When The Long and the Short finished its West End run to go on a national tour, O’Toole left the company. His part was taken by Caine, who later identified his success in the role as ‘my first step towards becoming a star’. David Andrews also bowed out, replaced by an intensely shy young man by the name of Terence Stamp, making his professional debut. Stamp never saw the original production but often walked past the theatre gazing at the photographs of O’Toole and Shaw on the hoardings outside. One night in the Salisbury he witnessed O’Toole holding court, before an irate stage assistant burst in, ‘Mr O’Toole, please, it’s time. We’re waiting to start, sir.’ After more pleading the desperate assistant grabbed O’Toole by the lapels and literally dragged him out. Stamp was impressed, was it endorphins that kicked in when O’Toole walked on stage, ‘Because an icy soberness becalmed him until the interval, when he was once again legless. I thought I could be pretty flash myself until I saw this fella.’
Despite huge personal success as Bamforth, neither O’Toole nor Caine appeared in the film version of the play. Former head of Ealing studios Michael Balcon had secured the rights and desperately wanted O’Toole, failing that Finney. His American backers had different ideas and insisted on a ‘name’ that would play in the US market, settling on Laurence Harvey. During the West End run the cast knew a film was in the pipeline and one night Bob Shaw sidled over to O’Toole on stage and whispered, ‘Row A, seat 12, he’ll be playing your part in the movie.’ O’Toole looked out over the footlights to see Harvey. Three nights later, O’Toole took great pleasure in whispering to Shaw, ‘Row G, seat 9, he’ll be playing your part in the movie.’ It was Richard Todd.
SIX
It was never in O’Toole’s scheme of things to be a film star, he was quite content at this time simply to become the best actor he could be. While at RADA he’d done a few walk-on bits on television and performed some stunt work on films shot at Elstree Studios, falling off the odd horse and hurling himself with abandon through windows. He enjoyed it, in spite of the resultant bruising, and would perform under various pseudonyms such as Walter Plings, Charlie Staircase and Arnold Hearthrug. There was also a small role in the adventure series The Scarlet Pimpernel, set during the French revolution. Playing a soldier, O’Toole was required to chase after a coach on horseback. ‘I swallowed a fly, lost a wig and said: “You are to make the acquaintance of Madame Guillotine.” End of part.’ Still, it constituted his first spoken lines on television when the episode aired in March 1956.
Much more substantial were his roles in three episodes of the US/UK anthology series Rendezvous, all filmed in 1959 at Elstree but not transmitted in Britain until 1961. Of special note was the episode ‘London–New York’, where he appears opposite the distinguished actress Patricia Neal. In a gripping tale they play passengers seated next to each other on a long-delayed flight out of a fog-bound London airport that runs into trouble.
Thanks to his success as Bamforth, O’Toole was beginning to come to the attention of movie makers, notably the renowned director Joseph Losey, who thought he had tremendous talent. ‘He also had the arrogance that goes with it when you are young.’ Losey was setting up a film entitled Blind Date, a psychological thriller, and wanted O’Toole to play the police inspector, essentially the second lead alongside German actor Hardy Kruger. Despite a nasty head cold O’Toole impressed at the interview but the financial muscle behind the picture refused to accept him, he wasn’t a ‘name’. Losey had to look elsewhere, eventually casting Stanley Baker.
When it finally arrived, O’Toole’s film debut came about purely by accident. Walt Disney were bringing Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic novel Kidnapped to the screen in glorious Technicolor. Peter Finch had been chosen to play the Scottish hero Alan Breck and work was underway at Pinewood Studios. In one scene Breck indulges in a bagpipe contest with a fearsome Highlander. ‘There’s only one actor I know who can play the part and the fucking bagpipes,’ said Finch and O’Toole was hired.
The part itself wasn’t of any interest but the fee of £175 for a couple of days’ work certainly was, and when it came time to view the rushes of his scene with Finch, O’Toole thought to himself, I can do this. ‘It never occurred to me I’d be mediocre.’ He’d behaved like a star from the get go. As Kenneth Griffith alleged, becoming a star isn’t entirely down to being a great actor, ‘It’s how you handle those bastards.’ During a Michael Parkinson chat-show in the 1970s Griffith was bluntly asked why he had never become a star, despite appearing in a string of films from Lucky Jim to I’m Alright Jack. By means of a reply he told an anecdote about O’Toole’s very first day on Kidnapped. The movie company had rung that morning demanding to know why the actor was not at the studio. ‘I told a lie. I said, this is a very large house, I’ll see if I can find him – and I popped my head round his door. He was fast asleep, and I said, “O’Toole, you are forty-five minutes late,” and he said, “Has my car come?” “No?” I replied. “No car, no me.” And he went back to sleep. From that day to this, there has been a Rolls waiting for him. That’s why I’m not a star. I’d have been there on the dot.’
By the time he came to star in Kidnapped, Peter Finch had already carved out a fearsome reputation as a drinker of some note. It’s no surprise then that he and O’Toole became drinking partners and firm friends until Finch’s untimely death in 1977 at the age of sixty. Without doubt the best O’Toole/Finch story, which O’Toole used to tell with glee, involves the time Finchie was living in Dublin. He and O’Toole were on the lash one night and as they struggled back to Finch’s pad in the early hours came upon a tiny hole in the wall bar and decided to drop in for a final snifter. After a couple of drinks the landlord said, ‘Boys, you’ve had enough. You’re having no more.’ This is not what O’Toole and Finch wanted to hear. ‘Oh no, no, no, we’re having much more.’ The landlord was adamant. ‘You’re out.’ So they bought the pub. Out came their chequebooks and two cheques were duly signed. Come the morning the full horror of what they’d done came into sharp focus and they immediately called their bank to cancel the cheques only to find they’d not been cashed. Racing to the scene of the crime, there was the landlord holding both cheques, which O’Toole and Finch had the pleasure of tearing up. ‘You two boys have got to behave yourselves,’ he admonished. After that, the bar became a favourite haunt for both of them and when a year later the landlord died O’Toole and Finch were invited to the funeral. Arriving at the cemetery they gathered round the open grave with the other sobbing mourners until a woman gently tapped O’Toole on the shoulder to tell him they were at the wrong grave.
Joseph Losey remained convinced enough of O’Toole’s potential to recommend him to Nicholas Ray, then casting a new film, The Savage Innocents. O’Toole was eager to work with the director of Rebel Without a Cause, but the whole experience ended up something of a personal disaster. The plot revolves around an Eskimo, played by Anthony Quinn, who runs foul of the law and is captured by a Canadian trooper, O’Toole. The camera unit had achieved some spectacular exterior footage in the Arctic zones of Canada and Greenland but the majority of filming took place on sets at Pinewood, where the snow was several tons of salt mix. Two polar bears brought in from Dublin Zoo to lend authenticity were deemed not white enough against the salt so had to be covered head to toe in peroxide, which drove them crazy.
With O’Toole’s growing reputation for drinking and staying up all night the film company put in place contingency plans. At the time he and Siân were renting a fourth-floor flat in Bryanston Street, just behind Marble Arch. ‘As second assistant I was delegated to go in the limo and wake him up and make sure he came out on time,’ recalls David Tringham. Often Quinn would be in the same car and the two actors built up a rapport of sorts, but Tringham was witness to an important moment between them on set. ‘There was a scene set in a storm, with the wind machine blasting snowflakes everywhere, and Quinn was a master of upstaging and Peter was still quite naive and physically not strong. When Ray shouted acti
on they started to struggle and instead of being saved by the Mountie as planned it was Quinn who saved the Mountie, he upstaged Peter and Peter couldn’t handle it because he didn’t know how to. It was Quinn’s force of personality. Peter learnt a valuable lesson from it because when I worked with him on Lawrence of Arabia he was much more confident.’
O’Toole’s relationship with the maverick Ray was awkward at times, with the American failing to appreciate his sense of the absurd. With a script that was being rewritten every day, they were stuck with the problem of how the men were going to make a sledge to escape the snowy wastes. O’Toole helpfully suggested the Eskimo eat his character and make a sledge out of his bones and skin. ‘We want a happy ending,’ said Ray. ‘Couldn’t he whistle?’ offered O’Toole.
They did become friendly enough for O’Toole to take Ray that summer of 1959 to Stratford to see a production of Coriolanus starring Laurence Olivier. While Ray thought Olivier ‘unbelievable’, the sheer force of his presence actually damaged the play; when he was off stage, ‘It lost colour and became uninteresting.’ Except for one young actor that Ray found fascinating. ‘Who is that?’ he asked. ‘Next to me,’ O’Toole answered, ‘he is the best young actor in England.’ It was Albert Finney.
The Savage Innocents ended badly for O’Toole when Ray decided that the Irish accent he’d used for the character was too strong and dubbed him with the appalling mid-Atlantic drawl of another actor. Incensed, O’Toole demanded his name be taken off the picture, since it was no longer the performance he had given. ‘I don’t want anything to do with it,’ he bitterly complained to the press. ‘As far as I’m concerned the whole thing is a shambles.’
One man determined that O’Toole would not suffer such professional discourtesy again was an American film producer by the name of Jules Buck. The son of a cigar-store owner on Broadway, Buck served as cameraman for the US Army Signal Corps during the Second World War, notably on the John Huston directed documentary The Battle Of San Pietro (1945). After the war, Huston encouraged Buck’s Hollywood career, where he was assistant producer on the film noir classic The Killers (1946), which Huston co-wrote, and serving the same function on the Huston directed thriller We Were Strangers (1949). After producing several more films, including Love Nest (1951), featuring one of Marilyn Monroe’s earliest appearances, Buck moved his young family to Europe, discouraged by the oppressive atmosphere sweeping Hollywood following Senator Joe McCarthy’s Communist witch-hunt. He was the whole of his life a liberal idealist, but also a savvy operator when it came to business.
In London, Buck attended a performance of The Long and the Short and the Tall and immediately recognized the potential of O’Toole. He signed him up to an exclusive contract; henceforth if a film or theatre producer wanted to acquire the services of O’Toole they had to deal with Buck. Michael Deeley, an eager young filmmaker who later produced the iconic movies The Italian Job, The Deer Hunter and Blade Runner, worked for Buck in the early sixties and believes the partnership with O’Toole, which was to last almost twenty years, was a perfect match. ‘Jules was very charming and knew how to get what he wanted. And I think he also knew how to handle Peter, he knew how to treat him. And there was great affection between them.’
Quickly Buck began to organize O’Toole’s life, both private and professional, such as his tax affairs, which he had treated with a nonchalance bordering on contempt for years. It was a similar situation with his car, for which he had no licence. According to Siân, O’Toole had learned to drive on holiday in the Swiss Alps, though his manic driving style did tend to shred the nerves. He once fell asleep while driving on a motorway and woke up to find himself careering down the grass of the central reservation. ‘There was nothing for it but to put my feet up on the dashboard and wait for the crash.’ One friend who accepted a lift off O’Toole swore afterwards that she would never do so again. During the journey he ignored a keep left sign on the grounds that it was ‘silly’ and narrowly avoided driving down a flight of steps. ‘He should never drive anything! He’s lovely, but I thought we were going to die on that journey.’
Finally in the winter of 1959 he agreed with Buck that perhaps a driving licence might be in order. A professional instructor was hired and on the morning of the first lesson O’Toole was brimming with confidence, if a little hung over. Requested to execute a three-point turn, O’Toole took an unerringly long time over it, eventually connecting violently with a pillar. The shaken instructor requested to be driven back to the start and for O’Toole to withdraw from the vehicle. He then said a very firm goodbye and walked off. The solution was simple, O’Toole spent thirty shillings on an Irish driving licence, which was perfectly legal in the UK, and carried on regardless.
On the professional front, Buck set to steer O’Toole’s career in the right direction and searching for a suitable film project landed upon a book by John Brophy set in the early 1900s entitled The Day they Robbed the Bank of England, about a group of Irish rebels who set out to plan the perfect robbery. O’Toole would be ideal casting for the leader of the gang, but the role didn’t interest him. Instead he wanted to play their chief antagonist, an English Guards officer. Buck raised the cash for the film, but did feel that O’Toole needed a little outside help if he was going to make it in the movies. ‘Do you just want to become a successful actor or do you want to be an international star,’ he asked his client one day. ‘Jules, I want in,’ O’Toole answered. ‘Right,’ said Buck. ‘You’d better have a nose job.’
The O’Toole nose was far from ugly or misshapen, it was just slightly bulbous on the end, but it gave his face character. What Buck was suggesting was just a trim, nothing dramatic, more of a clean-up operation. When his theatre friends heard what had happened there was a sense that he had sold out. ‘It was a great nose, very sardonic,’ recalls Phyllida Law. ‘When he grinned it moved on his face, which is why they had it bobbed, of course, it would cause terrible shadows on a film set.’ At Bristol, Phyllida can’t recall O’Toole ever being self-conscious about it. ‘I’m sure he wasn’t. I can’t imagine him being self-conscious about anything. No, it was a great nose, a wonderful nose, I was outraged when I heard he had it bobbed.’ David Andrews was equally aghast when he saw it. ‘Peter’s nose was massive but it was beautifully proportioned, you could never say his nose was big, it was beautiful and I think they ruined it when they turned it into a horrible Hollywood snub.’
When it opened The Day they Robbed the Bank of England went virtually unnoticed, though the influential critic Dilys Powell wrote in the Sunday Times that O’Toole ‘looks like being a gift to the British cinema as well as the theatre’. More importantly, the film provided a valuable lesson when he went to watch himself in rushes one day. ‘I was horrified and for days afterwards I was posing and strutting about. It made me feel self-conscious, which is death for an actor.’ From that day onwards O’Toole vowed never to see his rushes again.
While O’Toole was working steadily, Siân was spending most of her days alone in the Bryanston flat watching her career being ignored as Jules Buck talked of a future framed around O’Toole. Sometimes she wouldn’t see him for days, a situation she reluctantly grew accustomed to. He was never going to be a straightforward nine to five guy, that she knew (‘If you don’t like me – leave me,’ he’d say), but often he’d simply arrive drunk at 4am and expect her to make breakfast. O’Toole was so incredibly charismatic and fascinating and wonderful to be with that it made up for the long days and nights of depression and loneliness. His pursuit of pleasure and joy of living were irresistible. Quite often Siân didn’t know what the hell he was going to do next. Once he showed up in a new sports car yelling, ‘Get your passport, we’re off.’ He wanted to show her Venice, but it was cold and wet. After a few days they wanted sun and headed south towards Rome, except they took a wrong turn and ended up in Yugoslavia. It was the beginning of a grand mystery tour around Europe that took in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Holland. For Siân each day was a chall
enge and a hilarious adventure, with O’Toole the perfect travelling companion, who seemed to draw people to him wherever they went, people who had no idea who he was.
When talk turned to marriage, Siân was warned by her friends and even acquaintances of O’Toole that her own burgeoning career would suffer, that he would be overbearing and suffocating. Kenneth Griffith held grave doubts, indeed told Siân to her face not to marry O’Toole. ‘Understand, he is a genius, but he is not normal.’ She ignored them all, preferring to choose love over fear, happiness over caution.
The proposal when it came was typically unorthodox, O’Toole grabbing Siân in the kitchen and stating, ‘Have my children.’ What could the poor girl do except agree. Thanks to Jules Buck, Siân managed to get a divorce, not an easy thing to do in those days, and in December 1959 she and O’Toole flew to Dublin for a low-key ceremony in the city’s solitary registry office; actress Marie Kean acted as best man. Neither of their parents were present but both families expressed delight with the union. Following the ceremony the small party caught the evening performance at the famous Abbey Theatre and then went on a pub crawl, amassing well-wishers and friends along the way.
SEVEN
When twenty-nine-year-old Peter Hall was handed the reins at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford, one of the most prestigious repertory companies in the country, late in 1959, he was hailed as the new shining light of the theatre world. His first season was shaping up very nicely, with Paul Scofield agreeing to play two of Shakespeare’s great roles: Shylock and Petruchio. Contracts were drawn up and duly signed. A couple of months before rehearsals were due to begin Scofield suddenly changed his mind and withdrew. Minus his leading man, Hall began a desperate search for a replacement.
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