Lucille Ball: The Insecure View from the Top

Vivian Vance played sidekick to Lucille Ball all through I Love Lucy and partway through The Lucy Show, then bowed out, demanding a salary increase she knew would be rejected.

“I was sure she felt I was deserting her,” Vance wrote. “She had a tremendous fear of rejection, and unless she thought it through, it could seem that I was rejecting her, giving her up after 14 years of closeness and clowning, for a husband and a home I wanted to share with him.”

Lucy had other priorities. “Marriage, motherhood, leisure — all were subordinated to the main concern of putting on a good show and turning a profit for the Desilu stockholders,” wrote Stefan Kanfer in Ball of Fire: The Tumultuous Life and Comic Art of Lucille Ball. “Though she determined to get along without her feminine foil, Vivian’s departure did make an enormous difference, not only in the scripts but in Lucy’s outlook. In her view, she had been dropped twice, by her husband and by her closest professional friend.”

Richard Burton, Lucille Ball and Elizabeth Taylor

“’On the set, she could be a holy terror,’ said one of the technicians who watched Lucy in action. She summarily fired a New York Method actor who mumbled his lines; intimidated directors and cameramen; and sought confrontations, even when the star was as big as she was.

“When she gave Danny Kaye instructions on how to do humor, he snapped, ‘Just who the hell do you think you are?’ Lucy shot back, ‘You’re full of shit, that’s who I am.’ She was not smiling.

“Joan Blondell, who had known Lucy since their starlet days in the 1930s, had become a first-class film and stage comedienne in middle age. Lucy booked her on the show, then expressed dissatisfaction with the way Blondell read her lines. After one take, her friend Herb Kenwith reporterd, the director yelled ‘Cut!’ and “Lucille pulled an imaginary chain … as if flushing an old-fashioned toilet.’ Blondell turned away but caught the tail end of the gesture. ‘What does that mean?’ she demanded. Lucille said, ‘It means that stunk!’ Joan looked her right in the eye and said, ‘Fuck you, Lucille Ball!’ The studio audience was stunned. You didn’t hear words like that in those days.’ Kaye and Lucy were to make up their differences. Blondell never came back.”

In 1970, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, then the world’s most famous couple, appeared on Lucille Ball’s CBS sitcom Here’s Lucy. Lucy and Liz exchanged increasingly large bunches of roses, but all was not so rosy after Lucy insisted on giving the famous Welsh actor line readings.

Amused, Burton noted that Lucy referred to Liz as “…for the most part as Mrs. Burton or Miss Taylor and occasionally Elizabeth but (she) corrects it to the more formal immediately.” Liz, meanwhile, referred to Lucy as “Miss Cunt.” 

A Marvelous Party in Jamaica

Noel Coward's statue, sculpted by Angela Connors, still looks out over the Jamaican coast from Firefly.

The playwright, actor, singer and author Noel Coward is buried not in England but at Firefly, the mountaintop oceanfront home he built in Jamaica. It was where Coward had been happiest.

“Running though this year of 1951, and for many years to come, was the happy fact that Ian (Fleming) and Ann, soon to be joined by James Bond, were just along the coast at Goldeneye,” recalled Coward’s friend and aide Cole Lesley in his The Life of Noel Coward.

“Jamaica was booming. It had become ‘the’ place to holiday in the winter — Noel, Ian and Ann and their friends heading the post-war pioneers — and hotels began to spring up all along the North Coast.”

Interior of the spartan Firefly, now open to the public

“Agnes de Mille was among Noel’s troop of fascinating visitors, and we saw a great deal of Roald Dahl, accompanied the following year by the ravishing Patricia Neal, soon to become his wife. Pat taught us to cut off the top quarter of green coconuts, fill the rest of the nut and its soft white flesh with lamb, prawn or chicken curry, seal the top on again with a paste of flour and water and stick the whole thing in the oven for as long as you like. Marvelous for picnics; when the top is removed, even after several hours, the delicious inside has retained its piping heat. We became so mad about this dramatic-looking dish that Noel named it Cocomania.

“Errol Flynn, his lovely young wife Patrice Wymore and his yacht — he called her a schooner — the Zaca, were along the coast in the other direction at Port Antonio. Joycie and (Baron Nicolas) Niki de Gunzburg were staying at Blue Harbour; Niki and Errol were playmates of old and we were all asked over.

“First of all, drinks under striped awnings on the deck of the Zaca, beautiful in the evening light. Then we went ashore to feast on one of the corral beaches of Errol’s own island; the table covered with jade-green banana leaves, decorated with scarlet hibiscus, gleaming with candles and silver and crystal, and a baby suckling-pig slowly roasting over a pit in the sand a few yards away. When an enormous moon came up out of the sea, everything seemed too much: it was piling Pelléas on Mélisande, Noel said (referring to Debussy’s five-act opera).”

“Joyce and I had not met Errol before and I don’t know what we had expected, but all four of us agreed on the way home that, in spite of all we had read, he was one of the most charming, kind and courteous hosts we had ever known. If only he had lived longer; the kind, civilized man is revealed in parts of the autobiography, but he was no longer with us to receive the praise.

“All this gaiety notwithstanding, Noel worked away every morning like a beaver. He wrote the verses which make the links between the songs on the album of Conversation Piece and flew up to New York for a few days to record them. Lily Pons sang Melanie’s songs and arias, and the part of the young leading man was spoken by Richard Burton.

“Even as long ago as 1951, $200 was a pittance to Richard and he told his agent to refuse it. His telephone rang — Noel was always one for the direct approach — and he heard the firm tone in the well-known voice: ‘You will do it for $200 and like it,’ and Richard did it. Whether he liked it or not I don’t know, but Noel was very fond of Richard, and admired him as an actor from the beginning, and his voice on the record remained for Noel a source of pleasure.”

Alec Leamas Meets Travis McGee

Burton as Le Carre's Alec Leamus

“Went to bed and read a ‘Travis McGee’ thriller by a very competent American writer called John D. MacDonald. He is one of those prolific writers like Simenon and Erle Stanley Gardner and so on who seem to turn out a book a month. MacDonald is a cut above most, however, and tries to be unsentimentally tough about the decaying morality and mass-production mania and advertising nightmare of the American way of life. Ends up with a lump in his throat about the occasional innate nobility of man.

“McGee is a thoroughly detestable man in his pretended cynicism and muscular pretension and despises with a tired dismissal anybody who is not ‘machismo’ and ‘mucho hombre’ and an inexhaustible stud.

“There are fairly sick-making lines like ‘he patted her girl-rump’ and ‘he responded to the rampant woman in her.’ Another occasion for bile is that this McGee — who is enormous 6 ft 5 and as fast as a cat —is called ‘Trav’ by his friends. 

"However, I’ve learned to skip the sermons when they come up and the yarns and the inconsequential but authentic-seeming descriptive backgrounds are very readable.

“I envy anyone’s capacity for such sustained and for the most part sound writing. If he wrote one book a year instead of 10, he could be considerable.

“I don’t think I could write a thriller. I don’t think I want to even if I could. Such books are meant to be read, not written. Read fast and quickly forgotten and therefore readable again in a couple of years.”

— Richard Burton’s journal, June 1970

For Richard Burton, the Revels End

Ravaged by arthritis and the residue of his alcoholism, Richard Burton at 58 worked on without complaint, running on willpower and his abiding love of life and language.

Burton on the set of his last film, "1984."

He had finished a seven-month run with his ex-wife Elizabeth Taylor in Noel Coward’s “Private Lives,” and turned in a much-applauded performance in the film “1984.” At home in Switzerland, he’d fallen off the wagon one night with his co-star and friend John Hurt, seemingly without doing much harm. The next evening he went to bed as usual, reading and jotting notes in red ink on a nearby pad. But he never woke up again.

Burton had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage in the night. His fourth wife, Sally, had him rushed to the hospital in Geneva. They were operating, and she realized with horror that it was likely that Burton would end up in a wheelchair, unable to speak. A living death.

But the lover of language was spared that. He died, and Sally went in to see the body alone. “I remember quite clearly thinking — Well done! You’ve thrown off your old body. You’re on your next adventure. Well done!”

“I had a strong feeling that it was a tragedy for us but not for Richard,” she told biographer Melvyn Bragg. “That helped me through the next weeks. My feeling was that Richard had many lives in him, but not that of an old man.”

It was only days later, after the funeral, when Sally was at home alone tidying up that she noticed the pad beside Burton’s bed. The last words he had written there were, “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow… Our revels now are ended.”

The Diamonds in the Sky Are Stars

Elizabeth Taylor with The Ring

Notoriously, Richard Burton bought Elizabeth Taylor a 69.4 carat diamond ring for $1,100,000, outbidding Cartier.

“It turns out that one of my rivals was Ari Onassis but he chickened out at $700,000,” Burton wrote. “But apart from the fact that I am a natural winner, I wanted that diamond because it is incomparably lovely. And it should be on the loveliest woman in the world. I would have had a fit if it went to Jackie Kennedy or Sophia Loren or Mrs. Huntingdon Misfit of Dallas, Texas.”

Biographer Melvyn Bragg wrote, “The New York Times deplored the crowds outside Cartier’s where it was displayed and lambasted the Burtons for vulgarity. Princess Margaret too thought it vulgar: Elizabeth asked if she would like to try it on: yes please. ‘It doesn’t look so vulgar now, does it?’ said E.T.

“Not much later, John Gielgud went to stay and, helping with the washing-up, found it lying on a draining board next to a saucer. It is also surprising — and something of an insight — to learn that Elizabeth Taylor washed up!”

The diamond didn’t derail the couple’s famous rows for long, however. Two weeks after it arrived, Burton noted, “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.”

What Do the Acting Folk Do?

Burton plays professor in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"

Richard Burton was an acclaimed actor rich enough to buy a $1,050,000 62.42 carat diamond as a bauble for his wife, who’d often been described as the most beautiful woman in the world. But he had a secret dream, a fantasy.

He wanted to teach college English.

Although he was a superb actor, that craft did not completely absorb the attention of this voraciously literate man. Biographer Melvyn Bragg noted in Richard Burton: A Life that Burton’s journals rarely discuss acting, and never discuss theory. “He could as well be a plumber out on a job and no doubt he would in some part welcome the analogy,” Bragg wrote.

Writing in 1968, Burton said, “I spent much of yesterday in a bath with a lot of body make-up on, which meant when I came home Elizabeth had to wash my back. I was back to the mines again and the women washing their husbands’ backs clean of the grime of the colliery.”

A little later, on a break from filming Staircase for Stanley Donen, Burton wrote, “So after this day is over, we have three delicious days off. We plan to hide in the hotel and not go out at all, except perhaps for an occasional meal. I shall read and read and read.”

Burton was thrilled to get the opportunity to fill in for a professor on sabbatical. “How funny it will be to be lecturing at Oxford without a degree!” Burton wrote. “Now I’ve always had this pregnant women’s yearning for the academic life, probably spurious, and a term of smelly tutorials and pimply lectures should effect a sharp cure.

“I would like to deal with either the medieval poets in English, French, Italian and German and possibly some of the Celtic like Welsh & Irish, or to confine myself to the ‘Fantasticks,’ Donne, Traherne, Henry Vaughan, George Herbert.

“The first poem in English that ever commanded my imagination:

“Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright

“The Bridal of the earth and sky:

“The dew shall weep thy fall tonight:

“For thou must die.

“Sweet rose whose hue angry and brave,

“Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye:

“They root is ever in its grave,

“And thou must die.

“And that’s not all. I mean that chap Herbert was indeed a box where sweets compacted lay. 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. Little do they know how privileged they are to speak and read and think in the greatest language invented by man. I’ll learn them.”

And that’s what acting folk do. So they say. They teach. So I’m told.

Richard Burton: The Subject was Sex

Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor

Richard Burton had no particular complaints about literary pornography or sex, and was suspicious of those who did.

“The unctuous rubbishy shit written about pornography is nonsense,” wrote the Welshman in his journal for Nov. 17, 1966. “Practically all good pornography is best-selling, so I understand, and yet I have never found anyone who when asked if they enjoyed it will ever admit it.”

“(Author Malcolm) Muggeridge quotes Hugh Kingsmill as saying that the act of love is ludicrous and disgusting. Speak for yourself, Kingsmill. I love its disgustingness and comicality. Put some jaundice in your eyes and the act of walking is ludicrous and obscene, and swimming and, above all, eating. All those muscles, in most people, 50 percent atrophied, sluggishly propelling people over land or through water or gulping oysters. Come off it.

“It is an important thing to kill cant and humbug even if one is a humbug oneself."

With his fine voice, the well-read actor could hold forth on many topics. And one of them, apparently, was homosexuality.

That nettled Gore Vidal, who recalled that whenever he met Burton, Burton would launch into “…an extravagant aria about why he was not homosexual. I’d listen as long as I could and then say, ‘Who cares, Richard? Let’s talk about dermatology. Now there’s a subject!’”

Burton was always touchy about his bad skin, so touché.

They Should Have Been Afraid of 'Virginia Woolf'

Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in the 1966 film Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? either echoed or anticipated the tempestuous, all-absorbing marriage of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.

Burton had pushed Taylor to do it to improve her confidence and reputation as a real actor, something that had taken a beating in the reviews of their first film together, the out-of-control epic Cleopatra.

But Burton was still wrung out from having given a great performance during the difficult shoot of John Le Carre’s The Spy Who Came In from the Cold. First-time director Mike Nichols — hand-picked by Taylor — said, “He was the loneliest man I had met.”

“The broken, tender yet brutally tongued man here spoke words that echoed his own life and which ricocheted off the set and into the dressing rooms, into the house,” wrote biographer Melvyn Bragg in Richard Burton: A Life. “Elizabeth went up to 155 pounds and transformed herself into what Richard often called her — in fun? — a termagant. Their rows were nasty.”

Bragg notes, nevertheless, how his performance supports hers. “The crack of the dialogue — no doubt well rehearsed by Nichols — is entirely paced by Burton. He hammocks almost every sentence she speaks and lifts what could have been mere shrillness into that damaging desperation.”

So you could read their love between the lines, and something else within the lines. “’Virginia Woolf’ took a toll,” Bragg wrote. “When they separated for the first time (years ahead), Elizabeth said that she was ‘tired of playing Martha.’ Richard in his journals admits to a nature which, and not only in drink, could be ‘picky,’ ‘twisty,’ ‘nasty,’ ‘quarrelsome’ and the film licensed that. In one scene, she had to spit in his face. Nichols demanded take after take and Elizabeth eventually cracked up, wept, couldn’t do it anymore. Again on one occasion, Burton simply could not leave his dressing room — not drunk — couldn’t find the nerve to suffer the exposure that the part brought.”

Their greatest film together, Virginia Woolf brought an Oscar for Taylor but not Burton, whose go-it-alone attitude had once alienated too many people in Hollywood.

“Must we always make films together?” Burton once groused. “We’ll end up like Laurel and Hardy.”

As quick with a quip as Martha, Taylor replied, “What’s wrong with Laurel and Hardy?”

At Literate Leisure with Richard Burton

Actor Richard Burton at his favorite pastime.  The quotes below are from the Melvyn Bragg biography.

Richard Burton acted an affable in loco parentis role for Brook Williams, the son of Emlyn Williams, the author of The Corn Is Green. It’s a play about a boy given singular help by a dedicated adult.

“Emlyn was away a great deal: Burton knew what it was to have an absent father and knew also through Ifor the value of a much older brother. Brook was the beneficiary and never lost that status.

“We recreated some of Richard’s routines. Out in the red MG — still working well on a fine Sunday morning; drive the 20 minutes into Geneva Airport, having phoned the newspaper booth beforehand to make sure the Sundays were there. Perhaps a petit blanc in the bar, scanning the sports pages, the book pages, the reviews, marking down the longer pieces for later. A first stab at the crossword puzzle. Past the bookshop and a quick purchase or two — ‘You read this one, Brookie? Bloody good. I’ll get it for you. And I’ll have these two here.’ — back into the car and perhaps loop back through a favorite village for another petit blanc or maybe a vodka in the bar with the locals and return for lunch as likely as not over at the Café de la Gare and the local fish dish with the local wine. Boules in the afternoon, a game of tennis or table tennis in which no quarter was given, and then reading into the night, a glass or maybe two…” 

A Tale of Two Hamlets

Richard Burton and John Gielgud

The young Richard Burton did credit to himself as Hamlet on the British stage in 1953, being described as a “moody, virile and baleful” prince with “dash, attack and verve.”

Winston Churchill saw it, muttered the lines along with Burton during the performance and then came backstage to Burton’s dressing room to ask, “My Lord Hamlet, may I use your facilities?”

Another celebrated Hamlet, Burton’s friend John Gielgud, also saw the performance, and was drily unimpressed.

Biographer Melvyn Bragg wrote, “After he had seen it, he came around to Richard’s dressing room to take him to dinner and, observing he was beset by visitors, said, ‘Shall I go ahead or wait until you’re better — I mean, ready?’ Burton loved to re-tell that story.”

The Burdening and Unburdening of the Burtons

The Burtons, Richard and Philip

The actor Richard Burton was neither the first nor the last young man to benefit from the presumably chaste devotion of a presumably gay older man.

Until he met his mentor, the upper limit of advancement for this Welsh coal miner’s son was some job where your neck stayed clean (Burton’s was in a clothing shop, and he absolutely loathed it).

A handsome lad with a steady gaze, rugby-mad, a troublemaker in love with language and life, the teenaged Burton needed someone who might broaden his horizons. He found him in Philip, another Welsh coal miner’s son who was 20 years his senior, but one whose mother had propelled him into the University of Wales, where he’d earned a double honours degree in History and Mathematics.

A teacher and playwright and church organist, Philip also worked as a freelance writer, producer and actor on BBC Radio in Cardiff.

“He read deeply and liked his own company,” wrote biographer Melvyn Bragg in Richard Burton: A Life. “He used to tell (his landlady) Mrs. Smith that ‘a cultured person is never lonely.’”

Perhaps not, but this austere, tidy man — “38, formidable and, locally, not a little feared” — was missing something that he found in a restless, fearless boy with smelly socks.

“You could see that the ‘rough and fearless’ young rugby player, the suspicious street boy now, despite his pock-fretten skin, coming into a youthful handsomeness which men and women alike would call ‘beauty,’ would break like a wave on the serenity of Philip’s rock of scholarship,” Bragg wrote.

“Scholarship and sport and money and poetry: four of the things that mattered to the young Welshman, and something else he needed more: opportunity. He had been given and had himself taken an immense amount out of that mining culture. But his was still a subject class. He and Philip … conducted what could be looked on as some kind of elaborate courtship ritual which would result in his hurtling onto a world stage.”

Philip worked ceaselessly and for years to provide Burton with acting training and opportunities. Burton moved out of his sister’s home into Philip’s “spotless bachelor” quarters at Ma Smith’s.

Philip and Richard with Elizabeth Taylor

“When he was in school I gave him every chance I could to play before an audience, both in the school and in the local YMCA,” Philip recalled in his memoirs. “He loved performing. When he first came to live with me, he showed some envy of his young brother Graham’s success at the local eisteddfodau, the Welsh competitive festivals. I pointed out that his voice had certainly ceased to be soprano, but he pestered me to teach him the solo for the next eisteddfodau. It was Sullivan’s ‘Orpheus with his lute.’ One evening I reluctantly agreed to go back to the school and attempt to teach him the solo. (I was the pianist in the school assembly which began the morning)… Richard faced the nonexistent audience and so couldn’t see my reaction as he gave vent to excruciating sounds. At last, I could contain my laughter no longer. He turned on me in dumbfounded fury. Then he stalked out angrily, exclaiming, ‘I’ll show you. Someday I’ll show you.’

“And he did. On the first night of ‘Camelot’ on Broadway, on Dec. 3, 1960, I went into his crowded dressing room after the performance and he greeted me with: ‘Well, I showed you, didn’t I?’ I didn’t know what he was talking about.”

When they met, Philip’s name was Burton, and Richard’s was Jenkins. To get Richard into a six-month program at Oxford while he was an air cadet, Philip adopted Richard as his ward as a way of resolving what he called the “question-raising ambiguity” of their relationship.

That relationship remained as complicated as it was intense. In an interview with the Telegraph, Rosemary Kingsland claimed she had an affair with Burton when she was 15 and he was 30. She said she believed Burton was referring to Philip when he told her, “There was someone [who had] been in love with me for ages and I knew it. I played him like a fish on a hook to get what I wanted.”

On another occasion, she said Burton called Philip “…a bloody arse-bandit. If I wasn't sitting on it, studying all those bloody books he set me, he would have stuffed himself up it.”

“Richard had built up a deep anger within himself and much of it was directed at Philip Burton,” Kingsland said. “He never mentioned him with affection. There was always a feeling of angst or regret.”

Whatever the relationship was, it remained deep.

“In later years, he always referred to me as his father,” Philip wrote. “He told me that, when he heard in 1957 that his father had died, his immediate reaction was, ‘Which?’” 

The Spy Who Came In to Read Bond

Sean Connery as 007 in "From Russia With Love;' Richard Burton as Leamas in 'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold'

The Spy Who Came In from the Cold — portrayed by film actor Richard Burton — remained cold to Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, at least at first.

“Another brilliant morning. I awoke at nine. I went to bed about nine and read a book of Ian Fleming’s called ‘You Only Live Twice.’ A clever schoolboy mind and atrociously vulgar. And every so often he stops his narrative to give little homilies about food, drink, national morals, etc., all of an excruciating banality. Yet ever since the phenomenal success of the films about his hero James Bond and the books — I’m not sure which came first — and of course his death, he is actually being treated seriously by serious critics.

“I put the light out about midnight and slept for a couple of hours, woke and read a short novel by Nathaniel West, ‘Miss Lonelyhearts.’ What a contrast between that and Fleming. West’s book is taut, spare and agonized while the other is diffuse, urbane and empty. West hates himself and postulates a theory that you are always killed by the thing you love, while Fleming loves only himself, his attraction to women, his sexual prowess, ‘the-hint-of-cruelty-in-the-mouth’ sadistic bit, his absurd and comically pompous attitude to food and cocktails ‘be sure the martini is shaken and not stirred.’

“He has the cordon-blue nerve to attack one of my favorite discoveries: American short-order cooking. I remember with watering mouth the soda fountain on 81^st Street, one block west of the park in Manhattan, where in a blur of conjuring the cook would produce corned-beef hash with a fried egg on top and French fries on the side and a salad with a choice of about four or five dressings. All this magically produced and whipped on to the table, piping hot, before you’d finished the comic strips in the Herald Tribune, or read Red Smith’s wry column.

“Yet you cannot help liking Fleming. He is so obviously enjoying the creation of his extroverted, Hemingwayese, sadistic, sexually maniacal boy scout that in the end he becomes likeable. I rather like him too for his death line, if the reports are true. He was about 57 and had known for some time that he had a diseased heart. He is reputed to have said: “Well, it’s been a hell of a bloody lark.’ And of course, to that bon viveur, woman-chasing intelligently muscled mind it had been.”
— Richard Burton’s journal, March 28, 1969
I think, by the way, the Burton is conning us just a bit here. He knew more about the literary Bond than he could have learned from that one late novel, You Only Live Twice. And although he didn't often go to movies, Burton read hundreds of paperback thrillers, so he'd certainly run across Ian Fleming before, and must have been aware that the novels came a decade before the movies they inspired.