The Richard Burton Diaries (73 page)

E was funny last night. She must have come in to see me ten times during the course of the night, dog-tired as she was, because she said she couldn't sleep without me. She's a funny odd old thing and needs comfort. She could be easily lonely.

I have either lost or mislaid Liza's irastosable letter. I shall go mad if I can't find it. [...]

Wednesday 13th
I said yesterday that the day might turn out to be irastosable, and it did. E said last night that I behaved just like Rachel Roberts. Probably I did, which is just as well as it means that we'll never be invited again to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor's soirées. And thank God, he said fervently. Rarely have I been so stupendously bored. There were 22 people for dinner and only two names did I know or remember, and that was from history – the Count and Countess of Bismarck.
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And he, the Count, looks as much like
one's mental picture of the iron chancellor as spaghetti. Soft and round and irresolute. He couldn't carve modern Germany out of cardboard. The iron of his grandfather didn't enter his soul.
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It is extraordinary how small the Duke and Duchess are. Two tiny figures like Toto and Nanette that you keep on the mantelpiece.
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Chipped around the edges. Something you keep in the front room for Sundays only. Marred Royalty. The awful majesty that doth hedge around a king is notably lacking in awfulness.
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Charming and feckless.

I took my coat to work and Rex confessed that he was jealous. Latterly he has been calling me me ‘darling.’ I call everybody ‘love’ so I suppose it's rubbed off. He tried on the mink and I had difficulty getting it off him. It, of course, looks superb on him. He wears clothes as only a coathanger can. Clothes, no matter how dreadful, drape themselves around him, knowing that they have come home at last.

E just reminded me that at one point I said to the Duchess last night: ‘You are, without any question, the most vulgar woman I've ever met.’ Waaaaash! She also just told me that we were the only people at the dinner party who didn't have titles. Little does she know that we've made her the Princess of Pontrhydyfen. The Duke, says E, was furious with everybody that he wasn't sitting next to her, and I was furious that I wasn't sitting next to the Duchess. I was surrounded by two American ladies, one was a Duchess and the other a Countess. They were hard-faced pretty and youngish like ads for Suzy Nickerbocker's column, which I've only read once.
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One of them said that she had seen me as Hamlet in New York, and actually asked me how could I possibly remember the lines. I told her that I never did actually get them straight and that some of my improvisations on speeches which I hated and therefore could never recall would have been approved by the lousy actor-writer himself. I told her that once I spoke ‘To be or not to be’ in German to an American audience, but she obviously didn't believe me. I told her there were certain aspects of Hamlet, I mean the man, so revolting that one could only do them when drunk. The frantic self-pity of ‘How all occasions do inform against me and spur my dull revenge.’ You have to be sloshed to get around that. At least I have to be. I think I must have shocked her.

Another lady, not a day under seventy, who's face had been lifted so often that it was on top of her head asked me if it were true that all actors were queer. I said yes, which was the reason why I was married to Elizabeth who also, because of her profession, was queer, but that we had an arrangement. Her face, in its excitement, nearly joined her chin. ‘What,’ she said, ‘do you do?’
‘Well,’ I said, as straight as a die, ‘she lives in one suite, and I in another, and we make love by telephone.’ If she believes that she'll believe anything.

At another moment apparently I picked up the Duchess and swung and swung her around like a dancing singing dervish. Elizabeth was terrified that I'd drop her or fall down and kill her. Christ! I will arise and go now and go home to Welsh miners who understand drink and the idiocies that it arouses.
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Holy mother, they had to have licensing laws to cure us, and we were incurable. I shall die of drink and make-up.

The reason why there are two pages, instead of one, in today's entry for the idiot stakes, is because I have nothing better to do. [...] I have been up since about eight, and Elizabeth tried to lock me in the spare bedroom, and so I was constrained to try and kick the door down, and nearly succeeded which meant that I spent some time on my hands and knees this morning picking up the battered plaster in the hope that the waiters wouldn't notice that the hotel had nearly lost a door in the middle of the night [...]

Thursday 14th
Yesterday was a day as doomed as the Hittites but more delightful, that is to say, nobody died. Many curious things happened. Rachel, who is always pretty good value for a diary, showed everybody her pubic hairs, and as a dessert lay down on the floor in a mini-skirt and showed her bum to anyone who cared to have a glance. Outrage, in Rachel's case, has now become normal. If she had a cup of tea with a ginger-snap and made polite conversation about modern poetry, we would all go mad and display our private parts to visiting tourists. I wasn't much help. She said at one point over my dying body to Rex, hooded-eyed and malevolent, ‘I don't care about his hard-faced blondes.’ No response. So she said again: ‘I don't care about his hard-faced blondes.’ ‘Neither,’ I said with a laugh as false as a dentist's assurance, ‘do I.’

I've just received a letter from Cathleen Nesbitt with a poem, ‘in his own write’ as she says John Lennon would say, written about her by Rupert Brooke.
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I shall write a poem for her in the next short course of my life or pack in the idea of courtesy for ever. What a lady. They bred ‘em good in the old days. She is the only old lady, she is near 80 years old, that I could imagine making love to. [...]

I'd better be off and to work because I behaved with a fair amount of disgrace yesterday. I drank, so I gather from my friends, three bottles of Vodka, during the course of the day. And that, naturally, doesn't include the evening when I think I slowed down. But it is not a good idea to drink so much. I shall miss all the marriages of all my various children, and they'll be angry because there'll be nobody around, apart from their mother, to make bad puns.

Everybody was very kind about me. The director was nice and Rex, feeling himself in the ascendant superior and having received my confession, was good enough to say that with three Hail Marys and a smart visit to the lavatory and a touch of ipepacuana, I would stand a fairish chance of being absolved.
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[...]

Friday 15th
Yesterday passed well enough, though I had a rough time with Aaron who is so sorry for himself that it prevents one from having, temporarily at any rate, any sympathy for him. He has the beginnings of multiple sclerosis, which so the
Oxford Dictionary
says is a ‘morbid hardening of tissue’. Lovely. If he turns his head quickly, he loses his balance and is likely to fall down. If I had it, even mildly like Aaron, it would mean the end of my career. One could hardly act if one was going to fall over every time one turned one's head. Aaron can still function and will continue to do so for an ordinary lifetime. So he's lucky in an unlucky way. But it frightens me to see people frightened. I don't think I'll be frightened when the call comes. I hope.

As most days my dressing room was a fishbowl, open to everyone's view. There was Aaron and a drunk James Wishart, and a reporter called Jim Bacon.
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Cathleen Nesbitt came in for a drink. [...] Rex was in splendid form, giggling and chortling and gurgly. We had the umpty-ninth telegram from Dick Zanuck saying that though he knew he sounded like a broken record he had to tell us again that the latest batch of film was superb etc. In his telegrams he calls Rex and myself ‘the boys.’ Sixty and Forty-three.

I dread today. First I have to act, which I like doing sometimes, but not today. Second I have Aaron and his endless questions about legal nothings. Third, I'm likely to have a room full of people again. Fourth, I'd like to be alone with E for about two hundred years but can't even get two days – we're off to Guy and Marie-Hélène Rothschild's house for the weekend. I love the house and love them so maybe it will be alright. We don't go until tomorrow and we'll probably come back on Monday morning.

[...] On reflection I realize how dreadful Aaron's disease is. Caroline, who is wise as an old woman, told me that from her experience of it the worst thing is the gradual loss of independence. You have to be guided and manoeuvred [...] wherever you go. I don't think I'd fancy that much.

Saturday 16th
Yesterday was alright after all. I pleaded pressure of work and ‘important scenes coming up’ to cut down Aaron's sesquipedalian questions. Eventually he went off to E's studio but told me later that all he received was a
vague and charming smile and the offer of a drink. So he and James Wishart came back to my place and eventually came home with me in the car. [...] They had a drink with me while I waited for E to come home.

The day went better than expected and I think my acting was good, my weariness giving it a sort of nervous intensity that compensated for lack of enthusiasm. Rex was very good and the sailor too. He doesn't have a word to say but he says them very well, as ‘twere. His name is Stephen Lewis, very tall and very cockney.
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I asked him if my accent was authentic enough. He said it was perfect.

E told me that Princess E called her up yesterday and said that she missed E so much that she was wondering if she could come over next week. E said, ‘Come off it, Elisheba, it's not me you miss but Warren Beatty.’ My E then turned into the den-mother and dished out advice to the effect that W.B. was a player of the field, and purported at least, to be in love with a film actress called Julie Christie.
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And that Neil, Elisheba's manfriend of the moment was an infinitely better deal etc. etc., but naturally when a woman is set on a certain course of action, order turns into chaos and logic to insanity.
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[...] Perhaps we should explain to her that the six million dollars he realized out of
Bonnie and Clyde
, as I heard yesterday, because of ill-advice from lawyers, has virtually disappeared like the morning mist before the rising sun.
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[...]

As mentioned before in this writing, I'm not quite sure about Elisheba. Bess says I'm wrong, but I think for a time, until I get to know her, I shall wear armour on my back, where the daggers go in. [...]

Aaron said in his cups last night that I was the most intelligent man he'd ever met! And he'd met them all, he went on wildly. Supreme court judges, philosophers, Jack Kennedy, eminent doctors, great actor and Uncle Tom Cobbley and all. I curtsied sweetly but I like the flattery so much that I've gone to the trouble of putting it down in this diary, haven't I? A pebble on the shore of the great sea of knowledge and thank you Sir Isaac Newton.
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I think I'll try sleeping for an hour to succour my massive brain. [...]

Sunday 17th, Chateau de Ferrières, Seine et Marne
Sunday morning in my favourite house, it is almost midday and the first snow has come in the night [...]. Yesterday was a bit wearing with a great deal of talk and oddly enough I
was not in a very talky mood but was forced to. We brought Caroline with us to show her the house and grounds, and E says that she was very thrilled, as well she might be. [...]

Guy and David were here when we arrived, we met the latter coming out of the trees with a shot rabbit in one hand and a pheasant in the other.
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The two young boys and a pretty little girl cousin were with. Philippe the youngest had shot the rabbit.
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It was the first bag of his young life. Also here on arrival was Guy's daughter Lili who has to lie down a great deal as she had a clot on the brain about two months ago.
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She says that the whole thing was brought on by the unhappy coincidence of a malfunctioning kidney and the famous ‘Pill.’ The pill that orally taken every day prevents women from having babies. She also said that young girls of eighteen and twenty are struck down by the pill and not having her luck, have died.

The elevator refused to work at the end of the day so Lili's husband and I carried her, fireman fashion, up to her room.
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I was puffing a bit as it is two floors up.

Most of the conversation before Marie Hélène arrived, was about sexual aberrations. Guy says he knew a man who could only make love if the woman was naked except for bottines-a-boutons, that is old-fashioned fin-de-siecle button-up boots like one's granny used to wear. Sam Spiegel, he said that poor Sam can only get excited if a woman defecates onto his face. [...]

Marie Helene arrived in a great state of excitement having had her make-up done for four hours by Alberto de Rossi.
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It wasn't received very well. She is quite an ugly woman with a large hooked nose and an almost negroid mouth but very beautiful blind eyes, and the vivacity of her manner and her machine gun delivery in both languages makes her very attractive.

I don't know why I find it surprising when rich people are intelligent, after all they have the advantages from birth of superb educations, and the money to hire the best tutors etc., but Guy and his son David are as bright as buttons, especially the former. And they both have a very witty turn of phrase. David makes bad puns which I adore. [...]

There were thirteen for dinner so two tables were made up side by side to allay any superstition. At one point I mentioned Onassis's name and a bitter quarrel sprang up between Marie-Hélène and Lili. The former adamant that the Onassises would never be invited to her house, and Lili and myself saying that they would be invited to ours.

Monday 18th
Yesterday was a dream day. We slept until noon and discovered to our delight that lunch was a high tea at 4.30. So we ordered breakfast in our rooms. Bacon and eggs and brioche, homemade, toast from homemade bread, little apples, home grown. Then for me, while E stayed in bed and read a book, a long walk through the woods and the snow. Distantly and occasionally I could hear sounds of the shoot. E waved to me from the window. The lake was starting to freeze over and the ducks and swans were slowly swimming along the still unfrozen channels, very slowly and for some reason, comically.