The Richard Burton Diaries (120 page)

In complete contrast is the fact that my nephew, Anthony Cook, has been just sentenced to 3 years in prison for ‘stealing cars in order to buy sex’ – I quote the
Daily Mirror
.
²⁶⁶
He is a tall, handsome feller so why did he have to do that? [...]

Monday 17th,
Kalizma [...] Prince Rainier and Grace and Grace's sister and a friend are coming to lunch today and Rainier is bringing either a tiger or a panther as a present for E. That's all I need. [...] What the hell are we going to do with a PANTHER or a TIGER? It means that we can never work in Britain again. Imagine a tiger or a panther in quarantine or on a yacht in the Thames? Many sailors would be eaten a day, several vets would be munched for lunch; I may be nibbled myself. Dead dogs and cats in Gstaad and Johann Sebastian Bach will be prostrate as he tries to water the flowers, and Raymond will be forced to play ping-pong with him. Brook Williams may tell the animal a joke or two but I bet the animal won't laugh. The only two persons who will survive it are going to be Elizabeth Taylor Burton and Liza Todd Burton. Liza will saddle him and ride him, and Elizabeth will insist that he sleeps in the bathroom, which means she has slept with me for the last time – it's the atom-bomb shelter for me! I'm sure that I'm going to love him or her but I insist it's by telephone. ‘How big,’ I said to Rainier yesterday at lunch, ‘does a panther grow?’ ‘ About this size,’ he said, with a gesture that indicated something cosmic. I nearly struck him, but didn't because it would have been impolite, and also he might have struck me back. He had that look on his face which I can only describe as ‘smug’, that total assurance that the man to whom he is talking is absolutely terrified. I love the Prince and I love his wife and I love Monaco but if, every time we come here, we are going to be given a lion, I'd rather write bad books at home. And play with enormous jewels. [...]

Tuesday 18th,
Kalizma
, Monaco
This morning in the early hours the pot decided to have a go at the kettle and won handle down. E, the pot, gave this particular kettle, me, a savage mauling. I was coldly accused of virtually every sin under the sun. Drunkenness (true) mendacity (true) being boring (true) infidelity (untrue) killing myself fairly quickly (true) pride envy avarice (all true) being ugly (true) having once been handsome (untrue) and any other vice imaginable except homosexuality and ungenerousness. [...]

Grace, Rainier, Grace's sister, Peggy, and a Lady Fford (I think) came on board for lunch and stayed until 5 so they cannot have been displeased.
²⁶⁷
Also a 3 month old panther of great beauty but also of great wildness. Reluctantly we had to give him back to Rainier. Though, if we had a large enough piece of property for him to run around in I would have taken a chance and kept the little savage. [...]

DECEMBER

Friday 5th, Gstaad
We leave for Paris tomorrow, regretfully. It is so beautiful here now – deep snow, brilliant sunshine, books to read and no work.

Yesterday we held Maria's birthday party prematurely as she was born on the 8th which we would not have been able to attend. We had four child guests from her school. [...] We gave Maria a stamp album with about four hundred stamps to put in it. She was busy all evening. [...]

Monday 8th, Gstaad
[...] The thing we were supposed to do with Phil last night in New York, a special presentation to him or something, was called off because of the death of Mrs Winthrop Rockefeller's father.
²⁶⁸
[...] Now perhaps we can get out of it altogether. Why, I wonder, do I dislike being a public spectacle? Other actors love it – even Elizabeth doesn't mind tarting up for a premiere of one of our films. [...]

I will start early tomorrow and try and write all about the arrival of the diamond and the ball at Monaco's L'Hermitage.
²⁶⁹

We arrived back last Tuesday from M.C. and waited for Ivor and Gwen to arrive from Stoke Mandeville.
²⁷⁰
[...] Ivor goes up and down, but catastrophically he had a stroke in his sleep last September, which was hidden from us. He has great difficulty in speaking and has retreated more and more into himself. Apart from an occasional spirited flash as of old, he has changed into another person. He is mortally afraid, he tells me, not of death itself but of leaving this
world and all its varying excitements. The physical pain of death he discounts. ‘I will die in my sleep for sure anyway and won't know anything about it. My stroke in my sleep at Stoke Mandeville didn't wake me up and I didn't know anything had happened until the orderlies came in in the morning and I found I couldn't speak.’ What a blow on a blow. He'd have lived until he was 90 were it not for that trip in the dark at Céligny. [...]

Wednesday 10th
A choice of new furniture has arrived for the library. E and I are still in the top tens of the box-office which surprises me somewhat as, apart from
Secret Ceremony
for E and
Eagles
for me we didn't have anything out.
Staircase
hasn't been on general release yet so doesn't count. [...]

I am hovering around 176lbs in weight and it feels splendid but will try for 172 before I leave for New York next week. E is 127lbs. Lithe and limber we both are with murderous games of ping-pong to keep us that way.

Cocktail-time approaches, the fire roars, it is cold as cold can be outside.

Friday 12th
Today we received a telegram from Ed Henry of Universal Pics saying that
Anne of the Thousand Days
has been shown to the press in NY and LA and the reaction is ‘nothing short of sensational’. And ‘superior to
Man for all Seasons
and
Lion in Winter
’.
²⁷¹
We shall see Mr Henry, we shall see. It would be rather nice if it was a blockbuster as I have a hefty percentage of the gross. And rings and farthingales and things and hospital wings could be bought. It would be a good thing if Gin Bujold won an Oscar which, since she's unknown and if the film is as successful as Universal believe it's going to be and if she keeps her trap shut about how horrible a place Hollywood is, she is quite likely to do. If she does, or even if she doesn't come to think of it, I'd hate to be her next director or leading man. I think she firmly believes herself to be the legitimate heir to Rachelle and Bernhardt and Duse. She has all the power of a gnat. A dying one. I could whisper louder than her screams.

[...] We leave for New York in five days and I dread the journey or journeys involved. We go from there to LA, and from there to Hawaii. I long to see Hawaii but I loathe the means of getting there. It means in my case an entirely lost week before I have been able to re-adjust myself so I'm likely to be a moron through Xmas. I'll keep quiet and sleep in the sun, if any, and hide in corners with a bad book.

MARCH

Tuesday 24th, Puerto Vallarta
It's a long time since I wrote in this thing. I fell by the wayside at the Sinatra house.
¹
It must be confessed that he is a very unhappy man – apart from his fundamental moroseness he was at the time plagued by writs etc. by the State of New Jersey [...] about complicity with local gangsters. I believe Sinatra to be right that he was in no way implicated and we have read since that he finally appeared in New Jersey without the necessity of extradition or whatever they call it between state and state, and has been clean-slated.
²
So that's alright. His house is a kind of super motel in shape and idea. A series of very elaborate suites with every possible modern gadget included, vaguely surround a small swimming pool. There is what is known as the rumpus room which contains a pool table and a magnificent toy train set given to Frank by the manufacturers and which he has arranged to have transferred to some children's home or something. He is a very nice man in short doses but I imagine a bore to live with, especially now with the energy gone and where he is obviously watching his health. His library was quite extensive but ‘Prince’ Mike Romanoff told me that Frank had asked him to choose the books.
³
That may have been of course Mike's intellectual conceit, but I did see lots of copies of
Encounter
around and I'm bloody sure Francis doesn't read that.
⁴
Elizabeth made sheep's eyes at him the whole time, and sometimes he at her. I've never seen her behave like that before and apart from making me jealous – an emotion which I despise – I was furious that he didn't respond! We out-stayed our welcome and over-stayed it by three or four days, though I was longing to get away. Eventually we did and came back down here to Vallarta. We flew up to Palm Springs and back to LA in Sinatra's jet plane which is called a Gulf Stream jet or something like that. It's a lovely plane and
E of course immediately wanted to buy a similar one. It costs no more than $3
¹
/
₄
m. That's all. What with that and a $1m hospital bill we'd be flat. And the world has changed – I mean our world. Nobody, but
nobody
, will pay us a million dollars a picture again for a long time. I've had two financial disasters
Staircase
and
Boom!
, and Elizabeth
Boom!
and
Secret Ceremony. Anne
is going steadily along and will more than make its money back. So is E's picture
The Only Game
but
Anne
only cost $3
¹
/
₂
m whereas
The Only Game
cost $10 million so that one will never get its money back under twenty years. I'm afraid we are temporarily (I hope that it is only temporary) out in the cold and fallen stars. We haven't of course fallen very far – we could doubtless still pick up $750,000 a picture which ain't chicken-feed. What is remarkable is that we've stayed up there so long. Instance Julie Andrews who on the strength of
one
picture
The Horrible Sound of Music
has stayed up for about 5 years but now the lads in Hollywood tell me that as a result of two big failures she is really out.
⁵
Not only that but she has had her head turned so it appears from her enormous initial success and winning the Oscar etc., turning up late or not at all and sometimes for days. Well she can always get Blake Edwards to write her a script and he can produce and direct it.
⁶
How fast the moods change – two years ago she was the darling of America and now she's hardly ever talked about. She doesn't have our consistently antagonistic press and therefore the shocks are still to come.

This is going to be a long entry presumably to be continued tomorrow. [...] I went into Hollywood Presbyterian hospital to have a complete check-up. And what a check-up! It took 24 hours which meant I had to stay the night in the hospital. By the time they had made me get into bed, taken what seemed like several pints of blood out of my [...] arm, [...] and Rex Kennamer, the doctor, assuring me just by feel that I unquestionably had an enlarged liver as a result of 30 years of excessive drinking. [...] Next day Kennamer came to see me and told me that I simply had to stop drinking for at least 3 months. Why, I asked? Because apparently, at my present rate of booze I would have sclerosis of the liver within about five years which would get progressively worse. Whether I drank or not. I mean after five more years. Very well, I said, I shall stop drinking totally. I have done so before for an occasional week and sometimes longer. This will be the longest time of the lot. This is my 10th day without booze of any kind and I must confess I feel immensely healthier. [...]

Wednesday 25th
We are going fishing today and stopping for lunch with a man who lives in an Indian village half way between here and Jalapa.
⁷
He is a man called Richard Foot known to all as Don Ricardo. He is the only ‘gringo’ who lives in this particular village. He has reputedly built a school there and made a church. [...]

Thursday 26th
We left the house at 10.15 and boarded a fishing boat [...] towards Foot's village [...]. It is a small pueblo and all the houses are the usual palapa except his of course which has every mod con, [...] full of fascinating bits and pieces from various but almost entirely Asiatic places.
⁸
Balinese, Japanese and Chinese and very fine copies of Spanish-Colonial cupboards and ‘Welsh-Dressers’ etc. with a garden, built on sand, which, were it not for the Bougainvillea could have been mistaken for an English garden in Kent. Beautiful roses etc. Much discussion on our return as to whether he was a genuinely good man, interested in the welfare, education etc. of his very backward village or whether he was merely playing God. He doesn't sound very intellectual and keeps on saying that he reads a great deal. I looked through his library which is small and contains very little that I haven't read and apart from a few pseudo-mystical books nothing that you wouldn't find in anybody's week-end cottage. On the table, opened and face down was a book called
Famous Stories of Sherlock Holmes
.
⁹
[...] We had raw grated fish marinated in lime juice to start, followed by clam chowder followed by grilled sierra with a tomato and cucumber salad. The two Chrisses also had lasagna and finished with what they said was cheesecake of the best kind they'd ever had.
¹⁰
[...] Elizabeth and Norma (Heyman that was), who has been staying with us for a couple of weeks escaping from her horrible lover [...] had had their ‘Vallartans’ which is the name we give to a drinking regime which means one drink before lunch and two before dinner. I am, of course, still not drinking anything at all except tea and occasionally coffee, which I don't normally drink except with brandy. [...] Since I stopped drinking I've become a bit of a gourmet myself, certainly were it not for stern self discipline, a gourmand. I have therefore formed the opinion that hard liquor in whatever form before eating is a taste-bud killer, though a burgundy rich and deep with beef and port with a powerful cheese is delectable. So is a good very dry light white wine with fish. [...]