The Richard Burton Diaries

by Richard Burton

  I did the ‘Kup show‘80 and though the questions were more or less the same as everybody else's they were framed with much more warmth and charm than most. We went well over the scheduled 1/2 hour to 42 minutes so the other guests, I understand, had to make do with what remained of the hour.

  Last Friday night we supped after the show with a Mr Bricause and wife, Kup and wife, Forrest Tucker and daughter, and several other people – all unknown to me.81 ‘Tuck’ boisterously drunk and loud. Nice man but can't hold the booze anymore. He shouted a lot and everybody except me was highly embarrassed. There but for the grace of Susan and God, thought I, goes I. Fortunately for the others he passed out early, in the middle, as ‘twere, of a sentence and his daughter – a nice girl and as big as he is, took him home. To me, but hopefully not to himself, Forrest Tucker, is a minor tragedy. Very big personality, very big voice, handsome, very big man (6’ 4–5", I would guess and heavy with it) and, as far as I know, never been out of work and, I would think, has made a lot of money in his time – for years he was in a TV series called F TROOP.82 And yet he has never made the big scene, the big time. Far lesser people with far less talent have done far more. Where did it all go wrong? If he is happy with his lot then he's happy and he's been lucky. If he thinks of the other possibilities then he must be very unhappy. The ‘other possibilities’ are the doubtful privilege of a very thin company of actors or actresses, stage or screen. Those who for some reason create excitement wherever they appear, where audiences metaphorically – and sometimes literally – sit on the edge of their seats waiting for the ticking bomb to explode into a fury of interpretive creativity. Still and all, he works continually and is well paid which is a privilege in itself. So many thousands and thousands in my profession wear out legions of shoes, walking from agent to agent, from audition to audition for ever and ever. Poor sods.

  Rex Harrison opens tonight – after a week of previews – in New Orleans in that jewel of a musical My Fair Lady. I'm told that his energy level and stamina are as electric as ever despite his advancing years (he's about 71, I think) and I pray for a repeat of his original smash hit in the same piece 25 odd years ago. Unlike most people so I understand I genuinely delight in the successes of my friends and do not exult in their failures. I think Rex is, of his genre, the greatest actor in the world – the highest of high comedians. No less a person than that delicious Noël Coward once said ‘Rex is the greatest light-comedian in the world’ – pause ‘after me.’ I would say they were at least even, with Rex having the edge. I shall be thinking of him all evening long. Both Susan and I have sent him telegrams separately and one to the entire company together. Rex's brand of acting and his off-stage personality are inextricably bound together. Most obviously, for instance Rex's normal private-life voice is the same as the voice on-stage – only projected a little more. I think mine is. So is George C. Scott's, so is Gielgud's, so was Coward's so is Jason Robards’, so is Fonda's, so is Richardson's but Olivier's is totally different, and Scofield's, and Guinness’.83 Alec and Paul tend to ‘boom’ on stage though cathedrically quiet off and Larry Olivier's develops a machine-gun metallic rattle with an occasional shout thrown in ‘to keep,’ as he said to me once ‘the bastards awake.’ I'm not quite sure whether Larry meant his fellow-actors or the audiences or both. But one has to be careful with Larry – he is a great dead-pan leg-puller and one is never quite sure whether he is probing very subtly for weak spots or majestically sending one up. Superb good value though all of them. O'Toole's voice too eccentrically accented in private is the same on the stage. I wonder what it means. Does it mean that Olivier, Guinness and Scofield are basically and essentially character actors while the rest of us mentioned above are simply extensions of ourselves. Well, the more I act and the more I think about it (which is not very often) the less I know of the heart of its mystery. Why one believes absolutely in one actor and knows he's blazingly honest and not in another equally dazzling player is beyond my competence to explain. I can only accept it and hope for the best.

  Talking of O'Toole I only knew by chance that he had taken such a terrible hammering – a front-page hammering – from the British critics for his performance in Macbeth. I knew only because Onllwyn Brace came to supervise my narration in the documentary film about Welsh rugby football. ‘Your pal O'Toole,’ he said, ‘has been murdered by the English critics.’ ‘For what?’ asked I. ‘For Macbeth,’ said he. I phoned Peter that night as soon as the hours were right and managed to catch him before he'd left the Old Vic. I said, ‘a couple of boys from the BBC were over today to record my voice and they told me you've had a bit of stick from the critics.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘How are the houses?’ I asked. ‘Packed.’ ‘Then remember this my boy,’ I said (he is 4 years younger), ‘you are the most original actor to come out of Britain since the war and fuck the critics.’ ‘Thank you.’ ‘Think of every four letter obscenity, six, eight ten and twelve letter expletives and ram it right up their envious arses in which,’ I said, paraphrasing Robert Atkins, ‘I'm sure there is ample room.‘84 ‘Thank you.’ ‘Good night Peter. Don't give in and I love you.’ ‘I won't and it's mutual.’ ‘Good night again.’ ‘Good night Richard and thank you.’

  That was the extent of our conversation but my fury at the critics took me through the night – another sleepless one – and I thought of all the things I should have said to Peter and didn't and thought I should write him a letter and didn't and prayed to God I hadn't sounded like a false sympathizer secretly rejoicing in his critical debacle. But no, I comforted myself, he knows I too have been through the fire and understand. And by God I have too. It's a phenomenon that is again inexplicable that a few of us – O'Toole, Sinatra, Brando, Elizabeth Taylor, Jane Fonda, Barbra Streisand et al. carry something sanguicolous and the parasite is called ‘press-envy’ – especially in our own countries. Why is it? Because we take risks and run against the conventional. It cannot be because we are, albeit patchily, successful and earn millions because one never hears of viciousness anent Robert Redford or Dustin Hoffman Paul Newman or De Niro or Jon Voight but one does about Al Pacino – my dear he has – an American Film Star yet – dared to play Richard III!85 And what's more – horror of horrors – he's going to have a go at Othello. Shakespeare's Othello, no less. I can hear the critics and gossip-mongers and the Sardi-Set already stirring up the vitriol.86 Mr Pacino is certainly not lacking in courage – he has my deepest admiration. [...]

  Monday 29th We shall be leaving at 1pm for the airport and so to Dallas. [...] Susan slipped while packing yesterday and gave herself a nasty bump on her middle spine. Both my shoulders have seized up again. [...] Vivienne very depressed yesterday and Susan had a weep – the shock of the fall didn't help. Vivvy said Susan was working too hard. I wonder if Vivvy realizes that she, Vivvy, has been the prime cause of Susan's high tension. Well now for three weeks alone with S. It's a curiosity that when Susan and I are apart from other people and only have each other we are perfectly happy. The intrusion of a third person, however affable and amiable begins to irritate us after a mere two days or so. We'll have to be careful of this. It could destroy us. [...]

  We had dinner (supper) on Saturday night with the Kupcinets. Susan – as I hoped – has taken to them very much. What a pity that the people one really likes are almost always geographically very distant. [...]

  Received an odd telegram from Tim Hardy (I presume) saying that he'd given a long interview to Paul Ferris – a South Welsh writer who's determined to write a book about me. I've tried to discourage him by total silence. Tim assures me that Ferris is a distinguished writer. Well, I've read his (Ferris') biog of Dylan Thomas and found it petty and silly. Fitzgibbon's book is far warmer and generous.87

  We closed at the Arie Crown here on Saturday night to the usual non-audience during the show, sluggish and dull, and slow, but an ecstatically thunderous ovation at the end as ever. [...] Now we shall see how Texans – Dallas Texans in particular – respond. We are already completely sold out in D
allas, but they couldn't possibly be any nicer and generous than Chicagoans everybody, policemen, people in the streets, pubs and restaurants etc. have been overwhelmingly kind and it has been very gratifying to break every conceivable record, house, city and world records for attendance. [...]

  How far away and unimportant everything else seems when one neither listens to the radio, watches TV or reads the newspapers. I discovered yesterday that there's a war on or something close to it between Iraq and Iran.88 What's it all about Alfie?89 Must get back to Keats’ ‘giant agony of the world’ shortly.90 The whole world's in a terrible state of chassis.[...]

  My Fair Lady with the ineffable Rex H. opened in New Orleans last week and Rex, thanks to whatever Gods may be received an ovation. Diolch iddo byth am gofio.91 If he hadn't bang! would have gone another friendship perhaps.

  Vivienne and baby Vanessa leave for London this evening to start – yet again – divorce proceedings against Joe the husband. We shall win I'm sure. Muhammad Ali fights Larry Holmes on Thursday night. I wish he wouldn't. It genuinely frightens me.92

  OCTOBER

  Thursday 3rd, Dallas93 Arrived here on Monday to very disappointing weather, overcast and Mancunianly depressing. [...]

  We previewed the play on Tuesday night and despite being politely asked not to come – since previews, in our case, are to iron out the wrinkles and remove the gremlins attendant on opening in a new theatre with a much smaller stage [...] – the local critics were mule-headed and obdurately provincial and insisted on coming anyway and will-nilly. [...]The theatre, in comparison with the Arie Crown, was (is) a delight to play and long-forgotten laughs were back again. The notices incidentally [...] are fine according to Mike Merrick who phoned at 3am this morning to tell us so. I was very gruff and brusque. I was comfortably installed in bed complete with chocolates and Evelyn Waugh's Black Mischief when Merrick's call came through.94 I talked, or replied rather in harsh monosyllables. ‘Yes’ ‘No’ ‘Good’ ‘Bye’ ‘Thanks.’ Susan asked from the bed when I re-entered the room [...] ‘Who was that?’ I said ‘Mike Merrick.’ She asked ‘What did he want at this ungodly hour?’ I said ‘Wanted to tell us the notices were good.’ Susan averred that my telephone manner was atrocious and she called Merrick back and apologized for me. I too apologized and Susan said how hopeless I was as my apology was gruffer than the original response. What is it about phones that makes me so antagonistic? I know I can sound reasonably nice on them if I'm prepared for a call but the unexpected ring infuriates me for some reason. [...]

  Tuesday 7th, 0550 Greatly excited Sunday as Valerie arrived. She brought the inevitable ‘goodies.’ Yesterday, Monday, was a clear day off [...] I read, indoors, some of Peter de Vries Consenting Adults; or, the duchess will be furious.95 Some of Kenneth Clark's The Nude – how beautifully and succinctly he writes [...] and Prufrockianly the comics and the sporting page, (and the politics) and watched the LA Dodgers v. the Houston Astros in a single game play off for the National League West.96 Astros won rather dully. We the Yankees had already won our division on (Sat.)

  McClure and wife Eres came to dinner on Friday night last. And were delightful. John drank a fair amount – enough to loosen him up to plunge into speaking verse by Edith Sitwell.97 [...] McClure explained to me how D. H. Lawrence had changed his life.98 Brought up as a WASP square and astonishing his people by preferring the piano to dating, smooching and necking with girls and not being interested in going into business, he found himself the ultimate in intellectualizing every emotion, every lust, every desire.99 Aldous Huxley, Eliot, Spender timidly cerebral, all added cold douches or water to his instinctive desires. He seemed potentially what V. S. Pritchett might call the inhibited descendant of late children of ancestors who had wasted the family lust and physical excitement before he McClure was unexpectedly born.100 John is that rare combination – to me at any rate, of a man who's fascinated with technology – he must be one of the best ‘sound’ men in the world – Bernstein never moves without him, and from now on, neither will I. And at the same time was a potential concert piano pianist and is a fine harpsichordist [...]. He has met and known and worked with many people – some of whom we have in common – Stravinsky, Auden, Isherwood, Spender, and e. e. cummings.101 Curiously enough the only time I met cummings he was very but coherently drunk but according to John, who visited him frequently in his deliberately primitive home somewhere in the Eastern States he, McClure, had never seen cummings even sip a glass of innocuous white wine. So now I am mystified as to why the only encounter I had with cummings he was so desperately drunk. Harvey Orkin, whom God preserve though now dead was with me. It was in the Brussels Restaurant [...].102 In his cups John quoted him too [...]. After they left – 3 in the morning Susan and I talked ourselves into a profound melancholy and I added to it by speaking for her Eliot's the Journey of the Magi (Not a madly cheerful little number) ‘A cold coming we had of it.‘103[...]

  Eres is a rare creature in that she hardly ever [...] laughs out loud. But when highly amused by John's or Susan's or my sillinesses permits a fugitive shadow of humour to distort attractively one side of her face. Susan's smile is so open (and her mouth and teeth are magnificent) my smile and John's are charming so we're told – but Eres’ slight readjustment of features is intriguing. Another unique, uncommon quality about Eres is that she hardly ever mentions that she is born and bred Israeli. None of that race's chauvinism, like the sometimes insufferable South Irish, is apparent in her for which respite many thanks.

  I had been told that De Vries and Evelyn Waugh were similar – that in fact De Vries was the American Waugh. On the evidence of all of Waugh's work all of which I have read and re-read and I must confess so far only one book of Peter De Vries, the only comparison is that they both can be funny – funny to the point of making me laugh out loud – and fundamentally deeply serious but otherwise, except superficially, poles apart. Before examining them against each other I must read and soak myself in De Vries. So now for a De Vries round-up.

  [...] I shall try again to cut down on cigarettes. I know I can do it – stop smoking I mean, and not out of vanity either but I dislike being short of breath and who knows what other incidental damage it's doing to the body. But I have to be careful. The last time I tried (for five pathetic days) I turned into a monster and also completely lost my memory that is to say I had a five day blackout. That wouldn't do at all for Camelot.

  [...] I have done a great deal of sleeping over the week-end – enough to keep me going over today and tonight I think, and have, for such a frugal eater, packed myself with food.

  [...] The theatre in Miami is apparently another monster but I cannot think it will be as ugly as the Arie Crown. Also we have a house on the beach there, a private beach they say and there's no sound like the sea sound flowing like blood through the loud wound open wide to the winds the gates of the wandering boat for my voyage to begin to the end of my wound.104

  I have been asked to be televiewed in Miami – CBS local. I suggested at once that P.H. should be on it but am beginning to have second thoughts about the whole thing.105 I have been, in three last months or so on the widely (coast-to coast) viewed Today show (six days in a row) the Donahue Show, also coast to coast, and the Dick Cavett Show, another coast to coast, plus Kup's show which is apparently widely shown also but not nationally. Susan is afraid of over-exposure. I feel like a film in a camera. [...]

  OCTOBER 1980–FEBRUARY 1983

  Richard Burton ceased keeping his 1980 diary in early October. He did not resume his personal record until mid-February, 1983.

  Richard continued to appear in Camelot throughout the remainder of 1980, the production visiting Miami Beach, New Orleans and San Francisco, and then going on in 1981 to Los Angeles. But the physical strain, evident in the diary entries for 1980, was too great and Burton had to withdraw from the production at the end of March. He was taken into St John's hospital in Santa Monica for spinal surgery in April. He emerged in time to provide television
narration for the wedding of the Prince of Wales and Lady Diana Spencer on 29 July 1981, but was drinking again and the marriage to Susan was in dissolution. A further spell in hospital followed in October, by which time Susan had left to live in Puerto Vallarta. Their separation was finally announced in February 1982.

  Apparently undaunted by this further setback in his personal life, Burton began 1983 with another major project: making the epic film Wagner which involved filming in a number of European cities. He was also drinking heavily. While on location in Italy he met continuity editor Sally Hay, and they began a relationship. Richard's health was not good – he spent more time in hospital – but he and Sally did find time to see Elizabeth Taylor in the London stage production of The Little Foxes in June. Over the summer Burton appeared alongside daughter Kate in a film adaptation of a stage production of Alice in Wonderland. In September it was announced that Burton and Taylor would appear together in a Broadway production of Noël Coward's Private Lives in the spring of 1983.

  1980

  JUNE

  Sunday 29th, New York Today, like a man dying of thirst I slaked and lapped and wallowed in the New York Sunday Times. I haven't read a newspaper since leaving Geneva to come here – i.e. for about two months! Neither has Susan. The only encroachment from the outside world, outside the world of Camelot the musical, and King Arthur in particular, has been the occasional late-late-night film. I only remember one of them, chiefly because of a remarkable piece of acting by Dickie Attenborough in Greene's Brighton Rock yclept in Canada Little Scarface.1 A rare picture of a shabby shop soiled, Roman-Catholic-haunted race-gang slasher. Very Graham Greene, very soul-stretched tight and grey with inarticulateness. For the rest of the time it seemed that I ate breathed dreamed and rode the nightmare of Camelot. We might be winning the race – I'm not sure – but, if the Toronto audience reaction is anything to go by, then we have a massive hit whatever the critics might say here in the Empire State. We open the previews in two days. [...] Susan went with Frank Dunlop to see a ‘rock’ show at Madison Square Garden.2 S. returned looking shell-shocked. She had, she told me, never heard such a monstrous cacophony. Just imagine, she said, 19,000 people screaming manically for three non-stop hours. [...] Am having enormous difficulty sleeping. I suppose that when the play is definitely on the move I will sleep properly again. The lack of sleep is not helped by a bothersome and, by now, boring bursitis in my right bursar. Am going to see ‘the daddy of all the "neck and shoulder"’ doctors in the Western world. We shall see if I've torn something. Tomorrow also will be critical time for new costumes. Tomorrow, indeed, taken for all in all, is not a day I'm looking forward to.