Hepburn was in London filming Suddenly Last Summer with Montgomery Clift, and she commended the performance of this young actor O’Toole to the movie’s producer, Sam Spiegel. Spiegel called O’Toole and asked him to take a screen test. A silver Jaguar arrived, driven, O’Toole recalled, by a particularly surly chauffeur, to ferry him to Shepperton Studios. Spiegel had wanted O’Toole to stand by for a weekly fee, ready to take over Montgomery Clift’s role as a doctor in the film; he apparently doubted that the oft-ailing Clift would be able to finish it. The unfriendly driver who had fetched O’Toole worked for Clift and realized a coup was in the making. Once there O’Toole was hustled onto the set of a doctor’s office, where, holding an X-ray as a prop, his screen test consisted of his own impromptu wisecrack: ‘Mrs Spiegel, your son will never play the violin again.’ The producer was not amused and O’Toole was quickly dispensed with; indeed Spiegel never forgot the insolence of the young actor and just a few years later almost thwarted O’Toole’s bid to land the role of his lifetime – Lawrence of Arabia.
Most evenings after the show O’Toole enjoyed a long walk around Covent Garden. Sometimes if he was in the mood he’d scale the wall of Lloyd’s bank. The first time he took his future wife Siân Phillips on one of these nocturnal jaunts she was startled when he began his ascent of the north face of the bank thinking it to be, ‘mad, dangerous behaviour’. But after a few nights of it the actress came to accept this as unremarkable, as far as O’Toole was concerned.
At the time O’Toole and Siân were staying rent free with actor Kenneth Griffith who admired O’Toole greatly but had grave doubts about the couple’s wedding plans. ‘You cannot marry this wonderful man,’ he said one day to Siân. ‘Understand, he is a genius, but he is not normal.’ Siân started to get similar words of warning from quite a few of O’Toole’s friends, and some of her own. She ignored them all. ‘I was so deliriously in love I couldn’t understand why everyone around me was worried.’
Griffith would remain one of O’Toole’s most loyal and longest lasting friends. The two first met while working on a TV play in 1957. O’Toole woke up pissed one morning, no clue as to where the hell he was, remembering only that he’d written down on a piece of paper that he had to turn up for rehearsals for this play. Arriving late, with the rest of the cast already assembled and waiting, he burst through the doors. ‘Sorry I’m late, darlings.’ In an instant he fixed eyes on Griffith, thundered across the room, picked him up and kissed the startled actor on the cheek. ‘I think you’re bloody marvellous,’ said O’Toole. It was an odd introduction.
Despite Griffith’s misgivings O’Toole and Siân were very much in love, but certainly an unusual alliance. Looking at her decorative if drab wardrobe of black and violet clothes one day O’Toole said, ‘You look as though you’re in mourning for your sex life. Give it here.’ Gathering up armfuls of shoes, gloves, frocks, hats and suits he flung them all out of the window. Siân looked at a thousand pounds worth of clothes on the wet cobbles below. ‘What will I wear now?’ she howled. O’Toole’s reply was instant. ‘My clothes.’ They became the only couple in town with a shared wardrobe of cotton trousers, lumberjack shirts and fisherman’s sweaters. Their marriage in Dublin, which consisted of a pub-crawl picking up well-wishers along the way, wasn’t so much a ceremony as ‘just an excuse for a piss up’ in Siân’s words.
It was the sheer unpredictability of the man that had so attracted Siân to him in the first place. Quite often she didn’t know what the hell he was going to do next. Once he showed up in a sports car yelling, ‘Get your passport, we’re off.’ Heading for Rome they took a wrong turning and ended up in Yugoslavia: the beginning of a grand mystery tour around Europe. For Siân each day was a challenge and an hilarious adventure. O’Toole was the perfect travelling companion. ‘He had an aura, always. When we first went on holiday, we were mobbed. People wanted to travel with us, talk to us, but he hadn’t done anything then. He wasn’t famous. But even when he was nothing, as it were, you knew he was something.’
Still, his manic driving did tend to shred the nerves, either bombing down the autobahn or hurtling round the bends of alpine roads. After he’d taken a friend back to Amsterdam, the unfortunate woman later confided to Siân, ‘He should never drive anything. He’s lovely, but I thought we were going to die on that journey.’
They finished the holiday off with a trip to Wales to stay with relatives of Siân, but even a country cottage O’Toole managed to turn into a disaster area. One night he suddenly decided to do the cooking himself, although Siân had never seen him actually cook anything before. ‘I can make the best French toast,’ he stated. Minutes later the stove exploded into flames. They tried to extinguish the fire but it was impossible and both were driven out into the garden where they watched in the rain as the kitchen burnt down.
Instead of cashing in on the New Wave of British theatre exploding back home, Richard Burton was stuck making crap international films like Sea Wife (1957) in Jamaica, with Joan Collins cast, if you can believe it, as a nun. Naturally Burton made a pass at Joan, which was rebuffed. Unperturbed Burton slunk off, according to Joan, to shag half the island’s female population. ‘Richard, I do believe you would screw a snake,’ she told him. To which Burton glibly responded, ‘It would have to be wearing a skirt, darling.’
Bitter Victory (1957), a psychological war film, was another project that Burton felt was beneath him and so he frittered away the time haranguing his fellow actors and drinking himself every day into a stupor. Burton was rather prone to either sinking into a film role with utter conviction if he saw it as a challenge, or playing it with open contempt and boredom. If the film was a piece of shit Burton knew it in an instant and went on auto-pilot.
With a worrying number of film flops stockpiling behind him Burton agreed to do a play on Broadway, filling his spare time boozing royally in the bars of New York. He’d stroll into a club already pissed at midnight and be found there the next morning still telling tales, still knocking back double vodkas and beer chasers. Burton at this time never drank before 5pm when working, but his fortune was such that he could afford to hire a manservant, one of whose duties was to make sure that at 5pm on the dot a large vodka and tonic was ready to hit his outstretched hand.
While on Broadway Burton enjoyed an affair with his co-star Susan Strasberg, daughter of acting guru Lee. The romance lasted for several months and Burton didn’t hide it at all. He even went home with her to meet her parents and introduced Susan to members of his family he’d flown over from Wales to see the show. Even when Sybil flew in he carried on regardless. When the play ended its run, so Burton terminated his association with Susan and returned to England to make the film version of the hit play Look Back in Anger (1959) with Claire Bloom. Susan was left devastated and followed him, turning up unannounced at the studio. All of which made things cumbersome for Burton who now had a mini harem of mistresses. No sooner was Susan through the door of Burton’s dressing room than she was unceremoniously bundled into a toilet so Claire Bloom didn’t catch sight of her. Humiliated, Susan considered jumping into the Thames off Waterloo Bridge. Instead she flew home.
Harris had made such a strong impression with Michael Anderson on Shake Hands with the Devil that the director cast him in his next production, the seafaring epic The Wreck of the Mary Deare (1959) opposite two more film greats, Charlton Heston and Gary Cooper. ‘It was interesting,’ recalls Anderson. ‘When Harris first came on the set and I introduced him to Gary Cooper and Heston he said, “How are you then, nice to see ya.” He wasn’t at all impressed. That was Richard, he was his own man. As far as he was concerned he had his job to do, they had their job to do and he was certainly not intimidated by these big stars or anything else.’
Nor did Harris allow himself to be overawed by the fact that he was making his first movie in Hollywood, even though the flight over was almost his last when one of the plane’s engines burst into flames and they were forced to make an emergency landing. �
�He took the whole thing in his stride,’ says Anderson.
Sparks flew, however, during shooting when Harris and Heston failed to get on. Harris found epic cinema’s leading man to be prudish and stuck up. ‘He’d played in Shakespeare and to listen to him you’d think he helped the Bard with the rewrites. He was a prick, really, and I liked tackling pricks.’
Again Anderson came away impressed with Harris the actor. ‘He would improvise such wonderful things. We had a section of ship on the stage which was on rockers and he had to spit in this scene. So he spat overboard and with his head he turned as though he were watching the spit go down stream. Well, nobody in a million years would’ve thought of that bit of business, so you really believed that ship was moving. It was those little things that he would do out of the blue that were stunning, I’ll never forget that.’
When the film proved a sizeable hit it was enough to convince Harris what his future course should be: all out pursuit of Hollywood fame and fortune. But he’d pay a hefty price for it. He was drinking more and more, not caring about the consequences. ‘It wouldn’t touch the taste buds, just hit the stomach, bounce back into my head and keep me going for a little bit.’ Friends noticed that his temperament was starting to change, he was being vicious to people in a way he hadn’t been before, mostly towards his wife. When unleashed the Harris fury was deeply frightening and something to behold. When he returned home late one day tanked up, Elizabeth made a perfectly justifiable remark about his condition only to see him turn into a raging inferno. Grabbing a nearby wardrobe he lifted it above his head and threw it at her. Friends, not unsurprisingly, wondered how long such a marriage could last.
Harris’s habit of bringing home his drinking pals was causing Elizabeth severe distress too. She felt like an outsider in her own home. The poverty that existed in the early part of their marriage she could cope with. ‘But this lack of privacy was beginning to destroy me.’
After his success in The Long and the Short and the Tall Peter O’Toole started to get movie offers. But even in those early days his behaviour and drinking had become legendary within the business and who knows how many film offers went down the plughole because of it. On one occasion he went to see future 007 producer Albert R. Broccoli, then looking to replace an actor who had a drink problem on one of his films. Alas O’Toole stumbled into Broccoli’s office and a bottle of whisky fell out of his overcoat pocket.
While still at RADA O’Toole had appeared on film and television carrying out stunt work under various pseudonyms such as Walter Plings, Charlie Staircase and Arnold Hearthrug but his first proper credit was a small role in Disney’s Kidnapped (1959), based on the classic Robert Louis Stevenson book. Amazingly on his very first day on the film O’Toole overslept. An angry film company rang to ask, ‘Where is Mr O’Toole?’ Kenneth Griffith answered and bullshitted as best he could. ‘This is a very large house, I’ll see if I can find him.’ Griffith raced upstairs and popped his head round O’Toole’s bedroom door. He was fast asleep. ‘O’Toole. You are 45 minutes late.’ Lifting his bedraggled head off the pillow O’Toole asked if his car had arrived. ‘No,’ said Griffith, struck by the question. O’Toole’s head crashed back onto the pillow. ‘No car, no me.’ And he went back to sleep. ‘From that day to this, there has been a Rolls-Royce waiting for him,’ Griffith once revealed. Maybe in this one anecdote, we have the true definition of what makes a star. As Griffith wryly commented, he himself was never late for work, always turned up on time under his own steam, yet stardom and fame eluded him. From the very beginning O’Toole had star quality and behaved as a star should; in other words, a monumental egoist and royal pain in the ass.
The star of Kidnapped was Peter Finch. The Australian was a mighty drinker, so not surprisingly the pair became great pals. As a young actor Finch lived in Sydney and worked a lot on radio. One morning he woke up still pissed from the previous night and with just an hour before he was due on air. In order to sober up, and arrive on time, Finch jumped into the bay and swam a mile across Sydney harbour. He surfaced at the botanical gardens and arrived barefoot and soaking at the studio, ready for work.
Even after he’d made it as a matinee idol and international film star Finch remained a fearsome drinker. One night while driving him along Sunset Strip in Hollywood his exasperated wife looked across at Finch drinking from a bottle of tequila and just saw red. Opening the door she threw him out and sped off. Guilt kicked in about half a mile up the road so she reversed back to look for him, but he was gone. Anxious for the rest of the night she was about to call the police when Finch stumbled into their flat at five in the morning and fell into bed. Not a word about the incident was ever spoken.
O’Toole and Finch piss-ups were mighty affairs and although they never made another film together little excuse was needed to indulge themselves. When Finch was working in Ireland in the early 60s O’Toole joined him one night for a drink but the pub refused to serve them because it was after closing time. Both stars decided that the only course of action was to buy the pub, so they wrote out a cheque for it on the spot. The following morning after realising what they’d done the pair rushed back to the scene of the crime. Luckily the landlord hadn’t cashed the cheque yet and disaster was averted. O’Toole and Finch remained on friendly terms with the pub owner and when he died his wife invited them to his funeral. Both knelt at the graveside as the coffin was slowly lowered in, sobbing noisily. When Finch turned away, unable to stand it any more, O’Toole saw his friend’s face change from a look of sorrow to one of total astonishment. They were at the wrong funeral. Their friend was being buried 100 yards away.
O’Toole’s bit part in Kidnapped led to a sizeable role in The Day They Robbed the Bank of England (1960), about a group of Irish patriots who plan to steal the British government’s gold reserves. But seeing himself for the first time on screen was a calamitous experience and from that day on he never watched his own films, not even Lawrence of Arabia, instead giving his premiere ticket to a friend and asking afterwards, ‘How is it?’ He finally caught up with his most famous film when it premiered on British TV over Christmas 1975, giving up after 40 minutes as the memories came flooding back. ‘I kept thinking things like, weren’t we doing that bit when Omar Sharif got the clap? No, no, that bit was the day I got the clap. It makes serious viewing extremely difficult.’
His next film, The Savage Innocents (1960), where he played a Canadian explorer who befriends an Eskimo was even more of a calamitous experience. In one scene the two men have to make a sledge in order to escape the Arctic wastes but the scriptwriter hadn’t been able to figure out exactly how they were supposed to achieve this. O’Toole helpfully suggested the Eskimo eat his character and make a sledge out of his bones and skin. ‘We want a happy ending,’ said the director. Filmed at Pinewood the snow was in fact tons of salt mix and two polar bears brought in from Dublin Zoo weren’t deemed white enough against the salt so were covered in peroxide which drove them nuts. O’Toole left this sorry mess scratching his head as to whether he would ever make it in the movies, especially when he saw the final cut and discovered that his voice had been dubbed by another actor. Throwing a fit he demanded that his name be removed from the film’s opening and closing credits.
The Soused Sixties
More crap films followed for Richard Burton as he entered the 1960s. Making Ice Palace (1960) in Alaska, a lame action drama, to overcome the horrendous hurdle of getting up at 5am every morning he simply drank his way through the night, usually in the company of co-star Jim Backus (famous as the voice of Mr Magoo). ‘Here we are,’ Burton would say to Backus, ‘drinking at three o’clock in the morning, sitting on top of the world and making this piece of shit.’
Burton was quite conscious of the fact that he was appearing with alacrity in a steady stream of drivel. Later in life he admitted to having made more than his fair share of lousy movies, and not always just for the money. ‘I have done the most utter rubbish just to have somewhere to go in the morni
ngs.’ His pursuit of fame was mixed up in all this, too. Make enough films, one of them might score at the box office even if the others crash and burn. Burton wanted fame more than anything else. In the early sixties he went for the first time to Eastern Europe and, attending the theatre one evening, was forced to wait in a queue, something he’d not done for quite some time. As none of his films had been released behind the Iron Curtain no one recognised him. He related this incident to a journalist. ‘Wasn’t that nice for a change,’ the man said. Burton stared back, ‘No. I hated it.’
Drink still, to a large extent, controlled his life, though the loyal Sybil had learnt to tolerate it in silence. Sometimes Burton would slip into bed beside her at some ungodly hour, too drunk to take his clothes off. One night he got into bed with a lighted cigarette and fell asleep with it still in his hand. Luckily Sybil was awoken by the smoke from the smouldering bedclothes but couldn’t stir Burton no matter how hard she shook him. Panic stricken she ran through the house alerting the staff who together carried Burton from the bedroom to the safety of the garden. Only then did Sybil realise that no one had brought out their daughter Jessica, asleep on the top floor. Sybil dashed back into the smoke-filled house and rescued the little girl in the nick of time.
Even during interviews Burton didn’t hide the fact that he drank like a fish, not giving a stuff if it was reported or not. As the decade progressed journalists came to regard interviewing him as a perilous business because the actor usually expected the reporter to match him drink for drink. Burton would drain his glass, hand it to an acolyte to be refilled and then frowningly instruct his reluctant drinking companion to ‘finish that up, it’s time for another one’. During one interview Burton played a practical joke on his interrogator, challenging the reporter to a booze contest. Burton’s butler served the drinks and the journalist ended up comatose under the table. Burton stood over him triumphant, a wide smile on his face. Only later did the journalist discover that every time he was served with double whiskies, Burton’s glass was filled with iced tea.
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