The Richard Burton Diaries (107 page)

Monday 31st
[...] I am on the ‘Drinking Man's Diet’ or the ‘Low Carbo-hydrate diet’ to give it a more respectable title. I rather like dieting. It means I look forward to the next meal whereas normally I'm indifferent. It also means that I don't waste anything. [...] Now if only I can get down to what the books say is my proper weight for my height – I am about 5ft 10
¹
/
₂
ins – and smoke ‘à-la-Liza’ I shall be among the fittest middle-aged actors in the business. Smokin’ ‘à-la-Liza’ is smoking without inhaling. Just before her last (11th) birthday, which is August 6th, I asked her what she wanted as a present. She said very solemnly that the only present she wanted was for me to give up smoking. I said that was impossible for me to do. I had tried, I said, and had once gone for five months without nicotine but that in the process I became impossible to live with, and even with cigarettes I am not very easy to have around, and found, like Sigmund Freud, who gave up smoking for thirty years and took it up again because he ‘couldn't concentrate’, that my work was suffering. So she suggested, very sensibly that I should smoke but not inhale. I agreed to try [...] The oddest result is that puffing without inhaling tends to give me a sore throat. She is due here any day now and I can't wait to see that determined little face when she sees the donkey which I've hired for her. [...]

George Davis told me that Louise [Collingwood] is a lush – she has certainly been drunk every time I've met her so far – and that because of her drunkenness she cost Charles his job as head of CBS (in Paris) in Europe. At one reception she entered the banquet room or whatever and fell flat on her face. She told de Gaulle that she adored the way he spoke French because he was the only Frenchman she understood. She also called him ‘honey’. He didn't
take it at all well. Poor girl. She says she did a play with Michael Redgrave in London five years ago, that it, the play, had the word ‘sun’ in its title, that it ran for 15 months and, after much thought, decided that the playwright's name was Hunter. Probably N.C.
⁴⁹
This was at lunchtime before one had had one's first drink! I hope she's not a drunken liar. She's so gay and nice.

APRIL

April fool's day, Tuesday 1st
Well Louise is not a fibber, she is merely a lush. She
did
do a play in London with Michael and Vanessa Redgrave and it
was
written by N. C. Hunter, and it
did
have the word ‘sun’ in the title. It was in fact called
A Touch of Sun
.
⁵⁰

We had the Collingwoods and the three teenage girls to lunch plus Jim, George and two friends called Bronson and Hayes. The latter gets my Oscar for the queerest queer I've ever seen. When I first saw him I genuinely thought he was a woman. He wore an outrageous toupée which he took off later. [...]

As usual when surrounded by strangers, I drank far too much. Martini after Martini and later drove E down to the town where I drank tequila after tequila. [...] The jeep has turned up freshly painted in lavender and looks very pretty. I am going to paint E's name on the side. Just in case people don't know who she is!

The above is about as far as I could get yesterday. I was just too impossibly lazy and hung-over to muster up the energy.
⁵¹

Wednesday 2nd
Yesterday, after failing to finish my daily page, I asked E if she thought we should do a tour of the town and do our duties to the various hostelleries. This was also a sly opportunity to imbibe a few dog's hairs. So about 11.30 we set off [...]. We went to La Oceana first which is right close to the sea. It was virtually empty when we went in, but by the time we'd had one drink, and we only had one, the place was packed to standing room only. It was not quite as marked at the next hotel [...] but that filled up nicely too. That hotel is called La Rosita.
⁵²
E went to the lavatory there and said it was disgusting. [...] The next port of call was an [
sic
] hotel down by Nelly's place on the Muertos Beach. It was horrible and gimcrack and the people equally so. We felt claustrophobic and left in a hurry, not, however, before we had met the Mayor and somebody representing the President and agreed to go to Guadalahara to receive gold medals for being Friends of Mexico or something. Well we surely have been friends to Puerto Vallarta. I remember when Ray
Stark told me where the location of
Night of the Iguana
was that we all had to look it up on a map. It wasn't there and we had to get information from the nearest Mexican Embassy. Now there are huge signs in Los Angeles which enjoin one to ‘Fly to beautiful unspoilt Puerto Vallarta. Only 2
¹
/
₂
hours by Mexicana Jet.’ [...]

I've been asked with, among others, Noel Coward and John Gielgud, to write a couple of thousand words about Larry Olivier for a pictorial autobiography, I mean biography. E resents my doing it – she takes a long time to forget an insult – but I don't see how I can refuse. I can't say that I think it a bad idea to write about my fellow actors, as Paul Scofield says, because I've done so before.

Thursday 3rd
10 o'clock in the morning and I am sitting in the dining-room cum-kitchen of the lower house. I type every day at the dining room table, a cigarette burning in an ashtray ahead of me and a cup of tea on a dictionary to my right. The tea is on the book to prevent marking the table. The morning is brilliant as usual and E is still asleep but any second the voice will call from the upper balcony, ‘Richard’ and I will go out on this balcony, wave at her, tell her with signs to come down and see me and the long day will get off to a quiet start. [...]

Yesterday we sunned and swam a lot and read a lot. E is reading a long fat novel about the Mafia called
The Godfather
which she says is badly written but un-put-downable.
⁵³
I am reading a paperback history of the Mayans by somebody called Von Hagen, famous Spanish short stories with the English text on one page and the Spanish on the other, and am still ploughing through Senor Paz's
Labyrinths
.
⁵⁴
In bed I read a rather good detective story set in San Luis, Mexico called the
Rose Window
.
⁵⁵
A bit in the style of Simenon with a hero called Menendes, a pure Indian.
⁵⁶
A lot is made of the fact that there is discrimination between Mexicans of Spanish blood and those of pure Indian blood. I didn't realize it was ever apparent. There have been quite a few Indians who are honoured and revered Mexicans. Wasn't Juarez a pure Indian? And Zapata too?
⁵⁷

The language is giving me hell. I find myself unless I think slowly and carefully speaking either Italian or French to the servants all the time. I must, since we are hopefully going to spend a long time here in future, God Willing, get a better command of the language. [...]

Good Friday, 4th
Yesterday was a funny day. It went splendidly for the first half and degenerated into bickering around 3.30 in the p.m. It was largely my fault. I suddenly became testy for no very good reason and remained so for the rest of the day though I tried to get myself better around five but to no avail. E of course was no help at all and bickered back with almost masculine pride. This was some of the dialogue, roughly speaking:

The rest of the dialogue which was perfunctory and consisted of similar equally boring exchanges, which took place at four hour silent intervals, culminated in my going back upstairs to finish my detective story in bed. To sleep at 4.30 approx.

The exchanges this morning have been polite but mid-distant. E is now making a ‘salty dog’ so presumably things will warm up after that. One of E's typically strong-woman-feminine traits is that she's incapable of apologizing unless I apologize first. [...] I hated yesterday. I wasn't even drunk and in fact had only had two drinks, one before lunch and one before dinner, all day. Perhaps I should get sloshed.

Sunday 5th
Well I did get sloshed yesterday. The damage was done when we arrived at the airport to find that the plane was an hour late and there was nothing to do but sit in the airport bar and drink. Scotch whisky at that which never agrees with me anyway. But I remained in an amiable state all day. The kids all look fine though Liza's hair needs cutting as usual. She has got a certain thin-lipped pointed chinniness (from her father) and she needs a clever hairstyle to reduce its slight witchiness.

Michael has become very Anglicized but Chris is still hanging on to his American accent, though his too is fading. [...] I drove E and all the kids back in the Beach Buggy which was a success with all. [...]

The town is a mad house. Holy week has brought people in by the thousands. Even the Garza Blanca which is normally uncrowded was full and were we not us we might have had difficulty in finding a table. [...] Sitting at the next table inevitably it seems nowadays were Chas and Louise Collingwood. He gave me a fragment of a novel he is writing asking me my opinion and saying that if I thought it was any worth he would go on with it. [...]

As we arrived back at the house we were hailed by a negro. It turned out to be James Baldwin and a French boy who spoke no English.
⁵⁸
He was down here escaping from Hollywood he said. We discussed Black Power, Black Panthers, Black is best, Black is beautiful and Black and White. He said quite openly and not at all sneakily: ‘Richard, can you let me have 20 dollars?’ (‘Let me have,’ mark you, not ‘lend’.)

I was rather surprised, as I would have thought he was fairly affluent and said: ‘Twenty dollars?’

‘I mean 200 dollars,’ he said. I said certainly and Jim is going to give it to him today. We are seeing him again tomorrow.

Wednesday 9th
On Sunday we went on the boat for a little fishing and a little sightseeing for Val and Jane. It was not a very successful day as the boat was extremely uncomfortable, cramped and engine-shuddered the whole day. We did catch three Sierra for our supper.
⁵⁹
[...] Small motor-boats [...] are the most anti-social means of transportation. Every comment, every conversation, every observation has to be shouted. There are innumerable legs to be tripped over, and all kinds of bits of boat to bark shins on, or stub toes. I loathed it and will never go again except from the
Kalizma
to shore etc. [...]

We think that James Baldwin is a thief! Val had $220 or so stolen from her purse when J. Baldwin came to lunch on Monday, and after several reductios ad absurdum have decided that the guilty feller is Baldwin. It may be his French ‘friend’ but then that's the same thing. [...]

Thursday 10th
Well, we decided that J. Baldwin had stolen Val's money for the following, mostly psychological, reasons: The servants have not stolen anything in 7 years, despite my habit of leaving money all over the place in trouser pockets etc. and E leaving baubles all over her dressing table and other locations. The children have never stolen anything in their lives. James and George could have robbed us of thousands if they had wished to in the last
many years. It's inconceivable that the Collingwoods would have, and anyway they had no opportunity. Neither E nor I did.

I have already recorded in this diary that Baldwin had asked me for 20, no 200 dollars. Two days later he asked Jim for a further 50. Then a further hundred. Some couple of years ago he had borrowed $10 from Jim (while travelling 1st class on La France) and has never paid him back.
⁶⁰
He was sitting at the table with us over lunch when he saw me give the money to Jim to give to Val (I had been holding it for her) who put it in her handbag. She had later taken it to her room in the lower house and James had made a tour of the houses alone. We shall never be able to prove it and the money doesn't matter, but why does he do it? Does he also steal from blackmen or does he think that the white man owes him a living? I must find out from others if James has a reputation as a kleptomaniac.
⁶¹

At the same lunch a somewhat sozzled and belligerent Chas said something like how could I continue to do a job as degrading and despicable as being an actor. I said I'd prefer to play Hamlet than read the news. He had prefaced his whole attack on my profession by saying what great potential I had as a writer, and how I was wasting my time on acting etc. His wife later on, so E tells me, embarked on an attack on E. Her back was worse than E's. Liza (E's blood) was sullen while Maria (adopted) was delightful. [...] Envy was out in force that day.

Baldwin on the other hand was kind and generous about all and is very intelligent. So he can steal some more if he wishes. [...]

Friday 11th
[...] Yesterday was an indifferent day. First we had a slightly demented and prima donnaish letter from the boring opinionated mediocre headmaster of Michael's school which I enclose.
⁶²
It's almost feminine in its pique. We have decided not to send them back there and a telegram and following letter will be sent off today to that effect. This is not only out of our pique, but because, on reflection, the school has been bad for them. Their values have become tremendously coarsened, Michael started to smoke there and drink there and found jail-bait companions. Though admittedly he might have found them at any other school. Poor Michael, he is a good hearted boy but, outside the family, is incapable of exercising charm. His mother and father both have it and his brother has it in excelsis, but he gives the impression of
morosely mooning all the time.
⁶³
He cannot for instance sit down in a chair, he sprawls. If his mother asks him to do anything for her it is so charmlessly and apparently unwillingly done that I can understand why masters in school mistake it for spoiled-ness. Since coming here I have seen him read nothing but comic strips. Come to think of it though, I haven't seen Chris read anything else either. Maybe they are just not intellectual and that's that. The truth is though, I suspect, that [...] they are slow starters, and won't really begin to move until they're in their late teens or even their early twenties but unfortunately, unless one is a genius, the modern educational system doesn't cope with the late starters, and their lives are ruined thereafter.