In thrall to booze, books and breasts

 
p49 books main No Merchandising. Editorial Use Only. No Book Cover Usage Mandatory Credit: Photo by Everett Collection / Rex Features (422857ag) ELIZABETH TAYLOR AND RICHARD BURTON IN 'THE SANDPIPER' - 1965 VARIOUS
Tim Robey11 October 2012

The Richard Burton Diaries
edited by Chris Williams
(Yale, £25)

Richard Burton’s diaries come with a back-cover quote from Melvyn Bragg (“a waterfall of pleasure”), who was given access to them for his 1988 biography Rich. So that we might all get drenched up close, Chris Williams, professor of Welsh history at Swansea University, brings us for the first time in print the bulk of what Burton wrote. It’s a portly, bristling beast of a book, which in its digressiveness, ranting and endless bibliophilia reveals facets of a Burton not especially well-known to us. They may not all be endearing ones but the weirder the juicier.

We get piddling school-day entries from 1939-40, all woodwork, rugger and day-long chapel. But the vast bulk of this book spans the years from 1965-72, during Burton’s first marriage to Elizabeth Taylor, which were clearly the most professionally and personally fulfilling of his life. The writing is somewhere between luxuriant and waffly. He has moments of embarrassing effusiveness about “E”: “An eternal one-night stand.[...] She is my private and personal bought mistress.” In bed? “E is a receiver, a returner of the ball!”, whatever that means. Still, within little over a year, a recap of her wifely virtues is reduced to the following: “She fries a fair banger and grills an honest tomato and browns a nice onion perhaps. That’ll do for now.”

Intimations of what lay in wait to scuttle their marriage, twice, are laced through for all except Burton himself to see. On page 595 the entries for an entire week in May 1975 are each a word long: “Booze”. Even the amount consumed in the more garrulous years, when we presume he had the sauce under greater control, could empty several distilleries. Hand in hand with the drinking goes his passion for books, which is voracious and intellectually redemptive, though his verdicts are often shrugging or curt. Hardly a day goes by without him ploughing through at least one: everything from Ross Macdonald thrillers to Dylan Thomas or Churchill biographies; Baudelaire in French, Waugh, Amis, Gavin Maxwell, “Miramée”. Taylor bought him a colour-coded, calf-bound set of the whole Everyman’s library, and even naughtily filched an old edition of A Shropshire Lad from Foyles as a prank once.

Burton is much less interested in films, by his own admission, and a particularly harsh critic of his own early ventures. “My lack of interest in my own career, past, present or future, is almost total,” he says at one point, a little disingenuously — he does keep tabs on those Oscar nominations (seven, with no wins) and what the box office spells for the couple’s annual overheads.

E receives nothing but praise even in her battiest vehicles — Losey’s insane Secret Ceremony (1968), for instance — but his views of fellow actors are less complimentary. How’s this, on his Anne of the Thousand Days leading lady, Geneviève (“Gin”) Bujold: “Arrives at the studio looking like the end of the world. And smells like it.” Or this on Lucille Ball, who hosted the Burtons on her show: “A monster of staggering charmlessness and monumental lack of humour.” Sean Connery in Diamonds Are Forever (1971) “looks like a miner going to seed. Which he is.” Meanwhile, Anthony Quayle’s “tiny button eyes in that great arse of a face” have nothing on Rod Steiger’s face-lift, which makes him look like “one half of a naked arse-hole”.

The sum of these acrid put-downs, along with griping about the Scofields and Oliviers whose talent he disputes, can get a little repellent, especially since Burton reserves genuine devotion for few things except his books, Taylor’s breasts and a good bottle of Lafite ’63. Take these pleasures away, and this diarist of red-blooded hedonism can’t see why to go on.

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