The Richard Burton Diaries

by Richard Burton

  [...] When we left I made as if to pay the bill as no one else seemed to be offering – I'm so accustomed to picking up the bills anyway but a shake of the H. waiter indicated – I think – that the good Doctor had paid. We had paid for the house seats so it was a reasonable exchange. We later found out that the K's are very sensitive about this kind of thing as some actor had bitterly asked why he or the management always had to cough up money whenever Kissinger came to see a play.

  Outside in the street Henry and David Kissinger announced that they were walking home to River House.16 ‘Take a couple of guards for God's sake,’ I said. He did. [...]

  Last night I ate dinner, half watched a film called The Dam Busters, read a little while Susan talked on the phone endlessly to Valerie in California, took a Mogadon and died for 7 hours.17 Dreamless. Awoke at 9.30. Tonight we have what Susan calls a day off – meaning I don't have a matinee. After the show tonight we have supper with Richard Muenz and delightful girl Nana.18 Muenz is an interesting boy. (Boy! He's 32) One other fascinating member of the company. Robert Fox.19 Both heavily weighed down with chips on the epaulettes but interesting and moody. I barely know the rest of the cast, though I have a long time to get to do so. 40 weeks or more!

  Saturday 16th Went to the Muenz flat. Delightful place, lovely, clean, Nana and Rich very good hosts. Muenz darkly funny at times. We talked into the small hours – of ghosts. [...]

  Last night some strange man in the audience offered a thousand dollars if we would do the last act again as the audience had not understood me profoundly enough when I bellowed ‘Long live the King.’ Towards the very end of the play, when I had the boy Tom of Warwick (Thor) underneath my arm this same strange one came up on to the stage and tried to wrest the sword from one of the ‘knights’ saying ‘I must have his eyes ... I must have his eyes.‘20 And ‘I have a message from God,’ and finally ‘I've failed. I've failed.’ He was, apparently, taken away by the police. I kept on going willy-nilly. This almost child-like piece of Lerner and Loewe's has most extraordinary effects on people sometimes. Weirdly eerie. Some people, intelligent ones too, come backstage and are seemingly struck dumb, apparently speechless or incoherent with emotion. Others wait until they have stopped crying before they come to see me. Others though are untouched, or appear to be so and are as bland as bananas. One thing I've learned though or understood rather from personal experience: The emotional impact of a supple voice speaking lovely sounding banalities can shatter even the most cynical and blasé of audiences. They tell me that Lloyd George was a genius at it and I suppose too Senator Ed Kennedy's speech the other day was something of the same thing. Alex Cohen [...] said much the same thing. Oddly enough he (Alex) gave me a book by Tom Wicker which recalls that frightening Republican Convention when Eisenhower talked of the press and the ‘media’ as being enemies of ‘the Party.‘21 Wicker says that the mass hatred of the conventioners was appalling and frightening. But then it is and always has been a frightening world. I am convinced that the self congratulatory, self and modestly named ‘homo sapiens’ is stark mad. Raving. And the beautiful Earth's greatest enemy. I hope we are a dying species, like dinosaurs and mastodons and brontosauruses, and that we will disappear in a few years, a few hundred years, a few thousand years or whatever so that some other sane species will evolve and nurture this heavenly accident we live on.

  There is an idiotic amount of fuss going on twixt batteries of lawyers about the fact that the management are flogging T-shirts which bear my name and likeness and Camelot. [...] Lawyers are an abomination and should all be hurled into outer darkness.

  Two shows today, one today and every day until we leave for Chicago. God save the mark.22 Kafka and those lawyers haunt me still. I'll get on to Kafka tonight perhaps instead of watching the Avengers or Bogart or Clark Gable or Cannon.23

  Sunday 17th, New York More strange behaviour in the audience yesterday afternoon at the matinee. Miss Linda Ronstadt a pop singer and her leading man, a Kevin Kline, came to see the play.24 They had Christine's (Guenevere's) house-seats.25 The cast were greatly excited. I am not much for pop singers but Miss Ronstadt sings one song which is very attractive called ‘Blue Bayou’ which I greatly admire so I was pleased too that she was in front. At the end of the performance when the tumult and shouting had died she apparently came to my dressing room door and was told I'd be ready in a few minutes. She stood there for a time [...] and suddenly turned and took to her heels, [...] on to the empty stage, leapt from the stage into the side aisle and ran through the theatre and out.26 Her leading man (they are doing the Pirates of Penzance in the Park) also fled but re-appeared some time later and came into the dressing room to pay the usual compliments. I told him to tell Ronstadt that she was my favourite pop singer [...]. Robert Fox told me later that Kevin Kline was an old friend of his who had recently become very successful but obviously regarded Fox as beneath him now that he, Kline, was a ‘star’. [...]

  My ‘pinched nerve’, now infamous in legend and story, went back on me last night and I played most of the play in considerable discomfort. It started when I was sitting off stage smoking a cigarette and waiting to go on for the chess scene with Paxton.27 I handed the cigarette to Susan at exactly the wrong angle and the arm went berserk and played Hamlet with me, taking on a life – a spasmodic life – of its own. It's still a bit suspect today but much better and at least I can write this. [...]

  Back to random wanderings: The audience reaction to the play: When we were in Toronto and we received without fail standing ovations at every performance I warned the cast not to take it for granted, that it would only happen occasionally, if at all, in NY. But I was wrong. The same thing happens here with unfaltering regularity. I used to get the occasional house to stand up for me in previous plays but now they always do. Will they in Chicago and the rest of the places? It's a phenomenon that I am puzzled by. Is it nostalgia? The roars I get when I take my second solo calls are almost exultantly savage. Is it a ferocious hunger for the past, a massive ‘hiraeth,’ a sort of murderous longing for ‘home’ and security and simple peace.28 I don't know. It cannot be simply the performance. Some nights unavoidably, though I try like the devil to climb to the audience's expectations every time I play, I am not so good – but the final reaction is exactly the same. Is it that the audience know so much about me – or think they do – from my highly publicized and infamous past? Is it because my performance is now truly dynamic but no, it can't be that because only in the last couple of weeks have I taken absolute control of myself on the stage. Is it a combination of all. I shall never know. But let me say at once that to this little shrinking Welsh violet it is highly gratifying. Today, a glorious one I may say, we have a matinee – a glorious summer Sunday matinee. Will the ovations continue? I will refer to them never again – unless they stop. [...]

  Tuesday 19th ‘Only our concept of time makes it possible for us to speak of the Day of Judgement by that name; in reality it is a summary court in perpetual session.‘29 That is from a letter of Kafka's. It haunts me. The supreme judge at that severe searching of the soul is oneself. It is I who act, I who do the deed or have the thought and it is I only who can judge the action or the thought. I am prosecutor and defender, Satan and Saint. I am totally responsible for all my sins and goodnesses. And I am alone. That great storehouse of knowledge and memory, ignorance and idiocy, brilliance and banality, good and evil is in my own brain and only my own brain can call itself to the bar for the agony of self examination. An endless, life-long viva voce. I wish I had more time to think. I wish I didn't have the nightly performance hovering over me day after day. Last night the audience was a phantom, now with you, now gone, a chimera of wrong responses. I felt angry with them and I'm afraid allowed it to show a few times. Afterwards we went to the John McClures’ flat for supper.30 We talked until 3.15am. Mostly about Lenny Bernstein.31 How much we all loved him and how we loathed some of the things he does to himself and to other people. For Bernstein is indeed a fascinatin
g creature, genius and dolt, a man and a woman. A boy and a girl. There is no personal hell quite like the hell Lenny lives through. All the time, all the time night and day there is the battle between his super ego and his utter self loathing – a Mahatma Miserable. I think that master means to die shortly unless the will to live reasserts itself. [...] I've written and thought myself into a state of depression. Ah! How I'd love the panacea of a drink now. A double ice cold vodka martini, the glass fogged with condensation, straight up and then straight down and the warm flood the pain-killer hitting the stomach and then the brain and an hour of sweetly melancholy euphoria. I shall have a Tab instead. Disgusting.

  Friday 22nd Still finding new things in the play. We have had three ‘bad’ audiences in a row, ‘bad’ in the sense that they chuckle and don't laugh. But their silence which is sometimes very wearing explodes at the curtain calls into a roar. Rex's new Liza Doolittle (Miss Kennedy) who is British saw the play from the sound booth.32 [...] I whispered to her ‘Don't get upset when Rex (Harrison) loses his temper – he doesn't really mean it.’ She said ‘he's very charming and we have lots of laughs together.’ Maybe the incomparable Rex has mellowed. If so he is not the Rex we have loathed and loved, lo, these many years.33 He is coming to see Camelot on Saturday night. God save the mark!

  Yesterday was our wedding anniversary – the fourth. Susan gave me a life-saving present. A portable book-case, immensely durably strong which, at a rough calculation will hold a hundred or so really heavy thick tomes and I suppose twice that number of paperbacks. She had conspired with the stage hands; props man and carpenter to make it. Was it not Francis Bacon who said that books make the best furniture.34 He's right. I can't stop musing at it. It is painted my colour. Red. Very fetching and a delight. My beloved John Neville just phoned. He is coming to the play tonight. A remarkable man – brilliant actor, administrator, director and with the possible exception of John Gielgud and Larry Olivier knows more about the practical side of the theatre than anyone I know. I spoke in a whisper as Susan still asleep – she packed [...] yesterday and is very tired. [...] I am useless to help her as my right arm – which is now affecting my left arm as well – is dead for lifting the lightest weight beyond diaphragm height. After the show I can only eat food that is possible to lift to my mouth with one arm. Ridiculous.

  [...] I was intrigued last night when one of the Chinese waiters after having asked me if the theatre had been full that night and my saying ‘to the roof’ he knocked on wood. I asked him if that was general in China. He said that it was. I said, ‘How does one say "good luck" or "touch wood" "good health" in Chinese.’ He said something that sounded like ‘Hoo Toy’.35 I'll try it out elsewhere to find out if he was pulling my leg. Which reminds me that Kissinger told us that the Chinese will still treat you as a President or Prime Minister or (in his case) Secretary of State after you have lost power – for ever. He instanced Edward Heath who was received with precisely the same courtesy and privileged treatment long after his fall from the highest office to the back-benches. They seem a very attractive people. Must go there one day.

  There is something rotten in the State Theatre.36 We are announced in the weekly Variety as grossing 98 or 99% capacity when we can see with our own eyes standing-room-only customers, together with collapsible, folding chairs down the aisles.37 We know from Nancy Seltzer (who knows about such things) that people are sometimes paying $30 for standing-room night after night.38 So where is that non-existent one or two per cent going to? It doesn't affect me financially as I have a fixed weekly wage but no percentage. What do the letters IRS mean to you at the Box Office?39 Very curious. The two producers – Merrick and Gregory – plead, I believe honestly, that they cannot account for it. So who's robbing who? [...]

  Talked to my younger brother Graham yesterday. Onllwyn Brace, famous ex-captain of Oxford and a Welsh International rugby player, is coming to Chicago to show me a documentary film of one hundred years of Welsh rugby.40 It's our centenary and I am to narrate the film. It should be evocatively, perhaps tearfully good.41 I look forward to it. Welsh rugby is a mystique arousing in the Welsh a sort of madness when they play. I will write about it at length some day soon. It elevates us into ecstasy when we are at our brilliantly arrogant best and drives us to near suicide when we're not. [...]

  Thursday 28th, Chicago Have been here since Monday. We have either stayed at home and slept and read [...] or rehearsed and played in this abysmal theatre.42 It is enormous – seating 4,200 I'm told – and is atrociously designed. Endlessly long and thin and the audience seem a million miles away. [...] We must seem like ants to them and they seem to be from outer space to us. I know my eyesight is indifferent but I cannot even see the front row of the stalls especially because of the seeming blaze of the light on the orchestra. The first night [...] was funereal. F. Dunlop and M. Merrick et al. all assured us that the mass was enjoying it and laughing etc. but there was no hint of it on the stage. [...] The matinee yesterday was a little better and the response last night was almost riotous compared with the night before. But still it's very hard work. Susan went to the back of the stalls to check on her make-up of me. Especially the eyes, so vitally important to my kind of acting. She couldn't, she said, even see the expressions on my face – I was just a white amorphous blob – like Ralph Richardson thinks he looks like. ‘I have seen better looking and more animated hot-cross buns,’ he once told me of himself. Curious man Ralph. The official first night is tonight. [...] Talking of Ralph I had a note from J. Gielgud on Sunday last, written in his small fastidiously minute hand-writing saying he was sorry he'd missed me, had heard I was ill etc. I felt very guilty and hastened to phone him and ask him to come with us to the Kissingers’ for drinks and dinner. He regretted that he couldn't come. There was a Cocteau film on that afternoon which he simply couldn't miss and there was dinner with friends which dear boy much as he'd love to .... and so on.43 I mustn't be so remiss in future.

  The Kissinger tea, cocktails and dinner was v. interesting though somewhat nerve-wracking especially for Susan who didn't know who everybody was not having caught their names. I filled her in as quickly and as often as they were out of earshot. ‘Joe Alcott famous, sometimes brilliant and always instinct with probity, political writer.’ ‘William F. Buckley (Bill), T.V. talk show star political writer too, brilliant too, not too sure of his probity.’ Harry Evans we had to be told about as he was new to both of us.44 Editor of London Sunday Times with a provincial accent. 42 years old or 44 I'm not sure. Irish-Welsh he said of himself. Did a very good Welsh accent. Mrs Buckley – sloshed.45 ‘Happy’ Rockefeller – sloshed too but sweet and very un’ happy.’ Not surprising after the death of Nelson Rockefeller.46 And the manner of his death. I spent a long time comforting her. Susan too. The Kissingers and Susan and thy humble servant all sober. Ed of the Times – careful. Joe Alcott a bit tight but impeccably spoken at all times. He spoke with a veddy veddy English upper class accent. ‘Where on earth did you, a Yankee, get such an English accent?’ I asked. ‘I was very badly educated,’ he replied. Buckley [...] very red in the face and tried desperately to make it a brilliant evening. Much talk of the Middle East. Only Jordan (the kingdom, not the politics) could solve the situation with the PLO etc.47 ‘Happy’ Rockefeller said Buckley had no common-sense. She may have been right that night. We like the Kissingers more and more and Susan now feels at home with them. I always have done. I reasoned that after our first meeting in Jerusalem they wouldn't ask me back unless they liked me for my little timid self alone. Acting and actors were rarely if ever mentioned which is an enormous relief. I liked everyone there and, our hosts apart, ‘Happy’ and Joe Alcott the best. He has a wicked leprechaunish air about him and is deliciously acerbic – barbed at all points. ‘Hiss was guilty as hell,’ he said.48 [...] ‘I'm confused,’ I said. I've over-read on that case. ‘How can you be so sure?’ ‘Dean Acheson told me and my brother Stew,’ he said.49 ‘In private, of course, in public he said that he would never turn his
back on a friend.’ He also said that Dean Acheson felt very uncomfortable with journalists – ‘he accepted Stew and he accepted me with albeit some reluctance because we had aristocratic connections but he equated being a journalist as someone who was “in trade”’.

  It never ceases to surprise me despite my wide reading of history and the inevitability of the class system in any form of government or society and their rigid adherence to their own shibboleths when the Americans show it at all levels. ‘In trade’ indeed? In the USA indeed? Yes indeed! Buckley is very American but European mostly in his way of thinking I believe – like his arch-enemy Gore Vidal.50 [...]

  All of them seemed to have read one or other of my occasional published writings and seemed to my relief far more interested in that part of me than the acting part. I couldn't have been better pleased. The Editor of the London Sunday Times suggested that I write about the American hinterland. I was going there for the first time – why didn't I make it a book? Any good and he would publish extracts in the Sunday Times. He'd paid £32,000 or was it £38,000? to William Manchester for six or eight extracts from his latest.51 Why not me? Why not indeed, I thought? I said I would ponder over it and perhaps send him a few thousand words to see if or how he liked it. I still don't know if I will but it's an intriguing temptation. But what can I do about getting out and around. I cannot sit in a public park or any public place, restaurant or bar or church without being recognized within minutes. Like Hamlet but not for the same splendid reasons I am the observed of all the observers52 Being famous or infamous depending on whether you're Dean Acheson or Harry Goldberg the cab-driver has that disadvantage, and there are others but, I quickly must add, the advantages greatly out number the disadvantages. One curiosity about being as peculiarly well known as I am is that almost everywhere I go, it's the other people who change – not me. In the restaurant for instance, once it is known that I'm there and, gradually, Susan too, it's the other diners who begin to be self conscious and start unconsciously to act. Women especially become arch or arrogant, simpering or ultra-sophisticated [...] and everybody covertly, they think, stare at Susan – searching her hair, her jewelry, her clothes, her fingernails, face, figure legs and feet. A great many restaurants in these limited states have mirrors and it is sometimes amusing to sit at a mirrored bar with Susan beside me, while waiting for a table, [...] and watch the subtle changes of attitude and posture and pose and poise of the others. I taught Susan, who, unlike me, is shy almost to the point of being in pain, to watch them and I think it has greatly eased her shyness but she is still indignant that whenever she goes to the loo she is always followed by a gaggle of women who are hoping to see her at close quarters and her underclothes Bill Buckley would zengmatically say.53 I got the impression from Buckley, oddly, that in his conversation and questions to Henry K he was anti-semitic. He used the word ‘Israelis’ for instance with greater assurance than the word ‘Jewish’ or ‘Jews’ and yet he said both with a kind of furtive defiance. I may have mistaken what was a slight awe of Kissinger, his fame and achievements with anti-semitism but I honestly don't think so. Coming from a minority myself and having been taught by Bob Wilson how to look out for the signs of prejudice I am pretty sure I was not mistaken. Wilson and I have been together for some 25 years. He is a negro or a black, take your choice, and his antennae are always miles out waiting for the signals. ‘You see that guy,’ he said of a white man at a party years ago, ‘he hates my people's guts.’ ‘How do you know?’ I asked. The fellow had been sitting beside us and seemed weak but pleasant enough. ‘He's just asked me if I would let him freshen my drink. And I've let him.’ ‘So?’ I said. ‘He didn't ask if he could freshen yours.’ It was true, for I looked at my drink and saw the glass empty. Later on I came to know the man better – a theatre-buff in NY – and gradually I got him by very oblique statements, questions and answers to prove Bob right. He couldn't stand he told me finally ‘uppity niggers.’ It was a massive vindication of Bob's life-long experience. From then on, for some time I relied on Bob's judgements of people. He is always uncannily right. And though I think I'm pretty good myself now I always double check with Bob as I am still a little too naively trusting. I tell people, tongue slightly in cheek, that it's part of my charm but it is true. I am still appalled (at the age of 54) when I find out – and the evidence has to be overwhelming – that someone I like and trusted has lied to me, or stolen from me or cheated me. I lie quite freely myself but my lies are usually to make somebody else feel better and are rarely, if ever, egoistically prompted though some times egotistically so. Sometimes there is, to my sorrow, a touch of self aggrandizement in my talk. In vino which I never am nowadays I lose all control and will lie in my teeth about anybody or anything and viciously too. I am not a nice man at those times. I hope they never recur.