How a sober Richard Burton opened up on his booze hell
RICHARD BURTON was a hero of mine long before I ever saw him act. In the Sixties, I bought a recording of Under Milk Wood with Burton playing the narrator. I knew it line by line.
At the time of our interview he was a recovering alcoholic who had just returned from a stay in a clinic in Switzerland.
The interview was to take place late morning and we decided not to have any booze on show.
Burton seemed edgy while waiting and, as soon as his girlfriend left, asked for a drink. His hands were shaking. One of his entourage produced a whisky. It seemed to settle him, the trembling calmed, and he said he was ready.
Because it was taking place in the morning we had been unable to round up an audience.
Instead, we tannoyed around the BBC that Richard Burton was to be interviewed and asked anyone who was interested to come along. The majority of people free at that time were chefs and kitchen staff so, when I introduced him, he was faced with an audience of people in white coats. ‘Christ, I thought I was back at the bloody clinic,’ he said.
It was a memorable interview. He told of playing Hamlet, with Winston Churchill in the audience speaking the lines with him. ‘I couldn’t shake him off, whatever I did, wherever I went. “To be or not to be,” he was with me to the very end. Afterwards, I thought he might come backstage. We waited but he didn’t come, so I thought I might as well get sloshed. I was just about to start when the door opened and there was Sir Winston.
‘He bowed very graciously and, very courteously, said: “My Lord Hamlet, may I use your lavatory?”’
Burton told me that when the drinking was at its worst he was consuming up to three bottles of hard liquor a day.
He said: ‘Trying to get some food into my mouth was an extraordinary business.
‘I was in a Roman Catholic hospital in Santa Monica and I insisted that I fed myself. I held the spoon, but my hands would not obey me. They flew all over the place. ‘A friend of mine who was there said: “I know you’re in a Roman Catholic hospital, but there is no need for you to make the sign of the cross every time you eat.”’
He said he had been on the edge of a ‘terrible precipice’, but had survived and had decided to regain control of his life.
He didn’t. He died of a brain haemorrhage in 1984, aged 59.