The Richard Burton Diaries (131 page)

Friday 17th
[...] The acting in this film is very bad and I can only hope that there are enough explosions to kill the worst of it, or at least to take the attention away from it. Something better could be done with Greyn who is the worst offender but there is simply no time in a piece of this kind and there is the suspicion that it wouldn't improve things much anyway. He is, as Brook points out, a typically mediocre Rep actor and there's nowt one can do about that except re-write the entire thing to suit Greyn's personality. He should never have been cast in the first place. But nobody expects a masterpiece and
by the time it's out I shall have forgottenabout it. Colicos is heavily dramatic all the time though he is much better than Greyn and can be directed quite quickly into a more casual approach. He'll be alright I suppose. Brook did a couple of good bits yesterday and I was very pleased.

Tomorrow comes Snapshot back to me and life will be richer again and a bit more mad. Without her I could quite easily become a recluse and be seen only fugitively, half glimpsed in distant villages like the Scholar Gypsy.
²¹⁷
I dined with Liza, Brook and Maria (who forgot to come and do her lessons last night) and read
The Arms of Krupp
in bed until lights out at 10 o'clock.
²¹⁸
The Krupp story is a fascinating story and in a sense is the history of modern Germany but Manchester, the writer, is a vulgarian and a cheap writer and the book suffers. A pity as it could have been a superb work and William Manchester obviously did extensive research. It's a shame when a man capable of such labour as Manchester is hasn't learned to write and doesn't have a friend who could edit it ruthlessly for him. Example: ‘This Alfred (Krupp) found as funny as a crutch.‘
²¹⁹
Infuriatingly silly.

I was thinking yesterday as I saw everyone wilting in the heat and complaining about it how much stronger I feel than other people. I feel that I could go on for days while others fall beside the wayside, and have always thought so. I wonder if that accounts for Ivor's and my contempt and intolerance of weakness in others. Ivor's belief that one is ill only because one is mentally weak or masochistic has had a terrible retribution in his paralysis, but hasn't changed his belief. It hasn't changed mine either. But it is such a profoundly delicate subject that it is impossible to be adamant about it. Ivor's fall was an accident, or was it? Elizabeth's illnesses are bad luck or are they? If Ivor wasn't drunk he would not have broken his neck, or would he? Elizabeth's endless operations are the natural successors of indifferent eating and drinking habits and no exercise at all, or are they? There is no way of proving it one way or the other – one cannot set the clock back and say ‘Try that walk again tomorrow night in the same conditions and without the booze and see what happens this time Ivor,’ or, ‘Let's go back ten years Elizabeth and run a mile every morning and play tennis or something or ride a horse for an hour a day and take no pills of any kind and only moderate drink and eat to a proper weight level and then let's see how you go.’ If I have cancer of the lungs or throat tomorrow I have induced it by smoking too heavily haven't I? Or would I get it anyway? My father smoked all his life and didn't get it. Why should I? He lived ‘til he was over 80. Why shouldn't I? We shall never know. [...]

Saturday 18th
Last day of the working week and it should be an early day, perhaps very early if Hathaway gives the new German actor who plays Rommel half a chance to speak his speeches trippingly off the tongue.
²²⁰
I wonder if I should intercede on the German's behalf this morning before Hank destroys him before my eyes. I have no sympathy for any Germans but simply don't want to be bored by endless takes and mistakes from the actor – a Hun by the name of Wolfgang Preiss – pronounced Price.
²²¹
I can tell that he's a good actor I think just by instinct. Hathaway said yesterday: ‘Fuckin’ Germans either want to be the bosses or kiss yer ass.’ Churchill said the same thing about the odd humble-arrogance of the German people but in somewhat more classical terms: ‘Germans are either at your throat or at your feet.‘
²²²
Anyway, Hank's hatred of the Germans is not minced. He but hates them. I find them highly comical but as I would find the more amiable lunatics in an asylum comical, a laughter containing not a little pity and not a little fear that I may chortle myself to death. Of all the nations I have come to know reasonably well over the years the Germans are the nation who seem most the same, the most like each other, the most conformist. It is easy to see how they can become easily led. I cannot, simply cannot, like them though I have tried ever since Maria came into the family. Even when they are at their fat chuckling meerschaum-smoking jolly best I see the jew-baiting death's head under the jiggling flesh and the goose-step and the gas-chambers.
²²³

Hathaway told me yesterday that many years ago he had an idea for a film – ‘Christ as the unknown soldier’. He needed a writer to write it. He saw William Faulkner who thought it was a ‘hell of an idea’. Faulkner went away and months later he called Hank and said I will write it as a book first, because I don't know how to write scripts and then we'll do it as a film. ‘Great,’ said Hank. 15 years later the book came out dedicated to Hathaway called
Fable
.
²²⁴
Hank asked me if I'd read it and I said yes. He had read it, he said, but couldn't get through it because ‘it didn't have one, one single one of my goddamn ideas in it’. I told him I couldn't remember the book at all but remember only that it was very hard going. [...]

Sunday 19th
Yesterday was a very early day indeed. We had four pages in the can, as they say, by 11 o'clock and I was back, showered and dressed by 12.30. I went to the airport 3 times in an hour before I met the right plane which disgorged Elizabeth. She looked fine but seemed from her talk to be a little
squiffy but I am now hyper-sensitive about drink. Anyway, one should have a drink before a tedious trip. Among other things she brought a tabloid newspaper which has a snap of us on the front page with a headline saying Elizabeth Taylor flies to save Burton's life. There was a magazine called
Look
containing letters about the ‘Cojah’ coat I am supposed to have bought E. I amused myself for a couple of hours writing a reply but it has become very long and could be developed into an article about money.
²²⁵
I'll keep on with it just for amusement. Might even place it somewhere. Perhaps even in
Look
magazine. Or I could incorporate it into the lectures in Oxford. Might amuse the lads. That's three ‘amuses’ in 5 lines. [...]

Monday 20th
[...] E is going back to LA tomorrow for a complete job on her teeth, taking children and animals with her so I'll be alone again. It's hopefully only for a week so I'll be with them all shortly. In the meantime I have a hot few days ahead of me. Explosions and burning tanks and being inside a tank and flame-throwers again and running and shouting one-liners. ‘Get the lead out, Garth’, ‘Over there Mackenzie’ and similar deathless cries. Today however we simply have a talk scene with Rommel. Talking of Rommel and the actor Wolfgang Price [
sic
] – he is good as I suspected and to my delight Hathaway left him alone which was a boon and we didn't do more than three or four takes on any one scene, and apart from the weather that is the last obstacle left to the rapid completion of this great work. We are having lots of telegrams again about how good I and the film are which is faintly ominous as the same thing happened with
Staircase
which is the biggest failure with
Look Back in Anger
and
Faustus
that I've had.

I am still deep in the arms of Krupp. It's a long haul of a book and an astounding record of the collapse of all moral virtues among the Germans under Hitler with the Krupps showing all the signs even before the twenties and pre-Hitler thirties. It seems incredible that Adolf only came to power in ‘33 and was ready to go in ‘38 and actually went in ‘39. He was furious that Chamberlain appeased him at Munich. He didn't want to be appeased. He wanted war right then and there. What a clown. But it is genuinely astonishing that he could so revolutionize a whole country in so short a time. We and the Yanks can do it too. But only under the stimulus of war itself. If only we could harness and direct such vast forces in peacetime. We might achieve stupendous things, unbelievable changes for the good in a mere decade. Democracy, it seems, will not be hurried except in the agony of war when of course it ceases to be a democracy. It therefore follows that the swift implementation of the Civil Rights Bill in the States for example could only be brought about
quickly
by an immediate civil war, with Indians, Chicanos and Negroes on one side
and the bewildered Wasps on the other. Fear is the key that will open the door. If such a thing happens I hope to be fishing in a remote Swiss lake. With all my family around me. No participation without representation is my cry. [...]

Tuesday 21st
[...] Liza's report arrived and it is nice and affectionate but she is below average in practically everything due invariably to ‘lack of concentration’ and ‘daydreaming’. She is a year younger than her classmates on the average so her position in the class, which is well in the lower half is partially understandable. However she is not the scholar type and as long as she keeps her end up vaguely, we don't really mind. Now that they are all coming into their teens or have arrived there I find all the children a pain in the neck and though there's no living without them, there's no living with them either. My idea of children is going to visit the grandchildren, when we have them, for Sunday lunch and a walk in the park and tea at 5 and home by six saying how charming they are and how nice they are to spoil while someone else does all the work of remonstration and correction and admonition. I haven't met a child yet that didn't bore the brains out of me in an hour – most can do it in 15 minutes. I would have made the worst teacher in the history of pedagoguery if there is such a word. The child that I was, I loathe. I prefer the man that I am, though not over-much. Of course we bore them too. Kate during her annual visits can't wait to get away from us and into the arms of her friends. Ditto Liza and Maria. Ditto the boys, though not so much as the girls. Christopher is the only one whose company I enjoy like that of an adult, largely because he's so very quick and so honest. All the rest are evasive and downright dumb about most things. [...]

Wednesday 22nd
[...] Read a thriller by another MacDonald, Ross.
²²⁶
He is a good writer and very grey and despairing and weary. His detective Lew Archer is over forty and stolidly persistent and of course unostentatiously intelligent. He has no reason at all to be a detective – he could quite clearly succeed at anything. And no reason why he should be the hero of ‘formula’ detective stories, he could be the commentator on the mores morals and miracles of modern life in any other writing form. But this one is easier and more saleable I suppose.

I worked all the morning inside the mock-up of a tank with Johns Orchard and Colicos and Brook. It was very cramped and very hot and we were in there for a long time. It was less tedious than I anticipated however because I had imagined something much worse. I finished about 2 and was able to wave E and the children off from the airport. I felt very sad as the plane slowly rose, the undercarriage slowly pulling itself up into the belly when the small plane – a 4 seater twin engined Cessna – was barely off the ground. [...]

Everybody is convinced that our comical German – one Karl Otto Alberty – is either an amiable nut, solidly stupid or on drugs. Yesterday it seems he had to get hurriedly into a car and drive or be driven off at great speed in pursuit of me and my men. He hurried to the car alright but then did a kind of Charlie Chaplin high kick and gave a wild cry as he leapt into the car. Hathaway went ‘spare’ and bounced up and down in uncontrollable anguish. Everybody was so astounded that it wasn't until later that everybody laughed and were still laughing at ten o'clock at night.

‘Do you know,’ said Hathaway to me yesterday, ‘what that stupid Kraut son-of-a-bitch did the other day?’ ‘What?’ ‘He drives up to the check-point, right?, and says did a British Medical Unit come through here? Then he's supposed to say Get me to Field Marshal Rommel. Right? No he says Follow the bloody British, he says. I went nuts. I said what the fuck d'yer think you're doing you Kraut bastard. He says, that's what I would do. I would chase the British. But you have a scene with Rommel, I says, it's in the script, d'yer want to miss your scene with Rommel? I says. I sweated right through my shirt. The guy's gor [
sic
] to be nuts.

Karl Otto dresses up every Saturday night in tight black ‘charro’ trousers, an ornamental black shirt of many silver decorations and a black sombrero low on the forehead.
²²⁷
It is an unbelievable sight as he is a very white man with a huge belly and a face like two melons one on top of the other joining around the eyes. No photograph can do justice to the idiocy of his appearance, and yet, if one didn't know his talent for unconscious buffoonery one might find his physical presence imposing, even distinguished. He becomes very wild when dancing in the bar and after ‘dancing’ with elephantine grossness and awkwardness one night he leaned ponderously over a table and said to the boys – Brook Ron and others – ‘I wish people would learn to use their bodies with beauty’ indicating the other dancers with scorn.

When he came into the restaurant last Saturday night where E and I were dining alone sitting by the window she said in genuine wonder: ‘What is that?’ ‘That,’ I said, ‘is our tame German. That is our Karl Otto,’ I added urgently, ‘Do not look in his direction or we will have him for the night and he is unspeakably boring.’ ‘Hullo,’ she said immediately, ‘what a splendid costume you have on.’ ‘Sank Zew,’ he said, ‘I am always wearing dis on every Saturday night in honour of mein host country.’ ‘How thoughtful,’ said milady. From there on neither she nor I understood a word he said. [...]