The Richard Burton Diaries (191 page)

Monday 11th, Rome
[...] Still don't know whether to play with an accent or not. What with the Frenchman and the German with accents and my wife – who is played by an actress who was somewhat distinguished in my early days – will play with an accent too. She is Valentina Cortese.
²²⁸
Much older than I, I would guess. Middle 50s or so betcha. So with all around me making mit the accent will I stick out like a sore thumb. I'll try both, that's what I shall do and see how it feels. That's three nights in a row without a proper sleep and it must be because E is not here. I go off like a log when she is. Extraordinary hold she has over me.

[...] Am about to have my second cuppa and will then read myself to work. I hate my work.

Saturday 16th
Awoke at 5.30. Thought of getting up but decided to wait
¹
/
₂
an hour or so thereby falling asleep and not waking ‘til 8.30. I was destined to meet a lady called Rosemary Bain – I mean Romany Bain – at 9 so called Bob Wilson on to put her off until 9.30. I showered, shaved and shampooed and had a cuppa before she arrived. She is not the most stimulating lady in the world but then her job is not exactly conducive to brilliance. She writes for
Woman's Own
and other such diabolically tedious mags though this interview was for
Cosmopolitan
, an American mag which is starting an English version. I answered the unanswerable questions like ‘In what ways would you say you've changed since your first meeting and falling in love with Elizabeth 10 years ago in this very city?’ with my usual non-committal circuitous tergiversation. She then interviewed E and she did more or less the same. Infinitely humdrum and heavy with humbug.
²²⁹
[...]

Monday 18th, Grand Hotel
[...] Finished yet another volume of Powell's
Music of Time
and it's the first one that has made me laugh out loud. All that ‘richly comic’ stuff that I read in the extracts from notices is simply not there. I would say that he is quietly and perhaps cumulatively amusing. I still have difficulty in believing his coincidences.

Back to Trotsky this morning and that horrible scratchy beard with the gum offensively smelly and, even worse, the moustache. A real beard and moustache is bad enough – or in truth better than the false one during the day – but at least one can take the mock one off at the end of the day with
that equally horrible acetone, the smell of which would make a drinking me throw up.

A lovely day so I hope we'll be getting on with the film at a smart pace. I have to go back to Jugo after this and the sooner the better and the longer the holiday. Jugoslavia seems a long way off and already a long time ago. I'm looking forward to seeing it in the winter. Must wear long-johns or combs as the British call them. Since all these years with Elizabeth I am never quite certain whether a phrase, sometimes, is American or English. That's probably what's been happening to Wodehouse – about whom there is a great deal of fuss in the papers on his 90th birthday – for I find in his umpty-ninth ‘Jeeves and Bertie’ book that someone was ‘as imperious as a traffic cop.’

Home now and it's evening. Have had a funny day. Called for 9.30 didn't work until 1.30 and not again until 5.30. Wrote letters to Kate and Val and started on Powell's
Military Philosophers
.
²³⁰
I don't yet have the last volume and I'm missing two of the others though I think I read one of them some time ago. [...]

Tuesday 19th, Rome
Another scintillating day. [...] We shot, on my second day an establishing shot which covered a wide area and included my two co-stars Delon and Schneider. The sky was overcast. This means that all the following shots have to be in similar weather until I get inside the house. But the weather continues to sparkle. [...]

We were invited to have lunch with the King and Queen of Greece anytime we like this week or next Monday. I suppose they should be described as the ex-King and Queen.
²³¹
I said that E and I would be delighted to meet them and have a noggin but that going to a lunch was awkward as I was covered with false beard and moustache. I wonder why they want to meet us. I am very suspicious of political royalty. Perhaps like the Shahrina of Persia they are simply star-struck but usually royalty are not. They've usually met so many. Talking of the Shahrina it appears that she reads everything about E and knows all the children's names and where they go to school and all that publicity in the journals.
²³²

[...] My memory for words which has always been phenomenal had, in the last couple of years, become suspect. I found that I was taking longer than usual to learn lines but – probably as a result of abstinence – it has come back with all the tenacity of a steel trap. Very nice feeling. I have always said that if ever I got to the Noel Coward or Rex Harrison stage I would stop acting even if I wanted to.

Powell is a great user of archaisms. Yesterday I read ‘the smell of eld’.
²³³
I rather like their use them myself.

The Soviet Premier, Kosygin, was physically attacked yesterday in Ottawa.
²³⁴
What, I wonder, would have been the effect on Anglo-Russian politics if he had been assassinated? A lot of big-sounding threats I expect gradually simmering down to cold tea.

Wednesday 20th, Grand Hotel
I should not have spoken so soon about my memory being like a steel trap and all that mild boasting, as today I dried up in the middle of a long scene at least 15 times. Most unlike me. Actually the speech which threw me was an actual quote from Trotsky which Joe who has a predilection for such behaviour suddenly introduced into the scene. But that is no excuse really as I can normally learn a ten line speech in as many minutes. My real excuse is that it was a translation and the syntax was ‘throwing’. The speech itself was easy apart from one line ‘What aim could I possibly pursue in venturing on so monstrous so dangerous an enterprise.’ Every so often I am – and all actors are – defeated by a speech. For years and God knows it is years – I must have learned it when I was about 15 – I have never been sure that I ever got my favourite speech from
Hamlet
absolutely correct. ‘I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth foregone all custom of exercise etc.’ God knows too how often I've said it and been paid to say it. There must have been with both the Old Vic and Gielgud NY production around 400 performances. Let's see if I can write it out correctly now and I'll check up when I go down to the yacht.

I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth, foregone all custom of exercise, and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame the earth look you, this brave o'er hanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why it seems no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man, in action how like an angel in apprehension how like a God in form in moving how express and admirable, the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals. And yet to me what is this quintessence of dust. How infinite in faculty in form in moving how express. should go after ‘is a man.’ Oh to hell with it. It should go after ‘... is a man. How infinite in faculty, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension.’ Now I really don't know.
²³⁵

We are now having a dreadful time with Michael [...] Now he has assured Beth that he has got everybody out of the house in Hampstead and that he wishes to live with Beth and the baby alone. So, the innocent and her baby are flying back to the new Michael tomorrow. Elizabeth doesn't trust Michael an inch when he's under the influence of drugs which is now practically all the time. Just hoping and praying is all we can do. We both talked to Beth in Portland tonight and gave her what advice and blessings we could. I suggested that she go with the baby to London (she was going anyway) and that if Mike and his friends started his shenanigans again, they should go – she and the baby – hop on a plane to Rome. E is in a far worse emotional state than I as I, unlike E, am more optimistic about Michael keeping his word. [...]

And so to bed ere long. I feel very achy and I am expectorating great gobs.

Thursday 21st, Rome
[...] I read a script called
The Savage is Loose
last night.
²³⁶
It is a very doable film but would need a very imaginative director with great patience with a boy actor and with many different animals including a panther, a python and a crane. A brilliant cameraman would also be top priority. E would have to lose weight and I would have to put on some muscle. The end is wrong but could be fixed. Will wait for E to read it and decide with her. It would certainly be a pleasant film to make and we could, according to Heyman, shoot it at home in P.V. [Puerta Vallarta] Having read the piece now I don't see why not. All you need is jungle a beach and an ocean all of which we have in abundance in P.V.

Have just started another piece – the long-promised play for TV of John Osborne's called
Separation
. Actually it's two pieces, one called ‘His’ and the other ‘Hers’.
²³⁷
I gather it's about a marriage break-up, one play of an hour from her point of view and the other from his. We must do something for Harlech especially as it's made us some money, though that's incidental, and see if we can help keep the franchise or consortium or whatever they call it. Off to work. In case I hadn't mentioned it before I hate my work. Too strong a word – I dislike it.

Home from work at 6.00. Got through everything in takes one all day including a new scene with Valentine Cortese. Tomorrow I have yet another new scene to do with Cortese and two actors who play the Rosmers in the film.
²³⁸
The ‘Rosmer’ couple brought my (Trotsky's) grandson from Europe to see me in Mexico.
²³⁹

There's been a man called Jeffrey Archer, MP plaguing the life out of me through Raymond for weeks.
²⁴⁰
I've always refused to talk to him and have told
Raymond to tell him to tell Raymond what he wants to talk to me about. This he has refused to do as it was very important stuff and had to do with Princess Margaret, HRH. Then would he write it as Mr Burton will not speak on the telephone? So the stuff comes. It is, if you please a Royal Command (according to Mr Archer) to appear in a TV play for Sir Lew Grade – a 90 minutes one – play under separate cover – and at the receipt of our agreement to perform this so far unread play, which incidentally we hear is dreadful, Sir Lew Grade would make over a cheque for £100,000 to the St John's Ambulance lot.
²⁴¹
We would be paid nothing. Grade would have the right to sell it all over the world. I am absolutely staggered by Grade's effrontery. I await the play and John Heyman on Sunday. Her Majesty and His Royal Highness will find that they have commanded the wrong couple. I shall say that I'll do it for a KBE! Mr Archer hinted at it apparently to Raymond over the phone. He sounds a very ambitious little MP. We shall see.

Friday 22nd, Rome
I am a very ignorant man. The front page of the Rome
Daily American
announces that the Nobel Prize for Literature for 1971 goes to a poet-politician called Pablo Neruda. He is 67 years old and the Chilean ambassador to Paris. A Communist and has the usual revolutionary's awful luck and life until of course the Communists under Allende attained power in Chile.
²⁴²
Having read a description of his poetry I have an idea that it wouldn't interest me very much – the content I mean. I can never really understand the poetry of another language, Welsh and English only. I suppose few men who are not genuinely bi or multi-lingual from birth can. I generally know the important writers of other cultures even if I've never read them but Signor Neruda is a new one. I was surprised to read that only 6 S. Americans have won Nobel Prizes. That includes that vast half continent from Mexico down and I seem to remember that the Americans and British between them have won over 200. I lump them together because frequently the British and Americans have shared Nobel Prizes like the two British and one Yank who created or discovered the design of a molecule or whatever it was about 10 years ago.
²⁴³
The Nobel Prize is a very funny one from the start. First of all Alfred Nobel, who started it all, was a Swede, I think, who invented gun-powder!
²⁴⁴
It has given some hilarious awards. One of the funniest was to Winston Churchill. He won the ‘Peace Prize’. Never has a politician, despite his outraged protestations, loved war as much as the old man. Peace Prize indeed!
²⁴⁵

Sunday 23rd, Rome
²⁴⁶
We worked late last night and I didn't get home til after 7. E very impatient to see me as she'd had news that she valued from Brian Hutton who directed her in
XYZ
. He is normally a wry pessimist and not given, as most Americans in the film business are, to superlatives but E says that exhibitors are fighting for the privilege to show
XYZ
and that Harry Saltzman who had the taste to produce
Anger
and the lucky judgement to produce the James Bond films, has offered $6m for the film.
²⁴⁷
All this according to Hutton. I trust they won't accept the offer from Saltzman – I don't think that they can anyway without E's agreement – for if he offers 6 he must think it will gross more. Perhaps much more. At a sale of $6m I think that E could get about $1m guaranteed but at the end, since her percentage is of the gross absolute and for ever, Saltzman would still have to pay E the percentage. I must ask Aaron if E should persuade them to sell, pick up her guaranteed million and then sit back and – hopefully – watch the money roll in. We'll watch the outcome with great interest. There is even talk of Oscars and my lady must – if one can believe this pre-showing enthusiasm – should at least be nominated. That will bring her level with me said he with a sneering and somewhat bitter laugh. It is interesting to think that if one – only one – of the films we have made in the last 12 months or so hits the jackpot, the rewards will be fantastic. If
XYZ, Hammersmith, Tito
or
Trotsky
are blockbusters like
Cleo, Woolf
and
Eagles
the returns will have to be counted, for us, in many millions. Even if they are merely very big grossers – in the 10 to 20 million bracket – like
Becket, Sandpiper, Shrew, VIPs
it will still be considerable – far more than the old days of a million in front and 10% against the gross. I've worked out that if we'd no money in front and the same percentage deals as we've been having in the last 12 months, we would have made more money than we did on the old deals even with non-huge-grossing pics like
Ceremony, Spy
and
Iguana
all of which did 8–10 mils. It's more exciting this way all around. Against this argument is of course that for
Staircase
and
Only Game
we would only have received, as they were both massive flops, our expenses and, with luck a couple of 100 thousand.