Theatre

One Man And His Liver

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Elizabeth Taylor visits the set of ‘Villain’, 1971.

I became very drunk later and shouted a lot. At E. [Elizabeth Taylor.] I don’t know what about. Just plain sloshed.
Richard Burton diary entry from 1966.

Burton arrived drunk and stayed drunk throughout the film.
From RICH: The Life of Richard Burton by Melvyn Bragg, describing Burton’s condition during the making of The Klansman.

There were some murmurings of disquiet after last week’s entry: too much food, not enough booze, I was told. As a way of making amends, I would like to take a quick look at the later career of Richard Burton, which gives us an opportunity to drink the green room dry. Not the glorious early career at Stratford or the Old Vic or on the BBC Third Programme, or his achievements on film in the fifties and early sixties (Look Back In Anger, Becket, Night Of The Iguana, Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold) …. No, we’re looking at the fag end of his imperial ‘Burton and Taylor’ phase, a maelstrom of fame, excess, a sea of drink, and a lot of ‘failed art’ (to borrow John Waters’s comment on Boom! – see below). Melvyn Bragg’s affectionate biography of Burton offers a fair degree of mitigation for the shambles of his later career. Bragg adduces Burton’s problems with sciatica and problems with his many wives (and of course E.T. in particular) as significant factors, but ultimately can’t avoid the conclusion that he acted badly in so many bad films because he was an alcoholic. This is not quite the blindingly obvious assertion that it appears to be for the simple reason that some legendary thespian soaks were (past tense: who could get away with it now?) very good at staying sober – or at least appearing to be sober – when working. But Burton’s screen performances were all-too-often occluded by drink.

My interest in Burton was piqued because someone I follow on Instagram recently posted a series of fabulously lurid stills from Bluebeard, a 1972 Europudding starring Burton and a trolley’s worth of doomed cheesecake. Helpfully, as is often the case with unloved films financed by bankrupt companies and officially hidden from view, some enterprising person has posted the entire thing on YouTube. I tried watching it but didn’t get far. All you really need to know is that the filmmakers attached a blue false beard to Burton’s face, which no doubt contributed to his cosmically weary – or simply embarrassed – performance. From Bluebeard I went back a few years, to Boom!, a film from 1968 which features 40-something Burton playing ‘a young poet’ alongside Elizabeth Taylor and Noel Coward, all three seemingly determined to defecate upon their reputations. (The script derives from an unsuccessful play by Tennessee Williams and was directed by Joseph Losey, thus making it a significant turd on their CVs as well.) That stupefying film seems to mark the beginning of the end for ‘Dick and Liz’, in professional terms at least; they were to remain the most famous, probably the richest, couple in the world for a few years yet. And Burton went on making bad films. The Klansman, a 1974 film about the Ku-Klux Klan, appears – if the YouTube clips are anything to go by – to be Burton’s absolute nadir. If he looks hungover in Bluebeard, in The Klansman he appears to have suffered a stroke. A reporter for The Chicago Tribune Magazine described Burton (not yet fifty) on set: The once robust and forceful face has a powdery pallor. The irises are bright blue but the white are deeply red, with only flecks of white. On his face is a dazed grin as if he’s been shocked awake under those heavy lights in the midst of surgery.’ This was hardly surprising, given that he was on at least a couple of bottles of vodka a day at that point. This clip shows Burton attempting to perform an action scene when he is clearly incapacitated and has command of only one arm. Declared in imminent danger of death, he was taken to hospital where he spent six weeks drying out; and it was around this time Taylor served him with papers for divorce. The Klansman also starred Lee Marvin, no-one’s idea of a blushing flower yet even he was struck by the recklessness of his co-star’s drinking. Marvin offered a compassionate view: ‘The man’s suffering. Who knows what it is?’ (Incidentally, O.J. Simpson also features in The Klansman; in a strangely prophetic scene, glimpsed in the trailer, he holds Burton’s character as a hostage in a car.) Burton himself offered varying reasons for why he drank, including a primal compulsion he attributed to his Celtic roots, and the gnawing suspicion that acting was, for a man, an inherently homosexual pursuit. This last seems to have been a real anxiety and Gore Vidal is quoted as hearing Burton deliver ‘an extravagant aria’ as to why he, Richard Burton, wasn’t a homosexual. Vidal claimed to cut him off with ‘Who cares Richard? Let’s talk about dermatology. Now there’s a subject!’

Burton and friend in ‘Bluebeard’. There are many things that could be said about that beard but I have decided that I am not going to say any of them.

This last point is intriguing when viewing Burton’s attempts at playing gay characters. Staircase is a disastrous attempt to cast Burton and Rex Harrison as a pair of ageing hairdressers; but Villain, from 1971, is really interesting. Burton plays a Ronnie Kray-like gangster (he loves his mum) in drab early seventies London. Burton is very entertaining in a film that plays like a sort of feature-length episode of The Sweeney, and is none the worse for it. Burton’s camp menace is genuinely unnerving, and the viewer is especially fearful for pretty young Ian McShane who plays his boyfriend. It is a sort of pre-Thatcher precursor of The Long Good Friday, and in recent years its reputation has grown in stature. But the turkeys kept on coming, irredeemable dreck like The Assassination of Trotsky (Losey again), Hammersmith Is Out (which for a long time I thought was a La Cage Aux Folles-type comedy set in west London), a redundant remake of Brief Encounter, and so on. Towards the end, his drinking under some sort of control, there were occasional bright spots, like his turn in Equus, recreating his Broadway performance as the play’s psychiatrist, the title role in Tony Palmer’s biographical mini-series Wagner, and his last film was a well-received version of Orwell’s 1984. He died in the real 1984, a mere fifty- eight years old. Burton’s career is what happens when mega-success meets a monumental addiction to drink. But Burton’s diaries have been published, and they are confessional, insightful and frequently, inadvertently, hilarious. Domestic life with Elizabeth Taylor is the stuff of situation comedy. Sometimes the excess is of a weirdly suburban variety, e.g.: ‘Both E. and I went mad last night and started eating Callard and Bowsers Liquorice Fingers. I must have eaten a pound or so …‘. (This last is worthy of John Shuttleworth.) Elsewhere, the diaries can be genuinely moving. Above all, you like the man. The comments on the business of acting are invaluable; and perhaps the most touching passage is one in which he praises a fellow performer, a man who he declares – with a touch of awe – to be the best actor in the world: Michael Hordern.

Promo material for ‘The Spy Who Came In From The Cold’; Richard Burton sharing a bottle of wine with his favourite colleague.

See also: TV Drunks

London Airs

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Denmark St., with Centre Point looming behind, in 2015.

I have written about old St Giles before: as a dreadful ancient slum, Victorian London’s most fearful rookery, a festering warren inhabited by the poor, according to Charles Dickens, ‘like maggots in a cheese’. Did I mention that there was once a gallows roughly where Centre Point stands now? Seems fitting, especially as the phrase ‘one for the road’ derives from the custom of halting at St Giles to give a final drink to doomed convicts en route from Newgate to execution at Tyburn. (The Bowl and The Angel are both mentioned as pubs known for this charity.) In the 1660s St Giles became notorious as point of origin for the Great Plague, and the areas woes went on and on. Crumbling, fragile Denmark St., laid out in the 1680s, still survives, squeezed by the towering 1960s bombast of Centre Point and an assortment of wind- swept plazas that form an inner-city desert. You would be hard pressed to realize it now but this bit of town was once a mecca for British popular music. The Astoria Theatre, at the northern end of the Charing Cross Rd., was one of the most important clubs for breaking rock bands until it was sacrificed on the altar of Crossrail. A few yards to the north, on the southern reaches of the Tottenham Court Road, in an Irish dancehall (The Blarney, long since bulldozed), you would once have found the pioneer psychedelic club UFO, a short-lived temple to progressive music and expanded consciousness. For a few months in 1967 you could go there on a Friday night to lose your mind to the sounds of Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd or Soft Machine, who were the resident bands, and the hallucinatory light shows (pioneered by Mark Boyle, amongst others) that constituted a new form of art installation.

Billy Fury and manager Larry Parnes.

And you hardly need me to tell you that Denmark St. (‘London’s own Tin Pan Alley!’) used to be London’s music business quarter. In the fifties, this was the fiefdom of Larry Parnes, impresario and Svengali-figure, manager of Tommy Steele, Georgie Fame, and improbably-named singers like Billy Fury, Marty Wilde, Vince Eager, Dickie Pride, Johnny Gentle (these latter supposedly – urban myth alert – re-named by Parnes according to sexual type). Parnes was so risible that he was mocked by Muir and Norden in a famous Peter Sellers sketch, and the 1958 musical Expresso Bongo by Wolf Mankowitz (father of music photographer Gered) satirised Parnes’s domination of the contemporary pop scene. Expresso Bongo was promptly made into a film, wherein the satire was largely ditched in order to make it a star vehicle for Cliff Richard; this seems, somehow, entirely appropriate. Other local fixtures included songwriter Lionel Bart, the jingle genius Johnny Johnston (Softness is a Thing Called Comfort, Beanz Meanz Heinz, and five thousand other commercial ditties), and all the other personalities of the pre-Beatles universe. In the later sixties, The Rolling Stones, The Who, The Kinks, Donovan, Bowie, Hendrix all came here to record, in studios (e.g. Regent Sound, at no.4) carved out of 17th-century basements. The likes of David Bowie and Paul Simon came to schmooze publishers and hang out at the Giaconda coffee bar. Ten years later it was the turn of the phlegm-flecked protégés of Malcolm McLaren (the seventies version of Larry Parnes, plus value-added Situationist bullshit) The Sex Pistols, who rehearsed and lived here for a while. And, whilst he is unlikely to get a blue plaque, the mass-murderer Dennis Nilsen spent the early 1980s working in a jobcentre that used to be on the corner of Denmark St. and the Charing Cross Road (where, at one year’s Christmas staff party, Nilsen served his colleagues punch in a large pot he brought from his home, the same pan he used for boiling his victims’ heads).

Barbara Windsor and Lionel Bart during dress rehearsals for ‘Twang!!’

Wandering a bit further east from Denmark St., past Renzo Piano’s aggressively bright St. Giles Central development, you find Shaftesbury Avenue, St.Giles High St., and Bloomsbury St. converging in an unlovely funnel of tarmac. On the other side of the churning traffic lies the Shaftesbury Theatre, a crumbling Edwardian edifice stranded amidst the one-way system. The Shaftesbury is a survivor, narrowly escaping demolition in the 1970s, during the interminable run of the hippie operetta Hair, which ran from September 1968 until July 1973, when the theatre’s ceiling caved in. The owners, EMI, wanted to redevelop the site but the actor’s union Equity managed to get the building Grade 2 listed and it has since established itself as a successfully venue in a blighted location. The Shaftesbury also played a role in the downfall of local hero Lionel Bart. After rising to prominence as a writer of hits for Larry Parnes’s stable, Bart’s zenith was the celebrated musical Oliver! which opened at the New Theatre (now the Noel Coward theatre) on St Martin’s Lane in June 1960. A few years later, hubris struck as his under-prepared Robin Hood satire Twang!! – that’s two exclamation marks – had its chaotic London premiere at The Shaftesbury in December 1965. Reviews were terrible and the show closed after five weeks. Ignoring the wisdom that one should never invest your own money in your own show, Bart threw his fortune at the mess to try to keep it running and lost just about everything. At one point he sold his Oliver! copyrights to Max Bygraves for something like loose change. (As some of Oliver!‘s numbers were re-workings of old London street cries, this is another eventuality that has a pleasing inevitability about it.)

If 1840s St Giles was the ultimate in city squalor, its 21st century incarnation is the very model of a modern townscape: a sterile concrete tundra, safely contemporary, safely cheerless. Around 1900, London suffered the destruction of Wych St. and environs to create ‘new’ Aldwych and Kingsway, the loss of which it is hard to overstate. That particular act of civic philistinism didn’t just obliterate some of the prettiest streets in the capital, it cauterized life on the streets – which is exactly what it was intended to do, removing ‘unwholesome’ theatres and booksellers and erasing one of London’s cultural centres. The destruction of the area around Denmark Street is the contemporary equivalent. How do we characterise it? A few years ago, I saw chalked graffiti on the hoarding in front of the remains of the 12 Bar club that summed it up …

(Speaking of the Shaftesbury Theatre, there used to be a strange wine bar beneath it, The Grapes, which boasted an Escher-drawing of an interior and small, inadequate tables. It is now another branch of the London Cocktail Club. Some years ago I got into trouble there in a memorable episode which I describe here. A cautionary tale of sorts.)

An Evening With Harold Pinter

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The Long Bar, National Theatre, 2010. Photo: Tamburlaine Pickles.

A Fragment of Bar Life 

by Charles Jennings

The main bar in the Olivier foyer. Late 1970’s. The start of the evening shift. Things are quiet. Three part-time bar staff fumble with peanut packets and bottles of mixers. GARY, the head barman, comes in carrying a crate of soft drinks, which he bangs down on the floor. He is 27 years old; wears tattoos.

PART-TIMER ONE (looking at GARY’s face, which sports a glowering black eye): What happened to your eye, Gary?

GARY says nothing, goes to fetch another crate. The PART-TIMERS shrug. GARY returns and crashes the fresh crate down.

GARY: Pinter.

PART-TIMER TWO: Harold Pinter?

GARY: Fucking stuck one on me.

Pause

PART-TIMER ONE: He stuck one on you?

GARY: I hate that fucking bloke.

Pause

PART-TIMER TWO: Why?

GARY: What?

PART-TIMER TWO: You hate him?

GARY: He can stick one on me, I can’t hit him back. Cause he’s Pinter.

Pause

PART-TIMER THREE: Why’d he stick one on you?

Pause

GARY: I was making too much noise with the crates. He was in the theatre, listening. He said he could hear the crates out here during all those fucking pauses. Fucking Betrayal.

Pause

He came out and smacked me.

Pause

I could have fucking killed him. I’d have fucking laid him out. He’s a cunt, Pinter.

The PART-TIMERS affect a keen interest in their work. GARY stands in the centre of the bar, looking out into the empty foyer.

Harold Pinter in avuncular mood, circa 1980. (Getty.)

Charles Jennings is a writer based in London. His non-fiction titles include ‘Them And Us’, ‘The Fast Set’, ‘Up North’, etc. He was also one half of the bibulous blog ‘Sediment (I’ve Bought It So I’ll Drink It)’, now available in book form.