The Richard Burton Diaries (90 page)

Monday 24th
We went to Phil Ober's for drinks and a buffet dinner on Saturday night. The place was packed with the gringo drifters of this town, or perhaps ‘escapees’ is the word I mean. We must have been the youngest people there. There was a woman called Pantages of the famous Hollywood Pantages Cinema and her brother (a queen), Phil Ober himself, who is a well known character actor on TV etc. and his charming wife.
³⁴
There was a famous news commentator for CBS called Charles Collingwood and his scatty but enchanting wife who used to be quite a well-known actress I understand called Louise Allbritton.
³⁵
Jim and George tell us that though this whole community pretend indifference to these ‘movie stars’ as they describe us over their booze and drugs, nevertheless the whole room, for a second or two, lost its breath when we walked in and then talked frantically for the rest of the evening, trying desperately not to look at us [...].

I became somewhat drunk and was glad to get home. I woke up next morning feeling dreadful and shaky [...] to find to my dismay that E had invited Collingwood and wife, the two Pantages and their friend for lunch. I downed two vodkas and limeade to sweeten my disposition. [...]

Tuesday 25th
It is 4.30 in the morning and I am typing this in the new lower house. Cocks are crowing and an occasional donkey brays. The town itself is silent and no traffic moves. There is a quite large pleasure steamer out in the bay with all its lights blazing. It looks very cosy and safe. The kettle is boiling and it's time for morning tea. [...]

I went to the dentist and he X-Rayed my teeth. [...] The dentist's operating room was as neat and well equipped as any I have seen in Europe or the States, in complete contrast to the other rooms. This dentist looks as if he's
overworked. If he is I think I will arrange to get him an assistant and a second operating room. I will find out these things through Ray Marshall.
³⁶
[...]

After the dentist and before dinner I took E out for the first time in the Renault. It's a blue, enclosed car, very small and runs well except that it is much too hot in this climate. I shall sell it after this trip. I've seen a few little open cars around called beach-bugs. I shall get one of those. If possible. We drove down towards Mismaloya on the new road which, when paved is going to be superb. We stopped at a brand new Hotel called Garza Blanca (White Heron) and had a couple of tequilas.
³⁷
[...] E is looking gorgeous, though she's still a little tubby. How the sun suits her.

Wednesday 26th
[...] I worked off and on yesterday at the article for
Look
magazine about Wales.
³⁸
I wrote it in longhand and then laboriously typed it last night until about midnight, so, since I'd been up since 4o'clock the previous morning and awake for two hours before that, it was a weary man who dragged himself to bed. I'm afraid to look at it this morning in case I don't like it and have to do it all over again. It's about 2500–2600 words. I am falling into a trap as a writer that I should guard against very carefully if my ambitions as a minor scribe persist. The trap of talking myself out. I've always known it to be fatal for any writers but particularly the kind who are as glib and articulate as myself. I will frequently reject a fairly fine turn of phrase when writing because I've heard myself say it a couple of times and therefore seems to me to be a cliché. [...]

Thursday 27th
Got up this morning about nine, though I'd been awake again since 2.30. E and I chatted for three or four hours. [...] I told E lots of stories about the Romantic Poets. I dozed a little later, awoke from a frightful nightmare and got up and wrote a letter to Gwyneth asking her to get me some Welsh books and a Grammar and a Dictionary.
³⁹
Syb, who can't read a word of Welsh, took them all to NY when she left. Perhaps Jordan is learning Welsh!

[...] Everybody found favour with my piece about Wales though E found the end rather lame so I wrote a more powerful ending. She likes it so there it is. Now we'll wait and see if it's too late for
Look
magazine – the deadline was two, no three weeks ago. If it is I'll sell it to some other mag.
Life
magazine have always said they will publish anything I write. So I could foist it on to them, though they're hardly likely to pay me
Look
’s price which is $2,500. Also they wanted caption writing to go under photographs of Wales rather than an article, so perhaps they'll reject it for that reason. Anyway we'll see.

I am enjoying this holiday so much that I am beginning to think I really could retire from acting, and write occasional pieces. I will watch myself over the next five weeks and see how my restlessness goes. [...] Perhaps one film, at a reduced fee every three years. And only something really worthwhile.

Friday 28th
Another brilliant morning. I awoke at nine. I went to bed about 9 and read a book of Ian Fleming's called
You only live twice
.
⁴⁰
A clever schoolboy mind and atrociously vulgar. And every so often he stops his narrative to give little homilies about food drink national morals etc. all of excruciating banality. Yet ever since the phenomenal success of the films about his hero James Bond and the books, – I'm not sure which came first, and of course his death, he is actually being treated seriously by serious critics. I put the light out about midnight and slept for a couple of hours, woke and read a short novel by Nathaniel West
Miss Lonelyhearts
.
⁴¹
What a contrast between that and Fleming. West's book is taut, spare and agonized while the other is diffuse, urbane and empty. West hates himself and postulates a theory that you are always killed by the thing you love, while Fleming loves only himself, his attraction to women, his sexual prowess, ‘the-hint-of-cruelty-in-the-mouth'-sadistic bit, his absurd and comically pompous attitude to food and cocktails ‘be sure the martini is shaken not stirred’. He has the cordon-bleu nerve to attack one of my favourite discoveries: American short-order cooking. I remember with watering mouth the soda fountain on 81st Street, one block west of the park in Manhattan, where in a blur of conjuring the cook would produce corned-beef hash with a fried egg on top and french fries on the side and a salad with a choice of about four or five dressings. All this magically produced and whipped on to the table, piping hot before you'd finished the comic strips in the
Herald Tribune
, or read Red Smith's wry column.
⁴²
Yet you cannot help liking Fleming. He is obviously enjoying the creation of his extroverted, Hemingwayese, sadistic, sexually-maniacal boy-scout that in the end he becomes likeable. I rather like him too for his death line, if the reports are true. He was about 57 and had known for some time that he had a diseased heart. He is reputed to have said: ‘Well, it's been a hell of a bloody lark.‘
⁴³
And of course, to that bonviveur, woman-chasing, intelligently-muscled mind it had been. [...]

Saturday 29th
[...] I received a letter, a note more, from Chas Collingwood, saying that he thought I had written a ‘hell of a good piece’ and enclosing an
article by Denis Brogan in the
Spectator
anent Breton Independence.
⁴⁴
We are to dine with them in their casa tonight. [...]

Elizabeth is now looking ravishingly sun-tanned though the lazy little bugger ought to lose a few pounds or so to look at her absolute best. Looking as critically as I can at her yesterday I could detect no sign of ageing in her at all, except that she has quite a few grey hairs, mostly at the temples. But the skin is as smooth and youthful and unwrinkled as ever it was. The breasts, despite their largeness and considerable weight, sag very slightly but no more than they did 10 years ago. Her bottom is firm and round. She needs weight off her stomach, not so much out of vanity, but because all the medical men say it will ease her bad back if she has less weight to carry for'ard. She swam quite a lot yesterday and if she keeps that up she should be quite firm by the time we get back to London. Dreadful thought, London. [...] However it will be a chance to see Ivor more often. And the kids. Might even be time to watch some cricket with Ivor on Sunday afternoons and read books to him and chat. [...]

Sunday 30th
We roasted in the sun all day and read. E read
Portnoy's Complaint
while I read a book translated from the Spanish called
The Labyrinth of Solitude
written by a poet called Octavio Paz.
⁴⁵
I am finding it very tough going and one of those assertive books which make me long to argue back. Like most books of self-conscious philosophy it is totally lacking in humour. I like merry philosophers. To relieve my mind I would read a fairly entertaining thriller-with-a-message by Simon Raven, between slabs of the Paz book.
⁴⁶
It is very difficult to understand how any man can seriously discuss Mexico and Mexicans as if they are all one unit. ‘The Mexican is impassive, he is such a prideful man that he will not reveal himself even to his closest friend. etc.’.
⁴⁷
Balls. I know a great many Mexicans and the impassive ones, though the word that is nearer the mark is ‘sullen’, are almost always uneducated and poor. The educated are like their counterparts in Spain, vivacious and wild and romantic. He is equally sweeping about the Yanks. ‘Men and women are subjected from childhood to an inexorable process of adaptation; certain principles in brief formulas are endlessly repeated by the press, the radio, the churches, and the schools ... They become imprisoned by these schemes like a plant in a flowerpot too small for it: they cannot grow or mature.‘
⁴⁸
It may be so but it is also
so here in Puerto Vallarta, if P.V. can be assumed to be a typical small town. The Church dominates everything, and from the endless radios that blare from every house as you take a walk the people are only interested in listening to endless noisy bad music. Wouldn't it be awful for Mr Paz if he ever found out that behind the immense ‘impassivity’ of the Mexican Indian, there was, as we have found in the American Red Indian, nothing nothing nothing at all. Or not very much. I'll keep on ploughing through it. I suppose I feel strongly about this mass lumping of races together from my teens in Oxford and the RAF. ‘Taffy was a Welshman, Taffy was a thief.’ It's like the myth of the ‘fighting Irish’. I was so obsessed by this romantic appellation as compared to ours ‘Sly, devious and untrustworthy’ that I picked fights with Irishmen wherever I was or whenever I could. It was amazing how few would stand up and fight unless they had the support of a lot of pals. Or again the fable of the cold reserved tight-upper-lip Englishman. Well read his books or his poetry and you'll find that he is riddled with woolly sentimental ideas, and a slush of snob-ridden self pity. I will elaborate on this thesis one day. Or about the crafty penny-pinching Scot and the avaricious Jew. In general I have found them to be generous to the point of folly. [...]

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!