The Richard Burton Diaries (115 page)

Tony Quayle revealed himself to me in a way that I would not have thought possible. He talked of the formative years of his childhood, spent in Wales at Pontypridd.
¹⁹³
[...]

Wednesday 30th
I knew there was something wrong yesterday. I could feel it in my primitive Welsh bones. E had gone into the surgery for her 3rd and last injection for her ‘piles’, and when by 2.30 I had not heard from her (a mistake I understand) and I couldn't get through to her, all kinds of horror began to pile up on me, if you'll pardon the pun. The first word I had was from her doctor, a minute Welsh Jew called Rattner, who, twixt lines as ‘twere, made it blatantly clear that my baby child had nearly kicked it. Some doctor-idiot the last two words are virtually synonymous, had allowed the ‘shot’ to leak into her blood stream and the fools were standing by with heart shots etc. in case she started to die, which they feared she was actually doing. I can forgive a ‘panel’ doctor in South Wales making a mistake, seeing a miner every minute on the minute, because the pressures are so enormous, but I cannot forgive Harley
and Wigmore Streets.
¹⁹⁴
They work hard of course, even they, but there is no excuse for treating so expensive and tender a mortal as Elizabeth with anything less than calculated care. I am still dazed by the potential enormities of their ill syringes. [...] Well she has defeated their best efforts to kill her many times. I wish she would realize, like me, that good doctors are as rare as good actors. I only know about ten of us, I mean actors, out of ten thousand, who are not derivative and repetitive and tedious and run-of-the-mill. Why should one expect a higher percentage from doctors? They continually make stupendous mistakes, mortal ones, and get away with it. The feller who buggered it up with E yesterday was already protesting that it was her fault not his! In case so celebrated a patient died as a result of his maladministration. I could beat him to death with an eye-lid.

Anyway, she's alright, though I am still night-mared. What could life possibly be without her? Where would I go? What would I do? Everybody else pales by comparison. It's no use picking up a mini-skirted chick of 18 – she wouldn't last a week, if that. I would die, I suppose, a greatly accelerated death. Anyway, she's alright. Bastards.

Because of my fear, relief, anxiety, etc. yesterday I went over the top in one scene. I had to say to an actor called Marne Maitland ‘Get out! Limp back to Rome and tell His Holiness the Pope That I will have the marriage annulled. Get out. Get out Get out’.
¹⁹⁵
The last ‘get out’ was delivered with such murderous virulence and at the top of my voice that Mr Maitland's feet left the ground and he tripped and fell down. It was somewhat embarrassing and we had to do the scene again. Not only doctors can make mistakes! I couldn't wait, you see, to get home.

Thursday 31st, Dorchester
It's a cool grey dawn and E and I have just had a quarrel about who knows what. [...] If she'd only do some movement of some kind she could cure herself. But she slugs and slows and shrugs the world away. And she firmly believes in doctors rather than herself. Shots, shots, shots and pain-killers. And though she is not a Jewess by birth, she has acquired at second-hand, not only their brilliance but their mass masochism. [...] As for me, the day and the days stretch before me like a vast steppe. I have mentioned many times that what kills me is boredom. I am perfectly happy to be alone with E or Liza, oddly enough I can't say that about anybody else except Kate – (note that they are all women) but the pity of me is that I pity everybody else. I cannot bear, and I have to bear it, members of the human race, who don't know where to turn or where to go. I have, despite my background, never lacked for money, and when I am confronted with a Tony Quayle or a Robert
Beatty who cannot either separately or together afford the fare to Gibraltar or the Canary Islands I am suitably astounded.
¹⁹⁶
I bet you that if the worst came to the worst and inevitably to the vast unknown, I could find a job that would feed and clothe my family. As long as I am alive, Ivor used to say, nobody shall go short.

This day is going to be a rough one but I shall be gentle. Liza is coming with me which is always a blessing. I love this child. I hope to Christ that she knows that I do. She must. She must. When this creature says something nice to me, un-asked for, I blossom like a cherry-tree. In spring. I mean Spring. And now the child-monster has arrived and is kissing her mother and it's time go to work.

Much love Elizabeth, and I'm sorry.

AUGUST

Friday 1st, Dorchester
E was going to go away for the weekend [...] but I persuaded her not to. After all we both know we would be in agony without each other around. Little Liza behaved superbly with her mother and (on the telephone) with me, trying to reconcile us. She ordered E around. She made her eat breakfast. She made me ring up and apologize to E. She was everybody's minute mother. Instant wisdom. She is a hell of a child and I may be forced to keep her. Also she is going to be, and indeed already is, a knock-out as a beauty. She is a bloody ‘Bramah’ as we say at home.
¹⁹⁷
Her teeth will have to be fixed one of these days otherwise she might become a little chinny and she walks like a duck but all those things can be corrected.’ But her eyes, oh God, her eyes, fresh fire-coal etc. ...‘
¹⁹⁸

I suppose that deep down, though I hate to admit it, I am a proper actor and the parts I play
do
affect me slightly. There is always one part of me that is looking on and I am aware that I have become authoritative. Nobody is allowed to buy anything except me. I must give the drinks. I must pay for the lunch. My car, or one of them, must take you home. Mind, I've always been like that but playing a King, especially a man as demonic as Henry, has accentuated my natural assumption of superior means.

Aaron arrived at the studios yesterday. [...] I asked him how much money we have. Could we really afford to retire. He told me that in ‘quick’ money I have roughly 4 to 4
¹
/
₂
to five million dollars, and E has slightly less. This is quick money and not to be confused with the various houses, the
Kalizma
, the paintings, the jewellery etc. which would amount to about 3 or 4 million more. If, I said, we stopped acting, what sort of income would we get without
touching the principal. He said: At least
¹
/
₂
million dollars a year. Let us give away 100,000 of that in keeping R Hanley and Benton and Wilson in the style in which they are accustomed and all the godsons god-daughters nephews nieces and Howard and Sara and Will and schools. Let us give another 100,000 running the
Kalizma
. Let's allow another 50,000 for odds and ends and we, E and I, will have to make do on 250,000 a year. All the children are now rich, some more than other, and so we don't have to worry about them. Financially I mean. I think with some blank paper and a typewriter and some amiable but not furious vodka and Jack Daniels we could manage alright. [...]

Money is very important, not all important, but it helps a lot. That's why I have written about it so much today because it, if it means that E and I have the strength of mind to give up being famous we can at least live in more than lavish comfort. I might even be able to buy her the odd jewel or two. We'll spread our time between Gstaad the
Kalizma
and Puerto Vallarta. We'll nip over to Paris occasionally and give a party for the Rothschilds. We'll take the Trans-Siberian Express across Russia from Moscow to Vladivostok. We'll go to the hill stations in Kashmir. We'll muck around among the Greek Islands. We'll visit Israel and bury dead Egyptians. We'll re-visit Dahomey again and look at the washing on the line at the Palace – we can slide down the coast there in the
Kalizma
. And Spain and the West Indies and Ecuador and Paraguay and Patagonia and go up the Amazon. We'll take a month and do the Michelin Guide of France. There are many elsewhere, Coriolanus.
¹⁹⁹
I can write pretty books with photos by E.

Sunday 3rd
I went through a bad time yesterday, a time of enormous lassitude and indifference. I could barely bring myself, though I eventually did, to revise the enormous verbiage contained in the scenes I have to do this week. I tried to read a book about General Custer of Custer's Last Stand fame but found it un-readable. It is as if the writer was not only bad but a homosexual madly in love with Custer. The number of times he writes things like ‘and so the American Murat stormed into battle with his golden locks flowing in the wind’, or ‘the impetuous young man his golden tresses flying with the urgency of his charge, this marvellous boy ...’ etc. Sick-making. How do writers like that get themselves published? The author's name is Van de Water.
²⁰⁰
I must carefully avoid him in future. [...]

Today, however, I have lost all sorrow for myself and am really thinking of stopping this acting lark altogether. I will go into it very carefully with Aaron
this week and find out exactly where our various obligations lie. It may mean working for another year and picking up an extra couple of million or so to pay everybody off that we feel responsible for. [...]

Acting is a funny thing. Yesterday I read an article by that tall girl, Philip Hope-Wallace about the Cleopatras he has seen.
²⁰¹
Every one he mentioned (he was talking about Shakespeare's of course) was or is as ugly as sin. Tony Quayle, oddly enough, had said the day before at lunch. ‘Why is it that all our so-called major actresses are so plain?’ Why indeed? Let's have a look at the dames: Edith Evans, Ashcroft, Flora Robson and those who are semi dames like Maggie Leighton, Pamela Brown and that woman whose name I can never remember who's married to Larry Olivier – ah I have it – she is called Joan Plowright.
²⁰²
Vanessa Redgrave and Maggie Smith both tend to turn me agint sex.
²⁰³
He doesn't mention the only one who had the power or personality and physical beauty to destroy a man's life – Vivien Leigh. My wife was not considered of course because she is too beautiful and sensual. He talks of Peggy Ashcroft's exquisite care for the speaking of verse. Well Peggy speaks verse like an English mistress from Kensington. Fair dues the Hope-Wallace was only talking about stage performances.

Liza is quite hopelessly slap-dash. She has spent only two nights in the spare bedroom and where we share the bathroom and this morning it looked as if a tornado had hit it. Two pairs of under pants on the bathroom floor, her dress, shoes and socks in various corners of the bedroom, innumerable ‘Charlie Brown’ books scattered to the four winds.
²⁰⁴
What is this disease of sluttishness that possesses our children, boys and all? Well they are all past the age of curing so bugger it. But nobody shares the spare room with me again. I remember Simmy's room at Gstaad – the smell and chaos was so revolting that I couldn't go into it.

Monday 4th
[...] I'm at my wit's end as to where to send Liza to school. She has the education of a child of 10 and is 12 years old. And she is very bright but wouldn't stand a chance of getting into any school where they demand the 11-Plus. I suppose we'll work something out.

[...] I loathe loathe loathe acting. In studios. In England. I shudder at the thought of going to work with the same horror as a bank-clerk must loathe that stinking tube-journey every morning and the rush-hour madness at night. I loathe it, hate it, despise, despise, for Christ's sake, it.

Well that has managed to get a little spleen out of [my] system.

We must force ourselves to do something for Harlech TV though from all I hear from Stanley Baker, David Harlech and John Morgan the organization and the rivalry between the Welsh and English factions is as bad as I feared it would be when I first put E and my weight behind the effort to get the franchise. I should have had more sense. We'd better do something, much as I'd prefer to sell and get out. So far, every suggestion I've put to them not only has not been acted on but I've never even recieved, shit, received, that's better, any acknowledgement. They are quite hopeless.

So off to work and another round of repetition. ‘I must have a son to rule England when I am dead. Find a way Cromwell. Find a way. The Pope. The Cardinal. Orvieto, My Lord Bishops. Divorce Katherine. Divorce Anne. Marry Jane Seymour.’ I use every trick I know to make it credible but it's a losing battle. It's all mediocre rubbish. [...]

Tuesday 5th
Yesterday was another depressing entry though it had a few rewarding moments. [...] I suppose I also found some pleasure in the discomfiture of a journalist-gossip-writer named David Lewin who has been so vicious to us, particularly Elizabeth, in the last few years. Actually I feel rather sorry for him. It seems that he's lost his job as head of the entertainment section of the
Daily Mail
and now tells me with a pathetic attempt at bluster that he is editing a magazine. ‘Ah What magazine?’ say I, with blue-eyed candour. ‘
Film Trade Review
,’ says he. ‘You really should subscribe to it.’ This will make its circulation up to about six, I fancy – the other readers being his wife mother and children. Someone told me some time ago, I think it was Peter Evans of the
Express
, that his decline began with the pounding he took from Elizabeth on a TV interview at which he was idiotically present in company with an American Professor or Eng. Lit. Lord, and delicious, David Cecil, and our beloved N. Coghill. I have written about this encounter elsewhere in this diary. Why did a TV interview start his slide? ‘Because,’ said Peter Evans, ‘the editor of the
Mail
presumably told him that he had disgraced the
Mail
by his persistent idiocy with me and E and that she had made a fool of him etc. etc.’ The interview, unfortunately for him, was shown throughout the world. We, as a matter of fact, put it out as publicity for
Faustus
. Everybody exulted in E's anhiilation, how does one spell that word?, of him, though at the time I had the cold horrors and thought that in her tigeressish defence of me she was making a fool of
herself
. If he's any good he'll come back. But of course he's not good, is he? He writes in invisible ink.