Peter O'Toole

by Robert Sellers

  ‘I’m going to tie myself to the camel.’

  ‘Well, I’m going to get drunk.’

  Sharif smiled. ‘Oh, I’m going to get drunk, too.’

  Everyone was nervous and apprehensive as Lean made his final preparations. Then a series of rockets fired into the air began the stampede. All hell broke loose. Somehow O’Toole managed to remain on his mount and made it through the ‘fake’ Aqaba and out the other side, where his camel, along with the others, came to rest at the water’s edge. Still in one piece, apart from a broken thumb, O’Toole scanned the other riders for Sharif. There he was, still tied to his camel, but now hanging under its bulbous belly.

  Having bonded during their trips to Beirut together, O’Toole and Sharif were now firm friends. David Tringham remembers them both having a music hall song and dance act that they used to perform at parties. ‘It was quite funny.’ They’d also get up to other tricks.

  In Almeria a French film producer called Raoul Levy, who made And God Created Woman with Brigitte Bardot, came down to the Hotel Alfonso XIII, where the actors were staying. ‘He had this fabulous looking Mexican girl with him and Peter really fancied her,’ recalls Tringham. ‘If you want her, she’s yours,’ said Levy matter-of-factly. ‘I’ll fix it. She’s got to go back to Mexico first, but she’ll be back soon.’

  ‘OK, OK,’ said O’Toole excitedly. ‘I’d love to see her again.’

  By this point Sharif was feeling somewhat left out. ‘What about me?’

  ‘She can bring a friend, can’t you, Lucia,’ said Levy. The girl nodded.

  Two weeks went by and the girls were due to arrive, remembers Tringham. ‘Peter was rubbing his hands with excitement. So, these two women turn up. Lucia still looked fabulous, but the girl with her was a really sorry sight and she was carrying a small sewing machine. Omar said, “Who’s that?” Lucia said, “This is the friend for you, Omar.” And he went, “Oh please!” Major disappointment.’

  O’Toole had also become extremely pally with Jack Hawkins, who’d arrived in Spain to play General Allenby; drinking late into the night with him. And there was plenty of larking about, too. In the scene where Allenby grills Lawrence on his mistreatment in prison in Deraa, O’Toole, annoyed at the amount of takes Lean was making them do, blurted out, ‘I was fucked by some Turks.’ Without skipping a beat Hawkins replied, ‘What a pity.’ Lean was furious. In fact he took a dim view altogether of their friendship and actually asked Hawkins to keep his distance from O’Toole, since Allenby was supposed to be a father figure to Lawrence, aloof. Hawkins thought Lean was talking bollocks. ‘The fact that we used to have some rousing sessions together in no way impinged on our work; maybe it even improved our performances.’

  In Spain, Spiegel was a much more visible presence around the set. At one point O’Toole was summoned to see the producer on his yacht, and was given an almighty bollocking. Whether this was meant to spur him on in the final stages of filming he never discovered. ‘I left feeling dreadful. 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 and found one already propped up by John Box, who’d got the same rough treatment. After consuming several bottles the pair decided to have their revenge and climbed up the yacht’s anchor chain, crept into Spiegel’s private quarters and stole all his prize cigars.

  The crew had left Spain around the end of June 1962. It had been a fun shoot: Siân had again visited, as did O’Toole’s parents; he’d taken his dad to see a bullfight. But the picture was far from finished. Lean was desperate for more desert footage and persuaded Spiegel to let him film for a short period in Morocco. King Hassan II kindly arranged for the use of the Royal Moroccan Cavalry and the Camel Corps and a hundred nomads from the Sahara desert to serve as part of Lawrence’s army. During one charge an effects gun loaded with small pellets went off too soon, hitting O’Toole in the eye, temporarily blinding him. Unable to control his camel he was thrown in front of several hundred charging Bedouins on horseback. Luckily the camel stood guard over the prone actor, as they are trained to do, shielding him from serious injury and probably saving his life. O’Toole was flown to hospital for treatment and was back on the camel the next day.

  Base camp was in a fly-blown town called Ouarzazate, with the production office situated in a building that was once occupied by the French Foreign Legion. It was so inhospitable that legionnaires were still being sent down there as punishment. The heat was tremendous and once again there were casualties amongst the crew. Most alarmingly, a Moroccan army officer acting as an adviser cracked and took to shooting his rifle out of his tent at night. ‘Anything he saw, he shot at,’ recalled production assistant Norman Spencer. ‘So he had to be taken away.’

  Whilst in Morocco, O’Toole, Sharif and Hawkins were invited to the British Consulate for dinner. Arriving, they were asked if they wanted something. ‘I’d love a Martini,’ said Hawkins.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir, but alcohol is forbidden.’

  Hawkins looked dumbfounded. ‘This is the British Consulate, we’re not really in Morocco, are we, we’re in Britain.’

  ‘I’m afraid not, sir.’

  ‘Well,’ said Hawkins, ‘how do you go about getting alcohol, because we’re not going to make it through this.’

  The answer was a prescription that categorized them as alcoholics. ‘I’ll call this doctor who facilitates these things.’

  ‘See if he’ll come right away,’ said Hawkins. ‘This is an emergency!’

  The doctor arrived and promptly wrote them out a prescription. Armed with this valuable piece of paper they left for the nearest pharmacy and were handed a bottle each in a brown-paper bag. ‘It was some kind of pure alcohol,’ reports Johnnie Planco. ‘They went outside into the street and drank the lot and they were out for like three days. The way Peter told me the story, that was the most he ever drank.’

  Convinced that if he let him, Lean would happily stay in that sand paradise, cranking his camera over and over, never stopping, Spiegel announced a December opening for the film in London and New York, meaning Lean had just four months to edit his spectacular. ‘I must say it was a master stroke on Sam’s part, fixing the premiere dates before we were even through,’ said O’Toole. ‘Sam knew we were going on too long; David and I had begun to forget we were making a film. After two years it had become a way of life. So Sam nailed us with the dates – and that was that.’

  Filming came to an end on 18 August. The final scene was O’Toole sat in an army jeep with RADA classmate Bryan Pringle driving, his feet in a bucket of ice because it was so hot. ‘And David just shot it and shot it and shot it. He was amazingly reluctant to let go.’

  O’Toole felt very differently, he didn’t much care if he ever saw another blasted sand dune in his life. That evening he got very drunk at a grand celebration party at a hotel in Casablanca. Waltzing in through the big swing doors into a large packed lobby he screamed at the top of his voice: ‘The fucking picture’s finished!’

  Well, not quite. Back in England, Lean filmed Lawrence’s fatal motorcycle crash. The bike was mounted on a trailer that was attached to the camera car by a towing bar and a length of rope as backup. During one take the bar snapped and O’Toole would have careered off into the road at great speed if not for the rope, which luckily held firm. Clambering into the back of the camera car, O’Toole breathed a huge sigh of relief and wondered if it wasn’t just Lawrence, ‘up there, teasing’.

  Principal photography was finally completed on 21 September outside St Paul’s Cathedral, where Lean shot the exteriors for Lawrence’s memorial service, bringing to an end perhaps the longest shooting schedule for any single film in cinema history – May 1961 to September 1962; a total of 313 days.

  It had been an extraordinary adventure for O’Toole, as Lean had promised it would be. Costly, too, in purely physical terms. As well as his various camel misfortunes O’Toole lost two stones in weight, received third-degree burns, sprained both ankles,
tore ligaments in both his hip and thigh, dislocated his spine, cracked an ankle bone, tore his groin, sprained his neck and received concussion twice. Thankful to be back with Siân and Kate, O’Toole readmitted himself into hospital for several days in a bid to restore his health, quite unable to comprehend the enormity of what he had just been through. It all now seemed like a distant memory, a different lifetime.

  Still Lean, who was working round the clock with his editing team, couldn’t let O’Toole go. A call went out, he was needed for one more day. The famous appearance of Omar Sharif, arriving astride a camel from out of a mirage as if by magic, had been one of the earliest things in the can. Running it through again Lean was unhappy with some of O’Toole’s close-ups. On 6 October the actor was hauled into Shepperton Studios, put in an army costume, covered in sweat and sand and stood up against a blue sheet to resemble the burning Arab sky. When the brief shot was spliced into the existing footage O’Toole was amazed. ‘I was twenty-seven in the first shot and then eight seconds later, there was another close-up of me when I was thirty years old! Eight goddamn seconds! And two years of my life had gone from me! The difference was astounding. I’d lost the bloom of youth. We’re in a strange situation, film actors. We can watch the process of decomposition in the flesh.’

  As he sat and waited for Lawrence to open, O’Toole and Siân moved into a home of their own, a vast and glorious four-storey Georgian mansion at 98 Heath Street, Hampstead, called Guyon House. After the exertions of the last two years it was exactly what O’Toole needed, a little bit of stability, an anchor in his life, and a fine and dandy place to raise a family. Kate was now two but already a cause for concern, having inherited her father’s poor eyesight. ‘Daddy, Daddy! I broke my eyes!’ she announced one day. ‘Don’t cry, Kate, don’t cry, we’ll get you a new pair.’ These turned out to be thick NHS glasses.

  Financially the purchase of Guyon House had wiped O’Toole out. ‘I haven’t got a penny,’ he told a reporter. ‘The difference is that I’m now luxuriously broke.’ Plans for the future had been put in place, however. With Buck he formed his own independent production company, called Keep Films: ‘As in I keep what I earn and don’t give it to anyone else,’ O’Toole explained. Stars have always wanted to become their own producer and with Buck, O’Toole had someone who could provide the money and the expertise he didn’t have. Right from the start, however, it was made very clear that the centrepiece of the enterprise was O’Toole and that there was no place for Siân, save for her role as loving wife and mother. She had continued to act in theatre and television plays, building a reputation as a fine actress, but was dismayed to hear Buck say that it was OK for her to continue her career just so long as it didn’t interfere with her husband’s. The hope was that once Lawrence had established O’Toole as a star, some of the time and energy of the accountants, lawyers and secretaries Buck had assembled for Keep Films might be diverted ever so slightly in her direction. O’Toole would insist on it, wouldn’t he, after all, hadn’t he told friends before their wedding that in his opinion Siân was the best young actress in Britain?

  As a couple their profile was already beginning to rise, as invitations to high-society gatherings and showbiz events testified. At one elegant dinner given in Belgravia they watched Rudolf Nureyev dance on table tops and drink brandy from a bottle. Soon he was very drunk and very sick. O’Toole, no stranger to such conditions, took immediate charge, seizing his legs and bumping him down the thickly carpeted stairs, ‘Come on, mush,’ much to the consternation of guests who complained, ‘Be careful with him, take care of his feet.’ ‘To hell with his fucking feet,’ roared O’Toole as he bundled the Russian into a waiting cab.

  The week before Lawrence was due to open, Spiegel hosted a press reception for the film at the Jordanian embassy in London. Invites were sent out all over Fleet Street. When one landed on the desk of Keith Waterhouse he immediately phoned Barbara Taylor Bradford to see if she was going. Like Waterhouse, Barbara had left behind the sweaty news offices of Leeds to work in the fleshpots of Fleet Street and had landed a job on the London Evening News. She was very much looking forward to attending, with the express intention of meeting Omar Sharif. ‘Of course, who strolls in halfway through, this gorgeous, blue-eyed Hollywood-polished movie star called Peter O’Toole.’

  Waterhouse looked at Barbara and Barbara looked at Waterhouse. ‘Don’t you dare tell him it’s me,’ she said. ‘Barbara, luv, he’ll recognize you.’ Anyway, he did come over to say hello. ‘And he had been polished,’ recalls Barbara. ‘It was a gloss that you can only get when a lot of money has been spent. His dirty blond hair had become very blond and sleek and brushed back, and the eyes even seemed bluer. He looked positively drop-dead gorgeous.’ For Barbara though the most astonishing change was the voice. ‘It had become mellifluous and without a hint of the North. That night was a revelation because I remember thinking, gosh, he’s going to be a very big star.’

  Lawrence of Arabia opened on 10 December 1962 with a glittering Royal Premiere at the Odeon, Leicester Square, with the Queen and Prince Philip in attendance. There is a story that Richard Harris was being driven through the West End that night and happened to pass the cinema, at which point he looked at his watch and said, ‘In fifteen minutes O’Toole’s era of anonymity will be over.’

  Afterwards Spiegel threw a lavish midnight party for five hundred guests at the Grosvenor House Hotel on Park Lane. There was Noël Coward, who had loved the film, unable to resist the opportunity to congratulate O’Toole on his performance. ‘You were very good, Peter,’ he said. O’Toole smiled back, it had been an evening of congratulations. ‘Yes, very fine indeed,’ Noël continued. ‘And far, far more attractive than Lawrence could ever have been. If Lawrence had looked like you, Peter, there would have been many more than twelve Turks queuing up for the buggering session.’

  The critics raved. Alexander Walker in the Evening Standard summed it up best when he called Lawrence of Arabia ‘an epic with intellect behind it’. As for O’Toole, most agreed he had given a performance of which few other actors would have been capable. ‘He had to interpret one of the most complex characters ever under some of the worst acting conditions ever,’ said John Box. ‘And what he achieved is incredible.’

  By the end of the week O’Toole was in New York for the American premiere, followed by a trip out to Los Angeles for the film’s West Coast opening. Almost overnight he had been propelled into the major league of stardom. ‘I woke up one morning to find I was famous,’ he reported. ‘I 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.’

  Predictably, he hit the bars, where he was to encounter his first American Martini. ‘I’m a whisky drinker like every good Irishman, and I thought I was drinking lemonade. It was a memorable experience.’ Most of his nights out were spent in the company of actor Jason Robards, then married to Lauren Bacall. One night they arrived back particularly wasted and couldn’t get in the front door so were forced to climb through a window. In the lobby they saw Lauren Bacall descending the stairs with those huge curlers women used to put in their hair. O’Toole took one look at her and howled, ‘Yikes, it’s a chicken hawk!’ Miss Bacall grew so exasperated by their antics that she barred O’Toole from her house.

  One night O’Toole and Sharif saw the controversial stand-up Lenny Bruce do his act at a small club near Sunset Boulevard. Afterwards Bruce invited the boys back to his apartment, only for the place to be raided by the drug squad. Bruce was charged with possession and along with O’Toole and Sharif hustled into the back of a police van and thrown in a cell.

  Sharif used his one phone call to contact Spiegel, who arrived at the police station with a gang of lawyers and disappeared into a room with several officers. After a lengthy gap they emerged and O’Toole and Sharif were told they could go. O’Toole refused to budge, he wasn’t leaving without Bruce. More discussion
s followed. Finally all three were released. ‘The story never hit the papers,’ revealed Sharif. ‘But it must have cost Sam an arm and a leg.’

  There was another police incident involving Bruce and O’Toole, which only came to light when the officer in question wrote about it in a Los Angeles Times article a few days after the actor’s passing. Joseph Wambaugh, later a successful crime novelist (The Choirboys, The Onion Field), was in 1962 working the vice detail. One night his small team was keeping tabs on an address known for prostitution and illicit sale of alcohol when they stopped a taxi that had picked up two ‘customers’. Within seconds the occupants shot out of the door, leaving behind a bag of marijuana and uppers on the back seat. Wambaugh immediately recognized Bruce, but the other passenger was a complete mystery. ‘He was a tall, fair-haired young man with an upmarket Brit accent and was volubly denying any knowledge of how the bag could have gotten onto the taxi seat.’

  When told that since neither claimed ownership they’d both be charged, O’Toole cried – ‘Wait!’ Walking over to the sergeant he asked for the man’s name. It was Irish. Seizing on this good fortune O’Toole declared his own Irish heritage and told of how he was in Los Angeles promoting a movie that was going to make him famous. With Bruce remaining quiet, O’Toole continued, ‘Sergeant, my career is in your hands. You have the power to damage me irreparably. Haven’t you ever had a human weakness over which you sometimes had little control?’

  The sergeant listened impassively and then turned to his officers. ‘Throw the bag down the sewer and put them back in the cab.’

  Another public scandal had been avoided. Yet these incidents reached the ears of Spiegel, leaving the producer fuming. ‘You make a star, you make a monster,’ he observed. So bad did O’Toole’s behaviour become that Lean wrote to a friend, complaining: ‘I think it has all gone to Peter’s head and already people are getting a bit fed up with him not showing up for appointments. Sam and I did one TV show with him in New York and he was a real dope.’ It was the same in London, where reporters regularly complained that they had to scour the pubs of the West End and Soho to snag an interview.