The Richard Burton Diaries (125 page)

Tuesday 2nd, 925 Crescent Drive, Palm Springs
We flew here yesterday morning in a De Havilland jet in 28 minutes. [...] It's a cheap house and has clearly just been repainted [...]. It is a bit short on baths but has three showers, a large kitchen and four bedrooms, a master bedroom for us, another with
twin beds for Liz and Brook one for Raymond and a spare one, sans toilet and bathroom for me and my typewriter and ‘quarrels’ as E says. She is actually there now in the ‘quarrel’ room but not from a quarrel. I was snoring last night she says and she couldn't stop me so sought sanctuary in the spare room. [...]

Wednesday 3rd, Palm Springs
[...] There was much ado yesterday from Jim Benton and Dick Hanley and Springer in NY about an article in the current
Look
magazine about the sickness of E the fading film star and her insatiable demands for the most expensive things in the world including now if you please and above all things a $125,000 ‘coja'(?) mink given by the equally sick but presumably not fading husband, me. What a shame that I spoil the whole thing by not having given her the mink at all. It was paid for by posing for snaps for Neiman-Marcus and several cuts and bruises when E fell off a rock and landed awkwardly on a platinum beach location in Vallarta.
¹⁰¹
[...] The article is written by a singularly nice but singularly mediocre middle-aged man called Jonah Ruddy.
¹⁰²
Nasty as the article is it only succeeds in perpetuating the legend of immense wealth and distant unattainability which is the very stuff of ‘glamour’. [...]

Watched off and on the primary elections last night on TV. Politicians are really frightful people. God help us all.

Thursday 4th
Elizabeth started bleeding yesterday from her behind, great gouts of blood which were frightening to behold. I cleaned it up periodically – on one occasion the bathroom floor was awash with it – and thanked the Lord that I was a non-drinking man and felt no nausea at all. I am convinced that were I a drinker as I used to be I would have thrown up convulsively. [...] The poor little thing had about 8 of these emissions before we finally got her to hospital. The unfortunate doctor – named Sisler, a relation of the hall-of-famer – gave her a sedative which only succeeded in making her very jumpy and nervous.
¹⁰³
[...] Endless telephone calls were made to Kennamer and Swerdlow who both obviously thought that it was a minor thing and that she was trying to swing for some hard shots again. Finally we got Sisler, who has done a great deal of proctology and who is the doctor of and known to Dick Hanley to come over. After more phone calls it was decided to remove her to the Desert Hospital.
¹⁰⁴
Swerdlow drove from LA in what must have been a hair-raising 90 minutes and waited to examine another dollop of blood. It was not long in coming and he decided to knock her out and have a look at least
and see if she was haemorrhaging and she was knocked out and they wheeled her in to the theatre and found out that one of the stitches was ripped out, re-stitched it and she was all out in 30 minutes. I aged another ten years. She was pathetically frightened and kept on saying like a child as she was being wheeled down the corridor, ‘I love you Richard.’ ‘I love you too, Baby.’ And a baby she was, and a father I was. [...]

Friday 5th
[...] E still in hospital but considerably more comfortable. She lost ‘a unit and a half’ of blood, i.e. about a pint-and-a-half, and is correspondingly weak and will have to take it nice and easy until she's built up her own blood again which will take from six to eight weeks.

[...] Last night I had a vivid nightmare in which our Michael was dead. He was a skeleton in a desert. I must have guilt about Mike because I kept on calling him Absolom in the dream and E – a vague figure – was accusatory.
¹⁰⁵
What does it all mean. What's the meaning of this?

Sunday 7th
I pulled myself together took my courage in both hands leapt the chasm and finally sent off the rugby article to Cliff Morgan. I hope it's acceptable. Awful if it's not. Will have to sell it to some other paper to salvage my pride. [...]

E still in hospital with her blood-count very low and weakening and depressing for her, but if the count has remained the same or gone up this morning she will come out today. She is to rest a lot and not strain herself or overtire herself etc. until the blood has been restored. This should take about 6–8 weeks. It means she won't be able to come to Mexico with me probably when I make the film.
¹⁰⁶
It will be very strange without her but perhaps it's not altogether a bad idea as I shall be working terrible hours and will hardly see her at all, going to bed early and up at the crack of [dawn] in intense heat and so on. She might as well take it easy with somebody congenial in LA or Malibu. Female of course. Also, unlike E, once I start a film I want to get it over as soon as possible and will work any hours and seven days a week if necessary to do so. E, having grown up inside the MGM machine, gives them nothing free and considers adding to their costs fair game. I couldn't care less about that but with all the energy of a profoundly lazy man wish to get it over as soon as possible so that I can laze again or go to fresh fields. There is no film or play that I've ever been in that hasn't bored me after about six weeks so I like to get them over fast.

[...] I'm waiting anxiously for the phone call to find out if she's coming out or not. If not I shall sit there with her and do Spanish verbs. One a day keeps broken Spanish at bay. There are programmes on TV all day long here in
that language but apart from the commercials, I have a terrible job trying to keep up.

Monday 8th
Elizabeth came home yesterday at 4 o'clock, thank God, looking pale and wan but beautiful. Now for a slow but sure recovery. [...]

We watched the ‘Emmys’ on TV last night.
¹⁰⁷
Horrible and shaming. A girl called Patty Duke who, when a small girl, was in
Wuthering Heights
with me and Rosemary Harris.
¹⁰⁸
That enchanting child has turned into a dope-ridden idiot. Her acceptance of the Emmy was among the most embarrassing things I've ever seen. Clearly she was stoned witless. It made one want to crawl under the chair. What a mess.

Saw Charles Collingwood interviewing Speer about war crimes – his in particular.
¹⁰⁹
Charles seemed a bit holier than thou to me and Speer came out of it better and made no excuses. He seemed thoroughly likeable. There was a slight air of kicking a man when he's down in Charles’ attitude and more than a touch of self-righteousness. [...]

Tuesday 9th
[...] I talked to Kate yesterday and she comes out to stay with us after school finishes, which is Friday so she'll be here on Saturday for which many thanks and general rejoicing. She is still a little girl and hasn't become a long-haired unkempt pot-smoking hippie yet at least. I also talked to Aaron re
Don Quixote
and
Defector
and the documentary
Becket
.
¹¹⁰
All as nebulous as ever. For
Quixote
I can get $
¹
/
₂
m in front as they say. The market is looking up a bit but nowhere near what it was.

I expect another couple of bad days from E before we turn the corner but nothing short of a catastrophe can be as bad as yesterday. The nervous tension created in me when she's in pain is quite extraordinary. I am incapable of dispassion and keep on thinking how nice it would be if I had the burden of pain instead, except that I'd be far worse than she.

Wednesday 10th
Elizabeth in a complete reversal of form was bubbling over with joie de vivre all day yesterday and wanted to go out to a movie and/or go out for a drink. With memories of the last week's nightmares, fresh with haemorrhages and possible blood transfusions and hospitals and helpless pain, new in my mind, I said no. But perhaps, I said, tomorrow. [...] So if all proceeds at an even pace today we will go out to the cinema tonight. We have a choice of
Airport,
Mash
or
Marooned
.
¹¹¹
It looks like
Airport
. I read a long piece in
Time
mag about Mike Nichols and
Catch 22
in which I am, as ever, misquoted.
¹¹²
I therefore assume that everybody else is. Mike, for instance, doesn't sound like Mike at all though if the writer is right Mike may have changed his attitudes to life and all that because of the profound impact on it of
Catch 22
’s despairing black humour. A book I couldn't abide and I have a treacherous feeling that I won't be able to abide the film either. We must get it run when we're back in LA. [...]

[...] Apart from my Spanish I cannot settle down to what is known as ‘serious reading’ but gobble up thrillers at the rate of knots. Have got some lovely books too, hanging around.

Thursday 11th
[...] Received telegram from Cliff Morgan [...].
¹¹³
Gratifying. Cliff is no Connolly but gratifying.
¹¹⁴
[...] The best part of the day for me is usually the very early mornings – from 5.30–6.00 to about 9, but now the whole family has taken to getting up about 6.30–7.00 and it's bedlam. Lamentably here there is no place to hide, the house being so small. It'll be worse when Kate arrives. [...] Must learn to concentrate regardless of distractions. And they
will
read extracts from the newspapers to me in the middle of my typing. [...] I shall try typing outside on the patio beside the swimming pool tomorrow and see if I can get away that way.

Just had bacon and eggs and bangers which I didn't really want, but as I'm feeling churlish I took them with a reluctant ‘thank-you’. Why don't they go back to sleep – they've got nothing else to do. I have heaps of things to do, heaps and heaps. [...]

Friday 12th
[...] I awoke at 4.45 this morn. Got up and made coffee. A quiet silver dawn. Dogs all sleeping and all the family. The lights in this house are so low and so few that at this hour of the morning I type in semi-darkness, a gloom. Had a reply from Emlyn Williams yesterday to my avuncular letter of advice and sympathy re his mental and physical collapse last year.
¹¹⁵
The letter [...] is very chipper and would seem to indicate that he's around the corner. His bad-taste revue number is not, however, up to standard. Of course, those numbers have to be acted not written. How long it is since Noel and Emlyn created the revue. The late King George VI singing ‘K-K-K-Katie from the c-c-c-cowshed’ and Kenneth Kent, Radie Harris and Herbert Marshall (all wooden-legged) doing a dance number called ‘Touch Wood.‘
¹¹⁶
Esmond Knight and Esmé Percy (both one-eyed) doing a number called ‘I've got my eye on you.‘
¹¹⁷
A chorus of skeletons dancing and singing ‘Take me back to dear old Belsen, take me back to good old Buchenwald.’ Those were the early ones, or some of them, and there have been hundreds since.

E had a good day, so much so that we decided to go out to dinner in the evening at a ‘Steak House’ but after ten minutes or so it was obvious that she was only barely hanging on and so I took her home and went back later to pick up Liz and a very drunken Brook. He had had a lot of Napa Valley claret during the ten minutes I was away – anyway, a huge jug of it was practically empty. He looks ugly when he's drunk, speaks very loudly and repeats himself a lot. Also he looks uncannily like Emlyn at such times and his mannerisms become absolutely and frighteningly the same. The rat-tat-tat nodding of the head before the witticism or the didactic finger-wag. The pursed lips. He went on and on about a British actor called Wilfred Hyde Whyte – who lives here in Palm Springs with his new and rich young wife – and what a swine he is to act with.
¹¹⁸
A laugh-killer and up-stager etc. He sounds a nasty piece of work to work with. All this cut-throatedness done with ‘my dear boy’ bonhomie. Oddly enough I have always defeated such actors by giving them everything and ultimately stealing every march on them. Instance Rex in
Staircase
. Rex was so busy getting his face into the camera that he forgot to play the part as well as he could. On the stage it's even easier than on the screen to break the back of such petty performers. Just give them their heads and they chop themselves off. I've always found it so childish anyway. [...] Kate arrives tomorrow at 2.15 LA time at LA. I shall drive in to pick her up. Longing to see her. Watched Mexico play Belgium in soccer at Azteca Stadium, Mexico City. It's
the world cup. Mexico won on a penalty.
¹¹⁹
I wanted to have the Belgians win. Silly. Just because they were Europeans I suppose and had to put up with the mindless antagonism of 100,000 screaming Mexicans. There might be trouble down there on a big scale before this competition is over. International sport on that level brings out the most virulent hatreds. I wouldn't enter myself. Soccer fans seem particularly idiotic even in England. I myself become a nervous wreck when watching Wales play rugby, though it expresses itself in silent writings internally with an occasional roar of relief or arbitrary remarks to perfect strangers and lots of pulls at the flask of whiskey or brandy. I'd rather not go any more. I cannot even read the accounts of a Welsh loss!

Saturday 13th
[...] [Elizabeth] watched me in an old film last night –
The Rains of Ranchipur
– and said I was very handsome and sexy-looking and that the film was nothing like as bad as I said it was.
¹²⁰
Perhaps it's mellowed with age. [...]

The
LA Times
today announce that Larry has been made a life peer [and] that Sybil Thorndike has been made a CH. Freddie Ashton the same. I am a CBE and David Frost an OBE.
¹²¹
Nothing still for Emlyn and he could have done with one. Larry told me years ago that he was determined to be the first ‘actor-peer’. It was a reply to my asking him what worlds did he have left to conquer in our profession. He was in his cups and we were living together at Tower Road in Bev Hills and he was doing
Spartacus
and I was doing
Ice Palace
and neither of our careers were sparkling which is why we were doing such bad films.
¹²²
Larry was tearful because he couldn't get backing for a film of
Macbeth
which he lusted to do, and I was contemplating retirement from acting and writing instead – not for a living, not for money. I was already a dollar millionaire and with the inexpensive Syb could have lived like a prince for the rest of my life. I wanted to write because I sought for some kind of permanence, a cover-bound shot at immortality and not a rapidly dating film and acting to match.
¹²³
Well he's made his ambition to be a peer but not to film
Macbeth
. Perhaps one will follow the other now, but not if I can get in first. I'll be interested to see the reaction of the British Press to both Larry's peerage and my CBE. Larry's is so sensational an elevation that he might take the heat off my award and the stuff about me being a traitor to Britain for running away to Switzerland and not paying taxes. I remember being lumped with Chaplin and
Noel and somebody else as instances of rats leaving a sinking ship and all that. If the press is quiet about this I might nip a knighthood one of these days. A couple of seasons at the Old Vic and a stint or two at Oxford and I could swing one fairly easily with a Labour government in power. We might however have all died of asphyxiation or world poison by then.