The Richard Burton Diaries (169 page)

Anyway this Cardiff Welshman – a feature of the sleazy drinking houses in those days and vividly remembered though I can't remember his name – a writer who never published and an actor who never acted elected to tell us from our hands when we were going to die. My father was up for a week from Wales and I'd taken him to the BBC to have a look at it and was going to send him back to Hampstead after the afternoon drinking session was told he was going to die when he was 81, Dylan when he was 39, Lambert when he was 55 and me when I was 33. I was very impressed – so much so that I have remembered it to this day. It was made more frightening as Dylan did die when I was 29 at the age of 39 and Dic my father died when I was about the same age at 81. My brothers say that my father was 83 but there has always been some confusion re the old man's age and in my case he was, the prophet, only a couple of years out.
³⁰²
Lambert died but I don't know at what age and I can't remember whether he foretold Esmé's death date, but Esmé also died. My behaviour to anyone who didn't know during my 33rd year to heaven was high comedy. I went by car and train and boat whenever I had to travel. I turned down a film in Durango with Burt Lancaster and Audrey Hepburn and directed by Huston because of the unavoidable flying.
³⁰³
Were it not for the fact that I was ashamed to tell anyone I would not have worked that year at all and celebrated my 34th birthday with a stupendous booze-up. I was already very rich and kept on saying to myself as the offers came up ‘why should I risk my life for a mere $150,000 when I have a million in the bank, why don't I settle here in Céligny and never leave the grounds of the house even until the year is up. I can learn Hebrew or something. The thing is not to give the gods of retribution the slightest chance.’ The anomaly is that I am not even mildly superstitious ordinarily and am certainly not a fatalist. I must find out, as a matter of mild interest at what age Lambert died. I wonder too if in death Lambert is still considered to be the genius he was thought to be when he was alive.

I have the day off today and tomorrow I think. I have received beautiful presents. E has given me two cigarette lighters – an exquisite one, very light and thin, of gold and polished walnut and a sturdier one for everyday use of heavy gold made for her especially by Braun of Germany – the best lighters in the world unfortunately. How the British have lost out to everybody not only in quantity but quality. Claudye and Gianni had a large brief-case made for me out of antique leather with many neat and practical compartments. My favourite kind of things.

E is still being a good drinker. Yesterday she had only a glass of wine at lunchtime and a Jack Daniels at night. She continues to look like several dreams of avarice and is happy.

Two books arrived from Jane Swanson and her daughter Sarah and Bob gave me a sweater from Battistoni's.
³⁰⁴
Several telegrams including one from Grace and Rainier and we realized that we haven't sent one to her and her birthday is about now too.
³⁰⁵

I did an interview for
L'Express
yesterday for their cover story. My interviewer was an earnest young man with spectacles who spoke no English and talked a mile a minute and I virtually had to ask him to repeat every single question he asked me. This went on for an hour until I was practically screaming. In desperation I asked them to play some of the recording back for him to realize how impossible he was. He then confessed that he had never been so nervous in his life as he heard that I was an extremely dangerous person! [...]

Thursday 11th, Rome
The discerning scanner will realize immediately that the title heading is not in red letters. My birthday was a semi-drunken one for both of us. The rot set in when I made a large martini each about 1 o'clock. Then I went down below to chat it up with a reporter from the
Daily Mirror
called Donald Zec.
³⁰⁶
Elizabeth was unbelievably late even for her and Mr Zec is very hard going so, fatally as it turned out, I had a 2nd Martini. Off we went to Valentino's for lunch. The latter is apparently a very swank haute couturier and is making E's frock for the Rothschild Ball.
³⁰⁷
I had invited myself together with Zec who was completely out of his depth and betrayed his discomfort by being a silly kind of smart-aleck while I, not unpleasantly, pretended with the assistance of several glasses of wine to anti-semitism, negro, anglo-saxon, American and anything else I could think of. In deference to my host I excluded the Italians and, for Claudye, Corsicans. The reaction set in later when I got back home refusing to fit for my new suits and slumping off to bed where I slept for a few hours. I was suitably grumpy and snarled at E a lot – one more indication that life is sweeter off the sauce. Today therefore I feel somewhat fragile while E, who decided that if you cannot fight ‘em you might as well join ‘em, has a monumental hangover. We both agree that heavy drinking doesn't suit us anymore at all.

Presents: Apart from the above-mentioned I was given a large soft leather travelling bag by Joe Losey and Patricia and a lot of Cashmere sweaters from Ron and Bob and Ray Stark who is in town trying to persuade E to do a film for him but the present of presents is the
Complete Oxford Dictionary
in micro-print, the 17 (I think) volumes being reduced to two with a magnifying glass on a little wooden stand. You have to close one eye. To a bibliomaniac it is a
thrilling present. Not to be all stingy about it E gave me three sets, one for Gstaad, one for the yacht and one for Vallarta.

An effusive letter came from Princess Maggie yesterday. About the £100,000. Of course. Must write back.

We are all going to see
XYZ
at the Columbia private theatre tonight. We are trying to get a few people together to see it who have never seen it before, in the hope of finding out where the laughs come, but the place only holds 30 people.

Friday 12th, Grand Hotel
Another non-red headline as E had a few beers and a bloody mary (at my insistence) and two Jack Daniels while I had a bloody mary. (E, I remember said she had only 1
¹
/
₂
beers). This has been one of those mornings where through haste everything goes haywire. I didn't take a shower as not having been to bed until 3 I awoke by courtesy of E at 9 to be told immediately by Bob that I was wanted toute de suite. On opening the diary I dropped it and all the loose leaves fell out and had to be painstakingly put back in again. I tried to extract my vitamin pills from the box while holding a cigarette which dropped and burned my fingers while all the pills fell out on the bathroom floor. I managed to cut myself shaving – mildly it's true – but a considerable feat with an electric razor. I always order tea for two in the hope that E might join me. This morning I ordered only one – because I was in a hurry I guess – whereupon E arrived from the bedroom and asked for her tea. Not only had I not ordered my usual two teas but this morning she had asked for one. I hadn't heard her. The sun was brilliant when I first got out but is gone in again and today we must I think have sun. If Joe's and my luck hold we shall finish that shot today. If not it means working tomorrow and possibly even on Monday unless they can devise a shot without the sun's assistance. It is an awkward shot using a technique that I had never heard of. I talk of Stalin and pause to think and the technicians throw an image of Stalin onto space, suspended over my shoulder. I hope it's not too tricksy. Those are – there are a few such shots – the ‘almost subliminal’ shots described in the script and which I made so much fun of to Joe. So to work. Will write about the film which is, to me and will be I think to many people, absolutely shattering. I thought about it for several hours after the thing was over.

Evening
.
³⁰⁸

Well, we had the luck and I finished the film with two ‘almost sublimal’ shots in glorious technicolour and sunshine. Then the weather turned round and now it is grey-black and threatening again. There is a company party tonight down at Tor Vaianica but at the last moment we have decided not to go
as (a) company parties are invariably as flat as pancakes especially as the company has to work some more tomorrow and the main reason is (b) it is 40 minutes in normal end-of-business-day traffic and likely to be much more on a Friday. Hence nous resterons chez nous tranquillement avec des livres, des journaux et cette machine a ecrire.
³⁰⁹

The film I'm talking about above is of course
XYZ
which on seeing for the first time with everything finished – matching, music, titles (which I adored) and end titles etc. – I found more rewarding than ever. I am not much of a judge as I see so few films but I shall be very surprised if other people don't think E's performance to be one of the best ever given by anybody at any time. She runs the entire gamut from high comedy to knockabout prat-falls to pathos and near tragedy with dazzling brilliance. The film itself too is very and intriguingly beautiful I think and at one or two moments I had most unusual (for me) lumps in my throat. Especially when E was lonely and frightened. The remarkable thing too is that E emerges very sympathetically despite her stop-at-nothing ruthlessness to keep her man at any price. The others are good too but E completely out-dazzles them. Now watch for the reaction and I just hope we're not disappointed. I have never got
Staircase
and
Anger
out of my system. E's film
Gingerbread Lady
is postponed for a time – don't know how long – and Donen has been signed and E said that I shouldn't object too much as Donen's only good work has been with musicals. All this came from Swifty Lazar par telephone talk tonight.
³¹⁰
I said if they could let me know in a week or so and if the music and script were ok I would try and fit it in next year. And so I will. It is a shame to do it with Donen who so thoroughly buggered up
Staircase
, no pun. And so to books.

Saturday 13th
³¹¹
[...] Awoke at 8 ordered tea and finished a long letter to Liza who has cleverly chosen Tito as her historical character for this term. She asked me for ‘any information’ on him so I tapped out three pages or so of a rough outline. Also told her that her penmanship was appalling and would alienate any examiner regardless of the excellence of her writing otherwise. A very slapdash young woman.

[...] Every day here seems to be a day of demonstrations. Yesterday it was something to do with the Coca-Cola factories which, presumably in despair with the endless strikes, have closed down entirely. This morning there was a tremendous hullaballoo about ‘no repression in schools’ which I don't understand and, since the local papers never or hardly ever mention the demonstrations (so many of them I suppose) I don't know what the protest marches are about. Italian friends confess to being equally baffled though
one can hardly expect couturiers like Valentino and Tiziani to be much interested in social disputes. They only deal with the very rich. I must ask Carlo Cotti tonight when he comes.
³¹²
He is the second assistant on the film and appears to be a cut above the average in intelligence. He wants to talk to me re Benito Mussolini I think for whom, I'm told, he has a great and relatively unfashionable admiration. He is anxious for me to play the last days of Mussolini in a film. Never know, it might be interesting and with E possibly playing his mistress Clara Petacci it would certainly set all Italy by the ears.
³¹³
If we shot it cheaply and if it was well done it might be a knock-out. Why not one asks oneself? Why not? This Carlo is reputedly a very rich young man. He is certainly very richly dressed for a 2nd Assistant. [...]

Sunday 14th
A black day again. E and I had martinis before lunch though E only drank half of hers and we shared a bottle of Gewarstraminer at lunch [...] with which [...] we washed down caviar blinis in my case, and some sort of delicious veal with mushrooms in Elizabeth's.
³¹⁴
After that I drank no more for the rest of the day while E had a Jack Daniels and some wine at Joe Losey's where we went for dinner. E is in rare form acting the goat and mucking about and is generally very droll. [...]

Carlo Cotti came to see me yesterday to talk of Mussolini and he obviously does know his subject and he is a neo-fascist. He made the point that since Mussolini left us the Italians have not been governed at all and that Italy really does need a strong central character, another Mussolini, another benevolent dictator for they, the Italians, understand nothing else. He said that the cupidity and villainy of his race demanded a police state and that the people demanded by their very nature an organization which instilled fear. He wouldn't mind, he said, if there was a strongly repressive Communist Government if only they promised ruthlessness to tax evaders, brought back the death penalty and more importantly corporal punishment – the lash, the cat, the birch. All this from a young man of 32 with a sweet round face and curly hair and eyes of liquid brown and a charming self-deprecating grin. The communists however had behaved so stupidly and were so utterly alien to the Italian temperament and, as a consequence, so weak, that he was constrained to advocate more drastic means. He loved his people but they were en masse a silly mob of disorganized undisciplined schoolchildren and like schoolchildren must be threatened by dire punishment.

I sat back aghast. So much so that it took me 10 minutes to marshal my liberal arguments against his. Better, I said, to have the economy collapse and millions out of work and near starvation than the knout and the boot in the
face and the dreadful raid on your house in the small hours and imprisonment without trial and back to the torture chambers and the kneeling position and the bullet through the brain in secret executions. He was unmoved.

Deep in my heart of course I know he has a ruthless point but, like Communism, it is inapplicable to the Italians. I pointed out to him something that he had conveniently forgotten which is that Mussolini's Italy was as corrupt as the present Italy and that like this country today the Italy of the late thirties was also on the edge of bankruptcy.