Unarguably the biggest film role O’Toole was offered at this time came from David Lean, and it was the lead in his next big-budget spectacular, Doctor Zhivago. Lean had reservations, fearing the actor was far too extrovert to be ideal casting for the naive and idealistic Zhivago, ‘but I would rather suppress his exhibitionism than attempt to coax strength out of a lily’. O’Toole, however, had seen an early draft of the screenplay and made it known that he didn’t think highly of it. In the end Omar Sharif won the role. While O’Toole did revise his opinion when he saw the finished film, Lean never forgot his rash early appraisal and the pair apparently did not speak to each other until the early eighties, when Lean offered him the role of Fielding in his adaptation of E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India. Again O’Toole declined, perhaps his rift with Lean had not altogether healed, and James Fox was cast instead.
With the glorious exception of Lawrence of Arabia, O’Toole’s most commercially successful film of the sixties derived from a quite unusual source – Warren Beatty’s sex life. The Hollywood star had decided to bring his amorous exploits to life on screen, ‘the plight of the compulsive Don Juan’. It was called What’s New Pussycat?, an expression Warren often used when calling up his girls on the phone. He brought in Charlie Feldman as producer, and to write the script sought the talents of a young New York stand-up comic, Woody Allen. ‘Warren and Woody thought they were going to make a low-key, Woody Allen kind of picture,’ recalls Clive Donner, who’d been hired to direct. ‘Now there was no way Charlie was ever going to do that, that wasn’t his style, low key pictures, he was into big fucking powerful productions.’ Apparently Feldman’s advice to Allen was that he ‘write something where we can all go to Paris and chase girls’.
Alarm bells started ringing for Beatty when Feldman insisted Capucine play an important role in the film. ‘Warren and Charlie were very good friends,’ says Donner. ‘But Warren just didn’t want to act with Capucine. He’s a lovely guy, Warren, but deadly serious. So we had a big meeting, it went on and on and on, with Warren trying to get his own way.’ In the end he confronted Feldman, it was either him or Capucine; and as she had once been Feldman’s lover it was no contest.
Feldman himself came up with Beatty’s replacement during a meeting with Donner. ‘How about O’Toole?’ Donner knew and admired O’Toole, and more importantly knew he was more than capable of playing comedy. As it happened O’Toole was on the lookout for a project with a bit more levity to it. At Bristol he’d particularly enjoyed playing comedic roles but so far on film had barely been allowed to raise a titter. After all, comedy was just as valid as drama. For what was farce, he said, but tragedy without trousers. ‘Shoot a man in the stomach and it is drama. Shoot him in the backside and it is comic.’ Reading the script, he found it funny, ‘wonderfully anarchistic’, and reminiscent of the old Aldwych farces. The role on offer also appealed, that of a notorious womanizer who refuses to give up his hedonistic lifestyle to settle down and get married. It made a change, he said, from usually being in love with Richard Burton or camels.
Exerting a bit of star muscle, O’Toole insisted the role of Dr Fassbender, a crackpot psychoanalyst originally earmarked for Groucho Marx in the Beatty version, be played by Peter Sellers. The pair had almost worked together the previous year when Billy Wilder wanted them to play Holmes and Watson in a film that ultimately broke down due to the lack of a workable script, only to re-emerge in 1970 as The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes with a new cast. The problem was Sellers had only recently recovered from a near-fatal heart attack and no insurance company would touch him. In the end Feldman agreed to stump up $200,000 of his own money to cover the possibility of the comedian dropping dead halfway through shooting.
Showing little gratitude, Sellers arrived on the film demanding top billing. The studio were ready to tell him where to go until O’Toole told them he didn’t give a damn, ‘Let Sellers have what he wants.’ It was a bad start, but the two Peters did end up hitting it off. Things weren’t entirely comfortable, however, as O’Toole observed. ‘It was sometimes downright edgy, but it was the sharp edginess of stimulation and exploration.’ They got on so well that O’Toole made a guest appearance a couple of years later in Sellers’ overblown Bond spoof Casino Royale, playing the bagpipes in a marching band. He later claimed it was a St Patrick’s Day joke and didn’t realize it would make the final cut.
His relationship with Woody Allen was far more strained. Allen had worked for months on the screenplay, his first, only to watch chunks of it re-written by Sellers, Donner and O’Toole, or scrapped altogether. Allen’s grumblings aside, Donner remembered the general mood on the set was good. O’Toole was particularly delighted to hear that Burton and Liz Taylor were shooting interiors for their dreary romantic film The Sandpiper in the same Paris studio. One afternoon he snuck onto the set and replaced one of the actors playing a drunk who disturbs Liz and Burton’s amorous coupling on a beach. When the director called action, on pounded O’Toole who let forth a torrent of bad Welsh, cursing the bewildered Burton. Not to be outdone Richard insisted on a small cameo role in Pussycat. The pair of them bump into each other at the bar of a swish nightclub. ‘Give my regards to what’s her name?’ asks O’Toole.
O’Toole and Burton made good use of their time together in Paris, drinking in various establishments without serious incident. It was one evening when O’Toole was alone that he allowed the darkness within him to take hold. Returning to his hotel from filming one night he saw two policemen roughing up a prostitute. His revenge took place several days later at a nightclub he regularly frequented where at the close of the evening a policeman (not one of those he’d seen earlier) always arrived to be plied with alcohol by the customers and dance until he fell over. In the midst of these activities O’Toole weaved through the dancing throng until he was over his prey and jumped him, knocking the man to the floor and roughing him up. ‘By the time I’d finished with him I don’t think he was in any condition to whack any poor old whore around the head for a night or two.’
Finishing Pussycat in the early spring of 1965, O’Toole returned to London to discover Siân was the talk of the West End, having just opened to rave notices in Tennessee Williams’ Night of the Iguana. Siân’s casting in the play may have had something to do with an event the actor Bruce Montague witnessed some months before at the Salisbury pub. ‘There was a big chair at one end of the Salisbury in those days. At some point, we were impressed to see Tennessee Williams sitting in it. We were astonished to see Peter O’Toole get on his knees at the feet of the great writer and cajole him into talking about the casting of Night of the Iguana due to be presented at the Savoy Theatre. Whatever was discussed it must have worked because Siân Phillips ended up in the production.’
No matter how well or badly a play had gone, it wasn’t unusual for Siân and O’Toole to spend hours the following day pulling the performance to pieces, working out how to make it better. Siân later admitted that O’Toole was better than any drama school she went to. A good example was the time she was struck down with flu after being cast in a West End play and O’Toole coached her through it, going over every line of her dialogue. With virtually no rehearsal Siân was able to give a commendable performance.
O’Toole saw Iguana and enjoyed it enormously. He invited Siân’s co-star Mark Eden for dinner at Guyon House. The drink flowed and as the evening wore on Siân excused herself to go to bed. ‘From then on things began to go downhill rather quickly,’ Eden recalls. ‘Peter started pouring alarmingly large brandies, and like a fool I tried to match him drink for drink. It was to be my undoing. When I finally lurched to my feet to leave, I fell flat on my face and passed out.’ Eden faintly remembers being carried up the stairs by O’Toole who had him over his shoulder in a fireman’s lift. ‘How he was still able to climb the stairs was a miracle, never mind carrying a 175 pound drunken actor on his back.’
Next morning Eden woke with a horrendous hangover but still managed to drag himself to the
theatre for the matinee. ‘Peter was there waiting for me with a glass of what looked like muddy water. “It’s my own remedy,” he said, handing me the glass. ‘Great for hangovers – if you can keep it down.” It tasted absolutely vile, but it did the trick and I was able to get through the rest of the day – just.’
Not working, O’Toole could indulge in hanging out with his drinking pals, people like James Villiers, Ronnie Fraser, Philip Bond, Bryan Pringle. For O’Toole the pleasure of drinking wasn’t the effect, it was the company. ‘I like being around men with jars in their hands. Sober people, they’re not for me.’ They’d start off at the Cranbourne Tavern (now long gone), next to the Arts Theatre, and slowly drift towards the Salisbury. Acting would rarely come up as a topic for conversation, instead they’d be sharing the latest gossip, chatting about women, drink and sport. Any talk along the lines of ‘Did you see my Lear?’ was instantly frowned upon.
Most of them were followers of sport and always made a special effort to attend the Middlesex Sevens, an annual rugby tournament at Twickenham. It was a glorious piss-up that went on all day. This year, O’Toole picked everyone up in his Roller and as they arrived at the stadium car park who should they almost bump into but Robert Shaw, driving in his Rolls. The wine and beer flowed, but when the event finished around six the obvious next question was, where shall we go now for a drink. Philip Bond knew a member of the committee over at Rosslyn Park Rugby Club in Roehampton, so everyone piled into the two Rolls and off they headed. Allowed into the club’s private bar the drinking carried on until O’Toole announced he needed to be in the West End as he’d promised to pick up Siân. Again, off they all went and news was sent for Siân to meet them in such and such a pub. After several more hours’ drinking it transpired that O’Toole and Shaw had challenged each other to a race in their separate Rollers down to Brighton. Everyone piled outside to wave them off. No one saw either of them again for three days.
That June, O’Toole began rehearsals for a new play, David Mercer’s Ride a Cock Horse, which dealt with intense adult relationships. It appealed for a number of reasons, a desire to return to the stage, to do something contemporary, and to work with Mercer, whose intellectual weight of writing he respected. O’Toole took no fee until the production costs had been met. Above all, this was a star vehicle, requiring O’Toole to be on stage virtually the whole time as he juggles a wife, a girlfriend and an older mistress. It was a real marathon and at one point O’Toole demanded Mercer make cuts, only to learn that the deleted scenes meant a young actress in the cast had practically no character left to play. O’Toole insisted everything was put back in.
They opened for previews in Nottingham and were completely sold out. By this time Siân had joined the cast at short notice when the actress playing the older mistress had to leave, only to be largely left to her own devices by the director and O’Toole. Just managing to keep her head above water in the role, Siân hated every minute of the run, feeling she had been treated rather shabbily. She was just at the point of hating O’Toole when he managed, as he so often did, to pull an ace out of his sleeve. Many years before, moving house after a failed relationship, Siân had misplaced her mother’s complete set of Charles Dickens, which she had read avidly since childhood. On the opening night of their West End engagement, as Siân sat panicking and vomiting in her dressing room, a huge package arrived from O’Toole, a beautiful collection of Dickens’ works.
Playing at the Piccadilly Theatre for a limited engagement, Ride a Cock Horse broke the theatre’s attendance record. O’Toole gave a tremendous performance and was highly praised, even if the play itself received lukewarm notices. Kenneth Tynan came more than once to see it. But the strain was taking its toll and O’Toole began to suffer abdominal problems. Never having missed a performance through ill health he was determined to press on, despite having to perform sometimes in agonizing pain. He suffered intense nose bleeds, too, and there would be blood all over the stage. Thanks to an already healthy box office, it was decided to pull the play two weeks early. O’Toole immediately took Siân off for a relaxing break in Venice and on his return booked himself into a nursing home to get his battered body back into shape. He was told by doctors to ease off the drinking, as he had been during his tenure at Stratford. Again, he ignored them. He simply refused to accept he had a drink problem, later admitting that he never suffered a hangover until he was thirty.
Poor Siân though had become exasperated by her husband’s hell-raising image, an image he had begun to revel in and play up to. Stories about him were turning up regularly in the press. Sometimes it was difficult to decipher what was truth and what was Fleet Street fancy. Typical of these tales was one which had him arriving late for a ferry back to Ireland and he was refused entry by the captain. Undeterred, O’Toole chartered a plane to Dublin, then hired a taxi at the airport and raced to the harbour. When the ferry arrived there was O’Toole waiting on the dock to challenge the officer to a fistfight. Did this actually happen? The public didn’t care, they lapped it up with their morning coffee and toast.
He certainly got up to all sorts, that’s true. ‘We were silly and young and drunken and making complete clowns of ourselves. But I did quite enjoy the days when one went for a beer at one’s local bar in Paris and woke up in Corsica.’ For O’Toole it was all about having fun. Alcohol wasn’t an addiction, it was just a fuel, it was in addition to what was going on, which was leaping and shrieking and saying: why not? Robert Bolt, who wrote Lawrence of Arabia, remembers a dinner with O’Toole at this time when they were joined by Carry On star Kenneth Williams. The booze flowed and they all went on to a nightclub afterwards. In the morning both Bolt and Williams woke up with horrendous hangovers. It was an experience that compelled Bolt to write to Williams: ‘Evenings with Peter always extend into the early morning don’t they? It’s this quality in him which you diagnosed of making every occasion a holiday. I wonder if it feels like that to him. It must be lovely if it is so.’ Indeed it was, most of the time. As O’Toole explained to Tom Stoppard once, having fun for him was ‘a deep philosophical attitude’.
After What’s New Pussycat?, O’Toole looked for another project that would further avoid him being typecast as an actor who played tortured types, à la Lawrence and Lord Jim. He wanted to surprise people, to avoid a set pattern. This was something he’d been taught in theatre. ‘If you wanted to be a proper actor, if you wanted to be a Larry Olivier, or a Michael Redgrave or a John Gielgud, you had to have versatility.’ He found what he wanted in How To Steal A Million, a romantic/heist comedy shooting that autumn in Paris that gave him the chance for ‘a touch of the Cary Grants’. It also gave him his most glamorous co-star yet in Audrey Hepburn.
With Siân in London and Hepburn’s husband Mel Ferrer at home in Switzerland, inevitable rumours surfaced of an affair between the stars. In truth nothing happened, though both got on extremely well, with great mutual respect for each other’s abilities. Audrey loved O’Toole’s zany antics, which included the Irishman getting the actress plastered on set for the first and only time in her career. It was a cold morning and the scene required Audrey to do nothing more strenuous than drive down a street. O’Toole suggested a shot of brandy to starve off the chill, but one glass became two glasses which became three until finally when she was required on set Audrey bounded out of her trailer, waddled towards the car, got in and drove straight into five huge arc lights, totally demolishing them. Luckily nobody was injured.
Frawley Becker was the dialogue coach on the film and got to know O’Toole quite well, well enough to discern with his trained ear that the actor’s everyday speech did not always consist of the theatrical tones he often expressed himself with, but there were distinct traces of his working-class heritage there, too. Becker saw O’Toole as ‘the common man who became the crowned King’.
The film was shot at the Studios de Boulogne in the west of Paris under the supervision of William Wyler, a director responsible for a cavalcade of Hollywood clas
sics from Roman Holiday to Ben-Hur, but who was now operating past his prime and in somewhat poor health. Wyler was under no illusions about O’Toole’s hell-raising reputation, bluntly referring to him as ‘a drunk’. As far as Becker could tell, O’Toole behaved himself on set, waiting until the very last shot of the day before opening a bottle of Dom Perignon, which he invariably shared. Off set things were a little different as O’Toole was a frequent visitor to the trendiest Parisian night spots. ‘But whatever he did in the evening never seemed to affect his performance during the day,’ recalls Becker. ‘The lines around his eyes sometimes gave him away, and Audrey once remarked to me, as Peter appeared on the set, all smiles and removing the dark glasses he frequently wore, “What does he do with his nights.” ’
Obviously Audrey never read the Parisian newspapers, which delighted in reporting some of O’Toole’s drunken disturbances. One night he became involved in some fisticuffs with a gentleman who turned out to be a French count. Although he logged a complaint with the police of wilful assault, the incident was hushed up and O’Toole was never charged.
On his forays into the Parisian night O’Toole was often accompanied by Peter Perkins, the assistant cum bodyguard who began to work for him on the Bible shoot. Perkins had the constitution of a wrestler, having begun in the film business as a stuntman, notably doubling Sean Connery as James Bond in the classic fight aboard the Orient Express in From Russia with Love. Becker and many on the crew found the pair an odd match, the effortlessly sophisticated O’Toole with what looked like a fifth-rate Soho bouncer. Becker was even less enamoured of him after one encounter during a break in filming at the studio bar. ‘I give Peter three more years,’ said Perkins. ‘Five at the most. It’ll do him in, you see, his drinking. He’ll lose his looks. It’ll show up on the screen, in his face. Like I said, three to five years. And that gives me just a few years, too, to make my fortune.’ However sadly accurate Perkins’ prediction was to prove to be, it was still a callous assessment, especially by someone who was obviously doing well out of his association with the star. By the end of the decade, though, the two men parted company.
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