The Richard Burton Diaries (229 page)

Susan awake (3pm) and has read the notices. I could feel her fury or disappointment. She said ‘what did you say about the critics before we opened in Chicago.’ I replied ‘if they're good in New York they'll almost certainly be bad here.’ Well, she said, I was right though they're actually a bit bland rather than bad, she said. ‘Are they good for the kids?’ I said meaning Christine, Richard Muenz in particular, but also Fox, Valentine and of course Paxton.
⁵⁸
‘Yes,’ she said. [...] She then said (God how I love this child) ‘I am now going to have a bath and get myself
CLEAN
.’ The ‘clean’ was said in majestically capital letters and victoriously underlined. So yet another first night is over and it seems that the houses – gigantic as they are – will be full ones. [...]

SEPTEMBER

Friday 5th, Chicago
This city is very pleasing and unless I'm careful it will erode my affection for London and New York as being my first and second favourite cities. (Rome, LA, and Paris are villages avec beaucoup des banlieus.
⁵⁹
Our day off (last Monday) co-incided with Columbus or Labor Day – which meant that the city was like London or New York on a Sunday – streets virtually deserted and very little traffic. [...] A lot of the restaurants were closed for the day but a few were not, including an Indian place called
The Khyber
. It was cool and pleasant and the food was good though no Indian restaurant have I found yet, anywhere, makes the spices hot enough. [...] I was surprised when I went to the lavatory that it [...] was filthy. [...] I am reminded of a story that D. M. Thomas told us about Caradoc Evans.
⁶⁰
Now Caradoc Evans was a very Welsh Welshman who hated his own country and countrymen, hatred that was closely akin to love in its hostile virulence. He had written a famous diatribe against the Welsh in a book or a play called
Taffy
a pile of which books had been, so I'm told publicly burned in the towns of Aberystwyth Bangor Swansea and Cardiff by students.
⁶¹
Once below a time, as D. M. Thomas wrote,
they, together with Augustus John and Louis MacNeice and others were drinking in a pub in Ceinewydd (New Quay) in Wales (a bewitching sailor's town) when Caradoc when offered a drink said darkly ‘Where are your lavatories. I wish to inspect them.‘
⁶²
The barman an authentic cor blimey cockney said, ‘they are outside turn left, left again and Bob's your uncle.’ Caradoc left. Caradoc returned. He said ‘I will have a drink now.’ ‘You must be a foreigner and not Welsh.’ ‘Well now,’ said the sound of bow-bells, ‘how did you guess that?’ ‘Because,’ said Caradoc in a mighty voice, ‘your urinals are clean!‘
⁶³

It's 12.45 and Susan is still asleep. I have been awake and up and about and reading and writing this since about 10.30. We went to bed very late and I would guess that Susan didn't get to sleep until 7 or 8 or 9 o'clock this morning. She is dreadfully worried about her twin sister in South Africa.
⁶⁴
We are trying to get her out of South Africa and to us here in Chicago without her husband's knowledge [...]. She has a 7 month old baby and the husband is found to be, I put it mildly, incompatible. [...] We are very anxious to get Vivvy and the child away before he does irretrievable damage to either or both. [...] We hope to fly her to Frankfurt where she will get a visitor's visa to these United States and fly on from there to us here in Chicago. We are continually on edge and will remain so until she and baby Vanessa arrives. Also excited at the prospect of having a small baby around. 1pm and time to awaken Susan who is going to see
The Empire Strikes Back
a sequel to
Star Wars
.
⁶⁵
She goes with Bill Parry (Sir Dinidan in
Camelot
and my understudy) and two girls from the chorus Melanie and Laura.
⁶⁶
I may go with them. They guarantee me bad acting which I enjoy.

[...] Yesterday, with Christine (Guenevere) Ebersole, I went on the
Donahue
talk show which is apparently unique among its kind in that it invites the audience to ask the interviewees questions.
⁶⁷
It went along predictably enough. Same old questions. Same old answers. Booze, Elizabeth Taylor, which kind I prefer – stage or films etc? I felt sorry for Mr Donahue. He tried so hard to be provocative and had, fatal for an interviewer, got a couple of stock phrases locked into his brain in his exchanges with me which became almost uncomfortably ineffective as the hour wore on. [...] Susan listened and watched in the sound booth hoping that Mr Donahue would not ask about the booze and especially the one-night crack-up on Broadway. When, inevitably, he did, she said quietly ‘Vulgarian.‘
⁶⁸
The technicians who had been talking
like mad went absolutely silent. She also said that when I mentioned Dick Cavett and Irv Kupcinet (two other talk-show hosts) they, the technicians, said respectively ‘shit’ and ‘son-of-a-bitch’.
⁶⁹
I think of Donahue's job and shudder. Every day, day after day, he has this shabby shop-soiled little show to do. The strain must be enormous. Cavett really seems to enjoy his work but, on yesterday's evidence Mr Donahue does not. Later Christine said at the side of the stage as we were due to go on in
Camelot
. ‘You're such a gentle man (not gentleman) that you made him look crass.’ [...] Ah well. Kupcinet next. I wonder if he'll be the same. In person he's a treasure – and his wife too. [...]

Thursday 18th
13 days since writing – at least in this apology for a journal. Most importantly Vivvy and Vanessa [...] have arrived from J'burg. [...] Both Susan and I and grandparents and Valerie and Bob immensely relieved. [...] Now for the dreariness of divorce and who gets custody of the baby etc. That could go on and on. But [...] – I am delighted with the child. I have played with her for hours. And I'm trying to remember what my other babies were like at that age – Kate, Jessica and Maria. I cannot remember of course.

[...] Susan and Vivienne and Baby and I and a brilliant sunny autumnal day and full houses. What more could one euphorically want? And so to walk.

[...] As I entered the hotel I was greeted by a thunderous Welsh accent saying ‘Well look who's here by God Almighty. I heard you were about but didn't think I'd see you.’ I replied ‘Sen he has all my brether ta'en He will nocht let me live alane. Of force I man his nex’ prey be Timor mortis conturbat me.‘
⁷⁰
It was Ian Bannen, the very fine, highly eccentric Scots actor.
⁷¹
With him was his wife. So he has married at last after years of living with this one and that one. He must be 50 years old or so. I remember him first at Stratford-upon-Avon at the Memorial Theatre (now called ‘The Royal Shakespeare') and was intrigued by the fact that he had a very (to me then) expensive two-seater sports car despite the fact that he was a mere walk-on and understudy. Among other roles, he understudied that of the Scot in
Henry V
in which I played the King. One night the actor playing the Scot was off and this boy went on. To me it was sensational – Bannen showed immediate, perhaps instinctive, dynamic quality. Nobody else seemed to notice. It was therefore no surprise to me that later he became one of the world's finest actors. He is, at the moment, doing a personal appearance tour for
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
.
⁷²
[...] I'm very fond of him. His wife is attractive and seemingly good and kind. He needs
that – I would guess. The last time I worked with him I played Winston Churchill and he played Hitler. I thought he was splendid but the American producers thought he'd gone too far. I didn't think so and said that it was almost impossible to go too far with A. Hitler. They made him tone it down which I still think a shame. The show was for the
Hallmark Hall of Fame
yet! As they say. Very frightened people the latter lot. The
NY Times
had asked me to write about playing WSC and had published the article which wasn't entirely complimentary about ‘the great man’ on the Sunday of the TV premiere of the film in the USA.
⁷³
I'm told that the
Hallmark Hall of Fame
people nearly had several heart attacks and seriously thought of cancelling the show.
⁷⁴
So frightened indeed, is everybody in American TV [...] that one derogatory article in the August
NY Times
sends them immediately into conniptions. When one realizes that though the
NY Times
is read by a couple of million people and the viewing figures for a show of that magnitude are 60 or 70 or 80 millions who could not possibly be affected by what I wrote in the
NY Times
on the very day of issue and show one begins to wonder afresh at the sickness of our Western Society. Further, though I was very good in the part and would have been a certainty for the abominable
Emmy
(for make-up) if nothing else, my article struck at their fearless hearts and I wasn't even nominated. What should such creatures as they do, crawling between heaven and earth.
⁷⁵
[...] Almost time to go to work. [...]

It's 11.55 and midnight is upon us again. In the car on the way home I saw what I thought with my bad eyesight, was the moon and muttered almost to myself: ‘Regard the moon. La Lune ne garde aucune rancune, She winks a feeble eye, she smiles into corners, she smoothes the hair of the grass. A washed out small pox cracks her face.’ Susan asked ‘What's that you're saying?’ I said that it was T. S. Eliot – a bit from ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’.
⁷⁶
When we were home, I said, I would try and remember the whole thing. I've tried (Susan is cooking supper) and can't get it all. Large lumps of it but not the whole thing. That means a walk to a book shop tomorrow. Unless midnight, ‘this midnight, tonight,’ shakes the memory as a madman shakes a dead geranium.‘
⁷⁷
I must confess that some of Eliot's metaphors are hard wrought and sometimes unlikely and not at all evocative. ‘Prufrock’ for instance with ‘when the evening is spread out against the sky, like a patient etherised upon
the table.‘
⁷⁸
Shocking then I suppose but a dead and very forced image now. [...]

Tuesday 23rd
We are playing 13 days consecutively. Last night after a sleepless (who knows why?) night I laboured mightily through the piece with sudden turns of my head making me dizzy, both shoulders taut with pain, and legs of lead. [...] Came home immediately, dined while watching with dulled eyes Roger Moore in a
Saint
episode.
⁷⁹
To bed and read and slept for ten solid hours. Consequent feeling of relief today almost amounting to joie de vivre.

I did the ‘Kup show‘
⁸⁰
and though the questions were more or less the same as everybody else's they were framed with much more warmth and charm than most. We went well over the scheduled
¹
/
₂
hour to 42 minutes so the other guests, I understand, had to make do with what remained of the hour.

Last Friday night we supped after the show with a Mr Bricause and wife, Kup and wife, Forrest Tucker and daughter, and several other people – all unknown to me.
⁸¹
‘Tuck’ boisterously drunk and loud. Nice man but can't hold the booze anymore. He shouted a lot and everybody except me was highly embarrassed. There but for the grace of Susan and God, thought I, goes I. Fortunately for the others he passed out early, in the middle, as ‘twere, of a sentence and his daughter – a nice girl and as big as he is, took him home. To me, but hopefully not to himself, Forrest Tucker, is a minor tragedy. Very big personality, very big voice, handsome, very big man (6’ 4–5", I would guess and heavy with it) and, as far as I know, never been out of work and, I would think, has made a lot of money in his time – for years he was in a TV series called
F TROOP
.
⁸²
And yet he has never made the big scene, the big time. Far lesser people with far less talent have done far more. Where did it all go wrong? If he is happy with his lot then he's happy and he's been lucky. If he thinks of the other possibilities then he must be very unhappy. The ‘other possibilities’ are the doubtful privilege of a very thin company of actors or actresses, stage or screen. Those who for some reason create excitement wherever they appear, where audiences metaphorically – and sometimes literally – sit on the edge of their seats waiting for the ticking bomb to explode into a fury of interpretive creativity. Still and all, he works continually and is well paid which is a privilege in itself. So many thousands and thousands in my profession wear out
legions of shoes, walking from agent to agent, from audition to audition for ever and ever. Poor sods.

Rex Harrison opens tonight – after a week of previews – in New Orleans in that jewel of a musical
My Fair Lady
. I'm told that his energy level and stamina are as electric as ever despite his advancing years (he's about 71, I think) and I pray for a repeat of his original smash hit in the same piece 25 odd years ago. Unlike most people so I understand I genuinely delight in the successes of my friends and do not exult in their failures. I think Rex is, of his genre, the greatest actor in the world – the highest of high comedians. No less a person than that delicious Noël Coward once said ‘Rex is the greatest light-comedian in the world’ – pause ‘after me.’ I would say they were at least even, with Rex having the edge. I shall be thinking of him all evening long. Both Susan and I have sent him telegrams separately and one to the entire company together. Rex's brand of acting and his off-stage personality are inextricably bound together. Most obviously, for instance Rex's normal private-life voice is the same as the voice on-stage – only projected a little more. I think mine is. So is George C. Scott's, so is Gielgud's, so was Coward's so is Jason Robards’, so is Fonda's, so is Richardson's but Olivier's is totally different, and Scofield's, and Guinness’.
⁸³
Alec and Paul tend to ‘boom’ on stage though cathedrically quiet off and Larry Olivier's develops a machine-gun metallic rattle with an occasional shout thrown in ‘to keep,’ as he said to me once ‘the bastards awake.’ I'm not quite sure whether Larry meant his fellow-actors or the audiences or both. But one has to be careful with Larry – he is a great dead-pan leg-puller and one is never quite sure whether he is probing very subtly for weak spots or majestically sending one up. Superb good value though all of them. O'Toole's voice too eccentrically accented in private is the same on the stage. I wonder what it means. Does it mean that Olivier, Guinness and Scofield are basically and essentially character actors while the rest of us mentioned above are simply extensions of ourselves. Well, the more I act and the more I think about it (which is not very often) the less I know of the heart of its mystery. Why one believes absolutely in one actor and knows he's blazingly honest and not in another equally dazzling player is beyond my competence to explain. I can only accept it and hope for the best.