Peter O'Toole

by Robert Sellers

  It seemed to Mohyeddin that when O’Toole wasn’t preoccupied with his camel training, he was deep in preparation about how he was going to play Lawrence. At O’Toole’s insistence Hugh Miller, one of his favourite teachers from RADA, had been brought out to Jordan as the film’s dialogue coach; his primary function to assist O’Toole with his speech. Miller was courteous enough to allow Mohyeddin to be present when he conducted his initial sessions with O’Toole. ‘Peter read out his lines and Miller interrupted him only when he felt that Peter was not inflecting the right word. I was sitting next to Hugh Miller at dinner one evening, Peter wasn’t around, and I asked him if Peter’s speech was far removed from that of T. E. Lawrence. “Mmm . . . No,” he said. “I wouldn’t say that, but Peter tends to flatten his vowels now and then, and we are trying to sort that out.” Peter worked assiduously with his coach. After dinner, other people either played cards or exchanged anecdotes or discussed their ailments, but Peter would sit with Miller in his tent and be engrossed in the script. It was evident that he was more than determined to spend every ounce of his energy in building up Lawrence.’

  The film unit had set up base at a dilapidated army barracks in the Jordanian city of Aqaba, at the north-eastern tip of the Red Sea. A barbed-wire fence separated Aqaba from Eilat, the Israeli seaside resort. ‘You could see plump ladies swimming or sunbathing on the sand,’ recalls Mohyeddin. ‘Peter would sometimes scan the scene through his field glasses. If he ever spotted a “tasty chick”, as he put it, he would lend his glasses to me to share the view.’

  While there were a few air-conditioned Nissen huts, the majority of the unit lived in two-man canvas tents with a partition and a fly-screen door. The wooden floor was reinforced by bits of balsa wood stuck around the edges to stop the scorpions getting in at night. Tony Rimmington, the assistant art director, recalls that the man sharing his tent caught yellow jaundice and had to be flown back to England. The heat was so draining that you had to take salt tablets every day. ‘I collapsed once simply because I hadn’t taken my salt tablet,’ recalls Rimmington. ‘It was rough.’ But as Lean observed, ‘Physical discomfort is the price of authenticity.’ Lean, however, did insist on shipping over his air-conditioned Rolls-Royce.

  As the start of filming approached, some of the cast began to assemble in Jordan. The integral role of Sherif Ali had first been offered to Horst Buchholz, one of the stars of The Magnificent Seven. When prior work commitments ruled him out, Lean chose Alain Delon. Again conflicting schedules got in the way. His replacement was another French actor, Maurice Ronet, but when he arrived in Aqaba it was very quickly apparent that he spoke with a very heavy accent. ‘David Lean was a bit perturbed about it,’ remembers Mohyeddin. ‘He asked me and Peter to spend some time with him in the evenings. “See if you can straighten out his speech a bit,” he said. Scripts in hand, we used to go over his lines. Ronet tried, and he tried hard, but could not manage to “straighten out his speech”.’

  After a few days O’Toole got bored and when asked by Lean how Ronet was getting on said, ‘Ask Zia, he has been conducting most of the lessons. I think he’s a bit poncey.’ By this time another young actor had arrived. His name was Omar Sharif. A big star in his native Egypt, he’d been brought in to play a comparatively small role. David Tringham, the film’s second assistant director, remembers the impact Sharif made when he arrived at the Aqaba camp. ‘All the Arab workers knew him and were following him, it was amazing to see, he just strode along with real regal bearing like, I’m a star.’

  Tringham stood and watched as Lean made Ronet and Sharif run through a scene together. ‘Maurice did one page of dialogue and David said, “Umm, that’s good,” looking very intense, with those jumbo ears like an African elephant. “Umm, now, let’s just change it a minute. Omar, you do the lines and Maurice, you just stand there, umm, yes, mmm.” And afterwards I think David whispered to one of his assistants, we’ve got our Ali. So they paid off Maurice Ronet.’

  O’Toole was introduced to his new co-star probably later that same day and the first thing that struck him was that nobody in the world could possibly be called Omar Sharif. ‘Your name must be Fred.’ Henceforth Sharif was known as Cairo Fred.

  For a short while Siân visited the location. Prior to her arrival Mohyeddin had enjoyed hours of sitting with O’Toole in his tent ‘chatting’ about life and literature and learning and actors and the London Theatre. ‘He was fond of holding forth. Chatting is not the right word. He held forth. I was mostly a silent listener. I would offer an opinion now and then, but he remained much too absorbed in whatever he was saying ever to register it.’

  After Siân’s arrival the scene changed, Mohyeddin’s long chats with O’Toole became less frequent. Instead Siân would invite him to join them over lunch or dinner. ‘She was a remarkably self-possessed lady,’ recalls Mohyeddin, ‘who made sure never to give the impression that she was on location to keep an eye on Peter. She had a stately presence and a calm demeanour. It was interesting to note that Peter, who spoke and behaved like an upper-middle-class chap, turned into a devil may care, flamboyant Irishman in her presence. Whether it was an act he put on for me, or whether he wanted to send up the sophisticated etiquette of Siân, I don’t know. Siân was an actress of no mean standing, but whenever there was talk of a play or a performance, she would offer her opinion guardedly as though she was unsure that what she was saying would meet with Peter’s approval.’

  One evening they all walked along the beach after dinner. The sea was calm and the moon shone heavily on the bobbing waves. Inspired by the moment, Siân began to recite the famous Dylan Thomas poem ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’. Mohyeddin recalls she spoke the lines beautifully, but then stopped. ‘You do it, Peter,’ she pleaded. ‘You do it so much better . . . go on, darling.’ O’Toole’s version was pure Irish blarney. ‘I was in fits,’ says Mohyeddin. ‘Siân laughed as much as was befitting. She seemed to want to live up to his expectations at every moment. To be honest, there was something slightly odd about their relationship. It was too well stage-managed. I wasn’t too surprised when I learned, some years later, that they had parted.’

  Principal photography on Lawrence of Arabia began on 15 May 1961 in a remote region of the desert called Jebel el Tubeiq. On that very first day Lean walked purposefully over to where O’Toole was standing and declared, ‘Pete, this is the beginning of a great adventure.’ Those words proved something of an understatement.

  Mohyeddin has never forgotten that opening day of shooting. When Lean cried action for the very first time he and O’Toole had to ride their camels towards a mark and then stop. ‘Peter takes a gulp from his canteen and then offers it to me. I don’t take it. He insists that I do and I say something like, I am a Bedouin, I don’t need it. “Cut,” shouts Lean. He was obviously not satisfied. “Let’s do it again,” he said tersely. There were seventeen if not nineteen takes. Peter was sweating and so was I. After the first two or three takes Lean didn’t give us any specific directions. “Let’s try it once more,” he would say. And we went on until we heard him say, “All right, chaps, that’s a wrap.” ’

  When it was time for Mohyeddin to say goodbye to Lean after he had finished his work on the picture, the actor found him quite relaxed. His face was less stern, now. ‘I think you’ll like your work when you see it on the screen,’ he said with his winsome smile.

  ‘May I ask you something?’ said Mohyeddin. Lean nodded. ‘What was it that I was doing wrong on the first day of the shoot? Please tell me now.’

  ‘Oh,’ Lean chuckled. ‘It was a bit of a joke. I wanted Peter to realize that filming is going to be a bitch of a nightmare. I just wanted to knock the wind out of his sails.’

  The impression of Peter O’Toole that Zia took back to London with him was that of a man totally absorbed in himself, an extremely self-centred person. ‘Later on I changed my view. Peter was ambitious, more ambitious than any other actor I had ever come across. His was the kind of ambition that bro
oks no obstacles. He wanted to pluck the stars and put them in his pocket. He wanted to own the world and that is not a bad thing for a young actor to desire.’

  The logistics of shooting in isolated places like Jebel el Tubeiq, 250 miles from Aqaba, were incredible, with temperatures often touching 120 degrees; film stock had to be kept in refrigerated trucks to stop it from wilting. One of the toughest things to deal with for the largely British crew was the feeling of total isolation. There was also the clash of cultures. Everywhere they went an Arab escort was provided, armed with rifles or Bren guns. ‘Everybody was armed out there,’ says Tony Rimmington. ‘Even the bloke digging up the road was carrying a Webley pistol. Unbelievable.’

  One of the most famous scenes shot at Jebel el Tubeiq is when Lawrence goes back to rescue one of his men stranded in the desert, played by the Indian actor I. S. Johar. Both actors were required to ride a single camel but appeared to be having great difficulty remaining mounted. It transpired they’d been smoking hashish and were stoned out of their minds. Shooting had to be abandoned for the day.

  The Lawrence unit were attempting stuff no film unit had attempted before. ‘And you never questioned that you could do it, or what was needed and what had to be done,’ says David Tringham. ‘You just did it.’ Much of that blind faith was due to the inspirational presence of David Lean, although as a director he could be a real bastard in getting what he wanted, someone who tested people to the nth degree, gave them hell. Lean was particularly hard on O’Toole, pushing him almost to the limits of endurance, though his confidence in him was unshakable. ‘David was very intense with Peter,’ confirms Tringham. ‘But I never saw Peter argue with him once.’ It was tough and there were moments when O’Toole came close to breaking down, but his admiration for Lean was unqualified. Here was someone he could learn from and he did, coming away from the experience knowing more about filmmaking than a lot of directors. ‘I graduated in Lean, took my BA in Lean.’ It meant that in his career O’Toole could look at something and immediately discern whether or not it met the standards that he was used to and he wanted. The critical eye that he cast upon everything on film came from Lean.

  The two men, however, never worked together again, although there were several opportunities to do so. A real shame since creatively they worked extremely well together, and a great loss to cinema since they did make a superb team. Take the scene where Lawrence is first given his Arab robes. Lean shot it several ways but it wasn’t working, something was missing. In the end he took O’Toole to one side and said, ‘What do you think a young man would do alone in the desert if he’d just been handed these beautiful robes?’ He then pointed out towards the desert. O’Toole’s eyes followed. ‘There’s your theatre, Peter. Do what you like.’

  Suddenly the scene came to life with O’Toole’s idea that the egoist Lawrence would immediately want to see what he looked like. With no mirror to hand O’Toole improvised by pulling out a ceremonial dagger from its scabbard, holding it at an angle and peering at his reflection. ‘Clever boy,’ Lean muttered to himself.

  The crew drove to these desolate places in Land Rovers and Austin Gipsies every morning. Eventually Lean got so far into the desert an old Dakota was chartered to fly everyone in and out, landing on a salt flat because there was no runway. ‘There used to be much merriment among the English crew during these flights,’ recalls Rimmington. ‘Jokes about making wills and the like.’ There was one near calamitous incident Rimmington got to hear about when Anthony Quinn arrived to play the great Arab tribal leader Auda Abu Tayi. ‘They flew him in this old Dakota from Amman airport to the desert site, which was a spot in the middle of nowhere, the pilot had to find it. As he was coming in to land the other passenger, this English doctor who had been in Malaya during the war, recognized the warning horns go in the cockpit – beep – beep – beep – in other words, the pilot hadn’t put the undercarriage down and he belly landed, all in the bloody sand. Quinn got out of there shaking like a leaf, “I’m never flying in that bloody plane again!” ’

  Stars of Quinn’s stature would often just pop in, play their part and then drift off again, it was O’Toole that remained a permanent fixture. When Alec Guinness arrived to play Prince Feisal, he came away highly impressed by O’Toole, writing in his diary: ‘He has great wayward charm and is marvellously good as Lawrence. He’s dreamy good to act with and has great personal charm and gaiety.’ Some time later, when the film crew were working in Spain, Guinness’ admiration had cooled dramatically due to O’Toole’s excessive alcohol intake. Notably there was the occasion they were invited to dinner by a Spanish grandee. ‘O’Toole got drunk, quarrelled with his host and threw a glass of champagne in his face. Peter could have been killed – shot, or strangled. And I’m beginning to think it’s a pity he wasn’t.’

  As the weeks of shooting passed into months the strain began to show. Some members of the crew literally couldn’t take it any more and left for home. There were fears O’Toole himself would crack, go AWOL. At one point he begged Siân to come out again and raise his spirits: ‘Here, you have to be a little mad to stay sane,’ he told her. At the camp in Aqaba there was very little to occupy oneself with. ‘It was like being in the army,’ Omar Sharif recalled. ‘We sat in the bar and got pissed every night. There was nothing else to do.’ The beer marquee was very popular and used to be packed every night; there was a dart board, table tennis and the odd air-rifle competition. All the booze was provided by Spiegel. But the air conditioning never worked so it was always as hot as hell. One of the riggers marched through the tent one night completely naked except for a pair of boots, past the astonished glances of a couple of production secretaries and Phyllis Dalton, the costume designer.

  O’Toole was one of the beer-tent regulars and Rimmington never forgot one particular evening when the actor walked in, clearly well gone, and punched the solid wood upright support of the marquee, punched it with his bare fist. Then walked out again. ‘His knuckles were in a terrible mess the next day. God, he was in a real state.’ There were also practical jokes he played, some more appreciated than others. One night he collapsed the tents of the crew as they lay sleeping. ‘After a day’s hard work in 120 degrees of heat, that wasn’t funny,’ said second unit cameraman Peter Newbrook.

  To keep from going completely crackers O’Toole and Sharif would occasionally fly by private plane for a few days off in Beirut, to enjoy the flesh pots of what was then the sin city of the east. ‘We misbehaved ourselves appallingly!’ he later verified. They visited nightclubs and gambled. ‘We once did about nine months’ wages in one night,’ confirmed O’Toole. To keep awake, because they didn’t want to waste time sleeping, they took Dexedrine. Looking for female companionship, they ended up in one place only to be left wondering why the women there were so unresponsive. They were in a nunnery.

  As filming progressed, Sam Spiegel, who resided on his yacht off the coast of Aqaba and rarely ventured inland, became increasingly fed up over the time Lean was taking, fearing he’d never leave the blasted desert or finish the picture. It’s true Lean had become despotic, paranoid and a perfection fetishist. On one occasion he found a perfect spot of desert only to return the next morning to find somebody had strayed across it leaving very distinctive footprints. ‘I want to find out who that is,’ Lean raged. ‘I want a shoe inspection!’ The culprit was never found.

  After firing off several cables ordering Lean to speed the pace, which only served to antagonize him more, Spiegel took the dramatic decision to shut down production in Jordan at the end of September, after 117 days of filming, and relocate after a break of two months to the more manageable Spain. Production designer John Box recalled that Lean ‘had to be dragged screaming from his caravan’.

  O’Toole felt very differently. It meant a return to Britain for a long recuperation and he began by immediately checking into hospital for a refit and recharge. Once out he went on the ultimate bender. ‘After six months in the desert, I should think so.’ Inevita
bly he got into trouble whilst visiting friends in Bristol. When police stopped his erratic drive down a street at four in the morning, O’Toole stepped out of the vehicle to confess. ‘OK, Skip. Let’s go to the station. I’m drunk.’ Spiegel was far from pleased. ‘You’re not supposed to get up to that kind of caper on a film like this!’ The outcome was a £75 fine and a driving ban.

  NINE

  Filming on Lawrence of Arabia resumed on 18 December 1961 in Spain, primarily Seville, where many of the interiors were shot in and around authentic Moorish buildings. There was also location work done at Almeria, on the Mediterranean coast, which O’Toole dubbed ‘Pontefract with scorpions’.

  The biggest sequence shot in Almeria was the attack on Aqaba. Lean hadn’t been able to recreate the famous battle on the real site since wherever he placed the camera the vista was occupied by oil-storage tanks, so John Box replicated the town in the southeast of Spain. The approach was daunting, a mile and a half of shale, all downhill. Lean had insisted no doubles, O’Toole and Sharif were to lead the charge themselves, which involved several hundred camels and horses. The rehearsal was, in O’Toole’s word, ‘chaos’. Come the morning of the real thing O’Toole popped into Sharif’s tent to see him sat up and playing with his worry beads, a painful expression on his face. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Peter, I’ve been working out the odds.’

  ‘What odds?’

  ‘Whether the camel will fall over or I will fall off the camel,’ said Sharif.

  ‘And what have you decided?’

  ‘There’s more chance of me falling off the camel than there is of the camel falling over.’

  ‘I see,’ said O’Toole. ‘And what do you intend to do?’