The Richard Burton Diaries (180 page)

As usual I am beginning to have butterflies in the belly at the thought of starting work again and don't even have the nerve-deadener of a script to learn as I know it is being entirely re-written. At least, I hope it is. So I continue with Italian and French and Frances Stevenson's [diary] re Lloyd George and Trotsky's life.
⁷²
My ignorance of the latter was monumental. I didn't know that he was one of the Mensheviks, for instance, or that he vilified Lenin so harshly.
⁷³
As for Frances Stevenson, her diary is sweet but she sometimes makes Lloyd George sound like a boastful little nothing.
⁷⁴
Writing only his version of events and being constantly challenged by history in the shape of dry little footnotes by the editor, A. J. P. Taylor. [...]

Tuesday 17th, Ionian Sea
[...] E read the diary yesterday and said I'd forgotten to mention the cig-holder given to her by Tito. It is the famous one, much cartooned, which he used to flourish a lot at the UN and other convocations holding it as if it were a pencil with hot end up. She passed many many remarks on its unusual beauty assuring him it must be a Fabergé.
⁷⁵
It seems to me that no one there knew what a Fabergé was or is. However after two days of subtle brow-beating he gave it to her. She kissed him on both cheeks which gratified him enormously. He gave me a bunch of flowers. He also gave us a lot of his own home-produced wine made in his own vineyards. [...] There is some trouble brewing up again on his borders with Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. Doubtless he'll be able to handle it. Geographically of course, he has that coveted access to the sea which all the land-locked have greedy eyes on. I understand a sight more about Russia's behaviour between the wars since reading
Trotsky
and for the first time Stalin's pogroms and purges take on a kind of historical inevitability. [...]

Wednesday 18th, Adriatic
[...] Am still deep in
Trotsky
and so far the man who comes out as the most enigmatically fascinating is Stalin. I must get
Deutscher's book about him as soon as I get back to an English library.
⁷⁶
I could order it to be sent to Rome for the start of the Trotsky film.

[...] We are due in Dubrovnik in about four hours and am beginning to feel nervous again about Tito. Jesus I hope they have a part for me to get hold of. I have all rights outside Jug[oslavia] so I must do my best to get things done so that I can re-cut and if necessary cut out some of the things they might get up to. That is, if the director is as average as he seems to be. We shall soon find out. How splendid it will be if the director is very good.

I want to persuade them – I have done so partially – to included a great [deal] more stuff about the British Military mission's reaction to Tito and his struggle. A lot more emphasis on his refusal to try and merely talk the British – Deakin principally – into getting Allied support but to
show
them by the deeds of his partisans that they were really fighting the German and Italian and Bulgarian armies. I also want to show in as low-key a fashion as possible Tito's life-long refusal to shoot captured enemies, even
etnik traitors. He told me of one terribly bitter story. He had a few hundred German prisoners and was at a point where he was forced to retreat. To carry the prisoners with him would have been a tremendous strain on his ever-slender resources. So he informed the senior German officer that he was releasing them to find their own way back to their commands. They were astonished but delighted, naturally. The usual treatment in that kind of warfare was to shoot all prisoners. He also hid his own injured men who were not able to move in what he thought was a safe place. He found out later that the released Germans returned as soon as he had disappeared and slaughtered the helpless partisans. Even so, he never wreaked vengeance. The other day, I noticed that Mihaaelovic [
sic
], the Royalist
etnik leader died of old age.
⁷⁷
He had not been shot when he was caught but given a trial, found justly guilty of collaboration with the enemy and sentenced to life imprisonment (I believe)
but not shot
. When we were with Tito he said how sorrowful he was that one of his favourites in the Sudan coup which was happening then had shot out of hand scores of political and military prisoners.
⁷⁸
This had turned him off completely. I asked him if he had ever lost his temper during those harrowing years of ravenous warfare. He said he had only done so twice. Once when he and some of his men were trapped in a cave and one by one tried to break out against heavy and concealed enemy fire. He said he blazed away at a helplessly trapped company of Germans who were in a captured jeep. Once when Deakin came to him to tell him that, after the capitulation of Italy, all captured Italian arms, ammunition, tanks etc. should be held and handled over to the Allies. Deakin mentions this in his
book too saying it was the first time he, Deakin had seen the Marshal go mad with rage.
⁷⁹
Among many little oddities I found from Tito [was] that he shaved everyday of the war except one day, the one day, when he was wounded in the left upper arm by bomb splinters. And that he dressed as impeccably as was possible throughout the whole madness. Another bit: he had sent a message to Stalin telling him of his release of the German prisoners. He received a brutally nasty telegram from Stalin in reply to which he sent a cold reply saying the unless Stalin could send him, Tito, material assistance, or at least the morale-lifting presence of a military mission, he should mind his own business. When later Tito went to Moscow to see Stalin there was a small party at which, among many others, was the dreaded Beria, chief of the Secret Police.
⁸⁰
Many toasts were drunk and all inevitably to Stalin. Tito had not had a drink of any alcoholic kind during four years and the eternal vodka was hitting him very hard. When his turn to toast came he toasted the inevitable Stalin, whereupon Stalin said with deadliness ‘Why do you toast me now after sending me that insulting telegram?’ Tito mumbled some placatory answer but the atmosphere was charged with menace. Later feeling sick from the vodka Tito went out into the grounds to throw up. A shadow appeared among the trees. It was Beria who said: ‘Don't worry, it is only your friendly policeman!’

Thursday 19th, Dubrovnik
We arrived off Dubrovnik at 5.15 yesterday afternoon and waited for the pilot for whom we continued to wait and wait. [...] When the pilot finally appeared before our puzzled eyes he explained that there was an hour time difference between Italian and Jugoslavian time. Hence the muck-up.

To our surprise, puzzlement and delight there wasn't a soul to meet us. The wharf was a desert [...] After about half an hour the inevitable little John Howard appeared telling us that everybody was on tenterhooks waiting for us to come.
⁸¹
The radio and TV had been on about it for days. Were we coming by jet, private, or our yacht. We were due on Wednesday morning, Wednesday evening, we were coming by sea-plane on Thursday! Within half an hour they descended on us like Assyrians. Popovi
, Deli
, Stepanjek, yet another interpreter a General in full get-up – didn't get his name but sounded like Vuko something – the press representative.
⁸²
[...] The Slavs seem unexpectedly to have a manana sense of time except so far Tito.
⁸³
He was as fanatically on the dot as I am. [...]

Friday 20th
[...] The house is enormous and totally impersonal and it seems that we are the first people to sleep [there]. Despite its vastness it only contains four bedrooms, two of them gigantic and containing two equally gargantuan study-offices adjoining. The other two are your large but not awe-inspiring bedrooms. The groundfloor ‘lounge’ and dining-room which leads off from it is about the size of a tennis court. There are 17 servants only one of whom speaks English or Italian and badly at that. So I have temporarily married my Serbo-Croat phrase book. Have you ... and nouns nouns nouns. Coffee, tea, onions, tomatoes.

Everybody means well but we shall quietly move back to live on the yacht. It is cooler and there is no language problem for E when I'm not around and the beloved books are ambient.

The yacht is parked very precariously near the steps leading up to the house and is potentially dangerous in case of a sudden sirocco so on local advice we are moving today to a little harbour about three miles away. Since leaving the yacht here is inviting everybody, and there are many many people around, to a perpetual ‘open house’, it is a good idea to get away. Yesterday we had Hardy Krüger and wife and children and the nanny and a Jug actress very young and a bit ‘cute’ called Neddy pronounced Naydee and probably written Nedj or something.
⁸⁴
Krüger and wife are very German and very serious and determinedly intellectual. Somebody mentioned Visconti's
Death in Venice
and I said I hadn't seen it and – politely and totally without interest – asked if Mrs Krüger had seen it.
⁸⁵
She had. What did she think of it? I said like a fool. Foolish, because then she proceeded to tell me and at length with a wealth of perfectly predictable criticisms of it because I too had read a few of the notices by accident, and saw them all coming like a Teutonic juggernaut. Phwew! Krüger himself who is one of those measured mental pipe-smoking meerschaums went on for an equally long time about the vast problem of whether E should or should not play a small part in the film of a partisan lady-doctor who is conventionally brave and loses her legs in a battle and suitably dies heroically and so on. I said that I wouldn't dream of asking a major star like E or Loren or A. Hepburn to play such a minute and conventional role and that it demanded nothing of her while she, being a professional, would demand a great deal of them.
⁸⁶
Well, Mr Krüger went on, now Stanislavski (There are no small parts. Want a bet Stan?) Freud and Stephen Haggard (I would rather play a bad part in a good play than a good part in a bad play) and charity, as ‘twere, her, E's contribution to the heroism of the Slav peoples by playing a
small part for nothing.
⁸⁷
My syntax is all to hell as I am sitting on the poop and am continually distracted by Liza, Kate and E and Raymond.