The Richard Burton Diaries (205 page)

Sunday 6th
[...] I have so lost count of time and days that I had a lovely surprise – paradoxically an expected surprise if I'd known what day it was and that we were playing Scotland at Cardiff yesterday. Anyway, there were the lovely headlines. ‘Welsh Crush Scots’, ‘King For A Day Gareth smashes Scotland’, etc. We had beaten the Scots, strongly fancied in some quarters after beating the French by 20 points 4 weeks ago, by 35 to 12. Wales scored 5 tries to Scotland's one and three of the Welsh tries, one by Gerald Davies and two by Gareth Edwards had to be seen apparently to be believed.
²⁴
I feel very strange about this Welsh team. It would appear that they are the greatest all round team since the ‘Golden Age’ from about 1900 to 1910 and like the golden men of that age, talked about with breathless awe by those who saw them, and again like those immortal ghosts,
I have never seen them play
.
²⁵
I believe that I saw Gareth Edwards play for Millfield in a ‘Sevens’ many years ago but apart from him and possibly John Dawes playing for London Welsh I
have never even seen them play as individuals.
²⁶
The Welsh this century, apart from a mediocre patch in the 20s, have always been able to produce very sound teams and nearly always hard to beat with an occasional match winner or two in the side, men out of the common mould like Bleddyn and the Cliffs Morgan and Jones, Tanner, Wooller, Watkins the forward before the 2nd War and Watkins the fly-half since, but since the Golden Age I cannot remember – on paper at least – a team that contained such a heavy percentage of ‘geniuses’ at the same time.
²⁷
Morris of Neath, Mervyn Davies and John Taylor in the pack, Edwards and John at half back, John Williams at fullback, Gerald Davies on the wing and – in full cry – a virtually unstoppable Bevan on the other wing.
²⁸
I have to guess that Bergiers and Lewis in the centre are sound, especially in defence.
²⁹
What I should do is write to Cliff Jones and ask if I can buy 16mm copies of the matches played in the last 3 years including the tests against New Zealand and have myself a punny ball.
³⁰
Must do so.

Tomorrow to Hungary. I am looking forward to it with excitement. The very name Budapest smacks of romance and tragedy and wild Magyar music. It cannot, simply cannot be dull, regardless of friends’ warnings that it is the most depressing capital in Europe. I shall start out, at least, refusing to be talked into disliking it before I find out for myself. And again the Communist experiment is eternally fascinating. There must be some alternative to the idiocy and rat-race murderousness of ‘democracy’ and I'm pretty sure that Communism is not it but it is different so one more look at one more communist country.

I went to the ‘Lion’ book shop yesterday and bought yet another pile of books for the ten week stay in Buda and Pest. Cadogan's diaries, A. L. Rowse's two vols
The Early Churchills
and
The Later Churchills
, Solzhenitsyn's
Full Circle, Chosen Words
by Ivor Brown.
³¹
Two dual-language Penguins of Mallarmé and French Poetry of the 19th Century.
³²
A book by Auberon
Waugh – son of Evelyn.
³³
Isaac Deutscher
Red China Russia and the USA
– I think it's called.
³⁴
A Hungarian Grammar. And a handful of thrillers. So we should have more than enough to get through ten weeks.

Monday 7th
We leave this afternoon for Budapest flying at 3.30. The people are so adamant that we depart and arrive at the border, at the exact time
over
the border rather, that one gets the impression that if we are too early or too late we will be buzzed or shot down. This must be a very nervous frontier anyway since 1956 but particularly since they have a very nervous Jugoslavia nearby.
³⁵
Joe and Patricia came for drinks and dinner last night and Joe, who has just come back from Jugland, said that the talk is that the dissident communists in Croatia are being financed and armed by either Nazi Jugoslavian exiles operating behind great wealth from South America or by Russia or both.
³⁶
[...] I wonder if the old man is going to be forced to start shooting a few blokes at last.
³⁷
If he doesn't and things get worse the Russians may come over the border ‘to help out’ as they did in Hungary in 56. Who knows? Merely taking political prisoners may not be enough. A few public trials and death sentences or forced exile may be called for. I hope the old man clears everything up shortly for out of sheer affection I'd not like to see his majestic and reasonably humane leadership of his marvellous little country fizzle out into a bewildered and helpless kow-tow to the Muscovites. Taking the long view it won't much matter historically if Jugoslavia becomes yet another satellite of the Kremlin's for nobody is going to be able to keep those people down for long.
³⁸
It is writ down in corporal in the books for all to read, They cannot be a subject race for long. With the Mexicans I have never fallen so violently in love with a nation at first sight, as I have with the Jugoslavians. As for Hungarians, the only ones I have consciously known have been successful exiles – George Tabori and he who gave me his word and a contract for £100 per week while I was still slogging away in the theatre – the incomparable Alex Korda.
³⁹
When I think of Hungarians I emblematize them in the person of that great scoundrel of ineffable charm, huge generosity and large lies, of living grandiosely beyond his means, of telling me of poverty in Paris where he lived at one time – he solemnly assured me – on one gigantic cake sent him by his mother, for 6 weeks. When, out of the blue, I was invited to have lunch with him at 146 Piccadilly which turned out not to be lunch at all but coffee and
cigars, and he said in his growling Hoongarrian English, ‘Would you like to work with me?’ I stammered a sort of ‘Yes, but of course I have to...’ ‘It will hardly inconvenience your stage career. In fact I insist that the theatre must come first. I am going to give you £100 a week for five years. I have never seen you act but I have heard from a friend or two that you are going to be an actor of importance. My friend and colleague Laurence Olivier told me that you are a natural aristocrat and now that I have seen you I know that he is right. I am therefore investing £5000 on a belief that Olivier and I are right. So learn all you can in the theatre. Try not to get in long runs, do as many plays as you can. Go to Stratford. Buy a car, get your wife a mink. Enjoy yourself.’ I was in a daze of delight. I was about 24 – no 23 years old – and the most I'd ever earned was £12 a week. ‘Sign this,’ he said indicating one sheet of paper with only one side worded. I began to read it. ‘Good,’ he said: ‘never sign any paper you haven't read and understood.’ It said roughly that I was to be available to Sir Alexander Korda for a maximum of 12 weeks a year at my convenience, for a maximum of 5 years during which time – if I did a film for anyone else – I was to get my usual 5000 plus half of whatever price the other film company were prepared to pay. The other half was to go to Korda's company ‘London Films’. I danced down Piccadilly to the nearest pub and phone. I called home and told Syb. I called Stanley Baker. I told the publican – a complete stranger. I called Ivor through Dai John Philips.
⁴⁰
When the pub closed at 3 I suppose it was, I took a taxi, undreamt of extravagance, to the ML Club near the BBC where I was sure that there would be a few congenial well-wishing friends. To cap it all the late and beloved Dylan was there and the even later and equally beloved Louis MacNeice both of them well on the way to stupefaction. Vague figures loomed in the haze of smoke and alcohol and I had pretty well run through my first week's salary by the time I arrived home in the little hours.

This was an astonishing step forward. Many young actors, some of them good like Dirk Bogarde, Donald Houston, Andrew Crawford, Jimmy Granger – I think – and Jean Simmons were under horrible contracts to the Rank Organization but I was under contract to Sir Alexander Korda and his other contract actors were Olivier, Vivien Leigh, Ralph Richardson and a host of other giant names. A very much posher and distinguished lot than the Rank ‘stable’. In the end I never did do a film for Alex. He loaned me out to Emlyn Williams and Tolly de Grunwald and then to Fox for a film called
My Cousin Rachel
with Olivia de Havilland as my leading lady.
⁴¹
I was still agent-less (unless one considers Korda as my agent) and Fox offered me
$50,000. I had told Syb and the family that I was going to stick out for £7000. When the Fox representative, whose name oddly enough was Freddie Fox, offered me roughly twice what I was so ruthlessly determined to hold out for I agreed at once. I must confess to lying about it all to my friends and saying that I had fought them every inch of the way to get that enormous sum. To ice the cake Korda said he was not going to take his cut but that I should go out and buy a Rolls-Bentley immediately. I bought a Mark 8 Jaguar instead.

But there was more to come. The man who insisted I played in the film was George Cukor, an infinitely wicked and loveable man as well as being, at his best, one of the very fine directors. He has seen me and was seeing me in a play of Lillian Hellman's yclept
Montserrat
.
⁴²
I didn't think much of the book or the script but I thought a lot of Cukor and my leading lady was, he assured me, to be either Garbo (who told me mendaciously but charmingly some months later, having seen the film, that she would have done it had she known I was so good) or Vivien.
⁴³
So I left with Syb and her brother Dai Mogs – just down from Cambridge with a deliberately indifferent degree – who was supposed to be my secretary though I ended up answering not only my own post but his too – on the
Queen Mary
first call and all found.
⁴⁴

By the time we got to NY 5
¹
/
₂
days later Cukor had been either fired or had withdrawn (I never did find out which) and my leading lady was Olivia de Havilland who had just won two Oscars in three years and was in the language of Hollywood ‘hot, hot, hot.‘
⁴⁵
She was married to a very eccentric man, very forgettable, who thought that his wife was the mid-century Duse and had a notice put on the board that all members of the crew and cast were no longer to call Olivia ‘Livvy’ which was her long-established diminutive in the industry, but as Miss De Havilland at all times.
⁴⁶
I was also told by Zanuck's hatchet man [...] Lew Schreiber that Miss De Havilland would not permit me to have co-starring billing with her. I didn't mind about the billing a bit and to this day I have never cared about it but I did get the impression, later confirmed, that they were hoping I would do a Rex Harrison and arrogantly walk out as they wanted somebody else, or Miss De Havilland wanted somebody else – I seem to remember it was Greg Peck – to play my part.
⁴⁷
I said somewhat testily to Schreiber that I had worked with the greatest living actors and actresses and they hadn't fussed about billing. So I stayed but with a little murder in my heart for Miss De H. The film, for some forgotten reason was delayed for 7 weeks and we lived in a small – large to us – duplex apartment on Charleville
Boulevard. It was during those seven weeks that I started the hunt for Jean.
⁴⁸
It didn't take long. What has this to do with Hungary? Well, eventually it will lead back to the loveable larcenous Sir Alex Korda. [...]

Tuesday 8th, Budapest
We arrived yesterday at exactly 5pm [...] when I arrived a pimply bloke with a mike asked me why I had come to Budapest. I said ‘You mean you don't know. I have come to do a film.’ Yes please, he said, and what is the name of the film? ‘Don't you read the papers?’ I queried, and then, at a nudge and a look from E, added ‘I have to do a film called
Bluebeard
.’ ‘What are you doing here Mrs Burton?’ ‘I am being Richard's wife’ said E. End of interview. Budapest was shrouded in Danube damp, ghostlike like London sometimes and is still the same this morning. Pretty cold too, but the suite – The Presidential Suite of course – is about the best appointed of its kind I've ever seen anywhere.
⁴⁹
It is enormous with an indoor garden and a massive balcony on which one could play tennis practically, certainly two games of table tennis. Additionally there is a heated indoor, glassed-in terrace. Two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a dining room, a largeish kitchen and enough space for all of E's clothes. Sensational. Its only drawback, which I shall try to rectify today is that at night the lights are so low powered that it is difficult to read. One has to sit directly under the lamps to read.

[...] There was much talk last night from Gianni, who is Jonah's half brother I swear, and Claudye about the recalcitrant intransigence of one of my ladies in the film. A lady I'd never heard of before this film called Joey Heatherton.
⁵⁰
She has refused to work until her clothes which she wore in Paris and approved have all been re-done by someone other than Vicky who designed the first lot.
⁵¹
She sounds a frump but I shall be interested to find out if she carries on when I'm around. The probability is that she's talentless and knows it and is therefore frightened and hides behind a defensive cloak of ‘temperament’. Why couldn't they get a good actress? There are a lot about.

The Danube – certainly not blue in this London weather – lies beneath us. It is as wide as the Thames at Westminster at this point I would guess. Perhaps a little less though I am a hopeless judge of water distances. The far ‘Buda’ side is thick with ice floes which are moving almost imperceptibly down river. It must be cold up in them thar hills.

So far all the Hungarians I've met are very solemn though I did get our evening waiter to crack a somewhat pained smile. The tragedy of ‘56 must still be a giant sorrow. I shall get to know them better once I start work. Gaston says they are much nicer than the Jugs. That must be very nice indeed.