The Richard Burton Diaries

by Richard Burton

  90 The line ‘the giant agony of the world’ is from John Keats (1795–1821), The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream (1819).

  91 From the Welsh hymn ‘Diolch iddo’, the line translates as ‘Thanks be to him for ever remembering’.

  92 World heavyweight champion Larry Holmes (1949—) stopped Muhammad Ali (formerly known as Cassius Clay) in ten rounds on 2 October 1980.

  93 Thursday was 2 October.

  94 Evelyn Waugh, Black Mischief (1932).

  95 Peter de Vries (1910–93), Consenting Adults; or, The Duchess will be Furious (1980).

  96 Kenneth Clark (1903–83), The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1956).

  97 Edith Sitwell (1887–1964), poet and novelist.

  98 D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930), novelist.

  99 WASP: White Anglo-Saxon Protestant.

  100 V. S. Pritchett (1900–97), short story writer, critic.

  101 Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971), composer, conductor, pianist. Christopher Isherwood (1904–86), novelist. edward estlin cummings (1894–1962), poet.

  102 Presumably the Brussels Restaurant, New York.

  103 T. S. Eliot, ‘The Journey of the Magi’, written in 1927 and published in 1930.

  104 Dylan Thomas, ‘Lie Still, Sleep Becalmed’ (1945), includes the following lines: ‘Under the mile off moon we trembled listening / To the sea sound flowing like blood from the loud wound / And when the salt sheet broke in a storm of singing / The voices of all the drowned swam on the wind. // Open a pathway through the slow sad sail, / Throw wide to the wind the gates of the wandering boat / For my voyage to begin to the end of my wound’.

  105 P. H. Burton, by this time living in Florida.

  1983

  1 Pierre Koessler, architect, son of Edouard Koessler.

  2 Sally Hay (1948—), to become Burton's fourth wife.

  3 This refers to the forthcoming trip that Burton and Hay were planning to make to Haiti, to the intended divorce that Burton was seeking from third wife Susan Hunt, and the trip to New York to allow Burton to play in Private Lives with Elizabeth Taylor.

  4 D. Brynner is presumably Yul Brynner's second wife Doris, from whom he had been divorced in 1967.

  5 John and Joan Dearth were about to visit Richard and Sally.

  6 Brother Tom had died in 1980.

  7 Milton Katselas (1933–2008) was the initial director of Private Lives, but would leave the production following disagreements with Taylor in Boston.

  8 John Cullum (1930—) was to play the part of Victor Prynne in the play. He had played with Burton in the 1960 production of Camelot and in the Broadway production of Hamlet.

  9 Mark Getty (1960—), businessman, brother of Aileen.

  10 Burton had read Michael Parkinson, Best – An Intimate Biography on its first publication in 1975.

  11 Ireland beat France 22–16 at Lansdowne Road, Dublin, and Wales beat Scotland 19–15 at Murrayfield.

  12 Profile of a Superstar was a television film about Burton that screened on American television in 1983.

  13 Taylor was making a TV movie, Between Friends.

  14 Pope John Paul II visited Haiti in March 1983.

  15 M. Vandal was dealing with Richard's divorce.

  16 Albert Silvera, owner of El Rancho Hotel where Richard and Sally were staying in Haiti, who was attempting to persuade Burton to purchase his beach house.

  17 Burton's divorce from Susan Hunt.

  18 The President of Haiti was Jean-Claude Duvalier (1951—), also known as ‘Baby Doc’.

  19 The cartoon was a ‘Gren’, (by the cartoonist Grenfell Jones (1934–2007) presumably from the Cardiff evening newspaper the South Wales Echo, dated 23 February 1982, in which a lawyer, sitting in a luxurious penthouse office suite, is explaining to a client, ‘I had nothing to begin with except an unshakeable belief in my ability and the Richard Burton Divorce Contract.’ The explanatory caption below the cartoon reads ‘Yet another Richard Burton divorce is announced.’

  20 PV: Puerto Vallarta.

  21 Nicolas Duvalier, born 31 January 1983.

  22 François Latour (1944–2007), Haitian writer and actor. Leslie Gerson was US non-immigrant visa chief in Haiti. She and Latour subsequently married.

  23 The President's wife was Michele Bennett Pasquet (1950—). Her brother, Frantz Bennett, had been convicted of drug trafficking in Puerto Rico in 1982 and was serving a three-year term of imprisonment.

  24 Latour wrote in an accompanying letter (dated 4 March 1983), ‘It is my pleasure to make it possible for you to have these books; I am so appreciative of the interest you are taking in my country.’

  25 Noel Coward wrote Private Lives in 1933, when he was 34.

  26 On 5 March Wales beat Ireland 23–9 at Cardiff, and Scotland beat England 22–12 at Twickenham.

  27 Burton was to purchase Habitation Courvoisier, l'Etang du Jone, Petionville.

  28 Willi Wichert, manager of the El Rancho Hotel, and his wife Chantal, sister-in-law to Albert Silvera.

  29 Top of the Pops, the BBC TV pop music chart show.

  30 Guy Malary (1943–93), lawyer, assisting with the house purchase, later Minister of Justice (1991–3).

  31 M.U.: make-up.

  32 Burton presumably means maquilleuse, make-up girl.

  33 Madeleine Harrison, to marry David Rowe-Beddoe in 1984. Valerie Douglas. Lisa Rowe-Beddoe, eldest daughter of David Rowe-Beddoe.

  34 Kate Burton played the character of Mag in Winners, the first part of Lovers by Brian Friel (1929—), staged at the Roundabout Theatre, New York.

  35 Maria Burton, who had married Steve Carson in 1982, had given birth to Eliza in 1983.

  36 The Beresford, an apartment building on Central Park West, New York.

  37 Zev Buffman (1930—), producer of Private Lives, who had previously directed Taylor in Little Foxes.

  38 Kathryn Walker (1943—) played the part of Sybil Chase in Private Lives.

  39 ‘Alka’ was Richard's nickname for Nancy Seltzer, publicist, ‘Alka Seltzer’ being an effervescent antiacid compound used for indigestion, headaches and hangovers.

  40 Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961), crime writer. Fran 3 Kafka (1883–1924), novelist. The biography might have been Ronald Hayman, Kafka: A Biography (1982). Mark Twain (1835–1910), writer.

  41 17 March is celebrated by people of Irish descent as St Patrick's Day, Patrick being the patron saint of Ireland.

  42 The Cort Theater, West 48th Street, New York.

  43 The play would start its run at the Shubert Theatre, Boston, on 7 April.

  44 Wales lost to France 9–16 at the Parc des Princes on 19 March 1983. Ireland beat England 25–15 at Lansdowne Road.

  45 Simon and Sheran Hornby.

  46 Tennessee Williams had died on 25 February 1983 in New York.

  47 The Night of the Iguana and Boom!

  48 Christopher Wilding. If Burton is right then that would probably have been during the making of The Night of the Iguana.

  49 Private Lives opened at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, New York, on 8 May.

  50 Theoni V. Aldredge (1932—) was the costume designer for Private Lives.

  51 Geraldine Fitzgerald (1913–2005), actor.

  52 Jimmy Breslin (1930—), journalist, Hollywood columnist and writer, and friend of Burton.

  53 The Thorn Birds was a TV mini-series that screened over four nights from 27 March 1983.

  54 ‘Pangs of disprised love’ is a line from Hamlet's famous soliloquy in Act III, scene i.

  55 A reference to Michael F. Ritchie (1958—). He and Kate married in 1985.

  56 Katselas had been a Scientologist since 1965.

  57 John Hurt (1940—), actor.

  Notes

  Introduction

  1 William Redfield, Letters from an Actor (New York: Viking, 1967), p. 20.

  2 Data collected by the 1911 population census revealed that women aged between 20 and 24 averaged 7.36 children if they married coal miners, but only 3.48 children if they married doctors. Coal miners
also enjoyed one of the earliest average ages of marriage of any occupational group, a function of the relatively high wages that could be earned by young men underground.

  3 Port Talbot Guardian, 5 February 1943. Wales had no officially recognized capital until 1955, when the city of Cardiff was accorded that honour.

  4 George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949; Guild Publishing, 1989), p. 434.

  5 Thomas Mallon, A Book of One's Own: People and their Diaries (St Paul, Minnesota: Hungry Mind Press, 1995 edn), xvii.

  6 Burton uses the terms ‘diary’, ‘journal’ and ‘notebook’ at various times to describe what he is doing. Here the term ‘diary’ has been chosen as more accurately reflective of the entire sequence and the fact that Burton did keep dated entries confined to single days.

  7 There are scattered references, in the diaries and elsewhere, which suggest the existence of other diaries or other forms of writing. Hollis Alpert, Burton (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1986), p. 90, refers to Burton keeping a diary, written ‘in his own invented hieroglyphics’ in about 1960. Perhaps Burton meant his schoolboy French. Alpert also suggests that Burton was writing a novel and had written 20,000 words which he lost when in Hollywood in 1970 (p. 197).

  8 There does not appear to be any supporting evidence for the suggestion made by Penny Junor, in Burton: The Man Behind the Myth (London: Sphere, 1986), p. 143, that Burton read his diary ‘out loud to friends’.

  9 In fact most, perhaps all, of the diaries covering this period have survived.

  10 Lantz to Burton, 11 August 1976, Richard Burton Archives, RWB 1/2/1175.

  11 Sunday Express, 4 December 1988; Sunday Times, 18 December 1988.

  12 RWB 1/2/1/3 – Weissburger and Frosch [Box 19/3]. Although undated, this evidently dates from the period 1964–75.

  13 Melvyn Bragg, Rich: The Life of Richard Burton (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1988), p. 211.

  14 Robert A. Fothergill, Private Chronicles: A Study of English Diaries (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 10.

  15 There is very limited evidence of wilful destruction of the diaries. On 24 June 1965 Burton records that ‘in fury’ he had torn out the preceding page of the diary, covering 17–23 June. The page has not survived. There is no other comment of this kind, but this does not rule out the possibility that he destroyed other pages and did not leave evidence of such destruction.

  16 Bragg, Rich, p. 369. See further assessments on pp. 108, 165, 210–11, 216–17, 290.

  17 A similar case is that of Burton and Raquel Welch. Taylor was suspicious of Welch's interest in her husband, and there is speculation to this day (not quashed by Welch herself) that Burton and Welch may have been lovers during the making of Bluebeard. Yet the diaries (which admittedly end in March 1972, before the cessation of filming) offer no evidence for this.

  18 Cited in Hermione Lee, Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 7. This is not the place to list the failings of specific Burton biographies and biographers (or, indeed, those of Elizabeth Taylor). For readers seeking further enlightenment and relatively sure-footed narrative, my advice would be to consult the works by Bragg, Ferris and Stead on Richard Burton, and by Alexander Walker on Elizabeth Taylor.

  19 John Cottrell and Fergus Cashin, Richard Burton: A Biography (London: Arthur Barker, 1971), pp. 345–6.

  20 The most recent example being Michael Munn, in his Richard Burton: Prince of Players (London: JR Books, 2008). Munn is not named in any of the diaries.

  21 Bragg, perhaps subconsciously, appears to accept this when he writes (Rich, p. 375) ‘As in many autobiographies there is self-justification as well as self-revelation.’

  22 Arthur Ponsonby, English Diaries (London: Methuen, 1923), p. 5.

  23 The exceptions are the diaries of 1940 (Bragg had some kind of indirect knowledge of this) and 1975.

  24 The Diary of Virginia Woolf, volume II: 1920–1924, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (Luda: Hogarth, 1978), Editor's preface, p.ix.

  25 Virginia Woolf, ‘The Art of Biography’ (1939), in The Death of the Moth and other essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1942), p. 195.

  26 See Lee, Biography, p. 16: ‘The idea that there is such a thing as an innate, essential nature, often vies in biographical narrative with the idea that the self is formed by accidents, contingencies, education and environment. The belief in a definable, consistent self, an identity that develops through the course of a life and that can be conclusively described, breaks down, to a great extent, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.’ Elizabeth Podnieks develops this further: ‘The self is always to some degree invented, so the diary that contains this self is at least partially fictive’ (Daily Modernism: The Literary Diaries of Virginia Woolf, Antonia White, Elizabeth Smart and Anaïs Nin (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2000), p. 5.

  1939

  1 Richard's brother, Thomas Henry Jenkins (1901–80), a coal miner by occupation, was widowed when his wife Cassie (born 1905) died, leaving him with a daughter (Mair (1938–2008). Tom and Cassie lived at Cwmafan, an industrial settlement located in the Afan valley two miles north (as the crow flies) of Richard's home in Taibach. They had taken in the youngest of the Jenkins children, Graham, following his mother's death shortly after giving birth to him in 1927.

  2 William Shakespeare's Richard II, King (c.1595).

  3 Mrs Pike, the mother of Raymond Pike, one of Richard's friends, who later emigrated to Australia.

  4 Colin Wherle, a fellow pupil, lived in Heol-yr-Orsedd, Port Talbot.

  5 The ‘Cach’ was the local name given to the Picturedrome, the cinema in Taibach, located between Gallipoli Row and Alma Terrace. It mainly showed films well after their first release (i.e. not film premieres), the programme starting at 6 p.m. Before it became a cinema it had been the local drill hall for the Territorial Force (after 1920 Territorial Army). Cach is Welsh for ‘shit’. Stranded in Paris was the UK title of Artists and Models Abroad (1938), directed by Mitchell Leisen (1898–1972), starring Jack Benny (1894–1974). Bulldog Drummond's Secret Police (1939), directed by James P. Hogan (1890–1943), starring John Howard (1913–95) and H. B. Warner (1876–1958) was the latest in a long series of films featuring the eponymous hero.

  6 The Regent was a cinema in Taibach located on Commercial Road. I Met A Murderer (1939), directed by Roy Kellino (1912–56), starred James Mason (1908–94) and Pamela Kellino (1916–96). Exile Express (1939), directed by Otis Garrett (1905–41), starred the Russian-born actor Anna Sten (1908–93).

  7 Although Richard writes ‘football’ he means rugby football rather than association football. Mr Nicky was Mr Jack N. Nicholas, the maths teacher, who also coached the school rugby team.

  8 Aunt Edith Evans, the sister of Richard's brother-in-law Elfed James. Edith, usually ‘Ede’ but sometimes ‘Edie’, who lived at 9, Geifr Road, Taibach, ran (together with her brother, Ivor James) a fish and chip shop, located in the front room of her house. Richard would collect newspapers (used for wrapping purposes) for her for money.

  9 Dillwyn is Dillwyn Dummer, one of Richard's childhood friends, a second cousin once removed, and just a few months younger than Richard. Dillwyn's mother Margaret Ann was Elfed James's sister.

  1940

  1 The Talbot Memorial Park, located between Taibach and Port Talbot.

  2 The Oklahoma Kid (1939), directed by Lloyd Bacon (1889–1955), starred James Cagney (1899–1986) and Humphrey Bogart (1899–1957). Richard was to become friendly with Bogart in the 1950s.

  3 Arthur ‘Boyo’ Jenkins, a fellow pupil, who lived in Varna Terrace, Taibach, and who later played first-class rugby for Aberavon RFC. Lloyd's bicycle and sports shop, Station Road, Port Talbot.

  4 The Carnegie Free Public Library, Taibach, situated on Commercial Road, opposite the Co-operative store.

  5 ITMA, an abbreviation for It's That Man Again, was a very popular wartime radio show, starring Tommy Handley (1894–1949).

  6 Britain suffered its severest frost for 45 years i
n 1940. Snow remained on the hills around Port Talbot until the end of February.

  7 Cecilia or ‘Cis’ James, née Jenkins (1905–93), Richard's sister, married to Elfed James (1900–79), with whom he lived at 73 Caradog Street, Taibach.

  8 This refers to the Taibach and Port Talbot Co-operative Society. Their central premises were at 4–16 Commercial Road, Taibach. Elfed James was to serve on its management committee. Richard was to work there as a draper's assistant after leaving school in April 1941.

  9 Albert ‘Sandy’ Powell (1898–1982) was a British comedian and film actor famous for his catchphrase, ‘Can you hear me, mother?’

  10 The Plough field is a sports ground, immediately north of and adjacent to the Talbot Memorial Park.

  11 Mrs Jackson was Richard's next-door neighbour in Caradog Street, and was originally from Gloucestershire. Richard was friends with her son Billy. Dr Marshall was the local general practitioner, who lived at 1, Grange Street, his house both consulting room and dispensary.

  12 A rugby union match. Aberavon lost 7 points to 16 in a match the Port Talbot Guardian thought ‘one of the most exciting and interesting played on the ground this season’.

  13 Dots in the original.

  14 Joe's was Joe Morozzi's ice-cream parlour on Talbot Road, officially known as ‘Berni's’.

  15 ‘Mam James’ – Elfed James's mother. She lived at 3 Inkerman Row (since demolished), immediately behind (uphill from) Caradog Street.

  16 Noddfa Welsh Congregational Chapel on Commercial Road, Taibach. Noddfa had been established in 1933 following a schism in Gibeon Welsh Congregational Chapel (which was near the Picturedrome, between Gallipoli Row and Alma Terrace) and had moved into its new premises in November 1939. Both chapels were Welsh in language.

  17 Baglan is a settlement lying to the north-west of Port Talbot, approximately three miles from Richard's home in Taibach.

  18 ‘My mother’ must refer not to Richard's natural mother (who had died in 1927) but to his sister Cis. Cis and Elfed were second cousins, both great-grandchildren of Rees Morgan and Hannah Davis, who had lived in Pontrhydyfen. They shared common membership of Gibeon Welsh Congregational Chapel, Taibach, and married in 1927, only four months before they took in Richard following his mother's death. Cis had worked as a housemaid for the Handford family, drapers by occupation, who had a shop opposite the Talbot Arms Hotel, later a store on Station Road (afterwards the site of Woolworths). Elfed was a coal miner who worked at a colliery at Goytre. This was probably the Glenhafod Level, owned by the Glenhafod Collieries Limited of Port Talbot. Glenhafod Colliery was located in the bottom of the valley below the present cemetery.