The Richard Burton Diaries (175 page)

Monday 6th, Ritz
³⁸⁹
After having arrived back last afternoon I read papers and did yesterday's entry and read a book by Ross MacDonald and half watched TV and talked to Kurt Frings agreeing to see him and his lot today at 5 o'clock downstairs to ‘discuss the script and read a note from a boy called Richard Sterne who addressed his note ‘Most noble Richard of Burton’ and ended ‘Richard of Sterne’.
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Surprising, this, as he has always struck me as being a most solemn feller and not given to even mild flights of fancy of this kind but he has been in Paris for a year or so as he says ‘a great year here in Paris at the school of Marcel Marceau’. That's the mime chap I think.
³⁹¹
And perhaps the air of Paris has gone to his head. He kept a diary and tape-recorded a book called
John Gielgud directs Richard Burton
which I couldn't read but which other people obviously could as he says it is going into a second edition. He said he was below with ‘Joanna the Piana’ whoever that may be. Was there a girl in
Hamlet
called Joanna. Don't think so. The Sterne man played an infinitely small part but I can't remember which. He left his tel no. and I shall call him sometime if we stay longer in Paris as we may now as Losey wants me to do dubbing on Trot on the 13th in Rome and we are trying to get him to
change it to here. Going home to Gstaad and then packing again for Rome a couple of days later would be another trauma and drama. [...]

Tuesday 7th, Ritz
³⁹²
We shall be going to Rome, tomorrow night on the sleeper train leaving here at 6 and arriving in Rome at 9 the following morning. The motto is ‘Bon soir, Paris – Bonjour Rome.’ The Roman people said that they couldn't possibly get the loops ready by Thursday whereupon E said then very well he won't be able to come until the middle of January. Promptly they called back and said they'd be ready by Thursday.

Yesterday was one of those bitty days and today promises to be the same. [...] I went downstairs at 5 o'clock to talk to Dmytryk and about six other people including Frings who was the only one I knew and I said that E thought the end of the film too portentous and idiotic but that I didn't think a horror film should be taken too seriously either way as long as it was well done. We agreed on a venue outside Budapest and that we would live in a house if possible and a hotel if not. And they told me they had Virna Lisi and almost had Andress and Ann-Margret.
³⁹³
I couldn't care less but just to test their veracity Gianni called Lisi and I asked her if indeed she was in the film as I didn't trust anyone and she said yes but that she wanted to play the biggest part but they had said they had to have an American star for that because the man was probably going to be unknown and they needed Box Office but that now that I was the star who needed, she said and wanted an American star and would I mind if she tried for the biggest part now. Go ahead. Go ahead. And then there was talk about Brian doing a film with E and the TV films of Osborne's seem to be very confused. Nobody seems to know what is going on and there's a TV thing about Tennessee Williams directed by Hutton who is rapidly becoming a part of our lives and he wants and we want him to do the Osborne plays so we are all three likely to walk down the aisle before long and plight eternal troth.
³⁹⁴
And Stanley Donen of the squeaky voice called on the phone asking Comment va tu and I said Bene gracie and he's coming today at 2 o'clock for discussion re
Little Prince
which they want to do in the Spring and it all has to be fitted in with E and then there's also
Absolution
and I may kill myself on Christmas Day and screw everybody.
³⁹⁵

We went to the Duke and Duchess’ house last night for dinner with half a dozen of the most consummate bores in Paris. I don't know their names but I shall never need to remember them for I have an idea they are people who
only go to the Windsors and one of them – probably the old Duke – must die very soon – though it is she who is now nearly completely ga-ga. It was a sad and painful evening and needs a long time to write about and I haven't got the time. They both referred continually to the fact that he was once the King. ‘And Emperor,’ I said at one point. ‘And Emperor,’ she repeated after me, ‘And Emperor, we always forget that. And Emperor.’ He is physically falling apart, his left eye completely closed and a tremendous limp and walks with a stick. Her memory has gone completely and then comes back vividly in flashes. She derided Grace Kelly all night as being a boring snob. I defended but she would have none of it. I finally gave up as I knew that half the time she didn't know what she was saying. There was one woman there a French woman who protested violently that she was not Swiss – what's so wrong with being Swiss – and who is married to a Hungarian Count who obviously didn't realize that the Duchess was gone away from us and attempted pathetic rational argument. I gave the word. Her husband said that Tito was the natural son of a Hungarian Count who had exercised his Droit de Seignor or whatever that's called over Tito's mother's family. I said I would tease him with it when next we saw him. I doubt it. Both the allegation and that I would tease him.
³⁹⁶

Wednesday 8th, Ritz
³⁹⁷
The Hungarian and his French wife were quite serious about Tito's illegitimacy and his being the natural son of a Hungarian nobleman as last night at Baron de Rede's supper for Liza Minnelli the wife slipped me a note with the name of Tito's father on it.
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The father was a Count Erdody with an umlaut above the o, and he had fancied Tito's mother who supposedly a maid at Erdody chateau or castle or whatever the hell Hungarians have, was a pretty little thing, and was snapped up by the lechy count. Josip Erdody Tito. Pronounced Err-durdy. It might be possible to introduce it into conversation with Tito by saying something like ‘My God, the Capitalist West and its decaying aristocracy claim even the foremost living Communist. D'you know sir, that they said of you quite seriously that ...’ and then duck or wait for the firing squad. The Count, the Parisian one I mean and not the dirty one who fathered Tito, said to me ‘Has it ever occurred to you to wonder why these peasants, these Brozzes, managed to have such a beautiful family home? You must have seen it.’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘I haven't seen it but on reflection it does seem to be rather grand for poor people but I assumed that it had been tarted up by Tito after he became President. I have only seen still snaps of it in books.’ ‘My dear Burton, go and look at the house the next time you and Mrs Burton are in Jugoslavia. It's an easy trip after all. It has the best road in Jugoslavia leading to the god's birthplace. And it is not smartened up at all,
except perhaps its immediate surroundings. It is as it was.’ We will go if we have the chance. I'm sure that the Slavs will lay it on for us. It would weaken Tito immensely with the out and out extremely Lenin-Stalin Marxists to find him so tainted but I have an idea that any documentation will have been erased from all slates including living memory, if any. [...]

We went, E in a Caftan of Slav-Turkish origin and as heavy as lead with me in a dinner jacket with an all-black ruffled shirt with one brilliant diamond pin borrowed from Van Cleef mounting firmly to the chin. [...] Liza's opening numbers were frighteningly and intensely nervous and with the exception of Lena Horne (and possibly myself when boozing in a heat-wave) I have never seen anybody sweat so much.
³⁹⁹
After a time she settled down though I suffered agonies for the first 15 minutes. Rocky Brynner (Yul's son) sat in front of me and was so nervous for her, being her follower since childhood apparently, that he made me more nervous. However her shattering nervous energy finally communicated itself to her hopelessly dull audience until they went too far and would not let her leave the stage with a steady unisonic handclap and she did another number and still the now really silly audience asked for more and I told Rocky to wave her off – she was right near him – and off she went.

Alex de Rede's house is a museum and ought to be in one.
⁴⁰⁰
It was as intimate as a Maples show-window, but all done with superb and detailed taste.
⁴⁰¹
It's a shame as well as a surprise to find out that it's not his house but is leased by him for 60 years so all that labour, and labour it is – he must have spent millions and travelled the world – will eventually fall under the auctioneer. Apart from some very discreet ceiling lights the whole place was lighted by candles and these were endlessly multiplied by mirrors. I sought the far room as soon as I arrived and sat there alone for ten minutes savouring a glass of Perrier – still liquor-less after an intensive 6 days of society – and I mean ‘savouring’ as I was terribly thirsty for some reason – and but for those concealed ceiling lights I could have been back in time a couple of hundred years. The same faces appear at all the parties. We talked to Salvador Dali for a time who clowned about charmingly as usual giving us his Catalanese pronunciation of ‘butterfly’ which cannot be impersonated in print.
⁴⁰²
The English live in fogs and therefore everything, including their language is rife with imprecision, including their language, he said, but our Catalan is sharp-edged and everywhere defined and sharply dominant, like our language. Nonsense I said. Your language with all its esses elided in eths sounds is liquid but not limpid, it is muddy like your minds. He left saying ‘butterfly’. With him was a striking looking blonde, tall and thin, who stared at me all the time while
at dinner and Guy (blonde hair always falling over his forehead) Barrault(?) was helpless with stoned laughter saying Tu as ton ticket, c'est drôle, tu as ton ticket et la dame est un homme.
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And so she was. The girl was a man. [...]

We are off to Rome tonight on the train and I'm looking forward to it. I've had enough of French society. Also their faces were beginning to become familiar to me and indeed some of them began to acquire names as the same faces are seen at all parties. I want to retreat now into the silent world of the Alps and bury myself in walks and books and dogs and hibernate until the holidays, so loathed by me, are over. Messy Xmas trees that shed and the house running with people.

And now to meet someone called Robert (I think) Hakim, one of the innumerable Hakim (Egyptian) bros re
Under the Volcano
.
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Friday 10th, Grand
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To work at 9 this a.m. and with a bit of luck I might be finished by lunchtime but I may become word-drunk around midday and it might be better to take a break before the final and last lap. Also I remember I have to do a lot of off-stage talking – nothing specific but the sort of diatribic stuff that Joe can shove in anywhere. Joe says that the visions over my shoulder things don't work and that he has cut them all out. Just badly done he says, the machine incompetently handled as he saw the same technique used on British TV only two nights ago absolutely brilliantly. Comes to something when the poor relation does technically better stuff than the rich Uncle. I thought at the time that the technical boys on the process were all too familiar to me, faces that I'd seen around for years in Italian films and guessed then that such a new process would demand, normally, new men – particularly the men who invented it, and usually young men. They were all old. That is at least my age – middle aged-ish.

E is eating as if she is about to acquire some dreadful disease which will include a loss of appetite, and so that while she is hungry she will eat and eat and eat. I keep on telling her that she is as round as she is tall which is a complete lie as apart from her impossible stomach and her hereditary double chin she is not really all that tubby. She is well covered though. She is one of those who can only diet when the mood takes her and then she goes too far. Since she doesn't have a weight problem of any consequence she could eat very well, not dieting and still remain trim without too much trouble, but milady has all the discipline of a mountain pony. I enjoy self imposed discipline, there must be a masochist hidden here somewhere, though in the matter of dieting I find it hardly any trouble at all. [...]

Evening

I finished my so called two days’ work in less than a day since yesterday we worked only from three ‘til 5.45 and today I cleared the lot by lunchtime. Much private rejoicing as I hate that aspect of the work. After it was over I saw a reel of the film leading up to and including the assassination. It will look good I'm sure when all the thuds and noises are put in and the blood is very effective and will be more so in a good print.

Trap and Joe [Joseph and Patricia Losey] and the children are coming for dinner and I have just seen a pair of diamond earrings for a cool million dollars. They were two pendant diamonds 30 carats each and very beautiful and superbly cut but I told Gianni Bulgari's man that the price was outrageous and that I would find it nasty to buy them even at
¹
/
₂
half that cost.
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Bet you an offer nearer the latter than the former will come through ere long.

Saturday 18th, Ariel
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I stayed in bed for as long as I could bear it but finally – foot or no foot – I got me up and with cunning contortions managed to dress myself, sat me in a chair in the bedroom, placed another chair as a table and wrote yesterday's entry. I then began [
...
] the article for the
Mail
. I have a vague shape of it in my head and I did about 200 words though they have yet to be polished and balanced. At the moment I have only the vaguest idea as to how long it will be – anything from 1000 words to 3000 would be my guess.
⁴⁰⁸
[...]

Chris arrived last night very late and I was so bushed that I simply couldn't wait up for him. [...] Chris looks magnificent and is his usual sarcastic denigrating nothing-is-any-good self. Ron and E say that last night he excelled himself and Ron said, ‘You'd better get him the hell out of that school in Krautland Richard – they're turning him into a Nazi.’ I replied that nobody had to worry about his turning into Attila the Hun but Attila was the bloke to worry about. What did he say or do, I asked. They said that after he arrived Vicky asked him if he wanted to play Yahtsee and he replied: No, it's a boring repetitive and stupid game. Well, said I, in Chris’ defence he's right and it is. However, I agreed he might have been slightly more non-committal as everybody else there was obviously enjoying the game. In any case I would prefer, in anybody, more jaundice and cynicism than over-sentimentality.