The Richard Burton Diaries (144 page)

Wednesday 8th
A horrible day. The heat in the desert was insufferable and I spent half the day lying in the sand with my mouth agape pretending to be unconscious while the sand, stirred up by the wind which was blowing in exactly the wrong direction, blew up my nose and into my mouth. However
I was excited at seeing E so I was stoically good-natured. The plane carrying E and the kids and Norma buzzed a couple of times and I panted with impatience to finish and get home. Like all things too eagerly awaited the meeting was a fiasco. I arrived and tore into the ‘suite’ and there was nobody there! Kate came in and said ‘Hi’ and went out again. Somebody had turned the air-conditioning off and the living room was like an oven. E came prancing in and we hugged and kissed though I was filthy and covered with grease and sand and wasn't very huggable. Immediately everybody started making cracks about San Felipe and what a terrible place it was, and one would have thought they had attacked Pontrhydyfen – I was so defensive. Never has a man been so chauvinistic about a shit-house. I feebly pointed out the beauty of its beach, and lamely said the sea was wonderful. Kate said it was too warm and it was like taking a hot bath. I lamely and bravely said that there were horses for hire. I said it was much more cosmopolitan than Bucerias which is like saying that hell is better than purgatory. We went in a sullen silence to dinner at Reuben's [...]. E made me as jealous as vengeance earlier on by saying that she'd called Marlon on the phone and that they had talked for an hour and that he was very solicitous about me. He really is a smugly pompous little bastard and is cavalier about everybody except Black Panthers and Indians.
¹⁹³
‘He's been keeping tabs on you,’ said E. That infuriated me even more. That sober self-indulgent obese fart being solicitous about me. You can't get any of those surrounded-by-sycophants one-time-winners on the phone unless they want something from you. Sinatra is the same. Gods in their own mirrors. Distorted mirrors. [...]

Thursday 9th
Yesterday was a lovely day. I left for work for the day at 7.00 and E came with me, despite the heat [...] she stayed until after lunch [...]. Everyone was delighted that she was there and everybody said afterwards that it was the best day they've had on the film yet. Hathaway was mellow by his usual standards and at one point when he started screaming at one of the actors I told him he was mistaken and that he had told the actor to move earlier. He said ‘Goddamn it I did not.’ ‘Goddamn it, you did,’ I said. ‘I apologize,’ he said to the actor. Everybody was astounded and one chap said to Ron that it was the first time in thirty years of working with Hathaway that he'd ever known him apologize to anybody. So I was a little hero, the leader of my little band, the little Robert Emmet.
¹⁹⁴
Elliott Kastner arrived with ‘Dirty’ Brian Hutton who very sweetly drove the former all the way from LA in his Mercedes.
¹⁹⁵
That's 6 to 8 hours hard driving. Both were exhausted particularly Elliott as he had flown over the Pole the same day I believe. Elliott brought a
script called
Plea for Defense
or some courtroom title which is going to be changed.
¹⁹⁶
It is a racy sadistic London piece about cops and robbers – the kind of ‘bang bang – calling all cars’ stuff that I've always wanted to do and never have. It could be more than that depending on the director. I play a cockney gangland leader who is very much a mother's boy and takes her to Southend and buys her whelks etc. but in the Smoke am a ruthless fiend incarnate but a homosexual as well.
¹⁹⁷
All ripe stuff. And over in a minute. They can do me entirely in five weeks, possibly six. He has a much more significant piece for Elizabeth – an original screenplay by Edna O'Brien but it will not be finished until next week.
¹⁹⁸
He says that E's could shoot at the same time as mine which wouldn't be a bad idea. It would also be in London.
Hammersmith Is Out
could go at the end of the year and E wants a bloke who is very hot at the moment called Robert Redford.
¹⁹⁹
She says he's very good but won't be available until the end of the year which would be very suitable. London in the fall can be lovely and the thought of Europe is very stimulating. I shall watch us to note how soon we'll want to come back to this hemisphere again. We are both a pair of old nomads. Since taking our Sabbatical we have lived in Switzerland, France, (Evian), Monte Carlo, Hawaii, Vallarta, Beverly Hills, Vallarta again, Beverly Hills, Malibu, Beverly Hills, Palm Springs, Malibu and now San Felipe. Otherwise we haven't moved a step.

Buckley says in an article yesterday in the
LA Times
. ‘If ever I saw firmness and justice tempered with mercy epitomized in one man, that man is Ronald Reagan.’

And talking of politics: Norma Heyman says that the feeling in the country at Wilson's defeat was indescribably joyous. She said it was like VJ day or something or Mafeking Night.
²⁰⁰
Everybody suddenly burst out singing type of reaction.
²⁰¹
Poor old Wilson. I can't believe that the Labour rank-and-file felt like that and she is talking only of her particular social circle, which is not the most stable, but it is surprising nevertheless. She said that Heath, who has always been as dull as rust, positively sparkled when she saw him give a speech on TV. The office is making the man again I suppose, as so often before. [...] Modern politics is such that, if you never read the papers or watched TV and lived in a market town you would not have known or know which party was or had been in power in the last twenty years. The differences between them have been so indiscernible. The strikes show a fine impartiality, the cost of
living likewise, the unemployment figures remain the same, the health service and the railroads and the public services are the same with only tiny fluctuations. Once in the Common market if we ever go in, nobody will notice that there is much difference except that money is still hard to come by.
²⁰²
It's all a load of old cobblers as the boys say. [...]

Friday 10th
[...]I did not work until after lunch [...]. Up and down a road waiting to be strafed by a plane – no plane will appear of course, that has already been shot. We had a full house yesterday morning with Kastner, Hutton, Romany Bain and Norma all in the one room.
²⁰³
Agreed to do Elliott's film subject to dates of
Hammersmith
which will be alright I should think to allow us to shoot former starting 14th September. Will do
Hammersmith
straight after presumably. He will get E's script to her shortly he says with Brian directing. Brook acquired himself a couple of extra lines yesterday by fast thinking. He had noticed that ‘Brown’ had a couple of lines to say to me but had been placed in another truck of the convoy.
²⁰⁴
Therefore when Hathaway said to Sevareid who was sitting next to me on the lorry ‘D'you know the lines’ Brook said ‘I do Mr Hathaway.‘
²⁰⁵
And they were his. He swapped places with the hapless Sevareid and got his face in lots more shots. Thinking all the time, that's our Brookie.

I lunched here at the motel with Bain and Elizabeth and the publicity man Walter. He is a negro and very pretty and intelligent. He says his wife has many white relatives and that the only time they acknowledge each other is when they commonly meet at funerals. The white half, when they have to, refer to the coloured half by their Christian names while they insist on being called by their surnames. Prejudice within the family because of different skin pigmentation is a new one on me. [...] The girls are full of giggles and are going through a dirty mind stage. Kate says things like ‘Oh Pisspots’ when she loses at Yahtsee. The film goes on apace and so far we seem to be well within schedule. [...] Hathaway is very careful of my comfort and, since I began shooting, has been pretty good with the first horrifying day with the German Karl Otto Alberty. He is still rough on the latter, but it has become a joke more than the terror that it was.

Kate leaves today to go to LA and tomorrow to NY. I can kiss goodbye to innocence. When we see her next she will be a teenager and the child will have gone for ever. It is unfortunate that sweet as Sybil can be that Kate picks up Syb's platitudinous lack of thought. One is aware all the time of half thought
judgements on a great many things – from poetry to politics. I have told her that nobody knows what poetry is – she obviously could have a passion for it as I have, and has the ear – but that it can only be known to those who recognize it. She said that Rod McKuen was an awful poet.
²⁰⁶
I asked her if she'd read him. She said no she hadn't. Well, I told her she was quite right but that she should read him first and decide for herself. Pompous as pride I was and am. [...]

Saturday 11th
6.20 and the children are already over from their rooms so the usual morning peace is shattered. Liza wants to come to work with me principally I suppose because I said that yesterday I saw a mare with its foal standing under the shade of a tree in the desert on the road to the location. I took Kate to the plane – the airstrip is a dirt strip between the town and the mountains – and off she went. I felt a bit funny as ever. [...]

[...] A letter arrived from Cis saying how pleased she was with the CBE and saying that she enjoyed the ‘Frost’ show but that her grandchildren were annoyed that I described her as ‘old’. [...]

It seems that we've been here for ten weeks and not ten days. The heat to which we are all thoroughly acclimatized is tremendous. And humid with it. Were it not for air-conditioning it would be a case of continual sweat morning noon and night. [...] The work consisted of throwing a German across a truck while four or five of my men render him unconscious. Next stint was jumping off the back of the lorry. Today there will be knifing in the back and lots of firing etc. Might even get to say a few jokes.

We dined at ‘Arnold's’ but almost as soon as we sat down to eat the main fuse blew and we ate in candlelight and air-conditionless until it became too insufferable.
²⁰⁷
As the waiters brought in the candles a cockney man called John Orchard sang ‘Ave Maria’.
²⁰⁸

Sunday 12th
Woke early [...] from a dream in which E and I could not get anybody to put up money for any film we wanted to do. Refused to put up and actually withdrew money already committed if we had anything to do with a film. We were outcasts and were forced to go to the theatre, where again we were refused employment. The dream or nightmare wasn't as coherent as that and vivid faces came and went and was obviously prompted by ‘producer's talk’ yesterday with Harry Tatelman and Hathaway, but I was relieved to wake up.
²⁰⁹

Yesterday was my first really full day on the film. I shot all day long, killing a man, firing machine-guns, jumping off half-tracks, jumping on lorries,
running across the sand in the boiling heat. It was an early day as the Mexicans insist on a straight through no-stopping-for-lunch-only-a-grabbed-sandwich day until 2.00. Starting shooting at 8am. This is a good day, and could well be done every day. A no-lunch day starting on the set at 8 in the morning and finishing at 3 in the afternoon would suit me fine. [...]

As for the nightmare – it cannot exist in reality for either of us – we are both too good at our jobs, and too rich and too famous. The producers are starting to line up again and ‘stars’ are coming back into fashion, after several failed attempts to repeat
Easy Rider
and other small-budget pictures.
²¹⁰
Actually for people with our command we are just coming into the millennium. If this pic or the next or the one after gross an average of $4 million each which is pessimistic, I could ‘walk away with’ 3 or 4 million dollars. If they were biggish grossers I could take 5 or 6. If one of them was a smash I would make 7 or 8 millions. There is, in fact, no known series of accidents that I can think of that could impoverish us even if we never worked again. Even a large war – as long as it wasn't the ultimate catastrophe – if we survived it, would leave us rich, perhaps even richer in this insane world. Even if we both died this afternoon our children would be more than adequately provided for. Materialistically, we could hardly have done any better for our families. He said, smugly.

The present state of the industry is bad luck on the johnny-come-latelies unless they are quickly and enormously established. The latest ‘stars’ like Elliott Gould and Hoffman etc. have had bad luck in starting to hit the jackpot while it is empty. Hoffman of course is so brilliant that the state of the industry is a matter of indifference to him but people like Elliott Gould are by no means so clever and smack of being one-shot artists and might well fall on their asses. [...]

Liza is growing up into a sweet little lady and is going through a heart-breakingly vulnerable stage, very aware of boys and thinks she's ugly and unattractive and so on. I feel enormously protective and am worrying already that she is going to be hurt before long by some dashing idiot. She came to work with me yesterday and stayed the whole time despite the boredom and the fact that we couldn't find the horse and foal. She is frequently in day-dreams of some kind and has to be brought back to attention with an affectionate snap of the fingers. I wonder what she thinks about apart from the beloved Derby Day the VII.
²¹¹

E is fat but happy. I suppose she'll have to start watching her weight before she starts the next film, but she's very jolly as she is. The camera is cruel however so five or ten pounds will have to come off.

Monday 13th
[...] The rest of yesterday was a classical Sunday – a read and a doze and love in the afternoon, a crossword puzzle (Penguin
Sunday Telegraph
Collection) grapplesnaps and tea and an early dinner over in the restaurant and to bed about 9.00 with a John D. MacDonald and asleep by 10.30.

[...] There is a terrific amount of drunkenness in the bar after work is over, I'm told and two separate cliques have quickly formed. The Germans on one side and the British-Americans on the other. Brook says he wouldn't be surprised if there was a bit of a punch-up one of these days. Neither would I. Even in Stratford-upon-Avon I remember tempers getting frayed and a lot of snarling after the actors had been stuck together for ten months in one small town. Lucky it's only another three weeks or less here. I remember too in Tripoli doing
Bitter Victory
that I ended up by knocking Nigel Green about a bit, and he me.
²¹²