Peter O'Toole

by Robert Sellers

  What spurred on people like O’Toole and Harris to these ridiculous exploits, fuelled almost exclusively by drink? Even O’Toole himself confessed he didn’t really know what he got out of it. ‘What does anyone get out of being drunk? It’s an anaesthetic. It diminishes the pain.’ For much of his life O’Toole was plagued by stomach ulcers and these occasional bouts of intestinal pain were both alleviated and aggravated by drinking. And there was the insomnia. He’d always been a night person anyway and detested having to get up for early morning film calls. ‘The man who invented mornings was no Christian. I prefer to go straight into the afternoon.’ Again drink came in handy there, too, having discovered that a bottle of cognac or fine burgundy would send him off to sleep nicely.

  There was something deeper too, a reaction against the times they were living in. It was more than ten years since the end of the war, but England was still in the grip of harsh austerity measures. Despite economic miracles in Germany and Japan, the government were still advising everyone to tighten their belts. Bollocks, hailed O’Toole. ‘We didn’t want any of that. We wanted the roaring twenties, please. There were some of us who saw it as our duty to be truants from the system. The drinking was liberation from the fear and the restrictions of the post-war years. The frivolity and the fun had gone. Booze was a way of recapturing it. We certainly had a bloody good time.’

  O’Toole liked to quote the often repeated line that if you can remember the sixties, you weren’t really there. ‘Well, we were doing that in the fifties.’ Much of their free time did appear to revolve around pub opening hours, and there were parties galore. They even took their merriment on the Underground, taking over a train carriage on the Circle Line where it was warm and there were seats, and with battery operated gramophones playing 45s round they’d go till the system shut down. ‘We’d get off at Sloane Square, pop out to the pub, get some more booze and get back on again. Great fun! And the Sixties were only a continuation to that.’

  One of O’Toole’s earliest admirers at Bristol was the theatre impresario Oscar Lewenstein, who along with the actor-director George Devine ran the English Stage Company at the Royal Court, which had premiered Osborne’s Look Back in Anger. Several times Lewenstein had caught O’Toole in performance at Bristol and believed the young actor to be achieving similar things to Albert Finney. ‘They were the two foremost actors of their generation, and the best examples of the new non-university breed of actors that the new times and plays were demanding.’

  A play had recently come into Lewenstein’s possession by a young writer called Willis Hall, one of O’Toole’s old comrades on the Yorkshire Evening News. Based on Hall’s own military experiences, The Disciplines of War dealt with a small band of British soldiers on patrol in the Malayan jungle during the Japanese advance of early 1942. It was Hall’s own statement against the stiff-upper-lip heroics then proliferating in British war films. There were no mock-heroics here, only the dank sweaty odour of real conscripted men’s experiences of fear, danger and death.

  O’Toole was given the play to read with the prospect of him playing one of the main leads, Private Bamforth, the classic ‘barrack-room lawyer’, up to every dodge and skive in the book. He loved the play and wrote to Lewenstein saying whoever played Bamforth would become a star, ‘and please let it be me.’

  It was scheduled to open at the start of 1959 at the Royal Court, and Devine and Lewenstein chose as their director Lindsay Anderson, whose first act was to ditch the original title in favour of The Long and the Short and the Tall. He then began to cast the play with a brilliant eye, choosing earthy, working-class actors as the soldiers: Edward Judd, Alfred Lynch and two old RADA colleagues of O’Toole in Bryan Pringle and Ronald Fraser. To play the platoon’s tough sergeant Patrick McGoohan was first choice but when he turned the part down Robert Shaw was hired. As for Bamforth, O’Toole was left disappointed when he was beaten to the role by Albert Finney.

  On the second day of rehearsals Finney arrived looking rather the worse for wear. A clearly concerned Anderson was hastily reassured that it was nothing more than the result of a late night. ‘I’d been at a party and got through a bottle of Pernod,’ said Finney. ‘Mostly uncontaminated by water.’

  The next day Finney’s pallor was if anything even worse. The excuse this time was an overindulgence of vermouth but Anderson wasn’t convinced and urged the actor to see a doctor. It turned out to be an acute case of appendicitis and Finney was rushed into hospital. When it became clear that Finney needed a great deal of time to recuperate, the search for his replacement began. The obvious first port of call was O’Toole, but he didn’t much fancy the idea of substituting for Albie. Ultimately he saw sense and accepted the part.

  Playing the wireless operator was David Andrews, the youngest member of the company. Within hours he had been adopted by O’Toole and taken under his wing. ‘After that first rehearsal I found myself in Kenneth Griffith’s flat, where Peter was staying, and we sat in the front room drinking and singing all night, and we’d hardly met. Peter was a great singer and taught me a couple of folk songs. He was a lovely guy and incredibly charismatic, he had the most wonderful, sparkling, piercing blue eyes. That’s one of the things that made me attach myself so closely to people like Peter, they were magnetic people, you couldn’t resist them.’

  Disappointed at losing Finney, Anderson consoled himself with the fact that at least O’Toole ticked all the right boxes; he was working class, had a chip on his shoulder and didn’t hail from the Home Counties. Anderson believed northerners lacked ‘the curse of middle class inhibitions’. The two of them should have got along famously then, except it turned into a war of attrition from day one. Anderson considered O’Toole ‘too much of a star performer’, while O’Toole thought ‘Lindsay’s idea of the working class was perfumed shit’. The relationship never healed. ‘Peter hated Lindsay,’ confirms Andrews. ‘Thought he was rubbish. He used to pick up bits of script and pretend to wipe his arse with them.’

  The Long and the Short and the Tall opened in January 1959 and played to near capacity audiences. Very quickly O’Toole, Shaw and Ronnie Fraser fell into a pattern of drinking in a nearby pub prior to curtain-up. Sometimes with only minutes to spare they’d stampede back into the theatre, rub dirt over their faces and change into a khaki uniform looking as if they’d spent an hour in make-up to achieve the desired bedraggled jungle look. Anderson was almost driven bonkers. ‘I’m furious!’ he’d yell at them. ‘I’ve never known anything quite so monstrously unprofessional,’ while the expert hired to make the actors look like real soldiers suffered a nervous collapse and left.

  However, for Bruce Montague, a young RADA student, who had recently done his National Service in Malaya during the emergency, the play was wholly authentic. Willis Hall gave the occasional lecture at RADA and invited Montague and a dozen other students to see his play and introduce them to some of the cast in the bar before the performance, including O’Toole, ‘who, in those days, displayed a large nose, wild hair and a fondness of Guinness’, recalls Montague. When the curtain came up the young student was mesmerized. ‘The sweat patches on their jungle greens were just right: the performances spot on. Peter, commanding the Japanese prisoner to put his “flingers on bonce”, remains with me to this day.’

  Certainly David Andrews has never forgotten those months he spent with O’Toole, nor the special thrill of appearing in what was a significant theatrical event. ‘I hero-worshipped Peter. He was breathtaking to act with, so instinctively and intuitively intelligent, also clever and cunning and wily. To see him and the rest of the cast playing the same roles night after night and always making it sound as if it were just happening for the first time, that they were under this appalling pressure in the jungle, it came over so clearly, it resonated so well.’

  As Bamforth, O’Toole had plenty of showy speeches, during which Andrews was usually seated at his radio set. During one such speech, Andrews worked out a bit of business that involved darning a sock.
‘My confidence growing, I perfected a moment when the thread being drawn through the darn was pulled out just a tiny bit too far and my eyes followed the liberated end as it jumped into the air. This got something of a titter so I kept it in the following night. During a dramatic pause in his speech, Peter sauntered across to me and with bright blue laser-like eyes pierced me with his angry look and under his breath said – “If you do that medieval business again I’ll sew your fucking bollocks together, you little bastard!” ’ When the curtain came down Andrews went to O’Toole’s dressing room, with some trepidation, to remonstrate with him for not saving his comments until the interval. ‘He beamed at me in an avuncular way and said, “Come on, son, you’re a wonderful actor, don’t fuck things up for yourself before you’ve even started.” He poured out two whiskies and we sat and chatted like old pals. But I never dared do that business again!’

  It didn’t take long for word of O’Toole and Co.’s antics to spread around theatre land. One Saturday evening, after the show had been running for a couple of weeks, stage hand Michael Seymour was alone in the auditorium clearing things up when through a door on the prompt side of the stage a man emerged. ‘I say, where can I find the boys?’ Seymour directed him to the dressing rooms. ‘He thanked me, saying, “Oh, my name’s Noël Coward.” I later saw him in happy conversation with them all in the local pub.’

  The critics, too, took notice. Kenneth Tynan especially singled out O’Toole for praise: ‘I sensed a technical authority that may, given discipline and purpose, presage greatness.’ Tynan was also astute enough to sense that the play was performed ‘in what, for the London theatre, is a new style of acting’. Not just a new style of acting, but by an entirely new breed of actor. The cast of Long and the Short, together with people like Finney and Harris, were lauded as the embodiment of a new, gritty realism in film, theatre and television. With hindsight, it’s easier to see that O’Toole was much more of an old-school successor to the likes of Irving, Olivier and Richardson. But what heavily linked him with these other actors was a propensity to raise hell. ‘They were so self-destructive, that group of actors,’ says David Tringham, who worked as an assistant director on Lawrence of Arabia. ‘They all wanted to be Robert Mitchum.’

  Working class and proud of it, it’s probably too simplistic to say that their drinking and revelling was a two-finger salute to the middle-class acting establishment, although it’s fair to say that for some of this generation acting wasn’t a true vocation, merely a way to make money. ‘We didn’t want to be the best actors in the world,’ said Harris. ‘We didn’t want to be the best King Lear. What a boring ambition.’ Instead they wanted to experience everything that life had to offer and have as good a time as they could. ‘We weren’t pause and think,’ claims Elizabeth Harris. ‘We were doers – go out and do it!’ Yes, these actors were talented, supremely so in some cases, and took what they did seriously, but they were also totally fearless and the noise they made was their way of saying, ‘We’ve arrived, ignore us at your peril.’ ‘It wasn’t that they broke the rules,’ says Elizabeth. ‘They didn’t accept them.’

  At the time Robert Shaw was the established big-cheese actor, he’d had his own TV series and made a few movies, which gave him the right to occupy the only dressing room with its own toilet. O’Toole had to make do with a big sink. One night he was merrily pissing when he heard an unmistakable voice at the door. ‘Hello, my name is Katharine Hepburn.’ Swiftly popping his old feller away, O’Toole invited the Hollywood icon inside. The actress happened to be in London working with Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift on the film Suddenly, Last Summer, and the next day discussed O’Toole with its producer, Sam Spiegel. Clift had a tendency to drink himself into a stupor or disappear altogether, so Spiegel was scouring London for an actor to come in and take over if the need arose. O’Toole was sent for and arrived at Shepperton Studios for a screen test. Hustled into make-up and dressed in a white coat, he was taken to the set of a doctor’s office. Holding up an X-ray, O’Toole couldn’t stop himself and cracked: ‘Mrs Spiegel, your son will never play the violin again.’ When Spiegel watched the rushes the next day O’Toole’s playful prank did not find favour; indeed it nearly came back to haunt the actor a little over a year later.

  Regardless of how poorly the audition went, Hepburn continued to sing O’Toole’s praises both in London and back in Hollywood. For years he would bump into people who’d say, ‘Katie Hepburn told me all about you.’ Another early champion was the formidable Dame Edith Evans, best known for her definitive portrayal of Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest. Actor Oliver Senton recalls a story his father used to tell of when he was President of the Oxford Union Dramatic Society in the late fifties. Quite often the Society managed to lure top theatrical names to give lectures or readings and on this particular evening Dame Edith had agreed to give up her time to read some poetry. ‘When my father collected Dame Edith as she arrived from the railway station, lying unconscious on the floor of the cab was this long, thin man that she was carrying about as her protégé, which was O’Toole.’

  Following its successful run at the Royal Court, The Long and the Short and the Tall transferred in April 1959 to the West End and the New Theatre (now the Noël Coward Theatre), conveniently located next door to the Salisbury pub on St Martin’s Lane. The Salisbury remained the prominent watering hole for the cast. For years it had been a beacon for those in the arts to relax and drink, thanks to its location bang in the middle of London’s theatreland. Back in the early fifties John Osborne referred to it as ‘The Rialto for loud-mouthed actors and lounging fairies’.

  The cast drank there practically every night, slipping out of the back of the theatre after the show, across an alleyway and straight into the side entrance. Some partook of the brew before performances, O’Toole notably, which did no favours to his understudy, who’d stew in suspense backstage wondering if he’d return from the pub or goodness knows where else in time. The understudy in question was Michael Caine and his agonies lasted three months. One evening his nightmare became reality when O’Toole failed to show up with barely minutes to go.

  ‘Michael began to get extremely agitated,’ recalls David Andrews, who witnessed the whole episode. ‘And eventually the stage director came into the dressing room and said, “You’ll have to get the uniform on.” And I can remember, Michael was trembling putting this stuff on and we were all thinking, Christ, is he going to cope with this. And then we heard the click on the tannoy as the microphone was switched on for the front of house announcement and thought, Christ, it’s act one. So there we all were, waiting in the wings for the curtain to go up and suddenly the stage door burst open and O’Toole rushed in and they grabbed him and put him in his outfit in record time. And there was Mike, sweat pouring off his face.’

  What had happened was O’Toole had been at a wedding somewhere in Hampshire and presumably got smashed and when he looked at his watch it was getting very late in the day. ‘Christ, how am I going to get back to London?’ Luckily the father of the bride was a wealthy man and raced him over to Blackbushe, a small private airport nearby. ‘And this guy chartered a Viscount, which is a four-engine passenger plane, and got Peter onto it and flew him to Heathrow,’ says Andrews. ‘I don’t know how true that story is, but it’s the one Peter told.’

  On another occasion O’Toole ran in just in time screaming, ‘Don’t go on, Michael!’ as he bounded into his dressing room, shirt and trousers cast asunder. ‘He was changed within seconds,’ recalled his old drinking pal from Leeds and now a Fleet Street reporter, Keith Waterhouse. ‘And, pausing only to throw up violently out of the upstage window of the set – which the audience thought was part of the action – gave a flawless performance.’ Andrews always had his doubts that some of these near misses were not contrived, since O’Toole never actually missed a single performance. His inebriated state on occasion though did have repercussions, such as the time Bamforth was required to lie down on a wooden benc
h and O’Toole fell sound asleep and had to be given a sharp boot in order to wake up and deliver his next line.

  Besides his job as understudy, Caine’s other functions were to fetch booze, find out where the best parties were and acquire girls. ‘I’d have made a wonderful pimp,’ he later joked. One memorable Saturday night after the show O’Toole invited him to a restaurant in Leicester Square before going on to a party. ‘This for a start was a surprise,’ Caine recalled. ‘Because I had never seen Peter actually eat anything. I thought he was one of those people who could get protein from alcohol.’ Ordering a plate of egg and chips was the last thing Caine remembered until waking up next to O’Toole, both fully clothed, in a strange bed in an even stranger flat. Sunlight was pouring through the window. It turned out they were in Hampstead, and it was 5pm on the Monday; somehow they’d managed to miss an entire Sunday! Racing to the theatre, they arrived to see the stage manager waiting for them. The owner of the restaurant had been in and henceforth the pair of them were banned from his establishment for life. Caine was just about to ask what they’d done when O’Toole whispered, ‘Never ask what you did. It’s better not to know.’ Caine bowed to O’Toole’s greater experience in such matters but made a point of never going out on the booze with him again.

  Other evenings O’Toole might spend walking around Covent Garden. Sometimes if he was in the mood he’d scale the wall of Lloyd’s Bank. The first time he took Siân on one of these nocturnal jaunts she thought it the behaviour of someone not properly equipped with the requisite set of marbles. But after a few nights the actress came to accept this as unremarkable, as far as O’Toole was concerned. Indeed, this kind of architectural mountaineering wasn’t a one-off. There is a tale of when O’Toole heard that his old RADA chum Frank Finlay was in town and a guest at the local YMCA. It was early morning when he arrived only to find the entrance locked. Undeterred O’Toole climbed his way four storeys up, and with bottle in hand manoeuvred his way along the narrow ledge to Finlay’s room hammering on the glass like a mad thing. ‘Open up, open up!’