The Richard Burton Diaries (70 page)

The whole evening was a fiasco for everyone except our party. First the film was mediocre. Then the dinner party was catastrophic. [...] The place, I still don't know where it is, was so overcrowded that the waiters had difficulty in getting between the tables. A great many people never were served at all. Hair-dos and Tiaras were knocked over or askew by desperately over-worked waiters. Rachel at one point having been jostled from behind by some poor sod of a waiter for the umpteenth time threated to kill him as well as Rex! At another point she started feeling and hugging Alexis de Redé who was aristocratically polite. [...] I wouldn't be disenchanted if I never saw Rex and Rachel drunk again. We got to bed about 7.30 in the morning and got up at 10 to go and visit Paul-Emile Victor and his family. We were naturally a bit shaky but they were very kind. We visited with them a houseboat which costs $70,000 and which we might buy. It would cost at least as much again to fix up Beth says. I still yearn for a converted power barge. Why shouldn't I? Life is very short and we give away a great deal of money. [...]

Last night we had for what was supposed to be drinks but turned out to be supper as well and went on till 2 in the morning, Linda Mortimer and her husband Henry, an American and a nice young man called Bill who say that they can virtually guarantee us an average of 34% interest on our investments. It seems incredible. Should I give them a million dollars and see what they do with it in a year. An income of $340,000 a year from a million is staggering to the imagination. I told them that my idea of absolute financial bliss was an annual income of a million dollars a year. Without working. They thought that very reasonable. It's a far cry from 1925 and the helpless poverty of the valleys.

A beautiful morning, Bessie still asleep, dogs and cat running around, so now to wake my blissly beautiful animal girl and read the Sunday newspapers together. I am fantastically lucky. Don't spoil it nobody, boys, fellers.

Monday 21st
Another beautiful but cold morning. Onassis married Jackie to what appears to be the general disapproval of the USA. At least that's what the papers say. We shall send them a telegram of congratulations today sometime. Dick Hanley says she will be declared a ‘public sinner.’ I said that she should be declared a public winner. In a comical world the Vatican is sometimes the most comical thing in it. I remember some years ago that the
Osservatore Romano
, however one spells it, recommended that Elizabeth was an unfit mother for her children and that they should be forcibly removed from her!
⁷⁶
Silly pompous asses.

We spent the day quietly and got out of the Callas Beatty dinner. Three nights in a row for people who hardly dine with others or outside more than once a week when we're working is a bit strong. [...]

I wrote a longish letter to Kate. The next two tasks are letters to Mike and Chris. I am very bad about letter writing and always have been. I have just acquired a four volume collection of Orwell's papers and he had the same problem but to an agonising degree.
⁷⁷
For an innately courteous man it is very hard on the conscience to find yourself hiding letters in drawers because of your feeling of guilt. Then suddenly I will write 20 in a morning and then perhaps nothing for a month except absolute musts like letters to the children, especially Kate in New York as I see her less than anyone. [...]

Tuesday 22nd
I went to work slightly apprehensive of Rex's reaction to Friday night's fiasco. I learned that Rachel and Rex were standing near their car after the supper was over being photographed when suddenly the photographers saw Eliz appearing and abandoned the two Harrisons. Rachel in a red Welsh fury screamed ‘I'm the star of this fucking show not that fucking Elizabeth Taylor etc.’ The photographers took no notice but it was in the cheaper French papers next day so Tommy Thompson told me. I can understand her feelings but the one way to attract indignity is to shout it to the Press. Ingrid Bergman who was there and who was equally ignored was as calm and regal as ever.
⁷⁸
She is still very beautiful. Thank God the Windsors and the Rainiers had the sense not to turn up. The film had bad notices. [...] Apart from our own first nights, and if possible, not even those, we are not going to such childish affairs again. [...]

The Onassis Kennedy thing still fills the papers. It's odd that you have to search for the news of the three Yanks in orbit in the Apollo.
⁷⁹
The Vatican says that Mrs Onassis has sinned against her church etc as expected as ever. We sent Onassis a telegram of congratulations yesterday.

Tommy Thompson told me an oddly flat little story yesterday. He said that the American Ambassador Shriver was shooting with the General on his estates with other Ambassadors, when he, Shriver, a self-confessed poor shot brought down a bird.
⁸⁰
It landed with a thud two feet from the General. And the General said, (wait for it!) ‘Splendide.’ Now the odd thing is that both Thompson, fairly hard-boiled and very cynical about other public figures and Shriver, who presumably has met a great many Kings and Counsellors of the earth, should consider this nothing story indicative of the courage, sagacity and wit of De Gaulle. The impact of this old fraud's personality must be enormous for that one word to receive the awed report of the head of
Life
Magazine in Europe and the American Ambassador. I'd kick him in the arse if I could reach that high. [...]

Wednesday 23rd
Elizabeth tells me that Jacqueline de Ribes, Marie Helene,
and
Baron Alexis are all mad for Warren Beatty. They continually phone E or Warren or each other scheming to get him. Poor bastard. The only really attractive one to my mind is Bettina. But what a world. One's read of the upper-class French morality but never really believed it, or thought it out of date. But not a bit of it. Jacqueline has several lovers and her husband knows it. He has a mistress and his wife knows it. Marie Helene has a lover who is Alexis who has a lover who is a man. Bettina has many lovers but she is rather square in that she is not married. Phew! All this gossip I get from Elizabeth in whom they confide. I have an idea that Marie Helene and Jacqueline were after me for a time about two years ago but gave me up as a bad job.

[...] The Onassises have disappeared completely from the front-pages and for the most part from the papers altogether. I told Elizabeth that they didn't have our stamina. I also said with great smugness that he had given her a wedding present of only ‘slightly less than £100,000 of diamonds precious stones etc.’ whereas I had only recently given a £127,000 diamond ring simply because it was a Tuesday. I enjoy being outrageous with Beth. [...]

Thursday 24th
I have a very tedious couple of days ahead of me I suspect. It is likely to be so because I wear the completely bald alopecian wig. It is not porous and once on cannot be taken off, so I am going to sweat a great great
deal. Still for a $1 [million] and a quarter a picture one mustn't grumble. But of course I will. Elizabeth also is receiving $1
¹
/
₄
[million] for her picture. That will mean that this year we will have earned in cash between us $4
¹
/
₂
[million]. Which is immoral. In addition to this there are many percentages coming in e.g. $
¹
/
₂
m from
Shrew
. Roughly a million goes out on living and overheads, yacht and crew, plane and pilots, secretaries and staff chauffeurs. Aaron Frosch once said that between us we created as much business as a small African state. I can believe him. There is, however and plainly, quite a profit. Of course once we stop working the overheads will drop tremendously but even so it will cost about $
¹
/
₄
[million] a year to live on our particular scale. [...]

I have been drinking much less lately and feel much better for it. I wish I could stop smoking and get my taste-buds back in order again. It is a pity to be missing on one gastronomic cylinder with such largesse abroad in Paris. However we hardly ever go out to eat and the food in the hotel though splendid in the dining room downstairs is indifferent once carried upstairs. I noticed that at the Savoy and the Dorchester too. I'm told that they are different kitchens. We have now put in a tiny two-burner stove upon which Beth can cook at the weekends and on which I can make my packaged soups and tea in the dead vast and middle of the night.
⁸¹

I awoke this morning at about 5.30, and got up after vainly trying to go back to sleep, at 6.30. I ran over the scenes I have to do today and tomorrow, read the
Herald Tribune
, and went back to bed about 8.30. I fell into a nightmared sleep so profound that E had difficulty in waking me at 10.15. I complained albeit gently that I didn't have to be in work until one o'clock. For some reason I dreamt about Herbert Humphrey and we were riding in a motor-cycle side-car to a place that I think on reflection was either Northampton, England, or an outer featureless suburb like Croydon.
⁸²
I must be worried about the American elections without being all that consciously aware. Cor mate.

Friday 25th
Yesterday, because I anticipated the worst, was better than expected and Ron did an excellent job with the bald wig. Judiciously lighted it looks absolutely authentic. Elizabeth thinks it looks lovely and that I look as good as Yul Brynner! [...]

Despite being self warned about yesterday's discomforts I was still like a bear all day long, but kept myself under control for the most part until at the end of the day I had a few drinks and started being more and more sarcastic until in the end, by the time I arrived home I was downright boorish and did
my usual trick of going to bed in the other room alone. Why, as Ivor says, do I do it?

One of the actors in E's film called Charles Braswell called and had a drink in my room.
⁸³
[...] Obviously awed that he is acting opposite E, he told stories rather desperately about Lucille Ball and Angela Lansbury, trying to show, no doubt, that ETB was not the only starfish in the sea.
⁸⁴
I told him not to worry about my lady and that she was infinitely easy to work with. I suspect it is his first film role though he has been around Broadway for years. He is about 45 years old I guess, and that's late to begin in films.
⁸⁵

The enemy is insidiously attacking again. Beth read in the papers that Ari Onassis had given Jackie half a million pounds worth of rubies surrounded by diamonds. Now Missy already has, as a result of former battles against useless yours-truly, one of the greatest diamonds in the world and probably the most breathtaking private collection of emeralds surrounded by diamonds also in the world. Now the Battle of the Rubies is on. I wonder who'll win. It will be a long attritive war and the idea has already been implanted that I shouldn't let myself be out-done by a bloody Greek. I can be just as vulgar as he can, I say to myself. Well now to get the money.

Elliott Kastner came from London yesterday and told about flying to the Palace Hotel in Montreux to read Nabokov's new book, which he hasn't yet finished, and for which he asks $1m.
⁸⁶
All the film boys have been flying into Switzerland in a desperate attempt to be the first to press a million green ones into his hot little Russian palm. How was the book, I said to Kastner? Great, he said. How long is it, I asked? Eight hundred pages. How the devil did you manage to read it in six hours? [...] Well, he said, I read half and Alan (his friend and assistant) read the other half. How then, I said, can you tell it's a great book? You've only read half of an unfinished book. He said he trusted Alan's judgement and presumably Nabokov's too. Funny way to buy a book. [...]

Saturday 26th
Yesterday I finished the scene in which I am wearing the bald wig. [...] It only remains for me to be off-stage for Rex on Monday, who declined to work the full time because he had a series of tongue-twisting speeches and was tiring rapidly he said. [...] So we will begin half an hour earlier on Monday.

Elliott Kastner had lunch with us in the dressing room. [...] Elliott wants Elizabeth to do a film at the same time as I do
Anne of the Thousand Days
. Since so far he has been a man of his word it might be a good idea [...] because Beth plainly enjoys working when the script, people and co-star or stars are
congenial. And it's much better for her than sitting at home and twiddling her thumbs. Apart from anything else Bess does no shopping herself. Everything has to be sent to the Hotel as there is a mob scene generally after she's been in a shop for more than twenty minutes. [...] So the common ordinary joys of shopping, which can deliciously, at least for women, waste endless time are denied to the poor little rich girl.

Rachel Harrison came to my room about 6 o'clock and proceeded very quickly to get drunk. While she was there Elizabeth called me from the Hotel, she had a day off yesterday, and I asked Rache if she'd like to speak to her. Yes, she said, and then, without any preamble, began to bark into the phone. Literally. Like her dog – an adorable Basset Hound called Homer. And that's all she did. Barked and barked. Eliz tells me she was so embarrassed that she didn't know what to do. She is a mad case of alcoholism. After the idiocy of her behaviour last Friday night she had the drunken effrontery to ask me if she were allowed to apologise on my behalf for what Rosemary Harris considered to be an insult on that same night, namely that I'd pinched her bottom and said ‘I detest you.‘
⁸⁷
Now first of all, I behaved well that night. Secondly, I've never pinched anyone's bottom in my life, I've patted them. Thirdly, from a Welsh miner or his son, ‘I detest you’ to someone he is very fond of means ‘I adore you.’ Which in Rosemary's case is true, and which she knows. Rex, hearing the tail-end of Rachel's tale said that she had got it all wrong and that Rosemary was actually not complaining but telling her new husband how
sweet and unchanged I was
, so there! Anyway Rosemary is 40 years old and I've patted her bottom for about 15 years incessantly telling her how much I loathe her. Rachel was obviously trying to obviate her own guilt.