Peter O'Toole

by Robert Sellers

  Siân was kept busy appearing in a play in the West End and mid-way through the run, to her immense surprise, shock and delight, began a passionate affair of her own with one of the cast, a young actor by the name of Robin Sachs. He was exciting, attentive and generous in his feelings and emotions, the complete opposite of O’Toole, who had always kept his emotions in check, that included with friends, family and work mates.

  In August 1975, O’Toole returned from Mexico and life seemed to carry on as usual at Guyon House. The film he had made, Foxtrot with Charlotte Rampling, ended up being of absolutely no consequence, not even theatrically released in Britain. In it he played a jaded aristocrat who deserts Europe at the end of the Second World War to live on an island. Its reception was indicative of the poor choices he’d made since returning to the cinema, which the actor blamed on a dearth of good material coming his way, a situation that was beginning to wear him down. Ironically, it was now Siân’s career, so long in the shadow of her husband’s, that was blossoming, having won a major role in the BBC’s adaptation of How Green Was My Valley with Stanley Baker. O’Toole accompanied her to the Welsh location and for one scene playfully dressed up as a collier and milled around in the background as an extra. After that was finished she was asked to play Livia in another major BBC drama series, I, Claudius, the role for which the actress remains best known.

  With a paucity of good film roles on offer, O’Toole took to writing poetry and did a lot of reading, just trying to fill every moment of the day with activity; perhaps to keep his mind off alcohol. He also kept himself busy by putting in hours at the Belgravia office of Keep Films, even though his relationship with Jules Buck had begun to unravel over the past year and would soon end. The American had always taken pride in the fact that he above most other people was able to read O’Toole, keep him under some kind of control. ‘It depends what sort of mood he’s in. If it’s Peter’s Yorkshire mood then it’ll be all right. He’s sensible and makes all the right decisions. But if he’s in his Irish mood. Duck.’ Now they had grown apart and were no longer of the same mind on too many things. Maybe the partnership had just run its course. Maybe O’Toole blamed him for his string of film failures.

  Siân was around for the most part, still secretly seeing Robin Sachs, but also looking after the house and the children, almost sleepwalking through her role of wife, a role she found increasingly hard to sustain. To all intents and purposes she was already lost to O’Toole and he didn’t know it, to him the house and those in it, wife, children, mother-in-law, maid, etc., still revolved around his presence.

  At last a quality script arrived, written by Frederic Raphael and based on Geoffrey Household’s 1939 novel Rogue Male, about an English aristocrat who tries to assassinate Hitler just before the outbreak of the war. The book had been a favourite of O’Toole’s youth and he quickly accepted. Over the years the work had achieved cult status and when the word was out it was being made by the BBC, agents inundated the corporation with requests for their clients to be in it. O’Toole himself was clocked by Harold Pinter at a cocktail party asking to play the role of the solicitor. And Alastair Sim, literally on his death bed, crawled out, saying to his distressed wife, ‘Peter will need me to play his uncle.’

  It was a gruelling six-week shoot on locations in England and Wales requiring a great degree of physical action, leaping from cars, hurdling gates and the like. Particularly tough was the torture scene, where the would-be assassin is captured by the Nazis and has his fingernails torn out. ‘Peter found that excessively difficult,’ recalls Michael Byrne, who played the chief interrogator. ‘Because as he told me that was the moment, finishing a tough and painful scene, when he would have loved to have had a drink, and of course he couldn’t.’

  Something that surprised Byrne, given O’Toole’s flamboyance, panache and devil may care behaviour, was how conscientious he was about film acting. He especially emphasized the importance of the moment just before the director calls action and how it shouldn’t be wasted, that whether you were standing on a cliff top or freezing in a studio tank pretending it was the sea, you had to be truly in that moment. ‘Before a take he would hold my look,’ says Byrne. ‘And if there was a hold up in the filming and we should have been going in about thirty seconds but in fact we were four minutes late, he would hold that look throughout that four minutes, not let it go, and then we’d start the scene.’

  Once, on location in Wales, O’Toole asked Byrne if he minded coming to lunch with him. ‘I’m seeing a Mrs Jones.’

  ‘Where?’ asked Byrne.

  ‘In her house.’

  ‘Is it appropriate I come?’ Byrne thought something might be afoot. But for propriety’s sake O’Toole wanted him there.

  ‘This was so typical of Peter,’ says Byrne. ‘He’d bumped into this woman in the street, this ordinary housewife who lived in a little two up, two down, and she’d invited him to lunch and he’d said yes. So there we were, it really was most bizarre. And Peter was really playing up to it, but he was also delightful with her. He knew exactly the effect he had on her but wasn’t taking advantage of it in any way, he was not being condescending. Though he was obviously delighting in this little frisson that was happening.’

  Rogue Male was shown on the BBC in September 1976, ironically the same week as the first episode of I, Claudius. With the shows vying for the prestigious cover of the Radio Times it was O’Toole who won. When he visited Siân on the I, Claudius set, where they were still busily filming, he remembers being ‘about as popular as a pork sausage in a synagogue’.

  A week later he was flying to Rome to begin work on his own toga epic, having agreed to play the Emperor Tiberius in what would turn out to be one of the most controversial films in cinema history, Caligula. Financed by Bob Guccione, the proprietor of sex magazine Penthouse, and directed by Tinto Brass, who specialized in avant-garde and erotic films, what began life as a serious examination of how all power corrupts, with a script by Gore Vidal, quickly spiralled out of control into a visual assault of the senses with decapitations galore, rape, incest, buggery, orgies, murders and torture.

  O’Toole found himself in prestigious company. In the title role of the debauched Caligula was Malcolm McDowell, and there were Helen Mirren and John Gielgud. When O’Toole first encountered Gielgud on the set he greeted him with the words: ‘Hello, Johnny! What is a knight of the realm doing in a porno movie!?’ Nothing at all could be taken seriously, bored looking at all the naked bodies on display they began comparing operation scars. As for McDowell, he dressed for the most part in a nice gold lamé number, so O’Toole dubbed him ‘Tinkerbell’. McDowell adored O’Toole, spending hours in his trailer going over lines but mostly listening to his stories. He remembers one particular night shoot as they waited for the set to be dressed. ‘Peter was smoking and it certainly wasn’t tobacco.’ When they were finally called onto the stage the sight before them was of a mass orgy with every kind of perversion going on with dwarfs, amputees and giant dildos. O’Toole said a line, paused, looked over into a corner and then asked McDowell, ‘Are they doing the Irish jig over there?’ For one shot O’Toole had to ram a sword beneath the breast plate of a Roman guard, piercing a rubber bladder concealing blood. ‘But by this time he was so ripped, he could barely grasp it,’ revealed McDowell. The sword went under the plate with such force it hit the poor actor in the face and knocked him out.

  According to Guccione, O’Toole disliked Tinto Brass on sight, who he delighted in calling Tinto Zinc. On the first day of shooting O’Toole was asked, ‘How you like to be paralysed in picture?’ He thought about it and replied, ‘Anything you like, smiler.’ So O’Toole got himself a naked Sumerian girl to lean on from start to finish. ‘She became known as Betty the Collapsible Crutch.’ Nor did the actor endear himself much to Guccione when he told the producer of his intention to launch a girlie magazine of his own to rival Penthouse. It was to be called Basement and would include such features as ‘Rodent of the Month’ and ‘
Toe Rag of the Year’. Much later Guccione got his own back in an interview revealing that he never once saw O’Toole sober. ‘He doesn’t drink any more, or at least he wasn’t drinking then, but he was strung out on something. From time to time it took a little longer than usual to get him on the set.’ Whatever O’Toole’s condition, he managed to deliver an extraordinarily deranged performance, soaked in maliciousness and perversion as the syphilis-ridden Tiberius.

  For a while Siân and the children visited O’Toole in Rome. Siân was appalled at the profligacy and ineptness on display and even more appalled by the script, which had been rewritten to such a degree that Gore Vidal would eventually demand his name be taken off the picture. Over the next two years, as legal wrangling prevented the film from being released, McDowell and others also tried to distance themselves from it, especially after Guccione inserted some choice slabs of hard-core porn to spice things up. O’Toole wasn’t impressed. ‘As for being erotic, I’d say it was about as erotic as bath night on HMS Montclare.’

  Back at Guyon House, O’Toole and Siân had withdrawn from each other. Siân saw it as a ‘gulf that had opened between us’. There were long periods of silence and non-communication. Siân had also discovered O’Toole had acquired some land in Mexico with the intention of building a house there and was taking Spanish lessons. After months of this situation dragging on she moved out in February 1977, when O’Toole learnt of her liaison with Robin Sachs. It was decided that the children, who were still at school, should remain behind, as would Siân’s mother, who was now a permanent fixture at Guyon House and pretty much ran the place and whom O’Toole affectionately called ‘the old Welsh cow’.

  He was also adamant that the press should not find out about the separation for as long as possible. With Siân working on a BBC film, O’Toole insisted that the studio car still collected her each day from the pavement outside their house in Hampstead, rather than the flat she had taken in Chelsea. All of which necessitated Siân getting up at the crack of dawn to make her way across the capital to Hampstead to be picked up. It was madness.

  O’Toole bought Siân out of the house, but she received almost nothing else, certainly none of the beautiful jewellery that had been given to her over the years, that was sold at Sotheby’s. She was too embarrassed and defeated to contest the decision in court. The joint bank account was closed, her allowance stopped, her medical insurance cancelled; it was a complete severing. O’Toole and Siân were scarcely ever to cross paths again. Elizabeth Harris, who knew the couple, recalls great animosity between both of them after the separation. ‘I never remember seeing them together after the divorce.’ When Siân left she was fully aware that this would be the case. ‘O’Toole prided himself on his resolutely unforgiving nature.’ He was a supreme narcissist, capable of great warmth and generosity, but also capable of shutting people out of his life without seemingly ever wanting to get them back again. As Jane Merrow observed, ‘He respected people for a long time and then they showed their feet of clay and that was the end of it.’

  To the press O’Toole was philosophical about his own inadequacies that had helped consign the marriage to the waste bin. ‘Ooh, I was a hopeless husband. Hopeless. I’m a loving man, but not a particularly well-behaved one.’ Even to close friends he put up a bold front, saying, ‘It’s been a good canter.’ But in private Siân’s desertion and betrayal, for that’s what he saw it as, cut him to the marrow. He was devastated. It wasn’t necessarily an emotional loss. O’Toole was an ego-driven man and how he ran his life, from the very beginning of his marriage to Siân, was demanding and selfish and expectant of everything to go his way. For Siân to pull away from that would have come as both a shock and a big surprise, a case of ‘How could anyone leave me; and especially for a younger man?’ And yet Siân didn’t leave O’Toole for Robin Sachs, she had already ended the affair. Only later did they reunite and marry, when her divorce finally came through at the end of 1979. Rather, Siân left O’Toole simply to get away and be on her own, having finally had enough of his behaviour. Siân was by nature quiet and refined, and out and about with O’Toole, or simply at home, she was always nervously waiting for the next thing to happen, for the fireworks to start. Not for nothing has she described O’Toole as a ‘dangerous, disruptive human being’. And yet she loved him to distraction. ‘He did and does fascinate me,’ she said years later. ‘But I can’t claim to understand him.’ This from a woman who was married and lived with the man for almost twenty years.

  Asked once if anyone in the world really knew him, O’Toole laughed his high laugh before seriously contemplating how he was going to answer the question. ‘I think probably my mother and father had a better hint of the plot than anyone else. My sister once turned round to the very famous actress I was about to work with for a lot of months and said to her, “At the end of the picture, will you tell me who my brother is? What goes on in there, in the fucking thing he calls a mind?” ’

  Within months of Siân leaving, Malinche Verdugo was installed at Guyon House. The first Siân heard of it was during a lunch with her mother when she explained matter-of-factly how she intended to look after Malinche as though she was her own daughter. Siân was completely lost for words. With O’Toole’s help Malinche had also been accepted on a stage-management course at the Bristol Old Vic under the tutelage of Nat Brenner.

  The circumstances of recent years had indeed been a trial for O’Toole: ‘Heartbreak House wasn’t in it,’ he complained. ‘The things that happened to me were almost biblical.’ There was Siân’s departure, his near-death illness, his association with Jules Buck finally coming to an end and then the recent death of his father at the age of eighty-six. He was struck by a car while coming out of a bookie’s and crossing the road to go into a pub. ‘They took him to hospital and found he had nine mortal injuries. Nine! When we went to the hospital we found a form which said – The patient discharged himself. Discharged himself! Christ, he should have been dead nine times over.’ Remarkably, O’Toole senior lasted another three months and died at home. ‘But it took a car to take the old bugger away.’

  As far as work was concerned, O’Toole was still not receiving the big movie offers, so low had his marquee value slipped. For a while Nicolas Roeg did consider him to play the alien Thomas Newton in his spellbinding science-fiction film The Man Who Fell to Earth, a role that eventually went to David Bowie. Instead O’Toole accepted an offer from a young writer/director called Martyn Burke to star in his film about a military coup, called Power Play. Invited to Guyon House for preliminary talks about the script, Burke couldn’t help but notice how wounded an individual O’Toole was. ‘He talked about Siân with a real sense of pain and what came through was that they must have had some terrible battles, and that he was impossible, and yet I felt the pain and the regret so strongly I walked out of that house almost having to brush it off.’

  Burke is convinced that the recent marriage break-up was directly responsible for O’Toole taking on the film, since his role as an army colonel had him seducing and stealing the wife of an older colleague. This was a scenario that clearly resonated and one that perhaps O’Toole felt if he acted out might be purged from his psyche. ‘But the odd thing was,’ says Burke, ‘the weakest scenes in the film are where O’Toole is with this actress, he was somehow stiff, like he was afraid. I tried to work him through it but he never loosened up.’

  Another reason for taking on the film was the realization that his career was in trouble, especially after his involvement in Caligula. ‘He was despondent over having been in that,’ confirms Burke. He saw working in Canada with a new young director as representing a fresh start. His arrival in Toronto certainly caused a stir. As he disembarked from the plane he was greeted on the tarmac by a detachment of Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Mounties, famous for always getting their man. Amongst their number was one of the first female recruits. O’Toole spotted her straight away, took one look and said to her, ‘Darling, I hope you always get your ma
n.’

  The first read-through Burke remembers as ‘electrifying’. Besides O’Toole, top English stars David Hemmings and Donald Pleasence had been hired but the rest of the cast were largely young Canadian actors. ‘And when Peter walked in the room there was just an electricity in the air that was almost palpable and everybody in one way or another was trying to raise up to his level.’

  During the shoot O’Toole was helpful and encouraging, although if anyone loosened the reins through unprofessionalism, ill preparedness or just general laziness, he would eat them alive. This was Burke’s first feature, he had no track record, but O’Toole saw he was hard working, he saw that he hoped and prayed that he knew what he was doing and had a vision. ‘There was something in Peter that wanted the film to work for my sake, and I’ve always been enormously grateful to him for that. But there were times when I had to push him physically, you could tell something was starting to go wrong with him.’ Burke puts this down to drug use, though he never found out exactly what O’Toole was taking. ‘But I could see there was a physical haggardness that had started setting in, the make-up people had to work a little harder.’ He was a man in his late forties but looked ten years older.

  One extraordinary encounter Burke had with O’Toole came not long after they worked together, when he was invited one evening to Guyon House, along with the Irish actress Marie Kean. O’Toole traipsed around the place wearing a full-length fur coat, even though the heating was on high and the weather was mild. O’Toole invited his guests upstairs to what he referred to, as far as Burke can remember, as the Etruscan Room. It was wonderfully lit, tastefully panelled, filled with beautiful Etruscan art. It was a long room and sparsely furnished, a chesterfield sofa stood at one end, and a slightly raised platform with a throne-like chair at the other. ‘We went into this room and I almost fell over from the heat, it must have been eighty-five degrees, it was brutally hot. Marie and I sat on the sofa, while Peter sat on this throne-like chair at the other end, still dressed in this fur coat. Suddenly he stands up and says, “Nobody knows the trouble I have seen,” throws off the fur coat, stands there arms outstretched, crucifix-like, stark naked. And Marie and I were wondering what exactly did he want us to look at. And then we realized, peering through the light that was shining on him from overhead, the scars across his stomach and his abdomen, you could see them from where we were some thirty-five feet away. It was a truly bizarre moment. And then he puts the fur coat on again and grins that crinkly grin as only he could do, sits back down and says, “Well now, where were we.” ’