Peter O'Toole

by Robert Sellers

  It didn’t take long for O’Toole’s name to begin to spread further than the environs of Stratford and the closeted theatrical world. Eddie Fisher, the husband of Elizabeth Taylor, came backstage one night with a tantalizing offer to play opposite his wife as Count Vronsky in a planned film version of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. O’Toole liked to say that he sped down to London to see Liz in her suite at the Dorchester, ‘took forty quid off her in blackjack and said I’d be delighted’. In the end the project never materialized.

  It wasn’t just his name that was being spoken about, but the boozing, too. A reporter for the Evening Standard newspaper argued that while O’Toole was predicted to become one of the country’s greatest actors, one needed to add the proviso – if he doesn’t destroy himself first. O’Toole was having none of it. ‘I get drunk and disorderly and all that, but I don’t really think it’s true that there is any danger of me destroying myself.’ Yes, he admitted to a bit of hell-raising. ‘How often do I get drunk and smash up the furniture! Oh, not more than three or four times a day.’ Asked what he got from being drunk, he replied: ‘A bloody hangover and grim looks from the missus.’

  By July, however, O’Toole’s drinking had finally caught up with him and he began to suffer horrendous hangovers and severe stomach pains. Worried, he saw a specialist who told him to stop drinking, or at least rein it in significantly. For the next few weeks he made a great show of drinking nothing but milk.

  On stage, too, things were unravelling when he was cast in the relatively minor role of the deformed slave Thersites in Troilus and Cressida. O’Toole did not enjoy the experience. ‘I don’t think he was particularly happy with Thersites,’ recalls Donald Douglas. ‘Which surprised everyone, as it seemed like a perfect opportunity to give a totally different performance, away from the swagger of Petruchio and the tragedy of Shylock.’ In the end he didn’t quite know what to do with the character, and perhaps Hall didn’t know what to do with O’Toole in it, but he looked extraordinary in his make-up, with his flesh covered in pustules and scabs. The critics certainly sensed the actor’s unease, using words such as ‘disappointing’, ‘miscast’ and ‘ranting’ to describe his performance. O’Toole conceded the failure was all his own making. ‘I couldn’t make the words flesh.’ Perhaps he was only truly happy now when leading from the front.

  Overall the season had been a huge success, and not just on the stage. In previous years at the Memorial Theatre there had been a highly visible hierarchy, you had the star actors at the top, a sort of middle rank and then everyone else, the bit-part players and the spear carriers. The O’Toole season was really the first breaking of that privileged order. ‘In the old days you didn’t really instigate conversations with the stars,’ recalls Stephen Thorne. ‘It was almost like being at public school, calling the top stars sir until you were told otherwise. The top billing and the lower orders were also paid at separate times, and after the first night there was a party for the stars while the rest of the company went to the wardrobe party. And it was O’Toole and Peggy Ashcroft who stopped all that, who said bollocks to that, we’re going to the wardrobe party with everybody else. And so those star parties fell into abeyance. It was the beginning of the actual ensemble, of we’re all in it together.’

  Shortly before the season closed Peter Hall addressed the entire company, revealing his bold plan to turn Stratford’s six-month Shakespeare festival into a year-long operation built around a permanent company, with a base in London that also handled contemporary work from home and abroad. To achieve this goal Hall needed Arts Council subsidies and stars to make sure the inaugural productions were a success. Within days both O’Toole and Peggy Ashcroft had committed themselves to the creation of what was soon to become officially known as the Royal Shakespeare Company. However, an American tycoon and the Croydon-born son of Quakers were about to throw a major spanner into the works.

  EIGHT

  T. E. Lawrence wanted nothing to do with the movies. When it was mooted in the 1930s that the renowned producer Alexander Korda was preparing a film of his life, Lawrence made it known that he had no wish at all to be ‘celluloided’. This British scholar and soldier who mobilized the Arab revolt against the Turkish occupying army in the First World War and wrote about his exploits in his book The Seven Pillars of Wisdom had for years been trying to find anonymity from a world that had dubbed him Lawrence of Arabia and turned him into a national figure. When in 1935 this remarkable man died as a result of a motorcycle accident, aged just forty-six, Korda pressed ahead with the project and Laurence Olivier, Robert Donat and Leslie Howard all tested for the role. Eventually Korda lost interest and after several other abortive attempts to bring Lawrence’s famed exploits to the screen it emerged in 1955 that Terence Rattigan had written a screenplay to be directed by Anthony Asquith. With financial backing from the Rank Organization, the man chosen to play Lawrence was Dirk Bogarde, then Britain’s top box-office attraction. For the next year Bogarde immersed himself in the life of Lawrence, but while Asquith was in Iraq scouting locations Rank unexpectedly pulled the plug. No reason was ever given. At least Rattigan managed to make some use of his screenplay, reworking it into a stage play, Ross, that featured Alec Guinness as Lawrence. Bogarde, however, took the film’s cancellation badly, declaring it to be ‘my bitterest disappointment’.

  At much the same time David Lean had been out in India trying to set up a film about Gandhi, but budgetary concerns and logistical problems proved insurmountable and he turned his attention instead to Lawrence, a childhood idol. After the huge success of 1957’s The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lean and his producer Sam Spiegel were hot property and in February 1960 they purchased the screen rights to Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

  Spiegel wanted Marlon Brando to play Lawrence, having worked well with the temperamental star on the classic On the Waterfront. Lean wasn’t so sure, anxious about his ego and that the film might turn into ‘Brando of Arabia’. In any case, Brando turned the job down. For a while Richard Burton and Anthony Perkins were considered, and every week Lean was pestered by phone calls from Montgomery Clift begging to play Lawrence. Lean, however, had come to an important decision. In life Lawrence was very much an enigma, even to himself, so it made sense to cast an unknown actor rather than an internationally recognized star. The man chosen was Albert Finney, who had just completed his first lead role in a film, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, playing working-class antihero Arthur Seaton.

  Finney’s screen test for Lawrence of Arabia at the MGM studios in Borehamwood in August 1960 must rank as the most elaborate in movie history. Lasting a total of twenty minutes, it took four days to shoot at a cost of thousands of pounds, with its elaborate sets and costumes. Both Lean and Spiegel expressed delight at the result and Finney was formally offered the part, only to ultimately turn it down when he learnt he would have to sign a multi-picture contract with Spiegel that would see him tied down to the American producer for years.

  Left with no lead actor, Lean took drastic action. ‘I started to spend all of my days in the cinema watching as many films as possible. I was going from one cinema to the other, everywhere in London.’ The Day they Robbed the Bank of England just happened to be playing and Lean caught an afternoon performance. He had never seen nor heard of the young actor playing a Guards officer but he had an interesting face and could clearly act. There was something else, too, that indefinable quality that actors, however good they may be, either have or haven’t got – screen presence. Could he be Lawrence? Lean was convinced of it. Wasting no time, he put in a call to Spiegel. ‘Sam, I’ve got him.’

  ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Peter O’Toole.’

  There was a slight pause. Then, ‘He’s no good.’

  ‘What do you mean, he’s no good.’

  ‘I tell you he’s no good. I just know it.’

  O’Toole was still playing Shylock in repertory at Stratford when Lean contacted him to set up a meeting in London. He arrived in the full
beard he’d grown for the part and scraggy hair dyed black. With his hawk-like features Lean scrutinized the figure in front of him before finally speaking. ‘Peter, what do you look like underneath all that stuff?’

  ‘I’m quite fair-haired, really.’

  Lean appeared only slightly convinced. ‘Well, I saw you in a film called The Day they Robbed the Bank of England and I thought you didn’t put a foot wrong. And I really want you to do Lawrence.’

  ‘Who’s the producer?’ asked O’Toole.

  ‘Sam Spiegel.’

  ‘Not a chance.’

  Lean smiled and reassured O’Toole that everything was going to be fine, that he was going to fight hard for him. And that’s exactly what Lean did, persistently badgering Spiegel. ‘Look, Sam, what do you want to do, we haven’t got Finney, we haven’t got anybody! I think Peter will be wonderful. I want to test him.’ Spiegel still cast something of a gloomy figure but Lean got his way and O’Toole was auditioned on 7 November 1960. Instead of the four days that Finney got, O’Toole was tested over the course of a single day, reciting lines from Seven Pillars of Wisdom and repeating bits of dialogue Lean threw at him from behind the camera. After it was over Lean turned to Spiegel in buoyant mood. ‘Look, Sam, look at it, come on!’ But the tycoon still remained unconvinced and suggested a couple of new candidates. ‘I’ve forgotten who they were,’ said Lean years later. ‘But hopeless, hopeless, hopeless. In the end he finally had to agree.’ It was only much later that Lean discovered Spiegel’s reluctance to cast O’Toole was due to his earlier encounter with the actor. ‘Sam thought I was a tearaway. He thought I lived up a tree. He didn’t want to have to go looking for me every day with a net.’

  When O’Toole was finally offered the role by Spiegel, he couldn’t resist one last joke, asking, ‘Is it a speaking part?’

  So that’s Lean’s story of how O’Toole came to be Lawrence, but there is another tale suggesting that it was largely down to the persuasive powers of Jules Buck. And there is a witness, Michael Deeley. At the time Deeley worked for the MCA agency in London and was in the office during the casting of Lawrence. ‘When Jules heard that Finney’s people were sticking on the issue of options he went to see Spiegel, who he had worked with in Hollywood, and said, “I think my boy will be better, and he’ll give you the options.” And so O’Toole signed the contract that Finney had refused.’

  Whatever the truth, O’Toole’s fee was a grand £12,500 (something like £125,000 in today’s money) and to celebrate he waltzed into the Salisbury and slammed £150 on the bar. For the rest of the day the drinks were on him. There is also a story of O’Toole being rushed over to New York to be paraded in front of the big shots at Columbia, the studio bankrolling the picture. ‘When I look at you,’ one of the suits said, ‘I see six million dollars.’ ‘How’d you like a punch up the throat?’ O’Toole replied. It wasn’t his scene at all. ‘It made me feel like a prize bull.’

  In the midst of all this celebrating, O’Toole knew deep down that he couldn’t possibly play Lawrence and shouldn’t have accepted it. The reason was simple, he had already made an agreement with Peter Hall to lead the Royal Shakespeare Company’s inaugural season in London at the Aldwych, reprising his Stratford successes of Shylock and Petruchio, as well as taking on an exciting fresh challenge. Hall had managed the coup of securing the rights to Jean Anouilh’s new historical play Becket, a huge hit in France, over the heads of every West End impresario. O’Toole would play Henry II opposite his old Bristol colleague Eric Porter in the title role. Hall never forgot the day O’Toole walked into his office to announce that he’d been offered Lawrence of Arabia and simply had to do it.

  That Hall wasn’t entirely happy with the situation is an understatement, he was depending on O’Toole and refused to release him from his contract. Spiegel, one of the wiliest operators in Hollywood, advised O’Toole to ‘walk and let them sue you’. It was enough to make Hall think twice, he couldn’t risk the financial implications of a probably lengthy court case. ‘So Peter nearly wrecked the start of the RSC,’ Hall later claimed. ‘He was one of the staunchest people to commit to the Company and suddenly he was gone.’ Theatre director William Gaskill recalls Peter Hall telling him that after it was all over and O’Toole had got what he wanted he had the nerve to say: ‘Still friends?’ Or words to that effect. ‘Peter Hall was absolutely furious,’ says Gaskill. ‘Because it altered the whole nature of the RSC. If Peter had been leading the company it would have been a different company. That incident characterized the RSC ever after, I think, because when you have an actor of remarkable talent, it always makes a difference, it gives colour and accent to the whole work. And if you have Eric Porter and Patrick Wymark, you settle for something different, something less exciting, perhaps more manageable, perhaps finally better, I don’t know, but you lose the sheer excitement of the actor on stage.’

  Not surprisingly Hall and O’Toole would never work together again, and although O’Toole always harboured a slice of guilt over the course of action he took there remained inside him an enmity towards the theatrical knight. As late as 2005 during the shooting of Venus O’Toole still spoke of Hall in disparaging terms and one day on the set when someone brought in Hall’s autobiography he tore it in two like a strong man at the fair.

  With the role of Lawrence safely in his pocket, O’Toole settled down to celebrate the festive season with Siân, presenting her on Christmas morning with a brand-new Morris Minor, a huge ribbon neatly wrapped round the bonnet. Thrilled by the gift, if apprehensive of the prospect of more terror-stricken journeys, Siân hardly had time to take it for a spin round the block when O’Toole commandeered the vehicle for a sentimental journey up to Bristol to bid the city farewell before leaving for Jordan. That night Siân received a phone call from the police explaining that O’Toole had been arrested and was currently keeping one of the cells warm. Pissed, O’Toole had rammed the back of a squad car. Siân never did see her Morris Minor again; it went to that great scrap heap in the sky of cars O’Toole had wrecked.

  O’Toole’s arrival in Jordan, four months prior to the start of filming in May, was accompanied by a massive hangover. It would be his last for quite a considerable time. As the film’s technical adviser, Spiegel had hired the British diplomat Anthony Nutting, who had a peerless reputation in the Middle East and had successfully negotiated with King Hussein the use of Jordan as the film’s main location, along with the participation of its army. Nutting had another important function, to keep O’Toole off the bottle, and having seen him arrive in Jordan looking more than a little bit the worse for wear decided that a stern lecture was in order. ‘Look, if you don’t stay sober you’re going to leave Jordan on your arse. You’re the only actor we’ve got for Lawrence, and if you get bundled home, that’s the end of the film, and that’s probably the end of you. So you’d better behave yourself.’

  O’Toole came to admire Nutting enormously and tried his best not to let him down. As his guide to the history of Jordan and the ways of the desert, Nutting arranged for the actor to stay for a time with the Bedouin and travel across the desert with a camel patrol, sleeping rough under the stars, just as Lawrence had done. O’Toole soaked it all up. Where another actor might have cracked having to exist in the desert for three months before even a foot of celluloid was exposed, ‘Peter sniffed a battle and responded to it’, according to Beverley Cross, the English playwright Lean had hired as ‘continuity writer’. Cross had carried out his own research into Lawrence, ‘But Peter must have read every single word written by and about Lawrence – twice.’ There was also the Jordanian heat to contend with, so hot that it physically hurt. ‘But within a month I adjusted,’ said O’Toole.

  One of the principal reasons for O’Toole’s early arrival was to give him plenty of time to master riding a camel, although he heard it from someone that no one in fact can ride a camel, that it was impossible. ‘All that you can do is to find a beast whose discomfort you can tolerate.’ His teacher was a serg
eant from the Jordanian army and at first the lessons played havoc with O’Toole’s ‘delicate Irish arse’. Becoming more proficient the two of them would ride out into the sand dunes for hours.

  O’Toole was out somewhere riding his camel when Zia Mohyeddin arrived on location. Mohyeddin, a Pakistan-born actor trained at RADA, had been cast as Tafas, Lawrence’s guide who is famously killed at the well, and as such was also required to be proficient in a camel saddle. Late in the afternoon, Mohyeddin was sitting in his tent brooding about the forthcoming ordeal when O’Toole walked in with a welcoming smile. ‘O, that I were a glove upon that hand that I might touch that cheek,’ he boomed. It was a wonderful welcoming gesture and tribute to Mohyeddin, who had recently played Romeo at Stratford under the direction of Peter Hall.

  The next day Mohyeddin was invited to O’Toole’s well-furnished tent to go through their lines. ‘Around mid-day I suggested that it was time for a cold beer. Peter looked at his trainer as if to say, What are we to do? The trainer said he would see if he could organize something. He returned after a while bringing me a tankard full of cold lager. “Go ahead,” Peter said. “What about you?” I asked. He stroked his chin thoughtfully before saying, “I don’t think I feel like it.” I was taken aback. I had heard many tales about his drinking capacity. It was rumoured in the Buxton club that he could out-drink anyone. I felt a bit guilty sipping the liquid offered to me.’ Throughout his stay on the film Mohyeddin never once saw O’Toole partake of any alcohol. ‘His trainer, who stayed with him like a bodyguard, had apparently been instructed to see to it that he kept to his vow to remain on the wagon.’

  After a week of camel riding all Mohyeddin had learned was how to trot. ‘Peter was already claiming that he was about to acquire the knack of galloping. We were told not to use our reins and try to feel being one with the camel. We had to ride two hours in the morning and two in the late afternoon.’