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Posts: 15177
Location: Hong Kong
Joined: August 8, 2001
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The Richard Burton Diaries : ...Thursday 14th, Beverly Hills Hotel
Those who had told us that Lucille Ball was 'very wearing' were not exaggerating. She is a monster of staggering charmlessness and monumental lack of humour. She is not 'wearing' to us because I suppose we refuse to be worn. I am coldly sarcastic with her to the point of outright contempt but she hears only what she wants to hear.
She is a tired old woman and lives entirely on that weekly show which she has been doing and successfully doing for 19 years. Nineteen solid years of double-takes and pratfalls and desperate up-staging and cutting out other people's laughs if she can, nervously watching the 'ratings' as she does so. A machine of enormous energy, which driven by a stupid driver who has forgotten that a machine runs on oil as well as gasoline and who has neglected the former, is creaking badly towards a final convulsive seize-up.
I loathed her the first day. I loathed her the second day and the third. I loathe her today but now I also pity her. After tonight I shall make a point of never seeing her again.
The hitherto impeccably professional Joan Crawford was so inhibited by this behemoth of selfishness that she got herself stupendously crocked for the actual show and virtually had to be helped to her feet and managed, not without some satisfaction I dare say, to bugger up the whole show.
I said very loudly after yawning prodigiously and being asked by the director, a nice but not overly brilliant man called Jerry Paris, whether I was tired or bored or what, that I was not particularly any of those things but was puzzled as to why anybody who didn't have to for financial reasons et al. would submit themselves to this mindless routine week after week for 19 years. Miss Ball and her apology of a husband who was sitting beside me said nothing at all. The husband is a man called Gary Morton, who laughs at all her 'takes' etc. however often she does them and whether well or not.
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