The Richard Burton Diaries (78 page)

Just shared a pot of caviare with Ivor and Liza. K. says she doesn't like it. I suspect she has her mother's fear of famous but untried foods. I had it myself for a long time. It's very working class but I was weaned early by PHB. I was reading A. L. Rowse's second volume of biography recently in which he recounts his embarrassment at being offered asparagus when dining with Lord David Cecil and not knowing how to eat them.
⁸
I know the feeling well.

Thursday 25th
Just about to give a lecture to the boys. Apparently they have been playing records in their room until 2.30 in the morning, putting cigarettes out on tables etc. instead of or perhaps including ashtrays. Generally a case of showing off. [...]

Friday 26th
By the time their explanations had finished it was time for me to go to lunch with Hugh French, who, poor fellow, also had a tale of woe. The only girl he'd ever loved, in his words, had left him. Wealthily married to an impotent old husband she had promised to get a divorce, found herself pregnant by Hugh and suddenly without so much as a by your leave or a kiss me foot had disappeared somewhere in Paris for an abortion. He is looking for her. She's French, youngish, about late twenties, peasant, was on the fringes of the film business. Hugh met her through Terry Young, film director, who'd ‘used her’ in a film.
⁹
She sounds as ordinary as a tabloid newspaper but there's no accounting for love lust or taste. [...]

I am just about to leave for Geneva with Liza, Kate, Ivor, Gwen and Brook Williams for the funeral of André (Bobo) Besançon.
¹⁰

[...] went to the Hospital to see ETB, and there was Norma Heyman who was drunk and who had been turned down by my two stepsons for lunch and proposed to give us, me, E, a lecture on how to talk to the boys and how to keep them interested [...]

[There are no further entries in the diary until late September. During this period Richard travelled to Céligny to attend the funeral of André Besançon. He was accompanied by his brother Ivor, Ivor's wife Gwen, Emlyn Williams's son Brook, and daughters Liza and Kate. After the funeral the men dined at the Café de la Gare in Céligny. Initially the intention had been to travel on to Chalet Ariel in Gstaad but, as they had eaten and drunk rather well, it was decided to postpone the journey to the following day. Instead they agreed to stay at Le Pays de Galles, which Burton had not visited for more than two years. Ivor went on ahead to open the house up and put on the heating, and when attempting to gain entry to the property, slipped and struck his neck on a paving slab. In what appears to have been a freak accident he was paralysed from the neck down. Ivor's incapacitation and eventual death in 1972 would cast a considerable shadow over Richard.

Much of August was spent in organizing Ivor's treatment, initially at Stoke Mandeville Hospital, near Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire, but in the last week Burton went to New York. By September he was in Paris to begin work on
Staircase
, co-starring with Rex Harrison, and Elizabeth was to co-star with Warren Beatty in
The Only Game in Town
.]

SEPTEMBER

Thursday 26th, Paris
We worked from 7 last night to approx 4 this morning. [...] Elizabeth has gone off to work and ‘test’ costumes. She should be back before I leave I hope. After 7 or is it 8 years I still miss her if she goes to the bathroom. She starts work on Monday, and after a time we shall be working the same hours, ‘Continental’ hours, so called, which means from mid-day to 8 at night.

Occasionally, as I hopefully continue with this diary I will try and fill in things that happened during the unrecorded days. e.g. We took Kate to NY with us on the
Queen Elizabeth
. With us also we took Liza and my God-Daughter Sally Baker (Stanley's daughter), Nella, and a nurse named Caroline O'Connor for Elizabeth.
¹¹
It was an uneventful crossing, and, having been so often on the big ships, rather sad. [...] There was a general air of run-down gentry, frayed at the edges. [...] I wondered if after many years of travelling that I had become blasé. Elizabeth said not, and Sally asked me if the ship had always been as shabby. Some of the life-boats and the great steel arms that presumably lower them into the sea were rusty and a great many of the weather-covers were torn. Sally had never been across the Atlantic before and so presumably had nothing to be blasé about.

While at dinner one night in the Verandah Grill, which is the same as ever, I was called to the phone to Ethel Kennedy.
¹²
I thought it was some sort of crank, because I'd read in the papers as we left England that Ethel was on Onassis's island in Greece.
¹³
However it later turned out that it was Ethel calling from Hyannis Port to ask me if I would do the narration of a documentary film about Bobby Kennedy. I said yes and did it in Quogue at Aaron's house. It was shown at the end of the disastrous Democratic Convention and was apparently the only thing in those vulgar five days that was well received.
¹⁴

Sunday 29th, Barbizon
¹⁵
Last night we dined in the Hotel Restaurant. [...] I became very mournful about Ivor, and started blaming myself for not having been with him when he went to open up the house that dreadful night. [...]

Back to Paris today. Elizabeth finally got round to reading her script yesterday and likes it, she says. [...]

Barry Cooper, Elizabeth's doctor of a few months arrives shortly to examine her.
¹⁶
Elizabeth has more examinations in any given month than I've had in my lifetime. [...]

Received a letter from Cis and Elfed today thanking us for the 500 quid we sent them and telling us how excited Tom and Hyral were when they received theirs.
¹⁷
Cis and Elfed were staying with them when it arrived. Can't wait, said Tom, for the bank to open, they'll hardly be able to get me through the door. Ivor is to be fitted with a collar, which hopefully will enable him to be sat up. This should be of enormous help psychologically. He has finally agreed to see Cis. She's the first so honoured apart from us.

Dr Cooper has been searching, he says, for the origin of Bateau Mouche. And could I tell him, he asked the origin of ‘Pumpernickel?’ I could, I said. Napoleon's retreat from Moscow. His horse was called Nickel. How it was spelled I don't know. The French soldiery [were] forced to eat off the country, including the black bread of Mittel-Europe. They hated it and groused that it was pain-pour-nickelle.
¹⁸
I also told him the etymology of Marmalade. Je voudrais la preserve d'orange pour La Reine
Marie qui est malade.
This from a courier who had been sent in a hurry from France from Mary Queen of Scots, who, pregnant, was insane to have some of her beloved Scots
marmalade.
¹⁹
There's no way of finding out whether these stories are true or not. I like them anyway.

Monday 30th, [Hotel] Plaza, Paris
Returned to Paris yesterday having at lunch at Bas-Breau with Caroline and Dr Barry Cooper. It seemed to me that he wasn't bound too strictly by the Hippocratic oath as he might have been when discussing a patient of his and acquaintance of mine called Nick Ray.
²⁰
He talked freely of his drunks, drugs and gambling etc. They lived together for a year he says. He also took a scholarship to Cambridge, and was only the second Jew to win a blue. For rowing. He is very short and tubby so he must have coxed, I suppose.
²¹
He also asked us and the children to stay with the Butes (Marquise of) in Scotland this winter.
²²
He talks carefully and quietly as if afraid that, if he didn't, he would accidentally reveal a non-U accent.
²³
He is vocally a bit like a black friend of ours called Roscoe Lee Browne.
²⁴
[...]

I read P. G. Wodehouse's latest
Do Butlers Burgle Banks?
in one sitting.
²⁵
It's exactly the same as all the others. He's still mining the same vein of gold, but it's as effortlessly entertaining as ever. Then a couple of chapters of Churchill's
World Crisis
, and so to bed for a couple of hours sleep until 12.30, a chat and some more
World Crisis
, and back to sleep again at approx 2.30.
²⁶

OCTOBER

Tuesday 1st
Eliz started work yesterday, but without Beatty. Tomorrow he starts. I continued mine with Rex, and oddly enough he was in sparkling form, not worrying about his lines much, and we got along merrily.
²⁷
Hugh French told me that R. Zanuck was more enthused than he'd ever seen him over the rushes from
Staircase
.
²⁸
[...] At Eliz's I saw John (Goulash) Shepridge who told of his favourite restaurant in Paris, known only to a select group, he says.
²⁹
It's called ‘L'Ami Louis,’ 32, Rue Verte Bois.
³⁰
I think he said it's near the Bastille. [...]

I am much happier in Paris than I am in London. It is perhaps that I have a dread of seeing my family, i.e.
most
of my family? It is because I like acquiring
new French every day, or that I speak the language, albeit roughly if fluently on occasion? Perhaps I'm ashamed of Britain's weakness. It's awful to see how despised and dismissed she is by the foreign press. Eight in the morning and I must be off to work.

Wednesday 2nd
Worked yesterday from 9 to about 4.30 when it became too dark to shoot. We were forced to stop for about two hours around midday because of rain. Went over to see E at lunchtime [...] and the place is like a madhouse. There is a maid to clean up, Dick and John, Frank LaRue, Jeanette, Claudye, Gianni, Vicky and Mia, George Davis and Caroline.
³¹
[...] In addition, for a lot of the time you have Rocky Brynner.
³²
[...]

George Stevens is behaving beautifully, and Beatty worries about whether he should wear a tie or not, according to E.
³³
George thinks E is smashing. So that's alright. Richard Zanuck thinks Rex and I are smashing too, according to a telegram we received yesterday. So everybody loves everybody as of this writing. [...]

Picked up E last night and brought her home, and for some reason [...] I suddenly turned from Jekyll into Hyde and went to bed dinnerless in one of my huffs. Eliz ate downstairs with Dick and John. I woke at 4.30 and waited for the world to get up. The world being Elizabeth. Finally decided to wake the world up at 7.00, whereupon it made me a Bloody Mary. That I said is my Vitamin C for the day.

Thursday 3rd
Worked all day until about 5 and went to Eliz's studio to pick her up as usual. They seem to be getting on fine. Ours goes well too, though Rex is very funny in his old-fashioned attempts to upstage, get into my close-ups, do funny business on my lines etc. It's rather like acting with a very determined
young actress. [...] I mentioned it to the director who said first that he hadn't noticed and then that he'd never seen it before in his life. Come to think of it, I never have, on films, and from a man. That is to say if you consider Victor Spinetti to be a Welsh-Italian girl. Because the latter did everything except break wind, and stick his finger up his nose to the knuckle. [...]

Last night we stayed up latish to watch a soccer match between Celtic of Glasgow and St Etienne of France. Celtic won by 4 goals.
³⁴
Delighted I was, and always am nowadays at the discomfiture of the French.

Friday 4th
We worked inside in the morning and went out in the afternoon. I did only 4 shots all day. The rest of the time I read
L'Express
to improve my French which latter could do with. [...] Elliott Kastner came to see me with a carte blanche offer of about ten properties.
³⁶
[...] He says that I will realize $7 million from
Eagles
. Now that would be nice.

I am absolutely possessed with the idea of buying a large barge and converting it into a river yacht. My dressing-room windows look over the Seine, and I see a hundred barges a day and beautifully stubby, chuggy, impertinent tugs fussing like bullies. It would be blissful to weigh anchor or whatever one does on barges and motor through the French countryside to Marseilles or Germany or Belgium or Holland. [...] I could have a mini-moke on board and a couple of push-bikes for the occasional excursions. I could ask for a lot of films to be done in Paris so that we could live on the barge. I could have a swimming pool put on the deck, and thousands of paperbacks in the library, on every conceivable subject. It shouldn't be all that expensive – much less than a comparable house. I'm told one could buy a 100 ft barge for about 20 or 30 thousand dollars and spend another thirty on it. I would buy hundreds of films in 16mm and have a small projection room. Roddy McDowall told me once that he has a library of several hundred films that cost him very little to buy. [...]

Saturday 5th
Yesterday we worked desultorily all day until about 5. Rex gave a party for the crew and cast (me) afterwards. [...] My turn next week. There was no vodka and Scotch is dangerous, so Jim made Vodka Martinis for us.
³⁷
I have been fairly squiffed three nights in a row, so I'd better watch it.

Pat Newcomb arrived.
³⁸
She is supposed to be head of publicity for the three productions
Staircase, The Only Game in Town
and
Justine
.
³⁹
She looks sun-lamped, and has a pot belly. Is she, one asks oneself, a man or a woman? [...]