The Richard Burton Diaries (137 page)

Sunday 26th, Guadalahara
We are staying here at General García Barragan's house who, I'm told, in whispers and with much looking over the shoulder by a P.R.O. man called Martin Rodriguez, is the real power in Mexico.
⁴⁵
He will decide, and has already perhaps decided, who will be the next President – it will be Echeverría apparently.
⁴⁶
It is all very Graham Greenish. They, the family, have given E everything she's pointed at and said – ‘It's yours.’ A horse that she saw from their plane (actually an Army plane – a DC3) was given to her on the spot – a Palomino. But on second thoughts Barragan's son Oscar decided it wasn't good enough for her and gave her his own white stallion which we have yet to see.
⁴⁷
I am left with the Palomino [...]. Tonight they gave her a splendid Mexican saddle. What is behind it all? [...]

Monday 27th
This week-end has been intolerably long and none of us can wait to get home. The air of sinister politico-secret-police-Ambler-Greene has disappeared. Despite the fact that the house is continually surrounded by armed guards David Morley, the boys’ tutor, managed to climb over the wall to get back in the house on a Friday night at about 2.00am! Now, instead of feeling stifled by the idea of so much hidden and arcane power, I'm beginning to feel somewhat sorry for them. They are irremediably middle-class in their reaction to our supposed fame and glamour. Though we have both said, almost to the point of vehemence in my case, that we hate, but HATE, meeting strangers and parties, they have had 12 to 14 people for lunch and dinner every day. That includes our lot of course which means that there are generally
¹
/
₂
of them and
¹
/
₂
of us.

[...] I read right through the night last night a biography of Ian (James Bond) Fleming. A thick paper-back with snapshots that I picked up in a giant store in town called Fabrica Francia I think.
⁴⁸
[...]

It's a longish story about El General and our involvement with him. It involves a piece of land on a sweet-water lagoon made by a river called the ‘Agua Caliente’ and which comprises part of a big estate called El Tuacan
which is the property of Barragan, the general. They have given us our choice of a piece of land anywhere on the 10,000 acres which contains 5 miles of sea front and goes 12 miles back into the interior. Many forests and another big lagoon (salt water) which they plan to open to the sea so that small ships can haven there. If we are left alone it could be a haven and a heaven. We both chose, separately, a hill of tree-covered rock which plunges straight into the lagoon and which is only about 50 yards – the lagoon – from the sea and at high tide is frequently invaded by the ocean. There is an air-strip
¹
/
₂
mile away which is to be extended to take jets. They are to put in a golf course and several condominiums and small sky-scrapers, hotels and a shopping centre which is sufficiently far away from us not to be a nuisance and at the same time highly convenient for the comforts of bars and food etc. There will also be a group of restaurants. They also plan an 18 hole golf course. I might even take it up again. It's years since I played and it might be amusing again to become an occasional ‘mid-week’ golfer. There is hunting – wild boar and deer – which interests me not at all. But I think I'll get a gun and pot shot at tin cans. It is the age of the private gun and I suppose I should have one. Their largesse is seemingly infinite and we can have all we want. [...] One thing is that it has spurred me to new efforts of learning Spanish. The basic grammar is now under my belt and I shall now extend my vocabulary for the rest of the year. It's sporadic but progressive my self education in this language. My passive knowledge of it is fairly good. Now I must read magazines etc. a lot with a dictionary and start spouting forth. Apart from anything else it will make life much easier talking to the Barragan family who speak nothing but Spanish. [...]

MAY

Sunday 3rd, Puerto Vallarta
The boys and the tutor left last night for Mexico City [...] The house feels very empty and quiet without them. [...]

We spent the late morning and all the afternoon at the land in Bucerias – a piece of land on the beach which we have leased for a 100 years or something.
⁴⁹
It comprises many acres though I don't know exactly how many. All of us are overlaid with red again. We have put up a palapa hut and a couple of palapa umbrellas, one for drink and the other (when completed) will be for food. We leave everything there unlocked and so far nothing has been stolen.

Monday 4th
[...] We went again to Bucerias today read, sunbathed, sea bathed I did a double-crostic and read Alan Moorehead's book
Eclipse
about the fall of Germany from Sicily on.
⁵⁰
[...] The village is a couple of dust streets two
miles roughly from our property with 3 fairly raunchy little bars and pretty smelly with it. We had beer and coffee at one.

Tuesday 5th
[...] We (Brook and I) went out shopping today and bought a very elaborate folding table and four unelaborate folding sit-up chairs and a machete each and ‘espatulas’ and barbecue forks and two bottles of olives for the martinis which I make every day for the family's ‘Vallartan’ at 6-ish every day. I regret that drink I must say. After the heat and the broiling sun and the frequent dips in the ocean and the hot-dogs and salad for lunch and a brisk mile sand walk the martini is fantastically tempting. But sternly I've refused. I shall take some coffee tomorrow with me and brew myself a cup during the ‘Vallartans’. We shall all be very sorry to leave for LA. Sheerly for being left alone Bucerias is the best place we've found in 10 years.

Saturday 9th
[...] Bucerias is rapidly becoming our favourite place. We barbecue every day there and read and I do double-crostics and swim and walk.

[...] We leave for LA tomorrow and Lucy Ball's show, rehearsing Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and shooting before a
live
audience on Thursday. Then E goes into hospital for the (we hope) final operation on her piles. Shall be very glad when that's all over for poor E. They say it is among the most sustainedly painful businesses. Nobody wants to go to LA but I must confess to a little excitement about the show because, I suppose, I haven't worked for so long. I'm told that L. Ball is very wearing to work with. [...]

Thursday 14th, Beverly Hills Hotel
[...] Those who had told us that Lucille Ball was ‘very wearing’ were not exaggerating. She is a monster of staggering charmlessness and monumental lack of humour. She is not ‘wearing’ to us because I suppose we refuse to be worn. I am coldly sarcastic with her to the point of outright contempt but she hears only what she wants to hear. She is a tired old woman and lives entirely on that weekly show which she has been doing and successfully doing for 19 years. Nineteen solid years of double-takes and pratfalls and desperate up-staging and cutting out other people's laughs if she can, nervously watching the ‘ratings’ as she does so. A machine of enormous energy, which driven by a stupid driver who has forgotten that a machine runs on oil as well as gasoline and who has neglected the former, is creaking badly towards a final convulsive seize-up. I loathed her the first day. I loathed her the second day and the third. I loathe her today but now I also pity her. After tonight I shall make a point of never seeing her again. We work, or have worked until today which is the last thank God, from 10am to somewhere around 5pm, and Milady Balls can thank her lucky stars that I am not drinking. There is a chance that I might have killed her. Jack Benny, the most amiable man in the world and one of the truly great comedians of our time, says that in 4 days she reduced his life expectancy by 10 years. The hitherto impeccably professional Joan Crawford
was so inhibited by this behemoth of selfishness that she got herself stupendously crocked for the actual show and virtually had to be helped to her feet and managed, not without some satisfaction I dare say, to bugger up the whole show.
⁵¹
I said very loudly after yawning prodigiously and being asked by the director, a nice but not overly brilliant man called Jerry Paris, whether I was tired or bored or what, that I was not particularly any of those things but was puzzled as to why anybody who didn't have to for financial reasons et al. would submit themselves to this mindless routine week after week for 19 years.
⁵²
Miss Ball and her apology of a husband who were sitting beside me said nothing at all. The husband is a man called Gary Morton, who laughs at all her ‘takes’ etc. however often she does them and whether well or not.
⁵³
I'm told he used to be a ‘stand-up’ comic in lesser night-clubs, how good or bad I do not know, and protects himself with standard jokes like: ‘I hijacked Lucy from a Cuban’. It is possible to imagine a series for a couple of years perhaps being reasonably tolerable as a way of life and a way of money – enormous money it'd have to be – with a congenial director and a happy few relaxed repertory of actors.

But for a life-time! Ah no. It is fascinating to watch her reaction to Elizabeth. She calls her for the most part Mrs Burton or Miss Taylor and occasionally Elizabeth but corrects it to the more formal immediately. She calls me in the third person His Highness or Mr Burton and sometimes Mia. This is a joke that E made on the first day when she, E, said that I had become so thin – I am now about 160lbs – that sleeping with me was like sleeping with Mia Farrow who is first cousin to a match-stick. She asked E yesterday how she felt. ‘Fine thank you,’ said E., ‘today my ass is not hanging out.’ Miss Balls then went into an embarrassing convulsion of hysterical laughter which terminated in her throwing herself helplessly over the back of a sofa and drumming her legs against the floor in a false ecstasy of amusement. It was acutely un-watchable and we all avoided each other's eyes. At another point Lucy said to me ‘We had Ruthy Berle over to dinner last night – he wasn't there thank Christ, he's such a goddam bore – and boy do you have a fan in her.
⁵⁴
She went on and on about you. Great actor. Great person and so on. Other people too. Roz Russell and people.
⁵⁵
Why do they do that?’ She ignores Brook and her brilliant straight man who's on, poor soul, week after week with her, a man called Gale Gordon, and Cliff Norton who plays a small part and the director.
⁵⁶
They don't exist off camera. Sometimes on. Between shots yesterday she summoned us Norton, Brook and myself to her dressing-room with a tap on each forehead – we were all sitting down chatting with Hugh French – and proceeded to tell us how to
play the scene which we had just walked through. With faces as straight as freeways we then all proceeded to shout every line at each other in ludicrously loud voices. ‘That's better, Richard, now I can hear that word, you're making me laugh.’ And laugh she did, every time we did it and we did it about three times. Brook's face was a study in disbelief. The other actor was obviously used to it and took it all as if this were normal for an actor to tell other actors how to do a scene without the director being there. I warned the director to warn Jingle-Balls that if she tried any of that stuff on Elizabeth she would see, in person, what a thousand megaton hydrogen bomb does when the warhead is attached and exploded. It will all be over tonight and again Lucy will be lucky that I am temporarily such a little saint as normally I would probably let her have what the Yanks call ‘the full shot’ of my contempt. [...]

Saturday 16th, Malibu
We are staying here – with the inevitable Liz and Brook – for the week-end. It is Hugh French's house in the ‘Colony’ as it is known.
⁵⁷
It is a Norman Rockwell cover of a place with a comfortably middle-class atmosphere.
⁵⁸
[...]

We did the Lucy show to great acclaim from Lucy and the rest of the people and the audience. We were all apprehensive as to exactly what was going to happen. Ron and indeed all of us were firmly fearful that Lucy, with her superior experience with this kind of medium would swamp us with changes of pace and/or ad libs and other cheap tricks of that kind. Nothing of the sort happened. We swamped her. She was intensely nervous and I found immediately that I was in total control of the audience and her from the moment we appeared together. The same happened when E appeared – Lucy's timing and assurance which we had assumed was a built-in mechanism which was faultless went skew-whiff and E, as ever, took everything in her stride. Everything she did – E that is – worked like a charm, and the audience quite clearly adored her. Her stage presence (this the third time I've felt it happen) is quite electrifying. She held the audience like a vice in
Faustus
at Oxford, at the Poetry Reading in New York and now in the Lucy Show.
⁵⁹
Now that we can afford it
though I will be as tense as a tigress with her young, she should try the living legitimate stage as they call it. Since she has decided to do it anyway there is no point in my getting in the way of a juggernaut. I talked to Ernie Gann yesterday about a stage adaptation of his forthcoming novel
The Antagonists
which is about the Masada, and it might be a good vehicle for her – and for me.
⁶⁰
[...]

As a reaction from the nerve-rack of the Lucy show combined with E's fears of the surgical knife on Monday and my fears of her fears and my natural irascibility and impatience when not drinking led to two bitter exchanges yesterday. E's telling me to ‘fuck off and get out of my sight’ and me replying in kind. My disappointment at being offered a CBE (which nevertheless I accepted, though E wanted me to turn it down thinking only a knighthood good enough) and not the bigger prize. The trouble with a CBE is that it is so easily confused with the pathetic MBE and OBE in the public mind though it is a much more important honour. Like the OM and the CM it means nothing because though it is a title – I suppose one is entitled to be called ‘Commander’ – it doesn't have the nice rolling sound of Sir Richard and Lady.
⁶¹
I am nevertheless immensely pleased. Pleased that it wasn't a ‘Beatles’ award.
⁶²
Pleased that it was obtained without any attempt on our part to get it. Pleased that it means we are no longer notorious but officially posh. Pleased that it will please the family. Pleased by the fact that a knighthood is not after all out of reach of a divorcee and a non-tax-paying citizen. [...] We might, in effect, have our cake and eat it at the same time. [...]