The Richard Burton Diaries (172 page)

[...] I am on my fifth Spanish lesson as well as listening to discs from the Assimil method.

Friday 26th, Ritz
It was Thanksgiving Day yesterday and, foreign as I am, I eat turkey and giblet gravy and sweet corn and yams but not cranberry sauce. Delicious. Much debate as to whether the Americas had any original food. They argued that turkey, potatoes corn and cranberries were indigenous to the States and unknown in Europe. I agree with potato and corn but disagreed with turkey and cranberries. Must look it up at home. I seem to remember that ‘cranberry’ is originally Greek. My new
Oxford
will tell me all – and the
Britannica
. Brian Hutton and his girlfriend Tamara something came to dinner with us. Nice girl and surprisingly unflashy and that rare thing to me – a native Californian. I know only one other and that's Val Douglas. Ah yes, Budd Schulberg too but I don't count him as he has lived away from there so long.
³⁵⁰
Tamara who inevitably in this literate family creeps in with petty pace from day to day is that thoroughly nice thing – a well-educated clean looking intelligent middle-class girl finished educationally in Paris.
³⁵¹
Almost old-fashioned. I would have thought that Brian would have more sultry ladies around, more obviously sexy and faintly dirty looking. I suspect though that underneath his talk of pot and ‘taking trips’ etc. that he is as square as a board. He says that the teaching system in his school in NY was so abominable that he was more or less illiterate until he was about 17 and didn't read his first book until he was 18. For somebody of his obvious intelligence it seems incredible to me. By that age I'd read and sometimes learned by heart half the world's classics. Perhaps he exaggerates a bit but he also averred that he was given an IQ test when he was about 15 and got a score of 5 points below ‘Moron’. That I find hard to believe too. He may be over-compensating for slightly below average marks in exams by pretending he was an idiot. He failed to get his first job because he could not spell the opening words of an application ‘To whom it may concern’. He got through ‘whom’ all right but couldn't be certain of ‘may’. Was it ‘mae’ like Mae West or ‘may’ like the month or was it sneaky and neither of those but ‘mai’. He gave up and left. [...]

I drank several glasses of nouveau Beaujolais last night at the Thanksgiving and though it seems innocuous it is not. I feel ghastly this morning despite tea and toast and copious swallows of coffee. Just had the bill from the hotel – $3000 approx. Staggering for just less than a week. They put up a buffet in Gianni's room for all the visiting couturiers and Van Cleef's and Alexandre etc. and it cost $500! Granted there were about 15 or 20 people but how could they eat and drink $500 worth of viands and vins especially when you think they barely had time to eat at all. Daylight bleeding robbery!

I wouldn't have had E's day yesterday for anything. She spent the entire day being dressed in what seems countless dresses and innumerable hair-dos. She looks dishy though and I pity those other poor bastards like Marie Helene. The latter is, if you please flying in Di Rossi from Italy (Rome) to do her make-up.
³⁵²
Nothing can help druan Rothschild – dim ond yr arglwydd.
³⁵³
A hopeless task.

E infuriatingly as bright as a button and aglow with youthful joie de vivre. I am tempted to kick her in the teeth. And so to Gstaad.

Saturday 27th, Gstaad
The journey by Trans Europe Express was lovely. [...] We took some wine and, rare for me, a whiskey. We had a second half bottle in our seats. The various TEEs must be the most successful trains in the world – I have never seen an empty seat. But nevertheless, whether by train or plane, unless the helicopter is available, the last two hours or so depending on whether we car it from Geneva or Lausanne is tedious beyond words. By the time we'd arrived we had begun to get edgy with each other and by bedtime a flaming and quite childish row was in high dudgeon.
Twice
, I stormed off to the alternate bedroom. Twice I went back. All manner of little things were exacerbating our natural weariness. [...] The shutter to my room, the dreamt-of library was broken and therefore the room is in darkness and one of the things I looked forward to was seeing the library the next (this) morning with the sun striking along the edge of the garden beyond. [...] I'm writing this very slowly as I find myself so bewitched by the mountains and the brilliant sun on the virgin snow that I can't tear my eyes away from it. [...]

A bunch of letters (copies) from Aaron via Jane in Rome. One talks of a Mr Charles who, according to the biography of me now out, tried with the connivance of the rest of the village of Pontrhydyfen to ‘soak me for £5000’ for the purchase of 2, Danybont – the house where I was born and spent my happiest hours. The entire village and Mr Charles are furious and no wonder. I must do something about it.
³⁵⁴
But what. A letter to the
Guardian
and the
Gazette
?
³⁵⁵
A letter to the village? A letter to Mr Charles? Since I had nothing to do with the attempted purchase of the house – Graham's big mouth at work again I expect – it puts me in a funny position. I'd better do something. A letter to Hilda would probably be the best way of letting everybody know in Ponty, but apologies like Justice must not only be made but be seen to be made. I could kill those two stupid failures who wrote the book. The only thing I asked them to do was to make sure that nobody in the book was to be hurt by it except myself. Bloody clowns of hell. [...]

Sunday 28th, Gstaad
[...] It is very bright this morning but not the brilliant sun of yesterday as expected. I sat and read in the sun yesterday wearing only a light sweater for over an hour and was as warm as on a summer's day. The sun must be pretty far away however as I only picked up a little colour whereas in a hot sun one hour would turn me into a Mohican. I shall try the sun-lamp. About my only vanity is to be tanned – on the face and upper body if possible. For some reason it makes me feel better and healthier. If someone could or would invent a really practical sunlamp I would use it summer and winter rather than submit to the boredom of sun-worshipping. [...] Did not do my espanol yesterday. Start again today.

Monday 29th
[...] I had difficulty sleeping last night so – not to disturb E who was quickly asleep – I slipped out to the kitchen made myself a sandwich of ham and cheese and a cup of tea, then reading a book of John D. MacDonald's I went into the other room and desserted on Rowntree's Pastilles, one and a half packets no less and a packet of some other Swiss fruit pastilles. Result is that on one scale I am 70 and the other 69. A long time since I was that weight so will knock off a few pounds in the coming days. That means for me, strict Drinking Man's Diet without the drink. I have been giving myself black titles for too long a time anyway. I have got back into the habit of a drink before lunch and dinner. So full stop again. Also I want to have my wits about me for the Proust Ball for there will be fine things to see and a lot to be heard and I want to see and listen and not be seen and listened to.

E and I are in the library which should always be the morning place as it gives our old maid – I don't mean that she's not married, I mean that she's old and a maid – Celina a chance to really ‘do’ the living room which she shows a curious reluctance to do when we are about. Actually as to a question of age – she is probably no more than about 50 but like most working-class Swiss women seems much older. She is certainly as strong as an ox. She surprised me yesterday when having asked where the two girls – Maria and Inge were – I replied that they had gone first to church and then to school. To Church she
said with great surprise and then ‘ah but then all you Catholics have different hours from us Protestants.’ What on earth supposed her to think we are Catholic? We have E – Jewish, Liza – nothing but Jewish by birth and C of E by school, Maria – wherever the school takes her which I believe is Protestant, Michael – nothing but a sort of Jesus lover mixed very woollily with anybody currently fashionable among his age-group like Hesse Tolkien and that huge idiot Alistair Crowley, Chris – non-committal but probably nothing.
³⁵⁶
Me – nothing. [...]

The devil over my shoulder, E, is trying to press me to have a martini before lunch because she wants one and doesn't like drinking alone. I'm dickering with the idea but think I will have one this evening if at all. As I've explained to E ad nauseam I find one drink simply not enough. I guess two or three stiff ones are what I'd find satisfactory but that means slowly reverting to being a drunkard again and I simply will not tolerate a return to that. [...]

Tuesday 30th
³⁵⁷
Raymond has arrived from London to sort out the chaos in the clothes dept. He has been a very ill man for a long time with absolutely crippling sciatica. After trying endless doctors of every nationality including Yugos, Italians, British, Yanks, French, Swiss and indeed every nationality in the various places we've been in the last few years he allowed himself at our continual insistence to submit, if necessary to surgery. He was very frightened as indeed why shouldn't he be – he is 52 and not brave anyway – but went through it. To our and his delight he didn't have to have surgery but last Friday he went to a hospital [...]. By, he gathers, using enormous pressures and bending his uncomplaining body hither, thither and yon they had forced the offending bone – whatever it was – smartly back into place. The acute, almost unbearable pain had gone and nothing remains but a mild ache in his left leg. The relief apparently enormous. Several times to me in the past few weeks he had thought of suicide if the horror persisted. Since he is a sprightly sort of feller normally with all the gaiety of the race this must have been pain indeed.

By his race I mean of course not his Italian-Swiss-French-German blood but the night-club dressed-up-to-the-tens-in-tight-tight-I-
will
-go-to-the-ball clothes and camping around with every conceivable signal of blatant homosexuality. [...]

Searching desperately, well not desperately but continually, for a book to write that would not be autobiographical, at least not overtly, I have come upon an excuse. I have been much impressed by a Jugoslav ‘novel’ called
The Bridge on the Drina
which I think I must have mentioned before in this haphazard daily exercise. For it is not a novel at all but a series of semi-legendary stories purporting to take place in and around the bridge. By this
means the author gives one a saga of the many invasions and changes of family and fortune, in small, of the entire south South Slavs of Jugoslavia. I thought of our pearl the famous or infamous Peregrina, and its extraordinary history.
³⁵⁸
Found by a slave in the sixteenth century or perhaps even the late fifteenth it was part of an argosy that took it to the Court of Spain. The slave who found it was given his freedom. Who was the slave? Are there any traceable descendants? Were the sons of slaves free too? Where were my ancestors at the time? Where were Elizabeth's? The tracing of the pearl's history will be complicated but much easier I would think but I shall have to imagine my and E's ancestors, unless E's mother's story that she is descended from Mary, Queen of Scots could be substantiated!
³⁵⁹
That would be a great coup for the book. The thing would of course take years to write and would demand a great deal of specialized reading and almost certainly the employment of searchers, I believe they call them. It has been done before. There was a rather good film on the subject I remember – the object being a tail-coat. But the Pearl involved famous dynasties and is authentic history in itself. I could elaborate on my cynical-comical views of mankind and a small page or two of its history. The whole and vast personal question is do I have the intellectual stamina to sustain such a big undertaking and is my writing good enough? I shall need to be fairly near a great library which means Oxford or London. Not all the time but from time to frequent time at least. I think the first person to consult would be Nevill Coghill who would introduce me to the methods of scholarship, what sort of people to employ and consult. Now I will sleep on it for 6 months until we get to England again. [...]

DECEMBER

Wednesday 1st, Gstaad
³⁶⁰
A cold, very cold morning, with the sun just coming round the corner and I have just lighted the fire in the library and put the kettle on and the dogs E'en So and Daisy Mae are having a mock fight having been in the snow and all would be idyllic were it not for the fact that at 2pm we fly to Paris to the Ritz and tomorrow to the Rothschilds. The latter part is ok. It is simply the fact of disturbing the serenity of this place and being able to do what ever one wants without care to be social and having everything to hand. Still and however when we come back next Monday short of a death in the family which is, with Ivor and E's mother so perilously balanced between life and death, not at all unlikely, we should be here without interruption until the middle of January when it's Jugoslavia again. Also, yesterday, I took the
decision to do
Bluebeard
. I said I could do it in Feb–March-bit of April but that after that it would take too much chopping and changing for all concerned. They said they were prepared to shoot ‘anywhere I want but preferably Hungary and next to that Spain and that I could make any changes I liked!’ Well, well, I thought this is the lot who were so adamant that it must be shot in January. I said I thought Hungary would be the favourite as neither E nor I had ever been there but that we loved Spain too. I am to see Frings tomorrow morning. What I really must get after is
Under the Volcano
. That, if any film can be considered so, is an important piece.

Yves le Tourneur who is a salesman for Van Cleef and Arpel and ‘covers’ Switz, came from Geneva where he lives and mostly works bringing with him about $3m of gems. E had changed a gold belt she had bought from them – or I had rather when she was doing
XYZ
and he had come up with the new belt-cum-neck-lace in exchange. With us of course, and probably with everybody, he brought as I said an extra two or three millions in temptations. I was not to be drawn however except for a pair of matching earrings for the already bought necklace which E had been ‘loaned’ for some time and was naturally (sarcastically) attached to. That, by the way, is a good play of such people as Yves le Tourneur. They let you have a splendid but not overwhelmingly expensive piece on loan, or for a specific occasion, an opening night or the Rothschild party for instance, and hope that the wearer or the spectator, me, decides to buy it what the hell. The necklace and earrings are a perfect example since I bought the earrings. They cost about $6,000. [...]