The Richard Burton Diaries (145 page)

Elizabeth took the sun very well yesterday [...]. She has remarkable recuperative powers and has confounded the doctors [...]. When she loses a little flab she'll also look fitter than she has for years. Her sexual appetite is as eager as ever and so is mine though I don't think either of us attaches the urgent importance to it that we used to. I had a fear that the complete cessation of drink would decrease my sex desire, and so it did for a time probably because I concentrated so much on stopping the alcohol that everything else became diffuse – I had difficulty in concentrating on reading for instance – and I found that my mind raced and flitted from thing to object to idea at a bewildering speed. Now that the poison is nearly out of my system – I'm told it takes six months to dry out totally – I can think clearly again. I don't see the world whole, but I see it steadily. I have lost the hungover nightmarish fear of imminent disaster and early deaths and all its concomitants and am better balanced. [...] I think that in about two or three months I'll be able to settle down to a sustained piece of writing and in this new sober world I don't have the desperate urgency that I used to have that I would never do anything with any permanence, even semi-permanence. Now slowly, I believe I can, and not through writing novels which is a most unreal form to me. Novels are tricky and artificial and contrived and apart from the very great ones are all bedside reading. When I finish this piece I will try again.

Tuesday 14th
[...] I worked until lunch-time yesterday [...]. I spoke my first German in the film and had a film-long speech and scene with Clinton Greyn who is not a very good actor I'm afraid. He is tall and good-looking in a kind of weak way with a voice that threatens to become prissy when he presses. I wish Hathaway would let him be more casual. I play my part with a ping-pong-no-damned-nonsense rapidity and he cannot match me when he tries to
do it. His voice is sibilant when he has a few esses flying about a sentence. Hathaway however is asking him to do things that don't accord with his personality – it's like asking the late Leslie Howard to be dynamic and harsh and clipped and furious.
²¹³

Today the film gets hot with guns firing, flame-throwers flaming hand-grenades grenading as I and the commandos teach the medics how to be men at arms. I heard good news yesterday that I may be out of here by the 26th of this month. That's a couple of weeks and will get us out of this long hot American summer and home to cool Europe. I am looking forward to going by train and lunch in the Pump Room in the Ambassador East in Chicago and paperbacks on the train and stupendous breakfasts while the States wheel by the windows. Read the various regional papers and all that and what comics do they have and which political boys do they syndicate.

[...] Last night I was lying on the bed doing a double-crostic and looked up a quotation in the paperbacked
Quotation Dictionary
that I carry around with me specifically for that purpose. I immediately became lost in the book and read all the Shakespeare ones right through very slowly. There was hardly a line there that I didn't immediately know but seeing the miraculous words in print again doomed me to a long trance of nostalgia, a stupor of melancholy, like listening to really massive music, music that moans and thunders and plumbs fathomless depths. I wandered through the book for a long time but no other writer hit me with quite the same impact as William S. What a stupendous God he was, he is. What chance combination of genes went to the making of that towering imagination, that brilliant gift of words, that staggering compassion, that understanding of all human frailty, that total absence of pomposity, that wit, that pun, that joy in words and the later agony. It seems that he wrote everything worth writing and the rest of his fraternity have merely fugued on his million themes. [...]

Wednesday 15th
[...] Showered and shampooed after work and had an early dinner (7 o'clock) with Liza and Maria and Brook. [...] Then read on the bed while Maria did some sums in arithmetic and then read me a few pages from a book. She really does read now, not just remember from previous readings. I shall work with her every day and try to turn her into a bookworm. It would be nice to have a fellow bookworm in the family. She is a darling little child. I don't know why I worry about her so much.

I read yesterday in the
LA Times
that Frankie Sinatra has ‘come out for Reagan’.
²¹⁴
That's like Laurel coming out for Hardy. I shouldn't think either of them has had a thought of their own in their lives except about themselves.
Frank was asked by Haber of the
Times
, ‘Knowing your justly deserved magnanimity and interest in charitable organizations and support for ethnic minorities and the under-privileged etc., how do you feel about Governor Reagan's slashing of the funds for the aged and the blind by $10 million?’ ‘Has he done that?’ said Frankie, ‘I must talk to him about that.‘
²¹⁵
Big, as they say, fuckin’ deal. If we hear shortly that Reagan has only cut the aid-fund to $9,900,000 we shall know that Francis Albert Sinatra's fine Sicilian hand has been behind it again. All either of ‘em can do is count – using their fingers of course. Hathaway suggests that it's pique on Frankie's part. He was given the brush-off by Jack Kennedy. ‘Don't call us Frankie, we'll call you,’ he is reputed to have said to Frankie who had been plaguing him with phone-calls after he was President. Even Frankie however, despite his monomania, should be able to see that Reagan is patched cardboard and dangerously stupid. Now let's hope that Jesse Unruh beats him in November and leaves Frank with egg on his face again.
²¹⁶
Silly sod.

Read the first act of
Much Ado about Nothing
last night before turning out the lights. Delightful. I must
read
William more often and not merely quote him to myself. There is a peculiar and tangible satisfaction from actually seeing the words on the page defying mortality.

Thursday 16th
[...] I worked steadily from 7.45 until just before 3 after noon, driving endlessly up and down a desert road chatting away to Clinton Greyn and John Colicos. It's odd that I cannot define what a good actor has, what quality or style but I can tell a bad actor immediately, and Clinton Greyn is bad. Colicos is slightly above average good and could in the right part be more than that, but Greyn is difficult to imagine good or forceful in anything. [...]

Elizabeth has been away for two days now and doesn't come back ‘til Saturday and I miss her all the time. I love getting up in the morns and typing or reading to suddenly find that she's got up too and is having a screwdriver or a Bloody Mary or a salty dog. And generally making a nuisance of herself. [...]

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.