BOOK REVIEW: The Richard Burton Diaries

A shorter review of this book originally appeared on the Five Leaves Bookshop website

During his career, Richard Burton published the occasional bit of journalism – including the controversial New York Times article in which, apropos of playing him in ‘The Gathering Storm’, Burton was openly critical of Winston Churchill – and two very slim nostalgic volumes, ‘A Christmas Story’ and ‘Meeting Mrs Jenkins’, which hint at autobiography. It’s taken the publication of his diaries, however – nearly thirty years after his death – to reveal the true extent of Burton’s literary capabilities and the overall effect is to make one weep for the memoirs he never wrote, or the century-spanning picaresque novel he gave some considerable thought to but which, again, never materialised.

The diaries – edited by Chris Williams, whose love of footnotes is as all-consuming as Burton’s torrid passion for Elizabeth Taylor – are ordered into six main sections: 1939-1940, in which a series of regular but short entries give a snapshot of his childhood and a burgeoning love of literature; 1960, which is little more than an appointments diary; 1965-1972, which spans almost 500 of the 654 pages; 1975, documenting his brief remarriage to Taylor and an unhealthy amount of drinking; 1980, centring mostly on his theatrical tour with ‘Camelot’; and 1983, which ends as he’s about to take to the stage again in Noel Coward’s ‘Private Lives’, an ill-fated production that co-starred Taylor.

What of the gaps? Ah, thereby hangs the frustrating aspect of what is otherwise a compelling and immersive volume. Three things emerge as constant enemies of Burton’s diarism: boredom (although he sometimes writes to fill otherwise empty hours), drink (it’s no coincidence that his most prolific and detailed entries come on days when he’s trying to stay off the booze), and engagement with a role that genuinely interests him. The latter might seem obvious, but such roles were few and far between. Burton admits to actively disliking his profession – “I loathe, loathe, loathe acting” – and much of what he did during the Taylor years seems to have been motivated strictly by financial realities. The diaries during this period record almost casually his acquisition of extravagantly priced jewellery, a yacht, a private jet (“I did something beyond outrage” he says of dropping $960,000 for the latter – this in 1967!*) and the kind of house-hopping that would have the ‘Location Location Location’ production team weeping into their portfolios.

The downside is that barely a word is expended on ‘The Spy Who Came in From the Cold’, ‘Becket’, ‘Night of the Iguana’ or ‘Villain’ and there’s nothing whatsoever on ‘Wagner’ or ‘1984’. There are, however, entire screeds on ‘Anne of the Thousand Days’, ‘Raid on Rommel’, ‘Staircase’ and ‘The Battle of Sutjeska’. The only exception to this inverse good film/no entries ratio is the underrated ‘Assassination of Trotsky’. Also, it would have been fun to read Burton at his bitchiest give behind-the-scenes accounts of ‘Exorcist II’ and ‘The Medusa Touch’ – but, again, this was sadly not to be.

What we do get, in plenitude, is an account of Burton’s life – the travel, the glamour, the fabulous restaurants, the glitzy hotels, the premieres and hobnobbing. In the wrong hands, this could have been the stuff of gloating. But everything Burton writes is tempered with his background, the poverty of his childhood, the admission – made repeatedly – that he’s been lucky. Moreover, fame and materialism didn’t lull him into intellectual moribundity. Throughout the span of the diaries, Burton demonstrates an inquiring mind, a thirst for knowledge, a keen engagement with the written word and a fascination with linguism. Put it this away: imagine you’re on a yacht, you’re worth millions, there’s an entourage on hand to give it the “yes sir no sir three bags full sir” at the merest inclination of your eyebrow, and you’ve got Liz Taylor lying on a sun lounger next to you. Would you just kick back and let a big wave of egomania wash of you, or would you spend the day reading a three-volume academic history of ancient Rome then work on bringing your Italian to fluency? 

Burton’s reading is voracious and eclectic. His love of poetry is writ large. For all that he socialises with royalty and fellow film stars, his most treasured acquaintanceships are with Dylan Thomas, W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender. Lines of verse, often subtly paraphrased to mesh with the business of that day’s entry, are threaded through the journals. Editor Williams tediously annotates every one – well, almost; he misses a couple of bits by Henley – and insists on rendering the actual line. He also fussily records that ‘The Phil Donaghue Show’ was presented by Phil Donaghue, PT means physical training, and bangers and mash is a dish of sausage and mashed potato – things I’m guessing that most people know – yet doesn’t bother to translate entire sentences that Burton renders in French. There are footnotes to every page, up to six or seven per page most of the time, and they’re generally facile. After a while, I trained my eye to simply disregard them and got on with the infinitely measurable business of wallowing in Burton’s prose.

While ‘A Christmas Story’ and ‘Meeting Mrs Jenkins’ are polished and bear the evidence of careful revision, the diaries are exuberant and unmediated, entire entries fast-flowing in a rush of words. You hear Burton speak as you read them – that commanding voice with its dramatic emphasis. Just as Burton the orator had an intuitive understanding of cadence and rhythm, Burton the writer unleashes torrents of words to just the same effect. He directs those words at those around him, often sympathetically and sometimes satirically (his description of Andy Warhol as looking “like a cadaver when still and a failure of plastic surgery when he moved” is priceless), but mostly at himself and with almost brutal honesty.

I haven’t enjoyed an actor in his own words this much since ‘Ever, Dirk’, John Coldstream’s volume of Dirk Bogarde’s waspish and fascinating correspondence. Bogarde, of course, enjoyed a second career as a memoirist, novelist and reviewer in the last two decades or so of his life. It’s a damn shame Burton didn’t get to tread a similar path.



*The equivalent of about $6.5million today.

Lassie Come Home

‘Lassie Come Home’ isn’t a film I’d normally review on Agitation, however my good friend Viv Apple has provided such a unique perspective on this evergreen family favourite – at once a review and a piece of social history – that I’m honoured to share her recollections on the blog.

I have waited nearly seventy years to see this film; the story of a dog who couldn’t bear to be parted from her owner, a young Yorkshire boy called Joe. Watching it on Channel 4 the other day with 21st century eyes, I could see (or rather hear) the incongruity of its very Home Counties accents as spoken by American actors, punctuated by valiant attempts to authenticate the setting by the occasional insertion of ‘Aye, lad’ and ‘It’s champion, champion’. But the story and the production itself, although of its time, is still magic to me for very special reasons.

It was released in 1943 at the height of the Second Word War, when I was seven and had just been evacuated from London to the ‘safety’ of a farm in Staffordshire. I was the only evacuee billeted with the farmer and his wife and son, and very homesick as my mother had stayed in London to be with my father, who was exempted from military service. I had a difficult time at the farm, and after about a year was taken back to London.

It took me a while to recover from being away on my own, but in my absence my mother had been to the cinema to see ‘Lassie Come Home’. So, knowing how I loved animals, she began telling me the story of the film each night to help me sleep. London was still in the grip of wartime chaos, and if there was an air raid expected or a sudden siren later on, we would go down the garden to spend the night in the Anderson shelter, a corrugated iron structure offering protection from blast and flying debris - but not from a direct hit.

The shelter smelled of its damp concrete base and of the smoky remains of the previous night’s candles, which were the only source of light. There were thick woollen blankets on the three bunks, and my mother would sit on the edge of mine while I watched her face as she recounted to me Lassie’s dangerous journey back to Joe. The story caught my imagination at once, perhaps because it was about a beautiful and intelligent dog but also because, like me, Lassie had found her way home in the end. So I would ask for it to be told again, night after night, until my mother must have grown weary – though she never showed it.

Outside, the drone of planes overhead (which could have been Wellington bombers on their way to Germany or German planes about to bomb us) was punctuated by bursts of flak from anti-aircraft guns stationed a few miles away. But I was aware of ‘the war’, and to me these sounds were a normal background to the shadowy shelter - and Lassie bounding to meet Joe from school or struggling to find her way back from Scotland to Yorkshire across rivers and through strange landscapes.

Watching the film in 2012, scenes I’d only heard about seemed to find their allotted place in my memory, a seamless step from the eight-year-old me...to now. Roddy McDowall was Joe, Elsa Lanchester was his mother and Donald Crisp his father. Elizabeth Taylor, in the role of Pricilla, granddaughter of the tender hearted Duke who buys Lassie when the family is forced to sell her, was a natural actress who didn’t yet know how beautiful she was.

From my perspective it is difficult to review ‘Lassie Come Home’ dispassionately, but if I were to try I’d say that the training of the dog (a male collie called Pal) was exemplary and enabled him/her to carry the film effortlessly. Joe and his family were well cast, villains and heroes well defined but not in a cloying way, and Californian scenery was cleverly shot to look like Scotland and Yorkshire. Most importantly, the interaction between humans and dog throughout Lassie’s long journey was convincing and at times, moving. The film was nominated for several awards, and has been described as ‘one of the truly great family films’. It was praised by the New York Times in 1943 as ‘...a story of such poignancy and simple beauty that only the hardest heart can fail to be moved.’ So it’s not just me who loves it.

And that’s good to know.

by Viv Apple

Elizabeth Taylor: magic and memories (guest article by Viv Apple)

Thanks to my good friend Viv Apple for this evocative and poignant piece.

The news on Wednesday of the death of Elizabeth Taylor, and the subsequent tributes and articles about that fabulous star, triggered memories I thought I’d long forgotten. In particular, ‘National Velvet’ (1944). It was this film which introduced me to the magic of cinema and made Taylor’s name as a child star, though she had also shone in ‘Lassie Come Home’ in 1943 - which I missed as I was evacuated to Staffordshire from London to avoid Hitler’s buzz-bombs.

I was a small girl with dark hair so I suppose I must have identified with Elizabeth Taylor – though I never consciously compared myself to the violet-eyed beauty. ‘National Velvet’ may not have been my first visit to the cinema, but it was the first film I can remember being moved by. The emotions engendered by child actors and animals in the story, and especially Elizabeth and Velvet, were as strong as falling in love and lasted longer than many love affairs.

From then on, my mother and I would walk the mile or so to the Astoria in Streatham High Road about once a week, and many of the films I saw then remain in my mind. When I was still very young another animal weepy, ‘The Yearling’, impressed me so much that I asked for the book (by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings) for my birthday and read it with tears streaming down my face. Cartoons were a favourite of course, with ‘Bambi’ top of the list (more tears!). There must have been many funny cartoons (and indeed there were lighter moments in ‘Bambi’) but the most memorable cartoon for me was the terrifying ‘Fantasia’ with its overwhelmingly oppressive shapes of vivid colour advancing towards me as I cowered in the one-and-nines.

Cinema in the 1940s and 1950s was very different from what it is today, and not just because of the over-acting and immovable hairstyles. Smartly uniformed usherettes would show us to our seats with torches, and we would sit in the stalls waiting for the B movie to begin the programme - or it may have been Movietone News which came on first. Then I would beg for an ice cream from the lady with a tray of goodies and a long queue. At some point, a large organ would slowly emerge from its underground lair just in front of the screen and the organist would start playing the same tunes, week after week. Finally, after what seemed like an hour but was probably no more than ten minutes, the organ disappeared again and the screen curtains would open with a magic click, click, click... The beam of light from the projection room behind us was always alive with patterns of smoke from the patrons’ cigarettes, thick and dusty, as it shone messages from Pearl & Dean onto the screen.

But it wasn’t all wide-eyed fascination. If the organist was boring, that was nothing to some of the B movies. English films then had a reputation for being of a lesser standard than the amazing Hollywood productions, and many were cheaply put together to fill a gap. They must have been boring because I can’t remember any of them. There were honourable exceptions, such as the Ealing comedies, but these were the main feature and not the one to be sat through whilst fidgeting with the seat in front. Even some American films could be tedious to young eyes; adults loved the musicals of Busby Berkeley, with all the Busby Babes dancing on endless staircases in dreamy dresses, but we children found these sequences excruciatingly dull.

Now, of course, I can appreciate the skill and artistry of the old musicals. But the really great movies of the 1940s and 1950s have always been loved, both then and now. Great stars made them, and none greater than Elizabeth Taylor, whose remarkable career and life was more interesting than any movie.

Elizabeth Taylor

i.m. Elizabeth Taylor, 27 February 1932 – 23 March 2011