Hellraisers

by Robert Sellers

  They got up to other laddish japes in London. At one time they were both competing for the affections of the same woman and after a night of drinking went their separate ways, only to bump into each other 20 minutes later outside the girl’s block of flats. The game was up and so a deal was struck. O’Toole would try to smooth talk his way into her bedroom using the intercom, while Harris would climb the drain pipe up to the sixth floor and try to attract her attention that way. First come, first served, as it were. ‘I nearly killed myself with my mountaineering efforts,’ Harris later recalled, ‘but eventually reached her balcony and peered in. Peter had literally that moment walked into the room to claim his prize. As they headed to the bedroom, he looked back and saw my dishevelled figure and winked. I nearly fell down just from laughing.’

  There is another version of this story, told from O’Toole’s point of view. The pair were searching for this woman and drunkenly knocked on her door in the middle of the night. When there was no answer O’Toole scrambled up the drain pipe, knocked on the window and gained entry. ‘But when I look back,’ recalled O’Toole, ‘there’s Harris still on the ground. He must not have had my experience growing up with drain pipes in Limerick.’ When Harris did try to climb, he got about four storeys up before the drain pipe broke away from the wall, leaving him in midair. So O’Toole and the girl summoned the authorities. ‘When they’d got him down, I shouted from the window, “Officers, arrest that drunken Irishman. He was trying to break into our home!”’

  O’Toole was fond of scaling walls. Delighted to hear one day that his old RADA chum Frank Finlay was in town and a guest at the local YMCA, O’Toole decided at past midnight to pay him a visit, only to discover the entrance locked. Undeterred O’Toole climbed his way four storeys up and, bottle in hand, manoeuvred his way along the narrow ledges to Finlay’s room and hammered on the glass like a mad thing. ‘Open up, open up.’ A bemused but delighted Finlay was only too happy to oblige.

  Peter O’Toole’s time at Bristol was spent playing a variety of roles, big and small. He’d had no formal education to speak of, so RADA and the Bristol Old Vic constituted his only real schooling, and he revelled in it, whether playing Shylock in The Merchant of Venice or Mrs Ali Baba in the Christmas panto Aladdin. He didn’t even mind having to sell ice creams in the interval. One evening, still dressed as Mrs Ali Baba he sold an ice cream to Cary Grant.

  One early stage performance required him to speak only one line as a peasant in a Chekhov play: ‘Mr Astrov, the horses have arrived.’ Trying to make the most of this meagre role O’Toole decided that the peasant was the young Stalin. Going on stage consumed with hatred for the whole aristocracy, having worked on his make-up for hours using early photographs of the dictator, O’Toole could feel an electric spark of anticipation coming off the audience. He glared at Dr Astrov, paused and snarled quietly, ‘Mr Horsey, the Astrovs have arrived.’

  Occasionally the Bristol Old Vic brought its shows down to London. One in particular, a musical, Oh My Papa, in which O’Toole played opposite Rachel Roberts, was a complete stinker and people quite rightly booed at them from the stalls. Afterwards O’Toole got drunk on home-made mead and was arrested at three in the morning for harassing a building in Holborn. He spent the night in the cells and in the morning told the court, ‘I felt like singing and began to woo an insurance building.’

  When he wasn’t at the pub O’Toole was busy making home-made whisky. ‘We made gallons of it. We had a distillery. The only trouble was we couldn’t find anything to store it in. So we got some of those big carboys they keep acid in and filled them with the stuff. Judging by the taste of the whisky, we left some of the acid in.’

  By far the pinnacle of O’Toole’s time at Bristol was his performance as Hamlet. Critics dubbed it an ‘angry young Hamlet’, alluding to the New Wave of British acting that was brushing away the cobwebs of staid middle class theatre. There was a revolution going on and post-war British dramatists typified by Noel Coward and Terence Rattigan were being dumped in favour of more gritty and controversial kitchen sink playwrights like John Osborne, thanks to his play Look Back in Anger. Cinema too was changing. The stiff upper lip and anyone-for-tennis brigade personified by Richard Todd and Kenneth More were being usurped by a new breed of tough working class actors: O’Toole, Harris, Albert Finney, Michael Caine and others. A revolution incidentally spearheaded by Burton.

  These working class rising stars all knew each other, drank together, threw up together and caused trouble together. ‘We were all mates,’ recalled Caine. ‘Raving it up around the pubs and clubs.’ Their drinking and revelling was a two-finger salute to the middle class acting establishment, putting a landmine under the Olivier and Gielgud generation. This was a new breed and nothing like them had been seen before or since. For them acting wasn’t a vocation. ‘We didn’t want to be the best actors in the world,’ said Harris. ‘We didn’t want to be the best King Lear or be the new Olivier. What a boring ambition.’ Instead they wanted to experience everything that life had to offer and have as good a time as they could. Yes they were talented, supremely so in some cases, but they were also totally fearless and the noise they made was their way of saying – we’ve arrived, ignore us at your peril.

  It was an interesting period in British cultural history that gave birth to the hellraisers. Burton, Harris, O’Toole, Reed and the rest all shared the common experience of being war babies, of being bombed, of being evacuated, of facing compulsory military service. ‘It’s one of the most incredible experiences in the world, being bombed,’ O’Toole has commented. ‘You play this mad, demented, passive role. I tell you, if you haven’t been bombed, you haven’t lived. Perhaps if more people had been bombed, they might be less generous in their supply of bombs.’

  Then there was rationing: no meat, no food, and no booze. But actually the post-war restrictions were worse. Years after the war Britain was still a country in the grip of austerity and belt tightening by the government. They had economic miracles in Germany and Japan. ‘And all we were getting was Stafford Cripps [Labour’s Chancellor of the Exchequer after the war] saying, “eat nuts.” Bollocks,’ railed O’Toole. ‘We didn’t want any of that. We wanted the roaring twenties, please. There were some of us who saw it as our duty to be truants from the system. The drinking was liberation from the fear and the restrictions of the war years. The frivolity and the fun had gone. Booze was a way of recapturing it. We certainly had a bloody good time.’

  O’Toole liked to quote the often repeated line that if you could remember the sixties, you weren’t really there. ‘Well, we were doing that in the fifties. I can remember how the decade started, and how it ended but, sadly, nothing in between.’ As students and young actors they had no money but had youth and stupidity in abundance, so often would save on heating by having parties on the Circle line on the London underground. It was warm, there were chairs and they’d take a battery-operated gramophone and play each other’s 45s. Did they drink? ‘Of course we did, baby,’ says O’Toole. ‘We’d get off at Sloane Square, pop out to the pub, get some more booze and get back on again. Great fun! And the sixties were only a continuation of that.’

  While O’Toole, Harris and Reed were busy trying to make a name for themselves, Richard Burton was already a huge star, jetting back out to Hollywood to appear in more brain-dead but successful epics. There was The Rains of Ranchipur (1955) in which he played a Hindu doctor opposite Lana Turner, a film so dire that Burton later quipped, ‘It never rains but it ranchipurs.’ Then came Alexander the Great (1956) with Burton playing the titular hero in a blond wig that resembled a cowpat. His leading lady was, interestingly, Claire Bloom. After he had won the earlier bet by seducing her into his bed the couple had begun a torrid affair and although Burton’s wife Sybil was on location with her husband in Spain this didn’t stop our Dick. Claire was desperately in love with Burton and he knew it, treating her dreadfully sometimes, even prepared to totally humiliate her seemingly on a whim. One day on the
set he announced to some of the crew that he was going to shag Claire in a nearby secluded stream. ‘Why don’t you watch from over that hill?’ he kindly suggested. That afternoon Burton did indeed perform to an audience of randy grips and stunt men.

  His next venture was another season at the Old Vic, which included Othello, alternating the lead role with that of Iago (generally considered to be the longest role in Shakespeare) with another actor. One Saturday lunchtime Burton was invited to attend a charity cricket match organized by the Lord’s Taverners. Amongst the group was a young actor, Ian Carmichael, soon to become a star himself in a string of classic British comedy films like I’m Alright Jack and Lucky Jim. ‘We had all downed a considerable number of pints,’ recalls Carmichael. ‘And my turn had come round once more. “Same again?” I enquired of all concerned. I then said to Burton, “Shall I skip you this time?” Burton stared back at me. “Why the hell not!” “You’ve got a matinee, haven’t you?” I asked. “Yes,” said Burton, “but it’s only Iago this afternoon.” The Welsh have great constitutions.’

  Burton was now famous and rich enough to become a tax exile – he had calculated that if he made £100,000 in a year in England the bloody tax man would grab £93,000 of it, while as a Swiss resident he’d pay no more than £700 on the same amount – so in 1957 he moved to Celigny, a small village on the outskirts of Geneva. A regular visitor there was Brook Williams, the ten-year-old son of Emlyn, who remained a close friend of Burton’s for the rest of his life. Burton enjoyed attending Brook’s school plays where he often took with him a flask, not filled with tea, but strong martini. He’d pour it out into a plastic cup during the performance and blow on it to keep up the charade.

  Not surprisingly Brook hero-worshipped Burton and became an actor himself, also a heavy drinker. In adult life Williams ran into personal problems and couldn’t find work, so Burton took him under his wing, plonking him on the payroll. Williams became the star’s minder, drinking companion and general lackey. Watch a Burton film and Brook Williams’ bemused mug is in it somewhere.

  Financially Burton’s self-imposed Swiss exile made perfect sense, but it did mean that he cut himself off from the renaissance in English theatre and film happening back home. He was in danger of losing ground to that new breed of British actor he himself had helped pave the way for.

  After his TV success Harris sparked interest from Associated British Pictures and the casting director there wasted little time in recommending the Irishman to director Michael Anderson, who was casting one of the main parts in his film Shake Hands with the Devil (1959). ‘Harris arrived at the interview,’ Anderson remembers, ‘and as he walked into the room he said, “Well it’s nice to see all you film folks, but I want to tell you up front, I don’t do film, I only do stage work.” I said, “Well why did you come?” And he said, “I wanted to see what you was all about, you know, you hear a lot about films these days. I’ve read the script, it’s a good script but no, I don’t think so.” And he got up and started to walk towards the door where he turned round and said, “Who’s in it?” And I said. “James Cagney.” He said. “I’ll do it.”’

  The part was an IRA gun runner and the film was shot in Ireland, where its subject matter caused a modicum of controversy. Though Harris was raw and un familiar with film acting technique Anderson recognised in him a spark of talent. ‘He had such a screen personality and put in gestures and little method things that weren’t in the script but stood out a mile. He was unpredictable in a scene; you never knew quite what he was going to do which made him so exciting. He was so different to Burton who had been disciplined on the set when I’d worked with him; Harris was not.’

  Already Harris was carving out something of a reputation for questioning his directors, not blindly following instructions but his own instincts, a habit that would lead to violent clashes in the future. ‘After just a few days on Shake Hands Richard would come on the set and say, “I don’t know if I want to do it this way,” and we’d talk about the scene and once I’d persuaded him that’s the way it should be done and the way I wanted it there was no problem. But near the end of the picture we were rehearsing a scene and Harris wasn’t there. I put all the chalk marks on the floor where the actors would stand and the crew were making bets that Harris would never stand on those marks, he’d do something totally different. So Richard came in and said, “What are we doing then?” I made up some bit of business and said, “I think if you go over to the window…” He said, “I don’t think I’m going to go over to the window, I think I’ll come up here.” And he went right on the marks that I’d put on the floor.’

  Though he shared few scenes with Cagney, Harris was in awe of the Hollywood legend, remembering the days when he’d seen him in action, blasting gangsters to kingdom come at his local fleapit. It was also a great opportunity to see a master at work and Harris exploited it to the full. ‘He was fascinated with Cagney and would watch him work,’ Anderson recalls. ‘He was taking it all in.’

  Money was now rolling into the Harris coffers so fast that he and Elizabeth didn’t have to live on stew made of Oxo cubes and carrots any more. There was also a new propensity to brawl as frequently as he was able; and there was the drinking. More so than before, going on booze benders had become Harris’s main pastime. After one evening he awoke in a prison cell. The sergeant asked him if he knew why he’d been arrested. ‘No,’ said Harris. ‘I haven’t a fucking clue.’ Harris had a good capacity for hard liquor and, just like Oliver Reed, liked the way other people’s inhibitions were loosened by it. There was also the Irish tradition of late night get-togethers where drink played just as much an important part as the reveries, the songs and the nostalgic stories about back home. ‘I never touch a drop when I’m happy,’ Harris reasoned. ‘But it’s a well-known fact that Irishmen are never happy.’

  Harris was a boon to the publicity department of his new employers, whose stable of bland film stars didn’t excite the press much. It was usually a case of coming into the office on Monday morning to find all the telephones ringing and wondering, ‘God, what’s Harris done now.’ During a celebrity bash at the Royal Festival Hall one of Harris’s friends accidentally broke a glass but the management mistakenly charged the group for ten replacements. When they refused to correct the error Elizabeth Harris got up and said, ‘All right, if you’re going to charge us for 10 glasses we still have nine to go.’ One by one she threw the rest of the glasses to the floor. When the couple left Harris saw a group of cops huddled outside that he assumed had been called to deal with his wife’s behaviour. Deciding to take pre-emptive action he rugby charged them, shunting the constables through a plate-glass shop window. No one was hurt, save Harris who had several stitches to a gash in his hand. Amazingly he escaped with just a caution.

  To consolidate his success as Hamlet at the Bristol Old Vic Peter O’Toole took on the important role of a cockney sergeant in the play The Long and the Short and the Tall about a bunch of misfit British soldiers lost in Burma during the Japanese campaign of WWII. It was to be presented at the prominent showplace for young acting talent, the Royal Court in Sloane Square. As was his routine O’Toole, along with other cast members Robert Shaw and Ronald Fraser, drank in the local pub prior to curtain up. Sometimes with only minutes to spare they’d stampede back into the theatre, rub dirt over their faces and change into a khaki uniform looking as if they’d spent an hour in make-up to achieve the desired bedraggled jungle look. They made such a habit of sitting in the pub all possible hours that a line eventually had to be rigged up from the theatre so the stage manager’s 10-minute call could be heard at the bar. The director Lindsay Anderson was almost driven bonkers, while the expert hired to make the actors look like real soldiers suffered a nervous collapse and left.

  Someone else who had a torrid time was the young Michael Caine, hired as O’Toole’s understudy. Caine would stew in suspense backstage as to whether O’Toole would return from the pub in time. This lasted three months and every nigh
t was torture. There he’d be, dressed up and ready to go on when O’Toole would breeze in offering a hearty hello to the panic-stricken youngster. One evening the curtain was actually rising when O’Toole ran in screaming, ‘Don’t go on Michael’ as he bounded into his dressing room, shirt and trousers being cast asunder. Caine’s other functions were to bring in booze, find out where the best parties were and acquire girls. ‘I’d have made a wonderful pimp,’ he later joked.

  One Saturday night after the show O’Toole invited Caine to a restaurant he knew. Eating a plate of egg and chips was the last thing Caine remembered until he woke up in broad daylight in a strange flat. ‘What time is it?’ he enquired. ‘Never mind what time it is, what fucking day is it?’ said O’Toole. They located their hostesses, two dodgy looking girls who told them it was five o’clock on Monday afternoon. Curtain went up at eight. Luckily they were still in London and made their way to the theatre just in time. The stage manager was waiting for them with the news that the owner of the restaurant had been in and henceforth they were banned from his establishment for life. Caine was just about to ask what they’d done when O’Toole whispered, ‘Never ask what you did. It’s better not to know.’ Ah, the voice of experience. After that Caine made a point of never going out on the booze with O’Toole again.

  At the time Robert Shaw was the big cheese actor, so his dressing room had the only toilet and O’Toole had to make do with a big sink. One night after the performance, he was standing in his dressing room, peeing in the sink, when he heard an unmistakable voice behind him. ‘Hello, my name is Katharine Hepburn.’ O’Toole pretended to be washing his hands and quickly shoved himself back in his trousers.