Richard Burton Diaries Part Two: 'Marlon has yet to learn to speak 19 September 1967 Noël Coward arrived looking very old and slightly sloshed and proceeded to get more sloshed. He embarrassed us both separately and lavished compliments on E about her beauty and her brilliance as an actress. He is a most generous man but he is beginning to lose the fine edge of his wit or perhaps like me he repeats himself when tipsy. Marlon [Brando] has yet to learn to speak. Christ knows how often I've watched Marlon ruin his performance by underarticulation. He should have been born two generations before and acted in silent films. Ken [Tynan] has always looked like Belsen with a suit on. Dachau in Daks. Buchenwald in brown velvet. John Heyman said yesterday that Ken has always written with a pen in one hand and Roget's Thesaurus in the other. He may be right at that. 8 August 1969 [Anthony Quayle] blew his top when JG [John Gielgud] said he'd been to see [Peter Brook's Marat/Sade] three or four times and thought it was miraculous or marvellous or whatever the latest adjective was that he'd picked up that morning as he passed T S Eliot in St James's Park on the way to the nearest lavatory. John has become a send-up of himself. I am just a child of nature, I don't know what I'm doing. Give me the words and I'll get on with the job. Is the war over, I'm so glaaaad. What is remarkable is that we [Taylor and Burton] have stayed up there so long. Instance Julie Andrews who on the strength of one picture, the horrible Sound of Music, has stayed up for about five years but now the lads in Hollywood tell me that as a result of two big failures she is really out. Not only that but she has had her head turned so it appears from her enormous initial success and winning the Oscar, etc, [she is now] turning up late or not at all and sometimes for days. How fast the moods change - two years ago she was the darling of America and now she's hardly ever talked about. 14 April 1970, Beverly Hills Hotel Those who told us that Lucille Ball was "very wearing" were not exaggerating. She is a monster of staggering charmlessness and monumental lack of humour. I loathed her the first day. I loathed her the second day and the third. I loathe her today but I now also pity her. E made me jealous as vengeance by saying she'd called Marlon [Brando] on the phone and that they had talked for an hour and he had been very solicitous about me. He really is a smugly pompous little b------ and is cavalier about everybody except Black Panthers and Indians. "He's been keeping tabs on you," said E. That infuriated me even more. That sober self-indulgent obese f--- being solicitous about me. You can't get any of those surrounded-by-sycophants one-time-winners on the phone unless they want something from you. Sinatra is the same. Gods in their own mirrors. Distorted mirrors. 13 September 1971 I love Larry [Olivier] but he really is a shallow little man with a mediocre intelligence but a splendid salesman. 2 November 1971 Why do the audience look at Paul Scofield and not me? He walks like a pimp, he's got a patently false voice, he's elephant-a---- and thin-chested and minute-shouldered and here stand I the shining and superb son of a hundred earls and yet they look at Scofield and his apology for acting. 14 February 1972 I don't think I will get a facelift like that abject Rod Steiger who not only admits to it but it makes him look like one half of a naked a------. He says he can't get any jobs and will soon be broke. It might be because people don't want to be looking at a talking a------.