Read The Richard Burton Diaries Online
Authors: Richard Burton,Chris Williams
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #Biography
The Richard Burton Diaries (226 page)
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
Richard Burton ceased keeping his 1980 diary in early October. He did not resume his personal record until mid-February, 1983.
Richard continued to appear in
Camelot
throughout the remainder of 1980, the production visiting Miami Beach, New Orleans and San Francisco, and then going on in 1981 to Los Angeles. But the physical strain, evident in the diary entries for 1980, was too great and Burton had to withdraw from the production at the end of March. He was taken into St John's hospital in Santa Monica for spinal surgery in April. He emerged in time to provide television narration for the wedding of the Prince of Wales and Lady Diana Spencer on 29 July 1981, but was drinking again and the marriage to Susan
was in dissolution. A further spell in hospital followed in October, by which time Susan had left to live in Puerto Vallarta. Their separation was finally announced in February 1982.
Apparently undaunted by this further setback in his personal life, Burton began 1983 with another major project: making the epic film
Wagner
which involved filming in a number of European cities. He was also drinking heavily. While on location in Italy he met continuity editor Sally Hay, and they began a relationship. Richard's health was not good – he spent more time in hospital – but he and Sally did find time to see Elizabeth Taylor in the London stage production of
The Little Foxes
in June. Over the summer Burton appeared alongside daughter Kate in a film adaptation of a stage production of
Alice in Wonderland
. In September it was announced that Burton and Taylor would appear together in a Broadway production of Noël Coward's
Private Lives
in the spring of 1983.
JUNE
Sunday 29th, New York
Today, like a man dying of thirst I slaked and lapped and wallowed in the
New York Sunday Times
. I haven't read a newspaper since leaving Geneva to come here – i.e. for about two months! Neither has Susan. The only encroachment from the outside world, outside the world of
Camelot
the musical, and King Arthur in particular, has been the occasional late-late-night film. I only remember one of them, chiefly because of a remarkable piece of acting by Dickie Attenborough in Greene's
Brighton Rock
yclept in Canada
Little Scarface
.
1
A rare picture of a shabby shop soiled, Roman-Catholic-haunted race-gang slasher. Very Graham Greene, very soul-stretched tight and grey with inarticulateness. For the rest of the time it seemed that I ate breathed dreamed and rode the nightmare of
Camelot
. We might be winning the race – I'm not sure – but, if the Toronto audience reaction is anything to go by, then we have a massive hit whatever the critics might say here in the Empire State. We open the previews in two days. [...] Susan went with Frank Dunlop to see a ‘rock’ show at Madison Square Garden.
2
S. returned looking shell-shocked. She had, she told me, never heard such a monstrous cacophony. Just imagine, she said, 19,000 people screaming manically for three non-stop hours. [...] Am having enormous difficulty sleeping. I suppose that when the play is definitely on the move I will sleep properly again. The lack of sleep is not helped by a bothersome and, by now, boring bursitis in my right bursar. Am going to see ‘the daddy of all the "neck and shoulder"’ doctors in the Western world. We shall see if I've torn something. Tomorrow also will be critical time for new costumes. Tomorrow, indeed, taken for all in all, is not a day I'm looking forward to.
JULY
Thursday 3rd, New York
It's 4.15 in the morning. Last night we had our first NY preview. In the last 48 hours I have suffered an agony of brand-new
costumes. John Barber of the London
Telegraph
and old friend and wisest and most compassionate of men (dispassionate too) David Rowe-Beddoe had (the former, Barber, by Frank Dunlop and the latter Rowe-Beddoe by Susan) been invited to look with new eyes at the production – we could no longer see the wood for the undergrowth.
3
Their observations were invaluable. And neither were sweeping generalizations but detailed analyses, scene by scene. Costumes worried them both. So they were changed. Why was I the only male member of the cast who didn't wear tights? asked Rowe-Beddoe. Had my legs suddenly, in middle-age become scrim-shanked. No, said I, spluttering at the very thought. I'll show you all by damn. And last night I did. All costumes had to be tightened up as I've lost 12–14lbs since we opened in Toronto. [...] Proper sleep – oh sleep it is a gentle thing beloved from Pole to Pole, To Mary Queen the praise be give she sent the gentle sleep from heaven that slid into my soul shall try again to sleep.
4
It's now 5.30. Come sealing night.
5
AUGUST
Tuesday 12th
So much for a daily report. The show is a super smash hit. Particularly, apparently, for me which is gratifying but surprising as only now, six weeks after the opening am I beginning to get the piece safely under my belt. We broke records week after week. [...] The show is still enjoyable. Long may it be so. I dread the time when I have exhausted its every possibility and go on automatic as ‘twere. Thus far I haven't given the same performance twice. It is always different. It's unplanned – something curious comes from the audience and I instinctively respond – always, of course, within the frame-work of the play [...]. There have been a great many distinguished or notorious audiences I'll get to them by and by. I had one cauchemar, an appalling catastrophe which hardly bears thinking about. That too I will try to explain.
6
Politics are the talk of the times. Last night was the first night of the convention (Democratic) and Senator E. Kennedy is out!
7
There is a line or two in Kafka's letters that haunts me.
8
I read it years ago and was impressed by its perfection of style (even in translation) but only in the last four or five years
has it meant anything to me – I mean only its horrifying and real meaning, personally applied, has it brutally come home to me after all these years in the smugness of the dark. [...] I am writing to please myself though there's a feeling in some place in my head [...] that this might be publishable. I haven't been writing for nothing. [...]