Peter O'Toole

by Robert Sellers

  This generosity of spirit was often in evidence, especially when it came to his friends. When the actor James Mellor, who had appeared in Baal, died aged just forty-three, O’Toole arranged the funeral and then the wake at Gerry’s drinking club. There was a memorial event at the Old Vic to raise funds for Mellor’s young family, which O’Toole also helped organize. Another anecdote has the actor Tony Selby in the Salisbury having half a bitter, all that he could afford, as he made his way home from the Labour Exchange. O’Toole plus entourage entered and on their way to the snug, where O’Toole liked to drink, he asked Selby to join them. Tony declined pleading a previous engagement to conceal his lack of funds. Just a few minutes later O’Toole came rushing out heading for the exit. Passing Selby he clapped him on the shoulder: ‘Good to see you.’ When he had gone Selby found that O’Toole had left £50 in the breast pocket of his jacket.

  O’Toole’s Hamlet came to an end on 4 December, since he was required to start work on a picture. He departed with the gnawing truth that he had far from given of his best on such an august stage. Months awaited him on the other side of the world to search for the reasons why. Perhaps it all stemmed back to that piss-up with Burton, the fact that they both loathed and despised the piece. ‘Of course, I think it’s the worst bloody play ever written. Actors do it out of vanity. I only did it because I was flattered out of my trousers.’

  Just days after Hamlet closed, O’Toole called on Rosemary Harris. She was renting a little one-bedroom flat in the Pimlico Road and her two nephews had come to stay the night, bringing along a girlfriend. ‘I’d put them all to bed, the boys roughing it in sleeping bags in the lounge, when the doorbell rang, it must have been about one in the morning, and it was Peter standing there with a bottle of champagne in a bucket and a napkin over his arm. “Are you good for some champagne?” I said, “Yes, come on up.” ’ The bottle was quickly emptied. Rosemary could tell O’Toole was getting drowsy so tucked him into the twin bed next to her nephew’s girlfriend, then took an eiderdown and some pillows and fell asleep on the floor. ‘The next morning, my nephew’s girlfriend woke up and said, “Who is that in the bed?” After a short pause she suddenly exclaimed, “Oh my goodness, oh my goodness, it’s Lawrence of Arabia!” Peter stayed there for the next three days, he didn’t wake up for three solid days and I had to call Siân to tell her that her husband was fine and that she needn’t worry. I mean, he’d had that huge success as Lawrence and he could have thrown his weight around and been obnoxious or difficult but he was a lamb, he was a sweetheart.’

  Rosemary kept in touch with O’Toole and they tried to meet up whenever he was in New York, where she now lived. In 1984, when Rosemary’s daughter, the actress Jennifer Ehle, was at school in London and O’Toole was appearing on stage in Pygmalion she took her and some friends to the matinee. ‘I said afterwards, come on, we’ll go and see Peter. He had the star dressing room and he was waiting for us in this beautiful dressing gown and he held me in his arms and we gave each other a great big hug, and I looked at all these little girls with their big round eyes and I said, “You’ve just seen the oldest Hamlet and the oldest Ophelia in the world.” ’

  Not long after regaining consciousness in Rosemary’s flat, O’Toole was pumped full of eighteen inoculations against tropical diseases, then raced to catch a flight to Hong Kong, where he was to start shooting Lord Jim. ‘The next bloody day I’m in a blazing small boat, wearing a funny hat and paddling like a man possessed.’ This was another mammoth Lawrence-like epic, with an international cast that included James Mason, Eli Wallach and Jack Hawkins, and a gruelling exercise for O’Toole whose idea of a workout was ‘carrying a pint of bitter from one smoke-filled room to another’.

  Based on Joseph Conrad’s classic philosophical novel, Lord Jim was set in the Orient of the nineteenth century and told of a sailor branded a coward who is looking for a way to redeem himself and finds absolution inevitably in his own death. Columbia (the backers of Lawrence of Arabia) had given nearly ten million dollars to director Richard Brooks, who had started in the business working with John Huston as the script writer of Key Largo, convinced he could deliver an adventure story out of the material.

  During his time in Hong Kong, which did not endear itself to O’Toole, ‘Manchester with slanted eyes’, he dubbed it, the actor got up to his usual antics. Staying in the plush Peninsula Hotel, he horrified the management by personally pulling a rickshaw and its driver into the main lobby at 2am and buying the fellow a drink.

  Brooks made extensive use of the city’s waterfront, though when it came to filming on a junk the director learned of his star’s lamentable time in the Royal Navy and aversion to any sort of choppy water. For the eight days the crew shot on the ocean O’Toole vomited profusely. ‘He’d rush to the side of the ship and heave, and then go before the camera as if nothing had happened,’ said Brooks. ‘In eight days he must have tried every known medical and non-medical remedy. Nothing worked.’

  After six weeks the company left Hong Kong and arrived for the bulk of location shooting in Cambodia. Despite an anti-West ferment brewing amongst the country’s populace, Brooks had managed to get permission to shoot in the ancient temple ruins of Angkor Wat, where technicians built school houses, shops, a stockade and a tribal palace. To accommodate the large cast and crew, the studio had to sanction a huge payment to add a forty-seven-room wing onto a little hotel near the location site. ‘That hotel!’ raged O’Toole. ‘More expensive than Claridge’s; ten flaming quid a night and a poxy room at that. Nicest thing you could say about the food was that it was grotesque.’ Soon everyone was suffering from dysentery and prickly heat rash and being set upon by giant stinging insects amidst insufferable temperatures. When Siân visited, a massive spider fell out of a pristinely folded towel in her hotel bathroom.

  Then the snakes arrived. Walking down the middle of a jungle road, O’Toole came face to face with a huge black cobra. ‘They say no snake can travel faster than a scared human,’ he recalled, ‘but I ain’t so sure.’ When the snake pounced the speed of the thing was dazzling, luckily it went in the opposite direction to a frozen O’Toole. Another time a cobra slithered onto the set and dropped to the floor of the makeshift ladies’ toilet. Of particular dread was a snake called the two-step. ‘It bites you, you take two steps,’ explained O’Toole, ‘and then you die.’

  In truth the snakes were less of a problem than the local officials, who constantly sought bribes. Brooks was forced to hire Cambodian soldiers instead of local extras, and with half a dozen or so dialects spoken there were translators for the translators. For good reason did Brooks call himself ‘a lunatic in the middle of the jungle trying to make a movie’. As for O’Toole, he took enjoyment in the company of the stuntmen, playing poker with them in the evening.

  During filming the pulse of political violence beating just below the surface grew louder. Cambodia’s pro-China Prince Sihanouk was currently in a war of words with the United States over Vietnam, foreshadowing the horrors that were to come. O’Toole remembers him paying the set a visit. ‘He started yelling the usual anti-British crud. I walked up to him and said, “I couldn’t agree with you more. I’m Irish meself.” ’

  One day a stranger appeared on the location and advised Brooks to get his company out of Cambodia by 12 March 1964. Deciding to take no chances, Brooks ordered the work schedule to be doubled. Shooting went on seven days a week and from noon until nearly dawn in order for everyone to be safely out of the country. One week later the US and British embassies were attacked by mobs. O’Toole was convinced that some of the trouble-makers had worked on the film. When the Prince denounced the movie company as ‘Western imperialist invaders’ on national radio, O’Toole took revenge by telling a reporter from Life magazine: ‘If I live to be a thousand I want nothing like Cambodia again. It was a bloody nightmare.’ Not forgetting to mention that he once found a live snake in his soup. When word of the interview reached the Prince, O’Toole was persona non grata.

>   Once out of Cambodia, O’Toole and Siân flew to Japan for a brief holiday, where they were invited to watch the great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa shoot his new movie with Toshiro Mifune, whom O’Toole insisted on calling ‘Tosher’. The two stars seemed to get on, though Mifune could speak no English at all, but that didn’t stop them getting roaring drunk that evening. Next the couple flew to New York for the opening there of Becket. A nervous flyer at the best of times, ‘I can’t believe all that tonnage can float in the air’, by the time the couple reached the city O’Toole hadn’t had a proper kip for thirty-six hours. After the usual press conferences and inane meet and greets, O’Toole hadn’t slept for sixty hours when he agreed to go on the Johnny Carson Show, one of the most watched TV programmes in America. Three minutes into the interview O’Toole, having been unable to put two words coherently together, collapsed, broke his glasses, excused himself and walked off. The effect was sensational. No one had ever walked off the Johnny Carson Show before. ‘I came home in a box.’

  For years afterwards Carson was asked what really happened in that interview: was O’Toole jet-lagged, drunk or both? Finally, in 1978, O’Toole was invited back and gently reminded of the incident by his host. He decided to come clean: ‘We’d left Japan on Monday and arrived in New York on Sunday, which alarmed me. And coming from Japan one stopped at lots of places, Hawaii and all over, and our stopping coincided with the cocktail hour. Everywhere we went it was the cocktail hour. And one doesn’t want to be discourteous. So we were pissed, that’s true.’

  Chosen as a Royal film performance, Lord Jim turned out to be a dud at the box office and a critical failure, with the main complaint being that Brooks didn’t know whether he was making a full-blooded, no-holds-barred adventure yarn or a psychological study. O’Toole was particularly singled out for attack. Variety called his performance ‘self-indulgent and lacking in real depth’. Observing the wreckage, O’Toole admitted he suited neither the film nor the role and that it had been an error of judgement. ‘I was in danger of becoming known as a tall, blond, thin dramatic actor, always self-tortured and in doubt and looking off painfully into the horizon. Lord Jim was my comeuppance. It was a mistake and I made the mistake because I was conservative and played safe. And that way lies failure.’ Perhaps, he mused, he should have taken on the challenge of James Mason’s villainous river pirate, but of course at that time nobody would have let him, it was not the star part. O’Toole might have scoffed at the idea of himself as a handsome leading-man type, preferring to mould his image into that of a ‘star’ character actor, but the studios didn’t see it that way. He was learning the hard way the limitations and burden of stardom.

  Whatever the levels of fame, O’Toole tried desperately to keep his feet on the ground. He was often asked whether success had changed him and he liked to think it hadn’t. ‘I like having money,’ he told one reporter. ‘I like to know I can take care of my wife and kids. I’ve had enough of poverty. I once wrote a poem with the line, “My thighs are bruised by poverty,” meaning that pennies are heavy, not like that crisp paper stuff which is what you want. But, of course, success changes other people toward you.’

  As often as he could he made trips back to Leeds to visit his parents and retained a small yet loyal group of friends, including Patrick Oliver, now trying to make his way in the art world. Later in the decade O’Toole bought a rather splendid early Victorian house in Potternewton Lane in Leeds with the intention of making it his domicile in his home town. Instead he ended up giving it to Oliver and it became his family home until the mid-nineties.

  The two men would often meet up. Oliver’s son Richard recalls his father saying how he once arrived at a theatre to see O’Toole perform with a complimentary ticket but without an allocated seat. ‘A splendid throne was dragged out of the props room and placed prominent side-stage for him to observe the proceedings from . . . and be observed.’ On another occasion Oliver missed a train home due to extended drink-taking by both parties, and O’Toole provided him with a VIP air ticket to get him back to Yorkshire, and a chauffeured limousine to take him to the airport. ‘Now, my father was, to say the least of it, visually striking in his younger years with an unforgettable shock of wildly unkempt hair and a beat’s disdain for conventional norms of sartorial cleanliness. Apparently the assortment of well-to-do business persons gathered there waiting to board the plane were somewhat taken aback when the immaculate Daimler rolled up, the smart chauffeur opened the passenger door and a wild-looking scruffy tramp with three days’ stubble and a red-eye hangover stumbled out, to be escorted to the posh end of the aircraft!’

  TWELVE

  O’Toole first met the maverick American film director John Huston at Christmas 1959, when he and Jules Buck were invited to stay with him at his home near Dublin. Keen to show off his protégé, Buck waited anxiously to see how the pair got on. Their rapport was instantaneous and O’Toole became a frequent guest for years after.

  During one visit the pair planned a hunting trip on horseback but come the morning the rain was lashing down. Huston crept into O’Toole’s room, wrapped in a garish green kimono, to announce, ‘Pete, this is a day for getting drunk!’ Breakfast consisted of a bottle of whisky and as the alcohol flowed it was decided to go hunting anyway. ‘John in his green kimono, me in my nightie in the pissing rain, carrying rifles, rough-shooting it – with a shih tzu dog and an Irish wolfhound. Of course we were incapable of doing anything. John eventually fell off the horse and broke his leg! And I was accused by his wife of corrupting him!’

  A determined atheist, Huston had nevertheless accepted an offer from Dino De Laurentiis to direct a spectacular epic entitled The Bible: In the Beginning, scripted by renowned playwright Christopher Fry. Originally De Laurentiis intended for a host of directors to tackle different subjects of the book of Genesis: Robert Bresson was given creation and the garden of Eden and Orson Welles Abraham, while Visconti and Fellini were also mooted. Ultimately Huston got the whole gig, as well as appearing as Noah. In a star-strewn cast, De Laurentiis hoped Laurence Olivier would play God, but Huston wanted O’Toole and had come up with the audacious idea of having the actor play three identical angels. O’Toole was happy to oblige, keen to work for Huston, and in a film full of overwrought and tiresomely earnest performances his cameo is quite easily the best thing in it, gliding ghost-like through Sodom and Gomorrah in a hooded cloak, unleashing God’s wrath with his blazing blue eyes.

  Arriving in Rome in the summer of 1964, when O’Toole heard that Richard Harris was to play Cain he joked to Huston that he really ought to re-title his picture ‘The Gospel According to Mick’. Another of his co-stars, George C. Scott, O’Toole was less fond. Hired to play Abraham opposite Ava Gardner’s Sarah, Scott had an unhealthy obsession with the actress and consequently their love affair was dominated by heated rows that usually ended in violence. One day on the set a drunk Scott went to hit Ava and it took Huston and six crew members to hold him back. When O’Toole heard about the incident it was only Huston’s intervention that prevented him from going round and beating the crap out of the Hollywood star.

  While staying in Rome, O’Toole had been warned about the paparazzi, who in recent years had become a pest in the city. Resting in his hotel suite, the door suddenly flew open and a gorgeous half-naked blonde fell at his feet. Quick as a flash he darted into the next room before two photographers came bounding in.

  It became something of a game between the paparazzi and O’Toole, they’d lie in wait for him, desperate to catch a bit of hell-raising. The fraught relationship reached boiling point at three o’clock one morning on the Via Veneto. O’Toole was hosting a private party at the Café de Paris with Finney and the British-born actress Barbara Steele, who had made a name for herself in Italian horror pictures. As they left to walk to their parked car a young photographer darted in front of them and began snapping away. Bereft of any more patience, O’Toole decked him. The police arrived and the actor, along with Miss Steele, we
re arrested and questioned in a nearby police station for two hours.

  The ordeal was far from over when the police arrived at O’Toole’s hotel the next morning informing him that they intended to press charges of assault and were impounding his luggage and passport. Asked to go and fetch them O’Toole had to think fast. Grabbing his stuntman and stand-in, a gentleman by the name of Peter Perkins, O’Toole made him wear his raincoat, cap and sunglasses and sent him down to the lobby and into the hands of the police, while he made a quick dash for it down the fire escape.

  The Bible took two years to finally reach the screen, but O’Toole thoroughly enjoyed his short stint with Huston and it was hoped the pair might collaborate again. In the end they never did, but for a while Huston was attached to a project that would have seen O’Toole play Will Adams, a sailor believed to be the first Englishman ever to set foot in Japan, where he became a key adviser to the Shogun. O’Toole stumbled upon the history of this remarkable man during his Japanese visit and once back in London began to research and study it more thoroughly, finally commissioning Dalton Trumbo to write a speculative screenplay. For several weeks O’Toole worked with Huston over the Trumbo draft at the director’s house. Anjelica Huston, then just fourteen, remembers busily working behind the bar keeping the men regularly refreshed with vodkas: half vodka, half water for O’Toole, ‘He won’t notice,’ and for her father, just water, ‘He won’t notice either.’ It was scheduled to be shot on location in Japan as a joint production between Hollywood producer Joe Levine and Keep Films, but sadly this ambitious film, which would have co-starred Toshiro Mifune, never materialized.

  Other mooted projects around this time included an offer to play the Duke of Wellington opposite Richard Burton as Napoleon in an epic retelling of the Battle of Waterloo. The project resurfaced a few years later with Christopher Plummer as Wellington and Rod Steiger as Napoleon. There was also a planned film version of King Lear, which O’Toole hoped to persuade Kurosawa to direct. ‘I think he knows Lear in his bones, that monolithic feudal thing.’ It was an astute observation since Kurosawa did eventually make his own version of King Lear in 1985, the critically acclaimed Ran.