The Richard Burton Diaries (244 page)

89
Paul Dehn (1912–76), screenwriter for
Taming of the Shrew
. He had also written
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
.

90
Natasha Pyne (1946—) was playing the part of Bianca.

91
Kurt Frings (1908–91) was Taylor's Hollywood agent.

92
The Bible: In the Beginning
(1966), directed by John Huston and produced by Dino de Laurentiis (1919–2010).

93
Gore Vidal (1925–2012), novelist, playwright, essayist and satirist.

94
Princess Virginia Carolina Theresa Pancrazia Galdina von Fürstenberg (1940—), and Patrick O'Neal (1927–94) were making the film
Matchless
(1967) in Italy at the time.

95
Hotel Fontanella Borghese on the Via della Fontanella di Borghese.

96
Stephen Grimes (1927–88), had been the (Academy Award nominated) art director on
The Night of the Iguana
and was also to work on
Reflections in a Golden Eye
.

97
Arglwydd Mawr
, Welsh literally for ‘great lord’, but equivalent here to ‘good lord’ or ‘god in heaven’.

98
Ossie is Oswald Morris (1915—), Director of Photography on
The Taming of the Shrew
, who had also been photographer on
Look Back in Anger
, director of photography on
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
, and who would be director of photography on
Equus
. Elaine is Elaine Schreyeck (1924—), responsible for continuity on
The Taming of the Shrew
, who would perform the same role for
Doctor Faustus
. She had been a script supervisor on
Cleopatra
, and responsible for continuity on
Alexander the Great
.

99
Michael Cacoyannis (or Kakogiannis) (1922—), filmmaker.

100
La Lupa
; play by Giovanni Verga, 1896. Anna Magnani (1907–73), actor.

101
'
Undonog
’ – Welsh for monotonous.

102
Petruchio's speech in Act II, scene i, including the lines, ‘Say that she rail, why then I'll tell her plain / She sings as sweetly as a nightingale’.

103
Tuesday was the 24th.

104
Corsetti's is an apartment complex at Tor Vaianica, on the coast some 30km south of Rome.

105
Henry Cooper (1934–2011) fought the world champion Cassius Clay (later Muhammad Ali) at Arsenal Stadium on 21 May 1966, Clay stopping Cooper in the sixth round. Burton and Taylor had attended the first (non-title) fight between Cooper and Clay at Wembley Stadium in London in 1963, in which Clay had stopped Cooper in the fifth.

106
Carlo is probably Carlo Lastricati (1921—), Assistant Director on
Taming of the Shrew
, who would also fill this role on
Boom!
and
The Assassination of Trotsky
. But also working on the film were Carlo Fabianelli, an editor (who was also to work on
Doctor Faustus
), and Carlo Savina, the conductor.

107
Russell Braddon (1921–95), novelist, journalist and broadcaster, was to publish ‘Richard Burton to Liz’ in the
Saturday Evening Post
, 3 December 1966. His most famous book was
The Naked Island
(1952), an account of his time as a Japanese prisoner of war.

108
Sir John Guthrie Ward (1909—) was British Ambassador to Italy from 1962 to 1966. His wife was Daphne Norah Ward (née Mulholland (1915–83).

109
Bosley Crowther (1905–81), film critic for the
New York Times
from 1940 to 1967, and his wife Florence (née Marks).

110
'Booby’: one of Richard's nicknames for Elizabeth.

111
Joseph E. Levine (1905–87), film producer and promoter.

112
OUDS: Oxford University Dramatic Society.

113
Rolle, on the north shore of Lake Geneva between Nyon and Lausanne, is the location of Institut Le Rosey, the prestigious boarding school attended by Michael and Christopher Wilding.

114
Joe Roddy had written an article, ‘Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton: The Night of the Brawl’, which had appeared in
Look
on 8 February 1966.

115
McCall's
: an American monthly magazine aimed at women readers.

116
Malheureusement
: French for unfortunately.

117
Frascati, the important wine-growing area to the south-east of Rome.

118
Bon Apetito is presumably a nickname for Taylor.

119
A Bloody Mary is a vodka based cocktail usually including tomato juice, lemon juice and a dash of Worcestershire sauce or Tabasco.

120
Agatha Christie (1890–1976), a prolific author of detective fiction. Burton had played the part of the detective Hercule Poirot in a production of Christie's
Alibi
while a schoolboy in Port Talbot.

121
A reference to the
Divina Commedia
by Dante Alighieri (1265–1321).

122
Montgomery Clift (1920–66), actor. He had starred alongside Elizabeth Taylor in
Suddenly Last Summer
(1959) and had been due to act in
Reflections in a Golden Eye
.

123
The Grande Raccordo Anulare is a motorway encircling Rome.

124
Nicholas Young was Technical Assistant on
Faustus
.

125
Roderick Mann (1922–2010), then film critic with the
Sunday Express
.

126
Darryl Francis Zanuck, (1902–79), a major American film mogul, at this time Executive President of Twentieth Century-Fox, and a man with whom Burton's career had been intertwined since the early 1950s. Zanuck had launched litigation against Burton and Taylor after
Cleopatra
, alleging that their affair had damaged the film's commercial prospects. The case was eventually dropped.

127
Peter Evans (1938—), journalist, biographer and novelist.

128
David Frost (1939—), broadcast journalist, at this time producing
The Frost Report
for the BBC. Frost had had a cameo part as himself in
The V.I.P.s
.

129
Zeffirelli's production of Samuel Barber's (1910–81) opera
Antony and Cleopatra
was first performed on 16 September at the opening of the new Metropolitan Opera House in New York. It was not well received.

130
Peter Evans's biography,
Peter Sellers: The Mask Behind the Mask
, appeared in 1968.

131
Two of Richard's sisters died in infancy, one in 1903 and the other in 1908. Both were named Margaret Hannah.

132
Ron, Richard's brother-in-law.

133
Andreas Teuber, actor: formerly an undergraduate at St John's College, Oxford, he had played the part of Mephistophilis in the OUDS production of
Doctor Faustus
earlier in the year, and was now playing the same part (albeit titled Mephistopheles) in the film version. He has since gone on to a distinguished career as a philosopher.

134
Artist and cartoonist William Hogarth (1697–1764), whose depictions of individuals were often unflattering.

135
Lionel Davidson,
A Long Way to Shiloh
(1966), a thriller.

136
Hugh Wray McCann,
Utmost Fish
(1965), a work of fiction (albeit based on a true incident), set during the First World War.

137
Randolph S. Churchill,
Winston S. Churchill
, Vol. I:
Youth, 1874–1900
(1966).

138
'The Child is father of the man’: a line from the poem ‘My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold’ (1802), by William Wordsworth (1770–1850).

139
Richard was considering the part of Napoleon in
Waterloo
(1970), eventually played by Rod Steiger (1925–2002), who, like Richard, had appeared in
The Longest Day
. They would both appear in
Breakthrough
(1979).

140
Reflections in a Golden Eye
appeared in 1967, directed by John Huston, produced by Ray Stark and starring Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor.

141
This became the film
A Guide for the Married Man
(1967), directed by Gene Kelly (1912–96) and starring Walter Matthau (1920–2000).

142
Burton means Prosper Mérimée's
Carmen
, (1845).

143
The official cause of death was ‘occlusive coronary artery disease’, although it is thought that addiction to alcohol and drugs exacerbated Clift's health problems.

144
Lorenzo James was Clift's secretary.

145
The part of Lucifer was played by David McIntosh and that of Belzebub by Jeremy Eccles.

146
Lionel Davidson (1922–2009) at this point had published two other books (under that name):
The Night of Wenceslas
(1960) and
The Rose of Tibet
(1962), both of which had been very well received.

147
His past knowledge of Italian had been presumably acquired when in Rome shooting
Cleopatra.

148
Basil Fenton Smith (sometimes hyphenated as Fenton-Smith) had been sound mixer on
Sea Wife
, ‘sound’ on
The Night of the Iguana
and would perform that role again for
Reflections in a Golden Eye
. He would be sound recordist for
Candy
. Dave Hildyard (1916–2008) had been sound mixer on
The Taming of the Shrew
and was performing that role again for
Faustus
. He would later be ‘sound’ on
Breakthrough
. Robert L. Jacks (1927–87) was a film producer who had worked with Burton on
The Desert Rats
and was the son-in-law of Darryl F. Zanuck.

149
Gwydion Thomas (1945—) who played ‘Lechery’ and ‘Third Scholar’ in
Doctor Faustus
was the son of the Welsh poet R. S. Thomas (1913–2000).

150
Ronald A. Lublin (1918–2004), film producer. Lawrence George Durrell (1912–90), poet, novelist, dramatist.
Oedipus the King
was made into a film in 1968, although Durrell is not credited as a scriptwriter.

151
Carl Foreman (1914–84) would produce
MacKenna's Gold
(1968) starring Gregory Peck (1916–2003) and Omar Sharif (1932—).

152
This is a paraphrase of the lines spoken by the character Sir Stephen Scroop in Shakespeare's
Richard II
, Act III, scene ii: ‘Sweet love, I see, changing his property,/Turns to the sourest and most deadly hate’, and of the line spoken by the character Zara in Act III Scene viii of William Congreve's
The Mourning Bride
(1697) ‘Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned’.

153
A part played by Elizabeth Taylor.

154
The Fixer
(1966) by Bernard Malamud (1914–86). It won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

155
Federico Fellini (1920–93), director.

156
On 24 September De Laurentiis had begun to take legal action against Fellini over the future of the film project
Il viaggio di G. Mastorna
. This dispute would be resolved early in 1967, although the film was never made.

157
Vanessa Redgrave (1937—), actor. Married to Tony Richardson from 1962 to 1967, she was to play alongside Richard Burton in
Wagner
(1983).

158
Burton means Neil Hartley (1916–94).

159
The ‘Greek gigolo’ was Thodoros ‘Theo’ Roubanis, in 1967 to become the third husband of Lady Sarah Consuelo Spencer-Churchill (1921–2000). They divorced in 1981. Roubanis had a minor acting part in the Richardson-directed film,
The Sailor from Gibraltar
(1967), which is the context referred to here.

160
Burton presumably means
posizione
– position.

161
Hugh Williams was playing Second Scholar and Richard Heffer (1946—) First Scholar.

162
Sheila Pickles was Zeffirelli's personal assistant.

163
'Cargoes’ (1910) by John Masefield (1878–1967). Should be ‘Quinquereme’.

164
Elmo Williams (1913—), President's Representative for Foreign Productions, Twentieth Century-Fox.

165
Ruth Blackmore was the granddaughter of Philip Burton's half-brother (18 years older than he), Will Wilson. Wilson's daughter Megan, a lecturer, had married Fred Blackmore, a school headmaster.

166
Richard Alderson, known professionally as Christian Alderson, actor, friend and one-time companion of Philip Burton.

167
The Christian Science Monitor
is the newspaper of the Church of Christ, Scientist.

168
My Dog Tulip
by J[oe] R[andolph] Ackerley (1956). A film version was released in 2010.

169
The Comedians
was Burton's next film project.

170
Burton was anticipating the role of Arthur Chipping in the musical version of
Goodbye Mr Chips
, which eventually came out in 1969 with Peter O'Toole (1932—) as the lead.

171
Pipo the donkey appeared in the film.

172
Jack Hildyard (1908–90), cinematographer, brother of Dave Hildyard. He had been director of photography on
Suddenly Last Summer
and
The V.I.P.s
, and would perform the same role on
The Wild Geese
and
Ellis Island
.

173
Roy Thomson (1894–76), had become Lord Thomson of Fleet in 1964.

174
Peregrine Worsthorne (1923—), deputy editor and columnist for the
Sunday Telegraph
.

175
Silver Masks are the annual Italian awards for achievement in the theatre, cinema, opera and television.

176
Robert Graves (1895–1985), author, poet. His memoir of wartime service on the Western Front,
Good-bye to All That
, first appeared in 1929.

177
Sir Stephen Spender (1909–95), poet, critic. Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–94), playwright, novelist, short story writer, essayist. Voltaire, pseudonym of François-Marie Arouet (1694–1778), novelist, poet, critic, philosopher. Samuel Goldwyn (1882–1974), producer. ‘Pieces of eight!’ is from Stevenson's
Treasure Island
(1883).