The Richard Burton Diaries (100 page)

I had been a little bit worried because it was quite obvious that people found Kate easier to handle and have around than Liza. But miraculously it seems, in the last month, Liza is running neck-and-neck with Kate and will, I guess, because the influences on Liza are more positive and because Liza's instincts are more generous, beat her (Kate) to the post. Understand that I love both children to the point of idolatry. She will never have charm in the ordinary sense of the word, she will never be, as Ivor says, and which I am, a ‘shw'd ichi heddi’, but, like her mother, she has the great virtue of honesty.
²⁰⁸
She enchants me because of course she is in any case a delightful child, she is her mother's daughter and because in the absence of her mother she lectures me exactly as if she were Elizabeth. She wags a self-conscious finger as portentously as Noel Coward. And she loves wicked and naughty words as innocently as her mother. She told me last night on her birthday if you please that she loved the word ‘Shit’. I just love it she said. I just love it.

I remonstrated but to no avail.

Just like her mother.

Friday 8th,
Kalizma
, Thames
It's 6 in the morning [...]. I am on a stand-by. I'd had very little sleep the night before (took a shower with my pyjamas on. Is't possible?) and for the rest of the day was like a somnambulist, drinking
steadily under the water until the exhausted and drunken body was given a succession of rockets from E and L on this yacht and ordered to go bed below decks. Example of dialogue with the two witches:

Outcome: A silent Liza appears with a tray of sandwiches and small exquisite tomatoes and spring onions with immense disapproval on the side. I gave her a sorrowful look with all the sly Celtic charm I could muster up, but it fell on deaf eyes. I think that child loves her mother. I hope she realizes that I do too. It's a shared privilege.

What a revelation Tony Quayle is? He's a sly-boots and perhaps he's mellowed with age, or perhaps I never knew him well enough but I'd either forgotten or didn't know how bright he is. And he can almost match me, said he with immense conceit, in knowledge of poetry. And reacts to it as immediately as litmus paper dipped in acid. What a strange thing for a man like Quayle to do. To stop being the boss of a great national monument like the Memorial Theatre and descend, for a few thousand quid, to playing opposite Gordon Scott in Tarzan.
²⁰⁹
And more than that. Stratford was a theatre that catered for actors who were not good enough for London, or amateurs straight down from the Marlowe Society or the OUDS.
²¹⁰
T.Q. changed all that. For a torn second or two Stratford became the poshest theatre in the world. The ripped moment lasted for about 10 years and Quayle was the man who did it. He got Larry there, and Vivien, and Ralph (for better or for worse) and the tallest girl in the school Redgrave, and a host of unknowns who later became ‘stars’ like me for instance. And Gielgud. And Badel.
²¹¹
And the best wearer of costumes in the world, Harry S. Andrews.
²¹²
It's quite something to have done. It's as, I think, Emile Zola said of a man's library: ‘It was not a library in the ordinary sense of the word. It was an act of faith. It was a passion.‘
²¹³
Even that anonymous librarian probably did not know how unconsciously well he'd wrought. You don't write wrought very often do you? There's something wrong
with the syntax of the last but 7th sentence, but we'll let it go. It will amuse me to correct it in my old age which will arrive next week. It is the bloodiest thing but I am only at home with children of my own generation. If you don't know your Richard two-strokes or three or the Dane.
²¹⁴
If you don't know that fool Dowson, or that lusting dying homosexual Housman, or Alexander Macgonical, then we have to begin from the beginning and re-educate ourselves.
²¹⁵
Nothing will persuade me that accident is art. Don't give me your bloody Beatles.

[...] Quayle told me yesterday at lunch, and it needs somebody to lay down the law because one forgets the obvious, that art must have form. J. Gielgud had seen that thing of Peter Brook's of Marat? Sade? and they were all having dinner or supper or whatever the hell it was at The Mirabelle with Alec Guinness and Simone Signoret.
²¹⁶
And Tony was in one of his recalcitrant moods. First: he hated the Mirabelle. Second: he wanted to find out something about Simone. Third: he hadn't seen the Brook thing. Fourth: he blew his top when J. G. said he'd been to see that particular production three or four times and though it was miraculous or marvellous or whatever the latest adjective was that he'd picked up that morning as he passed T. S. Eliot in St James’ Park on his way to the nearest public lavatory. Well to cut a long diary short, Tony asked: ‘But what was it about John?’ John didn't know and again Quayle blew his top and embarrassed his wife, the waiters, and gentle Alec and presumably the baffled Simone Signoret.
²¹⁷
And if I'd been there I would have blown my top too, except, of course that I wouldn't have the courage. But John, as Tony or I suggested, had deliberately become a send-up of himself. ‘I am just a child of nature, I don't know what I'm doing. Give me the words and I'll get on with the job. Is the war over, I'm so glaaaaad.’

Elizabeth says that Tony does the best impersonation of Gielgud that's ever been, that's deliberate. Better than me. Better than the two Peters, Ustinov and Sellers. I promised that I would find for Quayle an observation of Bacon's. It goes like this: ‘Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.‘
²¹⁸

I am neither full, ready or exact this morning but I have created a base on which to work.

Saturday 9th, Dorchester
Sadly I was called to work yesterday after all, and just for one line. ‘All will be well now Anne, all will be well.’ Today is Bob
Wilson's and Gwladys's wedding.
²¹⁹
I am to be best man and E the matron-of-honour or whatever the title is at Registry Offices. It is to be at Caxton Hall. I hope to god I don't get the giggles as I did at my first marriage at Kensington and E did at her marriage to Michael Wilding.

[...] Word came yesterday from the States that the children's film
Eagles
has grossed over $21m and is still going strong. That is in the United States alone. I don't know quite what it means but McKenna told me yesterday that it's been running for months in Dublin and if it goes on running much longer he'll be forced to see it. Cheek. In London it has been returned to Leicester Square from Coventry Street and is the only film in the recent heat-wave, not only to hold its own but to actually out-gross itself by £700 a week. So maybe retirement is a feasible idea after all. The film was a disappointingly slow starter but it is snow-balling along. If
Staircase
does half the business, I can probably employ J. Paul Getty as a butler and Onassis as a Greek chef.
²²⁰
Elizabeth top-less and mini-skirted, will serve me food and call me ‘sir’. That'll be the day! Jackie Onassis can be the tweeny and get her orders from Elizabeth. Noel Coward will be brought in every night to be witty and sing us songs. We'll get us a defecting Russian pianist, one of the great ones, to play every night. In chains of course. We'll pour white confetti on his hair and tell him he's in Siberia. [...]

Sunday 10th,
Kalizma
, Thames
The wedding went off without a hitch and there were a few moist eyes here and there. Quite a lot of photographers to give a tiny air of importance to the whole proceedings and last night we were all on the TV in the news. All good stuff and very nice for Bob and Gwladys. Not very nice however was the news that lovely Sharon Tate, wife of film director Roman Polanski, was one of the victims of a mass-murder in LA.
²²¹
She was pregnant which somehow or other makes it worse. It is all very odd and perfectly like one of Polanski's films because all his films have bizarre sex killings etc. in them, and E wonders if it was some ‘nut’ who was carrying out in practice what Polanski preached in theory. In which case Elizabeth is due to be beheaded. The poor little thing was apparently strangled and then hung from a beam. We shall find out more details today from the newspapers. And then we must send off a letter of condolence to Polanski because E likes him very much and says he's a sweet little man. I do believe that Mrs Polanski is the only person I've ever met who was murdered. Friends of mine have been killed but not murdered.

I have arrived at the stage, which E tells me is predictable, of being thoroughly bored by what I'm doing. The next three weeks are going to be torture.
I have tried for several weeks, and all my friends have too, to make Gin Bujold feel like a desirable person. But it's a lost cause. It appears that she goes out to discotheques with her husband every night, ignores her child-son, and arrives at the studio looking like the end of the world. And smells like it. She is forever throwing up. She is only 27. She has re-invented biliousness. Why can't she learn to look splendid at 6 in the morning, even if she went to bed at 5.30. Elizabeth looks dew-dropped with 15 minutes sleep. [...]

Monday 11th
It has been very humidly hot again over the week-end and promises to be so again today. This too is the day when I lie in bed with Gin Bujold which is not going to be cool. In fact it's likely to be somewhat sweaty.

Elizabeth has sweetly got up with me and is sitting opposite me at the moment making a deliberate nuisance of herself so I'll stop this entry right at this spot.

Monday 18th
[...] E is going down to Cornwall today to meet the polio victim – he who has walked from John O'Groats to Land's End on crutches. She has a strange journey. London Airport to St Morgans by jet, then ten minute flight in a prop plane to somewhere else, then a 10 mile car drive to Land's End where she will be met by the Mayor of Penworth. Brook and the two babies will be going with her. I wish Brookie, who is among the world's nicest men would start writing. The work he is doing is nowhere near his intelligence, and from his brilliant wit – as witty as Emlyn but without the malice – and use of language I would guess that he could become a fine writer. [...]

Thursday 21st, Dorchester
[...] Two events of family importance: An astonishing and lost and lonely and ‘God-written’ letter from young Michael in Hawaii.
²²²
[...] Poor little bastard. We must cwtch and cuddle him a lot when he arrives. We sent for him immediately. [...] I think we should keep him with us at Gstaad and/or the
Kalizma
for the next term and sort things out with him without too much of a rush.

Second event: A piece of crude but unsentimental doggerel from Kate which means, I hope to God, that she'll go on writing. She obviously has inherited the Jinks’ gift for words. At least it's a gift, I hope.

Only a week to go now on the film and shan't I be glad.

Thursday 21st
It's the same day but later of course, much later. I have finished work and am home and am supposed to go to a party given by Michael Hordern which surprisingly enough, knowing that we all in the film business have to get up at dawn or just after, doesn't start until 9 o'clock, which means
10 o'clock if I know Elizabeth, and two o'clock if I know me. And if I really know me it might be 2 in the morning or straight to work. That kind of thing. And also after an orgy of story-telling and an eternal dressing-room full of people for weeks on end I prefer to settle down to a little, in my case, rare silence. And talking is a disease that somehow or other I have to cure. I find for the most part that if I have a room full of people which I invariably have, unless I talk nobody else will. And I'm damned if I'm going to go through it all again tonight. I will talk to this machine only. [...] The trouble with a diary is that you have to pound it out, slam it in, there is not time to make corrections. That's why I know E to be right when she says that I should pack it in for a bit – acting – and start to think. We both tend to forget, though we never really do, the tremendous combined impact of our arrogant personalities and fame and wealth on poor blokes who are just wondering where they can get the next job. I am quite sure, for instance, that, without meaning to, I, and in a supporting role, Elizabeth, have turned John Colicos into a drunken conceited maniac who believes himself to be as desirable an actor as I am and that his wife should be as desirable as Elizabeth. ‘Vroom’ as the Yankee comics say, and he has lost his wife and the next film. And a lot of money. It is only a question of time before he will elect to kill himself or somebody else, hopefully not one of us, and which river he will choose in which to hide the body. I feel immensely sorry for him but nobody else seems to share my sorrow. After all he has those two lovely little boys.
²²³
[...]

Friday 22nd
Well, not long now boys, not long. One slight haul over the next hill and we're home again. I suppose there is no word quite as evocative in the English language as ‘home’, especially if you don't have one. Perhaps ‘nevermore’ is as good as any or ‘over the hills and far away’ or ‘Will ye no come back again, son o’ mine’, or, my sister's favourite, ‘Oh where is my wandering boy tonight, he is weary and far from home. Oh where is my boy tonight? For I love him he knows, wherever he goes. Oh where is my boy tonight.‘
²²⁴
They used to sing the latter about my father when he disappeared for a few days or weeks and, we discover, not with women but, as Liza would appreciate, with horses. [...]

Sunday 24th, Liz and Brook's Cottage
It's 7 o'clock and the place is as quiet as a country village which of course it is.
²²⁵
What a remarkable pleasure it is to be able to walk down the village street and stop at the tiny supermarket, minimarket,
and buy a choc-ice or an iced lolly without anybody giving so much as a second glance. I played a great many games of ‘pool’ with Brook and munched a great deal of Lillabetta's food – she is a fine cook – and had Sherry off the wood at some friend's house and went to the pub and drank a vodka or so, and saw Brook's garage and met his partner in the enterprise which is bound to succeed and altogether had a splendid day. The nights are as chill as cuddling up. We will almost certainly meet Molly today, and possibly Emlyn.
²²⁶
It will be odd to see them or one or the other down here after all these years. It was only 1943, only 26 years ago, that's all, when I first came here. The little baby is a delight, helpless as she is, and I love her gurgles and hysteria as you wheel her in her pram over rough ground. And her delight in the sound of click and pot of pool and the harsh hurry of the balls to get back to the lower end of the table while she grinds her teeth and attempts to kick her fragile legs. I am in love with her. She has a mind and makes noises, unlike Jessica, poor bastard. I generally shut Jess out of my mind but sometimes she re-enters with staggering agony.