Richard Burton Diaries Excerpts
Oct. 20th, 2012 12:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakRemember when in my recent Frankfurt Book Fair reports I mentioned browsing through these and finding them highly readable? I still don't own the book (it's on my Christmas list), but thankfully the media has printed some choice excerpts to demonstrate what I mean.
21 April 1965:
‘E opened her bag and handed me a book. It was an old edition of A Shropshire Lad. With all of those hundreds of people around, to say nothing of store detectives watching for our safety, all of them staring and oohing and aahing over her beauty, she had stolen a book! I burst into a cold sweat. I could see the headlines. “Millionaire Couple Steal Book From Foyles.” “Book not worth more than five bob, says manager”. Christ. I gave her a terrible row but her delight was not to be crushed. It’s the first and last thing she ever stole in her life, except, of course, husbands!’
24 May 1967 – Portofino
E anxious I write about her [in the diary] so here goes: She is a nice fat girl who loves mosquitoes and hates pustular carbuncular Welshmen, loathes boats and loves planes, has tiny blackcurrant eyes and minute breasts and has no sense of humour. She is prudish, priggish and painfully self-conscious.
30 July 1967 – Taormina
A slow day, marking time, with a walk in which we bought sunglasses at a little shop. As we left the crowd which had gathered applauded us. E thought it very sweet, which indeed it was. We dined in somnolence and some self-satisfaction as we compared our ancestors and former wives and husbands.
E has become very slim and I can barely keep my hands off her. It turns out that she’s not that less in weight but, as a result of massage and exercise the weight has been redistributed. She is at the moment among the most dishiest girls I’ve ever seen. The most. I mean dishiest.
19 September 1967
Noël Coward arrived looking very old and slightly sloshed and proceeded to get more sloshed. He embarrassed us both separately and lavished compliments on E about her beauty and her brilliance as an actress. He is a most generous man but he is beginning to lose the fine edge of his wit or perhaps like me he repeats himself when tipsy.
23 October 1968 [Aristotle Onassis married former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy three days earlier] The Onassises have disappeared completely from the front pages. I told Elizabeth they didn’t have our stamina. I also said with great smugness that he had given her a wedding present of only “slightly less than £100,000 [£660,000] of diamonds, precious stones”, etc, whereas I had only recently given a £127,000 [£845,000] diamond ring simply because it was a Tuesday.
[Later] The enemy is insidiously attacking again. Beth read in the papers that Ari Onassis had given Jackie half a million pounds worth of rubies surrounded by diamonds. Missy already has, as a result of former battles against yours truly, one of the greatest diamonds in the world and probably the most breathtaking private collection of emeralds surrounded by diamonds also in the world. Now the Battle of the Rubies is on. I wonder who’ll win.
8 November 1968
After completing yesterday’s entry with milady fast asleep in bed as I thought, I was looking through some scenes in the script when suddenly the bedroom door opened and standing there in a near diaphanous nightgown with one shoulder slipped on to her arm was E. So I went back to bed for 10 minutes. I was unquestionably seduced and I teased her about it for the rest of the day when we talked on the telephone. She was very beautiful. It is a fact that after all these years the girl can still blush. I lost that latter capacity a long long time ago.
13 November 1968 It’s extraordinary how small the Duke and Duchess [of Windsor] are. Two tiny figures like Toto and Nanette that you keep on the mantelpiece.
Chipped around the edges. Something you keep in the front room for Sundays only. Marred royalty. The awful majesty that doth hedge around a king is notably lacking in awfulness. Charming and feckless. [Later] E just reminded me that at one point I said to the Duchess last night, “You are, without any question, the most vulgar woman I’ve ever met.” Waaaaaah!
19 November 1968 – Paris
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, [we] 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!
25 May 1969
What an extraordinary world it is. How do you live with one person for 13 years, and another for eight and find both as alien as strangers. Elizabeth is an eternal one night stand. She is my private and personal bought mistress. And lascivious with it. It is impossible to tell you what is consisted in the act of love. Well I’ll tell you, E is a receiver, a perpetual returner of the ball! I don’t write about sex very often, because it embarrasses me, but, but…
“28 May 1969
Marlon [Brando] has yet to learn to speak. Christ knows how often I’ve watched Marlon ruin his performance by underarticulation. He should have been born two generations before and acted in silent films.”
6 August 1969
E said this morning that I lacked loyalty. Now she is a bright b----- to talk about loyalty. The list of her dis‑loyalties would fill the yellow pages of the New York Telephone Directory. Except of course to her children. And there she defeats me because I've been disloyal to mine.
8 August 1969
I behaved in a way to make a banshee look kind, good and sweet. Insulting Elizabeth, drunk, periodically excusing myself rather shabbily and then starting the rough treatment all over again. Sometimes I am so much my father’s son that I give myself occasional creeps. He had the same gift for damaging with the tongue, he had the same temporary violence, he had the same fidelity to Mam that I have to Elizabeth, we wave the same admonitory finger at innocence when we know bloody well when we are guilt-ridden, when we have to attack when we know we’re in the defensive position.
2 October 1969 – Geneva
When we came out of the Musée des Beaux Arts the cab driver had vanished, but he returned a few minutes later having very sweetly bought a single rose for Elizabeth. Somewhere between [then] and dinner, brooding set in. Between long silences deadly insults were hurled. At one point E knowing I was in a state of nastiness said to me: “Come on Richard, hold my hand.” Me: “I do not wish to touch your hands. They are large and ugly and red and masculine.” Or words to that effect.
This morning E said that I really must get her the 69-carat ring to make her ugly big hands look smaller and less ugly! Nobody turns insults to her advantage more swiftly or more cleverly than Lady Elizabeth.”
18 November 1969 – Monaco
This morning in the early hours the pot decided to have a go at the kettle and won handle down. E, the pot, gave this particular kettle, me, a savage mauling. I was coldly accused of virtually every sin under the sun. Drunkenness (true) mendacity (true) being boring (true) infidelity (untrue) killing myself fairly quickly (true) pride envy avarice (all true) being ugly (true) having once been handsome (untrue) and any other vice imaginable except homosexuality and ungenerousness.
July 14, 1970:
“[. . . ] Last night I was lying on the bed doing a double-crostic and looked up a quotation in the paperbacked Quotation Dictionary that I carry around with me specifically for that purpose. I immediately became lost in the book and read all the Shakespeare ones right through very slowly. There was hardly a line there that I didn’t immediately know but seeing the miraculous words in print again doomed me to a long trance of nostalgia, a stupor of melancholy, like listening to really massive music, music that moans and thunders and plumbs fathomless depths. I wandered through the book for a long time but no other writer hit me with quite the same impact as William S. What a stupendous God he was, he is. What chance combination of genes went to the making of that towering imagination, that brilliant gift of words, that staggering compassion, that understanding of all human frailty, that total absence of pomposity, that wit, that pun, that joy in words and the later agony. It seems that he wrote everything worth writing and the rest of his fraternities have merely fugued on his million themes. [ . . .]
13 September 1971
I love Larry [Olivier] but he really is a shallow little man with a mediocre intelligence but a splendid salesman.
4 December 1971 [At dinner] My attention was riveted from the first by a man sitting opposite me. He looked like a cadaver. He was eyebrow-less and eyelash-less and atrociously wigged or dyed with snow-white hair at the front of his head and brownish at the back. His face was hideously pasted with make-up and had odd lumps on it, a face made of funny putty by an inept child. [RB’s introduction to Andy Warhol]
(remarriage to ET in South Africa)
7 October 1975 – Johannesburg – Chobe
Grass landing. Slight brush with grim reaper. Left suspension, left wheel packed it in. Guess that we were within 6–8–12 inches from kingdom come. Decided to get married here as soon as possible unless E (or I, for that matter) changes mind. Love her beyond measure and above anything. She fast asleep. Shiver, shiver, shake shake. Can’t wait for E to awaken!
8 July 1980
E made me jealous as vengeance by saying she’d called Marlon [Brando] on the phone and that they had talked for an hour and he had been very solicitous about me. He really is a smugly pompous little b------ and is cavalier about everybody except Black Panthers and Indians. “He’s been keeping tabs on you,” said E. That infuriated me even more. That sober self-indulgent obese f--- being solicitous about me. You can’t get any of those surrounded-by-sycophants one-time-winners on the phone unless they want something from you. Sinatra is the same. Gods in their own mirrors. Distorted mirrors.
August 17, 1980
“Back to random wanderings: The audience reaction to the play: When we were in Toronto and we received without fail standing ovations at every performance I warned the cast not to take it for granted, that it would only happen occasionally, if at all, in NY. But I was wrong. The same thing happens here with unfaltering regularity. I used to get the occasional house to stand up for me in previous plays but now they always do. Will they in Chicago and the rest of the places? It’s a phenomenon that I am puzzled by. Is it nostalgia? The roars I get when I take my second solo calls are almost exultantly savage. Is it a ferocious hunger for the past, a massive ‘hiraeth,’ a sort of murderous longing for ‘home’ and security and simple peace. I don’t know. It cannot be simply the performance. Some nights unavoidably, though I try like the devil to climb to the audience’s expectations every time I play, I am not so good – but the final reaction is exactly the same. Is it that the audience know so much about me – or think they do – from my highly publicized and infamous past? It it because my performance is now truly dynamic but no, it can’t be that because only in the last couple of weeks have I taken absolute control of myself on the stage. Is it a combination of all. I shall never know. But let me say at once that to this little shrinking Welsh violet it is highly gratifying. Today, a glorious one I may say, we have a matinee – a glorious summer Sunday matinee. Will the ovations continue? I will refer to them never again – unless they stop. [ . . .]
21 April 1965:
‘E opened her bag and handed me a book. It was an old edition of A Shropshire Lad. With all of those hundreds of people around, to say nothing of store detectives watching for our safety, all of them staring and oohing and aahing over her beauty, she had stolen a book! I burst into a cold sweat. I could see the headlines. “Millionaire Couple Steal Book From Foyles.” “Book not worth more than five bob, says manager”. Christ. I gave her a terrible row but her delight was not to be crushed. It’s the first and last thing she ever stole in her life, except, of course, husbands!’
24 May 1967 – Portofino
E anxious I write about her [in the diary] so here goes: She is a nice fat girl who loves mosquitoes and hates pustular carbuncular Welshmen, loathes boats and loves planes, has tiny blackcurrant eyes and minute breasts and has no sense of humour. She is prudish, priggish and painfully self-conscious.
30 July 1967 – Taormina
A slow day, marking time, with a walk in which we bought sunglasses at a little shop. As we left the crowd which had gathered applauded us. E thought it very sweet, which indeed it was. We dined in somnolence and some self-satisfaction as we compared our ancestors and former wives and husbands.
E has become very slim and I can barely keep my hands off her. It turns out that she’s not that less in weight but, as a result of massage and exercise the weight has been redistributed. She is at the moment among the most dishiest girls I’ve ever seen. The most. I mean dishiest.
19 September 1967
Noël Coward arrived looking very old and slightly sloshed and proceeded to get more sloshed. He embarrassed us both separately and lavished compliments on E about her beauty and her brilliance as an actress. He is a most generous man but he is beginning to lose the fine edge of his wit or perhaps like me he repeats himself when tipsy.
23 October 1968 [Aristotle Onassis married former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy three days earlier] The Onassises have disappeared completely from the front pages. I told Elizabeth they didn’t have our stamina. I also said with great smugness that he had given her a wedding present of only “slightly less than £100,000 [£660,000] of diamonds, precious stones”, etc, whereas I had only recently given a £127,000 [£845,000] diamond ring simply because it was a Tuesday.
[Later] The enemy is insidiously attacking again. Beth read in the papers that Ari Onassis had given Jackie half a million pounds worth of rubies surrounded by diamonds. Missy already has, as a result of former battles against yours truly, one of the greatest diamonds in the world and probably the most breathtaking private collection of emeralds surrounded by diamonds also in the world. Now the Battle of the Rubies is on. I wonder who’ll win.
8 November 1968
After completing yesterday’s entry with milady fast asleep in bed as I thought, I was looking through some scenes in the script when suddenly the bedroom door opened and standing there in a near diaphanous nightgown with one shoulder slipped on to her arm was E. So I went back to bed for 10 minutes. I was unquestionably seduced and I teased her about it for the rest of the day when we talked on the telephone. She was very beautiful. It is a fact that after all these years the girl can still blush. I lost that latter capacity a long long time ago.
13 November 1968 It’s extraordinary how small the Duke and Duchess [of Windsor] are. Two tiny figures like Toto and Nanette that you keep on the mantelpiece.
Chipped around the edges. Something you keep in the front room for Sundays only. Marred royalty. The awful majesty that doth hedge around a king is notably lacking in awfulness. Charming and feckless. [Later] E just reminded me that at one point I said to the Duchess last night, “You are, without any question, the most vulgar woman I’ve ever met.” Waaaaaah!
19 November 1968 – Paris
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, [we] 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!
25 May 1969
What an extraordinary world it is. How do you live with one person for 13 years, and another for eight and find both as alien as strangers. Elizabeth is an eternal one night stand. She is my private and personal bought mistress. And lascivious with it. It is impossible to tell you what is consisted in the act of love. Well I’ll tell you, E is a receiver, a perpetual returner of the ball! I don’t write about sex very often, because it embarrasses me, but, but…
“28 May 1969
Marlon [Brando] has yet to learn to speak. Christ knows how often I’ve watched Marlon ruin his performance by underarticulation. He should have been born two generations before and acted in silent films.”
6 August 1969
E said this morning that I lacked loyalty. Now she is a bright b----- to talk about loyalty. The list of her dis‑loyalties would fill the yellow pages of the New York Telephone Directory. Except of course to her children. And there she defeats me because I've been disloyal to mine.
8 August 1969
I behaved in a way to make a banshee look kind, good and sweet. Insulting Elizabeth, drunk, periodically excusing myself rather shabbily and then starting the rough treatment all over again. Sometimes I am so much my father’s son that I give myself occasional creeps. He had the same gift for damaging with the tongue, he had the same temporary violence, he had the same fidelity to Mam that I have to Elizabeth, we wave the same admonitory finger at innocence when we know bloody well when we are guilt-ridden, when we have to attack when we know we’re in the defensive position.
2 October 1969 – Geneva
When we came out of the Musée des Beaux Arts the cab driver had vanished, but he returned a few minutes later having very sweetly bought a single rose for Elizabeth. Somewhere between [then] and dinner, brooding set in. Between long silences deadly insults were hurled. At one point E knowing I was in a state of nastiness said to me: “Come on Richard, hold my hand.” Me: “I do not wish to touch your hands. They are large and ugly and red and masculine.” Or words to that effect.
This morning E said that I really must get her the 69-carat ring to make her ugly big hands look smaller and less ugly! Nobody turns insults to her advantage more swiftly or more cleverly than Lady Elizabeth.”
18 November 1969 – Monaco
This morning in the early hours the pot decided to have a go at the kettle and won handle down. E, the pot, gave this particular kettle, me, a savage mauling. I was coldly accused of virtually every sin under the sun. Drunkenness (true) mendacity (true) being boring (true) infidelity (untrue) killing myself fairly quickly (true) pride envy avarice (all true) being ugly (true) having once been handsome (untrue) and any other vice imaginable except homosexuality and ungenerousness.
July 14, 1970:
“[. . . ] Last night I was lying on the bed doing a double-crostic and looked up a quotation in the paperbacked Quotation Dictionary that I carry around with me specifically for that purpose. I immediately became lost in the book and read all the Shakespeare ones right through very slowly. There was hardly a line there that I didn’t immediately know but seeing the miraculous words in print again doomed me to a long trance of nostalgia, a stupor of melancholy, like listening to really massive music, music that moans and thunders and plumbs fathomless depths. I wandered through the book for a long time but no other writer hit me with quite the same impact as William S. What a stupendous God he was, he is. What chance combination of genes went to the making of that towering imagination, that brilliant gift of words, that staggering compassion, that understanding of all human frailty, that total absence of pomposity, that wit, that pun, that joy in words and the later agony. It seems that he wrote everything worth writing and the rest of his fraternities have merely fugued on his million themes. [ . . .]
13 September 1971
I love Larry [Olivier] but he really is a shallow little man with a mediocre intelligence but a splendid salesman.
4 December 1971 [At dinner] My attention was riveted from the first by a man sitting opposite me. He looked like a cadaver. He was eyebrow-less and eyelash-less and atrociously wigged or dyed with snow-white hair at the front of his head and brownish at the back. His face was hideously pasted with make-up and had odd lumps on it, a face made of funny putty by an inept child. [RB’s introduction to Andy Warhol]
(remarriage to ET in South Africa)
7 October 1975 – Johannesburg – Chobe
Grass landing. Slight brush with grim reaper. Left suspension, left wheel packed it in. Guess that we were within 6–8–12 inches from kingdom come. Decided to get married here as soon as possible unless E (or I, for that matter) changes mind. Love her beyond measure and above anything. She fast asleep. Shiver, shiver, shake shake. Can’t wait for E to awaken!
8 July 1980
E made me jealous as vengeance by saying she’d called Marlon [Brando] on the phone and that they had talked for an hour and he had been very solicitous about me. He really is a smugly pompous little b------ and is cavalier about everybody except Black Panthers and Indians. “He’s been keeping tabs on you,” said E. That infuriated me even more. That sober self-indulgent obese f--- being solicitous about me. You can’t get any of those surrounded-by-sycophants one-time-winners on the phone unless they want something from you. Sinatra is the same. Gods in their own mirrors. Distorted mirrors.
August 17, 1980
“Back to random wanderings: The audience reaction to the play: When we were in Toronto and we received without fail standing ovations at every performance I warned the cast not to take it for granted, that it would only happen occasionally, if at all, in NY. But I was wrong. The same thing happens here with unfaltering regularity. I used to get the occasional house to stand up for me in previous plays but now they always do. Will they in Chicago and the rest of the places? It’s a phenomenon that I am puzzled by. Is it nostalgia? The roars I get when I take my second solo calls are almost exultantly savage. Is it a ferocious hunger for the past, a massive ‘hiraeth,’ a sort of murderous longing for ‘home’ and security and simple peace. I don’t know. It cannot be simply the performance. Some nights unavoidably, though I try like the devil to climb to the audience’s expectations every time I play, I am not so good – but the final reaction is exactly the same. Is it that the audience know so much about me – or think they do – from my highly publicized and infamous past? It it because my performance is now truly dynamic but no, it can’t be that because only in the last couple of weeks have I taken absolute control of myself on the stage. Is it a combination of all. I shall never know. But let me say at once that to this little shrinking Welsh violet it is highly gratifying. Today, a glorious one I may say, we have a matinee – a glorious summer Sunday matinee. Will the ovations continue? I will refer to them never again – unless they stop. [ . . .]
