The Richard Burton Diaries

He was the most charismatic actor of the last century.

The boy from South Wales conquered the London stage,

scaled the heights of Hollywood

and married the world's most beautiful woman.

Now, private diaries he wrote at the peak of his fame

reveal Richard Burton in his own words.

His personality comes through just exactly as I knew it.

He's dangerous, explosive, quite often uncontrolled.

The diaries explode all over the globe, just as Richard did.

-They

-are

-Rich.

He was the miner's son who made his name playing kings and princes.

The Richard Burton Diaries, now published in their entirety

for the first time, take us on an epic journey,

from the village of Pontrhydyfen to worldwide notoriety

and superstardom.

They're an intimate portrait of how far Burton moved

from his Welsh past - and how he never abandoned it, at all.

Bravo!

I really don't know what to say about my race. I'm so proud of them

and I love the Welsh with a passion that's almost idolatrous,

but particularly the South Welsh, the people I know the best,

and particularly the mining class.

But Burton transcends boundaries.

The diaries give us unrivalled access to the many worlds

he moved in, and to the man behind the myth.

His public romance with Elizabeth Taylor comes into sharp focus,

but so does his private passion - not acting, but literature

and the life of the mind.

Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer

by this son of York and all the clouds that lour'd about our house

in the deep bosom of the ocean buried.

He didn't rate acting very highly. He loved writers.

He liked to read and he himself wanted to write,

and he's done it in his diaries. His diaries are his real legacy.

The diary originals are held at the Richard Burton Archive

in Swansea University, donated by Burton's widow, Sally.

They're not a continuous record.

The bulk of the diaries cover the years 1965 to 1972,

when Richard is married to Elizabeth and relatively settled.

The diaries show us that this was a genuine marriage.

There was real love between the two of them.

Richard certainly pours out his love, his admiration for Elizabeth

on the pages. Yes, there are frustrations.

There are considerable rows, tantrums, rifts and tensions

that build within the relationship, but nevertheless

that urge that he has to bed Elizabeth comes through

fairly regularly.

Burton's sense of excitement

and sheer erotic rapture shines out in the writing.

'I have been inordinately lucky all my life,

'but the greatest luck of all has been Elizabeth.

'She has turned me into a moral man, but not a prig,

'she is a wildly exciting lover-mistress,

'she is shy and witty,

'she is nobody's fool, she is a brilliant actress,

'she is beautiful beyond the dreams of pornography.'

Their real-life affair fuelled an on-screen chemistry

that made their performances electric.

That I will...never be free of you.

'She was some sort of Cleopatra figure.

'He'd never met anybody like her.'

More than anything else, she was exotic.

So I think she enraptured him, really.

He was passionate about her

and, sexually, they were a match plainly.

Plainly.

Because although I don't think all the time,

but I think for a lot of the time he was totally faithful to Elizabeth,

because I think he was satisfied.

He plainly hadn't been faithful to his first wife Sybil,

with whom he had two daughters.

Before Taylor, there were numerous other sexual conquests,

including a long affair with the actress Claire Bloom.

The loyalty on Sybil's part was unmatchable.

He was a bad, bad boy, sexually!

I used to think there was a great deal of guilt in him about Sybil,

but I'm not sure that there was.

Reading the diaries, he's sometimes quite cool about Sybil...

and quite hard about her.

She adored him.

And that he then loved another more than he loved her...

..was... That destroyed her.

He became so obsessed with Elizabeth,

once he confessed to her that he loved her and wanted her,

she then applied the rules - and the handcuffs.

Richard was already living as a tax exile in Switzerland.

But the Burton-Taylor partnership took extravagance to new heights.

They had a luxurious yacht, the Kalizma,

and homes in Europe, Mexico and California.

He bought her a private jet, called Elizabeth.

The new Mrs Burton also had a certain weakness for jewels.

In the '60s, they were bigger than the Beatles.

They were part of the '60s liberation.

There was the Beatles, but there was Richard and Elizabeth,

doing what the hell they wanted. He really didn't give a damn.

And he was mad as a bat, which is deeply attractive, and a show-off.

I mean, fancy bidding for the most expensive diamond in the world

from a telephone box in a pub. But he did, and he knew that

Elizabeth was in the bar in the next room like that, "Did he get it?

"Is he going to beat the Maharaja?"

Well, of course he was going to beat the Maharaja!

Cos he just wanted to do it.

Some of those things that he pursued were innate in his nature

to begin with. He wanted out from his background,

although he loved his background.

He wanted power, he wanted riches, undoubtedly.

It fulfilled part of his dream.

After all, the fundamental basis of being an actor

is simply to make money.

I rather like being famous.

I rather like being given the best seat on the plane,

the best seat in a restaurant.

Aristotle Onassis, Princess Grace of Monaco,

the Kennedy family pop up in the diaries,

the Rothschilds.

So there is a sense in which Richard is enjoying

being part of that world. He was aware this was a very unusual place

for a miner's son from Pontrhydyfen to be,

and perhaps he had a sense that it wouldn't

necessarily last forever.

The awareness that he was lucky and could have been living

a very different life is threaded through the diaries.

His generosity towards his family was perhaps

a recognition of the tightrope he'd walked.

It's not my profits. I give it away. Give it to my family.

Or I buy enormous presents for Elizabeth Taylor. Or did.

The fact that I was able to take care of a certain amount of people

has given me some pleasure.

The fact that I had the power to do it.

From his first amount of money that he made on The Robe,

which was his first big major Hollywood film, he came home

and then bought every one of his brothers and sisters a house,

to make sure none of them needed to rent or to have a mortgage.

And of course he looked after them all through their lives.

I mean, Mam used to say, "The cheque will be coming now in August."

One would come in August and one at Christmas time.

Generous of spirit, generous with his money.

Money didn't mean that much to him. He had it, so he spent it.

His success was responsible for elevating our family

out of the working class, into the middle class,

and giving us a much better chance in life.

Burton himself was now in the international superstar class.

He enjoyed the high life, but was keen to share it, too.

It was his joy to invite the whole family up to The Dorchester,

you know, and to places that they'd never been before,

to go to Elizabeth's 40th birthday party in Budapest.

I mean, how fantastic was that, you know?

And sitting down at a table with Princess Grace.

I mean, what dreams are made of.

Burton and Taylor were a business partnership,

choosing scripts that exploited their fame as a couple.

Some of the films they made together were run-of-the-mill.

Others, like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

were huge critical and artistic successes.

I think he gave her that film. He subsumed his own part,

because she didn't want to do it.

It wasn't her, it wasn't in her range.

She knew that, she told him that. It's the diaries.

But he teased her into it.

He said, "Somebody's going to do it and they'll get an Oscar, Elizabeth.

"And it's not going to be you, if you don't do it."

You can sit around with the gin running out of your mouth,

you can humiliate me, you can tear me to pieces all night,

-that's perfectly OK, that's all right.

-You can stand it.

I cannot stand it!

You can stand it, you married me for it!

-That's a desperately sick lie.

-Don't you know it even yet.

He was always hitting her.

She starts a sentence and he comes in

and he makes her go like that, makes her angry, really angry,

not an actress angry. She's pissed off with him getting in her way.

But he makes her really good, and that got her the Oscar.

In that scene where she hits him, she really hits him,

-completely unprofessionally.

-No, no, you're sick.

I'll show you who's sick. I'll show you who's sick! I'll show you!

-All right!

-I'll show you! I'll show you!

-Stop it. Stop it!

SHE LAUGHS

Oh, boy.

You really are having a field day, aren't you?

In return, Burton acknowledged his debt to Taylor.

She knows a great deal about film acting and she persuaded me

that I mustn't pretend that film acting is just a means

of filling in time between stage performances

and, indeed, made me work at it, which I'd never done.

He called in to say that the new calf came into the world this morning,

and next year they're building a new chimney.

'When he started his early films, he was stagey.

'And it wasn't really until he was with Elizabeth, I think,

that she said to him, "Don't just do it all the time, just think it.

"Just feel it. Don't forget that in close-up you're over 40-foot high,"

'and he learnt to do that.'

Not always, because the fury and the power would burst out of him

sometimes, as it bursts out in the diaries,

and spoil what was building into a marvellously subtle performance.

The Hollywood publicity machine made the most of the Burton-Taylor brand,

encouraging audiences to believe that, by watching the movies,

they were also peering into the marriage.

Some parallels aren't lost on their closest friends.

I saw them at their best together when they were

making Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?

and Rich flew me out.

And I had a wonderful time with them watching the filming

during the day and coming home at night, when all their rancour...

..was expended in the filming. So they were sweetness and light.

But I did, on other occasions, see pretty tempestuous bickering,

which I hated.

When she was firing on all cylinders, I thought it vulgar.

Rough.

Burton, though, could give as good as he got.

His own melancholy and anger, which directors had used

to draw out some of his best screen performances,

were never far from the surface.

Even in the 1950s, one critic had noticed a curdled quality in him.

It's there in the remorseful and self-lacerating tone

in parts of the diaries.

'Yesterday was another terrible day.

'Insulting Elizabeth, drunk,

'periodically excusing myself, rather shabbily,

'and then starting the rough treatment all over again.

'Sometimes, I am so much my father's son

'that I give myself the occasional creeps.

'He had the same gift for damaging with the tongue.

'He had the same temporary violence.'

The writing is shot through with Burton's insight

and self-knowledge about his darker side.

He wasn't a nasty man, but he got drunk a lot.

He did have a turn on him.

When he got angry, he would say something and it would be vitriolic

and it would be incisive, and it would just cut your legs off.

Richard's mood wasn't helped by Elizabeth's large entourage,

a constant presence in their marriage.

It just became an even bigger struggle for him

to hang on to the centre of who he was.

And... Because Elizabeth wasn't real.

I mean, to me, to this day, she's not real, she's an icon,

a Hollywood mega-superstar, and Richard somehow married into that.

I walk past pictures of Elizabeth Taylor remembering,

"There was one time in my life that she was my auntie."

I'm going, "That's madness," you know?

I think my life was changed by a woman who's called Elizabeth Taylor.

I'm not entirely sure what exactly she did to me.

But certainly...

I think she was bad for him, in the sum of things.

I think, in a way, she destroyed him.

Mind you, I think he probably would have gone on to destroy himself,

without Elizabeth's influence...

..alas.

To the end, Richard himself was always generous about Elizabeth.

I suppose, 13 years of such intensity with two people living together

who adored each other as much as we did,

it's at such a continual seething,

boiling point, that eventually it spills over.

But there is no rancour, no animosity, on either side.

By the early '70s, younger actors had supplanted Burton and Taylor

as Hollywood's biggest stars.

In 1972 came the death of Ivor, Richard's beloved older brother.

Ivor, a former coal miner, had broken his neck in a fall

at Burton's home in Switzerland and become a quadriplegic.

Ivor was his hero, the guy he looked up to, his second father if you like.

If you couple the grief of Ivor's accident,

which he felt responsible for, with his natural melancholia,

then you've got a recipe for disaster.

And it happened at a time when he was drinking.

I think it really hit him hard.

1973 and 1974 were among the darkest times and Burton's life.

He and Taylor separated, then divorced.

His drinking was out of control.

There was a second or two, perhaps about a year ago,

when I didn't fancy much staying alive.

You can, of course, drink yourself to death.

And that's rather pleasant.

LAUGHTER

It's better than falling on a sword. That's for sure.

-Yeah, well.

-Is that what you tried to do, to drink yourself to death?

-I had a go, yes.

-Did you?

-Yes.

I was up to about two-and-a-half to three bottles of hard liquor a day.

The diary peters out in 1972 and doesn't resume until 1975,

the year of Burton's short-lived second marriage to Taylor.

Richard tended to keep his diary when he was relatively happy.

When he goes into this dramatic downward spiral in 1972-73,

he's not comfortable with who he is.

My sense is that he could not bear to keep a diary during that period.

He couldn't come to terms

with writing about his life as it began to disintegrate.

Just how disillusioned he'd become

is painfully apparent in an interview he gave

the movie critic Barry Norman, while filming in Milan in 1974.

I'm afraid I'm an actor. I don't want to be an actor,

but, however, I am.

'I think I'm reasonably intelligent,

'clever, good, kind.'

Sweet.

Husty.

-Gifted?

-Oh, no. I'm not gifted.

-May I have a cigarette?

-By all means, yes.

Do you enjoy this superstar status, the tremendous celebrity,

the fact that you can't move without being mobbed?

Do you really enjoy it, that kind of life?

If it stops, I'm dead.

Time and again in the diaries, he's scathing about the film business

and disdainful of his own profession.

'Acting on stage or films,

'apart from one or two high moments of nervous excitement,

'is sheer drudgery.

'If I retired from acting professionally tomorrow I would never

'appear in the local amateur dramatic society for the sheer love of it.'

This was a revelation to me,

the degree to which he loathed and despised acting.

I hate the tears in the eyes!

"Oh, how I hate it. Oh, how boring it is.

"I loathe it, being an actor is death!"

He was accused of wasting his talent

on a string of lucrative, but mediocre, films.

But what really got under his skin was the idea that the stage

was superior to movies or TV,

and that he'd squandered his destiny as a great classical actor.

The theatrical establishment said, "Oh, he's gone into films,

"he's betrayed his great talent."

He always thought that was nonsense. He thought that acting was acting.

'After, shall we say, ten weeks of playing Hamlet on the stage,

'one's soul staggers with tedium

'and one's mind rejects the series of quotations that Hamlet now is.

'Has there ever been a more boring speech, after 400 years

'of constant repetition, than, "To be, or not to be?"'

The Burton of the diaries is a man yearning to live other lives.

If I hadn't fallen for the lure of tinsel and paint and so on,

I might have made a very nippy wing forward for Wales.

I would rather have played for Wales than play Hamlet.

"He wasn't devoted to making great art,"

a fellow actor said of him.

"He was concerned that the odyssey that was Richard Burton."

That odyssey had brought him as a young man to Oxford University,

on a short course as an RAF cadet studying English literature.

He was enchanted and, in 1966, he returned with Elizabeth

to star in a student production of Doctor Faustus.

"The only play," he said, "I don't have to work on.

"I AM Faustus."

Time runs, the clock will strike, the devil will come

and Faustus must be damned!

Critics thought they'd found the perfect metaphor to beat him with.

The over-reacher who'd squandered his gifts

and sold his soul to the devil.

You must, at some time, Richard Burton,

faced the question of whether you should have

continued as an imposing and, even, in the view of many people,

great stage actor or moved into the world of films,

which is more commercially rewarding,

but perhaps not so rewarding, artistically.

Do you ever regret having moved into the commercial cinema?

Oh, excuse me, Richard, that makes me so angry!

Because he has not left the stage.

-That's absolute bloody rubbish.

-Elizabeth, pull yourself together.

Last year, he just did a thing here for Oxford

on the stage.

You said the exact phrase that I knew you were working up to.

"Sold out." And it offends me to my soul.

If Burton is offended, he doesn't show it.

Already, barely into his 40s, he's thinking of leaving acting behind

and striking out in a new direction.

I will have to make a choice.

That is whether to continue acting

or whether to not act and do something else that I have in mind,

which I'd rather not reveal, but...

Erm... Simply, it seems to me, to continue acting

until you are 70 years old, learning other people's words

and trotting them out all the time is faintly undignified.

That new direction shines through like a golden thread in the diaries.

It's a career as a writer and, perhaps, an academic.

Besides Elizabeth,

the great passion in his life was the English language.

The library at his home near Geneva

was a monument to his lifelong love affair with books.

When I was with him in Le Pays de Galles in Celigny,

where he had his house, he used to get up at 5.00am and read.

I would then go and join him up in the library.

Then he'd quote from something. "What do you think of this?"

Then he'd go,

"To begin at the beginning,"

and he'd recite from Dylan Thomas.

We were sitting in the Dorchester one night

and he had the complete works of Shakespeare there.

He said to me, "Sian, open it at any page

"and just give me the first line."

We spent the whole evening, I was fascinated with this.

I'd read the first line and he would continue. Page after page of it.

Tremendous memory.

The compact edition of the Oxford English Dictionary

was the best birthday present Elizabeth ever gave him,

Burton writes in the diaries.

He's always learning new languages,

practising his grammar or updating his vocabulary.

He reads voraciously - history, biography,

current affairs, sports, crime writing, novels, poetry.

And not just reading books, but then feeding into his diary writing

lines from Shakespeare, Gerard Manley Hopkins,

Dylan Thomas, Alan Lewis.

It's speckled throughout the diaries,

that kind of engagement with literature.

He talks about wanting to be a writer, wanting to be a don.

I think I made a great mistake in becoming an actor,

because I think my real desire would have been to be a scholar

at Oxford University.

That minute and infinitesimal scholarship, it seems to me,

is the idea of perfection.

Despite all the acting plaudits and the CBE,

he writes in the diary

that a D.Litt is the only honour he really covets.

He's thrilled when he's invited to spend a term as a don,

teaching at St Peter's College, Oxford.

'I am very excited.

'I am as thrilled by the English language

'as I am by a lovely woman or dreams.

'Green as dreams and deep as death.

'Christ, I'm off and running and will lecture them

'until iambic pentameter comes out of their nostrils.'

Burton's heroes were writers and scholars.

He gained fame for speaking the words of others.

More than anything, he longed to find his own voice,

to earn posterity not as an actor, but as a writer.

I wanted to write because I sought for some kind of permanence.

A cover-bound shot at immortality

and not a rapidly-dating film and acting to match.

But while Burton the actor exudes self-confidence,

Burton the writer is crippled by self-doubt.

It's a theme in the diaries and throughout his writing life.

In a radio interview in 1982, he laments the shortcomings

of a piece he wrote on the tragic death of his brother, Ivor.

I thought, how could I have made it sound so boring,

because I was so intensely occupied with the entire thing.

To die that kind of death, for such a brutally magnificent man,

was unkind and unjust and terrible,

but I wrote about it so ignobly that I'm rather ashamed of it.

Burton died in 1984, aged 58.

The book he dreamed of writing had not appeared.

He wanted a major work of writing.

I felt when he died, he hasn't done it, this is awful.

What stopped him doing it - the booze, the business,

the women, all the rest of it.

But I think, in fact, now, the diaries expose

one of the most extraordinary people of our century.

Most compelling of all is the tension between the public

and private faces of Richard Burton.

Time after time in the diaries, he is again the Richard Jenkins

who went to chapel three times on Sunday

and savoured the power of hymns and sermons.

WELSH CHOIRS SINGS

'I have a record on of 5,000 Welsh voices singing

'Mae D'eisiau Di Bob Awr.

'Enough to drive you daft with nostalgia.

'I need you every hour. Oh, yes, boys.

'The dead stand up in rows before my bloodshot eyes. Sod it all.

'Sod death. Sod age. Sod grief.

'Sod loneliness.

'Gad im deimlo Awel O Galfaria fryn.'

His diaries will be as lasting as some of his best films

and best readings.

If you carved, say, 50-60% out of that,

you'll have something that will very much hang around for a long time,

and that's the most you can hope for as a writer.

You don't have to read many pages to realise that what he longs for

is writing and to leave that as his testament.

The most important thing to me is, that in fact,

he has written a totally

magical portrait...of himself.

Knowing him as well as I did, this is the Rich that I knew,

and vastly enriched by what he's written,

in what, I think, is a major work.

And I think it will last.

Death be not proud,

though some have called him mighty and dreadful for thou art not so.

For those whom thou thinks that is overthrowed, I'm not, poor death.

Nor yet canst thou kill me.

One short sleep past we wake eternally and death shall be no more.

Death, thou shalt die.