drinking Burton. And how the non-drinking Burton will like him. [...] They want me to go up to Oxford for Michaelmas term October 11th to December 5th or Hilary in January until March. What am I going to lecture about? I must write today to Francis Warner and get some direction and hints. What, for instance, does he lecture about? It's a great platform to get rid of a lot of spleen. I can do lethal work on some public figures and clast a few icons. [...] I am very lazy. All work is a conscious effort and there is seldom any joy and enthusiasm in it. I could laze for a long time except that I would feel great guilt. I have dreams of living with Elizabeth on the Kalizma or a newer bigger vessel though the present one is perfectly adequate, and never living on land again. And moving all the time, a few days here a few days there. Make what is already a decent little library on the yacht into a really splendid one. Leave it only for a couple or three months a year while it's in dry dock and stay alternately in Vallarta and Gstaad. Just us and occasionally the children. Haunt the Mediterranean and search out all kinds of little ports that we've never seen. Work enough just to pay the overheads and only where we can live on the yacht. Seek the sun as much as possible and a little society now and again. Very little. The Rothschilds are our favourites and a weekend at Ferrières perhaps. Annual shopping sprees in Paris for E and gourmet journeys from the boat in the mini-moke. And then one year we could venture out into the Atlantic and work up the coast to Normandy and north to Scandinavia. But preferably remain in and around the countries where I speak the language. Italy Spain France. It costs roughly $110,000 a year to run the boat and keep it in good trim.

  The world is in a terrible state of chassis as Joxer has it and I want to watch its chaos from a little distance and make a leisurely and I hope long preparation for death.157 I love the world and its insanity and despite the fact that I am a highly romantic and passionate man, I find almost all things amusing – especially passion and romance in others. E's and my wildest quarrels are fundamentally ridiculously funny. Certainly in retrospect. And our leaders are without exception grotesquely and ludicrously comical. Brezhnev and Heath, Nixon and Agnew, Fred Kennedy and Humphreys and Pompidou and Willy Brandt and Mao Tse Tung and Cho en Lai and Nasser and Uncle Tom Cobley.158 Watching Nixon making like a man of destiny on the TV talks to the nations about Cambodia is a divertissement unparalleled. Agnew's prolix and sententious rhodomontade is a national joke, and so is his audience.159 Enoch Powell, so fantastically like Oswald Mosley intellectually and emotionally that I'm astonished that no one has remarked on it, is a howl.160 Wilson wrapped in a cocoon of smugness, even in crushing defeat, is a howl. The idea of the queen and all her trappings is high comedy, which reminds me that I have a part in that show shortly when I receive the CBE. There is a great international madness and there always has been but the speed of modern communications accentuates its lunacy and those who don't laugh go mad. Student rebellions, an integral part of our natural history, are either frightening or funny depending on your reaction emotionally. To me they're funny because I know that all those shouting banner-waving little sods are with few exceptions cop-outs and drop-outs. Like striking miners when I was a kid in the valleys. The union leaders had nothing to lose. The losers were the good miners, the lax and lazy ones were merely searching for a holiday – with no pay perhaps but there were always soup kitchens and a little casual labour building a new Co-op or something.161 The people who died inside were people like my brothers who wanted to work. The most laughable strikes of all were those in the twenties when the miners went back after prolonged strikes to much less than they got before they st
ruck.162 The only strikes that really worked were wartime ones. And everybody can shout and bawl as much as they like but they won't change anything fundamental. They will be thrown a scrap or two to stop the barking but human nature is unchanged and unchangeable except over millions of years. There is no difference basically in humanity now than there was 5000 years ago. The same cruelty, the same vices and virtues as ever. The same stupidity and intelligence and in the same proportion. Who can possibly take seriously a student who says ‘down with Nixon and Mao for ever’ or vice versa. Both are clowns. Neither commands our gravity only our laughter. The ‘thoughts of Mao Tse Tung’ are a laugh a thought. Nothing can happen overnight.163 The betterment of mankind will be a triumph of the inevitability of gradualness as the Baron of Passfield said in another context.164 That is if there's to be a triumph at all. So far the gradualness has been so minutely graded that it is invisible to the naked eye. There must be a holocaust one day soon. All the practical man's hope can be is that he is not at its centre, that he is peripheral and do his duty to survive and if possible see that his family survives with him. Here is one man who firmly believes the world to be a delightful place nicely balanced by its horrors. Without sorrow there can be no joy. True happiness is as transient and as ephemeral as true misery, thank god. Plus ça change plus c'est la même chose.165 The French, American and Russian revolutions changed nothing. Privilege and money still dominate mankind. ‘The Great Experiment’ in the USA is a whacking great spiritual and material failure.166 A handful of men own the country and millions and millions are servants as near to automatons as you can get in a ‘free’ society. And nothing, but nothing at all can change that great amorphous mass, that limited sprawl, that defined shapelessness. It is not even influenced by the last argument it ever heard. It remains the same. This great anonymous multi-headed mob can not be moved to a new idea. It is impossible to persuade a southern redneck that a negro is a human being. They are uneducatable. You can only hope to change this atrophying muscle and make it limber by catching its offspring young. Keep a thing for seven years and you may find a use for it, as the proverb has it. Or the jesuitry ‘Give me a child until its seven,’ or is it 12, ‘and he is mine for life’.167 But even starting now today this minute the process of re-education will take a long time. Only a small percentage of the dumb will be taught to speak and the blind to see and the deaf to hear, therefore the process of re-education will take aeons and aeons. The very system of education must be torn out by the roots and made different, but that itself is so deeply ingrained that it seems impervious to surgery, or transplant. I am convinced that in any group of a hundred people less than a half dozen are capable of fundamental change. They can be easily swayed en masse – I've done it to myself and been swayed – but they are impervious to radical new thoughts. By ‘new thoughts’ I don't mean new in the sense of original – there is no new thought under the sun – but new in the sense of being new to them, to what they've grown up knowing or not knowing, believing or not believing. I read somewhere that the children of Republicans and Democrats and Tories and Labourites almost inevitably become Republicans and Democrats and Tories and Labourites respectively just like their dads. I remember that when it was rumoured in the family that my brother Dai the Policeman had turned Tory we all thought he'd gone mad. In the recent election in Britain which resulted in what the newspapers called sensationally a Tory landslide and sweeping victory an unprecedented volte face of the electorate turned out to be the indifference of the Labour turn-out.168 Nobody had changed. Miners didn't go mad and vote for the Tories. They simply didn't vote at all. Labour will inevitably win again when they can get their supporters to get off their asses and away from the TV and make their marks in the appropriate space. Nothing has changed and regardless of any zeal he may possess Mr Heath will soon be sunk by the great apathy. We can be sure that if the world is still in existence in fifty years’ time, we can be sure that nothing will have changed. You might be a little poorer or a little richer but nothing will have changed to humanity to any measurable extent.

  Friday 26th Am writing this late in the afternoon having stayed upstairs and finished a book about golf and the professional golf tour in the USA called Pro by a pro golfer called Frank Beard.169 [...] I was intrigued by the day to day struggle to win the expenses and by the fact that one could after sufficient mastery of the game become a millionaire as people like Palmer, Player, Nicklaus, Casper et al. have.170 [...]

  I read today in the LA Times that ‘according to biological evolution both humans and sheep – as mammals – have evolved separately, but are derived from a common ancestor that lived aeons ago.’ Very apropos of yesterday's entry.

  The Rommel film is totally chaotic. Nobody knows when I start for sure. [...] I shall fly down on Tuesday which will give me a chance to see Liza before the work starts. [...]

  Saturday 27th [...] I read after a month's procrastination the script called Hammersmith is Out which P. Ustinov had sent. It is very wild and formless but just the kind of thing that I would like to do at the moment. Particularly as it has a splendid part for E too, and a film for both of us is what we've been looking for for a long time. Ustinov is to direct so that should be alright. He should also play one of the smaller parts.171 The whole thing begins and ends in a lunatic asylum and my role is a deadly and totally insane killer called Hammersmith. The idea is not new. Who are mad? Those inside the bin or those outside? In this case both. We might be able to shoot it this fall. I have a fear that I may have left it all too late. We shall know within the next few days I suppose. It should be wildly funny and fun to do, especially with somebody as congenial as Ustinov and as brilliant, and might be a big commercial success to boot and spur.

  [...] French came to discuss business yesterday at our invitation and was dismissed by E in about three minutes flat. [...] Never mind about a year's time for Chrissake, she said – never taking her eyes off the TV screen where Astaire and Leslie Caron were giving us Daddy Long Legs – lay on Hammersmith Is Out and we'll play it by ear from there.172 [...] She is wholly delightful lately and is beginning to read again. She finished a book for the first time since she went into hospital that age ago. I feel splendid myself as a result. [...]

  It's difficult to know how far to go with the students at Oxford without becoming irresponsible and inciting the drop-outs again. I despise them and wish to concede them nothing but sweeping generalizations will include them. What thy hand findeth to do do it with thy might is really the burden of my message, for there is neither wisdom nor device nor knowledge in the grave whither thou goest.173 I wasted time, said Richard the Second, and now doth time waste me.174 We have left undone those things we ought to have done.175 Increasingly as I get older I regret the things that I should have done, regret the black spaces which I could have filled with some knowledge of no use to anybody except me and though I try to make up for lost time my mind is not what it was and its sponge-like ability to soak up new learning and retain it is sadly impaired by dissipation and age. And trying to concentrate is becoming more and more of a task. The imagination is a wilful creature and keeping it under control is an arduous task. [...]

  Sunday 28th Two more days before I go to Mexico. Tales I hear of the place – San Filipe – are not too encouraging.176 Mean temp 113. Only two restaurants. Population 800. Shark-infested waters. Hurricane season. Only 33 beds in the whole town for visitors, most people living in caravan trailers and tents. No telephone. Only expert pilots can land there. Otherwise OK.

  [...] Saw or started to see film last night called M.A.S.H. Hated it and left after two reels. We had it shown here in the house [...]. The children for the most part enjoyed it – Kate and her friends from next door, two girls and a boy all about 12 to 15 years old. Maria hated it and had nightmares. There was a lot of blood on the screen since the whole thing took place in a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital in Korea and they showed operations and amputations and ligatures and spouts of blood and stitches. I was bored s
o left. Went to bed and read a ‘Travis Magee’ thriller by a very competent American writer called John D. Macdonald.177 He is one of those prolific writers like Simenon and Erle Stanley Gardner and so on who seem to turn out a book a month.178 Macdonald is a cut above most however and tries to be unsentimentally tough about the decaying morality and mass-production-mania and advertising nightmare of the American way of life. Ends up always with a lump in his throat about the occasional innate nobility of man. Magee is a thoroughly detestable man in his pretended cynicism and muscular pretension and despises with a tired dismissal anybody who is not ‘machismo’ and ‘mucho hombre’ and an inexhaustible stud. There are fairly sick-making lines like ‘he patted her girl-rump’ and ‘he responded to the rampant woman in her’. Another occasion for bile is that this Magee – who is enormous 6ft 5 and as fast as a cat – is called ‘Trav’ by his friends. However, I've learned to skip the sermons when they come up and the yarns and the inconsequential but authentic seeming descriptive backgrounds are very readable. I envy anyone's capacity for such sustained and for the most part sound writing. If he wrote one book a year instead of ten he could be considerable. I don't think I could write a thriller. I don't think I want to even if I could. Such books are meant to be read, not written. Read fast and quickly forgotten and therefore readable again in a couple of years.

  Oh to be in Europe, now that I have to go to work. I want to go everywhere at once. I want simultaneously to be watching the road to Santa Marguerita from Porto Fino through Zeiss binoculars while sunning on the poop deck of the Kalizma. I want to be sitting in front of a log fire in Gstaad in the library in the evening with a rich book in my lap and E in the chair beside me. Baked ham and au gratin potatoes in Gruyere in that hotel there. Trout at the top of Les Diablerets. Raclette in the Olden in Gstaad. More trout in Weissenbach in the restaurant by the river and the canopied wooden bridge. Saddle of lamb in La Réserve. Hors d'oeuvres in La Ferme above Beaulieu or in D'Chez Eux in Paris. Moules Marinieres in La Mediterranea opposite the Opera. Haddock filet a L'Anglaise at Fouquets. Omelette Arnold Bennett on the terrace of the Terrace Suite of the Dorchester on a fine day looking over the park on a Sunday with one powerful bloody Mary under my belt and that beauty always beside me and around. Raw fave and salami and white wine and a game of boule with E in the trattoria underneath the church on the hill outside Rome on the side road from De Laurentiis’ studios to the Raccordo Annulare where the choir chants at 7 in the evening.179 A car tour of the Michelin 3 star restaurants. Annecy and Beaumaniere and a couple of nights at The Hotel de la Poste at Avallon, can that be right?