The Richard Burton Diaries (124 page)

Wednesday 20th
[...] I spoke to Aaron for an hour yesterday about business and he told me that we were as usual overspending but no more than standard but this time without working and with no earned income and expenses. For the first time he may have to go into the income from the trusts we have set up for ourselves. I don't like that so therefore will go out and earn some more money. Next time we take a sabbatical and perhaps even when not I will squeeze in some time to write a book. If I write it in a certain way I can perhaps compromise with my conscience and deliberately write a best-seller. Have just talked to Elizabeth who has just had her first bowel movement since the operation. She says it is unbelievably painful and unfortunately occurred before anticipated by the doctors so she, as it were, did it all by herself without the assistance of lubricants and soothing laxatives etc. Result: Screaming agony. [...]

Must write an article for a book to be published marking the anniversary (100th) of the Rugby Union. Cliff Morgan is the demon-agent for this.
⁷⁶
I know so much about rugby and so many stories that I don't know where to begin.

Thursday 21st
[...] I wrote the first draft of the rugby article yesterday and shall try and complete it today. It looks awful in the cold light of dawn. Perhaps it will look better when it's all typed and neat. I have written a sort of account of the last game of rugby I ever played but have introduced elements from a lifetime of games in just such places. The place I physically think of is the awfulness of Tonmawr though I have never actually played there.
⁷⁷

Saturday 23rd
This is a brand new Olivetti typewriter upon which I am writing given to me by Lil and Brook. It is sparkling and very loose compared with the Hermes Baby and it will take me a little time to bang away on it with the same abandon as I do on the old one which I shall keep anyway out of loyalty for many years of battered service. I shall retire the Baby to the library on the boat or at Gstaad. The machine is fire-engine red and I've pasted on it a Welsh dragon sent to us by a Welsh American firm that specializes in producing stickers for the various groups of Irish Scots English French Italian etc. descendants who like to remember their origins in Europe. [...]

I had lunch with Hugh French after having had my hair-cut by Ron B and after having signed and initialled lots of bumf for Aaron who, poor chap, is an old man 20 years before his time. [...] He will be a helpless cripple before long I'm sure. The forties are an odd and sad time because going going going are the old familiar faces. Indeed I am frequently surprised to find that people like
Binkie and John Perry and Dick Clowes and Stephen Mitchell are still alive.
⁷⁸
All ghosts from my early years in the theatre. Even Emlyn can no longer remember his lines and had a sort of nervous breakdown last year. [...]

Sunday 24th

I wonder what the poor little bugger is going through – if anything. Is he or is he not a feckless cop-out? Time will tell if time will give us a chance to wait. This is a Sunday that feels like a Sunday. [...] I read
Reader's Digest
for half an hour – a publication I haven't looked at for years.
⁷⁹
I read the sporting page and my favourite Jim Murray on Hank Aaron and have not even got round to the political pages which I hardly ever miss.
⁸⁰
Re: politics: Brook was commenting yesterday on how the mighty had fallen in this case the mighty being the British. The announcement that Wilson had decided on a June election which was a front page photograph of Wilson in the
Times
with a hundred words on the subject, has not been followed up at all and on the news on TV that night was not even mentioned. Nobody gives a bugger. Pompidou and the French elections, Willy Brandt and the West Germans, received much much more attention.
⁸¹
Both of them lost the war and we won it. It is passing strange and a passing world. Always has been of course. I can imagine the various and vicious political machinations that are going on in the British press and the mud-slinging, not one smidgeon of which crosses the Atlantic to the ordinary papers or to the TV. The
Times
of NY doubtless has a column or two as will
Time
and
Newsweek
, but Wilson or Heath are not going to make the covers. [...]

Monday 25th
[...] I watched a lot of television yesterday mostly sport. The Angels v The Twins (won 6–5 by the former) and golf from Atlanta (won by Tommy Aaron.)
⁸²
I saw a much younger Clint Eastwood playing the piano and singing a love-song in a re-run of a series he used to do called
Rawhide
.
⁸³
A rare sight. I wrote painfully inadequate letters to Liza and Maria – one page each – caught a glimpse of Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi in a horror film.
⁸⁴
The series is called
Creature Features
.
⁸⁵
Ate two trout for lunch, raisin bran for breakfast and turkey with all the trimmings for dinner. Liquorice for dessert in bed while I tried to read a book, the
One Monday We Killed Them All
book I mentioned taking to the hospital last Monday. I read the political pages and found a spot about the British Elections. We came next after the Dominican Republic and the article says that it is likely to be the dirtiest election in modern times. It was very short. I read about Nixon [...], Cambodia, Kent State and the four students killed by the National Guard.
⁸⁶
I read that all food regardless of how purely grown – even the much loved potato – contains powerfully toxic elements which in excess could kill us all. Air pollution and hard drugs and the population explosion and the trip-wire tension in the middle-east between Israel and its neighbours. And there is nothing about all these things that I can do anything at all about. I could, I suppose, buy an electric car to make my own personal protest against gasoline, but nobody has made one yet that is effective. That should be a simple matter I would have thought with modern technology, but what would Standard Oil think of such treachery? They wouldn't like that would they? The stock market is bad enough as it is. Perhaps I could buy a horse and cart and try the freeways, go only by train – electric of course and not fuel-burning – and nuclear submarine. Shit on the world. I'll sit on my hands and pray.

[...] Yesterday afternoon I took E'en So for a walk and was hailed by a man called Harry Guardino. He was in a car with two small girls. I had no idea who he was but he chatted with great familiarity. ‘Who's that?’ I asked. ‘Harry,’ he said ‘Harry Guardino.’ Who are the girls? My daughters. I was taking them for a drive as it's Father's Day. They don't remember me I said – meaning my daughters. ‘The eldest one does,’ he said, ‘she recognized you first.’ I went home and told the story and Brook said that this same Guardino is a well-known and very good actor and indeed he was on a TV re-run of a film that very night called
Hell is for Heroes
.
⁸⁷
So now I know. Guardino must have thought me very up-stage but he probably doesn't know that I see very few films and never read the show-business page unless someone points out something funny about E or me or others.

Tuesday 26th
[...] We will [...] God willing after this week-end, go to Palm Springs and sun there.
⁸⁸
[...]

The party was horrible if like me you were sober. E was in pain in the bed-room for most of the time. George Davies was drunk and silly by 8 o'clock and got drunker and sillier, Val was smashed, Guilaroff was catastrophically boring as ever and kept on telling endless tales to Brook of his massive operations.
⁸⁹
Kennamer spent most of the time defending California's weather which I attacked and almost was reduced to tears at one point. His voice became very high.

Thursday 28th
Lil and Jim have gone to Palm Springs today to look at a house which is for rent for $1,500 a month or is it $1,800? and to which we may move on Monday next. [...]
⁹⁰

The market went up yesterday by a record number of points to everyone's surprise except mine. That is to say, I knew that it had to go up before long or go to war though by such a vast number of points and actually a record number of points in one day was not to be foreseen except by Getty.
⁹¹
A lot of people will be breathing a little easier today but I have an idea that it will drop again before it starts climbing steadily up hill.
⁹²

I have barely left the house except to take the dog for a walk and twice to shop at a super-market and buy books at an enormous book-shop called Pickwick's in Hollywood. Among other books I bought a very fat paperback called
University Hand-book for Readers and writers
. Flipping over the pages I came to ‘Sir Henry Newbolt. (1862—)’. The book is the revised edition of 1965. Could Newbolt still be alive then? He must be sleeping there below by now surely.
⁹³

I finished the rugby article three days ago and asked Jim or George to type it up. For some reason it took two days to do this. I read it again last night and hate it so will write it all again.

Crisis or no crisis we are neck-deep in scripts some of which are not bad though none that are really worth doing. Haven't got through a third of them yet though there are two that sound interesting.
The Devils
of Aldous Huxley which was done as a play by the Stratford Company some years ago, and a script by Peter Shaffer's twin brother who is having a great success at the
moment with a play in London called
Sleuth
.
⁹⁴
He is not as fancy as his brother apparently. Good.

Friday 29th
I cannot face the re-writing of the rugby piece, but it must be done. I must hypnotize myself into doing it somehow. I read somewhere once that all creation in art is induced by self-hypnosis which is almost sub-conscious. Well let's see if I can do it consciously and re-write 3000 lousy paroles about a game. [...] It must be done, Richard. I shall pretend that if I finish the piece and if it's good I shall be paid $2,000,000. That might get it done.

[...] I talked to Gwen yesterday. Ivor is back in hospital in Geneva. One kidney is mal-functioning. I wish him to die now. I can't bear to see him so helpless and childlike – not in his mind, that's all right – but in his querulousness, his hatred of being helped. And he is in continual pain since a kind of moribund life came back into the body. Why did that slip in the dark have to happen? So slight a slip, so gigantic a fall. A nightmare night that will haunt me forever. That whatever Gods may be for money. At least we don't lack that. He will die in first class which is the only way he has ever wanted to travel – a Pullman to the grave.

Saturday 30th
Three men came to see me yesterday in the morning at 11 o'clock to discuss a sort of documentary of
Becket
in which I will be the story-teller and occasionally appear. It is to be anything from one to one-and-a-half hours long. It will take me 10 days in September. It will be an interesting bit of travelling at any rate. I shall own it for Great Britain and own 50% of it for the rest of the world. I shall insist too on the cassette rights. The plan is to take the itinerary that he took. [...] The men were Huw Davies, a very Welsh Welshman from the Gower, an American called Lou Solomon who started off his morning with the disastrous ‘You don't remember me do you?’ I didn't and said ‘Remind me.‘
⁹⁵
He did and it turned out that he had written the first draft of
Elizabeth Taylor's London
and I made a faux pas when I blurted out ‘but I thought Sid Perelman wrote that’.
⁹⁶
Clang. He had the nervous idiocy to say the same to E on introduction and had the same blank reaction from her. Why do they do that? Mr Solomon has been in the business all his life and should know better. Doubtless he had boasted to the other two about how well he knew us, Dick an’ Liz and all that, and had to get in fast. The third man is a very long haired dark eyed sallow Brooklyn boy who seems very nice, but I felt the smack of amateurism.

Brook has gone to watch the ‘Indianapolis 500’ in a cinema where it is shown on closed-circuit TV and while typing I am listening to it on the radio.
⁹⁷
A dreadful cacophony, an assault on the ears. It is a very dangerous race apparently and is usually ignored by the great Grand Prix drivers though occasionally they have appeared here and won – the one I remember is Jim Clark the Scot, now dead.
⁹⁸
[...] There is very little movement from Hathaway and Ed Henry re
Raid on Rommel
.
⁹⁹
They must get cracking soon if they want to start on June 15th or thereabouts.

Sunday 31st
Rex came to dinner last night. I went to bed at 1130 and left the family chatting with him and Brook and Elizabeth told me this morn that he had said categorically that no American had ever been wrongfully sentenced to death and/or executed for murder. God he is a simpleton. And as self righteous as only the genuinely stupid can be. He talks of Nixon as if he were a God. [...] He is a perfect fascist in embryo. Were Hitler to arise here he would think him a great man and would join the Nazi party like a flash. A good lecture on Racism would make him virulently anti-Semitic overnight and he would categorize them enthusiastically for the prison camps.

I lunched soberly with Harvey Orkin at the Cock n’ Bull. He is a good sweet man and terribly muddled but could never become a Nazi or an anything-baiter.

I read all day apart from writing a couple of letters. When faced with this machine latterly I feel as dull as drinkwater. John.
¹⁰⁰

JUNE

Monday 1st, Beverly Hills Hotel
We are flying to Palm Springs this morning at 11 o'clock though I won't believe it until we get there. Swerdlow and Kennamer came to probe around E and said she could ‘dig ditches’ now if she wanted to. I can't myself see E digging ditches but it's obviously doctors’ idea of the acme of human good health that one is able to dig ditches. How about starting with a nice walk one asks one-self. Work it up to a slight sweat as ‘twere. [...]