Eventually the desert filming closed and the unit moved to Spain, which O’Toole dubbed ‘Pontefract with scorpions’. While there Sam Spiegel paid the production a visit on his yacht and summoned O’Toole to his cabin where he gave the actor a right bollocking. Whether this was meant to spur him on in the final stages of filming O’Toole never discovered. ‘I left the yacht feeling dreadful,’ he later recalled. ‘Just as ever, destruction was Sam’s game. I couldn’t bear that man.’ Pissed off he looked for a bar to drown his sorrows in and found one already propped up by the film’s art director John Box, who’d got the same rough treatment from Spiegel. After consuming several bottles the pair decided to have their revenge, climbed up the anchor chain onto the tycoon’s yacht, crept into his private quarters and stole all his prize cigars.
Lawrence of Arabia was a world-wide smash when it opened in 1962 and hailed as one of cinema’s true masterpieces. O’Toole’s extraordinary performance made him a star overnight. But during the American opening he behaved disgracefully, either turning up drunk for interviews or demanding outrageous sums for appearing on TV. ‘You make a star,’ said Spiegel, ‘you make a monster.’
O’Toole was now a star. ‘I woke up one morning to find I was famous. Bought a white Rolls-Royce and drove down Sunset Boulevard, wearing dark specs and a white suit, waving like the queen mum. Nobody took any fucking notice, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.’
After his stint as a werewolf more Hammer baddies followed for Oliver Reed: a scurvy bounder in Pirates of Blood River (1961) and then a vicious leader of a motorcycle gang in The Damned (1963), a performance and role that inspired novelist Anthony Burgess to later write A Clockwork Orange.
Work was coming in at a steady pace, including a lively appearance in the classic TV series The Saint. In the climactic scene Reed, inevitably cast as a villain, is gunned down by Roger Moore’s Simon Templar and killed. As the blank cartridge was fired Reed dramatically hurled himself backwards and knocked himself out cold. ‘It was the best example of method acting I have ever seen,’ said the show’s production manager Johnny Goodman.
Years later when the show was resurrected in the 70s as Return of the Saint with Ian Ogilvy stepping adroitly into Moore’s shoes Reed was on holiday in the south of France and staying in the same hotel as the cast and crew. The Saint’s producer Robert Baker proudly introduced Ogilvy to Reed. ‘This is the new Saint.’ Ollie studied the young actor inquisitively then leaned forward to ask, ‘You a poof?’ Saint author Leslie Charteris was there too, unfortunately for him as Reed was so thrilled to meet the The Saint’s creator that he took a knife and ran it across his own wrist, drawing blood. ‘You and I have got to be blood brothers,’ he announced, grabbing out for Charteris’s hand, which the author skilfully withdrew. Failing in his task Reed stumbled away from the table leaving a bloody trail on the carpet.
Cleopatra (1963), the most expensive film ever made, was in deep shit. Costs were spiralling out of control and filming had been halted in a rain sodden Britain and relocated to Rome, wasting millions. Burton was aware of the difficulties when he was drafted in to play Mark Antony, a decision that was to change his life and result in one of the all time great showbusiness scandals.
By the time Elizabeth Taylor met Burton she’d already been through four marriages and wasn’t even in her thirties yet. Burton couldn’t stand her to start with. ‘I must don my armour once more to play against Miss Tits,’ he said. So why did he go all out to seduce her? Was it Taylor’s wealth and status that he lusted after, to win and ultimately own the most glamorous woman on earth? Not bad for a boy from the valleys. Or was it lust at first sight? Burton referred to Liz Taylor’s tits as, ‘Apocalyptic. They would topple empires before they withered.’ Reportedly a sozzled Burton burst into Liz’s rented villa during a cocktail party to confess his love for her at the top of his voice and demand that, ‘If you’re my girl, come over here and stick your tongue down my throat.’ The guests watched dumbfounded as the Hollywood sex siren did exactly that.
Soon the rest of the world knew of the affair and the paparazzi followed the couple everywhere. Friends tried warning him off but Burton was in too deep; this time his affair with his leading lady would not end once the cameras stopped rolling. Burton had two children with Sybil, while Liz, then married to Eddie Fisher, had four, so there was enormous guilt on both sides about ripping the two sets of families apart. It eventually ended up being too much for Liz who attempted suicide. Not to be outdone, Sybil also tried to kill herself. Burton predictably hit the bottle.
The Burton/Taylor affair became the biggest news story on earth and everybody wanted a piece of the action. While filming an epic sea battle for Cleopatra in Ischia a producer invited the couple for lunch on his yacht and placed hidden cameras in their room in the hope of capturing and then selling exclusive pictures of them kissing. Liz, who’d been in front of cameras since she was a kid, sniffed them out and Burton had to be restrained from pulverizing their host.
Once Cleopatra was completed Burton and Liz tried desperately to end the affair, knowing how many people they’d hurt, but couldn’t stop themselves; their passion was just too intense. For the next two years the couple were literally on the run from the media while waiting for their respective divorces. 20th Century Fox, who’d bankrolled Cleopatra and were going bust because of it, tried suing the couple, claiming their conduct had pre judiced the film’s box office chances. The case was dropped after Burton threatened to reveal the sordid private lives of certain top Fox executives. A US congressman introduced a bill to have Burton and Liz banned from entering the country; even the Vatican slagged off their public adultery. Lesser people might have been destroyed, but for Burton and Liz it merely enhanced their mythic status and helped turn them into the most glamorous couple of the 1960s. ‘I have achieved a sort of diabolical fame,’ Burton said, no doubt hiding a smile.
Glamorous they certainly were, but they were gloriously mismatched, too. He was a rough rugby playing Welsh working class hero, she a Hollywood starlet, pampered since childhood. It was the ultimate example of opposites attracting and the textbook case of can’t live with her, can’t live without her. There were endless rows, with Liz taunting Burton by calling him ‘taffy’, ‘a burnt-out Welshman’ or ‘fatty’. He in return called Liz, ‘my little Jewish tart’. Often the rows turned violent with Liz hitting out and receiving blows in return.
Battered by the public spotlight over his affair with Liz Taylor, Burton proceeded to give his body a good battering too. Drinking Bloody Marys at 10.30 in the morning, he’d be on to his second bottle of vodka by the afternoon. Throughout his 30s and early 40s Burton pushed his body almost to breaking point, but his powers of recovery seemed unimpaired. He always considered his acting talent a gift, so too his ability to withstand alcoholic punishment and the endless boozing.
Lindsay Anderson, a director at the forefront of British New Wave cinema, wanted Richard Harris to play the lead role in a gritty film about the cutthroat world of professional rugby, This Sporting Life (1963), based on a novel by David Storey, who also wrote the screenplay. ‘We chose Richard,’ Storey recalls, ‘because of his emotional volatility, he was very accessible emotionally and had none of those traits of a conventional actor, or even a conventional leading actor. And his enthusiasm was total, he was completely committed, verging on the edge of insanity in some respects, and that became infused in the film itself. And then he had a very powerful effect on Lindsay in terms of a personal relationship.’
Some believed Anderson’s interest in Harris was not entirely professional; Anderson was homosexual and when he flew out to the Tahitian location of Mutiny on the Bounty to meet Harris he felt himself falling madly in love with the Irishman. So began one of cinema’s most bizarre partnerships. ‘Really it was a combination of Richard’s Celtic bravado and wildness and Lindsay’s homosexuality which he never really came to terms with,’ says Storey. ‘And in Sporting Life it came to a climax in the sense that Richar
d became the epitome of everything that Lindsay desired, the very powerful physical and emotional presence that Richard generated was completely intoxicating to Lindsay and he really had to hang on by his fingernails at times.’
Harris knew it too and exploited the situation mercilessly. As filming began Harris quickly became master to Anderson’s slave, resorting even to physical violence to show him who was boss. ‘It was a relationship, a masochistic relationship in many respects,’ says Storey, ‘that exploded and went over the edge several times. And it was great credit to Lindsay’s inner sturdiness that he managed to hold on to what he thought it might achieve for the film, but it very nearly broke him. We were offered several films after Sporting Life but I felt that the producer in each case wasn’t powerful enough to control the wildness and ferocity of the relationship between Lindsay and Richard, which had become quite obsessional really on both their parts, particularly on Lindsay’s.’
Years later Harris would be consumed by guilt over his behaviour towards Anderson and as late as 1990 would occasionally telephone the director, ‘when I feel dreadful’.
To get into shape Harris trained hard, afraid he wouldn’t measure up on the pitch to the professional rugby players hired as extras. On location in Wakefield, on the first day the local rugby league team congregated on the pitch while Harris was in his caravan. ‘He was spending ages on his make-up,’ recalls Storey, ‘with his false nose, his dark eye lenses to make him look more mysterious, and his mascara. And then when he came out and saw all the players standing at the other end of the pitch going, “Oh Jesus, look at this flower coming out,” he just took one look at them and ran down the whole pitch towards them. And as he ran he got faster and faster until they suddenly realised with horror that he was going to run right into them, which he eventually did. It was that initial gesture of total physical commitment, almost indifference and carelessness that caught the players’ admiration and they really took to him in a major way.’
In the scene where Harris is roughed up behind the scrum, rugby league legend Derek Turner, who was playing the character doing the punching, was asked by Anderson to make the contact look real. So he did. He punched Harris square in the face and knocked him out. Shooting for the day had to be stopped while Harris recovered.
Harris was also up against a fiery co-star more fearsome than Brando and Mitchum put together, Rachel Roberts. A complete eccentric and bawdy beyond measure when drunk, Rachel Roberts was married to Rex Harrison. At the after-premiere party of one of their films the couple grew increasingly irritated that the paparazzi were ignoring them in favour of their guests, Burton and Liz Taylor. Finally Rachel, who’d been drinking all night, snapped and climbed atop her table screaming, ‘We’re the stars of this fucking film!’ Not getting the desired response she lifted up her skirt and bawled, ‘Here’s my pussy. Take some pictures of that!’ Poor Rex could do little to calm his wife down. ‘Don’t you talk to me,’ she spat out at him. ‘You can’t get it up, you old fart.’
When really drunk Rachel took to impersonating a Welsh corgi; literally on all fours barking. At one all-star party Harris threw a few years later in Hollywood Rachel crawled over to a table where Robert Mitchum was sitting regaling colleagues with a story about how he’d caught and survived leprosy while working in the Congo. Suddenly he felt tugs at his trouser leg and some snarling growls. He ignored them and continued. Suddenly Rachel sank her teeth into Mitchum’s leg and started chewing the expensive fabric of his made to measure trousers. When she got to his bare skin and was attempting to draw blood Mitchum stopped to pat her on the head. ‘There, there,’ he said, before returning to his story.
This Sporting Life opened to widespread critical acclaim and Harris was labelled ‘Britain’s Brando’. In America too critics favourably compared him to the method eccentric. Awards followed – an Oscar nomination and best actor at the Cannes Film Festival. Harris attended the ceremony, pissed as a newt, and when he heard his name called out as winner bounced onto the stage. But when actress Jeanne Moreau handed him his award, in the shape of a plain box, Harris barked, ‘What’s this?’ Momentarily stunned Jeanne composed herself. ‘Cufflinks,’ she said. ‘That’s what the best actor gets.’ Harris clearly thought, fuck that, so he grabbed the biggest trophy he could see, said thank you and darted off stage. Two gendarmes attempted to retrieve the statue but Harris barged them asunder and escaped into the night. The festival committee demanded the return of the statue, which was inscribed for best animation film, and Harris finally relented. The cufflinks were duly mailed to him. He kept them for years but the incident still pissed him off. ‘Who gives cufflinks to an Olympic medallist,’ he moaned.
With the success of This Sporting Life behind him Harris’s drinking binges grew ever more legendary. On the American press tour for the film Harris got so bored with the endless interviews that he left his plush New York hotel to hang out with the bums and the tramps down in the Bowery. ‘I spent four days down there while my studio was going crazy.’ He even shared some of their awful gut-rot and was as sick as a dog afterwards. ‘But it was wonderful.’ Harris was near to being out of control. During another drinking binge he staggered back to his hotel room, undressed and climbed into bed, oblivious to the fact that it was occupied by a young couple. He was in the wrong room. ‘Hi, what’s the big idea,’ said a voice. ‘I don’t have one,’ replied Harris, ‘but if one occurs to you by all means wake me up.’
Besides starting trouble Harris was also very good at attracting it. ‘I never pick fights,’ he once said. ‘People pick fights with me.’ In a New York bar a complete stranger came up to the actor and punched him square in the face. ‘I got really mad.’ Harris laid into the guy until he dropped like a stone to the floor. Ironically both men ended up in hospital in beds next to each other. Such incidents caused anxiety back at the boardroom of Associated British, where Harris was still under contract. They even sent him to counselling sessions in order to try and keep him from getting into fights. On a visit to Rome Harris persuaded one of the film executives to join him in order to witness first hand that it wasn’t always the actor who started all the brawling. On their first night they went to a bar and listened as a drunken American tourist spelt out in a loud voice how he was going to do in Harris. The executive advised his client to take no notice. ‘Do you want me to wait until I get a bottle across the face,’ reasoned Harris, ‘or go in and get it over with.’ The executive could see only logic in this statement and Harris took the insulting Yank outside and flattened him. Amazingly the tourist came back inside the bar fists flailing and Harris had to fell him again. The executive reported back to his bosses that passive resistance on Harris’s part simply did not work.
At home he was even more unpredictable. While he was drinking with friends late one night a sudden compulsion overtook Harris to burst into song, but not without piano accompaniment. Problem was he didn’t own a piano, but the family upstairs did. He banged on the door and the poor man who answered had little choice but to let him in. Harris proceeded to raise a racket for the rest of the night. Another time Harris held a stag night at his flat and neighbours called for two police cars to be sent round to break it up. ‘It was quite a small and quiet party,’ said Harris. ‘I know I stood on top of a car in the street and recited Dylan Thomas and Shakespeare, but really there was no cause for complaint.’
It was incidents like this that drove the residents of the apartment block Harris lived in to sign a petition demanding his removal. Luckily another tenant, who happened to be Harris’s new drinking buddy, refused to sign and he was reprieved. Reaching the conclusion that all his neighbours were a snooty bunch of killjoys Harris paid a friend to march up and down outside the flats wearing a sandwich board declaring ‘Love thy neighbour’ – signed Harris. It only inflamed the situation. Luckily for everyone Elizabeth was pregnant again and the couple moved into larger dwellings. She then booked herself into a private nursing home where on the lawn outside Harris boozily s
erenaded her the night before the birth.
After the phenomenon that was Lawrence of Arabia Peter O’Toole was one of the world’s leading stars and his lifestyle began to match it. His Hampstead home was lushly decorated with fine furniture and objets d’art. O’Toole was a keen collector of antiques. Filming Lawrence he smuggled some precious Greek earrings back through customs by hiding them in his foreskin, an act of daring that caused him pain for several weeks after.
In a bid to do something radically different after Lawrence O’Toole returned to the stage. Baal by Bertolt Brecht was certainly different, and it was a disaster. His dresser, on the night of the final rehearsal, screamed ‘This show is cursed,’ flung the clothes on the floor and fled into the night, never to return. The play itself, due to technical difficulties, ran almost five hours. People walked out rather than endure any more.
But O’Toole’s star was rising and a hectic career schedule meant his children hardly ever saw him. O’Toole was not present at their births, and not around much afterwards either. Like all our hellraisers, he was something of a male chauvinist and had no intention of changing his ways now. ‘If you don’t like me, leave me,’ he’d say to Siân. He’d grown up in a male dominated household and so expected the woman to be supportive, undemanding, do the house chores and look after the baby. Siân came to understand that, ‘Clever women never nagged. Clever women dodged the flying crockery and went away to where they could get some peaceful sleep and never in the morning referred to the excesses of the night before.’ She learnt to make meals and throw them away before going to bed, only for her returning husband to wake her at dawn, after a night on the piss, demanding food.
But O’Toole’s absence from his children’s lives led to one distressing incident. When his daughter was ill he paid her a visit in the nursery. Days later the child asked Siân, ‘You know that man who came to see me mummy – who is he?’ After that Siân made a point of putting up stills of O’Toole’s current film or stage guises around the room to avoid any further misunderstandings.
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