The Richard Burton Diaries

by Richard Burton

  Later.

  Brook came upstairs in the house in Mostar this morning and gave me a twitch of the head indicating that he had something to tell me he didn't want E to hear. His face was ashen and he trembled. My heart stopped. What had happened? He led me into an office facing our suite where E was reading a book, closed the door and said that Mick Smith had just called from England to say that Liza had been thrown by her horse and was in hospital with a fractured skull and concussion but that she was alright and was conscious and was in no danger they thought but was very tearful and sorry for herself and asking for E. I was stupendously shocked. Despite Brook's playing down of the accident all I could see was his white face and all I could hear were the words ‘fractured skull’. My first reaction was to literally tear my hair, a phenomenon which I'd heard of and read of but never seen and here was I putting the words into living practice. All I said was ‘that horse, that fucking horse, why did I buy it for her?’ I stopped behaving like Medea after a few seconds and asked Brook to tell me everything again.214 Then my mind started functioning reasonably again. I asked Brook to phone Raymond and order the jet from Geneva and if unavailable at such short notice to get E on the plane from Dub to Rome at 2.20 and from Rome to London at 4. Failing that, try Jugoslavian charter. Failing that try Jane Swanson and Olympia jets in Rome and failing everything to try as a last resort to get Tito's Mr Protocol and an army jet or anything. In the meantime while waiting for the call I went in to tell Elizabeth, I prefaced everything by saying that there was no danger though, at that time, I was convinced that there was. E stared at me as if I was a stranger, her face went red then snow white. She moaned and cried but never became hysterical and never screamed or any of the things that lesser women do. We clung to each other and slowly, like a sleep-walker she began dressing and putting on her make-up. I made her a Jack Daniels and wrote Liza a letter for E to take with her and finally Raymond [Vignale] came on the blower. This was about 45 minutes after the news had come. Raymond was on the Kalizma and unreachable by phone. In the meantime E was ready to go and packed. We cleaved to each other again for a long time and then she was gone, her sweet eyes puffed with tears hidden by dark glasses. In that long hour before she left we hardly spoke at all. E wondered if she'd been thrown while crossing that dreaded road outside the school. I said I didn't think so. And it wasn't until after E had gone and I sat alone in my room did I begin to work out the timetable of the disaster saying to myself, quite logically: it happened yesterday obviously. Liz had tried to call us all morning and finally had left from the hospital leaving Mick to attempt the call which he succeeded in doing.215 If therefore Liza was seriously injured and in a coma and all that they would somehow or other have got through last night. Liz and Mick had seen her conscious and though weepy and though the skull was fractured and though she had concussion she was unquestionably alright. On the way up in the car I reasoned all this out loud with Brook. We agreed that she was ok but all the time thinking – were they telling the truth. How can someone with a fractured skull be alright? [...] And then, oh happy day, I called E in Kupari. She had a jet for 6.15. She had talked to Liza! And Liza sounded as chipper as a chipmunk and couldn't think what all the fuss was about! She obviously doesn't remember how she felt when she was concussed. So now I'm back to reading again. For this relief muchas grazias.

  Friday 9th, Sarajevo216 [...] I have been reading all day a book which I started weeks ago and put down and remembering that I am Trotsky on Monday thought to take up again. It is or they are The Memoirs of a Revolutionary by Victor Serge.217 A Russian by blood and temperament and a Belgian by birth and upbringing his is a depressing picture of man's inhumanity to man and nobody in my eyes, or capitalist, monarchist, Fascist or Communist comes out of it with any virtue. There are many tales of unfathomable courage for false or mistaken ideals but all it hammers home is pungent sentence after barbed comment.

  After scathing sarcasm is the hopelessness of this frightful world – a world which has been so good to me personally and demanded so little in exchange that I hardly recognize the filthy reality of the evidence of my own mind and reading. In the book I came across the following passage: ‘Sergei Yesenin, our matchless poet, has committed suicide ... said good-night to his friends. "I want to be alone. ..." In the morning he awoke depressed, and felt the urge to write something. No pencil or fountain pen was at hand, and there was no ink in the hotel inkwell: only a razor blade, with which he slashed his wrist. And so, with a rusty pen dipped in his own blood, Yesenin wrote his last lines:

  Au revoir, friend, au revoir ...

  ... There is nothing new about dying in this life

  But there is surely nothing new about living either.’

  Then Mr Yesenin hanged himself.218 What a banal line to write with your own blood and how juvenile how undergraduate and in his own blood yet! I find it unspeakably vile to die with such lack of taste or genuine and proper despair. Yesenin was supposed to be a great lyric poet which judgement I shall never be able to test as I will never be able to read in the original. He was married 8 times so if he wasn't perhaps the greatest poet of all time, he must surely have been the most married. Since he died when he was only 30 years old perhaps all those marriages were behind the last line. Mr Serge says that it was the failure of the Glorious Revolution which drove him to suicide. Silly fool.219 I imagine that by the time I finish with Trot and have come back here to finish with Tit I shall have had all this communist childishness up to my eyebrows. I am so far steeped in in Communistic lives and literature that all the capitalism in the rough rude West will be necessary to wash it out.

  E is my only ism and a very nice purpose in life. Elizabethism. Do you have any firmly held belief or creed or politic Mr Burton? Yes, I believe in Elizabethism. Elizabeth the Great of course. Of course. End of interview. Next day's Headlines: BURTON CONFESSES TO BEING AN ELIZABETHIST.

  E is in London and tomorrow, assuming I finish early enough and a plane can be found I shall be with her at the Savoy or the Dorchester. [...]

  Saturday 10th220 [...] Last day on the film and it's such a beautiful day that I think I will fly to London this afternoon, assuming that I finish in time and fly to Rome tomorrow morning. Talking of eccentricity, that is fairly good and since I am sick of reading about poverty and its accompanying miseries I shall behave like a mindless bloated plutocrat and scream from Sarajevo to Rome to London to Rome in 24 hours. Think of the money I'd save if I went by commercial jet to Rome only. How much would I save I wonder? About $400 I guess and what would I do with it? Give it to Marian. But I've already given her vast sums and she has a dead husband.221 Add it to her Christmas Box. [...]

  I talked to E last night. She sounded as disgruntled as a miner on a Monday morning and was obviously annoyed that I wasn't going to London which I was not last night, but have thought this morning that I really ought to see my daughter and want to see them both, I mean mother and daughter, and I will tell The Trot Company and M. Losey that I will do the make-up tests on Sunday evening. Good thinking Richard. Why can't a make-up test be done just as well in the evening as in the afternoon?

  I tried to read a detective story last night in bed – one of my favourite men called Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte of the Australian Police. These books by a man called Upfield, an Englishman, are more than ordinarily interesting whodunits as there is a lot of cumulative bits and pieces about the Australian Aborigines. As far as I know he, Upfield, is the only popular writer who writes about them all the time. Therefore, for a lazy mind like mine he educates painlessly and entertainingly. But I think I have read so much about modern politics in the last three months that I find it difficult to switch to anything else. I felt awful last night and E didn't make me feel any better. Instead of being delighted about Liza being OK and being happy after having seen her she spent most of the time complaining about the hotel, about its distance to the hospital (45 minutes she said and since she is at Sunning and if it is the place I remember near Reading
there must be some bad navigation on the chauffeur's part for it to be that long) that there was no telephone in her room but only in the bar and that the whole thing was unpleasant.222 Also if people weren't so melodramatic E could have gone to see Liza at her leisure and certainly we would have both been spared half a day's spiritual agony because it turns out that, thank God the baby had not ‘fractured her skull’ but had taken a very heavy bump on the noggin and was correspondingly concussed. The words ‘fractured skull’ are so horrendous. One thinks of brain damage and smashed grey cells and all that while she has actually sustained an injury which, again thank God, is infinitely less dangerous than a broken arm or collar-bone etc. I know perfectly well and was therefore perfectly happy to know, that Liza was an island of content as long as her mother was there and since ‘they’ wanted me in Rome tomorrow afternoon and since last night I felt bone weary I thought there was no point in my going to London. But the weather is so lovely and I really want to see Elizabeth more than Liza I am ashamed to confess and I felt so much better this morning that I will flip over to London after all. It will be odd to start a film without E being there to give me moral support. I don't think it has happened in ten years. Ah! Yes it has. The immortal Raid on Rommel was started alone and also, double oddity, sober. [...]

  [...] Ron is very nervous about the make-up and is beginning to make me so. He says, and I suppose, quite rightly, that the make-up is half the performance and that this is one film where I really should have been there a week or a few days before starting. It might take him, he says, 3 days to get the make-up exactly correct. [...] Also, he says morosely, that ‘Joe doesn't like me you know, Rich’. He still believes, says Ron, ‘that I poured that bottle of champagne over his head when we were all stoned in Cappo Cacia when it was Mcdonald all the time.‘223 ‘Don't be silly Ron’. Ron may be right at that because I remember Joe coming to see me in some film or other, Anne perhaps, and saying ‘Still keep your friends around you, I see.’ Only Ron, who was making me up, was there at the time. It's true of course that Joe has no humour at all and is, apart from his work, hard going as a conversationalist. Time to go to work.

  Later. London.

  Flew today from Sarajevo directly to London – we were going to drop Ron at Rome but the pilot said that if we did we would almost certainly end up in Paris Amsterdam or Brussels or somewhere as there was a fog warning for London for planes landing after dark. So despite Ron's anxiety to get to Rome because of somebody's – probably Joe's panic – I insisted he came to London with us and fly back with me in the morning. I can't understand this mad urgency for a make-up test. Ron is the best there is and has made old man make-ups on me before. I am very nervous about this film. John H[eyman]. suggests that Joe is drinking heavily. I wonder if Joe, in his middle sixties, has allowed the success of Go-Between to go to his old head.224 ‘Twould be funny. [...]

  Sunday 10th, London Airport This morning, to my dismay, I awoke to find it was 10 to 8 and not my usual 6 or 6.30. Dismay because I had promised Gwen that I would be up in NW3 to see her and Ivor at 8.30. The shower in the Dorchester ran weak and cold (the hotel is really falling apart) and so I abandoned all thought of a shower and [...] tore off after a quick shave and a ‘swill’ and was up in 2, Squire's Mount a few mins after 8.30. Gwen looked much better than she did a couple of months ago and so, astonishingly did Ivor though for many weeks he has not been able to keep his food down and has an almost permanent high temperature. Any normal man would have been dead a long time but Ivor's stoical will to live is, and the doctors agree, phenomenal. His mind is still as lucid as ever. I started this page on the runways and now am half way to Rome [...]

  Landed without incident at Ciampino, [...] I went immediately to the set which is about 10 minutes from the Studio and there was Rome as lovely mad as ever [...]. All seems well with the film and Joe was gentle and nervous and showed no signs of booze. Ron very seriously and very nervously did the make-up and though I think it looks as if I am a close relative of Ho Chi Minh everybody else was pleased as punch so assuming it pleases them as well on the screen as it did in the flesh that's one problem out of the way.225 They will be able, miracles, to see the results tomorrow morning at 7 o'clock. I am called to rehearse at 9 without make-up. I am somewhat taken aback as it's so long since I've done a film in which I am required to rehearse. Got home about 6 and [...] I called E who sounded very chipper and was about to settle down and watch herself play The Cat on the Hot Tin Roof on TV in England.226 I shall call her in 1/2 an hour or so to find out how she likes it and how she likes her pre-Burton self.

  On the plane today Ron gave forth with yet another Jeremiad regarding the femme fatale Romy Schneider. This was, of course, after a couple of heavy libations which were by no means his first of the day I suspect. [...] Just talked to E who was watching Laugh-In and told her my love and devotion and she, hers.227 And now to read my favourite fairy-stories – the sports pages of the Sunday Times.

  Monday 11th, Rome [...] Still don't know whether to play with an accent or not. What with the Frenchman and the German with accents and my wife – who is played by an actress who was somewhat distinguished in my early days – will play with an accent too. She is Valentina Cortese.228 Much older than I, I would guess. Middle 50s or so betcha. So with all around me making mit the accent will I stick out like a sore thumb. I'll try both, that's what I shall do and see how it feels. That's three nights in a row without a proper sleep and it must be because E is not here. I go off like a log when she is. Extraordinary hold she has over me.

  [...] Am about to have my second cuppa and will then read myself to work. I hate my work.

  Saturday 16th Awoke at 5.30. Thought of getting up but decided to wait 1/2 an hour or so thereby falling asleep and not waking ‘til 8.30. I was destined to meet a lady called Rosemary Bain – I mean Romany Bain – at 9 so called Bob Wilson on to put her off until 9.30. I showered, shaved and shampooed and had a cuppa before she arrived. She is not the most stimulating lady in the world but then her job is not exactly conducive to brilliance. She writes for Woman's Own and other such diabolically tedious mags though this interview was for Cosmopolitan, an American mag which is starting an English version. I answered the unanswerable questions like ‘In what ways would you say you've changed since your first meeting and falling in love with Elizabeth 10 years ago in this very city?’ with my usual non-committal circuitous tergiversation. She then interviewed E and she did more or less the same. Infinitely humdrum and heavy with humbug.229 [...]

  Monday 18th, Grand Hotel [...] Finished yet another volume of Powell's Music of Time and it's the first one that has made me laugh out loud. All that ‘richly comic’ stuff that I read in the extracts from notices is simply not there. I would say that he is quietly and perhaps cumulatively amusing. I still have difficulty in believing his coincidences.

  Back to Trotsky this morning and that horrible scratchy beard with the gum offensively smelly and, even worse, the moustache. A real beard and moustache is bad enough – or in truth better than the false one during the day – but at least one can take the mock one off at the end of the day with that equally horrible acetone, the smell of which would make a drinking me throw up.

  A lovely day so I hope we'll be getting on with the film at a smart pace. I have to go back to Jugo after this and the sooner the better and the longer the holiday. Jugoslavia seems a long way off and already a long time ago. I'm looking forward to seeing it in the winter. Must wear long-johns or combs as the British call them. Since all these years with Elizabeth I am never quite certain whether a phrase, sometimes, is American or English. That's probably what's been happening to Wodehouse – about whom there is a great deal of fuss in the papers on his 90th birthday – for I find in his umpty-ninth ‘Jeeves and Bertie’ book that someone was ‘as imperious as a traffic cop.’

  Home now and it's evening. Have had a funny day. Called for 9.30 didn't work until 1.30 and not again until 5.30. Wrote letters to Kate and Val and started o
n Powell's Military Philosophers.230 I don't yet have the last volume and I'm missing two of the others though I think I read one of them some time ago. [...]