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Skribent: Simon
Emne: Re: Mellemrummet
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Her en fin historie fra en poetisk skribent og gudsbenådet skuespiller, der desværre døde alt for tidligt, nøjagtig som hans gode ven Dylan Thomas o.a. gjorde, men som alligevel overlever i vort indre i kraft af enestående oplevelser i enten teatret eller på lærredet, hans genius og karismatiske personlighed, som især stikker igennem i interviews.
Man må i øvrigt nyde godt af hans vittige og til tider ironiske tankelandskaber i den vidunderlige ’The Richard Burton Diaries’ (edited by Chris Williams), bogen som vennen – og heldigvis nulevende – Robert Hardy anser for værket Richard Burton så alligevel fik skrevet, ja dvs. ved siden af to andre fine små historier, nemlig ’A Christmas Story’ og ’Meeting Mrs. Jenkins’. Men altså, her én til smilebåndet, og ikke mindst for de af os der kender situationen med at vente på fruen…
Richard Burton’s ‘The Trials Of Travel With Liz'
Travelling with Elizabeth Taylor is a kind of exquisite pain. Let me explain why this is: I am ferociously over-punctual, whereas Elizabeth is idolently the opposite. I love Elizabeth to the point of idolatry, but - let's repeat that 'but' - she will unquestionably be late for the Last bloody Judgement. And, infuriatingly, she is always breathtakingly on time. She actually misses no train, or plane or boat, but of course misses the fact that her husband has had several minor heart attacks waiting for her while he shifts a shivering Scotch to his quivering mouth to his abandoned liver, waiting, waiting, waiting for her to come out of the lavatory.
And the hooters howl or somebody says, 'All aboard' or 'last call for flight 109 to Los Angeles,' and not standing there is my stupendously serene lady, firmly believing that time waits for no man but her. In a sense I am one of the original boys who watched the train go by and lusted for London and, indeed, I finally caught that train and never went back and never will.
Elizabeth is not the only one of her sex who thinks that a hair's breadth is half a mile wide. I have a sister-in-law who for years has been catching the 10.55 from Paddington to Port Talbot, resolutely believing that it's the 9.55. She has never understood why the train is always an hour late. But travel has become to us, as to most itinerant professionals, a part of our lives. We have been forced by habit to become doomed nomads, incapable any more of being sweet stay-at-homes, sweet lie-a-beds, forced to work around the world. We find nowadays that staying in any one place for more than - shall we say - three months is intolerable. And there is no place we've been to that we don't love.
We love New York (but not in June) and Los Angeles and London and Paris and San Francisco and Puerta Vallarta and Gstaad and that rough country of my heart, Wales, and even Ireland, though the land is so unharsh that it gives a cragged moored felled fenned man like me a touch of the creeps.
We sit around in the middle of the night wherever we are and dream of places we have been to - my wife is a bad sleeper and worries about spiders and mosquitoes - and in the middle of the night is sometimes an open forum as to where you would like to be now. And she says, or I say, perhaps in Paris, 'Wouldn't you sell your soul for an ordinary drugstore where you can have hamburgers or coleslaw or corned beef hash with an egg on top?'
And then again we're in New York and again we awake at the dying time of night and dream of a bistro in Switzerland or some of the remoter regions of France unspoiled by Michelin or a trattoria in Italy nestling at the foot of a hill at the top of which is a magnificent church and there is a turbulent red wine and salami and cheese that crumbles in the hand, falling down its own face like a landslide. We separate countries into foods.
Then there is, of course, the press. I mean photographers. If they are not there to meet us off the plane or train or boat, I lament the end of our careers. If they are, I blame Elizabeth for being too notorious. What can you do? What can she do? You're damned if they're there and you're damned if they're not.
However, travelling with Elizabeth has its compensations. She loves it. Porters and stewards and even stewardesses reward her with enormous over-attention and therefore I get a little on the side. Customs men from Port Said to Porto Santo Stefano grace her with a kiss on the hand. Grim men at Chicago and Dover wish her well. I remember once going into a restaurant, a famous one, in the South of France, and there were so many cars outside that we couldn't pull up to the entrance. We had two of our dogs with us. They ran ahead and up the steps into the restaurant. We had forgotten that dogs are forbidden in the place. The head waiter came out in a passion of outrage looking like an impersonation of Peter Ustinov impersonating a head waiter and with a shuddering admonitory finger was about to order them out when suddenly he saw Elizabeth and the cosmic gesture of dismissal turned, in a flash, into the most sycophantic leering smile of welcome that it has been my privilege to see. I laughed for the rest of the day. So much so that I allowed them to overcharge me. After all, one hundred dollars for two bowls of soup and two quenelles de brochet and two mille-feuilles is going a bit far, I think. They fed the dogs too. By hand. Very sweet. We've never been back.
But back to the drawbacks. how would you like to have a shoe of your wife's stolen off her foot by some fanatical fool at an airport - one of several thousand fools on this particular occasion - and feel the urgency of the crowd toppling you inexorably, it seemed at the time, into a trampled and affectionate death? How would you like to pass your small daughter over the heads of the madding crowd to a friend, all of us shouting in a language we didn't know? How would you like your wife to be hit in the stomach by a paparazzo because he wanted an unusual photograph? It happened, you know. No jokes. Honest to God, he hit my wife in the stomach. I wasn't there or I would have long ago walked Death Row. Or how would you like to travel from Paris to Geneva with two nannies, four children, five dogs, two secretaries, a budgerigar, and a turtle who has to be kept permanently in water, and a wildcat, and 140 bags and Rex Harrison edging his way through the narrow bag-seiged foyer screaming in a low mutter - this was in the Lancaster Hotel in the Rue de Berri - 'Why do the Burton's have to be so filthily ostentatious?'
Well, I'll tell you, it's a tough old ride, but I wouldn't swap the privilege of travelling with Elizabeth for anything on earth
- Richard Burton.
mvh
Simon
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