The Richard Burton Diaries

by Richard Burton

  Power does corrupt. I doubt whether Tito sees the ordinary Joe Soap from whom he came except when the latter waves a flag and carries a banner. At least he doesn't keep his people waiting. Last night we went to see a film in the Roman Theatre at Pula. The streets were lined with sailors rigidly at attention behind them being masses of people who applauded the whole route. E was the star of the evening – much more so, or at least equal to Tito. When we entered the coliseum – 6000 people capacity – they all stood up and gave an ovation. E deeply thrilled. Me cynical as ever. The film was fun. The inevitable tray of drinks was presented at the same intervals throughout the film. We had earphones with an English translation. [...]

  Tuesday 3rd Have just come back from the minute island of ‘La Madonna’ which is just off the front of our villa which I discover is called ‘Jadaranda’ I think. We see the President and Madame for the last time this trip at noon. It is now 11.30. We had a swim and breakfast on Madonna. I eat nothing and have, in fact, eaten nothing since lunch yesterday except one plum and a vitamin pill. Rarely have I stuffed myself as much as I did at lunch yesterday on the President's island – not Brioni, the other little retreat. Madame Broz likes to play practical jokes, so I understand but is restrained by the Marshal.

  Had a 3 hour discussion with Tito about Sutjeska, Mihailovi , etniks, British, Churchill, Allies, Stalin and Uncle T. Cob. which I will type up later when I get back to the Kaliz this afternoon.55 [...] Am still worried by the atmosphere of dread which surrounds Tito. Cannot understand it. Neither can the rest of us.

  Thursday 5th, Villefranche Have been back since Tuesday. [Monte] Carlo a nuisance as usual so nipped over here for a slice of quiet. Michael Caine on board from his rented yacht – a veritable tub that bobs like a cork.56 He has a nice girl with him called Suzy Kendall who is married and presumably separated from her husband who is a comedian called Dudley Moore.57 Michael speaks in a shout which becomes a bit hard in a small room. He is very funny and very cockney most of his ‘wit’ being a regular and repeated pattern of catch-phrases. ‘Black as your hat,’ ‘A turkish religion with a tip-up seat’ etc. All repeated at various times during the day. Spends his time going to discotheques and parties of which, down here, there are hundreds. Many good reports of XYZ from all kinds of sources so E might have a big one again. [...]

  Wednesday 11th, Kalizma We left Monte Carlo two or three days ago and went to Portofino which is as enchanting as ever and where of course we inevitably met Rex Harrison and his future wife Elizabeth Rees-Williams. She was married to an actor – very good I believe, though I have never met him or seen him – called Richard Harris. Professional Irish type I gather, getting drunk and fighting when sufficiently so. Rex came on the K at cocktail time and was already paralysed with booze. So was the Rees-Williams. Acutely painful hour or so with Rex being endlessly repetitive and eventually tottering on the brink of outright rudeness. We all agreed after they had left that this couple were among the most unattractive we'd come across in a long time and the thought of their getting married before the end of the month a monstrous joke. She is a kind of brazen blonde type with a veneer of finishing school. I feel very protective about Rex as I fear this woman is not just a harum-scarum shouter and bawler like Rache but a devious minx on the make. She looked ugly with dissipation and so did Rex. His casual elegance was noticeably lacking and he has put on a lot of weight – tremendous pot and jowls. E and I sat up in bed after they had gone and after dinner and had a smug hour telling each other how lucky we are in that we have each other and that we like each other. And so on. And by god we are lucky in virtually every way. E kept on saying: How lucky we are to love each other. Too right.

  We were hoping to get away from M.C. days before we did because there is no peace there and we were inundated with visitors. Niven, Van Cleef and Arpels from whom I bought a ‘Leo’ necklace with a lion pendant for E as a ‘granny present’. It is very pretty and cost $27,000. She loves it. ‘Leo’ is the child's Zodiac sign. M. Caine and Suzy Kendall. Messages from Grace and Rainier asking us to come to the Red Cross Ball held outside the Opera. Tried like mad to get out of it but couldn't very well and anyway it turned out to be an entertaining evening. I had Grace one side of me and a young baroness the other who is Paul Gallico's daughter – or rather step-daughter – who was very sweet and thrilled and is going to be an actress.58 She calls herself, for the stage, Ludmilla Kova I think.59 Shouldn't think she'll get anywhere. Gallico, who is 74 and looks 55, impressed E very much but her favourite Rainier was as much fun as ever she tells me. He is an extraordinarily nice man and very bright which for some reason always surprises me in royalty.

  We are half way between Portofino and Porto Santo Stefano where I shall see Losey as I've decided to do Trotsky. Absolution, for which I had high hopes has fallen through financially and I was forced to give it up and do Trotsky in between ‘Tito’ shooting. Got rid of Hugh French in as nice a way as possible and asked John Heyman to revert to his old job of agent for a while. He is in Belgrade at this moment chatting the Slav money boys up.

  Thursday 12th En route to Porto Santo Stefano where we should have some or will have some word from Heyman. If all goes well I shall be playing Tito on Monday though I'm so lazy and enjoying the bateau so much that wouldn't be averse to a few days or even a couple of weeks postponement. Wouldn't actually be suicidal if the whole thing were scrapped until next Spring, say, or scrapped altogether for that matter.

  [...] Children and E watched a film of mine called Prince of Players which I made about seventeen years ago.60 [...] I remember the high hopes I had of that film and my disappointment at its indifferent reception. The original script by Moss Hart was very good when I agreed to do it but a year later when I actually did it had been murdered by Zanuck and his hacks.61 Some of it was saveable however which accounts for what little success we had. It seems to me that I was outrageously pretty in those days and much prefer my present hard and ravaged countenance. [...] Like last year, I am enjoying not drinking though there have been one or two close calls. [...] It is easy when I am alone with E as she rarely gets drunk. About the only time I get testy with E is when she has had a couple of drinks and has taken a ‘pink’ pill (a pain-killer) or prematurely taken a sleeping pill which are mild enough but in conjunction with the booze makes her speech funny and gives her a kind of false euphoria and she becomes sentimental and a bit reminiscent of her mother. Since her mother is the bore of all epochs this can be a bit hard.

  We have had a tremendous amount of unsought for publicity in the last few weeks and publicity of the world-wide kind. The daggers incident.62 The grandchild, Tito – which was news-reeled all over the world I understand – and guests-of-honour at Grace and Rainier's Red Cross Ball. One Italian newspaper yesterday said that La Taylor continues to astonish the world and can say to all her rivals that she is still the greatest headline maker of them all. Rubbish but pleasant. It is phenomenal the continued attention we get. Literally there must be millions of words written about us and hundreds of thousands of photographs. Once the girls thought that they would save all the photos of E or me or both on the covers of magazines and plaster them all over the wall of the games room in Gstaad – but there were so many, even in a short time, that they abandoned the idea as they decided they, the covers, would cover the whole house. [...]

  Friday 13th, Porto Santo Stefano63 Confusing telegram and messages from John Heyman. [...] Cable from Heyman says something like Expect conclude satisfactory deal this weekend. Popovi says you (meaning me, RB) not interested in money and doing film because you are such a great fan of Tito's. You expected Dubrovnik Monday, and then four question marks. ???? [...] We are parked outside Stefano Harbour – there are two actually –and will go in with E and Raymond at 9 o'clock to phone [...] and find out what I can.

  The other reason for going in is to visit the café where we had our first and near-fatal drink one near-dawn morning on our way to the next bay for a clandestine weekend. I had driven
E from Rome in the small hours in a rented car – a small two-seater Fiat as I remember – in order to escape the paparazzi. The town was a grave at that hour and in the bar-cafe were only a couple of people and a boy and a dog and a waiter. All the world press were searching for us. We thought we had got clean away. One of the anonymous gentlemen in the bar was a newspaper man on a humdrum assignment to cover the arrival of Dutch royalty. And lo and behold there in front of his eyes were the ‘hottest’ and most scandalous couple in the world. We left the place after a coffee and cognac apiece or perhaps we had two and drove in smug blissfulness to the hotel who had set aside for us a half-finished and small villa which was half a mile from the hotel, looked stupendously over the sea and was completely isolated. We gambolled like children, scrambling down the rocks to the sea and enjoying ourselves as if it was the last holiday. We found out soon enough that every bush – and there were hundreds of them – contained a paparazzo. We were well and thoroughly trapped. The weekend turned immediately from an idyll into a nightmare. We drank to the point of stupefaction and idiocy. We couldn't go outside. We were not married. We were impregnated with guilt. We tried to read. We failed. We couldn't go out. We made a desperate kind of love. We played gin rummy. E kept on winning and oddly enough out of this silly game came the crisis. For some reason – who knows or remembers the conversation that led up to it? – E said that she was prepared to kill herself for me. Easy to say, I said, but no woman would kill herself for me etc. with oodlings of self-pity. Who knows what other kind of rubbish was said. Who remembers from so long ago with everything shrouded in a miasma of alcohol what was said. Out of it all came E standing over me with a bottle or box of sleeping pills in her hand saying that she could do it. Go ahead, I said, or words along those lines, whereupon she took a handful and swallowed them with gusto and no dramatics. I didn't believe that they were sleeping pills at first. For all I knew they could be Vitamin C or anything else. She then, I think, took herself off to bed in an adjoining room. From then I hardly remember any detail. Vague memories of trying to get her awake, of realizing that she wasn't joking, running around looking for that awful ‘contessa’ who, I discovered later was having an affair with our sometimes chauffeur Mario, searching also for the latter. Loading E into a car and a hair-raising drive to Rome and a hospital and hiding at home because officially E had a tummy complaint or some other excuse which the press told immediately to the Marines. Not being able to go to the hospital because of the snappers and not answering the telephone to all the disaster-lovers like Roddy McDowall and Manciewicz and almost everybody.64

  So now we have just come back from the very same café where E had a cafe latte and a cognac as she did that time ago, and I noticed that it was Friday the 13th. I mean today and decided that I didn't want any repetition of that awful Easter. By God, what if she'd died. Worse, what if she'd lived with an impaired brain? I'm perfectly sure that I am incapable of suicide so presumably I would still be alive. What would I be doing? Maybe I would have drowned myself in booze by this time. Anyway, it's all over though never forgotten. It certainly has cured any thoughts of suicide from this family. In that year also Sybil had a go at knocking herself off. I was furious with her but not furious oddly enough with E. I suppose I must have been thinking of Kate being motherless and didn't think similarly of Liza, Maria et al. being likewise because they were still little-seen-known or loved by me at the time. [...]

  Still Friday 13th, Approaching Anzio65 [...] Tito told me that he never ever raised his voice above ordinary conversational level during his whole life, except where distances were involved – shouting across a valley for instance – and that he had always found it infinitely more effective and on occasions much deadlier than a Hitlerian or Mussolinian storm.

  Kate and I discussed the day-to-day aspect of our lives and how strange it must be for people in ordinary jobs with a regular pay-packet to understand a life where, like today, we don't know whether we shall be in Jugoslavia tomorrow or Naples or both. Hopefully it will be Naples, or rather Ischia which is or was one of our favourite places.66 I'm told though that it is now over-run with German tourists.

  Almost in Anzio. Lovely dirty little port. And a working one to boot which I always love.

  Saturday 14th, Anzio So at last the Tito deal has been fixed. I start a week on Monday – i.e. the 23rd of August and I am to be paid $50,000 expenses and $250,000 cash and vast percentages, starting at 10% of the first dollar and working up to 50% of the world grosses. I should end up with several hundred thousand dollars with an average return. A big hit of course could bring in untold monies though we are perfectly content with what we have. Heyman had just flown from the States which means that in less than a week, a week which he considers normal, he has flown from London to Nice, Nice to Rome, Rome to Belgrade, Belgrade to NY and New York to Rome and to us.67 He flies back to Belgrade today and then from there to Messina (where we shall be) on Monday.68 He is a very fast moving young man. He said the other day that he wants to retire from this business at 45, he is about 35, go into politics when his aim will be to abolish all forms of prejudice by way of a complete top to bottom revolution in education.69 You might say he is a little ambitious.

  My favourite kind of present, albeit a working present, was brought today by one of Losey's aides – a fat three volume paperback edition of Isaac Deutscher's Trotsky.70 Days of splendid reading. And on a yacht too, at sea, with no telephone calls, no cables and all work set up for the next half year. Bliss.

  [...] My refresher course in Italian has worked wonders and I find myself chatting away like mad. The Serbo-Croat has come to a stop as the discs they sent me have been completely fouled up in Nice by the man who transferred them to cassettes. Half the way through the first cassette the speakers go mad and jump from lesson to lesson like a back-played soundtrack.

  Sunday 15th, Capri [...] E saw Cleopatra last night with all the kids. I popped in at one point for about ten seconds and went away and slept for another couple of hours. No reflection on the film! As a matter of fact E said this morning that the film is not at all bad – marvellous spectacle and all that. My lack of interest in my own career, past present or future is almost total. All my life I think I have been secretly ashamed of being an actor and the older I get the more ashamed I get. And I think it resolves itself into a firm belief that the person who's doing the acting is somebody else. That accounts presumably for my fury if anybody shows me anything about my acting in the magazines and journals. I don't mind the gossip stuff like ‘seen walking on the Via Veneto last night’ or ‘The Burtons on their luxury yacht’ etc. And I am equally angry whether I am praised or damned though mostly I'm praised. The press have been sounding the same note for many years – ever since I went to Hollywood in the early fifties, in fact – that I am or was potentially the greatest actor in the world and the successor to Gielgud Olivier etc. but that I had dissipated my genius etc. and ‘sold out’ to films and booze and women. An interesting reputation to have and by no means dull but by all means untrue. [...]

  Monday 16th, Ischia-Messina Sitting on the poop with a mug of real coffee [...] and the Kalizma steaming flat out with not a quiver on the waves. [...] Italians are shrieking on the radio and E is sitting opposite me having her ‘breakfast’ consisting of vodka and orange juice. A habit she picked up from me in my drinking days. A good start to the day if confined to one. In my case, sadly it had become as much as three and even more if there was anyone game enough to join me. A bottle before lunchtime was by no means unusual and a pleasant but ruined morning behind me.

  We left Capri, the Marina Grande, about 4 o'clock [in the] afternoon and sailed to Ischia where we parked off-shore from the Isabella Regina where we used to live in sin while locating for Cleopatra.71 We went ashore to the pizzeria which we used to do then. Everybody had his or her pizza and then we attempted to do some shopping. I say attempted because the crowds became so great that we had to abandon it and run for the Riva and the Kalizma. [...]


  As usual I am beginning to have butterflies in the belly at the thought of starting work again and don't even have the nerve-deadener of a script to learn as I know it is being entirely re-written. At least, I hope it is. So I continue with Italian and French and Frances Stevenson's [diary] re Lloyd George and Trotsky's life.72 My ignorance of the latter was monumental. I didn't know that he was one of the Mensheviks, for instance, or that he vilified Lenin so harshly.73 As for Frances Stevenson, her diary is sweet but she sometimes makes Lloyd George sound like a boastful little nothing.74 Writing only his version of events and being constantly challenged by history in the shape of dry little footnotes by the editor, A. J. P. Taylor. [...]

  Tuesday 17th, Ionian Sea [...] E read the diary yesterday and said I'd forgotten to mention the cig-holder given to her by Tito. It is the famous one, much cartooned, which he used to flourish a lot at the UN and other convocations holding it as if it were a pencil with hot end up. She passed many many remarks on its unusual beauty assuring him it must be a Fabergé.75 It seems to me that no one there knew what a Fabergé was or is. However after two days of subtle brow-beating he gave it to her. She kissed him on both cheeks which gratified him enormously. He gave me a bunch of flowers. He also gave us a lot of his own home-produced wine made in his own vineyards. [...] There is some trouble brewing up again on his borders with Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. Doubtless he'll be able to handle it. Geographically of course, he has that coveted access to the sea which all the land-locked have greedy eyes on. I understand a sight more about Russia's behaviour between the wars since reading Trotsky and for the first time Stalin's pogroms and purges take on a kind of historical inevitability. [...]