The lemony Richard Burton
During the late 1960s and early 1970s, the years he most assiduously kept a diary, the actor Richard Burton (1925-84) had the following pet names for his wife, Elizabeth Taylor: Lumpy, Booby, Old Fatty, Shumdit, Cantank, Old Snapshot and the Baby. She sometimes called him, who knows why, Darling Nose and Drife. They were at the height of their fame, and they seemed to speak a private language. Together they called Campari mixed with vodka and soda water, one of their favorite cocktails, a “Goop.” They referred to the act of raiding the refrigerator instead of sitting down to a proper meal as “grapple-snapping.” That’s a vivid and useful phrase I hope becomes, alongside noshing, common usage.
Burton’s diaries, published now for the first time, are filled with these kinds of pocket-size delights. I grapple-snapped my way through them and even fixed a Goop or two. (They are delicious and derailing.) But I admired this complicated and fairly remarkable book for its deeper and more insinuating qualities as well. First among them is that Richard Burton, a maniacal reader his entire life, was handy with the English language. He was unpretentious and aphoristic. You can open his diaries almost at random and find lines like: “I shall die of drink and makeup”; “It was a piece of glottal cake”; “We are cosmic jokes”; “I was gonged down by a highway patrolman for exceeding the speed limit”; “There are few pleasures to match tipsiness in this murderous world.” Many actors have complained about gawking vacationers and cunning paparazzi. Only Burton put it this way: “If the ‘Origin of Species’ is valid then we are certain to see within the next few hundred years American tourists with built-in cameras.”It’s hard to imagine a midcareer actor working today whose diaries will be half as literate or lemony.
Taylor is in her late 30s in most of these entries; he is in his mid-40s. “E is my only ism,” Burton writes. “Elizabethism.” While she was away, he noted, “I miss her like food.” He calls Taylor “an eternal one-night stand” and “beautiful beyond the dreams of pornography.” He declares, “She is a prospectus that can never be entirely cataloged, an almanac for Poor Richard” …
Burton read everything, high and low, and his running commentary is mostly a joy to behold. Edmund Wilson is “wrong about everything” and “a bore.” A Kingsley Amis novel is “expertly written but has ‘don’ written all over it.” He notes the “excruciating banality” of Ian Fleming and writes about him, hilariously: “He has the cordon-bleu nerve to attack one of my favorite discoveries: American short-order cooking.”
