The Richard Burton Diaries (96 page)

John himself, at the moment looks pretty emaciated. They recently had to remove a perforated ulcer and it became very dangerous. He had nearly destroyed himself over a girl called Joanna Shimkus, an actress who had left him for the Negro actor Sidney Poitier.
¹³⁶
Sometimes I think that Jews are instinctive masochists, much as I admire them. Holy God, I could see what that girl was after five minutes. It took him three years and a smashed stomach. And almost his life. He is though a lovely man and loves my wife, in the best
sense of the word of course, and is going to take her out to the cinema when I'm at work. Isn't it strange that the only two enthusiasms we do not share are fried chicken and films. I have learned to love bagels and Lox and hot dogs and she has learned to love caviare and rarish steaks.
¹³⁷
But no accord have with fried chicken and films. I like her though, and God knows, she has a lot to put up with. I mean, there are times when I think I am slightly out of my mind. And there are times when I am. [...]

Saturday 31st,
Kalizma
, Thames
[...] Yesterday was what one might call eventful. I tested at the studio, I danced with Gin who is, perhaps out of nerves, turning into a bit of a tiresome bore; I had lunch with E and C at the ‘Guinea’, I went to Berman's and fitted costumes; I went on the yacht; I was told by Gaston who was crying proper tears that ‘Madame’ didn't like him anymore because the Cadillac which she had given him and which he has apparently gone into business with Ron Ringer ensemble was being rented out to Elliott Kastner who in turn was assigning it to, of all people, the ineffable Claire Bloom.
¹³⁸
E was in a rare tear. Gaston is a good chap but he made the fatal error of lying to her, I suppose. The French, with all their pretence to a perpetual renaissance of the brilliance in all forms of art etc. etc. really have never taken their eyes off the franc. It is, of course, fairly ridiculous that with four cars
one
has not been available to Mabel [Elizabeth] at all times. If I survive the day, which I doubt, I will start laying down the law. I mean, after all, that Bob Wilson, whom I love but is perfectly useless, has eternal use of E's Rolls. He shall be forced to ride in an Austin Princess.
¹³⁹
Hardship. I'll give him black power. I'll give him Welsh Power. Note the difference in capitals.

Fortunately, towards the close of the day, Tim Hardy came on board.
¹⁴⁰
His mind delights me and I forget, every so often, how much I adore and miss him. He talks as good as you can get, and has the charm of the angels. I think that I am, despite my ferocious attachment to the working-class, an admirer of the true aristocrat, particularly if he is cleverer than I am. And Tim after all is a direct descendant of Richard
III
. Honest. And he is cleverer than I am. What a terrible admission from a son of the soil. He is, I think, the 135th direct descendant of Alfred the Great, whereas the present Queen is only the 135th
indirect
descendant. He had come on board simply to tell me that Henry VIII was a great archer and show me exactly how to do it. Greater love hath no actor than that. Most people, he said last night when I expressed distaste for Buck's Club, love a Lord, but I love Dukes.
¹⁴¹
It gives me, he said, great pleasure
to dine at Buck's with a Duke in one corner and a Duke over my shoulder, and another Duke asking me if I could spare him a fiver. So there you are. Every man to his pleasure. I, personally, would prefer Welsh miners. But I'm perverse. Caroline stayed on the yacht. I love that child and forced to choose between a Duke and Caroline, I would take the latter. I'm not sure about a miner.

JUNE

Saturday 7th
[...] I had a hard day yesterday. Gareth had come aboard with us the night before and we spent half the night sitting up and talking and drinking with me insulting E for most of the time.
¹⁴²
Then off to work at the crack of dawn to face a long scene with Gin Bujold in which I had to do most of the talking. She'll be alright I suppose though she doesn't have enough dynamite and spit and venom and arrogance for the part, but of course I always am thinking in the remote rear of my cranium how marvellous E would be and how much better. I got through it well enough and then, Oh blessed relief, I had to work with Tony Quayle and Michael Hordern. Marvellous pair of pros and no rubbish and cunning as snakes. I held my own I think. They have every shrug, nod, beck, sideways glance and shifting of eyes ever invented. I said to the director that it was somewhat akin to playing between the frying-pan and the fire. All Michael Hordern had to say was ‘Yes, your Grace.’ He must have said four hesitant ‘yours’ and the three words, uttered in his inimitable way became slightly longer than
Hamlet
. Uncut. They both varied the time of their readings in an unconscious effort to ‘throw’ each other off, and me. But I'm too old a hand. I ‘threw’ them a couple of times too. None said a word to each other about it but all three old bastards knew bloody well that when that camera is purring it's every man for himself. Of course if you are the ‘star’ or the ‘money’ as the technicians call it you can afford to be magnanimous because the ‘money’ is almost automatically protected but it's as well to know what the hell you're up to. And to let them know that you know what they are up to. There is of course nothing malicious about it, but it is deep in the subconscious.

[...] The two babies arrived from La Suisse and I suddenly realized that after work on the film I had to do the narration for the investiture of the Prince of Wales. And after that Winston Churchill and 5 Dukes of Marlborough for the Son et Lumiere at Blenheim Palace.
¹⁴³
Cor! Was I whacked. Liza is turning into a young lady and I don't think there's much wrong with Maria's intelligence. Thank God! It's the first time I've thought that she stands a chance in the rough world without us.

Sunday 8th
[...] Yesterday was a soporific day. We lazed about all day with the din of a factory pump thumping in our ears. I called it Gorgonzola, because it went to the rhythm of that aromatic cheese: GORGONZOLA, GOR-GON-ZOLA etc. all day long. [...]

I cannot take my eyes off Liza. Her eyes are the most beautiful I've ever seen and I love her to the point of pain. Perhaps because she's so like her mother. And Maria, to repeat, is going to be alright, J'espere.

I had the frights again yesterday – the second weekend in a row, God Blast It! E and I were going to make love in the afternoon and while cleaning herself on the bidet, she began to bleed from her bumsie. And I mean BLEED. Not your pale pink variety but thick clots of blood that had to be fingered into disappearing down the drain. I sat with her and stroked her and tried to comfort her as best as I could. It finally stopped but I nightmared a great deal. In fact, after two weekends of torment on the yacht, I have mentally re-named the place ‘Nightmare Stairs’ and not Princes.
¹⁴⁴
I searched E's bumsy very often to check up on its progress. It is an extraordinary thing to look up somebody's ass-hole, and a beautiful ass it is, and to do it not with lust or sex in mind, but with love.

And a little fear. I mean a great deal of fear. She is better this morning and the excrescences have receded a considerable amount, but I shall not feel safe until she's seen a Doctor though,
under no circumstances
, is the knife to be employed. There are other ways.

Wednesday 11th, Dorchester
Yesterday the two girls, Liza and Maria, left to go back to school. Simmy has, in effect, been expelled from Montesano ‘for’ SHE SAYS ‘being late for Sunday dinner and not being on time for roll-call!‘
¹⁴⁵
A likely story. Now we will have to employ all what little charm we have to get the Headmaster to change his mind so that she can at least finish the term. [...] Raymond, the chief steward told E, who didn't tell me until last night that once last term Simmy asked if she could bring some friends up to the chalet for tea. He said OK and she arrived with a boy of about 18 and another girl of her own age, which is 19. By the time they went back to school Simmy had imbibed a whole bottle of vodka.
Our
vodka. And the best of Samoan luck.

Scrumptious Kate is with us still and so far has come to work with me every morning, despite having to get up about 6 o'clock of a morning. All adore her and my leading lady in the film asked if she were for sale. I said that if she were I'd buy her myself.

[...] E looked very exciting in the shortest mini-skirt. The slightest inclination from the vertical and her entire bum was revealed to the admiring gaze.

Thursday 12th,
Kalizma
, Thames
I have been up since 5.10. and obviously I caught the best part of the day since from 5 until 7 the boat was, and the river and shore, as quiet as a condemned cell, but now that infernal factory has started up again with its GOR-GON-ZOLA recurring and recurring. [...] Kate and Elizabeth are whole-fast asleep and it is hardly possible for any Prince to have greater love for a sleeping beauty than I have for them. Those. Two sleeping beauties.

[...] Kate went to see Ivor yesterday. I finished a little early on the film and went straight back to the hotel where, a little later, Kate joined us, and Michael Todd, and we all repaired to the yacht. Michael is a very rewarding and good and funny man and is a pleasure to be around. I hope that before long he will make an enormous success in his own right and not in the shadow of his father. It's a hell of a burden, I imagine, to have a famous father who was also a famous personality. In my case I have only the private memory of my father to compete against. [...]

[...] Elisheba, the dangerous woman, the Princess of Jugoslavia, is about to marry Neil Something-Or-Other, a charming English barrister, and they are due to come on board for lunch.
¹⁴⁶
I utterly approve of the marriage, but I wouldn't like to be in his shoes. She is beautiful – about the only Princess who is – but she has a dismissive mind and tongue to match which can only come from a childhood of immense disillusions. She is as cynical as a freed slave, who rid of his master, finds that he was poorer than he was before. She would never marry Neil if she were a true Princess. They wouldn't allow her to.

Saturday 14th
I love my wife. I love her dearly. Honest. Talk about the beauty, silent, bare ... Sitting on the Thames with the river imitating a blue-grey ghost. My God the very houses seem asleep. And all that mighty heart is ... lying still.
¹⁴⁷

My God, again, how easy it must have been in the early days of this language to write poetry. How easy to impersonate the false feelings of a shepherd like Wordsworth's ‘Michael’.
¹⁴⁸
Or impassive massive indifferent passion of my favourite lines. And I have felt a passion, a sense sublime, or something far more deeply interfused, whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, and the round ocean, and the living air, and the blue sky, and in the mind of men.
¹⁴⁹

Among the extraordinary things that happened to me daily since I was a chuckle from the womb, yesterday the sound man asked me for a voice level. There were several hundred people around. Quayle said nothing [...]. The girl doesn't have a mind. Colicos is an invention of Churchill and is equally bereft. I mean as Quayle. Churchill himself would have given one a voice level which would have started a revolution in Scandinavia. I simply said: He had the ploughman's strength in the grasp of his arms. He could see a crow three miles away.
¹⁵⁰
Did you ever look at Welsh mountains? We grow from sea-level. And one of them is a man. And the man happens to be a woman. And the woman is my wife. And she will sit there, eternally, forever, and hover over all of us.

The silence among these assorted Dukes and Dustmen was absolute. Everybody was fascinated but acutely embarrassed. So was I.

Sunday 15th
I awoke this morning at about 7 o'clock. I stared at Elizabeth for a long time. I am worried about her and her little bum and the blood. I held her hand and kissed her very gently. Probably no woman sleeps with such childish beauty as my adorable difficult fractious intolerant wife. ‘When in sorrow,’ said T. H. (Tim) White, ‘learn something new.’ I decided to examine my reactions to all the men of talent I have ever met and which company would I prefer. After serious thought, lying on that silent bed, with that killing cigarette between my lips, how I love its round cool comfort, I dropped names all over my brain. Churchill? No! A monologist. Picasso? No! An egomaniac. Emlyn? No. A mind like a cut-throat razor and a tongue to match. Dylan? No! Brilliant but uncomfortable. William Maugham?
¹⁵¹
No! He cared only about playing bridge with losers. Gwyn Thomas? No! An impersonation of a chap who would like to be big strong and tough and who is actually fat weak and febrile. Camus?
¹⁵²
Possibly. But he had the infernal impertinence to die young. John Osborne? No! No leavening of humour. Gielgud? A strong contender for the Burton stakes, but I have a feeling that he finds me uncomfortable. Edward Albee? No! A week with him would be a life-time, and he'd feel the same about me. Anyway, why go on? I reduced it to two people. Noel Coward and Mike Nichols. They both have the capacity to change the world when they walk into a room. They are instinctively and without effort and un-maliciously witty. They are both as bland as butter as brilliant as diamonds and never speak with the forked tongue. Noel is an old man and I think he plans to die shortly. Mike plans to out-last Methuselah. What they have, and what I envy, is their absolute assurance. They are totally unafraid. When Noel totters – and he actually does totter – into anyone's presence, their faces light up like lamps. Including
mine. Including Elizabeth's. Both E and I have a remarkable capacity of inculcating the idea of fear into people. I have actually seen people shiver as they cross the room to be introduced to Elizabeth. What the hell is it? Who did it to us? I know that we are both dangerous people but we are fundamentally very nice. I mean we only hurt each other. And we never hurt other persons unless they hurt us first. Somebody once wrote [...] that when Elizabeth walked into a room for a press conference which he happened to be attending, she gave the impression that nobody else was there. She answered, as it were, from outer-space.