The Richard Burton Diaries (128 page)

I read today in the
LA Times
that ‘according to biological evolution both humans and sheep – as mammals – have evolved separately, but are derived from a common ancestor that lived aeons ago.’ Very apropos of yesterday's entry.

The
Rommel
film is totally chaotic. Nobody knows when I start for sure. [...] I shall fly down on Tuesday which will give me a chance to see Liza before the work starts. [...]

Saturday 27th
[...] I read after a month's procrastination the script called
Hammersmith is Out
which P. Ustinov had sent. It is very wild and formless but just the kind of thing that I would like to do at the moment. Particularly as it has a splendid part for E too, and a film for both of us is what we've been looking for for a long time. Ustinov is to direct so that should be alright. He should also play one of the smaller parts.
¹⁷¹
The whole thing begins and ends in a lunatic asylum and my role is a deadly and totally insane killer called Hammersmith. The idea is not new. Who are mad? Those inside the bin or those outside? In this case both. We might be able to shoot it this fall. I have a fear that I may have left it all too late. We shall know within the next few days I suppose. It should be wildly funny and fun to do, especially with somebody as congenial as Ustinov and as brilliant, and might be a big commercial success to boot and spur.

[...] French came to discuss business yesterday at our invitation and was dismissed by E in about three minutes flat. [...] Never mind about a year's time for Chrissake, she said – never taking her eyes off the TV screen where Astaire and Leslie Caron were giving us Daddy Long Legs – lay on
Hammersmith Is Out
and we'll play it by ear from there.
¹⁷²
[...] She is wholly delightful lately and is beginning to read again. She finished a book for the first time since she went into hospital that age ago. I feel splendid myself as a result. [...]

It's difficult to know how far to go with the students at Oxford without becoming irresponsible and inciting the drop-outs again. I despise them and wish to concede them nothing but sweeping generalizations will include them. What thy hand findeth to do do it with thy might is really the burden of my message, for there is neither wisdom nor device nor knowledge in the grave
whither thou goest.
¹⁷³
I wasted time, said Richard the Second, and now doth time waste me.
¹⁷⁴
We have left undone those things we ought to have done.
¹⁷⁵
Increasingly as I get older I regret the things that I should have done, regret the black spaces which I could have filled with some knowledge of no use to anybody except me and though I try to make up for lost time my mind is not what it was and its sponge-like ability to soak up new learning and retain it is sadly impaired by dissipation and age. And trying to concentrate is becoming more and more of a task. The imagination is a wilful creature and keeping it under control is an arduous task. [...]

Sunday 28th
Two more days before I go to Mexico. Tales I hear of the place – San Filipe – are not too encouraging.
¹⁷⁶
Mean temp 113. Only two restaurants. Population 800. Shark-infested waters. Hurricane season. Only 33 beds in the whole town for visitors, most people living in caravan trailers and tents. No telephone. Only expert pilots can land there. Otherwise OK.

[...] Saw or started to see film last night called
M.A.S.H
. Hated it and left after two reels. We had it shown here in the house [...]. The children for the most part enjoyed it – Kate and her friends from next door, two girls and a boy all about 12 to 15 years old. Maria hated it and had nightmares. There was a lot of blood on the screen since the whole thing took place in a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital in Korea and they showed operations and amputations and ligatures and spouts of blood and stitches. I was bored so left. Went to bed and read a ‘Travis Magee’ thriller by a very competent American writer called John D. Macdonald.
¹⁷⁷
He is one of those prolific writers like Simenon and Erle Stanley Gardner and so on who seem to turn out a book a month.
¹⁷⁸
Macdonald is a cut above most however and tries to be unsentimentally tough about the decaying morality and mass-production-mania and advertising nightmare of the American way of life. Ends up always with a lump in his throat about the occasional innate nobility of man. Magee is a thoroughly detestable man in his pretended cynicism and muscular pretension and despises with a tired dismissal anybody who is not ‘machismo’ and ‘mucho hombre’ and an inexhaustible stud. There are fairly sick-making lines like ‘he patted her girl-rump’ and ‘he responded to the rampant woman in her’. Another occasion for bile is that this Magee – who is enormous 6ft 5 and as fast as a cat – is called ‘Trav’ by his friends. However, I've learned to skip the sermons when they come up and
the yarns and the inconsequential but authentic seeming descriptive backgrounds are very readable. I envy anyone's capacity for such sustained and for the most part sound writing. If he wrote one book a year instead of ten he could be considerable. I don't think I could write a thriller. I don't think I want to even if I could. Such books are meant to be read, not written. Read fast and quickly forgotten and therefore readable again in a couple of years.

Oh to be in Europe, now that I have to go to work. I want to go everywhere at once. I want simultaneously to be watching the road to Santa Marguerita from Porto Fino through Zeiss binoculars while sunning on the poop deck of the
Kalizma
. I want to be sitting in front of a log fire in Gstaad in the library in the evening with a rich book in my lap and E in the chair beside me. Baked ham and au gratin potatoes in Gruyere in that hotel there. Trout at the top of Les Diablerets. Raclette in the Olden in Gstaad. More trout in Weissenbach in the restaurant by the river and the canopied wooden bridge. Saddle of lamb in La Réserve. Hors d'oeuvres in La Ferme above Beaulieu or in D'Chez Eux in Paris. Moules Marinieres in La Mediterranea opposite the Opera. Haddock filet a L'Anglaise at Fouquets. Omelette Arnold Bennett on the terrace of the Terrace Suite of the Dorchester on a fine day looking over the park on a Sunday with one powerful bloody Mary under my belt and that beauty always beside me and around. Raw fave and salami and white wine and a game of boule with E in the trattoria underneath the church on the hill outside Rome on the side road from De Laurentiis’ studios to the Raccordo Annulare where the choir chants at 7 in the evening.
¹⁷⁹
A car tour of the Michelin 3 star restaurants. Annecy and Beaumaniere and a couple of nights at The Hotel de la Poste at Avallon, can that be right?

Have just heard from Hugh French that Ustinov is ecstatic about our enthusiasm re
Hammersmith is Out
. Shall have a quick word with Peter's partner Alex Lucas, I think, today at lunch.
¹⁸⁰

JULY

Friday 3rd, San Felipe, Mexico
Drove into Mexicali yesterday, took a room for the day at the Lucerna Hotel, phoned Elizabeth, borrowed a bell-boy from the hotel and raided supermarkets for food and bits and pieces for the apartment here.
¹⁸¹
It was delicious talking to E. I had wondered why I felt so peculiarly lost without her this time of parting as we have been apart before for a couple of weeks – when I was in Geneva two years ago and Ivor had his accident and two or three years before that when she went to California when her dad had his stroke and a few days when she went to Paris for the funeral of Gaston's
son – but suddenly realized why I felt so lonely this time. Reason being that before we were always able to talk on the blower but not so from here. So for the first time in my life I appreciated the normally despised telephone. I talked to her twice in a couple of hours! She will be here in a couple of days. Hip! Hip! Michael! She said she missed me as badly as I missed her and that she mooned about at night and felt almost tearful over a pair of my socks that she saw hanging about. [...]

I feel extraordinarily fit since I talked to her and feel as young as 25 or something. Stopping drinking is the best thing I've ever done for my physical well-being. Twice since I arrived I was immensely tempted to have a drink – once when I was alone. This is the kind of place and the kind of situation where one is naturally driven to booze. Waiting for the film to start, waiting for the tanks and guns etc. to get here, the uncertainty of the Mexican immigration [...]

However, we do start work tomorrow so they told me last night.

I have been learning the German I have to speak in the film from a German actor who plays the part of Schröder.
¹⁸²
He invented the reason for yawning. He is so boring that it is almost hypnotic. All I ask him to do is speak the lines for me and I will write it down phonetically in my own way and then learn the whole thing off like a machine-rattle. BUT he expatiates on every line. ‘I do not zee Cherman think would say to a check-point man dese thinks mit deses words’. So doing a page of script consisting of perhaps 3 lines of German for me, takes a full hour. I faint with ennui. ‘I disapproove of all military thinks and should not be doing ziss film but one must work I suppose and you are much admired in my country.’ He has a great soft white face and refuses to go into the sun, and a large elephantine bum and belly. He is most unattractive and his smile is horrifying. He gives the impression of unredeemable smugness. But the new Burton says ‘Yes, I see, of course, quite, See your point. Yes "krankenhaus"’ is right but you think a cultured German might say "Hospital" with the accent on the last syllable so good let's say that because our chief public for the picture are English-speaking and it's good if they recognize a word that is common to both languages.’ instead of: ‘Look, just speak the bloody lines for me and bugger off.’ I am so tolerant and understanding that I frequently give myself a nasty turn.

I am still surprised and pleased at the impact of my name on people. I arrived (with Brook) at the Hotel in Mexicali, unannounced, yesterday and within minutes was waited on hand and foot. The people in the supermarkets – we went to three altogether – were without exception delighted to see me, and all proffered advice on where to go and what to buy and all seemed delighted that I spoke Spanish. I like being famous. I wonder how I'll feel when I'm not. After twenty years of it now and a further few years I suppose it will
feel very strange to be R. Jenkins again as it were. The manager of the hotel reserved a room for us at the hotel – a suite I mean, which is three rooms in effect, – even though it's his biggest week-end of the year, being the 4th of July. The young boy, terribly pretty and looking about 15 but is actually 21 and answering to the name of David was in his seventh heaven showing us around the shop calling out to his friends as we passed them in the hired Impala which I drove. ‘Gustavo, Como ‘sta?’ He was a proper little lord for a day. ‘I will be waiting for you when you come back and I will tresore your Elizabeth Taylor,’ he assured me when I left.

Saturday 4th, San Felipe, Baja California
[...] It's the first day of the film and everybody is more nervous than usual because of Hathaway's reputation as a shit of the first water once the film starts rolling. Yesterday he had a dress parade and it was every bit as realistic as a real inspection by a real commanding officer in a real war. The poor actors were terrified out of their wits. He bawled and screamed and cursed. Colicos was ordered to have his hair cut not once but three times. Side-boards had to be trimmed to the top of the ear-line which is difficult for some of the other actors as our film is so short in schedule and quite a few of them are off to do other films in which they wear long modern hair within a few weeks. [...]

We tried to go to dinner last night, Bob Wilson, Brook and Ron Berk, to a restaurant called ‘Reuben's’ which is in a trailer park on the beach on the far side of town, but curiosity-seekers and a group of hippies very high on pot drove us away and to the anonymity of our protected motel.
¹⁸³
One immensely tall young man with the lost eyes of the hopelessly stoned tried like a man in a nightmare to put something in my pocket. Ron got him away. He was trying to give me a ‘joint’ i.e. a marijuana cigarette. Ron said to him after having wrestled him away ‘It's very kind of you and Mr Burton appreciates it but he doesn't use them.’ [...]

I was also driven off the beach yesterday where I was sitting reading a book called
An American Melodrama
by three English writers from the
Sunday Times
called Chester, Hodgson and Page.
¹⁸⁴
Everything was alright for about two hours. I had walked with E'en So for a couple of miles along the beach and had had a couple of dips in the ocean, reading between times when suddenly I was surrounded by a crowd of people who simply stared. Jacques Charon (a French Professor of Art from Berkeley) came over [to] rescue me, and I went indoors for the rest of the day.

[...] A letter from Buck House arrived yesterday telling me of the investiture on the 28th of July.
¹⁸⁵
I shan't be able to be there so other arrangements
will have to be made. It can be done by a vice-consul I understand which will be much more satisfactory and much less fuss. I shall try to arrange that.

[...] I have become so obsessed lately with the hopelessness of any rebellion against authority that I can only assume that I have come to a sort of climacteric. I read the political page every day and am continually astounded by what I read. To read an intelligent man like William Buckley writing of Nixon with reverence!
¹⁸⁶
[...] I shall learn my languages, live at ease, look after my wife and family and deride all else. I love the world and shall be reluctant to leave it but if I take it seriously I shall go mad. I must regard it all as a vast cosmic joke. Even his infrequent bursts of nobility can be attributed to a self hypnotized conceit, – I mean man's. I am infinitely more lucky than billions of my fellow men and that is the only fact that awes me.