Often the two of them would sit together between set-ups and O’Toole would regale her with wild stories, usually revolving around drinking and his fellow hell-raisers like Harris, Finch and Burton. ‘And you know, Barbara, we would meet wherever we were working, we would meet up on weekends and we would spend the whole weekend just drinking. We would go twenty-four hours just drinking.’ Sometimes it would be longer. O’Toole, Harris and Trevor Howard paid Burton a visit in England when he was shooting Where Eagles Dare. They left on the Friday night on a plane for Paris. ‘You will be back Monday?’ the producer Elliott Kastner asked Burton. ‘Oh, don’t worry,’ said Burton. They turned up on the Wednesday.
At these moments O’Toole took a modicum of pleasure goading one of the producers, with whom he had struck up a disagreeable relationship. The second assistant director would come over to them asking, ‘Mr O’Toole, Miss Carrera, we’re waiting for you on the set.’ This was O’Toole’s cue to turn to his personal assistant and ask for some coffee. ‘And then he would begin another story,’ recalls Barbara. ‘A long story, and of course he would always embellish it.’ After something like fifteen minutes the first AD would show up. ‘Mr O’Toole, Miss Carrera, we’re ready for you on the set.’ O’Toole would just ignore him and turn to Barbara, ‘Don’t move, my dear, sit there, don’t move.’ The coffee would arrive and he’d continue with his story. This went on until finally the director himself showed. ‘Peter, didn’t they tell you that we’re ready for you on the set?’ With an expression of pure innocence O’Toole would reply, ‘Why didn’t somebody tell me?’ According to Barbara this happened quite often and the reasoning behind it was quite plain. As O’Toole explained to her, ‘I do this to delay them, because delay is money. Damn producers. Get them by the truss.’ Then he would get on the set and pow, away he’d go. ‘And every time he worked you could hear a pin drop.’
Eventually the heat and the physical discomfort in Israel led to a decision being made to take the film back to Hollywood and finish it there. Many of the actors felt a huge emotional loss no longer playing at the base of the real Masada, in the real desert, instead shooting in the Hollywood Hills, with the freeway noise rushing by; it just wasn’t the same.
There was an obligation, recalls Strauss, that anything to do with O’Toole had to be done before lunch. That invariably left Strauss, dressed in Judean garb, having to play his close-ups in the afternoon with O’Toole standing behind the camera giving him his lines dressed in an impeccable three-piece suit. Still, Strauss would do his best. At the end of perhaps their most pivotal scene together Boris Sagal called, ‘Cut, print, I’m fine, let’s move on.’ As the crew began to dismantle the lights, O’Toole lent over to Strauss and whispered, ‘Ask to do it again.’ Strauss looked at O’Toole. ‘Why?’ O’Toole looked deep into him. ‘Because you can do it better.’ Some actors would have taken umbrage at this, but Strauss knew that O’Toole was simply being encouraging. When Strauss called over Sagal to say he wanted to do another take the director looked flustered. ‘Why? I’ve got what I want.’ Strauss insisted and so they went again. ‘And I tried to do it better. And perhaps I did.’
NINETEEN
It was always ‘the Scottish Play’, never Macbeth. O’Toole simply would not countenance its name being uttered. Whether he took the curse that is supposed to haunt productions of this piece seriously or pandered to the old theatrical superstition, who knows, but he did take it to extremes. Frawley Becker, the dialogue coach, remembers arriving at O’Toole’s trailer on the set of Night of the Generals in 1966 on a sunny but cloudy morning in Warsaw. Taking inspiration from the fluctuating weather he thought a quick burst of Shakespeare was in order: ‘So foul and fair a day I have not seen.’ Pleased with himself, Becker watched as O’Toole’s face recoiled in horror, as if some horrendous spirit had just passed over the threshold. ‘Do you not know that you must never quote the Scottish gentleman?’
‘You mean Mac . . .’
‘The Scottish gentleman!’ O’Toole blasted, giving even more theatrical bent to his voice than usual. ‘He must never be named! And never a line from that play may be spoken, except in the theatre where it is being performed or rehearsed.’
‘What happens if Mac . . . ’ Becker stopped himself just in time. ‘If the play is quoted?’
‘Great misfortune follows,’ said O’Toole. There was an uncomfortable silence before he spoke again. ‘I forgive you because you are American, and as such I assume you do not know the traditions of the English stage!’ O’Toole then went on to explain that the last time lines of dialogue from ‘the Scottish Play’ had been quoted on one of his film sets, Lord Jim, a boat full of extras capsized in a river. Becker never did find out if anyone drowned.
By the close of the seventies the Old Vic theatre was heading for financial ruination, rumours abounded that it might have to close down. What it needed was a box-office attraction to bring the crowds back through the door. O’Toole had last performed on the London stage in 1965 and in a newspaper interview spoke of his desire to return, somewhere like the Old Vic, a theatre that held a very special place in his heart. It was where, as a drama student, he had come to watch the likes of Guinness and Olivier ply their trade, ‘All working for buttons.’
Reading these comments with interest was Toby Robertson, head of the Old Vic Company. Getting in touch, he wanted to know exactly what the actor had in mind. There was a long-cherished ambition to do Macbeth, a play O’Toole believed to be the precursor of practically all gothic literature, a text that positively crackled with evil, and in his opinion Shakespeare’s greatest achievement. Perhaps it could form part of a short season that might also include another favourite, Uncle Vanya, which O’Toole fancied having a crack at directing himself. Robertson was in no position to refuse and O’Toole was hired in early 1980. He was also granted associate director status, with his own office on the premises.
Very quickly doubts spread about O’Toole’s health. Would he be capable of playing such a physically demanding role as Macbeth night after night, while at the same time preparing another play? It was not an unreasonable concern, but when it was raised at a meeting O’Toole reacted angrily and stormed out. In the end he was forced to bow to pressure and Uncle Vanya was dropped.
While he was away filming Masada events took a dramatic turn. Robertson was unceremoniously sacked by the Old Vic’s board and replaced as artistic director by the actor Timothy West. Pragmatic by nature, West was nervous of O’Toole’s reputation and that the actor’s contract at the Old Vic allowed him total artistic control over the Macbeth production. He feared a disaster.
For weeks O’Toole was holed up at his house in Clifden carrying out his customarily methodical research and preparation. Running along the beach in front of his house carrying heavy logs of wood, chanting the lines of the play, trying to get the rhythm of the speeches right, he was like a prize fighter getting into shape, fully aware that this undertaking brought with it huge risks and expectations. That was fine. He was fully committed.
For director, O’Toole asked Jack Gold, having worked well with him on Man Friday. But Gold had been offered a movie and decided he’d be on safer ground doing that. ‘Peter was very much his own man when he got into a part, particularly on stage; it was difficult enough on film. And I think I was much too inexperienced in stage work to direct a major piece like that.’ Gold is under no illusions that he made the right choice and was never tempted to watch the final result. ‘I couldn’t bring myself to see it.’
With directors proving either unavailable or scared off by O’Toole, actor turned film director Bryan Forbes was eventually chosen, a man who had never pretended to be anything other than an actor’s director and who once said: ‘In the last analysis, everything has to be subservient to the actor.’ Music to O’Toole’s ears to be sure.
Together O’Toole and Forbes assembled a large cast that mixed established players such as Dudley Sutton and Brian Blessed with rising talents such as Clive Wood an
d Frances Tomelty, chosen to play Lady Macbeth after O’Toole’s suggestion of Meryl Streep was rejected as being impractical. Rehearsals began in August 1980 in a blaze of publicity. Christopher Fulford, in his first professional job as an actor, remembers O’Toole arriving for the press call and walking onto the stage to the accompaniment of a band of Irish pipers. But already storm clouds were forming. Kevin Quarmby was another young actor not long out of drama school, who had long idolized O’Toole, but what he saw on that first day of rehearsal shocked him. ‘Here was someone in his late forties but my immediate thought was, my God this guy looks old. Incredibly lined, and thin. Let’s say O’Toole didn’t look like he was in the peak of health. But he was amazingly imposing – you were scared shitless.’
It was a strange rehearsal period. O’Toole had arrived already word perfect and had asked Forbes not to give him any direction until the third week. ‘To a great extent he had already set his performance,’ claimed Forbes. But doubts were raised very early on about the path O’Toole was taking. In the opinion of Quarmby, who now writes and lectures on Shakespeare, O’Toole’s delivery was tortured, idiosyncratic and laboured. ‘It was like listening to a mature public schoolboy being forced to recite Shakespeare in class.’ Christopher Fulford, however, remembers things differently. ‘Peter did his soliloquies holding his coffee mug and cigarette, and did them I thought brilliantly. There was a sense of grandeur to his performance, even in rehearsal.’
Over the coming weeks many in the company hoped that some concession to contemporary naturalism in Shakespeare performance would creep into O’Toole’s delivery. In fact it evolved not a jot, according to Quarmby. ‘I can still hear him doing every line, because I was on stage practically all the time, and the delivery was absolutely the same from the moment of rehearsals right to the very last night. His exclamatory style remained firmly rooted in the tradition of the lead actor controlling the stage, as exemplified by Donald Wolfit’s post-war touring Shakespeare productions.’
Other creative decisions were also coming under scrutiny, not least the madcap suggestion of employing inflatable scenery. O’Toole had an interest in an Irish company that had invented a revolutionary concept in stage design, scenery that could be erected and then dismantled to fit into the boot of a car. A demonstration was called for on the Old Vic stage, but all West and his fellow board members could see was what looked like an assortment of black bin liners haphazardly stuck together inflated by a generator producing enough noise to rival a 747 jet engine. Even O’Toole had to admit defeat and booted the inventor and his contraption out of the stage door.
Forbes quickly took the decision to hire a film-set designer with no theatrical experience, one of many film buddies that were coming in; jobs for the boys. The most dangerous of these was the fight director, who was an Irish stuntman O’Toole had befriended on Zulu Dawn. Quarmby has never forgotten his first fight rehearsal when he was given a spear and told, ‘Right, now Kevin, get this spear and you thrust it at the bastard, just thrust it at the bastard.’ Within two minutes Quarmby had accidentally pierced the jeans of his opponent, who cried out, ‘Stop, I am not working like this. I refuse to work like this.’ Everyone was a little more wary after that. ‘But we did have very realistic fights,’ says Quarmby. ‘Because there was absolutely no proper stage choreography. It was, let’s make it look as dangerous as possible by making it as dangerous as possible. It was pretty scary.’
Backstage, too, swords were drawn. From the off O’Toole and West appeared to be poles apart in both temperament and in their approach to theatre. It didn’t help that O’Toole kept referring to West as ‘Miss Piggy’. Theirs was a relationship Forbes described as like that of a warring husband and wife ripe for divorce living under the same roof. Paranoid, O’Toole believed West was out to sabotage his production and banned him from rehearsals. West in turn was worried about O’Toole’s erratic behaviour, not helped by his drug use, a situation the cast were fully aware of. ‘Let’s say he was sailing very close to the wind,’ says Quarmby. Actress Susan Engel saw it first-hand. ‘He was stoned out of his mind, seriously stoned. And that’s tragic.’ Susan, who had worked with O’Toole years before at Bristol, had been asked to play Lady Macduff, a role she didn’t care for much, but went to see O’Toole anyway. ‘And he was non compos mentis. He was very excited about the play and had all these completely mad ideas but I couldn’t actually follow what he was saying. It was very sad.’
By now even Forbes was beginning to harbour a few misgivings, particularly over his star’s obsession with making this the bloodiest Macbeth on record. ‘Do you know how many times the word blood appears in the text, old darling?’ O’Toole said to Forbes one day, before volunteering the information that, ‘If you stab a living man, blood spurts seventeen feet.’ There was also the double-handed sword he was having made of the finest Toledo steel for his duel with Macduff. When this fearsome weapon finally arrived at the theatre his co-star visibly paled. In the end it proved too heavy and O’Toole armed himself instead with a flimsy aluminium sword to conserve energy, which after each encounter became increasingly bent, not helped by his sometimes using it to practise his cricket swing.
Oddly, HRH Princess Margaret paid a visit to one rehearsal and during a break the subject of blood came up yet again in conversation. ‘What you need is some Kensington gore,’ the Princess volunteered, the stuff deployed in the old Hammer horror films. ‘We use it all the time in St John’s Ambulance demonstrations. It’s very realistic.’ Forbes saw O’Toole’s eyes light up.
Red appeared to be the production’s motif, since O’Toole had insisted his dressing room be painted blood red from floor to ceiling. He also had a lumbering Irish minder posted outside at all times. ‘This guy would have killed anyone for Peter, there’s absolutely no doubt,’ says Quarmby. Christopher Fulford, too, has memories of this gentleman, who rode shotgun with O’Toole at all times. ‘He was very genial to me and not at all unpleasant. But there were all sorts of rumours flying around about him.’
It was fairly obvious that Forbes was helpless when faced with this ego-driven onslaught, and so O’Toole’s personal vision for the play went gloriously unchecked, with members of the cast simply not used to being mere satellite figures to O’Toole. Enquiring what they should be thinking when Macbeth raves at the ghost of Banquo in the banquet scene, O’Toole’s sharp reply was: ‘You should be looking at me, dear, I’m the star.’ As Quarmby describes it, ‘His sole purpose for being in the play was to be the star. There wasn’t a vision for the play, there was a concept of Peter O’Toole is a great star and everything must be done to ensure that all focus is on him at every moment.’
As a result rehearsals became factionalized, with individuals discussing and answering amongst themselves questions of character, motivation and textual nuance. In essence it had become an unbalanced production, in that you had the principal actor playing one thing and the majority of the company playing something else and they were so far apart that nothing would make them gel. ‘It was an inevitable car crash that was going to happen with a huge star of the old school,’ says Quarmby. Forbes put it simpler. ‘It was an imbalance between Peter and some of the less experienced actors, some of whom were understandably in awe of him.’ There were those in the O’Toole camp and those firmly outside of it.
One decision of O’Toole’s that Forbes was powerless to overturn was the abandonment of the traditional portrayal of the three witches as hideous old crones and instead having them as voluptuous sirens dressed in silken robes. The fact that O’Toole was having an affair with the young actress playing the first witch, after the recent collapse of his relationship with Malinche Verdugo, almost certainly had no influence upon his decision. Her name was Trudie Styler and she and O’Toole were the subject of much gossip amongst the cast.
From the start O’Toole wanted to create a sense of occasion and a sense of adventure and had tried to get to know each one of the cast on a personal level. In the middle of rehear
sals Christopher Fulford recalls being invited to Guyon House and told to prepare a sonnet. ‘We had chilli con carne in his kitchen and before that we’d sat in his study. He’d got me a couple of beers, he wasn’t drinking, and he had me doing this sonnet with a clock to my ear to get the rhythm of the sonnet. And as far as I know he’d done something similar with everyone in the company.’
As the opening night approached, relations between O’Toole and West had deteriorated so badly that they were now only communicating through intermediaries. Barred he may have been from rehearsals, but West insisted on his right to watch the first dress rehearsal and was appalled by what he witnessed. It wasn’t just that it was hopelessly old-fashioned, but there seemed to be absolutely no artistic vision either, no concept, least of all anything imaginative or relevant in O’Toole’s performance, who delivered the lines as if his foot was tied to iambic pentameter. He pleaded with Forbes that radical changes needed to be made to avert a full-scale disaster but the director felt that to confront O’Toole now ‘would provoke an explosion that could destroy us all’. After West tried and failed to get a meeting with O’Toole he insisted on a brief statement being inserted into the theatre programme declaring that this Macbeth was under the direct artistic control of Peter O’Toole and not the Old Vic; in other words he’d washed his hands of it.
On the opening night, 3 September 1980, as the audience took their seats with twenty minutes to curtain up, Forbes walked into O’Toole’s dressing room and was stunned to find him stark naked except for a Gauloise in his mouth. ‘Peter, old son, aren’t you leaving it a bit late to get into costume?’
‘Can’t wear them, darling,’ replied O’Toole. ‘They’re hopeless.’
‘Ah!’ Forbes exclaimed, with a rising sense of panic. ‘We don’t have much alternative, do we? But let me see what I can do.’
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