The Richard Burton Diaries (230 page)

Talking of O'Toole I only knew by chance that he had taken such a terrible hammering – a front-page hammering – from the British critics for his performance in
Macbeth
. I knew only because Onllwyn Brace came to supervise my narration in the documentary film about Welsh rugby football. ‘Your pal O'Toole,’ he said, ‘has been murdered by the English critics.’ ‘For what?’ asked I. ‘For
Macbeth
,’ said he. I phoned Peter that night as soon as the hours
were right and managed to catch him before he'd left the Old Vic. I said, ‘a couple of boys from the BBC were over today to record my voice and they told me you've had a bit of stick from the critics.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘How are the houses?’ I asked. ‘Packed.’ ‘Then remember this my boy,’ I said (he is 4 years younger), ‘you are the most original actor to come out of Britain since the war and fuck the critics.’ ‘Thank you.’ ‘Think of every four letter obscenity, six, eight ten and twelve letter expletives and ram it right up their envious arses in which,’ I said, paraphrasing Robert Atkins, ‘I'm sure there is ample room.‘
⁸⁴
‘Thank you.’ ‘Good night Peter. Don't give in and I love you.’ ‘I won't and it's mutual.’ ‘Good night again.’ ‘Good night Richard and thank you.’

That was the extent of our conversation but my fury at the critics took me through the night – another sleepless one – and I thought of all the things I should have said to Peter and didn't and thought I should write him a letter and didn't and prayed to God I hadn't sounded like a false sympathizer secretly rejoicing in his critical debacle. But no, I comforted myself, he knows I too have been through the fire and understand. And by God I have too. It's a phenomenon that is again inexplicable that a few of us – O'Toole, Sinatra, Brando, Elizabeth Taylor, Jane Fonda, Barbra Streisand et al. carry something sanguicolous and the parasite is called ‘press-envy’ – especially in our own countries. Why is it? Because we take risks and run against the conventional. It cannot be because we are, albeit patchily, successful and earn millions because one never hears of viciousness anent Robert Redford or Dustin Hoffman Paul Newman or De Niro or Jon Voight but one does about Al Pacino – my dear he has – an American Film Star yet – dared to play
Richard III
!
⁸⁵
And what's more – horror of horrors – he's going to have a go at
Othello
. Shakespeare's
Othello
, no less. I can hear the critics and gossip-mongers and the Sardi-Set already stirring up the vitriol.
⁸⁶
Mr Pacino is certainly not lacking in courage – he has my deepest admiration. [...]

Monday 29th
We shall be leaving at 1pm for the airport and so to Dallas. [...] Susan slipped while packing yesterday and gave herself a nasty bump on her middle spine. Both my shoulders have seized up again. [...] Vivienne very depressed yesterday and Susan had a weep – the shock of the fall didn't help. Vivvy said Susan was working too hard. I wonder if Vivvy realizes that she, Vivvy, has been the prime cause of Susan's high tension. Well now for three weeks alone with S. It's a curiosity that when Susan and I are apart from other people and only have each other we are perfectly happy. The intrusion of a third person, however affable and amiable begins to irritate
us after a mere two days or so. We'll have to be careful of this. It could destroy us. [...]

We had dinner (supper) on Saturday night with the Kupcinets. Susan – as I hoped – has taken to them very much. What a pity that the people one really likes are almost always geographically very distant. [...]

Received an odd telegram from Tim Hardy (I presume) saying that he'd given a long interview to Paul Ferris – a South Welsh writer who's determined to write a book about me. I've tried to discourage him by total silence. Tim assures me that Ferris is a distinguished writer. Well, I've read his (Ferris') biog of Dylan Thomas and found it petty and silly. Fitzgibbon's book is far warmer and generous.
⁸⁷

We closed at the Arie Crown here on Saturday night to the usual non-audience
during
the show, sluggish and dull, and slow, but an ecstatically thunderous ovation at the end as ever. [...] Now we shall see how Texans – Dallas Texans in particular – respond. We are already completely sold out in Dallas, but they couldn't possibly be any nicer and generous than Chicagoans everybody, policemen, people in the streets, pubs and restaurants etc. have been overwhelmingly kind and it has been very gratifying to break every conceivable record, house, city and world records for attendance. [...]

How far away and unimportant everything else seems when one neither listens to the radio, watches TV or reads the newspapers. I discovered yesterday that there's a war on or something close to it between Iraq and Iran.
⁸⁸
What's it all about Alfie?
⁸⁹
Must get back to Keats’ ‘giant agony of the world’ shortly.
⁹⁰
The whole world's in a terrible state of chassis.[...]

My Fair Lady
with the ineffable Rex H. opened in New Orleans last week and Rex, thanks to whatever Gods may be received an ovation. Diolch iddo byth am gofio.
⁹¹
If he hadn't bang! would have gone another friendship perhaps.

Vivienne and baby Vanessa leave for London this evening to start – yet again – divorce proceedings against Joe the husband. We shall win I'm sure. Muhammad Ali fights Larry Holmes on Thursday night. I wish he wouldn't. It genuinely frightens me.
⁹²

OCTOBER

Thursday 3rd, Dallas
⁹³
Arrived here on Monday to very disappointing weather, overcast and Mancunianly depressing. [...]

We previewed the play on Tuesday night and despite being politely asked not to come – since previews, in our case, are to iron out the wrinkles and remove the gremlins attendant on opening in a new theatre with a much smaller stage [...] – the local critics were mule-headed and obdurately provincial and insisted on coming anyway and will-nilly. [...]The theatre, in comparison with the Arie Crown, was (is) a delight to play and long-forgotten laughs were back again. The notices incidentally [...] are fine according to Mike Merrick who phoned at 3am this morning to tell us so. I was very gruff and brusque. I was comfortably installed in bed complete with chocolates and Evelyn Waugh's
Black Mischief
when Merrick's call came through.
⁹⁴
I talked, or replied rather in harsh monosyllables. ‘Yes’ ‘No’ ‘Good’ ‘Bye’ ‘Thanks.’ Susan asked from the bed when I re-entered the room [...] ‘Who was that?’ I said ‘Mike Merrick.’ She asked ‘What did he want at this ungodly hour?’ I said ‘Wanted to tell us the notices were good.’ Susan averred that my telephone manner was atrocious and she called Merrick back and apologized for me. I too apologized and Susan said how hopeless I was as my apology was gruffer than the original response. What is it about phones that makes me so antagonistic? I know I can sound reasonably nice on them if I'm prepared for a call but the unexpected ring infuriates me for some reason. [...]

Tuesday 7th, 0550
Greatly excited Sunday as Valerie arrived. She brought the inevitable ‘goodies.’ Yesterday, Monday, was a clear day off [...] I read, indoors, some of Peter de Vries
Consenting Adults; or, the duchess will be furious
.
⁹⁵
Some of Kenneth Clark's
The Nude
– how beautifully and succinctly he writes [...] and Prufrockianly the comics and the sporting page, (and the politics) and watched the LA Dodgers v. the Houston Astros in a single game play off for the National League West.
⁹⁶
Astros won rather dully. We the Yankees had already won our division on (Sat.)

McClure and wife Eres came to dinner on Friday night last. And were delightful. John drank a fair amount – enough to loosen him up to plunge into speaking verse by Edith Sitwell.
⁹⁷
[...] McClure explained to me how D. H. Lawrence had changed his life.
⁹⁸
Brought up as a WASP square and astonishing his people by preferring the piano to dating, smooching and necking
with girls and not being interested in going into business, he found himself the ultimate in intellectualizing every emotion, every lust, every desire.
⁹⁹
Aldous Huxley, Eliot, Spender timidly cerebral, all added cold douches or water to his instinctive desires. He seemed potentially what V. S. Pritchett might call the inhibited descendant of late children of ancestors who had wasted the family lust and physical excitement before he McClure was unexpectedly born.
¹⁰⁰
John is that rare combination – to me at any rate, of a man who's fascinated with technology – he must be one of the best ‘sound’ men in the world – Bernstein never moves without him, and from now on, neither will I. And at the same time
was
a potential concert piano pianist and is a fine harpsichordist [...]. He has met and known and worked with many people – some of whom we have in common – Stravinsky, Auden, Isherwood, Spender, and e. e. cummings.
¹⁰¹
Curiously enough the only time I met cummings he was very but coherently drunk but according to John, who visited him frequently in his deliberately primitive home somewhere in the Eastern States he, McClure, had never seen cummings even sip a glass of innocuous white wine. So now I am mystified as to why the only encounter I had with cummings he was so desperately drunk. Harvey Orkin, whom God preserve though now dead was with me. It was in the Brussels Restaurant [...].
¹⁰²
In his cups John quoted him too [...]. After they left – 3 in the morning Susan and I talked ourselves into a profound melancholy and I added to it by speaking for her Eliot's the Journey of the Magi (Not a madly cheerful little number) ‘A cold coming we had of it.‘
¹⁰³
[...]

Eres is a rare creature in that she hardly ever [...] laughs out loud. But when highly amused by John's or Susan's or my sillinesses permits a fugitive shadow of humour to distort attractively one side of her face. Susan's smile is so open (and her mouth and teeth are magnificent) my smile and John's are charming so we're told – but Eres’ slight readjustment of features is intriguing. Another unique, uncommon quality about Eres is that she hardly ever mentions that she is born and bred Israeli. None of that race's chauvinism, like the sometimes insufferable South Irish, is apparent in her for which respite many thanks.

I had been told that De Vries and Evelyn Waugh were similar – that in fact De Vries was the American Waugh. On the evidence of all of Waugh's work all of which I have read and re-read and I must confess so far only one book of Peter De Vries, the only comparison is that they both can be funny – funny to the point of making me laugh out loud – and fundamentally deeply serious
but otherwise, except superficially, poles apart. Before examining them against each other I must read and soak myself in De Vries. So now for a De Vries round-up.

[...] I shall try again to cut down on cigarettes. I know I can do it – stop smoking I mean, and not out of vanity either but I dislike being short of breath and who knows what other incidental damage it's doing to the body. But I have to be careful. The last time I tried (for five pathetic days) I turned into a monster and also completely lost my memory that is to say I had a five day blackout. That wouldn't do at all for
Camelot
.

[...] I have done a great deal of sleeping over the week-end – enough to keep me going over today and tonight I think, and have, for such a frugal eater, packed myself with food.

[...] The theatre in Miami is apparently another monster but I cannot think it will be as ugly as the Arie Crown. Also we have a house on the beach there, a private beach they say and there's no sound like the sea sound flowing like blood through the loud wound open wide to the winds the gates of the wandering boat for my voyage to begin to the end of my wound.
¹⁰⁴

I have been asked to be televiewed in Miami – CBS local. I suggested at once that P.H. should be on it but am beginning to have second thoughts about the whole thing.
¹⁰⁵
I have been, in three last months or so on the widely (coast-to coast) viewed
Today
show (six days in a row) the
Donahue Show
, also coast to coast, and the
Dick Cavett Show
, another coast to coast, plus Kup's show which is apparently widely shown also but not nationally. Susan is afraid of over-exposure. I feel like a film in a camera. [...]

OCTOBER 1980–FEBRUARY 1983