The Richard Burton Diaries (105 page)

I think I had an overdose of History lately. The more I read about man and his maniacal ruthlessness and his murdering envious scatological soul the more I realize that he will never change. Our stupidity is immortal, nothing will change it. The same mistakes, the same prejudices, the same injustice, the same lusts wheel endlessly around the parade-ground of the centuries. Immutable and ineluctable. I wish I could believe in a God of some kind but I simply cannot. My intelligence is too muscular and my imagination stops at the horizon, and I have an idea that the last sound to be heard on this lovely planet will be a man screaming. In fear and terror. It might be me. Though I beg that I many go down into the awful dreadful night without a word, like
my father Dic Bach Y Saer.
¹⁷
Or perhaps just one admonitory and despairing ‘Fuck you.’

Saturday 11th
Yesterday I went to Alex Maguy's art gallery to try and help Sara to persuade him to take back a Vuillard which she and Francis had and have found unsaleable in California, and swap it for a couple of Kislings or Marquets.
¹⁸
He agreed though he has consistently refused for the past few years. She says that this was entirely due to my presence, my gift of the gab, even in French, and my fame! [...] He's a tiny man who claims to be a great friend of Picasso's, and indeed he has in his own home an impressive collection of Picassos including one that makes Elizabeth's mouth water. It's a lady in a blue dress with a dark blue hat with light blue lights in it and she is holding up what appears to be a train of white feathers. We haven't seen the original, but he, Alex has promised to invite us to his home to see it. [...] Even I like it. I saw many other paintings and will obviously end up buying one. There is a charming little Picasso of a Harlequin on a horse for which he's asking $40,000. [...] There's also a medium-sized Marquet, a landscape of Algeria which I like very much for $24,000 dollars. But the most impressive was two paintings by Van Gogh painted on both sides of the canvas – one of a man at a loom and one (the other side) of a man sitting in a chair near a fireplace it seems. But they are beyond even my purse. There was too, I thought, a very good-looking Vlaminck of a Cafe de la Gare, but nobody else was impressed.
¹⁹
Michael was with us, he [...] unlike me, has a great feeling for art. I hope he becomes an artist. It seems to go with his dreamy personality. He doesn't seem to pack enough dynamite to be an actor and he is certainly not literary. He is only just beyond the comics stage. He wouldn't read Shakespeare or even Dickens from choice I know. Yesterday he asked me if he might choose a book to read – I have a small library here in the hotel of about 200 books excluding reference books – and he chose a History of the Movies. Full of pictures of course. [...]

We stayed in, E didn't get home till 9 o'clock. Yesterday I had the following to eat and drink: Bloody Mary, Two Scotch and sodas, two softboiled eggs, for tea
¹
/
₂
dozen oysters with a glass of white wine, in the evening three cups of instant bouillon, for supper a chunk of Chateaubriand and a few stalks of Endive salad. And two vodka martinis. Result loss of a little less than a pound. Really to encourage weight losers they should calibrate weighing scales in ounces.

Sunday 12th
Yesterday I sustained myself as follows: 2 vodka martinis, 2 slices of calves liver and bacon, two rashers of bacon,
¹
/
₂
of Spanish Honeydew
melon, two glasses of Riesling (Johannisberger, very good) salad with roquefort dressing. Result a loss in weight of about 3/4 of a pound. I am now something like 12 stone 11 or 179 pounds. [...] Fighting fit and hard as iron when I was playing rugby I was 12 stones 7, but that alas was 20 years ago and weight has shifted to the wrong parts of the body. [...]

We stayed in all day and for the first time I watched French Television, though we've had the set here for three or four months. I watched Scotland play France in rugby (the former won against the run of the play by 6–3) [...]

We had Sara for lunch. I cannot make up my mind whether she is a pin-head or very shrewd. She is certainly very aware of money. Tomorrow I go with her to some French Government ‘expert’ to decide whether an Utrillo she and Francis bought before the war for $1,800 is genuine or not.
²⁰
If he decides against he apparently has the right to burn it! I offered to buy it from her to save it at least from that fate but she has some muddled obligation to an art dealer in LA called Ruth Hatfield.
²¹
[...] The people from whom she and Francis bought it were apparently all knocked off by the Nazis during the occupation. They were Jews. [...]

Monday 13th
My sins have come home to find me! Who would have thought that a man who had been known in his time to smash windows or fight against odds as a result of drunkenness should be appalled by it in others? At least others close to him. And who's closer than E? For the last month now, with very few exceptions she has gone to bed not merely sozzled or tipsy but
stoned
. And I mean stoned, unfocused, unable to walk straight, talking in a slow meaningless baby voice utterly without reason like a demented child. I thought, at first, that it was merely drugs but I understand that the stuff she's having now is merely vitamins so it has to be good old-fashioned booze. I made a desperate attempt this last weekend, when there was no pressure of work on her, to see if I could handle it. Result: the same. The awful thing is that it's turned
me
off drink! So perhaps it has its virtue. There is very little I can do about it. It would be a mistake to have a notorious old pet lecture, with much finger-wagging, a decaying kettle. So I'll continue to pray that it is a psychological reaction from that bloody removal of the uterus last summer, that it is only temporary, and that gradually she'll come back to normal. I'll have to be very careful that I don't allow myself to join her otherwise we'll have to get a keeper to look after us both. But the boredom, unless I'm drunk too, of being in the presence of someone to whom you have to repeat everything twice is like a physical pain in the stomach. If it was anyone else of course I'd pack my bags, head for the hills and go and live in a Trappist monastery, but
this woman is my life. I cannot go to work with her though I will try this afternoon and see how she functions on the set. Last night I was so worried about her and us that I didn't get to sleep until well after dawn. I tried to imagine life without her but couldn't. The intolerable dreariness of her life in that studio is hard to watch. Endless long takes from a multitude of angles, surrounded with possibly the dullest collection of sycophants it has ever been my pain to come across. [...]

We stayed in all day [...] I read a biog auto of Lord Egremont amusing but fatuous.
²²
His friends obviously think him a scream. And two detective stories by Michael Innes.
²³
[...]

Tuesday 14th
I went yesterday with Sara to see the ‘expert’ M. Paul C. Petrides.
²⁴
[...] he did his best to sell me a couple of paintings including a dreadful semi-nude by Picasso. It's of a lady with a disgusting figure wearing nothing but a pair of stockings half sitting on a divan. Such is the angle of her body that she appears to have no arms. Her dreadful pubic hairs are well in evidence and she is altogether, Picasso or not, a woman that I would well do without on my gallery wall. [...] He tore off the brown paper from Sara's ‘Utrillo’ and after one swift glance said ‘fake’. It was the first time I'd seen it and even I knew it was. [...]

After the art gallery I took Sara over to E's studio where we played gin rummy and afterwards watched a scene. E was very good and in total command as usual. Warren Beatty seems very self-conscious and actory. He's not out of the top drawer. He doesn't give that feeling of vibrant power as Rex does or the lethargic dynamism of Marlon. I can feel the power of a top class actor or actress come out in almost palpable waves. I felt nothing from this chap. He is competent and pretty and is doing and will do well. Nice too with it, as they say. [...]

Thursday 16th
[...] [Elizabeth] has managed to persuade her company to give her next Wednesday off and work the following Saturday, so that she can come with me to London for the opening of
Eagles
. So we shall fly on Wednesday morning, see Ivor in the afternoon, attend the opening on Wednesday night and fly back in time for her to work on Thursday. [...]

The boys left for Millfield yesterday with very long faces and a great many hints that a phone call from me could quite easily get them an extra couple of days. I thought about it but they are very bored here in Paris, they have no pals and despite their fluent French feel very lost. So it was just as well to pack them off.

I recorded for the BBC the day before yesterday. Instead of four or five poems as promised there were more like fifteen.
²⁵
[...]

[Elizabeth] seems to be crashingly bored with everything in the world at the moment. It is virtually impossible to excite her interest in anything: books, gossip, her own film, her mother, her children or me.

Friday 17th
[...] I stayed in all day yesterday and read and read and read. E came home about 8.30 muttering at the idiocy of a director who wants to shoot a 17 minute scene all in one take and then covers it with umpty-nine different angles. It would seem to me to be an indication of monumental conceit on George's part or, more probably, that he doesn't know what he wants, that he is, in fact, insecure. I am not being wise after the event when I say that it was a mistake to do this film. Let's hope at least that it makes money. E and Caroline and everybody at the studio tell me that suddenly Beatty has suddenly started to come the big star act and is ordering people off the set etc. Ah well.

Monday 20th
Yesterday there was an article in the
Daily Mirror
or rather
Sunday Mirror
by that somewhat pompous and humourless
Life
magazine writer Tommy Thompson about E.
²⁶
Among other things, for the most part it was meant to be friendly I think, it said she was 38 while she still is 36, that she was ‘thickening’ while she's been the same weight for ten years, apart from
Virginia Woolf
period when she deliberately put on weight, and that she was ‘greying’. True, the latter but she's been greying for ten years. Ah well. He also says that we never talk about anything but money, so there I've been pouring out my knowledge into his tin ear for days on end in my dressing room and it appears that all I talked about was money. He drank my drinks all day long didn't he? That's money. There is a tendency among certain writers, especially the sententious, to create ‘fine’ pieces of writing about us. They are all the same. The rich couple, living their lives in a fishbowl glare of publicity, unable to take an ordinary walk in an ordinary city street, mobbed wherever we go, protected by a huge entourage. [...] What they don't understand and completely misinterpret is our life-long attitudes to our jobs. I think Mr Thompson was deeply shocked when I told him that acting on stage or films, apart from one or two high moments of nervous excitement, was sheer drudgery. That if I retired from acting professionally tomorrow that I would never appear in the local amateur dramatic society for the sheer love of it. Could he not understand the indignity and the boredom of having to learn the writings of another man, which nine times out of ten was indifferent, when you are 43 years old, are fairly widely read, drag yourself off to work day after day with a long lingering regretful look behind you at the book you're
interested in. [...] They will never understand that E and I are not ‘dedicated’ and that my ‘first love’ (God how many times have I read that?) is not the stage. It is a book with lovely words in it. When I retire which I must do before long I shall write a screaming diatribe against the whole false world of journalism and show business. [...]

Wednesday 22nd
[...] I stayed in all day and read a lot of
Time
capsules. E arrived home from work crocked as a sock, sloshed as a Cossack. I was sober as a Presbyterian, which wasn't a good idea. My sense of humour was not at its best, which also was not a good idea. I have an idea that I am fighting a losing battle.

We leave for London a quarter of an hour ago for the first night of
Eagles
. I couldn't care less but I like Kastner and it's a chance to see Ivor.

I am to see David Harlech at 6 at the Dorchester.
²⁷
I will doubtless see a great many other people. I shall loathe it all. Give me a scallop shell of silence?
²⁸

MARCH

Thursday 20th, Puerto Vallarta
[...] Another long silence in this pathetic journal occasioned I suppose by acute unhappiness added to stupendous quantities of guilt, alcohol, laziness, fear for Elizabeth's health and reason, stirred up well with a pinch or two of Celtic pessimism and served as a first class recipe for suicide. It is by no means over. I am still as tightly drawn as a long bow by John of Gaunt, and as touchy as a fretful porpentine but it gets better every day.
²⁹

The last six or eight months have been a nightmare. I created one half and Elizabeth the other. We grated on each other to the point of separation. I had thought of going to live alone in some remote shack in a rainy place and E had
thought of going to stay with Howard in Hawaii. It is of course quite impossible. We are bound together. Hoop-steeled. Whither thou goest.
³⁰
He said hopefully.