The Richard Burton Diaries (222 page)

We've had a long day and it's obviously going to be longer. We shan't get to Geneva for 10–12 hours surely.

We went in to St John's this morning (i.e. yesterday) heavy bag – books being the main weight – to be left behind in c/o architect Smith to be picked up by lawyer Fuller. Then went with former to see house of associate architect called Frazer. All very Edinburgh Scots with the innate neat smugness of
those people. House nice enough but didn't fancy it myself. Small but lacked cosiness. The same applied to Mrs Frazer. I hope Susan's house will be grander
and
cosier. Don't know how one does that.

Am trying to keep awake until after NY then sleep to England. Can't read! Am, have been, trying to read a detective story by C. Day Lewis (N. Blake).
¹³⁰
Won't hold my attention. Susan enclosed in blankets beside me – eyes closed but don't know if asleep. Every other berth in darkness. Stewardess ghost-like and the overhead light throws a shadow from my fist on to the paper so cannot literally read what I'm writing until several words are past. Not that it matters. Am drinking coffee and writing merely to pass the time.

I am glad to be going back to Europe for a short change but
not
to do looping on a lousy film.
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Rome will be good to see again though I hope. News is that the paparazzi are a dying – if not dead breed. Hope so for Susan's sake. And mine. Ah what scenes I had with that lot. Endless maniacal chases down the Appia Antica and the Via Pignatelli(?).
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Madness on wheels and no fun in it. The paparazzi were so humourless. How I hate and hated them. I see their empty endlessly mindless faces now, vacant and talentless and dirty, with their little chattering scooters and baby-pram Fiats. Auugh!

Somebody's holding back the dawn for surely it should be coming up now or am I going the wrong way? It's 5.35. Antiguan time. Still drinking coffee which I don't usually take in such quantities but I have to stay awake somehow. Smoking cigs. Stopping and staring out of the window over Susan's crouched and feline body. Can't be bothered to write more. Will smoke and doze.

This plane should have been getting us to London in three or four hours.

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.

JULY

Thursday 3rd, New York
It's 4.15 in the morning. Last night we had our first NY preview. In the last 48 hours I have suffered an agony of brand-new
costumes. John Barber of the London
Telegraph
and old friend and wisest and most compassionate of men (dispassionate too) David Rowe-Beddoe had (the former, Barber, by Frank Dunlop and the latter Rowe-Beddoe by Susan) been invited to look with new eyes at the production – we could no longer see the wood for the undergrowth.
³
Their observations were invaluable. And neither were sweeping generalizations but detailed analyses, scene by scene. Costumes worried them both. So they were changed. Why was I the only male member of the cast who didn't wear tights? asked Rowe-Beddoe. Had my legs suddenly, in middle-age become scrim-shanked. No, said I, spluttering at the very thought. I'll show you all by damn. And last night I did. All costumes had to be tightened up as I've lost 12–14lbs since we opened in Toronto. [...] Proper sleep – oh sleep it is a gentle thing beloved from Pole to Pole, To Mary Queen the praise be give she sent the gentle sleep from heaven that slid into my soul shall try again to sleep.
⁴
It's now 5.30. Come sealing night.
⁵

AUGUST

Tuesday 12th
So much for a daily report. The show is a super smash hit. Particularly, apparently, for me which is gratifying but surprising as only now, six weeks after the opening am I beginning to get the piece safely under my belt. We broke records week after week. [...] The show is still enjoyable. Long may it be so. I dread the time when I have exhausted its every possibility and go on automatic as ‘twere. Thus far I haven't given the same performance twice. It is always different. It's unplanned – something curious comes from the audience and I instinctively respond – always, of course, within the frame-work of the play [...]. There have been a great many distinguished or notorious audiences I'll get to them by and by. I had one cauchemar, an appalling catastrophe which hardly bears thinking about. That too I will try to explain.
⁶
Politics are the talk of the times. Last night was the first night of the convention (Democratic) and Senator E. Kennedy is out!
⁷
There is a line or two in Kafka's letters that haunts me.
⁸
I read it years ago and was impressed by its perfection of style (even in translation) but only in the last four or five years
has it meant anything to me – I mean only its horrifying and real meaning, personally applied, has it brutally come home to me after all these years in the smugness of the dark. [...] I am writing to please myself though there's a feeling in some place in my head [...] that this might be publishable. I haven't been writing for nothing. [...]

Thursday 14th
Two shows yesterday and was I tired. Lots of people to see after the second performance. [...] Henry Kissinger's son, David, and a friend, Arnold Weissburger and Milton Goldman, Lucy Kroll, and others.
⁹
The dressing room is so small that I have to see them in the corridor outside. The newspapers – but nobody else I notice – agog with a ‘great’ speech by Edward Kennedy.
¹⁰
I read it and it is the usual fustian and good for his political future perhaps in 4 or 8 years time. He's a mere stripling of 48. Despite the polls I have a feeling that Carter will be re-elected.
¹¹
Perhaps because I want him to be. Henry Kissinger who came to see the play with his wife Nancy a week or ten days ago said that the re-election of Carter would mean ‘a world catastrophe’ within a couple or three years.
¹²
Why? Because he (Carter) was totally ignorant of foreign politics. He was a peanut farmer and a fool and a megalomaniac. So, he said, was everyone else. Anderson (he'd seen him the night before in Washington) had a funny crazed look in his eye.
¹³
‘Messianical?’ I asked. ‘Yes.’ Kissinger looked much the same as he did in Jerusalem in 1975 when we talked at the King David Hotel after one of his shuttle diplomacy days in the middle of the night.
¹⁴
A little less rotund perhaps and as witty and intelligent as ever [...] We supped at the ‘21’.
¹⁵
The Doctor had about 6 guards within shouting distance. I remembered the contrast. In Jerusalem I was told there were 750 guards. 250 Yanks, 250 Israelis, 250 Arabs – for
one
man. The conversation went on for hours (we closed the ‘21') although it was more a monologue by Kissinger. I was [...] the feed or stooge. ‘The presidency is now open for any unemployed megalomaniac,’ was one of his bon mots. He used the word megalomaniac many times. Anderson was, Carter was, everybody else was including, he said, for a short time, he himself. Nixon wasn't. Well-well.

[...] When we left I made as if to pay the bill as no one else seemed to be offering – I'm so accustomed to picking up the bills anyway but a shake of the
H. waiter indicated – I think – that the good Doctor had paid. We had paid for the house seats so it was a reasonable exchange. We later found out that the K's are very sensitive about this kind of thing as some actor had bitterly asked why he or the management always had to cough up money whenever Kissinger came to see a play.

Outside in the street Henry and David Kissinger announced that they were walking home to River House.
¹⁶
‘Take a couple of guards for God's sake,’ I said. He did. [...]

Last night I ate dinner, half watched a film called
The Dam Busters
, read a little while Susan talked on the phone endlessly to Valerie in California, took a Mogadon and died for 7 hours.
¹⁷
Dreamless. Awoke at 9.30. Tonight we have what Susan calls a day off – meaning I don't have a matinee. After the show tonight we have supper with Richard Muenz and delightful girl Nana.
¹⁸
Muenz is an interesting boy. (Boy! He's 32) One other fascinating member of the company. Robert Fox.
¹⁹
Both heavily weighed down with chips on the epaulettes but interesting and moody. I barely know the rest of the cast, though I have a long time to get to do so. 40 weeks or more!

Saturday 16th
Went to the Muenz flat. Delightful place, lovely, clean, Nana and Rich very good hosts. Muenz darkly funny at times. We talked into the small hours – of ghosts. [...]

Last night some strange man in the audience offered a thousand dollars if we would do the last act again as the audience had not understood me profoundly enough when I bellowed ‘Long live the King.’ Towards the very end of the play, when I had the boy Tom of Warwick (Thor) underneath my arm this same strange one came up on to the stage and tried to wrest the sword from one of the ‘knights’ saying ‘I must have his eyes ... I must have his eyes.‘
²⁰
And ‘I have a message from God,’ and finally ‘I've failed. I've failed.’ He was, apparently, taken away by the police. I kept on going willy-nilly. This almost child-like piece of Lerner and Loewe's has most extraordinary effects on people sometimes. Weirdly eerie. Some people, intelligent ones too, come backstage and are seemingly struck dumb, apparently speechless or incoherent with emotion. Others wait until they have stopped crying before they come to see me. Others though are untouched, or appear to be so and are as bland as bananas. One thing I've learned though or understood rather from personal experience: The emotional impact of a supple voice speaking lovely sounding banalities can shatter even the most cynical and blasé of audiences. They tell me that Lloyd George was a genius at it and I suppose too Senator Ed Kennedy's
speech the other day was something of the same thing. Alex Cohen [...] said much the same thing. Oddly enough he (Alex) gave me a book by Tom Wicker which recalls that frightening Republican Convention when Eisenhower talked of the press and the ‘media’ as being enemies of ‘the Party.‘
²¹
Wicker says that the mass hatred of the conventioners was appalling and frightening. But then it is
and always has
been a frightening world. I am convinced that the self congratulatory, self and modestly named ‘homo sapiens’ is stark mad. Raving. And the beautiful Earth's greatest enemy. I hope we are a dying species, like dinosaurs and mastodons and brontosauruses, and that we will disappear in a few years, a few hundred years, a few thousand years or whatever so that some other sane species will evolve and nurture this heavenly accident we live on.

There is an idiotic amount of fuss going on twixt batteries of lawyers about the fact that the management are flogging T-shirts which bear my name and likeness and
Camelot
. [...] Lawyers are an abomination and should all be hurled into outer darkness.

Two shows today, one today and every day until we leave for Chicago. God save the mark.
²²
Kafka and those lawyers haunt me still. I'll get on to Kafka tonight perhaps instead of watching the
Avengers
or Bogart or Clark Gable or
Cannon
.
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