The Richard Burton Diaries (81 page)

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 One's read of the upper-class French morality but never really believed it, or thought it out of date.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.

Sunday 27th
It's 10.30 in the morning and a dullish kind of day. We are going out to lunch in the village where Maurice Chevalier lives, somewhere in the forest of St Cloud.
⁸⁸
The restaurant is called La Tete Negre or something like that.
⁸⁹

Yesterday we stayed in all day, read newspapers, did crosswords and read detective stories. I also read part of the first volume of Holroyd's book about Lytton Strachey. I had read the second volume first while E was in hospital this summer. The first volume is obviously not, so far, going to be as enthralling as the second. It is painstakingly copious but may pick up a bit as it gets on. [...]

Earlier on this week in this diary I had said that we might be going down to the yacht this weekend because there was a public holiday on Friday. This is
not so. The holiday is next weekend. The following guests are due, and I thought it was going to be a quiet three days: Princess Elizabeth of Jugoslavia and a friend of hers, Bettina, Norma Heyman and her lover, Caroline, Simoleke, a friend of the boys’ from Millfield and of course the boys themselves.
⁹⁰
With us that makes a total of twelve, which is practically a full house. I hope to God the weather's good or it's going to be pretty close quarters for such a mob. I am longing to see the boys and can always slope off with them to Nice, with Elizabeth [...]

The Sunday papers are fairly dull today and the Olympics are down to the dreary stage of canoeing and foils etc. and has none of the drama of the demonstrations of ‘black power’ which we had last week from Tommie Smith and Carlos.
⁹¹
Sammy Davis Jun. told me the last time he was in Paris, a couple of weeks ago, that it was no longer considered kosher or ‘in’ to call Negroes Negroes but blacks. From nigger to negro to black to brown betcha!

Monday 28th
Yesterday was a strange and semi-lost one. We went to lunch at a restaurant called Hostellerie de la Tete Noire. Megirl was a little late getting ready which for some reason, and I should be used to it by now, threw me into a fury which I didn't really recover from all day. I tried my damnedest to be nice later on at lunch and later on again when Simoleke arrived but my bloody temper kept on breaking through. I went for a long walk with my little dog and got myself thoroughly lost. As usual I had gone out without money in my pocket and so I couldn't stop and have a drink, which perhaps is just as well. I was in some very deserted street, very odd that it should be so empty and silent while only, as I discovered later, a stone's throw from the Champs Elysees, when a sort of hard-bitten girl came around the corner. I swallowed my pride at being lost and asked her ‘Ou est l'avenue Montaigne, s'il vous plait?’ ‘I don't know,’ she replied in English. I thanked her and walked on. Suddenly I realized she had turned and was walking beside me. ‘Vous aimez Paris?’ she asked. ‘Oui, je l'adore,’ I replied, picked up E'en So and crossed the road in a sort of urgent half-walk half-trot as if I were the prettiest little virgin in town. I had been made a pass at! First time for years. I wonder if she was a tart.

[...] When I arrived back in the hotel I persuaded E to put on some slacks promising that I would take her and Sime to the pizzeria. I of course couldn't find it and we ended up at Fouquet's where we had ‘Haddock Poche a L'Anglaise’ with ‘Pommes Vapeur.‘
⁹²
We washed it down with a bottle of Hock.

Simoleke became very tearful because, she said, she felt so guilty about her luck in being adopted by Howard and Mara while the rest of her family, there
are 16 in all, were living in uneducated poverty in Samoa. We said that when she started to earn money she could help them out, at least financially, as I have helped my family and Elizabeth hers. But it was hard to console her. [...] I suspected that she was something less than loyal to Howard and Mara but E says I am mistaken. I love Howard and Mara so much and admire them so greatly, particularly Howard, that I may be over-protective. And we know how deeply he loves the girl and how much disciplined agony it must cost him to send her half way around the world away from him.

Riots in London yesterday and a front-page picture of a Bobby being kicked in the face.
⁹³
I don't know where my sympathies lie, my own two boys will be on those marches before long, but if either of them kicked somebody else in the face without provocation I would be constrained to kick him sharply in the behind. Not that either of them would ever do such a thing, he said fondly and hopefully. [...]

Tuesday 29th
I received a letter from Francis Warner yesterday asking if I could or would become a don at St Peter's, Oxford, sometime shortly.
⁹⁴
I am very excited and am going to write to him suggesting that I should go up for the summer of 1970. He will, he says, give us his chambers and I shall offer to swap them for the yacht and our various houses. He needs a sabbatical he says. How funny it will be to be lecturing at Oxford without a degree! Now I've always had this pregnant woman's yearning for the academic life, probably spurious, and a term of smelly tutorials and pimply lectures should effect a sharp cure. I would like to deal with either the mediaeval poets in English, French, Italian and German and possibly some of the Celtic like Welsh and Irish, or to confine myself to the ‘Fantasticks’ Donne, Traherne, Henry Vaughn George Herbert. The first poem in English that ever commanded my imagination: