The Richard Burton Diaries (212 page)

Heatherton seems unbelievably ordinary which might be good for the part. She has one of those one-on-every-street-corner blonde rather common and at the drop of an insult I'm sure vicious bitchy faces. However the film comes first and I will do what I can to help her be good, because if she ain't good we
only have half a picture. Dmytryk is very little and very brisk and light-voiced and intelligent and pretends to knowledge that he doesn't really have or has forgotten. The girl said that she had never been so nervous in her life at meeting anyone and that she had worshipped me ever since, as a schoolgirl (she was careful to point out) she had seen me in
Anger
and – wait for it –
Bramble Bush
. The first put her up in my estimation, the second sank her without trace. [...] Talk is that she is having a ding-dong, as the vernacular goes, with Dmytryk. I wouldn't be at all surprised as however else did she get the part? I mean, who had heard of her? And Ann-Margret who is currently fashionable, having made a success in Mike Nichols’ film
Carnal Knowledge
, had offered to play in
Bluebeard
.
⁶⁵
[...]

I dwell on ‘Joey’ as she is yclept, as until I read the script again yesterday I had forgotten what an enormous part and opportunity it is and gives. Also I've got to learn to act this kind of Maria in the Red Barn melodrama.
⁶⁶
It has to be done with immense tongue in cheek. I try to remember how the master – whassisname – Vincent Price plays it. [...] Even voiced, measured in speech, purposeful in movement with the occasional violence in voice and movement. Must be funny serious. Shall know the minute I begin how to do it I hope. [...]

Keep on thinking about poor Mike Junior. His mother died when young as E pointed out.
⁶⁷
His father died shockingly in an air-crash and they were very great friends. His wife dies after a skiing holiday at 41 years old. Rough on the poor little sod. Must try and talk to him tonight.
And he's such a nice man
. [...]

Sunday 13th
[...] Had a telegram yesterday saying that Jim Benton was in Cedars of Lebanon Hospital having a bad case of infectious hepatitis and since we had [been] in contact with him 10 days ago it was necessary for us to have a shot of Gamma Globulin – if that's the word I'm searching for as Bertie Wooster might say – an operation that I always dread ever since I had a mass of typhoid, tetanus, yellow fever, Gdang fever and other assorted shots to go to work in Morocco in 1964 and lo and behold – after being as sick as a dog for a week with each inoculatory disease as they took turns, and having to work at the same time at the Vic I suppose – we shot the film (
Alex the Great
) in Madrid – in and around Madrid – instead.
⁶⁸
[...]

I worked, as ‘twere, for the first time yesterday. That is to say I did a full scene with the girl and her partner though he had nary a word to say and it seems to be alright. She has a natural hardness that might become effective as
she is the only lady of the 8 who manages to turn the tables on me and escape. I might enjoy this film and one of the ways is to work hard at it and not ‘eef’ it or ‘wing’ it as I had thought to do. First of all I can, I think, improve my dialogue by paraphrasing what they already have – I don't mean on the spot, waiting for the inspiration paraphrasing but pre-planned re-writing. Keeping it to myself and simply doing it when the time comes for I know that directors dearly love to ‘kick it around a bit’ when you suggest a change of dialogue. That can – and I'm pretty sure it applies to this man – mean a couple of wasted hours mucking about [...].

The minute people go away and leave E alone she is a different woman. She came to the studio yesterday afternoon and waited until the end and we went home together, and for the first time spent an evening together without interruption from anybody except the waiter who unfortunately
will hang around
while we eat and though I'm sure he is not trying to listen to our conversation or any of that kind of spies everywhere rubbish it is still uncomfortable. We smile and nod and say that will be fine thank you, we'll help ourselves from now on and though he understands English perfectly, nevertheless it is cribbing cabining and confining.
⁶⁹
[...]

We had our shots and E's left a lump like a goose egg whereas mine left nothing at all except a lot of blood on my underpants and pyjamas. I forgot to tell the Doctor that I am a bleeder. Whatever will the laundry think. [...]

Monday 14th
[...] I am still slowly persisting with the Lingua Magyar but it is not so sweet now as twas before and I had asked the young doctor who comes in now regularly – whether asked or not it seems – if he could spare five minutes, to record some ordinary phrases into my tape-recorder which he did and I thanked him but on playing it back I must have buggered up the device as he sounds as if he's speaking Turkish on a bad line from Istanbul via Vladivostok.
⁷⁰
I shall try again. [...] I don't ask much. I want to be able to ask for food and drink in the native tongue, acquire the numbers and the monetary system, and learn like a parrot about a page about any given current topic and show off. If anybody replies, I shall revert to English or if there's nobody around to understand it, Welsh.

Saw last night many lovely snaps of E taken by Norman Parkinson who turns out to be a very amusing and nice man and, indeed, of the scores of photographs, only about 5 or 6 made E's face look a little full. He must be used again. Those old aristos – Beaton and Parkinson, really know what they're doing. I suddenly realized the difference in quality between a Parkinson or a Beaton and a Gianni Bozzacchi and his kind. Not a brush of touch-up is
necessary. Partly by his lighting and mostly from E's having lost 8lbs or so I would say, the fullness of the chin – the underchin is never obtrusive.

He didn't make me look very fetching but I gather that he's not very good with gents. Anyway I've never been – at least not for 20 years or so – and am never likely to be the pin-up type. Too many excrescences and twisted bones. My hair is at last getting very thin though it still covers my whole scalp but when wet, soaking wet one can see its barrenness. Since it's such a bore to have Ron pencil in lines all over the place I think I might one of these days try one of those transplants. It won't be like those idiots who are really bald and on whom it is still obvious and I only need a few strands around the crown of the head. I don't think however that I will get a face lift like that abject Rod Steiger who not only admits to it but it makes him look like one half of a naked ass-hole.
⁷¹
In addition to which, he says, he can't get any jobs and will soon be broke. It might be because people don't want to be looking at a talking ass-hole. Now there's a man who really has worked very hard at his job all his life and at last, when he got an Oscar a couple of years ago, everybody thought well now at last he's a ‘STAR’.
⁷²
But he ain't and never was and never will be though with a harsh director he can still be very effective. He has the dreadful problem of believing himself to be a great actor – whatever that may be – and it shows in every thing he does. His Napoleon was merely silly.
⁷³
Incidentally I sent off a telegram yesterday saying no to Nelson. Apart from the fact that Nelson bores me – unlike Napoleon – the film belongs to Lady Hamilton who if she's half a good actress will get an Oscar.
⁷⁴
[...] The script is very able as usual as it comes from the fecund pen of Sir Terence Rattigan.
⁷⁵
We really do have some very unlikely knights around nowadays. [...]

Tuesday 15th
Started off in black and over-laid it in red. I am still as purely non-alcoholic as the scion of two AA's.
⁷⁶

Pouring with rain this morning and it rained all day yesterday too. I wish someone would reprint that slim volume of Alun Lewis which contains the poem ‘All day it has rained’ and ‘For Gweno’ etc., a companion of my teens, when I was more poet than most, indeed the time when I read and acquired by familiarity the vast store of memorized and memorable verse that still lies here in my head.
⁷⁷

[...] I awoke at 5 to 7 actually and did all my usual ablutions and exercised with the addition – very carefully for fear of my chipped base of spine and my tendency to lout gumbago and arturitis – Spooner and Mr Bindle – 10 sit ups the stomach muscles taking it very well.
⁷⁸
I shall keep up twenty a day, 10 at night, 10 in the morning for a few days and see how it goes. Would like to work up to a hundred, 150, and lo those flat stomach muscles again. My stomach is flat at the moment but soft like a baby's. I wonder if I shall ever get those two parralel (still asleep) parallel ridges of vertical muscle that I used to pride myself on. Or am I now too old? [...] Yesterday I played organ (traditional for horror movies) while a hawk flew around – a falcon to be exact – and landed on my shouldders
⁷⁹
(I really am only half awake) and a white cat streaked around. [...]

I work with ‘Joey’ again this day. She seems perfectly innocuous to me but everybody else seems to loathe her. She gets up to tantrums behind my back presumably that I never see. I must confess that she is about as stimulating an actress as the worst I've known but I keep on telling myself that it doesn't really matter. We can slide around her with cunning and girls in horror movies are always props after all. All they have to do is be pretty and dumb.

Am reading – at work – three books. In the upstairs dressing-room either
Volcano
or a novel by ‘Hungary's greatest prose’ writer Imre something and in the trailer and most fascinating a biog of Einstein.
⁸⁰
At home it's a detective story in bed and a history of espionage in the Abwehr before during and slightly after the war.
⁸¹
Interesting that one of the so-called master spies was a Welsh Nationalist xenophobe – especially anglophobe – called Owens.
⁸²
He is reputedly still alive. He is described as ‘an excitable little Welshman’ but he was a double spy used by the XX section of MI5 and the Germans. Some of the things he did were hair-raisingly courageous so he cannot have been all that excitable. I was told a long time ago that he was in South Ireland. I must try and seek him out. There might be a film on him as he reported to his German ‘masters’ that he had a whole ring of anglo-phobic Welshmen spying for him and therefore for them all around Britain including a former Chief Detective Inspector from Swansea. It could made a film and an odd one – perhaps even a funny one – as of course, the minute the Huns started out in earnest bashing us during the blitzes all the dissident malcontents in the Welsh Plaid Cymru turned double spies against their German friends. And deceived them throughout the war. A dirty game but fascinating nevertheless. [...]

Friday 19th
⁸³
[...] I read a lot of the biography of Einstein and indeed to God began to think that – poetically at least – I was understanding the relativity of time and space but very much through a glass darkly. Then I had several
¹
/
₂
hours of Wolf Mank and a man from the Jersey Islands who for some reason I didn't quite trust though he seemed nice enough.
⁸⁴
I had no idea that the Channel Islands are so free of British rule and that they have their own tax laws. [...] Anyway if we do the
Canterbury Tales
there which I and E too probably will we might do worse than as twere case the joint as a possible home from home instead of Suisse. Geographically too I am moronic. I said the islands are midway in the channel or nearer France. Oh my God, he said, France of course – I frequently water ski there. Ah, said I. Dick Makewater was here too with the art director of
Shrew
or was it
Anne
who won an Oscar I think.
⁸⁵
He is to direct. I wonder if he can. Wolfie was in one of his racier moods. ‘My gawd you look smashing’, he said, ‘what's happened to you?’ ‘Dunno,’ I said ‘it can't be the loss of weight at I was this same weight approximately when we last saw each other in Bosnia.’ ‘Yeah I know,’ he said, ‘but you look more smashing, somethin's happened to you.’ He kept on about it. [...] Anyway I said it was ‘exercise’. ‘Aw Chraist,’ he said, ‘I can never do anything physical for myself and to myself that I can imagine better.’ He was at his most engagingly cockney and obviously adored Elizabeth who reciprocated and said, ‘Now that's the kind of man I could love if you weren't around, I adore him.’ ‘Bloody daft thing to say,’ I said, hurting. But good taste all the same I thought. Wolfie always looks hooded eyed and desperate and is always being hounded by some ‘bird’. ‘They're all fackin nuisances, they want to possess a man body and soul, won't leave you alone. Nasty dirty bastards. Hate the cunts.’ Except Elizabeth apparently to whom he paid court all evening. There is always an oddity about people's preferences for types. I've always lusted for medium height dark haired Jewesses, or those who could be first racial cousins. Elizabeth has always fancied Jews period. She seems to have a rapport with them which she doesn't have with the ordinary Anglo Saxon. She and Wolf could obviously have talked all night. And about all kinds of things. They touched lightly on Wedgwood for instance last night [...].
⁸⁶
And it has nothing to do – in E's case – with male beauty for Wolf is a mess, about my height with a great pendulous belly that is big enough to turn after the rest of his body has turned, double chinned, grubby looking without being unclean. But his mind is astringent. There is no shit about him and he is a renaissance man. He opens
shop to sell Wedgwood having first made himself an expert on the subject, writing a lavishly illustrated book to prove his own provenance as an expert and then – as he just has – sold the shops owned by his sister and himself for half a million nicker tax free capital fackin gain. And who to, d'yer think? Fackin Wedgwood that's who.
⁸⁷
He has now started or resurrected a small private printing press in Cork or Dublin – anyway in Eire somewhere – and his first publication is a book of his own poems.
⁸⁸
Now he wants me to write for them. Anything he says, ‘rondeaux, frigging triolets, belles lettres, the story of your life, graffiti, anything you like old mate.’ He is superlatively intelligent with a considerable smattering of the poet about him. [...]