Hellraisers

by Robert Sellers

  In a theatrical environment the opportunity for excessive shagging was far greater than in any other sphere of life simply because the prevailing tone of theatre land was gay, and so if you were something of a stud then actresses fell over each other to get you into bed. The best example of all was Rachel Roberts, later Mrs Rex Harrison, who took it upon herself to seduce platoons of young actors whom she surmised were undecided which way to swing sexually, among them Laurence Harvey and Robert Shaw. In the morning she’d wave them on their way with the cheery words, ‘You see, lovely. Stop worrying, you’re not queer!’ She certainly bedded Burton, although no sane person would’ve marked him down as ‘confused about his sexuality’.

  Burton quickly garnered a reputation as a fine actor and in 1948 Emlyn Williams wrote the part of a young boy especially for him in his film The Last Days of Dolwyn, about a Welsh village that must be evacuated so it can be flooded to make way for a reservoir. Williams ranked Burton as a natural, despite the fact he had trouble emoting innocence or vulnerability. In one scene Burton just had to look casually at a girl dancing, but all his face registered was a dark ferocity. ‘Maybe he had never been innocent,’ concluded Williams, who referred to Burton as being born ‘with the devil in him’.

  Burton’s smoking habit also irked his director who worried it might bugger up his voice, which even then had the timbre of the soul of Wales about it. In the end Williams offered him £100 (a hell of a sum in those days) to give up fags for three months. Burton’s face lit up and he took the bet, but after six weeks caved in. ‘Self-indulgence overcame greed,’ he confessed.

  Williams also deeply disapproved of Burton’s sexual appetite. ‘Having discovered sex,’ Burton said, ‘I began looting and plundering it with great delight.’ Exasperated Williams said Burton really ought to settle down, and why not date one of the nice girls in the cast, pointing as he spoke to a pretty actress called Sybil Williams. Burton took the advice and the couple were soon seriously dating. Right from the start of the relationship Sybil knew about Burton’s reputation and his numerous affairs, but was content with the fact that most of them were only one night stands. Burton himself always took great care for his nocturnal romps to remain as secret as possible. ‘Mustn’t hurt Sybil,’ he’d say. It didn’t take him long though to realise that here was a diamond indeed and they decided to marry only a few months after meeting, in February 1949, setting up home in fashionable Hampstead.

  Impressive roles began coming Burton’s way. He played Henry V for BBC radio, arriving at the audition clearly pissed but still getting the job. This despite arguing with the producer that no one was going to tell him how to play Shakespeare and threatening at one point to throw him through a window.

  He appeared in a West End play, The Lady’s Not For Burning, directed by John Gielgud who wrote in his diary about Burton, ‘He was a real pub boy, had a great stable of ladies. At the very first morning of rehearsals he began to yawn and look at his watch, already eager to get back to the pub for a drink.’ ‘He was already a star,’ fellow cast member Claire Bloom noted, ‘a fact he didn’t question.’

  Claire also noticed Burton’s drinking. He’d line up glasses of beer interspersed with glasses of straight whisky and knock them back in turn. The other young members of the cast tried to compete but Burton could drink the lot of them under the table. Boilermakers were a particular favourite drink of Burton’s at the time. He was once challenged by an entire 15-strong rugby team, all Welsh miners, to a drinking contest and downed 19 of them. Alas the next day he was in no fit state to remember who won.

  Inevitably the cinema was soon interested in Burton; his first British pictures, largely forgettable, included Waterfront (1950), about a drunken sailor who returns years later to the Liverpool family he deserted. The director was also somewhat green, it being only his second feature, but Michael Anderson has nothing but fond memories of the young Burton. ‘He was certainly not difficult in those days; indeed he was very helpful and generous as an artist, helping out other actors in the cast who were even less experienced than he was.’

  Anderson later became a director of international renown with films like The Dam Busters and Logan’s Run. He’d also work with Richard Harris no less than three times and learnt that the best way to deal with actors with a hellraising reputation was to make them feel secure with their director. ‘They needed to feel comfortable, that they were listened to, that their point of view was at least appreciated, so that they weren’t just being ordered around like cattle.’

  There was one actor on Waterfront, however, that even Anderson could not control, the irrepressible Robert Newton, most famous for his film portrayals of Bill Sikes and Long John Silver. ‘The problem with Newton, who had this huge drinking problem, was to keep the booze away from him. Somehow I think he always managed to get hold of a drop of something and often was never quite as fluent in his delivery of lines, but that was all part of his charm, that was his performance, that’s what he did that made him so great. He was famous for occasionally pronouncing long “aghhhs” in a scene. I found a couple of times on Waterfront it was when he couldn’t remember a line, he would look up at the ceiling and go, “Well, I, er, aghhh.” He was thinking of the next line. It became a trademark.’

  Filming Waterfront Newton often gave Burton a lift to the studio in his battered old Bentley. One morning Burton arrived to see Newton unusually the worse for wear, brandy flask in hand, and unshaven. It was winter and the car had a thin covering of frost and refused to start. Newton handed Burton his flask, went back into the house and returned with a horsewhip and began laying into the bonnet. When they tried the ignition again the Bentley revved up. Drinking all the way to Pinewood they arrived late on the set. Newton’s dresser was hurrying him along with his costume when the bell rang for the commencement of filming. Newton dashed for the set, his dresser rushing behind him desperately trying to point out the fact that he wasn’t wearing his trousers or indeed any underpants. The set was awash with technicians and actors as Newton arrived. ‘Oh sir, you can’t go on like that,’ the dresser yelped. ‘And why not?’ queried Newton. ‘Because there’s something missing, sir.’ ‘Missing. Missing!’ Newton bellowed before looking down at the awful evidence. ‘Thank you for pointing it out. Very grateful,’ Newton said as he lifted his shirt. ‘Make-up!’

  Newton’s drinking was sometimes so excessive that he’d lose all memory and sense. He once got so inebriated that he showed up on the wrong movie set. The director was slightly bemused by his appearance but managed to put the star in four scenes until people from the movie he was really supposed to be in came to haul him off. When he was performing at the St James’s Theatre in London the curtain failed to rise one evening and the audience grew restless and started to slow clap. At last the curtain moved to reveal the sozzled figure of Newton. Silence fell upon the auditorium. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he bellowed. ‘The reason this curtain has so far not risen is because the stage manager has the impertinence to suggest that I’m pissed!’

  Michael Anderson directed Newton again on the mammoth Around the World in Eighty Days (1956), but almost didn’t because the producer Mike Todd was nervous about casting him due to his reputation. Todd confronted Newton with, ‘Your friend David Niven says you are a big drunk.’ The actor replied, ‘My friend Niven is a master of understatement.’ In the end Newton agreed to have it in his contract that he wouldn’t touch a drop for the entire shoot. He kept his word. ‘But when the picture was over,’ says Michael Anderson, ‘he went on a binge about a month later and I think it killed him.’ Newton was indeed dead before Around the World opened in cinemas.

  Invited to watch the shooting of Waterfront was Euan Lloyd, then publicity manager of the Rank Organisation. Years later the press thought him mad for casting Burton and Harris together in The Wild Geese. ‘But that could have applied equally to Paul Soskin, producer of Waterfront,’ says Lloyd. ‘Robert Newton was “King Lush” in the eyes of the world and the young Burto
n tried hard to keep up with him.’

  In the bar at Pinewood Lloyd and Burton got acquainted, their friendship sealed when the actor learnt of his birthplace: Rugby. Lloyd found himself an ‘honorary’ member of Burton’s club of Welsh rugger supporters, made up of fellow actors Stanley Baker and Donald and Glyn Houston, whose voices were heard annually on the terraces of Twickenham when Wales and England clashed before 50,000 fans. ‘This handsome young star with a Churchillian voice sent from heaven could do no wrong in the fifties,’ says Lloyd. ‘And every beauty in town, young and old, craved his company. With booze spurring us on, some of us found ourselves in competition for favours. At a movie premiere I met a gorgeous young starlet and was invited to call on her the next day. All spruced up, cologne applied, I arrived on her doorstep at the appointed time and rang the bell. A long delay, some off-stage noises were heard, and eventually (but slowly) the door was opened. As I entered her hallway I caught a short glimpse of a male head lowering itself out of the kitchen window…it was Richard, the Welsh bull! Spotting me he yelled, “A try for Wales, I think!”’

  Sacked by his father and now free from any obligations to work in the family business Richard Harris had reached a momentous moment in his life. He’d decided to emigrate to Canada, to escape the stifling middle-class conventions of his upbringing and the religious bigotry and hypocrisy of rural Ireland. The fact that Harris had just split up from his first ever serious girlfriend probably pissed him off, too. Then his whole world fell apart when he was diagnosed with TB. Canada was out, as were any hopes he may have fostered about a rugby career. He never did play again. Instead Harris was confined at home for nearly 22 months, six of which he lay inert in bed, ‘playing a staring game with the damp Irish walls that caused my TB in the first place’.

  It was here that he first dreamt of escape into an acting career and began sending off letters to drama schools in London. His TB finally beaten, Harris promised himself never to be shackled and imprisoned again, and set out to pursue a life of sensory overload, willingly embracing his demons. The death of his sister from cancer also deeply affected him as a teenager. Within a year he saw his mother turn into an old woman through grief. He knew then that life was short, that you could die tomorrow or next week. ‘So I wanted to embrace it all. I had a terrible desire to let nothing pass me by.’ It was a personal journey that nearly killed him.

  When he heard the news that his son was leaving for England Harris’s dad’s only comment was, ‘For God’s sake, let him go.’ Harris gave himself just one year to succeed in London, and the friends and family members who waved him off at the station couldn’t help thinking he’d be back in Limerick soon, tail between his legs. Arriving in London Harris took the cheapest lodgings he could find and on his second day auditioned for the Central drama school. He was 25 years old amongst other applicants barely out of their teens. He looked physically out of place too. The mid-1950s was the age of the Rank matinee idol as personified by pretty-boy actors like Dirk Bogarde who spoke with clipped upper class accents and were sexually non-threatening on screen. Harris was Irish and though his accent was moderately decipherable his native brashness and swagger, combined with his loud personality, grated with some people. At the end of his audition piece the panel said, ‘What right do you think you have to enter our profession?’ Harris wasn’t going to take that one on the chin. ‘The same right you have to judge me.’ He was shown the door.

  His next port of call, LAMDA, was more successful, even though he arrived covered in muck and leaves after falling asleep in a park; he was accepted on a two-year course. He’d fallen in love with London, the neon-lit nightlife of Soho, the smells and new experiences and the kind of fascinating women he could only have dreamt of meeting along Limerick High Street. Inevitably Harris turned almost overnight into a gung-ho womanizer, often moving from flat to flat as love affairs dictated. It was as if he’d found a great new sport and was training like mad for the Olympics.

  Such behaviour rankled with some of his drama school contemporaries, as did his exuberant personality and aura of ‘look at me’. He had a problem with the teachers too; old fogies in grey suits telling him to treat Shakespeare with reverence and pronounce his verbs like Olivier. Fuck off, thought Harris. As usual he wanted to do things his way. To prove his point he hired a venue off Leicester Square (so grubby it eventually was turned into a strip joint) to put on his own stage production. But it proved a disaster and closed after just a few performances.

  The consequences of Harris’s bold theatrical enterprise were severe. He was left wiped out both physically and financially. Without the money for rent he slept for a while on top of the bar of a mate’s pub and then under piles of coats on the Embankment. When it rained he scraped enough cash together for a bed in a local doss house. Later he camped in doorways along the Earls Court Road, close to LAMDA, which he still falteringly attended. When one day he collapsed from hunger during class a fellow student took pity and offered him accommodation at his small flat. Harris had entered what he was to call his starvation period.

  By 18 Peter O’Toole had decided journalism was not for him, a view shared by his editor. Obsessed by theatre O’Toole had joined a local drama group with the intention of becoming an actor, only for this ambition to be curtailed in 1950 by National Service. Undecided about which of the armed forces to enter he finally opted for the Navy, gamely bullshitting that he came from a long line of Irish salty sea dogs. ‘I preferred the sea and I vomited over every square inch of it.’

  O’Toole arrived at Victory barracks Portsmouth with a ragtag assortment of other recruits and after a visit to the demon barber and collecting ill fitting uniforms, next on the agenda was an intelligence test. ‘It was here we realized that we had amongst our group either a total nut case or a man of genius!’ one of his naval comrades later recalled. O’Toole was given a series of wooden pegs, some round and some square. The idea was to fit the round pegs in the round holes. For O’Toole that was too easy. In front of the RN shrink and keeping a straight face, he spent about half an hour trying to force the square pegs into the round holes. Other officers were called to witness this feat and when they had given up in despair, and called off the test, a huge grin appeared on O’Toole’s face. Next was a series of questions to ascertain whether or not the recruit was officer material. O’Toole answered only one of the 20 questions. How would he lift a heavy barrel over a 30-foot wall using only two ten-foot lengths of rope. O’Toole replied simply, ‘I’d call the chief petty officer and say to him. “Get that barrel over the wall.”’

  After all that O’Toole became a signals operator in the submarine service – ‘can you think of anything more unsuitable than that, I get claustrophobic in a lift’ – and was ordered to the North Atlantic. It didn’t take long for him to rebel, explaining to the ship’s doctor that he had a hereditary in-growing toenail (fictitious, of course) and as such he could be injured for life if he had to wear regulation boots. O’Toole became the only member of the ship’s company to be allowed to go ashore in anything other than boots. At a later stage, he acquired an imaginary curvature of the spine and was allowed to sleep in a camp bed rather than the conventional hammock. He was also arrested for taking extra rations of rum (‘because it was a cold day’) and again later for insubordination. It did look as if the Navy and O’Toole was an ill-matched pair. ‘I would stand alone on deck at night talking to sea gulls for hours.’

  It was all really part of O’Toole’s grand scheme to get out of the services as quickly as he’d got in. ‘What was I doing marching to the left and marching to the right? What was I doing darning socks? It was a bloody nightmare and I tried everything to get out.’ One attempt consisted of drinking 18 bottles of wine, taking a lot of aspirins and a drug that was supposed to turn his features a deathly grey, but it didn’t work.

  Given the task of decoding weather forecasts sent in code by a Wren ashore O’Toole, plainly going against the spirit of the test, avoided the hour and a h
alf it took to decipher the message by simply telephoning the woman and getting her to read it out in English. But somebody ratted on the girl and she was booted out while O’Toole got thrown in the brig. Even worse was the occasion his ship visited Sweden. A big ceremony was planned for the British admiralty to walk ashore by jetty to greet the Swedish king, but when a fog descended the fleet got lost and couldn’t find the correct place to dock. O’Toole was hurriedly sent out in a boat with a walkie-talkie to tip off the admiral where the king could be found. Alas O’Toole accidentally dropped the radio into the sea. He was jailed once again.

  While in Sweden O’Toole did manage to find an unorthodox cure for the stammer and lisp that had been plaguing him since childhood. Playing in a Navy rugby team against one made up of thugs from the Swedish police force, O’Toole caught the ball and fell on it only for a hulking great Swede to kick him full on the chin, slicing his tongue in half. He was rushed to hospital and the tongue was stitched back together, resulting in his speech impediment disappearing completely.

  The hospital discharged him when it was time for his ship to set sail and put him on a train. He had been riding for half an hour when he found out he was going the wrong way. There was O’Toole, unable to speak English let alone Swedish, but luckily the nurse with him managed to find the way to the harbour – just in time to see the fleet sailing off into the distance. O’Toole later swore he hired a funfair boat and paddled out until it came alongside the supply ship and they threw a rope ladder down to him.

  By hook or by crook O’Toole continued to try and get out of the Navy. ‘I started pointing out the ridiculousness of the whole situation to them. I can’t really say how much of what I was doing was pretending, or when my pretence became real. But I was released as mentally unsuitable after 18 months.’ He’d later describe his time there as, ‘a total waste for everybody, particularly His Majesty.’ As a grand gesture, and to purge the Navy out of his system before resuming civilian life, O’Toole took his uniform and threw it in the Thames. Now it was back to Leeds and, he hoped, a career on the stage.