Despite the harshness of the area, there was a keen sense of humour amongst the inhabitants and great communal pride. Life was simple. The milkman delivered from a large churn on a cart. If you weren’t in, no problem, you just left a jug on the windowsill and it was full when you returned home. No one would think of stealing it. O’Toole found comfort in the closeness and kinship of his family. It was Constance who kept the household together. ‘My little mum fair tore into troublesome tasks and made them seem glad duties.’ For extra money she did cleaning jobs around the district.
There were warm memory-making weekend outings, like catching the tram to Roundhay Park, where the youngster spent hours in its enchanted woods or down by the lake, and excursions to the nearby market town of Otley to bathe in its outdoor swimming pool. He played football on Hunslet Moor and rugby in the streets with a loaf of bread instead of a ball. There were special trips with his dad to the Moo Cow Milk Bar, or ‘Peter’s pub’, Patrick christened it, to drink thick flavoured milkshakes through a straw. Then it was off to the pictures to watch a programme of news reels, cartoons and one-reelers. Young Peter loved Donald Duck and Popeye, and the madcap antics of the Three Stooges. Watching King Kong for the first time had a profound effect as he found himself rooting for the huge hairy beasty against the nasty humans. For Peter the picture palace was a place of wonder and enchantment, and he never forgot the afternoon his dad took him to see a matinee performance of the Marx Brothers’ A Day at the Races with what seemed like the entire horse-racing fraternity of Leeds.
One of his earliest memories was whizzing down hills on his bicycle one day with such wild abandon that after a while he’d no clue whatsoever where he was. In front of him was a half-painted lamp post – the worker had gone off for lunch, leaving his brushes and pots behind. Young Peter decided to finish the job himself and was found by a policeman, covered in green paint, and marched off to the nearest police station. ‘I remember looking up at the desk, all white tile, white as a nun’s hand, and then I remember seeing a big fucking nasty looking down at me.’ Once back home he was dunked into the bath and smothered with turpentine and scrubbed as if he was a dirty pan. As punishment his bike was confiscated and he was told never again to wander off. Fat chance, the young O’Toole was always AWOL. ‘Always where he shouldn’t be, rarely where he should,’ as his mother used to say.
Dressed in a dark suit, spats and his trademark billycock bowler hat, Patrick was a familiar face around the racecourses of Yorkshire. The Captain was unmistakable, with his hat tilted to one side, a cigarette perpetually stuck on his lips and his fingers wrapped round a pint of Guinness. On special occasions Peter was allowed to accompany him. He loved the excitement of the race track, the jockeys in their multi-coloured silks, the hubbub of the crowd, the parade of horses in the paddock and the bookies all shouting the odds, white-gloved tic-tac men with their weird hand gestures. Sometimes Patrick miscalculated the odds and would need to scarper in a hurry. Grabbing little Peter’s hand he’d urge, ‘C’mon, son, let’s be off!’ and the two of them would slip through the shrubbery, not returning to the track for a few weeks.
It was a bizarre and haphazard lifestyle, with the whole family’s income resting on success or failure at the racetrack. ‘When he’d come home after a good day, the whole room would light up. It was fairyland,’ O’Toole recalled. ‘When he lost, it was black. In our house, it was either a wake or a wedding.’
For some inexplicable reason O’Toole was nicknamed ‘Bubbles’ as a child: ‘That cost me a lot of lumps.’ He was very sweet and adorable looking, and rather tubby, ‘with a mop of golden hair that I’ve tried to keep straight ever since’. But he was plagued by ill health. ‘You mention it, I had it.’ His eyes were a particular cause for concern and he underwent a series of traumatic operations, eight on his left eye alone. The trouble persisted into adulthood; he was especially susceptible to bright light and had to wear special dark glasses. There is also evidence that his eyesight was further damaged during the shooting of Lawrence of Arabia. Actress Jane Merrow, while working with O’Toole on The Lion in Winter, remembers him telling her that David Lean insisted on some occasions that he stare directly into the sun. ‘It is abusive behaviour in a way,’ says Jane. ‘It’s misusing your actors to get the effect that you want.’
At the age of six O’Toole was raced by taxi to hospital with his mother. He’d complained all day of stomach ache but when suddenly the pain turned acute Constance thought something was very wrong. His appendix had burst leaving him with an infected abdomen and in the days before antibiotics the chances of survival for children weren’t too hopeful. O’Toole underwent an emergency operation to remove the infection and was then swiftly moved to another hospital and placed in an isolation ward. When his parents and sister visited they weren’t even allowed in the same room and had to make do with viewing him through a glass partition. Over the course of several months Peter recovered and was allowed back home, but he was weak, non-communicative and couldn’t walk long distances. With encouragement he soon returned to his impish self. But it had been a traumatic experience for sure.
These medical misfortunes undeniably affected his schooling, and while he could read and write to a good standard by the age of four he was by inclination a poor pupil. School was ghastly and an institution to make one’s escape from as soon as possible. About the only subject he enjoyed and was any good at was English composition. Being good Roman Catholics the O’Tooles entrusted their son to the care of Jesuit priests and ‘flapping nuns with white, withered hands’, in O’Toole’s words. ‘They’d never held a man, those hands.’ He used to be scared stiff of them; ‘their whole denial of womanhood, the black dresses, the shaving of the hair, it was all so horrible, so terrifying’. A penchant for rapping his knuckles with a ruler every time he attempted to write with his left hand instead of his right hardly helped the situation. Perhaps subconsciously, O’Toole always employed his right hand in times of violence, smashing it through glass, into concrete and people’s faces. And it had the scars to prove it. As for his left hand, it was smoother than a baby’s backside.
In art one day when he drew a picture of a horse and was asked by one of the nuns whether there was something else that might enhance the scene, the young O’Toole drew a huge dangling dick gushing piss into a foamy ferment. The nuns immediately tore the offending picture up and started to wildly hit him round the head.
The unfairness of being punished for merely expressing himself did not sit well with the young O’Toole. Nor did the religious discipline and doctrine, coming as he did from a household of gambling and drinking. He did, however, enjoy the theatricality of religion, the pomp and ceremony of its rituals, and successfully applied to be an altar boy. ‘I loved every second of it. The mass was my first performance, it’s as simple as that.’ At this age he still believed in the concept of there being a god, of some benign divinity. When sweets were rationed during the war he sacrificed his toffees to a church charity.
By 1939 the omnipresence of God jostled for space inside the O’Toole psyche with an altogether less benevolent obsession. At the cinema one afternoon the cartoons had finished when on came the newsreels. There was a fat Italian, all done up with medals, who looked like one of the Three Stooges but he was getting pelters and ripe raspberries from the audience. ‘Then along came Hitler and there were no raspberries and I was physically ill at the age of six, seeing this man.’
Adolf Hitler was the bogeyman of O’Toole’s childhood, and his obsession with ‘this profoundly strange mincing little dude from Linz’ was never to leave him. His memories of the war never dimmed either, of trenches being dug and air-raid shelters springing up, and windows covered with crossed strips of tape to prevent injury from flying glass. At school the teachers warned that Hitler intended to send over poisonous gas and each child was given a gas mask in a plain cardboard box with a string carrying strap. One afternoon in the playground everybody was told to put on their gas masks as a
teacher opened a canister and thick white smoke poured out. Either O’Toole hadn’t put his mask on correctly or it had malfunctioned because the tear gas got into his eyes and mouth, producing vicious bouts of vomiting. In spite of the soothing attempts of his mother his eyes burned for days.
While Leeds didn’t suffer as badly as other major cities, O’Toole remembered the ear-piercing sound of the sirens going off and running to the cellar with his family to hide and huddle together as the bombs rained down. One seemed to land nearby, exploding with such ferocity that Patrick instinctively threw himself over his son to protect him. In fact the bomb landed almost two miles away and next morning Peter and his sister Patricia went to investigate. It was the library and museum that had been hit and strewn around the street was the surreal image of burnt books and a charred stuffed giraffe.
After bombing raids it wasn’t unusual for children to run and play amongst the craters, looking for shrapnel and other paraphernalia. Rummaging around one particular wasteland with his mates Peter came across a slim metallic object. ‘Finders keepers,’ he cried and picked it up proudly to carry it off back home. Outside a butcher’s they sat a while to rest. One of the customers took one look at what they were holding, dropped his dinner to the pavement and hollered, ‘Piss off, lads, it’s a bomb.’ Taking the thing at arm’s length he placed it carefully in the middle of the road and with the help of the shop owner surrounded it with sandbags. The police were called and Peter walked home, minus his prize.
Another night he and his dad left the sanctuary of the cellar and opened the front door to watch the spectacle of searchlights in the sky and tracer bullets whirring about. Suddenly there was a white flash and an ear-shattering bang, followed by a heat blast so powerful that it actually lifted them off their feet. They were alive, if slightly singed: ‘Completely awed, completely frightened.’ Such incidents left their emotional mark, how could they not. ‘It’s one of the most incredible experiences in the world, being bombed,’ he’d say. ‘You play this mad, demented, passive role. I tell you, if you haven’t been bombed, you haven’t lived. Perhaps if more people had been bombed, they might be less generous in their supply of bombs.’
With the country in need of skilled labourers, Patrick applied for war work and landed a job repairing ships at a restricted naval base that kept him away from home all week. Every night without fail Constance would walk two hundred yards to the nearest phone booth to call her husband, often with Peter in tow. Not much of a journey, but this was the time of the blackout and mother and son would have to scramble around the streets in the pitch black, clinging to each other, sometimes stumbling and falling, shuffling along alleys, searching their way with their fingers. Sometimes they’d get lost in the dark and have to sense their way back home.
With no end in sight to the war and some schools closing, the eight-year-old Peter was evacuated to the Midlands and taken in by a kindly but dour couple. He remembers not feeling sad or apprehensive as he was loaded onto a train, a cardboard label stuck to his coat with a safety pin and his gas mask full of sandwiches. He went to the village school, adopted a new gang of friends, went scrumping in nearby orchards and played at Robin Hood in the woodlands. In one field they came across a well and saw buried deep down it a mysterious object the size and shape of a rugby ball. It was decided that O’Toole be lowered down to investigate. Hoping it wasn’t another of those unexploded bombs, Peter gave it a good kick, only to realize he had disturbed a wasps’ nest. A swarm of the bastards encircled him and began dive-bombing attacks. Scrambling out, he and his mates all ran for their lives.
Back in Leeds, Peter was met with the dreaded news that government men with bowlers and brollies were rounding up rogue children and sending them back to school. It didn’t take long for O’Toole’s collar to be felt and he was sent off to a school that was about as much fun as a penal colony. He played hooky as often as he could, and was sent to yet another school where he lasted precisely thirty minutes. It wasn’t his fault, some bright spark set fire to one of the desks and the whole place had to be evacuated. Arrangements were made instead to allow him to attend the Catholic school that he had gone to as an infant. Here he was held in great reverence by the other pupils as he was ‘popularly elected commander-in-chief of research into the dirty bits in the bible, possessor and generous distributor of dog-ends and whole cigarettes acquired from a wide acquaintance of adults, supplier of copies of Picturegoer whose covers provide inspiration for masturbators in the air raid shelters, considered a bit of a whizz at playground cricket, youngest member of the school swimming team and seldom out of the frame at high pissing’.
He was also quite handy with the bagpipes, having joined a local outfit of pipers and dancers called Lord Kilmorey’s Own Hibernians. Indeed, O’Toole always claimed that the bravest thing he ever did in his life was walk through Hunslet at the age of eleven, ‘when I was a Little Lord Fauntleroy in a kilt’.
For the majority of his years in education, religion was an overpowering part of O’Toole’s life. It seeped into his soul, and for a while he flirted with the notion of the priesthood. There was a favourite Jesuit tutor who liberally sprinkled his speech with the word bloody and said that there was more faith in honest doubt than there was in reciting a thousand hollow Our Fathers. He also never forgot the time he caught one of the priests enjoying a crafty drag on a cigarette in church. Surely this was a sin, admonished O’Toole. Sharp as a button the priest replied that the bishop had personally told him that it was all right to smoke in church, just so long as he prayed at the same time.
As he approached adolescence O’Toole’s faith reached crisis point. By the age of fifteen he no longer practised Catholicism and stopped believing altogether not long after, referring to himself as ‘a retired Christian’. Under the harsh scrutiny of a teenager’s view of the world the tenets of religion had come up wanting. It wasn’t helped by tales of priests with wandering hands. ‘It was abominable. I was lucky. I wasn’t affected by it. The hard kids put a needle in their trousers so that when the priest went to touch them they got a nasty shock.’
In a 1960s interview with Playboy O’Toole criticized his religious upbringing and the Catholic Church in general. For weeks after he got angry letters from priests and nuns. ‘They were shocked. I wrote back saying I was shocked – what were they doing reading Playboy.’
TWO
O’Toole left school with scarcely a backward glance. He’d no qualifications, as he had not sat a single exam, his one ambition was to flog second-hand Jaguars. He ended up instead working in a warehouse wrapping up parcels, learning the handy trick of breaking string without the aid of scissors. It was a friendly local priest who recognized potential in this wayward urchin and managed to persuade one of his parishioners, who happened to be the general manager of the Yorkshire Evening News, to take him on as a copyboy. O’Toole’s mundane duties consisted of taking typed stories from desk to desk, making tea and buying horse meat for the chief photographer. In time he took on more responsibilities and graduated to apprentice press photographer. It was the beginning of a love affair with the art of photography that never waned. On his very last film, Katherine of Alexandria, O’Toole was often invited to look through the camera lens and on a few occasions director Michael Redwood even allowed the actor to come up with the composition of certain shots. ‘His eye for photography was extraordinary.’
By the time he was sixteen, O’Toole had begun doing little bits of reporting on local cricket and football matches, along with the odd article and reviews of films and some theatrical productions. He remembered going to see Laurel and Hardy at Leeds’ Empire Palace Theatre on behalf of the paper and going backstage to meet them. In a bid to improve his usage of the English language he took to reading more and enrolled in night school, having reached the conclusion that education was a vastly important thing and since he hadn’t got very much of it at school he’d better hurriedly acquire some. This rush for self-enlightenment earned him an affectio
nate nickname amongst his newspaper colleagues, ‘the bard of the bog’.
As a junior reporter O’Toole regularly popped into the numerous city centre pubs, his lanky frame filled out with a heavy raincoat, cigarette nonchalantly positioned in the corner of his mouth, newspaper under his arm and a flat cap, props to up his age to the required eighteen. ‘It didn’t always work but it was well worth a try and, anyway, what could they do, shoot me?’
Every Saturday lunchtime reporters from the city’s two main papers, the Evening News and the Yorkshire Evening Post, met up for a heavy drinking session. O’Toole always tagged along, usually in the company of a journalist he’d befriended on the News, a fellow Hunslet lad by the name of Willis Hall, the working-class son of an engineer’s fitter. He had his eyes on a pretty lass, barely sixteen, who often showed up on these afternoons with a wild-looking individual with flaming red hair called Keith Waterhouse. Waterhouse had taken this young girl under his wing after she’d left the Post’s typing pool to become a junior reporter. Her name was Barbara Taylor. Waterhouse always dragged her along to these boozy sessions but insisted she always leave after two pints for fear she might turn into one of the lads. That didn’t stop O’Toole fancying his chances, as Barbara recalls. ‘Peter always used to ask me out. “Do you want to go ta pictures?” he’d say in his broad Leeds accent. I was a bit shy and I’d say, “No, no, thank you very much.” Or Keith would tell him, “She can’t, Peter, she’s too young.” ’
According to Barbara, O’Toole was very much a fixture among that drinking crowd and despite his unwanted chat-up lines was pleasant company, genial and good fun, but hardly boyfriend material. ‘He had lanky hair and spots and looked waif-like, rather like a starving poet in a garret. There was nothing that made him stand out, no charisma at all. He was very ordinary was Peter back then. He was just another lad.’
Peter O'Toole Page 2