Curiously though for a man who loved his country with a passion, Harris’s ashes were scattered in the Bahamas. A curious end to an extraordinary life.
When Peter O’Toole heard of Harris’s passing he was deeply moved. ‘A great spirit has gone, though I didn’t expect him to die. I thought he was indestructible.’ Even though sadly they never worked together, the two men had been friends and rugby game chums for 50 years, often cheering on Munster, Harris’s favourite team. Harris didn’t share O’Toole’s love of cricket, however. ‘Harris hated cricket. I mean he hated it. This tedious baffling English game. He found it insupportable.’ In recent years, however, Harris had been barred from going to any of Munster’s matches because he was considered a jinx. Local newspapers called it ‘the Harris factor’ because the team had lost every game in the last few years he’d attended. When Munster reached a cup semi final Harris again was barred, but he kept a keen watch on the result. ‘I’ll be hanging from every goal-post if they lose,’ he said, which of course, they did.
‘I went into his room afterwards,’ O’Toole recalled. ‘It was the last time we saw each other. The television was on and there was Harris watching cricket, after 50 years of cursing it. Then he turned off the television and put his head on the pillow, and I thought, “Well after the unnamable horror of a game of cricket, death must have been a walk in the park.” And I’m now convinced that the long shadow on a cricket field is Harris.’
Last Man Standing
First Burton, then Reed and now Harris – all had gone; now only Peter O’Toole was left to fight the good fight. For a while it seemed O’Toole had checked out too when in 2001, mistakenly believing the great man had pegged it, confused fans bombarded websites dedicated to the Irish actor after he went on a TV show to talk about old age and plans for his send-off, including the fact he’d already chosen his own epitaph. Tributes poured in. One message read, ‘I can’t believe he’s gone. What a man, what a talent.’ The fan sites hurriedly issued a statement reassuring fans that O’Toole was still very much alive.
Perhaps sensing that O’Toole wasn’t too far behind his comrades in retiring to the cricket pavilion of dead hellraisers, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences decided in 2002 to bestow upon him their lifetime achievement Oscar. Chuffed? Not a bit of it. Over his whole career O’Toole had received seven nominations for best actor without a single win; it was a record he shared with Richard Burton. Back in the 70s the two men shared a plane flight. ‘And we proceeded to get drunk,’ Burton recalled. ‘Peter asked me how many Oscar nominations I’d had. I said, truthfully, five. He said, holding up his fingers, that he’d had four. I know he’s only had two. Does he think we’re idiots?’
O’Toole stunned Hollywood by rejecting the honorary statuette, declaring in a note to the Academy that as he was ‘still in the game and might win the lovely bugger outright, would the Academy please defer the honour until I am 80?’ The board of directors sent a note back saying, ‘We unanimously and enthusiastically voted you the honorary award because you’ve earned and deserved it.’ The show’s producer branded O’Toole ‘silly’ for not attending the ceremony; not half as silly as the Academy was for failing seven times to give the man a proper Oscar.
In the end O’Toole backtracked and decided to make a personal appearance after all, but almost missed out on picking up his Oscar after he threatened to leave the ceremony because of the show’s strict no-alcohol rules. O’Toole had arrived in the green room and sauntered over to the bar to ask for a drink. ‘We have lemon juice, apple juice, still or sparkling,’ said the barman. O’Toole gazed at him with alarm. ‘No, I want a drink.’ The barman shook his head. ‘No alcohol, sir.’ O’Toole’s face went ashen. ‘All right, I’m fucking off.’ One of the lackeys managed to stop him in time and eventually some vodka was smuggled in. ‘I still like a little drink,’ he told the press.
O’Toole was certainly still in the game and had seen something of a renaissance in his career. He sparkled as the elderly Casanova in a BBC drama series and was back making epic movies too, appearing as Augustus Caesar in a mammoth American TV production. Director Roger Young had only ever envisaged O’Toole for the role and was a huge fan. ‘I flew to London to meet him, but I was so in awe of the man that I kind of drifted through the experience in a daze.’ Arriving on location in Tunisia, O’Toole was given a large rented house by the ocean. Young paid him a visit the first day, just to hear his ideas about the script. ‘I arrived at the appointed time and was escorted, by his assistant, through this large house out to the balcony where Peter waited. He sat in a chair at a table with the script laid out in front of him. I was terrified. I thought that Peter O’Toole could rip the director into little shreds of whimpering self-doubt if he wanted to, and I was afraid that he might want to, just to show who the boss was. He did nothing of the kind. He was charming, calm, soft spoken, and never arrogant. He never threw his weight around.’
Instead they just talked and when O’Toole finally showed signs of wanting to wrap up the meeting Young asked if he could be shown the way out, since he’d forgotten the path to the front door. ‘I have no idea, darling,’ said O’Toole. ‘I don’t go into the rest of the house. I stay in this room.’ The room he was talking about was of tiny proportions with just a bed against one wall, a dresser, a closet and a bedside table. It was obviously meant for the maid. ‘Mr O’Toole,’ said Young (it took him a whole week to summon up the courage to call him Peter), ‘I’m sure there is a master bedroom for you to sleep in.’ O’Toole shook his head. ‘No, no, I can’t stand all that room. I’m fine here. I don’t go into the rest of this house. Too large.’
When it came time to film O’Toole’s scenes Young was so in awe that he couldn’t find the guts within himself to give the star a note, a piece of direction, or even a suggestion for three full days of shooting. ‘I could barely ask him to do a second take. Finally, on the fourth day, he said to me, rather loudly, so all could hear…“Darling, call me Peter. And tell me what you want.” I’m not sure I can impart what a privilege that was. PETER O’TOOLE just said “Direct me.” TO ME! So began one of the most enjoyable shoots I ever had.’
O’Toole also gained the respect of the entire cast and crew, largely because of who he was and the incredible reputation that he carried around with him, like a shadow, but also by his sheer professionalism. ‘Peter often would take part in preparing the set,’ recalls Young. ‘If he wanted a prop, or a piece of furniture moved for the scene, he would just do it himself. There is a scene in which he gets into a bath. Peter helped fill the tub!’
It was a long tough shoot and about a quarter through it O’Toole got sick. ‘We thought it was serious,’ says Young. ‘I visited Peter in hospital. He looked ill. I was afraid for him. The next day we started planning how to shoot around him. He was obviously going to be out for weeks. The day after that, he was back on the set! Ready to work. No little illness was going to stop him. He worked every day after that. If anyone showed concern for his health he simply waved them off. He’s a strong man.’
Still, Young remained concerned about his star’s fragile health, particularly as the role required dollops of stamina. In one scene Augustus Caesar faints on the hard cement floor of a temple. Young wanted O’Toole to begin his fall, and then he’d cut and let his double continue the stunt. O’Toole wanted to do it for real, knowing the shot would look better. ‘I don’t want you to take that fall, Peter,’ said Young. ‘Oh, darling, I’ll be fine. Let’s try it.’ Young, cried ‘Action’ and O’Toole collapsed on the hard floor. After the shot the star said, ‘Want to do it again?’
That dedication seemed to sum up O’Toole for Young. ‘I’ve now worked with the best in the world. It doesn’t get any better than that. He was professional, a gentleman, genius talent, and a great work ethic – a legend. It’s an experience I’ll never forget, sitting around talking about his films, David Lean, cricket, women, his children, various directors, Kate Hepburn, his books, and more cricket. I asked him
to explain cricket to me one day and he said, “Oh dear boy, it would take months.”’
Another epic followed, Troy (2004), where O’Toole played Priam, the father of Paris played by Orlando Bloom. It was a heavyweight film costing around the $175 million mark and also starred Brad Pitt and Sean Bean, another self-confessed O’Toole aficionado. ‘First time I met him on the set,’ recalled Bean, ‘he was in a robe with a cigarette holder and he said, “Sean, how are you, dear boy?” He was just how I imagined him to be. It was a great moment.’ From working class roots himself, Bean was a big fan of the old-school stars like Burton, O’Toole, Harris and Reed. ‘They lived life on their terms, and why not? There are no rules saying you have to do this and you have to do that. They did it on their own terms and had a great time doing it.’
That was certainly still true of O’Toole, who, upon seeing the final result of Troy, labelled it, rather undiplomatically, ‘a disaster’, sending the PR brigade into a frenzy. Worse, he started to slag off the director, Wolfgang Petersen. ‘That kraut, what a clown he was. When it was all over, I watched 15 minutes of the finished movie and then walked out. At least I had one good scene.’
O’Toole had never been the most subtle of people and old age hardly dented his un-PC ways. He had little time for the current crop of British stars like Hugh Grant. ‘Ugh, that twitching idiot! Ooh, I mustn’t say that, must I, but he’s just a floppy young stammerer in all his films. How far is that line going to go? I watched that Four Weddings and a Funeral and thought, what the fuck is going on here?’
Amazingly, in 2007 O’Toole found himself in the running for a best actor Oscar yet again for his performance in Venus – his eighth nomination (you’d think they’d have finally caved in and given it to him – alas no). The film chronicled the curious, tender, almost wholly platonic romance between Maurice, an elderly thespian who has been reduced to playing corpses on TV (when O’Toole tells his ex-wife – played by Vanessa Redgrave – that he’s been given a role as a corpse in a TV drama, she says, ‘Typecast again?’) and Jessie, a 21-year-old northern girl, sent to London to tend to her great uncle, Maurice’s old acting mucker played by Leslie Phillips. O’Toole was delighted at the script and the idea of playing this odd romance: ‘No one better for a dirty old man who falls for a sluttish young woman.’
Maurice’s sexual interest hits the barrier of Jessie’s revulsion, but slowly, as the characters reveal their vulnerability to each other, she starts to reward him with tiny tokens of favour. She bares her breasts for him when he’s ill in bed and, in a daring scene, she slips a finger between her legs and allows him to smell, although naturally he wants to taste, too. ‘Oh boy,’ said O’Toole when reminded of it. It’s a scene all our hellraisers would have been proud to play.
So O’Toole is the final one, the last surviving British reprobate. He has outlasted them all: an achievement the actor puts down to the O’Toole genes. ‘My old man died when he was knocked down by a car. They took him to hospital and found he had nine mortal injuries. Nine! But he managed to die at home. When we went to the hospital we found a form which said, “The patient discharged himself.” Discharged himself! Christ, he should have been dead nine times over.’
And so indeed should O’Toole; he knows he’s been living on borrowed time for years, watching all his drinking pals from the 60s go under the turf one by one. ‘The common denominator of all my friends is that they’re dead,’ he once said. ‘I went to their funerals. There was a time when I felt like a perpendicular cuckoo clock, popping up and down in pulpits saying, “Fear no more the heat o’ the sun.” They were dying like flies.’
But like all our other hellraisers he has never once regretted the mistakes in life that he made, the boozing that almost killed him. ‘I loved the drinking, and waking up in the morning to find I was in Mexico. It was part and parcel of being an idiot.’ As with Burton, and to a lesser extent Harris and Reed, the accusation has been raised that O’Toole squandered his genius for fame, Hollywood and the bottle. When a reporter asked him to counter such claims he replied, ‘Assholes!’
Our hellraisers never drank out of desperation or loneliness or some psychological problem. ‘We weren’t all brooding, introspective, addicted lunatics,’ says O’Toole. ‘And we weren’t solitary, boring drinkers, sipping vodka alone in a room. No, no, no: we went out on the town, baby, and we did our drinking in public. We had fun!’ Maybe it was even less complicated than that. ‘O’Toole, Burton and I all drank to excess not because we had problems, but because we loved it,’ said Harris. ‘We liked to wonder what sort of trouble we could get into today. For us Alcoholics Anonymous was a joke. Can you imagine any of us at an AA meeting?’
Oliver Reed, too, never admitted he had a problem with booze. He drank. He fell over. No problem. If he wished he could stay on the wagon for months, but then go off on a marathon binge. Nor did he feel an ounce of guilt when inflicting his addiction upon others, even his own son, Mark, who he took along to a pub for the first time aged just 12. Mark downed seven pints and his father was immensely proud. Speaking years later Mark summed up Ollie Reed: ‘My father never drank by himself. To him, beer was like a cup of tea. My father drank to have fun with people.’
And that’s it, in a nutshell. OK, so in between the laughs, the falling down stairs and the pranks, marriage vows were trampled in the dirt, teeth were punched out of the faces of total strangers, and the odd police cell was occupied overnight, but at least it was done with style, a certain sense of panache, and nearly always for the sake of fun. I hope this collection of memories and anecdotes serves as a testament to four extraordinary lives lived extraordinarily.
Select Bibliography
The following previous books on our hellraisers proved most useful:
Richard Burton by Fergus Cashin (W. H. Allen, 1982)
Burton: The Man Behind the Myth by Penny Junor (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1985)
Rich: The Life of Richard Burton by Melvyn Bragg (Hodder & Stoughton, 1988)
Richard Harris: Sex, Death and the Movies by Michael Feeney Callan (Robson Books, 2003)
Behaving Badly: The Life of Richard Harris by Cliff Goodwin (Virgin Books, 2005)
Peter O’Toole by Nicholas Wapshott (Hodder & Stoughton, 1983)
Loitering with Intent by Peter O’Toole (Macmillan, 1992)
Reed All About Me by Oliver Reed (W. H. Allen, 1979)
Evil Spirits: The Life of Oliver Reed by Cliff Goodwin (Virgin Books, 2000)
Other books proved helpful with miscellaneous stories:
The Street Where I Live by Alan Jay Lerner (Hodder & Stoughton, 1978)
A Divided Life by Bryan Forbes (Heinemann, 1992)
What’s it All About? by Michael Caine (Century, 1992)
Parcel Arrived Safely, Tied with String by Michael Crawford (Century, 1999)
The Diaries of Kenneth Tynan by John Lahr and Kenneth Tynan (Bloomsbury, 2001)
Trevor Howard: A Personal Biography by Terence Pettigrew (Peter Owen, 2001)
Public Places: The Autobiography by Siân Phillips (Hodder and Stoughton, 2001)
Bruce: The Autobiography by Bruce Forsyth (Sidgwick & Jackson, 2001)
Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don’t Care by Lee Server (Faber and Faber, 2002)
And Why Not?: Memoirs of a Film Lover by Barry Norman (Simon & Schuster, 2002)
Adventures of a Suburban Boy by John Boorman (Faber and Faber, 2003)
Close Up: An Actor Telling Tales by John Fraser (Oberon Books, 2004)
Blow-Up and Other Exaggerations by David Hemmings (Robson Books, 2004)
From the Eye of the Hurricane: My Story by Alex Higgins (Headline, 2007)
I’d also like to thank the staff of the British Film Institute library for allowing me access to their vast collection of magazine and newspaper cuttings regarding our hellraisers.
Also by Robert Sellers
Sting: A Biography
Cult TV: The Golden Age of ITC
The Battle for Bond: The Genesis of Cinema�
��s Greatest Hero
Graham Rye
Robert Sellers is the author of nine books. He has contributed to Empire, Total Film, Cinema Retro, and The Independent. A former stand-up comedian, he lives in the United Kingdom with his wife and daughter.
I’d like to thank the following who contributed to and agreed to be interviewed for this book:
Michael Anderson,
Vic Armstrong,
Ian Carmichael,
Ray Galton,
John Glen,
Piers Haggard,
Anthony Harvey,
James Hogg,
John Hough,
Waris Hussein,
Charles Jarrott,
Christopher Lee,
Mark Lester,
Richard Lester,
Euan Lloyd,
Peter Medak,
Brian Murphy,
Barry Norman,
Tony Palmer,
Richard Rush,
Ken Russell,
Ilya Salkind,
Alan Simpson,
David Storey,
Jack Wild,
Michael Winner,
Herbert Wise,
Michael York,
Roger Young
Index
The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your eBook. Please use the search function on your eReading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.
A
Anderson, Lindsay
Anderson, Michael
Andrews, Julie
Anne of the Thousand Days (film)
Antonioni, Michelangelo
Armstrong, Vic
Ashton, Roy
Aspel, Michael
B
Bacall, Lauren
Backus, Jim
Hellraisers Page 35