Peter O'Toole

by Robert Sellers

  O’Toole himself recognized what was happening. Stardom, he said, was something insidious: ‘It creeps through your toes. You don’t realize what’s happening until it reaches your nut. And that’s when it becomes dangerous.’ At least one columnist enjoyed O’Toole’s shenanigans in the movie capital and lamented the fact he would soon have to return home. ‘Too bad O’Toole won’t be spending a lot of time in Hollywood – his personality is reminiscent of Errol Flynn.’

  Lawrence of Arabia stands as one of the most remarkable achievements in the history of cinema; Steven Spielberg has referred to it as ‘a miracle of a film’. Much of its success can be attributed to O’Toole’s central performance, he’s barely off the screen and carries the drama from start to finish. But it is the vision and maverick genius of David Lean that turns what is essentially a character study into an epic film of rare quality and beauty. It packed out cinemas round the world, raking in $77 million (adjusted for inflation, that’s almost $600 million today).

  Such is the longevity and esteem in which the film is held that when in 1999 the British Film Institute surveyed a thousand people from the world of British film and television to produce a list of the top one hundred British films of all time, Lawrence of Arabia ranked an impressive third, beaten only by Brief Encounter (another Lean-directed film) and The Third Man. Some would place the film even higher than that, this author included.

  TEN

  There had been much speculation as to what O’Toole would do after Lawrence of Arabia. Just how do you follow one of the most revered and successful films in cinema history? For a time he was linked to the part of Henry Higgins in the Warner Brothers’ film version of My Fair Lady. Jack Warner was against Rex Harrison reprising the role he played so successfully on Broadway and appeared keen on O’Toole, after Cary Grant had said no. The choice found favour with director George Cukor: ‘I think he’s our man,’ he wrote to a Warner executive, offering to make a test with the actor either in London or Los Angeles. ‘That is if he’ll make the test at all. I think he might. He really wants the part. He’s great.’

  Warners opened negotiations with O’Toole’s people but baulked at his wage demands. Later when asked about the project O’Toole was rather coy. ‘I said that the only man who could and should play Higgins was Rex Harrison,’ which didn’t really tally with the truth. In the end Harrison was indeed cast.

  There was also a desire for Keep Films to make a screen adaptation of Waiting for Godot. O’Toole caught a flight to Paris where Samuel Beckett resided with the express intention of persuading the playwright to part with the film rights. ‘It took me about eight hours and seven bottles to convince him that Godot was never meant to be a stage play at all but was really a film all the time.’

  Hoping to both produce and star, O’Toole saw the picture as a small art-house offering, shot over two weeks on the West Coast of Ireland on a budget of just £20,000. To keep costs low he himself would take no fee to play Vladimir, and friends Kenneth Griffith and Jack MacGowran would appear in the other roles. He also asked Tom Stoppard to help with the adaptation. The two had become friends since Stoppard’s move from Bristol to London; O’Toole was instrumental in getting the writer his first job and also lent him money when he needed it.

  In the end the project collapsed and the film rights reverted to Beckett, who had almost immediately regretted selling them in the first place, firm in his belief that the play was not cinema material, ‘and adaptation would destroy it’. He would never make the same mistake again, spurning all future filmmakers, including an approach later in the decade by Roman Polanski.

  What O’Toole really wanted was a return to the stage. ‘It was the only way I know to get back in touch with what I know I am about. It is the only way I can measure what I have done for the last two years, how I have grown or changed. It gets me back to the freedom I need as an actor.’

  Given carte blanche by a West End producer to appear in any play he wanted, O’Toole teamed up with director William Gaskill from the Royal Court with the idea of putting on Pirandello’s Henry IV. Gaskill admired O’Toole enormously. ‘I’d seen him at Stratford and thought he was the actor of our generation, unquestionably.’ During early discussions Gaskill raised the alternative of doing Baal by Bertolt Brecht. Unfamiliar with the text, O’Toole read it and responded almost immediately, especially to the central character of a wastrel young poet who leaves tattered and broken lives in his wake.

  It was certainly a risky venture. ‘It’s not a crowd puller,’ says Gaskill. ‘Even with a big star in it, because Peter was riding the crest of a wave.’ Brecht’s first ever full-length play, written when he was a young student at Munich University, Baal had not been performed since 1926 in Berlin and its sordid nature was bound to ruffle a few feathers at the Lord Chamberlain’s office, the austere body that still regulated theatre censorship. And that’s exactly what O’Toole hoped for, as he wrote to Tom Stoppard: ‘I think we will get arrested. It makes Jimmy Porter look like Mrs Dale’s Diary.’ All this was too much for the West End producer, who bailed out, replaced by Oscar Lewenstein, who Gaskill had worked with at the Royal Court: ‘Oscar was a very interesting man. He was both a mixture of extremely commercial and really quite left wing.’

  During rehearsals O’Toole behaved impeccably and largely stayed off the sauce. ‘He was a very dashing person,’ remembers Gaskill. ‘Tremendously impulsive.’ Once he approached Gaskill after a rehearsal saying he needed a lift to Paddington Station. So off they went. ‘He was late for the train and so kept instructing me where to go, and we were heading down one-way streets and goodness knows what – “Now go round there!” By the end I found myself driving down the station’s entrance ramp, which you’re not supposed to go down at all. “That’s fine,” said O’Toole, got out of the car, kissed me and ran to get his train and disappeared. I can’t imagine myself doing something like that, but I did! Peter had great panache, he really did, and you were swept along with it.’

  If the subject matter weren’t difficult enough (O’Toole had waived his fee), Baal opened at the Phoenix Theatre in February 1963 during a bitterly cold winter. When the theatre’s heating packed up Lewenstein brought in hundreds of portable heaters to keep the audience warm. Further drama occurred when O’Toole’s dresser screamed, ‘This show is cursed,’ flung the clothes on the floor and fled out of the theatre and into Charing Cross Road, never to return.

  Amongst the supporting cast was a young actress making a very early West End appearance, Gemma Jones, who looks back on Baal with nothing but fondness. ‘It was an extraordinary production and there was a huge focus of attention on it because of Peter and Lawrence of Arabia. It was a wild cast, a lot of drunken Irishmen. Peter treated me with great respect because I was very young and very green.’ In their love scene, however, O’Toole did used to unzip the chemise she was wearing so that when she got out of bed she had to wrap the thing around her to stop it falling off.

  As it turned out the Lord Chamberlain’s office didn’t kick up much of a fuss, leaving untouched the play’s frank sex scenes, including a three in a bed romp and on-stage nudity. Gemma found herself sharing a dressing room with one of these nubile actresses. ‘Guinevere Roberts was her name and she had a very, very luscious figure and the number of actors who would knock on the door by mistake, oh sorry, wrong room, hoping to catch Guinevere in her undies. There was a lot of riotous goings-on backstage to counteract the fact that we were in such a serious piece of drama.’

  While it was a courageous move bringing Brecht into the West End, the effort met with a largely indifferent public response. ‘If you could keep awake during Baal you were a very avid theatregoer,’ remembers David Andrews. ‘I didn’t like it, I couldn’t understand much of it for a start, and all I could see was Peter appearing to indulge himself with it. I’m sure he wasn’t but it looked like he’d chosen it because he was never off the stage and I think that slightly demeaned him because he didn’t need to be like that, he could wa
lk on with one line and he’d steal the whole bloody thing.’

  Even Richard Harris thought it an odd choice, especially coming so soon after his success as Lawrence. Perhaps O’Toole did the play in order to show off his versatility, to look bedraggled and unclean on stage in an attempt to escape the beauty of the Lawrence image. Anyway Harris decided to see it but did so incognito, dressed as a Roman Catholic priest, with rosary beads, hat and collar, the works. ‘I went with a mate of mine and we sat up in the gallery and O’Toole was unbelievably brilliant. So I had to go back and tell him he’s great, but I couldn’t go back dressed as a priest. So my friend and I swapped clothes.’ The next day one of the newspapers reported a commotion during the matinee, when a Roman Catholic priest was seen to undress in the gallery. Anyway Harris went to see O’Toole and not a word was said. Fast-forward seven years and Harris had a number one single, ‘Macarthur Park’, and decided to go out on a one-man concert tour. ‘I went up to the north of England, to Scunthorpe where no one could see me break it in. I’m singing a song and I heard a commotion at the back of the hall, so I stopped the orchestra. “What’s going on out there?” And a voice said, “I’m Peter O’Toole, I’m here dressed as a nun.” ’

  If the production itself received largely a poor response, O’Toole’s acting soared above the play so impressively that one of Brecht’s biographers, the scholar Martin Esslin, dubbed O’Toole ‘the greatest potential force among all English-speaking actors’. Gaskill, too, was pleased with the performance, having never forgotten how he played Baal’s death scene, crawling to the door literally on his fists. There was also one very special rehearsal. ‘It was that wonderful moment when the text seems to be coming from the actor, not from the writer, and everyone suddenly went still.’

  Midway through the run O’Toole heard that he had been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor for Lawrence. The picture itself had received ten nominations, an incredible feat. The ceremony was due to take place in Los Angeles and O’Toole found himself competing with Burt Lancaster for Birdman of Alcatraz, Jack Lemmon as an alcoholic in Days of Wine and Roses, Marcello Mastroianni for Divorce Italian Style and the eventual winner, Gregory Peck for To Kill a Mockingbird. In the end O’Toole did not make an appearance, as he was still treading the boards in London. Sam Spiegel attempted to buy every ticket for that night’s performance of Baal so he could fly to Hollywood, but the theatre management said it would be impossible to reach all the patrons for refunds.

  Despite the disappointment of losing out to Peck, a popular winner on the night, Lawrence triumphed overall, winning seven Oscars, including one for Lean and Best Picture. O’Toole took some consolation in the fact that he won Best Actor at that year’s BAFTAs. That he was now on his way to the top was indisputable, but with that expectation came voices of caution. ‘A lot of people have talked about being ruined by success,’ he said. ‘But let’s face it, more people have been butchered by failure.’

  Baal was only intended to run for a short time, since O’Toole had already committed to his next film. Not long after Lawrence began coining in money around the world, Spiegel set about planning O’Toole’s future, explaining that his next four films would all be made under exclusive licence to his company, as per the contract he’d signed, the one that Finney had so vehemently refused. It was then that Buck dropped his bombshell. With brilliant cunning and chutzpah he’d managed to put a clause in the contract right under the noses of both Spiegel and Columbia Pictures stating that O’Toole’s services did not extend beyond the period of Lawrence of Arabia. One of the wiliest operators in Hollywood had been outmanoeuvred and when it was discovered what had happened the shit really did hit the fan and people were fired or resigned. But nothing could be done, O’Toole was a free agent.

  He’d learnt that Hal B. Wallis, the famed former head of Warner Brothers, had bought the film rights to Anouilh’s play Becket, which had caused all that controversy between O’Toole and Peter Hall. For his director Wallis hired Peter Glenville, who had staged the play on Broadway with Laurence Olivier as Becket and Anthony Quinn as Henry II. With those two stars deemed too old for the film version, thoughts had drifted towards O’Toole playing the King when quite by chance Glenville met the actor at a dinner party in London. Before there was a chance to even raise the subject, O’Toole cornered Glenville demanding to be cast. ‘Fixing me with blazing blue eyes, he said it was his part.’ Encountering him in the flesh, Glenville was now utterly convinced of O’Toole’s suitability. Here was a man, Glenville observed, ‘Full of nervous energy. He is mischievous, sharp witted, uninhibited, extrovert and unquestionably an original.’ Glenville, too, was pleasantly surprised to learn that not only did O’Toole know everything about the origins and background of the play and why and how it came to be written, but had already flown to Paris to discuss the part with Anouilh. He had also seen the Broadway production. ‘He is not a young man to leave a stone unturned,’ noted Glenville.

  A dramatization of the conflict between Thomas Becket and King Henry II in twelfth-century England, Becket had all the elements of a big, spectacle picture while at the same time was an intimate, literate, witty and adult drama. Amidst all the history, colour and pageantry, there was the underlying conflict of two friends who turn against each other. In their youth Becket and the King pursue wine, women and song, but when Henry appoints Becket as archbishop, his spiritual rise results in his allegiance to God and the Church outweighing any duty to a sovereign. It’s a power struggle that ends in tragedy.

  As negotiations began with Jules Buck over O’Toole’s services, negotiations that Glenville revealed as ‘intolerably demanding’, thoughts turned to who should play Becket. Several actors were considered including Maximilian Schell, Peter Finch and Laurence Harvey. Glenville’s preferred choice was Richard Burton, which changed to Albert Finney when he heard that Burton was unwilling to appear opposite O’Toole. ‘For this I do not blame him,’ Glenville wrote to Wallis. ‘As by all accounts the latter seems to make mincemeat of any other male actors around him. I do not think this would affect Finney – he has a talent of equal stature to O’Toole and knows it!’

  Finney turned out to be busy, and Burton re-entered their thinking when it turned out that he was most eager to work with O’Toole after all. Burton had made no secret of his admiration for this young and thrusting new talent. After seeing him at the Bristol Old Vic he wrote in his diary: ‘He looked like a beautiful, emaciated secretary bird. His voice had a crack like a whip. Most important of all you couldn’t take your eyes off him.’ It was a real casting coup for Wallis, teaming the world’s two most exciting stars: Burton, whose notoriety over his affair with Elizabeth Taylor meant his face was never out of the newspapers, and O’Toole, the bright new star of Lawrence of Arabia.

  Clearly aware of the other’s reputation for hell-raising and boozing, the two actors called a truce until they had acclimatized sufficiently to each other and to their respective roles. The film crew, expecting a typhoon to pass through the usually tranquil Shepperton Studios when filming began in the summer of 1963, were left scratching their collective heads as O’Toole and Burton sat quietly between takes sipping tea and doing crosswords. After ten days it was abundantly clear that both actors had the desired on-camera rapport, and putting on his best Irish accent Burton said, ‘Peter, me boy. I think we deserve a little snifter.’ They drank for two nights and a day. After that Glenville had his work cut out keeping his stars under control; it was not unknown for them to appear on set intoxicated. In the scene where Henry places a ring upon Becket’s finger, making him Chancellor of England, O’Toole could barely focus. ‘It was rather like trying to thread a needle wearing boxing gloves,’ Burton recalled. For an opulent banquet scene O’Toole arrived having drunk solidly for twelve hours.

  Often they drank in the small smattering of pubs located near the studio, such as the Hovel, whose eccentric landlord displayed his appendix in a bottle on the bar, along with a shrunken head and a pickled
penis. There was also the King’s Head, where the landlord, Archie, would greet them with, ‘Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this leg of pork.’ These were wild lunches, lasting hours, full of hearty quaffing of champagne and brandy and verbal fencing, both men lobbing Shakespeare soliloquies at each other.

  One morning O’Toole arrived in Burton’s dressing room with an open bottle of whisky in his hand. Burton declined it and asked what he was celebrating. ‘It’s an Irish birthday.’

  ‘And what day is that?’ asked Burton.

  ‘Any day I say it is.’ O’Toole drained the bottle in ten swigs, and fell flat on his back. Shooting resumed twenty-four hours later.

  While O’Toole commuted to the studio from Guyon House, the tax exile Burton resided at the Dorchester with Elizabeth Taylor, who came on the set so often that Glenville had a canvas chair made for her with her name emblazoned on the back. Future cult film director Brian Trenchard-Smith remembers being invited to Shepperton as part of the Wellington College film circle and spending several hours there wandering about the sets and watching Glenville directing. In one scene he remembers O’Toole replacing a nude actress under a blanket in his bed with a compliant Miss Taylor just before cameras rolled. When he pulled back the sheet revealing a beaming Liz, Burton didn’t find it as amusing as the rest of the crew.

  Taking a quick break from shooting, O’Toole spirited a heavily pregnant Siân over to Dublin to give birth to their second child, another daughter, named Patricia after O’Toole’s father. Determined that this new child be born on Irish soil, O’Toole made all the hospital arrangements and arrived at Dublin airport dressed all in green (green corduroy jacket, green bow tie – the works). He was treated by the local press like a returning hero.