The Richard Burton Diaries (42 page)

Later we tottered up the hill with me complaining all the way that there was no point going all the way up in order to come all the way down again in an hour for Vicky's party. Ah well I lost, and we went down to the party and I spoke bad French and worse Italian to Big Nino and his wife and Gaston's girlfriend. I ate practically nothing, but drank a lot of wine. Quite a heavy drinking day for me today. [...]

Saturday 22nd
We read today in the Rome
Daily American
that there's been a terrible tragedy in Aberfan.
²³²
200 small children 5–12 years old were feared buried under a moving slag-heap that torrential rains had turned into sludge. Christ how many blows have those thin valleys taken. Neither E nor I can get the thing out of our minds. The details are heart rending and I found them so pitiful that I had to stop reading about them. Elizabeth wept. Somebody is at fault. I hope he or they are suitably punished. If not by law then by themselves.

We stayed in all day. I sat in the sun and read and did some Italian.

We had thin, medium-rare, slices of roast beef for dinner with a bottle of Torre Quarto to wash it down. A gorgeous evening with just two tiny boats on the huge sea.

Read in bed and slept. Elizabeth has been given an extra day so we don't go back until Monday. We are delighted.

Sunday 23rd
Rose, lazed about, read books. Made myself boiled eggs for breakfast. Gaston brought a leg of lamb from Naples which was cooked for us here at the Sirenuse and we ate it for lunch. It was very good.

Later that day after reading more about the Welsh tragedy we went down the beach and had pizza with Ron and Vicky. Ron was pretty sloshed and repeated himself endlessly. There was an odious American woman who bothered us for a while. Ferdy Mayne and a Welsh actor called Something Griffiths were there when we arrived.
²³³
They were just leaving. I drank quite a lot but couldn't seem to get drunk so turned to Sambuca. Still no joy of it. The pizza was very good. [...]

Monday 24th Positano – Rome
We woke about 9.30. I bathed and packed. [...] We were going to stop en route for lunch but finally since E, as usual, took an incredible time to bath and make-up we decided to lunch at the beach and leave after lunch. [...]

The kids were waiting. E played with them until 10.30. [...] She's on stand by tomorrow. And is nervous. I must be nervous for her too. I dreamt the old dream of not knowing my lines on a first night.

Saturday 29th, Rome
We went to the Studio on Tuesday and E only rehearsed after all. She didn't film. Marlon B came in for a drink, as did Julie Harris at the end of the day.
²³⁴
E suspects the other man Brian Keith has an alcohol problem as he always refuses drink.
²³⁵
Met the other protaganist too who plays Williams. Think his name is Forster (Robert?)
²³⁶
They all seem very nice and E, after some trepidation initially, now finds J. Huston very easy to work with. Chiefly he doesn't much care if you don't
exactly
know the lines which is always a great help. All that fuss about every ‘The’ ‘but’ and ‘And’ being correct is generally unimportant and can, to some people, be quite unnerving. I saw endless people in a seemingly continuous procession: Frosch, John Bryant re
Barbouza
,
P. Glenville re
Comedians
F. Zeffirelli re
Shrew
Ray Stark re everything.
²³⁷
Talked on phone to California to Frankenheimer re
Fixer
by Malamud. McWhorter talked to Wallis re
Anne of the Thousand days
for me.
²³⁸
[...]

We've seen a lot of Brando who is very nice – much nicer than he used to be – and very engaging and silly after a couple of small drinks. After 1
¹
/
₂
vodkas the other day he said that ‘unquestionably, the
easliest anquage
[
sic
] to learn was Spanish and not’ as I had asserted, ‘English.’

E seems pretty happy in her work and everybody seems very impressed with her. I think she's probably better than all of ‘em.

I saw
Faustus
and
Shrew
all the way through. The latter is very fine. I'm not sure about the former but there's a lot to be done with it and we may have a most interesting piece by the time we've chopped changed and diffused the weaker spots.

The boys arrived from Gstaad today. [...] They seem in good form and Mike's standards seem to be improving.

[...] Have been reading all kinds of books.
Europe without Baedeker
by that pompous bastard Edmund Wilson.
²³⁹
He seems to be wrong about everything – his book deals a lot with immediate post-war Europe. His reflections on national character are puerile. He seems to have talked only to journalists and second rate artistic people (Santayana, an exception) and from them has received these earth shaking impressions.
²⁴⁰
He talks about the overwhelming American influence on English writing for instance and writes more like an Englishman than almost anyone I know. He is also lacking in humour. He is a bore. See his book on Internal Revenue.
Memoirs of Hecate County
, is unreadable.
²⁴¹

The above was written in something like impotent fury – he is much better than that – but his determination to prove that the Decline of the West stops its headlong flight just west of the British Isles and Ireland is startling to read. His misunderstanding of the British is colossal.
And
he doesn't have the courage to say ‘I hate the British’ but all his stories about them with about two or three exceptions among 100s show them as snob-ridden bores of the traditional, as he describes one Englishman himself, ‘Music Hall’ kind. He has a mindless short story in it about an English woman and an American woman both working for UNRRA in which the warm homespun democracy of the American and the cold dispassion and cynicism of the Englishwoman are juxtaposed.
²⁴²
Need I say who the winner is. He is a sour man who seems to
rely for ecstasy entirely on fugitive glimpses of slender women in caught attitudes. He is quite nice for once about an English girl called coyly ‘G’. He is, I think, like Hemingway, fascinated by the passionately dispassionate prep-school, finishing school, mater and pater sexiness of the middle and upper-class British woman.
²⁴³

He is, as I have already stated, a bad writer but his single-minded determination to destroy all who are not American is compulsive. Though I fling the book across the room a dozen times (metaphorically) I have to retrieve it and go on reading.

NOVEMBER

Wednesday 2nd
I have been more or less drunk for two days. I don't know why but I enjoyed it thoroughly. I didn't do too much harm except that I was rude to Bob Wilson on Monday and he sulked all day yesterday (Tuesday). I also made a feeble pass at Karen, our Maria's nurse, and apologized immediately and straightaway told E who thought it funny but probably harmful to K. I apologized again the next morning in front of E. Now what on earth possessed me to do that? It must be my impending 41st birthday. I think no permanent damage has been done to Karen I hope to God; she's such a very good person.

I also attacked Marlon B for embarrassing R. Stark by taking off his boot to demonstrate that poor Stark wears lifts. I accused Marlon of wearing them too. I think he does though what the devil harm there is in it I don't know. Women wear lifts all the time and I wore them throughout
Shrew
to make myself look bigger. Also I don't much like looking up at people especially those who were born to be looked down on.

It's a glorious Wednesday morn which makes a change – we have had a thunderstorm which seems to have lasted a week. Long low rumbling and sheet lightning. The lights go out all the time of course but we are well prepared with candles. The children love it when the lights go out and prefer flashlights to candles. What a lovely light a candle makes. They take me back at once and unbearably to my bed in the box-room in 73, Caradoc Street.
²⁴⁴
All the books I read, all the things I learned, all my early furtive shame in one little room by candlelight. I was showing
Shrew
yesterday to a group of people including the children when the power failed and stayed failed for about 45 minutes or an hour. Here we are about to land on the moon while it sometimes takes a fortnight, via Airmail, to get a letter from England – One script from Emlyn Williams took over a month – it is virtually impossible nine times out of ten to understand what anyone says on the phone without fantastic concentration, and a lot of rain will put the lights out three times a night. [...]

Thursday 3rd
[...] For some reason I worried a lot about E this morning, whether she loved me or not and how awful it would be to lose her etc. I worked myself up to a rare state of misery and was absurdly relieved when she telephoned from the Studio. What's the matter with me?

Left for the studio at 12.30 and had lunch with E, the 3 boys and Brando [...] Managed to obtain skulls left from
Faustus
for the boys to take back to school. They left the house at 7.40pm to catch their plane. Before going E made hot-dogs on the barbecue. There was a howling wind and the portable barbecue which is on the balcony outside the bedroom flamed and roared like a mad thing. The kids loved it.

I had a couple of drinks and played sad songs on the Joanna.
²⁴⁵
I always worry when somebody close to me goes somewhere in an aeroplane.

I've decided after many years of tolerance that I really don't much care for Ray Stark. He's a very little person I think and is wind blown and windy and, though meaning well, is not to be entirely trusted. He is blindingly transparent and his particular immorality offends me. He is greasy handed. His mind is dirty. I shall probably not work with him again. Short sandy and seventh-rate.

Marlon's immorality, his attitude to it is honest and clean. He is a genuinely good man I suspect and he is intelligent. He has depth. It's no accident that he is such a compelling actor. He puts on acts of course and pretends to be vaguer than he is. Very little misses him as I've noticed.

Monday 7th
Tremendous storms hit N. Italy, Switz and Austria last Friday. Over a hundred people have been killed and both Florence and Venice have been severely flooded.
²⁴⁶
There is great fear for the safety, not only of the people but for great works of art. In Florence 6 million precious books are under the deluge. We received only the tail end of the storm here and it was enjoyably wild, not tragic. Two or three trees in the garden were torn out by the roots but Rome is untouched. They are the worst floods in the history of Italy. And that's quite a time.

E finished a little early on Friday and we had planned to go to Venice on the overnight train! But the Gritti Palace was closed for the season so we decided to stay.
²⁴⁷
Just as well. We haven't left the house since, except on Saturday we took the children to lunch at the Flavia and from there to the Zoo.
²⁴⁸
We were soon followed by a small crowd but I was amiable for once.

[...] Stanley Baker very insistent that we do a TV spectacular for the Aberfan disaster.
²⁴⁹
I think it's a mistake. They have, according to the press, already received £420,000, and don't know what to do with it. It would be silly to add to their embarrassment. E suggests we should turn it over to the Italian disaster fund. Good idea.
²⁵⁰

Tuesday 8th
[...] A glorious day – as yesterday, blue skies and sun. I sat outside and got some sun on my face but I became too hot and had to change my sweater for a cooler shirt. [...] I cut down smoking cigarettes yesterday from my normal 50 or 60 to 17! It wasn't any great hardship but I wonder if 17 isn't as bad as 50 because I smoked each cigarette thoroughly whereas when I smoke thoughtlessly I probably take no more than two or three real ‘drags,’ the rest simply vaporizing away. My appetite increased too though this may be the effect of not drinking which I haven't for 3 days.

Zeffirelli [...] arrived about 3.30. He told us all about going to Florence to get his Auntie and her dog and the impact of the terrible floods on that lovely city. Cows, cats, cars, trees, tapestries, clothes, furniture etc. etc. all piled up in distorted corners of the city. A cow and a calf who had somehow fled before the flood or had been carried along by it finding refuge in the cemetery of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning which is apparently on highish ground.
²⁵¹
Whole family businesses wiped out and ironically a great shortage of drinking water. [...] I am to run
Shrew
again tomorrow at 3.00. I don't like making films. I don't like acting in them and I don't like cutting them – especially the latter.

We dined with the children and Karen on lamb and artichokes and potatoes and salad followed by an apple tart. I made myself a martini before dinner just like a little old American. It tasted awful and put me in slightly bad temper. I read the whole of Anita Loos,
A Girl like I
in one sitting not because it was compulsive reading but feeling that if I stopped at any one place I wouldn't start up again.
²⁵²
She tells stories well but they're a little too polished to be true – some of them. She is of course a determined feminist and is kind to her own kind, even going so far as to describe Margalo Gillmore as being one of the great ladies of the American theatre.
²⁵³
Poor old talentless intoxicated Margalo. Anyway the book kept me awake until 2.00 in the morn. She is so determined to be witty and different that she succeeds only in becoming anticipated. My
sighs punctuated the whole reading. And what a dreadful story she tells about dead defenceless Alex Woollcott even if it is true.
²⁵⁴
It sounds terribly like what she would like to have happened. It was unforgivable to print it. [...]