The colourful life of legendary actor Richard Burton comes alive with the publication of his diaries. Richard Edmonds reports.

You could argue without fear of contradiction that lovers have always been central to world literature, since love and lovers have always been the fire at which we have all warmed our hands and famous names have always made the historical headlines.

It probably began with Adam and Eve, later came Eloise and Abelard, Arthur and Guinevere, Romeo and Juliet, the Ladies of Llangollen, Scarlett and Rhett and the Windsors.

And now we have Burton and E.T. – a flashy extra-terrestrial from outer space if ever there was one.

This publication of The Richard Burton Diaries sets into a single volume the fascinating, colourful (and frequently indiscreet) surviving diaries of Richard Burton Jenkins who managed to travel from a Welsh mining village to the courts of Ancient Egypt in a life filled with exhausting incident, much of which tips into these fascinating pages.

At Burton’s memorial service in August 1984, the other great Welsh actor, Emlyn Williams, said, at the end of his eulogy, “Diaries? Autobiography? Time will tell and may surprise”.

Williams was right. The surprises are all here, from a man who had no truck with social elitism, who was sophisticated without cynicism and was fascinated by human kind in all its forms, and who was equally a great, if slightly dangerous, companion in the theatre, as I know from friends who have worked alongside him and watched his bar bill soar.

We write diaries for ourselves and those who come after us.

Diaries can record equally our small joys, our spleen, our resentments at the deal life doles out to us or our personal “take” on a monumental experience.

They are a bore to compile and a pleasure to read. After March 1972, Burton’s diaries are more fragmented. But to what extent can one explain these frequent lapses from continual writing? In my own case, it’s boredom. A great experience is allowed to slip past and I find I have written down a bit of tittle-tattle of no interest to anyone in the future.

Most diarists are like this, and Burton began early in a school notebook. Later on, the diaries were expensive affairs in tooled leather with “R.B.” in gilt letters. They were gifts from Taylor.

On May 10, 1940 (the day the Germans launched their blitzkrieg in Europe), the 14-year-old Richard Jenkins – his name changed later – wrote this: “Holland, Luxembourg and Belgium, invaded by Adolf and his crazy gang. I think this Germany’s first and great mistake. Played tennis with Dai (his brother). He won”.

A few weeks later, the Welsh schoolboy kept a note of what occurred on June 1, 1940: “Did all my errands as usual and changed my library books in the afternoon. Went to The Regent (cinema) and I saw a picture called The Four Feathers. Showed what family tradition can do to a man. This man was sent four white feathers. But he proved them wrong”.

Burton records the moment with a flashing skill. He could have become a novelist, perhaps evading the puerile quality that pervades much new fiction. After all, we live today in a godless world where infinite oceans of information dazzle us with a specious promise to extend the terminal shut-down that faces us all.

Burton was aware of this philosophical mendacity and wrote on January 10, 1969:

“The more I read about man and his maniacal ruthlessness and his murdering, envious, scatalogical soul, the more I realise he will never change.

“Our stupidity is immortal, the same mistakes, the same prejudices, the same injustice. I wish I could believe in a God of some kind but I simply cannot.

“My intelligence is too muscular and I have an idea that the last sound to be heard on this lovely planet will be a man screaming in fear and terror. It might be me.”

At one point in a long career, he combined his love of the academic and appeared in a production of Marlowe’s masterpiece: Dr Faustus.

Burton played Faustus. Taylor was Helen of Troy.

An American magazine review noted that he was excellent, but when slightly overweight Taylor appeared in a costume heavy on bling, she mostly resembled the front bumper of a Buick! I could find little of that theatrical foray here, and in a similar way there is little on the Cleopatra debacle.

But this complex and persuasive man also has his deeply amusing side. The diaries have been edited, but what we get is frequently hilarious. In December 1971, Burton and Elizabeth Taylor were guests at the Rothschild’s Proust Ball – a magnificent diamonds and champagne affair with le tout Paris and others dressed as characters from Marcel Proust’s novel A La Recherche du Temps Perdu. It was staged at Ferriere, the Rothschild’s chateau.

Elizabeth wore loaned diamonds in her hair, which Burton notes he may one day purchase for her.

At one point he struggles to get to his table and notes it takes 15 minutes “after having trod on endless trains and knocked aside several coiffures”.

Then his attention is riveted amongst all the drinking and noise by the man sitting opposite.

“He looked like a cadaver when still and a failure of plastic surgery when he moved. He was eyebrow-less and eyelash-less with snow white hair at the front and brownish hair (like mine) at the back. His face was hideously pasted with make-up and had odd lumps on it – a face made of putty by an inept child. He leaned forward and said: “Where’s my Elizabeth?”.

Ah, I said, she is ah, at the other end, if you know what I mean...he said, “I wish she were here”. So do I, I said!

It was Andy Warhol.

Taylor had by this time joined up with Princess Grace of Monaco (sans Rainier who seems to have got the dates wrong). “The lucky b******s had Guy [de Rothschild] Maurice Herzog, the Himalayan mountaineer and the Duchess of Windsor.

“The star turn according to E. and Grace, was the Duchess who is getting slightly ga-ga.

“She has an enormous feather in her hair which got into everything, the soup, the gravy, the ice cream and at every vivacious turn of her head, it smacked Guy sharply in the eyes or the mouth and threatened to get stuck in Guy’s false moustache which was glued on.

“After dinner, Guy asked E. if she would help him to remove his moustache which was becoming a bore.”

Apparently de Rothschild and Taylor fought their way through the guest whirlpool and went into the gents’ lavatory, where minutes later, the fashion model Bettina arrived and, finding Taylor wiping de Rothschild’s mouth with a tissue, suspected a clandestine liaison.

“At one moment,” Burton continues, “Marie-Helene (de Rothschild) looked me straight in the face, at a distance of one-and-a-half feet, and said: Where’s Richard?

She’s as blind as a bat. “It is I - Hamlet the Dane,” I said.

Whereupon she screamed and went off at a tremendous pace forgetting to take me with her to meet a woman who was dying to meet me.”

And so it went on until next day, with Cecil Beaton taking the snaps which eventually he published to his own advantage.

“Ah,” said a rather pushy guest, who had cornered Princess Grace that evening, insisting that she must remember this or that acquaintance from the past, “if only we were here for 2,000 years.”

“Rather than just 1,000 said I”

Sometimes Burton seems to be scarcely to be pausing to draw breath. There is a constant parade of stars and personalities. You get what he feels about them, and then what E. says or doesn’t say. The canvas is huge although 20 years are lost. The diary shifts from 1940 to 1960, cutting all Burton’s early work in the theatre, particularly his wonderful Henry V in the 1951 season at the Memorial Theatre Stratford-upon-Avon, a season which eventually led to Hollywood, My Cousin Rachel and The Robe.

But there is much here to fascinate.

He decides to buy her a plane so that they can get across the Atlantic a little more quickly, then he laments how little interest he has in his career, his present or his future.

He frets what will happen to E. should he die first. He talks about his secret shame at being an actor, and you feel worth is still being measured at the back of his mind by a yardstick he learned in a humble mining family in the Welsh valleys.

Perhaps there is something a little gauche in these gushing confessions, and perhaps, at heart, Burton had a deep-down ambition to write something exceptional one day, realising, in fact, that that day was unlikely ever to come.

The huge amount of detail here make these confessional details into compelling reading.

With Welsh candour and a good sense of the immediate, Burton brings colour, life and meaning back into diary literature and he reminded me of something J.B.Priestley once confided to me at a Stratford reception where he had arrived late and had time to talk to me.

I asked Priestley about the Hollywood characters shown in a nearby photo display. Buster Keaton, Randolph Scott and Carole Lombard were lolling against a 1930s Hispano-Suiza in the Californian sunshine.

“It was bloody ridiculous”, said Priestley, who was a script writer in Hollywood at that time,

“The men wore grubby tennis whites and the women wore emeralds with bathing costumes - ridiculous - but never boring”. I felt the same about these diaries.

* The Richard Burton Diaries, edited by Chris Williams, are published by Yale, £25.