The Richard Burton Diaries

by Richard Burton

  I am obviously still only half awake. Some of the sentences above are very oddly constructed. Beautiful day with a blue sky and a few white clouds. The moon was going down when I got up. The river, a very hurly-burly one is green in colour, like certain seas.

  Wednesday 5th, Mostar200 E arrived last evening earlier that I expected and all the better for that. She looked ravishing or perhaps she always looks startlingly beautiful when one hasn't seen her for even as short a time as 36 hours. Suddenly a bright room looks drab as she makes it by contrast. Received a message by phone which said: Terrance (sic) asks you to please not work Tomorrow or leave Mostar – Money not in Belgrad (sic). I was being interviewed by my Jugoslavian actor friend Basi (Pronounced Basheetch) when the urgently awaited message arrived. I was very disappointed as the less I do now the more I shall have to do in December and bang goes Xmas in Vallarta for a start besides which I really am very sorry for the Director and all the other very nice people despite the fact that I was told [...] after I'd explained the situation, that they [...] would perfectly understand. [...] I had been warned [...] through Hugh French by Deakin that though he, Deakin, was greatly enamoured of the Slavs he was also very aware that in business they can be devious almost to the point of skulduggery. [...] What finally renders us all speechless is that the cost of sitting around with thousands of people on call must cost them far more than the relatively paltry sums they owe me and the rest of the lads. I am furious, all the same that I'm not working. How different it would be if I was holding up production on some cute little killer like Zanuck or Jack Warner or L. B. Meyer. I would give parties.

  Last night after dinner Gianni Bozzacchi reduced me to tears of laughter when he told me some of the items put on our weekly bill at the house. Now, the number of people staying at the house is five – Gianni, Claudye, Raymond, E and myself, though E and I have spent very little time there as we usually stay at Cavtat in the Kalizma – and of those five only Elizabeth drinks but she drinks only booze brought from the boat, Smirnoff and Jack Daniels both of which products are unobtainable in Jugoslavia. So, in effect, nobody at the house of our party drinks at all. The bill however for one week had us down for 5,000 dinars, new dinars and the following week it had jumped to 8,000. I asked how much a bottle of Scotch was in dinars. Johnny Walker Red Label is 100 dinars. It therefore follows that if we were all drinking and if we drank only the most expensive drink obtainable which is Johnny Walker and other whiskies we would have drunk 50 bottles the first week and 80 the second. Again assuming we all drank the same amount it would mean that the first week we drank 1 and 3/7ths of a bottle per day, and in the second week 2 and 2/7ths of a bottle per day. Only five raving alcoholics of the classic pattern could keep up such a pace. I have in my time and at my best put away I'm sure the occasional 3 bottles of vodka a day but not for two or three days in a row and certainly not for a week or a fortnight. Otherwise it would be Dead Dad. No, that kind of consumption demands the presence of Bobby Newton, Bernie Lee, Trevor Howard, Errol Flynn and Jason Robards to name but a few of my friends only two of whom oddly enough are dead.201 If we had taken the local, and apparently very drinkable wine which costs 10 dinars a bottle we would in two weeks have put away [...] 1,300 bottles. As for the food, it is a riot of over-charging. It is reminiscent of the time when Dick Hanley found that the monthly bill in the house in Rome on the Via Appia Pignatelli for bread alone was $500.

  I wrote letters to Liza, Kate, Maria and Gwen and Ivor yesterday while E wrote two! One each to Liza and Maria. The pen-and-pencil set is practically smoking from use. [...]

  Went to work at 12 noon as asked and did two shots both involving huge explosions and neither of which I enjoyed as I swear to God I am becoming shell-shocked. Also, it must be confessed that the explosions on this film are the heaviest by far of any film I've ever been on and I have made quite a few very noisy war-films – Where Eagles Dare must have the all time top of the decibel rating so far. But if this one is as loud in the cinema as it is to the naked ear Eagles will have to take second place. If it makes as much money as Eagles it can, for my part, get even noisier and I'll take a chance on being shell-shocked. For the first time in my life in war-films I jumped involuntarily at one particularly near and shattering explosion. Out of the corner of my eye I saw everybody else twitch too but they are not Tito and impassive. During the first series of explosions I am sending out a carefully worded call to Moscow to relay to ‘Free Jugoslavia’ a message to ‘crush the vital forces of the enemy’ with all the sang-froid of the typical Walter Mitty Englishman.202 In this case I hope it's interpreted by the audience as Slavic fatalism. One of the decisions I had to make before the film started – a personal one, as the director doesn't speak or understand English – was what accent to use for Tito. To speak English with a Slavic roll and rumbles was a temptation as critics and audiences tend to think of that as ‘good acting’ but I decided it was too obvious and might even, unless I was very careful, become comical in the wrong way. So I asked a lot of educated middle-class Jugoslavians whether there was a ‘standard educated accent’ in Serbo-Croat and they said yes and did Tito speak with such an accent and they said no but he was slightly off centre. Therefore I thought I would speak my standard accent with the Welsh lilt occasionally thrown in as a shade, an almost elusive innuendo. I hope it will do. I was interviewed today for about half an hour by somebody [...] from Newsweek who was from Prague or Vienna or Budapest or somewhere in mittel europe with a mittel-european accent I think though it was so slight that it was difficult to place. [...] He was a political correspondent. What a relief they are after film writers. He asked me whether I thought the film had any political significance and I answered that of course it had. Apart from showing the fanatical courage of the Jugoslavian people it also showed its terrifying terrain and presumably, after seeing it, regardless of its artistic merit, anybody who planned Czechoslovakia here in my adopted country might well have second thoughts. The juggernaut could roll over the grass of Jugoslavia if it wished perhaps, but the grass would soon grow tall again and the Idol of Krishna would have to roll back and fore from coast to border for all eternity and still this particular grass would not lie down.203 I also pointed out that I had the feeling that these people, like a certain kind of Celt – the industrial South Welsh, the Irish and the Scots – liked fighting, looked forward to fighting and even revelled in fighting. Not entirely comfortable people for a dove to live with but I would rather join them than fight them. If the Nazi Army, at the height of its power and already battle-hardened, couldn't defeat this, at first, People's Army accoutred with pitchforks and scythes and of course hammers and sickles, if the Germans – the formidable Army of modern times couldn't beat them and were indeed defeated by these same people eventually then, short of some new diabolical genocidal weapon, nobody could.

  What will come out in the article as the reporter and I agreed after the automatons at Newsweek get at it is going to be of course something of stupendous banality attributed to me. Was it true, he asked me, that I was going to do a scene in front of Brezhnev which mentioned in more cryptic form the sentiments expressed above. I said that there was some talk of this but that something happened – perhaps the Russians got hold of it – and anyway it didn't come about. I said I regretted greatly that it hadn't.

  Since the entire crew and all the actors were chuckling fiendishly at the idea of this sharp little sticloc [sic] to the vitals of Russian arrogance I have no doubt that the Russians did hear of it. I talked the standard replies to whether I liked Tito and Jugoslavia and so on and I said yes we had been with Tito the day before he had his 3 day meeting with Brezhnev and that no we hadn't had the temerity to ask Tito how he was going to handle the affair which was not strictly true.

  [...] E will go back to Kupari tomorrow and I will get back on Saturday night which is going to be a charming six or seven hour drive in the dark down those interminably twisted roads. That will mean not getting back to the yacht before midnight
possibly, then to Rome the following day and drawing a couple of hasty breaths hard and fast into Trotsky on Monday morning. I expect Joe will give me an easy first day or, with a bit of luck, it may be possible that I, or rather, they may not be ready to shoot so quickly after their long bout in Mexico. [...]

  Thursday 7th [...] A lot of things happened to me – and us – in Rome and the old city is very much in my mind this morning. Perhaps because we are going there in three days’ time. The first time I went there, sometime in the early fifties, everybody was on foot or push-bikes or bussed it or trammed. The second time was about ‘56 and push-bikes were losing out to Vespas and Corgis buzzing around the city like so many angry bees while the next time – the time of Cleopatra – the petrol bikes were being replaced by small, indeed the smallest, Fiats and Volkswagens all seemingly determined to become Fangios or Stirling Moss.204 Now there are just as many of the latter I suppose but owned perhaps by the same people who have graduated to bigger and more middle-income cars while a lower group have taken over the Fiats etc. and the push-bikers to the Vespas have moved – why the German and Welsh syntax? – though the trams and buses must still be full. Since we were there last the Romans have passed laws restricting the traffic in some parts of the city. I think that some of the Piazzas are free from traffic – notably the Navona – but I wonder if the Vias Veneto and Sistinas and that street below the Spanish Steps are for pedestrians only. I shall find out by walking on Sunday mornings disguised in my John Heyman cap. I have been in only two towns where traffic is forbidden. One is Portofino and the other Dubrovnik. A traffic-less Rome would be a joy and an impossibility too since taxis and buses are essential.

  Jane Swanson called yesterday from Rome to say that if I wanted my old dressing-room back at the De Laurentiis Studios I would have to pay $150 a week but that she didn't think it worth it as I spent most of the film on location! Nonsense, said I, Trotsky never leaves his house or hardly ever. Meanwhile I looked through the script and discovered that almost every scene I do takes place on ‘The Patio of Trotsky's house’. So it appears that they must have taken a real house somewhere in the suburbs I presume and we will shoot it there. That will suit me fine if it's not too far from the city. It can't be in the heart because of the terrific traffic noise but also it can't be in the country as Trotsky's house was very definitely in Mexico City I think.205 I'm not sure but I think I am looking forward to the film. Much more will depend on its ambience but I enjoy playing ‘character’ parts much more than ‘straight’ ones. Instance my intense enjoyment playing the bald homosexual in Staircase. I feel much more secure for some reason when the person played is not simply an extension of me. Also I feel that I'm a better character actor than a straight man. I loved doing Toby Belch and Caliban in my days at the Old Vic except for the laborious make-up, especially the latter.206 Another good thing is that apart from 3 scenes I don't have to work with Delon who is so non-actor that I think I would be embarrassed.207 He should be ok though in this part as E says he is marvellous at playing killer-gangsters and so on. Reading the script again this morning I think that Joe will have to move the camera around a lot in the big scenes – there are two of them – between Delon and Romy Schneider (odd that her name in German means Taylor – I mean Tailor) as they are very static non-committal scenes. Am also pleased that I have only one scene with Miss Schneider as from what I hear she is uneasy to work with.208 [...] Ron, with his usual look of dark foreboding, says that she ruined the film they did in Israel for John Heyman with Richard Harris playing the star male lead and directing which Ron says was meant to be a sweet film about a small boy's adoration for a great veteran footballer but, he said, with more and more and darker and darker foreboding, she raped Mr Harris and by means of the bedroom literally fucked the film up into a love story between herself and Mr Harris, the footballer.209 ‘Keep,’ says Ron, ‘your eyes open and your wits about you. Beware the ides of October.’ ‘But surely Ron,’ I say with wide-eyed innocence, ‘it's Joe Losey who'll have to keep his hands on his zip-fly, I mean he's the director not me!’ ‘No offence, Rich,’ he says with a look of age-old wisdom, ‘you're an attractive guy and all that but Romy would give her eye-teeth to get you away from Elizabeth Taylor.’ ‘Very well Ron,’ I say, ‘I will have Elizabeth on set whenever I work with the dreaded Brunhilde and since I only work with her for two days at most and it's only one scene, I think we can safely say that we can consider that particular Biscay safely navigated.‘210 ‘Ah,’ he says, ‘she's the kind who will come in on her days off like pretending that she wants to watch you work because you're a great actor and all that I'm telling you Rich you've got to watch it.’ ‘But Ron. I've met the woman and I thought she was pretty dog-like and wouldn't have been interested in her even in the old days.’ ‘Ah! But she has become very beautiful in the last few years. You wait ‘til you see her.’ ‘OK Ron, OK.’

  [...] Miss Schneider impressed me so much, and I saw her a lot when we were doing Sandpiper in Paris and she was doing Pussycat with the Peters O'Toole and Sellers and she was for ever in the bar and so were we, that I simply can't remember what she looks like. I have a vague memory of someone small, I think, and blonde but that's about all. I think Ron would be on more securely prophetic grounds if he warned me of Delon who apparently will go with a Swan to get on.211 Now there's a bloke who would like to get Elizabeth Taylor away from Richard Burton if you like. And don't think Ron that he won't try. Look at the publicity for Chrissake, and in Rome too of all places. I mean, he would love to do a Burton on Burton. And I mean, this feller had a go at Elizabeth through an emissary when E and I were lovers in Rome and at the pinnacle of our scandal. Here is a man who will stop at very little. I don't know him and neither does E but I have an idea that I know his type very well. A sort of perennial juvenile delinquent who gets vicarious kicks out of hob-nobbing with the underworld. Very attractive to women. Not unlike Frank Sinatra and George Raft and Stanley Baker in their various milieux but without, in Frank's case at least, their talent. Actually, I know very little about his acting as I have, as far as I know, only seen him once in a film called Rocco and his brothers which must have been made about 1960.212 A Visconti film, I think, in which Delon seemed as queer as an Arab but very very pretty and Visconti (with who, I hear, he set up house for a few years) and the camera lingered lovingly and almost lasciviously over his exquisite little bones in vast close-up after vast close-up. He must have had something though as he is the only thing I remember about the film despite the fact that it was another actor who made the biggest success in the film and won all the Awards and was critics pet etc. Recently – that is a year or two ago – he was involved with an underworld killing of some kind. His chauffeur-companion, a bad lot with a record who was Delon's ‘bodyguard’ as well was shot dead in Delon's house in Paris or maybe it was an apartment. It was news in France – front page stuff for Paris Presse, Ici Paris, France Soir etc. – but it all died down after a while and I don't know exactly how deeply Delon was compromised. Anyway, he wasn't locked up or anything but spent a lot of time being questioned by the police.213

  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 ‘tha
t 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.