The Richard Burton Diaries (97 page)

A tall slim beautiful girl has just decided to join me on deck and have some scrambled eggs. She happens to be my daughter I think, quite clearly, that she is no daughter, actually of mine but an invention, carved in living marble of Praxiteles.
¹⁵³

Monday 16th, Dorchester
I am slowly coming out of my pit of despair. I am greatly helped by Elizabeth's understanding. I think that my daughter Kate loves me but is afraid of me whereas my wife loves me, j'espere, but is
not
afraid of me. Just afraid
for
me. Christ! I'm beginning to write like Queen Victoria. We are
not
amused. Take away our underlinings and our exclamation marks and we are illiterate. [...]

We went to Emma Jenkins’ christening yesterday. She is the daughter of Wendy and Derek Jenkins, who, despite his name, is an Englishman.
¹⁵⁴
She carried on like a she-wolf. The service was so banal that I approved of every scream and mentally applauded her total rejection of the vicar's platitudes. How can an intelligent man believe that tedious rubbish? I don't mean me. I mean the vicar. ‘You god-parents must realize that it's not the physical [
sic
] of the child but also the spiritual.’ The cracks were unquestionably directed at us. He was giving us a lesson. He was showing us that because we are rich and famous we are nevertheless not particularly desirable as parent in God. [...]

How can anybody believe such nonsense? I vomit from my brain such self-indulgent shit. You are invited to swear that you are a Christian, which I'm not, and E is a Jewess. I noticed that the vicar looked only at and directed his homily only at our party. Another child was also being wetted but she and her family might as well not have been there. But otherwise it was a day of pleasure. The baby, Emma, is enchanting. Elizabeth was an angel and looked like one. She suits a mini-skirt very well and I lusted after her. It was a warm and sunny day, there was a green garden hanging on to the house, and all the friends of Derek and Wendy are amiable. Gwyneth was so proud and nervous – she's the grandmother – and said to me at one point: ‘If anything happens to one of those two,’
meaning Elizabeth and Emma, ‘I shan't know what to do.’ How sweet of her to include E. [...]

Saturday 21st, Dorchester
We arrived back in London last night after five pleasant days in Kent. We stayed at The Leicester Arms Penshurst.
¹⁵⁵
They had done very hasty alterations to make a suite for us with a private bathroom. We worked at Penshurst Castle and later at Hever Castle both of which are a delight and the hosts – Astors in one case and I've forgotten who in the other – were equally delightful.
¹⁵⁶
Kate was with us and was another delight. She was obviously fascinated by the whole business and was offered and accepted a role of a kitchen maid. [...]

JULY

Saturday 19th,
Kalizma
, Thames
Christ Almighty, in whom I firmly believe not, what a week, what a fortnight, what a month. There is no question but that I must stop acting. It is dementing me. The thought of going to work in the intolerably early mornings is like a physical pain. It is all so perfectly boring. Anybody can play Henry VIII – I mean even Robert Shaw who should be consigned for the rest of his life to playing ping-pong against ageing former champions – has played it.
¹⁵⁷

There have nevertheless been a few rewarding things. Gielgud gave E an enchanting dog the day before yesterday which is described, discribed [
sic
] as a Shidzoo – at least that it how it is vaguely pronounced.
¹⁵⁸
[...]

It is funny that a man who pretends to no recognition of the Holy Trinity will still refer to Christ and God – that is, I suppose, the weakness of background. Even the Holy Ghost. I suppose there is some atavistic fear bred in the bones that gives one a ridiculous prop to lean on, despite the fact that one doesn't believe a word of it. The American astronauts are due to land on the moon tomorrow sometime. I think there are three of them. If you combined all of their three brains together I doubt whether they could solve a quadratic equation – brave and stupid like Columbus who was so great a navigator that he never found himself in the same place twice.
¹⁵⁹
He set out for Jamaica and found himself in Cuba. He set out for Cuba and found himself in somewhere like La Guaira.
¹⁶⁰
I think he only found his way back to Spain by running
aground in the middle of the night against a land mass which he thought was a new passage to the East Indies and China, and turned out to be Cadiz. The Welsh, of course, discovered the Americas. You know that, don't you? Can one imagine a mankind that has produced a Christ (there I go again) a Da Vinci, an Einstein, a Newton, a Darwin, an Erasmus, a Turgenev, a Shakespeare, a Pushkin, an Aristotle, a Pythagoras, a Freud, a Strindberg, a
Fleurs du Mal
, a Mallarmé, a Socrates, and endless others, including the multitudinous Huxleys, producing a product into outer space that can say nothing except ‘A-O.K’.
¹⁶¹
They are nothing but humanized monkeys. Their wives and children would not agree with that. And so they shouldn't. Get there and get back boys. You worry me. You are doing a perfectly useless and perfectly splendid thing. I envy you your stupendous courage.

Liz, I mean Liz Williams, who is among the most delectable ladies in the world of being alive, tells me that her little baby, with the assistance of an operation might be alright.
¹⁶²
How I am jealous of her hope, and Brook's. I would give half a soul to have Jess have the same hope. But it's hopeless, in my case, I mean with Jess. Quite hopeless. [...]
¹⁶³

Tuesday 22nd, Dorchester
The whole world, it seems, has gone mad because the American couple, Aldrin and Armstrong, have landed on the moon and got away again.
¹⁶⁴
Myself included. I have read more about the moon and watched on TV more about the moon than in the rest of my life put together. The three moments of unforgettable tension were the count-down to the landing, the count-down to the blast-off and the coupling together of the moon-ship with the mother ship. Now all they have to do,
all
they have to do, is get home. In a week or less I suppose I shall be heartily sick of the whole thing as a great many people are already.

I have more or less stopped drinking and the shock to my system is obviously pretty profound. It didn't matter in Puerto V where I didn't have to work, but the effect at the studios, I mean on me, is awful. I am fundamentally so
bored with my job that only drink is capable of killing the pain. The thought of doing a whole day's work with, for instance, John Colicos, which is my chore tomorrow, without at least half a bottle of vodka to ease back the yawns is like deliberately inciting a nightmare. It must however be done if I wish to live through the next fortnight. [...]

I have been like a mad and highly articulate bull in blinding flashes with all kinds of people that I normally have great respect for. I laid into Sheran yesterday at lunch for no good reason. I roughed up Brook and Bob Wilson and Jim Benton with a fine impartiality and to top it all I burned through and around E today at lunch, in front of the same Sheran, just after she had just come back from one of the most painful operations, the insertion of some dreadful machine up her behind. This is, or course, par for the course when I am drinking heavily, but I'm surprised that I still do it when sober. If it is still the same in a month I shall go back to old father booze and find out how long it will take him to kill me. I might as well enjoy what little might be left me. One of the oddities I've noticed before when I've stopped drinking is that when one starts again the smell of straight liquor is revolting, so much so that one either has to force it down like medicine to get over the initial shock, or mix it deeply with fruit juice or something that will camouflage the taste and smell. I made myself a martini before lunch today and could not drink it. I took one sip and shivered from top to toe. I've only been off it since Friday night and even now it is only withdrawal i.e. I still allow myself a couple of drinks a day. One forgets how delicious water is and milk. I shall continue these confessions of an alcoholic at a later date.

Wednesday 23rd
[...] The ‘moon-men’ are already out of the headlines and poor Teddy Kennedy is in them.
¹⁶⁵
I feel sorry for him and I suppose understand his panic and indeed it ‘could happen to anybody’ but unless he comes up with something extraordinary when he appears in court next week, he has had his presidential and possibly even his senatorial chips. The K family are of course notorious satyrs. (I was amazed when Bobby K took Margot Fonteyn off into a back bedroom at Pierre Salinger's house in B. H. and my asking Salinger, when they came back, ‘where the hell have they been?’ and Salinger's fat-faced reply which was a finger over the lips.)
¹⁶⁶
It was undoubtedly a hot party and Kennedy may have tried to save his friends. I doubt that he lacks courage, maybe brains though. We shall never know I suppose. Maybe they, the Kennedys do believe that they can get away with anything. Gawd Help
him. The press are ready for the kill. (I know too that when Jack Kennedy was running for President and stayed with Sinatra at Palm Springs, that the place was like a whore-house with President Kennedy as chief customer. Christ the chances those fellers took.) But they all got away with it except the last remaining baby. Perhaps somehow or other he'll be able to get out of it. E and I like the Kennedys, though, except through a phone call and a couple of letters we do not know Teddy K.

I am waiting for Alex Cohen, who produced my last
Hamlet
in New York, to arrive.
¹⁶⁷
I don't know what to say to him. I've changed my mind about doing another play. I don't deep in my heart want to do a play on the stage again for a long time, possibly never. I shall slide out with vague talk of other commitments etc.

I must start putting this diary together. I just slide it into the nearest drawer and so can't look back and find out what I wrote or didn't write about what or who or which. I mean, have I written about Gielgud or the dog he gave E. About my first time as a patient in hospital since I was 7 or 8? If I'm not called today I'll start assembling it. [...]

Thursday 24th
[...] Confessions continued: Last night I fell by the wayside and became drunk. It didn't take much to make me so. Today I shall return to the pavement.

Being (relatively) sober for the last three or four days I have learned a great deal. Drink, for instance, is a great anodyne. I had forgotten how boring people are. I'd forgotten how afraid people are. I'd forgotten how boring I am. And how all of us lead lives of quiet desperation, and bugger you Thoreau.
¹⁶⁸
[...]

I have since the above paragraph, taken a shower and washed my hands of [...], cleaned myself of every orifice, laboured over the cleansing of a body which will never be clean, examined a brain, some cells of which will never function properly again, and, in general, have dismissed me as a completely lost cause. There is no going back. There is no Isaiah's burning coal to cauterize a lifetime of self-indulgence.
¹⁶⁹
What would you like to do Rich? You want a back room in Paddington with a gas-fire and bobs to put in it and no bath but a public one around the corner just off Praed Street? You want a good girl who thinks you are the world's best bank clerk and will defend you against any bank manager who cares to take you on at the staff party? Well, you won't find one, baby. You want Pontrhydyfen and the unbelievably bad weather and 10 quid a week and the lust for the pint that you can't afford and the other man
has? You can't have it fellah. I mean you can have the pint but not the lust. Go home, said George Moore to John Millington Synge, Go home.
¹⁷⁰
Well, I got news for you Thomas Wolfe, you can't go home no more.
¹⁷¹

It's 6.30 and Liza has just arrived sleepy-eyed and looking like bad breath and has just gone in to see her mother. The poor little girl is going through a bad time, a time that I don't understand and can therefore do nothing about. I hope her mother can. Her mother is also going through a bad time, but that she can cure herself. I am going through a bad time and already I've started to cure myself. I had forgotten how alien Americans are from me. They speak the same language, more or less, but it is utterly foreign. They are loose somewhere in the centre. It will not hold.
¹⁷²
Rife with sentimentality, woolly-minded, and on the average, brilliant – at least their Jews are – like a vast race of Huns.

Saturday 26th,
Kalizma
, Thames
[...] Liza went to see
Becket
the night before last and was I think surprised to see that her father could, despite his dissipation, play a saint. Now she wanted to see all the other films that E and I had done. We explained that a vast percentage of them were rubbish and not worth anybody's attention but that, however, there were some that would bear re-watching. Which ones, we asked ourselves? Now E has made around 50 films and I have made around 30. Let us say a rough total of about 80. I guessed that about 10 would bear re-examination. We tried to sort them out. In E's case:

I'll think of something else in a minute but what is odd is, since actors are considered to be stupid, how E's best films have been made
OUTSIDE
the studio to which she was contracted. And in my case the only films I've made that were any good were the films that I chose, again outside the influence of contracts. The only two watchable films that I ever made before the end of my 14 year contract with Fox and Warner Bros., were
Look Back in Anger
and
Alexander the Great
. After that, and because of the remarkable impact of E on my life, I have had virtually free choice. I have, except out of fear, hardly made a mistake. Since Elizabeth I have practically caught her up. I have done, now let's have a look: