The Richard Burton Diaries

by Richard Burton

  Saturday 18th Last day of the working week and it should be an early day, perhaps very early if Hathaway gives the new German actor who plays Rommel half a chance to speak his speeches trippingly off the tongue.220 I wonder if I should intercede on the German's behalf this morning before Hank destroys him before my eyes. I have no sympathy for any Germans but simply don't want to be bored by endless takes and mistakes from the actor – a Hun by the name of Wolfgang Preiss – pronounced Price.221 I can tell that he's a good actor I think just by instinct. Hathaway said yesterday: ‘Fuckin’ Germans either want to be the bosses or kiss yer ass.’ Churchill said the same thing about the odd humble-arrogance of the German people but in somewhat more classical terms: ‘Germans are either at your throat or at your feet.‘222 Anyway, Hank's hatred of the Germans is not minced. He but hates them. I find them highly comical but as I would find the more amiable lunatics in an asylum comical, a laughter containing not a little pity and not a little fear that I may chortle myself to death. Of all the nations I have come to know reasonably well over the years the Germans are the nation who seem most the same, the most like each other, the most conformist. It is easy to see how they can become easily led. I cannot, simply cannot, like them though I have tried ever since Maria came into the family. Even when they are at their fat chuckling meerschaum-smoking jolly best I see the jew-baiting death's head under the jiggling flesh and the goose-step and the gas-chambers.223

  Hathaway told me yesterday that many years ago he had an idea for a film – ‘Christ as the unknown soldier’. He needed a writer to write it. He saw William Faulkner who thought it was a ‘hell of an idea’. Faulkner went away and months later he called Hank and said I will write it as a book first, because I don't know how to write scripts and then we'll do it as a film. ‘Great,’ said Hank. 15 years later the book came out dedicated to Hathaway called Fable.224 Hank asked me if I'd read it and I said yes. He had read it, he said, but couldn't get through it because ‘it didn't have one, one single one of my goddamn ideas in it’. I told him I couldn't remember the book at all but remember only that it was very hard going. [...]

  Sunday 19th Yesterday was a very early day indeed. We had four pages in the can, as they say, by 11 o'clock and I was back, showered and dressed by 12.30. I went to the airport 3 times in an hour before I met the right plane which disgorged Elizabeth. She looked fine but seemed from her talk to be a little squiffy but I am now hyper-sensitive about drink. Anyway, one should have a drink before a tedious trip. Among other things she brought a tabloid newspaper which has a snap of us on the front page with a headline saying Elizabeth Taylor flies to save Burton's life. There was a magazine called Look containing letters about the ‘Cojah’ coat I am supposed to have bought E. I amused myself for a couple of hours writing a reply but it has become very long and could be developed into an article about money.225 I'll keep on with it just for amusement. Might even place it somewhere. Perhaps even in Look magazine. Or I could incorporate it into the lectures in Oxford. Might amuse the lads. That's three ‘amuses’ in 5 lines. [...]

  Monday 20th [...] E is going back to LA tomorrow for a complete job on her teeth, taking children and animals with her so I'll be alone again. It's hopefully only for a week so I'll be with them all shortly. In the meantime I have a hot few days ahead of me. Explosions and burning tanks and being inside a tank and flame-throwers again and running and shouting one-liners. ‘Get the lead out, Garth’, ‘Over there Mackenzie’ and similar deathless cries. Today however we simply have a talk scene with Rommel. Talking of Rommel and the actor Wolfgang Price [sic] – he is good as I suspected and to my delight Hathaway left him alone which was a boon and we didn't do more than three or four takes on any one scene, and apart from the weather that is the last obstacle left to the rapid completion of this great work. We are having lots of telegrams again about how good I and the film are which is faintly ominous as the same thing happened with Staircase which is the biggest failure with Look Back in Anger and Faustus that I've had.

  I am still deep in the arms of Krupp. It's a long haul of a book and an astounding record of the collapse of all moral virtues among the Germans under Hitler with the Krupps showing all the signs even before the twenties and pre-Hitler thirties. It seems incredible that Adolf only came to power in ‘33 and was ready to go in ‘38 and actually went in ‘39. He was furious that Chamberlain appeased him at Munich. He didn't want to be appeased. He wanted war right then and there. What a clown. But it is genuinely astonishing that he could so revolutionize a whole country in so short a time. We and the Yanks can do it too. But only under the stimulus of war itself. If only we could harness and direct such vast forces in peacetime. We might achieve stupendous things, unbelievable changes for the good in a mere decade. Democracy, it seems, will not be hurried except in the agony of war when of course it ceases to be a democracy. It therefore follows that the swift implementation of the Civil Rights Bill in the States for example could only be brought about quickly by an immediate civil war, with Indians, Chicanos and Negroes on one side and the bewildered Wasps on the other. Fear is the key that will open the door. If such a thing happens I hope to be fishing in a remote Swiss lake. With all my family around me. No participation without representation is my cry. [...]

  Tuesday 21st [...] Liza's report arrived and it is nice and affectionate but she is below average in practically everything due invariably to ‘lack of concentration’ and ‘daydreaming’. She is a year younger than her classmates on the average so her position in the class, which is well in the lower half is partially understandable. However she is not the scholar type and as long as she keeps her end up vaguely, we don't really mind. Now that they are all coming into their teens or have arrived there I find all the children a pain in the neck and though there's no living without them, there's no living with them either. My idea of children is going to visit the grandchildren, when we have them, for Sunday lunch and a walk in the park and tea at 5 and home by six saying how charming they are and how nice they are to spoil while someone else does all the work of remonstration and correction and admonition. I haven't met a child yet that didn't bore the brains out of me in an hour – most can do it in 15 minutes. I would have made the worst teacher in the history of pedagoguery if there is such a word. The child that I was, I loathe. I prefer the man that I am, though not over-much. Of course we bore them too. Kate during her annual visits can't wait to get away from us and into the arms of her friends. Ditto Liza and Maria. Ditto the boys, though not so much as the girls. Christopher is the only one whose company I enjoy like that of an adult, largely because he's so very quick and so honest. All the rest are evasive and downright dumb about most things. [...]

  Wednesday 22nd [...] Read a thriller by another MacDonald, Ross.226 He is a good writer and very grey and despairing and weary. His detective Lew Archer is over forty and stolidly persistent and of course unostentatiously intelligent. He has no reason at all to be a detective – he could quite clearly succeed at anything. And no reason why he should be the hero of ‘formula’ detective stories, he could be the commentator on the mores morals and miracles of modern life in any other writing form. But this one is easier and more saleable I suppose.

  I worked all the morning inside the mock-up of a tank with Johns Orchard and Colicos and Brook. It was very cramped and very hot and we were in there for a long time. It was less tedious than I anticipated however because I had imagined something much worse. I finished about 2 and was able to wave E and the children off from the airport. I felt very sad as the plane slowly rose, the undercarriage slowly pulling itself up into the belly when the small plane – a 4 seater twin engined Cessna – was barely off the ground. [...]

  Everybody is convinced that our comical German – one Karl Otto Alberty – is either an amiable nut, solidly stupid or on drugs. Yesterday it seems he had to get hurriedly into a car and drive or be driven off at great speed in pursuit of me and my men. He hurried to the car alright but then did a kind of Charlie Chaplin hig
h kick and gave a wild cry as he leapt into the car. Hathaway went ‘spare’ and bounced up and down in uncontrollable anguish. Everybody was so astounded that it wasn't until later that everybody laughed and were still laughing at ten o'clock at night.

  ‘Do you know,’ said Hathaway to me yesterday, ‘what that stupid Kraut son-of-a-bitch did the other day?’ ‘What?’ ‘He drives up to the check-point, right?, and says did a British Medical Unit come through here? Then he's supposed to say Get me to Field Marshal Rommel. Right? No he says Follow the bloody British, he says. I went nuts. I said what the fuck d'yer think you're doing you Kraut bastard. He says, that's what I would do. I would chase the British. But you have a scene with Rommel, I says, it's in the script, d'yer want to miss your scene with Rommel? I says. I sweated right through my shirt. The guy's gor [sic] to be nuts.

  Karl Otto dresses up every Saturday night in tight black ‘charro’ trousers, an ornamental black shirt of many silver decorations and a black sombrero low on the forehead.227 It is an unbelievable sight as he is a very white man with a huge belly and a face like two melons one on top of the other joining around the eyes. No photograph can do justice to the idiocy of his appearance, and yet, if one didn't know his talent for unconscious buffoonery one might find his physical presence imposing, even distinguished. He becomes very wild when dancing in the bar and after ‘dancing’ with elephantine grossness and awkwardness one night he leaned ponderously over a table and said to the boys – Brook Ron and others – ‘I wish people would learn to use their bodies with beauty’ indicating the other dancers with scorn.

  When he came into the restaurant last Saturday night where E and I were dining alone sitting by the window she said in genuine wonder: ‘What is that?’ ‘That,’ I said, ‘is our tame German. That is our Karl Otto,’ I added urgently, ‘Do not look in his direction or we will have him for the night and he is unspeakably boring.’ ‘Hullo,’ she said immediately, ‘what a splendid costume you have on.’ ‘Sank Zew,’ he said, ‘I am always wearing dis on every Saturday night in honour of mein host country.’ ‘How thoughtful,’ said milady. From there on neither she nor I understood a word he said. [...]

  Thursday 23rd [...] Hathaway told me that we had six days left as from yesterday. The last few days always seem the longest in any film or play and yet time flies all the same. I am still reading Manchester's long tome about the Krupps which I had neglected for several days. Virtually every paragraph contains an enormity. I wonder what I would have behaved like had I been a working-class German at that nightmare time. I don't think I could kill a child or a broken old man or an emaciated young one as they did, as one might swat a fly so to speak. But it was so much an ordinary day for so many Germans that I am riddled with possible guilt. No I couldn't do it and that's flat. More and more it seems ludicrous that we did not train and use a special force to kill Hitler himself sometime in the early forties. We could have saved two years of war with a little luck and millions of people would have been saved. I wonder if any of our special services ever seriously thought about it. It seems, in retrospect, an obvious thing to do. Difficult I know but with the disaffection of certain highly placed Germans, which Alan Dulles knew about in Switzerland early in the war, by no means impossible.228 I suppose the obvious never occurs to the great minds that saw us through disaster after disaster.

  Friday 24th [...] Yesterday was another very hot day for us actors particularly wearing our jackboots and high-neck uniforms and tight gun-belts and with the reflectors and the mini-arcs always on. Hotter ‘n Hell as I say in the script and which might become the title of the film according to Hathaway. [...]

  Saturday 25th This should be my last weekend here and a week tomorrow we should be on the Super-Chief steaming across the continent to New York and on to the QE2 on the 6th August.229 Keen looking forward. What shall I take to read I muse deliciously. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire which I have yet to read in its entirety.230 Re-read Dickens favourites – Bleak House, Dombey and Son Great Expectations, Tale of Two Cities. Something like those and a mass of paperbacks for night reading in the swaying roaring train with the bedlight on. Breakfast with the local paper and the Pump Room in Chicago for lunch.

  Alex Lucas, producer of Hammersmith is Out arrived unannounced yesterday morning as I was sitting on the beach. [...] He had brought two copies of the script with him one of which we gave to Frank Beeston to read with a view to his giving us a rough costing.231 We want to shoot it without benefit of a studio and entirely on location if possible. I shall await Frank's reactions with interest. We shall take the same cameraman as we use on this probably, but I would like to see the work on this first before a definite commitment. [...]

  Sunday 26th I was bloody irritated by work yesterday and this was surprising as this is the first film I've ever been in which didn't frustrate and bore me with the inevitable delays and hangings-about. My back muscles were aching a lot and it would be a day when I had to lie down with my head up and my spine hooped against the earth, the worst and most uncomfortable position for a pulled back muscle. [...] There were two journalists for interviews. One was called Leblanc and the other's name I don't recall. They were both bottom-of-the-barrel types, the nameless one being unbelievably square. He asked me – all his questions had been neatly written about beforehand – ‘Do you think Mr Burton that there is a little of Camelot in every man?’ ‘Have you read a book called the Peter Principle the contention being that having achieved a certain plateau of incompetence you must then aspire to a higher plateau?‘232 No, I hadn't read the book but thought that in my profession one was almost always awarded a knighthood when the plateau had been reached, when ‘they’ were perfectly sure that you were not going to surprise them any more. What is the ‘Peter Principle’ I wonder? I suppose it's somewhere in the same school as Parkinson's Law.233 I'll find it and read it up.

  Only 3 or 4 more days now to the lovin arms of Sheba. Good idea to be away from her a little now and agin. Appreciate her more. Very strange to have no one to talk to and gossip with. Rather be home nevertheless Home being where she is. [...]

  Apart from pulling that damned muscle I am pretty limber – largely from climbing in and out of tanks and lorries and running across the sand and diving into various holes when explosions are supposed to be going off. Hathaway said to me yesterday what a revelation I was to work with. He had heard, he said, that I was a consummate professional but that I was super-pro and super-on-time etc. I said how much I admired his thoroughness too and that we should try something really ambitious together one of these days. There was nothing he'd like more, he said. So there. How to make friends. [...]

  Monday 27th Went out and sunbathed in the morning until too many people came on to the beach and then withdrew to the rooms at about one o'clock when Brook fried up some spam and sausage and scrambled some eggs. Went on to the bed to read but fell asleep and awoke to find Elizabeth standing in the doorway. It was very shocking and I was numbed with surprise. I am not very good at being surprised. I simply become very casual as if I had expected what the surprise was all the time. E was like Nellie Nemesis. Everything she had to tell me was instinct with near tragedy. Her teeth naturally had to be the ultimate in difficulty and she had an allergy to something that nobody had ever had an allergy to before which took the form of a five minute ‘tacky-cardy’ attack which gave her acute St Vitus dance and frightened the shit out of her for the rest of the time. [...]

  Then it turns out that E went out nightclubbing with Rex Kennamer and they were, on their way home to the hotel, chased and bothered by the attentions of some man in a Volkswagen who kept swerving the car across the road to try and stop them. [...]

  Then E told me to my astonishment that she had gone to have dinner at Joyce Haber's house. Now Joyce Haber is the descendant of Hedda Hopper and just as stupid and virulent and snide.234 I expressed surprise and asked what the devil she was doing at a gossip-columnist's house and she said she just tagged along with swinging Rex Ken
namer to see a film. I asked since when she went to the homes of such people and she became very antagonistic and defensive and at one point started shouting and bawling about how lonely she was and that the dental work had shaken her up and she couldn't stand being alone in the bungalow etc. I gave up. [...]

  Tuesday 28th [...] I only worked half the day yesterday with HH [Henry Hathaway] dismissing me at about 2 o'clock. In the meantime I had run and shouted and operated the flame thrower – once falling flat on my back while doing so and generally speaking being very hot. E came out about 11 and we lunched together and E drove me home with great élan in the Cadillac. [...] We are both looking forward to going home to Europe and the Kalizma and the journey on the Chief and the QE2 is also looked forward to as a great treat. I hope the Chief is as good as it used to be. New York is likely to be hard work with Aaron around but perhaps I can do some of that work on the train which might give us some freedom in the big city before getting on to the blissful isolation of the QE.