The Richard Burton Diaries (84 page)

I've just received a letter from Cathleen Nesbitt with a poem, ‘in his own write’ as she says John Lennon would say, written about her by Rupert Brooke.
¹³³
I shall write a poem for her in the next short course of my life or pack in the idea of courtesy for ever. What a lady. They bred ‘em good in the old days. She is the only old lady, she is near 80 years old, that I could imagine making love to. [...]

I'd better be off and to work because I behaved with a fair amount of disgrace yesterday. I drank, so I gather from my friends, three bottles of Vodka, during the course of the day. And that, naturally, doesn't include the evening when I think I slowed down. But it is not a good idea to drink so much. I shall miss all the marriages of all my various children, and they'll be angry because there'll be nobody around, apart from their mother, to make bad puns.

Everybody was very kind about me. The director was nice and Rex, feeling himself in the ascendant superior and having received my confession, was good enough to say that with three Hail Marys and a smart visit to the lavatory and a touch of ipepacuana, I would stand a fairish chance of being absolved.
¹³⁴
[...]

Friday 15th
Yesterday passed well enough, though I had a rough time with Aaron who is so sorry for himself that it prevents one from having, temporarily at any rate, any sympathy for him. He has the beginnings of multiple sclerosis, which so the
Oxford Dictionary
says is a ‘morbid hardening of tissue’. Lovely. If he turns his head quickly, he loses his balance and is likely to fall down. If I had it, even mildly like Aaron, it would mean the end of my career. One could hardly act if one was going to fall over every time one turned one's head. Aaron can still function and will continue to do so for an ordinary lifetime. So he's lucky in an unlucky way. But it frightens me to see people frightened. I don't think I'll be frightened when the call comes. I hope.

As most days my dressing room was a fishbowl, open to everyone's view. There was Aaron and a drunk James Wishart, and a reporter called Jim Bacon.
¹³⁵
Cathleen Nesbitt came in for a drink. [...] Rex was in splendid form, giggling and chortling and gurgly. We had the umpty-ninth telegram from Dick Zanuck saying that though he knew he sounded like a broken record he had to tell us again that the latest batch of film was superb etc. In his telegrams he calls Rex and myself ‘the boys.’ Sixty and Forty-three.

I dread today. First I have to act, which I like doing sometimes, but not today. Second I have Aaron and his endless questions about legal nothings. Third, I'm likely to have a room full of people again. Fourth, I'd like to be alone with E for about two hundred years but can't even get two days – we're off to Guy and Marie-Hélène Rothschild's house for the weekend. I love the house and love them so maybe it will be alright. We don't go until tomorrow and we'll probably come back on Monday morning.

[...] On reflection I realize how dreadful Aaron's disease is. Caroline, who is wise as an old woman, told me that from her experience of it the worst thing is the gradual loss of independence. You have to be guided and manoeuvred [...] wherever you go. I don't think I'd fancy that much.

Saturday 16th
Yesterday was alright after all. I pleaded pressure of work and ‘important scenes coming up’ to cut down Aaron's sesquipedalian questions. Eventually he went off to E's studio but told me later that all he received was a
vague and charming smile and the offer of a drink. So he and James Wishart came back to my place and eventually came home with me in the car. [...] They had a drink with me while I waited for E to come home.

The day went better than expected and I think my acting was good, my weariness giving it a sort of nervous intensity that compensated for lack of enthusiasm. Rex was very good and the sailor too. He doesn't have a word to say but he says them very well, as ‘twere. His name is Stephen Lewis, very tall and very cockney.
¹³⁶
I asked him if my accent was authentic enough. He said it was perfect.

E told me that Princess E called her up yesterday and said that she missed E so much that she was wondering if she could come over next week. E said, ‘Come off it, Elisheba, it's not me you miss but Warren Beatty.’ My E then turned into the den-mother and dished out advice to the effect that W.B. was a player of the field, and purported at least, to be in love with a film actress called Julie Christie.
¹³⁷
And that Neil, Elisheba's manfriend of the moment was an infinitely better deal etc. etc., but naturally when a woman is set on a certain course of action, order turns into chaos and logic to insanity.
¹³⁸
[...] Perhaps we should explain to her that the six million dollars he realized out of
Bonnie and Clyde
, as I heard yesterday, because of ill-advice from lawyers, has virtually disappeared like the morning mist before the rising sun.
¹³⁹
[...]

As mentioned before in this writing, I'm not quite sure about Elisheba. Bess says I'm wrong, but I think for a time, until I get to know her, I shall wear armour on my back, where the daggers go in. [...]

Aaron said in his cups last night that I was the most intelligent man he'd ever met! And he'd met them all, he went on wildly. Supreme court judges, philosophers, Jack Kennedy, eminent doctors, great actor and Uncle Tom Cobbley and all. I curtsied sweetly but I like the flattery so much that I've gone to the trouble of putting it down in this diary, haven't I? A pebble on the shore of the great sea of knowledge and thank you Sir Isaac Newton.
¹⁴⁰
I think I'll try sleeping for an hour to succour my massive brain. [...]

Sunday 17th, Chateau de Ferrières, Seine et Marne
Sunday morning in my favourite house, it is almost midday and the first snow has come in the night [...]. Yesterday was a bit wearing with a great deal of talk and oddly enough I
was not in a very talky mood but was forced to. We brought Caroline with us to show her the house and grounds, and E says that she was very thrilled, as well she might be. [...]

Guy and David were here when we arrived, we met the latter coming out of the trees with a shot rabbit in one hand and a pheasant in the other.
¹⁴¹
The two young boys and a pretty little girl cousin were with. Philippe the youngest had shot the rabbit.
¹⁴²
It was the first bag of his young life. Also here on arrival was Guy's daughter Lili who has to lie down a great deal as she had a clot on the brain about two months ago.
¹⁴³
She says that the whole thing was brought on by the unhappy coincidence of a malfunctioning kidney and the famous ‘Pill.’ The pill that orally taken every day prevents women from having babies. She also said that young girls of eighteen and twenty are struck down by the pill and not having her luck, have died.

The elevator refused to work at the end of the day so Lili's husband and I carried her, fireman fashion, up to her room.
¹⁴⁴
I was puffing a bit as it is two floors up.

Most of the conversation before Marie Hélène arrived, was about sexual aberrations. Guy says he knew a man who could only make love if the woman was naked except for bottines-a-boutons, that is old-fashioned fin-de-siecle button-up boots like one's granny used to wear. Sam Spiegel, he said that poor Sam can only get excited if a woman defecates onto his face. [...]

Marie Helene arrived in a great state of excitement having had her make-up done for four hours by Alberto de Rossi.
¹⁴⁵
It wasn't received very well. She is quite an ugly woman with a large hooked nose and an almost negroid mouth but very beautiful blind eyes, and the vivacity of her manner and her machine gun delivery in both languages makes her very attractive.

I don't know why I find it surprising when rich people are intelligent, after all they have the advantages from birth of superb educations, and the money to hire the best tutors etc., but Guy and his son David are as bright as buttons, especially the former. And they both have a very witty turn of phrase. David makes bad puns which I adore. [...]

There were thirteen for dinner so two tables were made up side by side to allay any superstition. At one point I mentioned Onassis's name and a bitter quarrel sprang up between Marie-Hélène and Lili. The former adamant that the Onassises would never be invited to her house, and Lili and myself saying that they would be invited to ours.

Monday 18th
Yesterday was a dream day. We slept until noon and discovered to our delight that lunch was a high tea at 4.30. So we ordered breakfast in our rooms. Bacon and eggs and brioche, homemade, toast from homemade bread, little apples, home grown. Then for me, while E stayed in bed and read a book, a long walk through the woods and the snow. Distantly and occasionally I could hear sounds of the shoot. E waved to me from the window. The lake was starting to freeze over and the ducks and swans were slowly swimming along the still unfrozen channels, very slowly and for some reason, comically.

High Tea was a feast. Chicken in the pot with all kinds of vegetables followed by endless cheeses and desserts. Roasted chestnuts. Raisins. fresh figs, mandarins, oranges, apples, and obviously and deliciously home made preserves. There were about twenty-five people sitting at the table. The minister of the interior whose name I've forgotten talked to me a lot.
¹⁴⁶
He said that his job was more important and onerous than our Home Secretary's. He couldn't explain why satisfactorily. I must find out. My ignorance of French politics is pretty stupendous. Perhaps because, all my life until de Gaulle, they seemed so irresponsibly droll. A new Prime Minister every three weeks and one only for a weekend.

Then upstairs to read and sleep a little and take a bath and so dinner in honour of Marie Helene and her birthday. This meal was at many tables instead of one large one. I sat between the Countess of Bardolini(?) and Madame Pompidou wife of de Gaulle's former Prime Minister.
¹⁴⁷
She believes, she said, that Georges, her husband, must denounce de Gaulle so that he will stand a chance of returning to power after de Gaulle dies, which she said, perhaps hopefully, cannot be long now. Georges didn't seem very impressive. I took just three words for each and impersonated everyone at our table, vocally that is, which Mme Pompidou found remarkable. So I was told afterwards by Marie Helene and others. They were very easy voices. The Brazilian Ambassador's daughter with a husky voice and a Portuguese French accent, two people with Italian-French accents, an hysterical gent with a very high pitched voice. A German-French accent. It was a piece of glottal cake.

[...] Practically everyone left for Paris after the party, but we sat up with the German Rothschilds and Marie Helene and Alexis Redé and Lili until 3.00 in the morning. I spoke Shakespeare and E and I sang them a Welsh song, ‘Ar lan y mor mae rhosys cochion.‘
¹⁴⁸
Elizabeth looked so beautiful that strong men were awed, and the children came to sit at her feet. She sang sweetly and unaffectedly and impressed everybody, including me. I'm not blasé yet.

Tuesday 19th, Paris
We left Ferrières late because of my dilatory Liz but miraculously despite driving slowly because of the snow-slushed and verglassed roads, we arrived on time. A man called Flink from
Look
magazine stayed for about an hour in my dressing room.
¹⁴⁹
He asked endless questions about homosexuality which I answered traditionally: Live and let live. It takes all sorts to make a world. Judge not lest ye be judged. Cast not the first stone lest ye be stoned. Some of my best friends are homosexuals etc. etc.

Two stories about Sunday's party which I omitted, ommited, ommitted – one of them must be right – from yesterday's entry: There were about perhaps sixty or more people in the room waiting to go in to dinner and cock-tailing, and Elizabeth and I were sitting in a corner of the room with Lili and other assorted odds and sods when Marie Helene came over and said to me: ‘Richard will you go over and talk to the dark lady in the corner?’ I said, ‘For God's sake Marie Helene I don't know her etc. and why should I etc? And Marie-H said, ‘She only wants to listen to your voice, which she thinks is heavenly.’ And my Elizabeth said in a powerful American accent: ‘Tell her I'll be over in a minute and give her an impersonation.’ My Broad doesn't muck around. Later when the children, after dinner, had gone up one by one to the head of the head table and made rather self-conscious little speeches, a man sitting next to E said ‘How boringly middle-class.’ E and I decided that if the Rothschilds and Ferrières and eighty guests for dinner in one wing of the house, where trees in the avenues had been planted by reigning monarchs, where there are a hundred servants, was middle class, then we had just crawled out from underneath a stone. How bored is bored and how middle-class can you be to describe the Rothschilds as middle-class? They are aristos my friend. It's like Syb once describing the Johnsons (President and Lady Bird) as ‘suburban’.
¹⁵⁰
What the hell does she think Ferndale was?
¹⁵¹
Buck House? Anyway, bugger you stranger, Elizabeth and I, famed as we are, rich as we are, courted and insulted as we are, overpaid as we are, centre of a great deal of attention as we are and have been for nearly a quarter of a century, are not bored or blasé. We are not envious. We are merely lucky.

I have been inordinately lucky all my life but the greatest luck of all has been Elizabeth. She has turned me into a moral man but not a prig, she is a wildly exciting lover-mistress, she is shy and witty, she is nobody's fool, she is a brilliant actress, she is beautiful beyond the dreams of pornography, she can be arrogant and wilful, she is clement and loving, Dulcis Imperatrix, she is Sunday's child, she can tolerate my impossibilities and my drunkenness, she is
an ache in the stomach when I am away from her,
and she loves me
!
¹⁵²
She is a prospectus that can never be entirely catalogued, an almanack for Poor Richard.
¹⁵³
And I'll love her ‘till I die.