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Frederick the Great, discussion post 6
...I think we need another one (seriously, you guys, this is THE BEST) and I'd better make it now before I disappear into the wilds of music performance.
(also, as of this week there are two Frederician fics in the yuletide archive and eeeeeeeeeee)
(huh, only one of them is actually tagged with Frederick the Great even though two with Maria Theresia and Wilhelmine, eeeeeee this is awesome I CAN'T WAIT)
Frederick the Great masterpost
(also, as of this week there are two Frederician fics in the yuletide archive and eeeeeeeeeee)
(huh, only one of them is actually tagged with Frederick the Great even though two with Maria Theresia and Wilhelmine, eeeeeee this is awesome I CAN'T WAIT)
Frederick the Great masterpost
Re: Elizabeth Taylor - 2 (Richard Burton)
21 April 1965:
‘E opened her bag and handed me a book. It was an old edition of A Shropshire Lad. With all of those hundreds of people around, to say nothing of store detectives watching for our safety, all of them staring and oohing and aahing over her beauty, she had stolen a book! I burst into a cold sweat. I could see the headlines. “Millionaire Couple Steal Book From Foyles.” “Book not worth more than five bob, says manager”. Christ. I gave her a terrible row but her delight was not to be crushed. It’s the first and last thing she ever stole in her life, except, of course, husbands!’
24 May 1967 – Portofino
E anxious I write about her [in the diary] so here goes: She is a nice fat girl who loves mosquitoes and hates pustular carbuncular Welshmen, loathes boats and loves planes, has tiny blackcurrant eyes and minute breasts and has no sense of humour. She is prudish, priggish and painfully self-conscious.
30 July 1967 – Taormina
A slow day, marking time, with a walk in which we bought sunglasses at a little shop. As we left the crowd which had gathered applauded us. E thought it very sweet, which indeed it was. We dined in somnolence and some self-satisfaction as we compared our ancestors and former wives and husbands.
E has become very slim and I can barely keep my hands off her. It turns out that she’s not that less in weight but, as a result of massage and exercise the weight has been redistributed. She is at the moment among the most dishiest girls I’ve ever seen. The most. I mean dishiest.
19 September 1967
Noël Coward arrived looking very old and slightly sloshed and proceeded to get more sloshed. He embarrassed us both separately and lavished compliments on E about her beauty and her brilliance as an actress. He is a most generous man but he is beginning to lose the fine edge of his wit or perhaps like me he repeats himself when tipsy.
23 October 1968 [Aristotle Onassis married former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy three days earlier] The Onassises have disappeared completely from the front pages. I told Elizabeth they didn’t have our stamina. I also said with great smugness that he had given her a wedding present of only “slightly less than £100,000 [£660,000] of diamonds, precious stones”, etc, whereas I had only recently given a £127,000 [£845,000] diamond ring simply because it was a Tuesday.
[Later] The enemy is insidiously attacking again. Beth read in the papers that Ari Onassis had given Jackie half a million pounds worth of rubies surrounded by diamonds. Missy already has, as a result of former battles against yours truly, one of the greatest diamonds in the world and probably the most breathtaking private collection of emeralds surrounded by diamonds also in the world. Now the Battle of the Rubies is on. I wonder who’ll win.
8 November 1968
After completing yesterday’s entry with milady fast asleep in bed as I thought, I was looking through some scenes in the script when suddenly the bedroom door opened and standing there in a near diaphanous nightgown with one shoulder slipped on to her arm was E. So I went back to bed for 10 minutes. I was unquestionably seduced and I teased her about it for the rest of the day when we talked on the telephone. She was very beautiful. It is a fact that after all these years the girl can still blush. I lost that latter capacity a long long time ago.
13 November 1968 It’s extraordinary how small the Duke and Duchess [of Windsor] are. Two tiny figures like Toto and Nanette that you keep on the mantelpiece.
Chipped around the edges. Something you keep in the front room for Sundays only. Marred royalty. The awful majesty that doth hedge around a king is notably lacking in awfulness. Charming and feckless. [Later] E just reminded me that at one point I said to the Duchess last night, “You are, without any question, the most vulgar woman I’ve ever met.” Waaaaaah!
19 November 1968 – Paris
Famed as we are, rich as we are, courted and insulted as we are, overpaid as we are, centre of a great deal of attention as we are, [we] are not bored or blasé. We are not envious. We are merely lucky.
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, she can be arrogant and wilful, she is clement and loving, Dulcis Imperatrix, she is Sunday’s child, she can tolerate my impossibilities and my drunkenness, she is an ache in the stomach when I am away from her, and she loves me!
25 May 1969
What an extraordinary world it is. How do you live with one person for 13 years, and another for eight and find both as alien as strangers. Elizabeth is an eternal one night stand. She is my private and personal bought mistress. And lascivious with it. It is impossible to tell you what is consisted in the act of love. Well I’ll tell you, E is a receiver, a perpetual returner of the ball! I don’t write about sex very often, because it embarrasses me, but, but…
“28 May 1969
Marlon [Brando] has yet to learn to speak. Christ knows how often I’ve watched Marlon ruin his performance by underarticulation. He should have been born two generations before and acted in silent films.”
6 August 1969
E said this morning that I lacked loyalty. Now she is a bright b----- to talk about loyalty. The list of her dis‑loyalties would fill the yellow pages of the New York Telephone Directory. Except of course to her children. And there she defeats me because I've been disloyal to mine.
8 August 1969
I behaved in a way to make a banshee look kind, good and sweet. 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 occasional creeps. He had the same gift for damaging with the tongue, he had the same temporary violence, he had the same fidelity to Mam that I have to Elizabeth, we wave the same admonitory finger at innocence when we know bloody well when we are guilt-ridden, when we have to attack when we know we’re in the defensive position.
2 October 1969 – Geneva
When we came out of the Musée des Beaux Arts the cab driver had vanished, but he returned a few minutes later having very sweetly bought a single rose for Elizabeth. Somewhere between [then] and dinner, brooding set in. Between long silences deadly insults were hurled. At one point E knowing I was in a state of nastiness said to me: “Come on Richard, hold my hand.” Me: “I do not wish to touch your hands. They are large and ugly and red and masculine.” Or words to that effect.
This morning E said that I really must get her the 69-carat ring to make her ugly big hands look smaller and less ugly! Nobody turns insults to her advantage more swiftly or more cleverly than Lady Elizabeth.”
18 November 1969 – Monaco
This morning in the early hours the pot decided to have a go at the kettle and won handle down. E, the pot, gave this particular kettle, me, a savage mauling. I was coldly accused of virtually every sin under the sun. Drunkenness (true) mendacity (true) being boring (true) infidelity (untrue) killing myself fairly quickly (true) pride envy avarice (all true) being ugly (true) having once been handsome (untrue) and any other vice imaginable except homosexuality and ungenerousness.
July 14, 1970:
“[. . . ] Last night I was lying on the bed doing a double-crostic and looked up a quotation in the paperbacked Quotation Dictionary that I carry around with me specifically for that purpose. I immediately became lost in the book and read all the Shakespeare ones right through very slowly. There was hardly a line there that I didn’t immediately know but seeing the miraculous words in print again doomed me to a long trance of nostalgia, a stupor of melancholy, like listening to really massive music, music that moans and thunders and plumbs fathomless depths. I wandered through the book for a long time but no other writer hit me with quite the same impact as William S. What a stupendous God he was, he is. What chance combination of genes went to the making of that towering imagination, that brilliant gift of words, that staggering compassion, that understanding of all human frailty, that total absence of pomposity, that wit, that pun, that joy in words and the later agony. It seems that he wrote everything worth writing and the rest of his fraternities have merely fugued on his million themes. [ . . .]
13 September 1971
I love Larry [Olivier] but he really is a shallow little man with a mediocre intelligence but a splendid salesman.
4 December 1971 [At dinner] My attention was riveted from the first by a man sitting opposite me. He looked like a cadaver. He was eyebrow-less and eyelash-less and atrociously wigged or dyed with snow-white hair at the front of his head and brownish at the back. His face was hideously pasted with make-up and had odd lumps on it, a face made of funny putty by an inept child. [RB’s introduction to Andy Warhol]
(remarriage to ET in South Africa)
7 October 1975 – Johannesburg – Chobe
Grass landing. Slight brush with grim reaper. Left suspension, left wheel packed it in. Guess that we were within 6–8–12 inches from kingdom come. Decided to get married here as soon as possible unless E (or I, for that matter) changes mind. Love her beyond measure and above anything. She fast asleep. Shiver, shiver, shake shake. Can’t wait for E to awaken!
8 July 1980
E made me jealous as vengeance by saying she’d called Marlon [Brando] on the phone and that they had talked for an hour and he had been very solicitous about me. He really is a smugly pompous little b------ and is cavalier about everybody except Black Panthers and Indians. “He’s been keeping tabs on you,” said E. That infuriated me even more. That sober self-indulgent obese f--- being solicitous about me. You can’t get any of those surrounded-by-sycophants one-time-winners on the phone unless they want something from you. Sinatra is the same. Gods in their own mirrors. Distorted mirrors.
August 17, 1980
“Back to random wanderings: The audience reaction to the play: When we were in Toronto and we received without fail standing ovations at every performance I warned the cast not to take it for granted, that it would only happen occasionally, if at all, in NY. But I was wrong. The same thing happens here with unfaltering regularity. I used to get the occasional house to stand up for me in previous plays but now they always do. Will they in Chicago and the rest of the places? It’s a phenomenon that I am puzzled by. Is it nostalgia? The roars I get when I take my second solo calls are almost exultantly savage. Is it a ferocious hunger for the past, a massive ‘hiraeth,’ a sort of murderous longing for ‘home’ and security and simple peace. I don’t know. It cannot be simply the performance. Some nights unavoidably, though I try like the devil to climb to the audience’s expectations every time I play, I am not so good – but the final reaction is exactly the same. Is it that the audience know so much about me – or think they do – from my highly publicized and infamous past? It it because my performance is now truly dynamic but no, it can’t be that because only in the last couple of weeks have I taken absolute control of myself on the stage. Is it a combination of all. I shall never know. But let me say at once that to this little shrinking Welsh violet it is highly gratifying. Today, a glorious one I may say, we have a matinee – a glorious summer Sunday matinee. Will the ovations continue? I will refer to them never again – unless they stop. [ . . .]
Then there's also the letter he wrote to her after their first divorce:
One of these days I will wake up - which I think I have done already - and realize to myself that I really do love. I find it very difficult to allow my whole life to rest on the existence of another creature. I find it equally difficult, because of my innate arrogance, to believe in the idea of love. There is no such thing, I say to myself. There is lust, of course, and usage, and jealousy, and desire and spent powers, but no such things as the idiocy of love. Who invented that concept? I have wracked my shabby brains and can find no answer. But when people die - those who are taken away from us can never come back. Never, never, never, never, never (Lear about Cordelia). We are such doomed fools. Unfortunately, we know it. So I have decided that for a second or two, the precious potential of you in the other room is the only thing in the world worth living for. After your death there shall be only one other and that will be mine. Or I possibly think, vice versa. Ravaged love, And loving Rich.
And in the year before her death, she wrote to a biographer of his: Richard was magnificent in every sense of the word, and in everything he ever did. He was magnificent on the stage, he was magnificent in film, he was magnificent at making love - at least to me. He was the kindest, funniest and most gentle father. All my kids worshipped him. The bond with all of us continued until he drew his last breath. We knew he was absolutely there for us no matter what. In my heart, I will always believe we would have been married a third and final time. From those first moments in Rome we were always madly and powerfully in love. We had more time but not enough.
Re: Elizabeth Taylor - 2 (Richard Burton)
That's rather heartbreaking to read -- the first entries, where he's so in love and sweet and everything is amazing, and shading into things just going to pieces.
And he does sound very self-aware (and witty, holy cow) throughout. which... well... still goes to show yet again, I guess, that one can be self-aware and screw things up pretty thoroughly.
Re: Elizabeth Taylor - 2 (Richard Burton)
Okay, one more orginal text. Context: Burton and Taylor fell in love during the shooting of Cleopatra in Rome; she played the obvious and he played Antony. This was the big scandal of the day and the public reaction even included reprimands from the Vatican despite neither of them being Catholic, for being a danger to public morale. But in fact, they had very briefly met once before, years earlier, when a much younger Richard Burton had tried to crack Hollywood the first time around. (This led to hilariously bad films like „Alexander“, in which he‘d played Alexander, in a terrible blond wig.) Elizabeth Taylor, otoh, was already a superstar - well, she’d been one since her childhood - currently married to Mike Todd and pregnant (he would die in a tragic air plane accident later, the only one of her marriages not ending in divorce).
Richard Burton, for whom, btw, English was not his native language - he wasn‘t just Welsh, but among the minority of Welshmen whose first language was still Welsh, and English only second, learned at school - much later wrote a wonderful, tender and witty description of that first brief meeting under the title of „Meeting Mrs. Jenkins“ (Jenkins was his real name; he was the youngest son of a Welsh miner, and had been adopted by the English teacher Philip Burton who first spotted his talent):
“It was my first time in California and my first visit to a swank house. There were quite a lot of people in and around the pool, all suntanned and all drinking the Sunday morning liveners – Bloody Marys, boilermakers, highballs, iced beer. I knew some of the people and was introduced to the others. Wet brown arms reached out of the pool and shook my hand. The people were all friendly, and they called me Dick immediately. I asked if they would please call me Richard – Dick, I said, made me feel like a symbol of some kind. They laughed, some of them. It was, of course, Sunday morning and I was nervous.
I was enjoying this small social triumph, but then a girl sitting on the other side of the pool lowered her book, took off her sunglasses and looked at me. She was so extraordinarily beautiful that I nearly laughed out loud. I didn’t, of course, which was just as well. The girl was not, and, quite clearly, was not going to be laughing back. I had an idea that, finding nothing of interest, she was looking right through me and was examining the texture of the wall behind. If there was a flaw in the sandstone, I knew she’d find it and probe it right to the pith. I fancied that if she chose so, the house would eventually collapse.
I smiled at her and, after a long moment, just as I felt my own smile turning into a cross-eyed grimace, she started slightly and smiled back. There was little friendliness in the smile. A new ice cube formed of its own accord in my Scotch-on-the-rocks.
She sipped some beer and went back to her book. I affected to become social with the others but out of the corner of my mind – while I played for the others the part of a poor miner’s son who was puzzled, but delighted by the attention these lovely people paid to him – I had her under close observation. She was, I decided, the most astonishingly self-contained, pulchritudinous, remote, removed, inaccessible woman I had ever seen. She spoke to no one. She looked at no one. She steadily kept on reading her book. Was she merely sullen? I wondered. I thought not. There was no trace of sulkiness in the divine face. She was a Mona Lisa type, I thought. In my business everyone is a type. She is older than the deck chair on which she sits, I thought headily, and she is famine, fire, destruction, and plague, she is the Dark Lady of the Sonnets, the on lie true begetter. She is a secret wrapped in an enigma inside a mystery, I thought with a mental man-to-man nod to Churchill. Her breasts were apocalyptic, they would topple empires down before they withered. Indeed, her body was a miracle of construction and the work of an engineer of genius. It needed nothing but itself. It was true art, I thought, executed in terms of itself. It was smitten by its own passion. I used to think things like that. I was not long down from Oxford and Walter Pater was still talked of and I read the art reviews in the quality weeklies without much caring about the art itself, and it was a Sunday morning in Bel Air, and I was nervous, and there was the Scotch-on-the-rocks.
Like Miniver Cheevy I kept on drinking and, in the heady flow of the attention I was getting, told story after story as the day boozed slowly on. I went in swimming once or twice. So did she, but, lamentably, always after I’d come out. She swam easily and gracefully as an Englishwoman would and not with the masculine drive and kick of most American girls. She was unquestionably gorgeous. I can think of no other word to describe a combination of plentitude, frugality, abundance, tightness. She was lavish. She was a dark unyielding largesse. She was, in short, too bloody much, and not only that, she was totally ignoring me. I became frustrated almost to screaming when I had finished a well-received and humorous story about the death of my grandfather and found that she was turned away in deep conversation with another woman. I think I tried to eavesdrop but was stayed by words like – Tony and Janet and Marlon and Sammy. She was not, obviously, talking about me.
Eventually, with half-seas-ed cunning and with all the nonchalance of a traffic jam, I worked my way to her side of the pool. She was describing – in words not normally written – what she thought of a producer at M.G.M. This was my first encounter with freedom of speech in the U.S.A., and it took my breath away. My brain throbbed; I almost sobered up. I was profoundly shocked. It was ripe stuff. I checked her again. There was no question about it. She was female. In America the women apparently had not only got the vote – they’d got the words to go with it.
I was somewhat puzzled and disturbed by the half-look she gave me as she uttered the enormities. Was she deliberately trying to shock me? Those huge violet-blue eyes (the biggest I’ve ever seen, outside those who have glandular trouble – thyroid, et cetera) had an odd glint in them. You couldn’t describe it as a twinkle…. Searchlights can not twinkle, they turn on and off and probe the heavens and so on.
Still I couldn’t be left out. I had to join in and say something. I didn’t reckon on the Scotch though. I didn’t reckon that it had warped my judgment and my sense of timing, my choice of occasion. With all the studied frenzy of Dutch courage I waded into the depths of those perilous eyes.
In my best chiffon-and-cut-glass Oxford accent I said: “You have a remarkable command of Olde-Englishe.”
There was a pause in which I realized with brilliant clarity the relativity of time. Aeons passed, civilizations came and went, brave men and cowards died in battles not yet fought, while those cosmic headlights examined my flawed personality. Every pockmark on my face became a crater of the moon. I reached up with a casual hand to cover up the right-cheeked evidence of my acne’d youth. Halfway up I realized my hand was just as ugly as my face and decided to leave the bloody thing and die instead. But while contemplating the various ways of suicide and having sensibly decided, since I had a good start, to drink myself to death, I was saved by her voice which said, “Don’t you use words like that at the Old Vic?”
“They do,” I said, “but I don’t. I come from a family and an attitude that believe such words are an indication of weakness in vocabulary and emptiness of mind…. Despite Jones’s writing that in times of acute shared agony and fear, as in trench warfare, obscenities repeated in certain patterns can at times become almost liturgical, almost poetic….” I ran out of gas.
There was another pause; more empires fell. Captains and kings and counsellors arrived and departed. She said three four-letter words. These were, I think, “Well! Well! Well!”
Somebody laughed uneasily. The girl had turned away. I had been dismissed. I felt as lonely as a muezzin, as a reluctant piano lesson on a Saturday afternoon, as the Last Post played on a cracked bugle.
I went home and somebody asked, when I told them where I’d been, what she was like. “Dark. Dark. Dark. Dark. She probably,” I said, “shaves.” To nobody in particular I observed that the human body is eighty percent water.”
Re: Elizabeth Taylor - 2 (Richard Burton)
Re: Elizabeth Taylor - 2 (Richard Burton)
Fortunately, ET, clever woman who she was, managed to win most of his friends and family around. She never pretended to be anything she wasn't, i.e. if she visited the Welslh miners, you can bet she wore diamonds as well. But she cultivated his sisters, helped cleaning up, and outdrank his brothers in the pub, she impressed further by proving herself a hands-on and involved mother to her kids instead of leaving them to the help, and as for his adopted father Philip Burton, who'd sworn not to talk to him again out of loyalty to Sybil, she approached him and told him RB, who was returning to the stage for the first time in years, really really really needed his help and coaching and could he please, no one was more important to Richard, etc. Cue Philip caving and starting to socialize with the adulterous couple. Otoh Montgomery Clift never quite lost his "is he really good enough for Bessie Mae?" distrust, and Peter O'Toole, RB's best actor friend, certainly loathed ET till his dying days because he blamed her for taking Richard away.
Incidentally, there was a recent BBC movie, Burton and Taylor, set during their autumn days, Long after their second divorce, which I can reccommend, and here's my review quoted:
It's been finally done: after various attempts that were embarrassing in various degrees, we finally got a good film about Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. It wisely did not try to be a biopic covering their entire relationship, or even those parts that were most famous (and where the audience would have the most mental images to compare), but instead picked a time near the end of Burton's life, the disastrous (as far as the critics were concerned, not the audience, for the cash, it flowed) run of Noel Coward's play Private Lives they did together on Broadway, years and years after their second divorce. So you have a short and limited time frame which allows for better character focus, plus aged ET and RB which means the actors don't have to compete matching them in their prime.
The next smart thing the BBC did, putting the project together, was the cast. Because it's Dominic West as Richard Burton and Helena Bonham Carter as Elizabeth Taylor. Neither of them looks much like the originals, but they have the charisma, and they have the craft. I can't tell you what a relief it is so see Helena Bonham Carter in something where she doesn't have to do the 104040th variation of her Gothic wildwoman persona that she picked up after abandoning the Edwardian beauty persona. I always thought either was selling her short because in those films where she's neither, she tends to be excellent. (A more recent example: supporting Colin Firth in The King's Speech.) Here, she's glorious, capturing the wit, the vitality, the middle-aged booziness and the larger-than-life-passionate nature. Dominic West must be able to do self-destructive witty Celts in his sleep by now, and he's very much not asleep in this film. (The voice isn't Burtons but gets the idea of it across very well, if that makes sense.) Also very important: they have great chemistry. (BTW, Burton and Taylor don't always have it in their screen appearances; real life chemistry doesn't necessarily translate, and neither does film chemistry to real life. See, say, Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable, who were both passionately in love with other people when they filmed Gone With The Wind and completely uninterested in each other.) The script gives both of them great zingers and, given the obvious temptations here, valiantly resists imitating either Edward Albee or Noel Coward. It does go for bittersweet and the can't live with, can't live without that the subject asks for, while also making it clear why "live with" wasn't an option anymore. It's what we call a chamber play - Kammerspiel - in German, for the tv format, and if you're uninterested in Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, it's still a good story about a middle aged couple of exes whose ties to each other went very deep, and who face aging in a profession that forgives anything but yet do so with gusto and no genteel restraint whatsoever. May it come out on dvd soon, BBC.
Re: Elizabeth Taylor - 2 (Richard Burton)