Susan fell prey to this on one occasion when she was exchanging silly dialogue with O’Toole downstage. ‘I suddenly thought, that’s a bit weird because as I was talking to him Peter was getting smaller and smaller. I couldn’t believe it! I’d never been on stage hardly before, I was as green as a gooseberry, let alone on stage watching somebody go down a trap door.’ As soon as Susan had begun her dialogue O’Toole cued the stagehands to release the trap door and down he went.
Susan ran to her dressing room almost in tears. Peter Jeffrey, who was playing the King, popped his head round to offer some sympathy, laced with a bit of free advice. ‘It’s all right, darling,’ he said. ‘It was terribly, terribly funny. Now here’s what you do, I’ve thought it over, because he’ll do it again tomorrow, keep that same expression on your face because it was just divine, pretend you don’t know what’s happening, be really upset, then give it a beat, look out front and say, “Poor Nellie, she never did learn to keep her trap shut,” ‘and you’ll get a laugh.’ Susan practised it diligently all the next day and when O’Toole began descending she gave the line and the audience roared with laughter. ‘After the show Peter came up to me and said, “What did you say when I was under the stage?” And he didn’t do it again. He wouldn’t be trumped.’
No cast member escaped his mischievousness. In one scene, O’Toole’s Dame and Susan wandered along a row of shops, all painted flats that came down on wires, until they arrived and entered a hat shop, and there followed a silly scene about choosing hats. A young actress had a walk-on part as the hat-shop girl with barely three lines. ‘And Peter couldn’t stand this girl,’ recalls Susan. ‘And she couldn’t cope with his improvisation, she’d try to say her lines but never got a chance.’ One night they came on, and the unfortunate young woman was waiting behind the flat. O’Toole walked up and turned the shop sign around from ‘open’ to ‘closed’, turned to the audience and said, ‘Oh, it’s closed, never mind,’ signalled his mates for the flat to be hauled back up, took Susan’s hand and they walked off. The poor girl never got on the stage. ‘Peter, that’s not very fair,’ Susan would try and say. O’Toole’s response was, ‘To every man his little cross and mine is that girl.’
On the night Susan’s Jewish mother came to see Ali Baba, O’Toole played his whole Dame in a Yiddish accent, which bewildered most of the audience but delighted Susan’s mother: ‘He’d done it all for her.’ To be fair this was panto and great panto is largely improvised. ‘It’s got to entertain the audience,’ says Susan. ‘And Peter was very funny.’ But O’Toole’s general attitude was severely wanting during this period, as Phyllida Law confirms. ‘He was so badly behaved at Bristol. I used to get very puritan about it and look disapprovingly at him and be fed up because he would alter our rehearsal time because he would have been in London having a lovely time and coming home on the train and he would fib about it majestically; we all knew what he’d been up to.’ For her troubles Phyllida earned the unflattering nickname of ‘Virgin Vinegar’, which O’Toole delighted in calling her.
A guest director at Bristol called Warren Jenkins thought O’Toole’s behaviour so disgraceful he complained to Brenner about it. ‘A young actor like he ought to be sacked – or horse whipped.’ But nothing was ever done, which didn’t surprise Phyllida in the least. ‘This was when Peter was doing awfully well at Bristol, and he had a bit of power. The authorities were pretty pathetic with him. The director of the theatre John Moody was fairly innocuous and would have known by that time that Peter was important and would have given him free rein. And Peter knew it, he wasn’t daft. He was gold dust, he was Bristol’s star and he was spoilt.’
It wasn’t just O’Toole’s wildness that meant he was late so much, he suffered from acute insomnia. To remedy the situation Brenner went to the extreme lengths of hiring the city’s rat-catcher to forcibly remove him from bed if he’d overslept. Mostly, though, it was self-inflicted. He could sniff out a party like a veteran bloodhound. ‘Often you’d follow O’Toole because we knew that’s where the action would be,’ says Sheila Allen. ‘He was a roaring boy; life was for living. And he would never go to bed before three in the morning.’ One Bristol student, walking to the university early one morning, recalled coming across a distraught O’Toole sitting in a doorway looking at a hole in his sock and crying.
While he might dodge the odd rehearsal, O’Toole never missed a single performance, that was sacrosanct, and he wasn’t afraid to get stuck in either. During Ali Baba he never complained in the least about having to sell ice creams in the interval. One evening, still dressed as the Dame, he sold an ice cream to the Bristol-born Hollywood star Cary Grant.
Sheila Allen got to know O’Toole quite well during this period, and in spite of the lead roles now heading his way never detected any fierce ambition; a little vanity perhaps as she observed he used to put shoe polish on his hair to make it darker. ‘I don’t know that he really cared about the ambition, I just think he loved acting. I don’t think he had a sculptured ambition of any kind. There was no scheming, but he would know what he thought was available in the script that he had in front of him and he’d go for it. He had an ambition just to be very, very good, O’Toole just thought that was mandatory.’
Often Sheila would join the gang of regulars that hung around O’Toole in the pubs of Bristol. These nights had a tendency to grow boisterous but whatever sin or misdemeanour O’Toole committed, the sheer power of his personality forced people to excuse him. What fascinated Sheila the most was a side to his nature that perhaps a less discerning eye might miss. ‘There was a quiet side to him, which was totally hidden and you only noticed it if you were hanging around and you could see this inner attention going on, when he wasn’t doing something cranky. He hid it like mad. And he could sometimes get stroppy and when he was stroppy he was impossible, you couldn’t break through.’
At the time Sheila was living with a young BBC television producer called Patrick Dromgoole, who was part of O’Toole’s drinking gang, the Bristol set that also included up-and-coming playwrights Charles Wood and Peter Nichols, John Boorman, then at the BBC, and a junior reporter by the name of Tom Stoppard. ‘Because Peter was always getting thrown out of wherever he was staying, I said he could move in with us for a while,’ recalls Dromgoole. As a flatmate O’Toole was difficult to get out of bed and almost religiously against doing any daily chores. There were also numerous boozing sessions and rows; O’Toole was a great one for having arguments but nearly always never gave a damn and had forgotten about them after a few days.
One disagreement between the pair almost resulted in O’Toole’s early demise. They were sharing a bottle of whisky while drunkenly making their way back to the flat along the ill-lit streets of Bristol. O’Toole had recently received some bad news about a relationship, and his mood was not helped by Dromgoole at one point yelling at him, ‘You’re just a drunken twit. You and I have no idea how she feels or thinks or anything about it.’ That did it. ‘Peter looked at me and turned his back and ran off very fast, contemptuously dismissing my attitude and my presence. He was a fast runner when he chose to be, even when drunk, and he vanished round a few corners.’
Dromgoole followed and found him sitting on the pavement leaning back against a set of poorly constructed railings, his long spindly legs drawn up in front of him so that his kneecaps were under his chin. ‘Come on, get up,’ said Dromgoole. ‘We’ve got to get home and go to bed.’ There was no response whatsoever. Tired and bored, Dromgoole got hold of one of O’Toole’s legs and pulled it straight, resulting in his whole body curving round and falling some twelve feet through a gap in the railings onto a filthy roadway. ‘I was terrified,’ says Dromgoole. ‘I shouted, “Dear God, Peter, are you all right?” I ran down to where he had fallen and he was lying deadly still there and I felt his head and my hand came away greasy and very wet. I really was shit scared now and started yelling, “Help. Help. Someone fetch an ambulance.” ’
At that moment Dromgoole sensed a s
tirring next to him, then a voice. ‘What are you making that fucking noise about.’ It was O’Toole.
‘I thought you’d hurt yourself.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ he said, clambering to his feet and dusting himself down.
Off they trotted back to the flat, with Dromgoole watching O’Toole fairly carefully the whole time. Only later did he realise it wasn’t blood he’d felt, it was machine oil. Once home Dromgoole made sure O’Toole was tucked up before climbing into bed with Sheila, where he immediately fell asleep. ‘In the middle of the night I woke up to find Peter was in the room with us leaning over the bed looking at me with grave suspicions and saying, “My head hurts. Why does my head hurt?” I told him I didn’t know and that perhaps he had a headache. He went back to bed. I never did tell him that story from my point of view and I don’t think he ever knew exactly what happened that night.’
Following a convincing turn as John Tanner in George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman, O’Toole was lauded as perhaps the Bristol Old Vic’s greatest acting find. ‘He was a very striking actor,’ affirms Dromgoole. ‘You couldn’t take your eyes off him on stage. Real stars all have a slightly dangerous quality about them and Peter had an unpredictability that bordered on menace.’
When Bristol declared its intention to stage a production of Hamlet no one was surprised to learn that O’Toole had been designated with the task of playing the Prince of Denmark. But on opening night, 23 April 1958, he suffered ‘a humbling and humiliating’ case of stage fright just as he was about to walk on. He felt as if every ounce of energy and crumb of confidence had been sucked out of him and that he’d blown his big chance when the curtain came down. The critics disagreed, his performance was hailed as a triumph. For Sheila Allen, after all those missed rehearsals and adolescent misbehaviour, it was the moment of truth. ‘I sat in the back of the stalls for the opening night of his Hamlet thinking, well, here goes, let’s see, and I could swear that ectoplasm was coming out of him on that very first night; it was just extraordinary.’ Tom Stoppard caught as many performances as he could, if he was working he’d try to get a fellow reporter to cover for him so he might at least catch the end. ‘It was everything it was supposed to be. It was exciting and mysterious and eloquent.’
O’Toole had deliberately steered clear of the usual Shakespearean delivery and presented a very different kind of Hamlet, a more common Hamlet, a Hamlet of the streets rather than some omnipotent luvvie. Shakespeare was a man of the theatre, not a deity, said O’Toole, and his characters should be presented as real people. ‘You can smell their breath. They piss against the wall. That’s the way I play Shakespeare.’ This new presentation was not lost on audiences or critics. The Times’ positive review of the production began with the headline: ‘An Angry Young Hamlet’.
O’Toole’s tenure at Bristol was drawing to a close and one of his final appearances there saw him reunited with Richard Harris. Since leaving LAMDA, ‘Mickser’, as O’Toole fondly called him, had found employment with Joan Littlewood’s theatre company in London’s East End, but the pay was risible and he was always looking for extra jobs. Bristol took Harris on for a short spell and he acted alongside O’Toole that May in The Pier, the play O’Toole had already done on television. Appearing this time as the gang leader, O’Toole’s performance was so realistic that walking home one night down King Street he was set upon and roughed up by a gang of local thugs.
Many nights were spent in the bars and pubs of Bristol. ‘Golden days,’ Harris called them. ‘We kept each other up half the time, we never slept. It was days of chat and yarn-spinning and great, legendary boozing.’ Elizabeth was there, sharing digs with Richard, and remembers the chaos they caused. ‘Nobody knew how to deal with them. These two together, it was madcap. They made directors shake.’
Harris gloried in telling one particular story. There was a fifteen-minute portion of the play when neither he nor O’Toole were required on stage, time they spent every night across the road downing pints; conscientiously keeping an eye on their watches. ‘One night we got so engrossed in telling stories that we forgot we were on stage. The next minute the door burst open and the stage manager came rushing in. “Harris, O’Toole, for God’s sake, you’re on!” We dropped our drink quickly down our throat and rushed across the street. I had to make my entrance just before O’Toole, as I hit the stage door, over the tannoy I heard my cue, I thought, I’ll never make it. I dashed on, tripped over a wire, slid right across the stage, right down to the footlights and hung over onto the lap of these Bristolian old women. And this woman looked at me in shock and said out loud, “Good God, Harris is drunk!” And I looked at her and said, “Madam, if you think I’m drunk wait until O’Toole makes his entrance.” ’
FIVE
After three years at Bristol, O’Toole had decided it was time to move on. He came to London and with nowhere to stay, and virtually potless was put up by Kenneth Griffith at his mews flat in Belgravia. Together they went off on a mini-grand tour of Italy, finding themselves in a hotel on Lake Como. One night O’Toole received a telegram that distressed him so much that he dashed out into the night and leapt on a wall overhanging the lake. ‘Griffith!’ he yelled. ‘It’s got to end!’ and flung himself into the water. The first thing that flashed through Griffith’s mind was – ‘My God, I can’t swim!’ Unknown to either of them, Lake Como at that particular point was only two feet deep.
Later that summer of 1958 O’Toole was recruited to join a touring production of a comedy entitled The Holiday, hoping for a West End engagement. It broke down in the provinces, but not before O’Toole had become intrigued by his leading lady, a twenty-five-year-old Welsh actress by the name of Siân Phillips. The daughter of a retired policeman, Siân had graduated from RADA in 1957 with the Bancroft Gold Medal, the academy’s highest accolade. She was seen very much as an actress to watch and had already begun to receive job offers from film studios, major theatre companies and television. Siân, in turn, admitted to being ‘dazzled’ by O’Toole; he made her laugh, sometimes out loud and during performances, much to the annoyance of the company manager. They began to date, secretly as Siân was already married, if separated from her husband, a university lecturer she ill-advisedly wed while still a drama student. According to actor Michael Byrne, however, the two young lovers had encountered each other before. ‘Siân once told me that when she was a student at Cardiff University a bunch of them would go across to the Bristol Old Vic and they always thought, who is this lovely old man who is playing all these old character parts, who must have been a beautiful actor at some point. And of course it was Peter playing all these old men.’
The pair categorized themselves fairly early on as soul-mates, their likes and dislikes chimed perfectly. All except alcohol, that is, Siân didn’t touch the stuff. The first thing O’Toole did to the poor girl was initiate her into the dark arts of boozing. During the tour he’d inflicted whisky and beer upon her. Where before alcohol played little part in Siân’s life, now it seemed to revolve around it. Evenings were spent invariably in a pub where Siân would sit sipping the black nectar, taking it down as a child might medicine, while O’Toole quaffed away like a man possessed. It was a strange life that she felt peculiarly drawn to and it wasn’t long before she was sharing his room at Kenneth Griffith’s mews house.
There were early warning signs, however, of what was to come, such as the occasion O’Toole threw her clothes out of the window, claiming she wore too much black and violet. ‘You look as though you’re in mourning for your sex life,’ he announced suddenly, and out it all went, practically the whole of Siân’s wardrobe strewn across the wet cobbles outside. When a bewildered Siân queried what on earth she was going to wear now, O’Toole’s solution was that she should wear his clothes. They became the only couple in town with a shared wardrobe of cotton trousers, lumberjack shirts and fisherman’s sweaters.
Peter introduced Siân to Richard Harris and Elizabeth, who had recently married. Elizabeth liked Si
ân enormously, but could see that she had her hands full with O’Toole. ‘Siân was doing her best to quieten him down – she didn’t stand a chance!’ Occasionally they’d all go out as a foursome, most memorably to a big dinner dance at the Festival Hall organized by the London Welsh Society, of which Elizabeth’s father, Lord Ogmore, was President. ‘Of course, Richard and Peter took great exception to all these Welsh being together,’ recalls Elizabeth. ‘And they started interrupting the speeches with cries of, “What about the Irish, then?” and chasing and jumping in-between the tables, basically screwing up the whole event. I was mortified. My poor parents.’ After threats from delegates that they would resign from the society unless the pair were ejected, Harris and O’Toole were asked to leave. ‘They did burn the candle at both ends and in the middle. And enjoyed every minute of it,’ says Elizabeth. ‘They were just like wild, naughty characters, but they weren’t vicious. The side effects would be accidental, and half the time they wouldn’t remember them. And when they were told about their exploits they’d be very contrite, but then the next day they’d go off and do exactly the same thing.’
Other laddish japes included the time they were competing for the affections of the same woman; as was often the case. ‘Peter and Richard were incredibly good looking,’ says Elizabeth. ‘With enormous energy, enormous charisma and enormous sex appeal. God help all the women that they ever met.’ On this particular night of drinking they had said their farewells, only to bump into each other later outside this girl’s block of flats. There was no answer when they knocked, so O’Toole scrambled up the drainpipe, knocked on the window and gained entry. Looking back he saw Harris still trying to navigate his way up. ‘He must not have had my experience with drainpipes, growing up in Limerick.’ About two storeys up the pipe broke away from the wall, leaving Harris dangling in midair. O’Toole helpfully summoned the authorities. ‘When they’d got him down, I shouted from the window, “Officers, arrest that drunken Irishman. He was trying to break into our home!” ’
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