Peter O'Toole

by Robert Sellers

  The season closed with The Apple Cart, a production Sara refused to appear in due to her aversion to Shaw. It was a decision that incurred the wrath of O’Toole and she left the company feeling bitter and miserable. She had enjoyed working with him, despite the challenges, but came away from the experience with the opinion that here was a highly manipulative individual. ‘He was maddening because he insisted that he was right and wasn’t actually interested in what anybody else had to say unless it complimented some intellectual concept that he had and then you could have a big intellectual discussion with him. He was a bit of a bully. And he didn’t suffer fools gladly. If he saw somebody who wasn’t pulling their weight or giving a performance that he didn’t approve of, he’d belittle them.’ O’Toole had a very quick tongue and could lash out in a subtle way, or a not very subtle way, just to put a person in their place. One was always reminded that this was all about him and that he was the centre of it. ‘He was a star,’ says Sara. ‘He dazzled, and he knew that he dazzled. He wasn’t an ensemble man.’

  Yet it was O’Toole’s star power that had brought huge crowds back to the Old Vic. ‘He saved our bacon,’ said Val May. ‘We never looked back after that.’

  Having not made a film since Man of La Mancha, O’Toole had given instructions to Jules Buck to find suitable projects for him to star in. In the summer of 1974 Robert Mitchum was cast in a kidnap drama about Palestinian terrorists called Rosebud, but arrived on location in Corsica drunk and over the next few days appeared not to sober up very much. Finally director Otto Preminger confronted him, they shook hands and he walked. When Buck, an old friend of Preminger’s, heard of Mitchum’s departure he called the director and suggested O’Toole as a replacement. Just forty-eight hours later O’Toole landed in Corsica ready to begin work.

  Some questioned Preminger’s logic replacing one drunk with another. When Mitchum heard the news his response was, ‘Hell, that’s like replacing Ray Charles with Helen Keller.’ Preminger knew he was taking a risk but for once alcohol wasn’t the problem, O’Toole was desperately ill. In London he’d complained of extreme stomach pain and was so unwell he couldn’t be moved and was forced to lie in bed for a month, where he would flit in and out of consciousness and when awake had to endure terrible pain. His doctor was at a loss for an explanation and when O’Toole was able to get up and move about the hope was that this mysterious illness had been defeated. According to Tony Gittelson, an assistant on Rosebud, O’Toole arrived in Corsica, ‘Looking totally dissipated, at death’s door.’ Sure enough, while shooting in Paris the stomach pains returned and he was taken to hospital and the film was delayed by several days.

  O’Toole had barely returned to work on the film when there was another emergency. The crew were filming in the Parisian apartment of an American journalist and when O’Toole arrived early that morning he discovered a note addressed to him, ‘Personal and Confidential’. He opened it and couldn’t believe what he was reading. It purported to be from the IRA, accusing him of being a ‘so-called Irishman’ and traitor to the cause for performing in a film that was critical of their terrorist brethren in Palestine, and that a bomb had been planted on the set which would detonate at noon. Taking no chances, Preminger ordered the building cleared. ‘This was the height of the bombings,’ O’Toole later recalled. ‘Bloody Friday, Bloody Sunday, my forebears were getting together and blowing things up. You had to take these things seriously.’

  As it turned out the whole thing was a hoax. A dinner party had been held in the apartment the previous evening and one of the guests, the critic Kenneth Tynan, had written the note as a prank. Preminger wasn’t laughing, nor was O’Toole, who learnt of Tynan’s whereabouts in the city and with two burly crew hands went over and viciously beat him up. Once friends and keen admirers of each other’s talents, O’Toole and Tynan never spoke to one another again, but no charges were brought.

  Rosebud is one of those globetrotting thrillers beloved of seventies filmmakers: Paris, Berlin, Tel Aviv, the French Riviera, Hamburg all make cameo appearances. O’Toole plays a CIA agent masquerading as a journalist trying to track down five kidnapped women, including a young Isabelle Huppert and in her film debut, Kim Cattrall. O’Toole gamely fleshed out the character, bringing a burned-out raffishness and eccentricity to the role, although according to Erik Preminger, Otto’s son, who wrote the screenplay, the actor didn’t think much of the project. ‘Or the script. I always got the feeling that basically he was doing it for the money. But you wouldn’t know it from the level of his professionalism. He was always on time ready to go. And very nice to me, considering how bad the script was.’ O’Toole did, however, insist on bringing his own writer in to redraft all of his dialogue scenes. He also rarely socialized, after filming he went back alone to his hotel.

  As for the formidable Otto Preminger, O’Toole found him a delightful character, and the feeling was mutual according to Erik. ‘Otto loved British actors because British actors did what they were told to do and that’s exactly what Peter did.’ Erik recalls no arguments between the two of them or disagreements. ‘Maybe Peter felt that the picture was a lost cause from the very beginning so why argue about it.’ Other members of the cast weren’t so lucky and fell prey to Preminger’s legendary temper, including Erik himself, who agreed to play a small role on the proviso that his dad didn’t shout or yell at him. Well, when Erik didn’t hit his marks on a couple of takes Preminger blasted him in front of the whole crew. ‘I remember though Peter rubbing the back of my neck to take the tension out of the situation.’

  When Rosebud finally opened it was clobbered by the critics and quickly vanished from cinemas. O’Toole’s film comeback had been inauspicious to say the least. His next screen role fared little better, a new version of the Robinson Crusoe story, Man Friday, based on a play by one of his Hampstead friends, the poet, playwright and novelist Adrian Mitchell, who wrote passionately about nuclear war, Vietnam and racism. O’Toole had seen the play and liked it enormously, enough to persuade Jules Buck to produce it under the aegis of Keep Films, with financial backing obtained from television tycoon Lew Grade.

  For director O’Toole chose Jack Gold, an accomplished filmmaker, and the pair got along fine, with Gold learning pretty quickly that you didn’t so much direct O’Toole as let him loose. ‘Peter came with a fully realized portrait in his own mind of what Crusoe was like, and the style in which he was going to play it, and my first awareness of it was when the camera was running. It didn’t evolve during the process of the filming, he’d got a conception of it and there it was, presented.’

  The five-week schedule in Puerto Vallarta in Mexico passed off smoothly, save for the occasion O’Toole inexplicably went to sleep on an ant farm and developed a throat infection as a consequence. There were long, luxurious lunches and games of football on the beach and O’Toole enjoyed working with Richard Roundtree, the American actor best known for playing Shaft, who had been cast as Friday. Gold also discovered he and O’Toole shared a love for Max Miller. ‘We used to do some of his old routines between us while we were waiting to shoot.’ As for booze, O’Toole was dry for the most part. Actor Peter Cellier, who last worked with O’Toole on his 1964 Hamlet, remembers getting a phone call on Christmas Eve asking if he could fly in on Boxing Day. ‘I arrived and there were six tequilas on the bar waiting for me. “You’re late,” said O’Toole.’

  One evening O’Toole invited Gold and Roundtree to join him for dinner with his old friend John Huston, who lived not too far away. One of his idols, Gold never forgot the experience. ‘He was old and arthritic by this stage and wanted to go to bed early, nothing like the roaring days, but the warmth was still there between him and Peter. It was a bit like memory lane for them, while I just sat there the whole evening with my mouth open.’

  As the film geared up for release news broke that it had been chosen as the official British entry for that year’s Cannes Film Festival. However, this did little to appease the critics, who largely dismissed th
e film, and thanks to a limited release the public ignored it, too. Gold thinks the poor response was due to the fact that audiences expected another traditional Crusoe/Friday story, not this critique of imperialist attitudes. ‘It wasn’t intelligent white man and ignorant savage, it was intelligent white man with a very intelligent and cultured, in his own way, black man,’ says Gold. ‘The roles became inverted. There was a strong moral and philosophical thread running through the whole piece.’

  O’Toole’s own performance was criticized in some quarters for being too extrovert. Katrine Ames of Newsweek complained that while there was no actor better at playing contained madness, ‘once he lets it out he turns into a ham’. Gold argues that the performance fitted the piece, which contained broad strokes in that there were elements of song and dance and slapstick comedy. ‘It also had to have great touches of sensitivity and self-examination. I thought it was fascinating. He could do the gamut, there’s no question how efficient Peter was.’

  SIXTEEN

  O’Toole hadn’t been long back from Mexico when all the stomach problems that had plagued him for years and his reckless drinking conspired to almost put him into an early grave. Repeatedly he was warned that the amount he was drinking was unhealthy but O’Toole had been born with extraordinary restorative powers and always seemed to come out of the other end of a drinking binge seemingly none the worse for wear. When he shared a flat with Kenneth Griffith in Belgravia, Siân learnt that some nights O’Toole would sit there drinking Scotch from one glass and white ulcer medicine from another, while alternately puffing on Gauloises.

  Was all this drinking a death wish, as some have suggested? Highly doubtful. On the night he returned to Guyon House after an evening boozing and complained of stomach pains evidently greater and more acute than any he had hitherto experienced, Siân could see the worry etched out on his face. When their local doctor arrived he decided that O’Toole should be immediately hospitalized and called an ambulance to take him to the nearby Royal Free.

  Curiously among the first things that happened to him was a vigorous shave. O’Toole had grown a handsome beard to play Judas in Lew Grade’s TV mini-series Jesus of Nazareth and went to remonstrate with the nurse given the task of removing it: ‘Hey, don’t do that. I need it.’ No he didn’t, he could barely walk let alone act. So ill was he that he couldn’t keep solid food down and pure water had to be fed directly into his stomach through a pipe.

  As tests began Siân was kept away, they wouldn’t even let her see him until the next day. When she walked into the room he was hooked up to so many machines that it looked like his life force was being drained away. When the tests came back inconclusive his team of doctors decided to carry out exploratory surgery. It was to be the first of several serious operations. ‘I suggested they put in a zip, they were opening me up so often,’ O’Toole later joked.

  Inevitably the press found out and began to speculate that O’Toole had alcohol poisoning or something wrong with his liver. They didn’t know the full story, only Siân, the doctors and Jules Buck knew how perilously he was clinging on to life. The children, who were luckily on holiday in Ireland with Siân’s mother, hadn’t been told and together Siân and Buck tried to keep the media in the dark as much as possible, though it didn’t help that Siân was sometimes called at home by journalists asking if she’d help update her husband’s obituary. Siân knew things were bad when talking to the ward sister one day, ‘It will get better, won’t it?’ she burst into tears and fled the room. For the weeks that O’Toole lay in that hospital in a comatose state Siân stood a lonely vigil by his bedside, watching as the man she loved ‘hovered between life and death’.

  With some convinced he wasn’t going to pull through, O’Toole finally opened his eyes, looked across at Siân and gave her a lopsided grin, before ripping out the tubes stuck in his body and demanding to be fed. Shortly afterwards Jules Buck arrived, beaming. ‘He’ll outlive us all, kid,’ he said.

  Discharged, O’Toole was gingerly taken back home and placed in bed to convalesce. Bored after a week, he fancied recuperating somewhere a bit more exotic than his own bedroom. Siân tried to reason with him, that doctors had urged him to rest and stay put. O’Toole would not be dissuaded and they booked a month in a hotel in Positano on the Amalfi coast that in the end did him the world of good.

  Returning to London, O’Toole was open to a barrage of press intrusion about his time in hospital but refused to comment. ‘My plumbing is nobody’s business but my own.’ American tabloids reported that his pancreas was removed, other rumours were that he’d got stomach cancer, but O’Toole denied them. What was true was that he came as close to dying as you can do without actually snuffing it. ‘It was a photo-finish, the surgeons said.’ However, there was now so little of his digestive system left that even the smallest amount of alcohol might kill him. He was ordered off the booze. And this time he heeded his doctor’s advice, while at the same time insisting the wine cellar at Guyon House remain fully stocked, as indeed was the drinks cabinet in his study.

  In 1980 on the set of the American TV mini-series Masada O’Toole confided in his co-star Barbara Carrera about his operation and the consequences of his years of drinking. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I’ve got to tell you I’ve got no stomach, my whole stomach has been removed because of alcohol. And if I were to drink a mere spoonful of alcohol it would kill me.’ Barbara was so shocked that every one of those words she’s never been able to forget. ‘Then he unbuttoned his shirt and showed me this scar that went from his chest to his abdomen. It was horrific.’

  It’s very easy to stop drinking when your actual life depends on it. But what’s it like for someone who made virtually a career out of it, an ex-hell-raiser, to no longer be the rip-roarer of old? ‘The pirate ship has berthed,’ is how he put it. O’Toole simply stopped playing the bad boy, cut out the wild antics, no more binges, no more lost weekends, no more taking his two daughters into pubs under his coat just as his father had done with him. ‘It was all becoming a bore. The pleasure wasn’t worth the pain.’ But what remained was a ravaged shell of a man, and the loss of his looks too early in life. Yet he remained unrepentant till the end, telling a US magazine in 1989, ‘I wouldn’t have missed one drop of alcohol that I drank.’

  He was actually coping quite well, having been prescribed plenty of vitamins to chew and hefty doses of Valium, though still chain-smoked his Gauloises using a long black holder, equipped with a filter in a concession to health. Such was his devotion to the habit that a friend once complained. ‘Peter, you smell like a French train.’ Actor Michael Craig recalls a strange incident when the two of them were making Country Dance in 1969. ‘We both smoked Gauloises, Peter smoked his without filters then and I smoked filtered ones. And he got in a terrible rage. “What’s the matter with you, bloody filters!” And he took my fags and broke all the filters off. “Now have a proper cigarette,” he said.’

  After giving up the booze O’Toole had little patience with drinkers, even if they were friends, or so it seemed. One of his closest acting buddies was Donal McCann, who took great pride in his association with O’Toole. ‘He idolized O’Toole,’ claims Billy Foyle. ‘He was a god to Donal.’ Visiting the Connemara area, McCann got in touch with Foyle asking if O’Toole was around and if they could set up a meeting. O’Toole’s number was ex-directory, Foyle was one of the few people who had it, so he called the house. After a short pause O’Toole spoke, he wanted to know if McCann was drinking. Foyle said he didn’t think he was. In fact, unknown to Foyle, McCann, who was an alcoholic, had been seen drunk in Clifden, something that O’Toole soon discovered after making a few phone calls of his own. When Foyle and McCann arrived at the house O’Toole was down near the beach exercising a pony on a long rope. The two men rested on the gate to watch. O’Toole ignored them. McCann was holding a stick and put a white handkerchief on the top and started waving it. O’Toole continued to ignore them. Fed up, Foyle went down to O’Toole to tell him in no uncertai
n manner what he thought of him. O’Toole returned his glare. ‘You told me McCann wasn’t drinking.’

  ‘He’s not drunk,’ said Foyle.

  O’Toole’s face remained impassive. ‘I didn’t ask you that. I asked was he drinking!’ Things got a bit heated and Foyle ended up telling O’Toole where he could go and left. ‘Poor McCann was very upset that Peter wouldn’t see him,’ says Foyle, ‘and spent three days in the town drunk until they got him out. You know, there’s nothing so pure as the reformed whore, and O’Toole not being the drinker and McCann still at it, I thought Peter would have shown a bit more generosity and sympathy, but he didn’t.’

  SEVENTEEN

  In spite of all the problems in their marriage, O’Toole had always been happy for Siân and the children to visit him on film locations. Now, as he packed for a stay shooting in Mexico in mid-1975 for his next film, he wouldn’t countenance the suggestion of Siân accompanying him. Faced with a brick wall of intransigence she did something she’d never done before, she pleaded to come with him. O’Toole waved her protestations away and headed to the airport leaving Siân rejected and isolated.

  What was behind such behaviour? Was it the need to be alone and independent again, not to be fussed over and nursemaided, to get on with his life after so very nearly losing it? Or was there another reason? During the filming of Man Friday O’Toole had begun an affair with a local waitress and budding actress more than twenty years his junior, Malinche Verdugo. Siân’s suspicions had been raised after coming across what looked like a love letter amidst the correspondence O’Toole left lying about. Her anxieties weren’t helped by the fact she hadn’t heard anything from her husband for weeks since his departure, not a letter or a phone call, nothing. She hadn’t even been given a telephone number that she could reach him at. It’s true that O’Toole had an aversion to telephones, finding conversations on the blasted things cold and emotionless, but this total lack of any communication was troubling.