Peter O'Toole

by Robert Sellers

  The gruelling circumstances Murphy’s War was made in certainly paid dividends on screen as the film is wholly authentic, and O’Toole delivers a whimsical and hard-edged performance. But it didn’t fare particularly well with the public or the critics. Deeley himself feels the film is flawed due to Peter Yates’ insistence that O’Toole’s character be killed off at the end. ‘Yates had this passion to make a picture which mattered, but this was not a film which mattered, it was a film which was meant to be a lot of fun, an adventure movie. Yates wanted to have this great sad ending, this anti-war message or something, which is such shit.’

  On his return from Venezuela, O’Toole was exhausted and recuperating in hospital when director Peter Medak paid him a visit. In spite of strict instructions that he was not to drink, Medak was surprised to see O’Toole sat up in bed eating caviar and downing vodkas. Medak had recently seen Peter Barnes’ scurrilous new play The Ruling Class, which gleefully laid into the decaying institutions propping up Britain’s rotten Establishment, and thought it would make an ideal film. As for the dazzling central role, that of the 14th Earl of Gurney, who is clearly out of his mind, first believing himself to be Christ and then Jack the Ripper, it was made for O’Toole.

  At Medak’s insistence O’Toole saw the play and was so captured by it he instructed Jules Buck to buy the film rights without delay. Promising Medak that he could direct him in it, there followed a worryingly lengthy period of inactivity as O’Toole busied himself on other projects. Worried, Medak would think the film was on, only for it to get bogged down or cancelled. ‘Finally, one night we came back from seeing Waiting for Godot at the theatre. And to go home with O’Toole meant stopping at every pub between Soho and Hampstead, and it didn’t matter that it was after closing hour because he would knock on the door and just say, “Peter’s here,” and every door opened for him. So about three o’clock in the morning we staggered into his house and he said to me, “Come on, let’s do Ruling Class.” And I said, “You say you’re going to do it but then nothing happens, it’s like Waiting for Godot.” I ripped into him a little bit. I said, “You will never make this fucking film.” And he leapt out of his chair across the room and jumped on my lap and picked up the phone and called Buck and said, “I’m with the crazy Hungarian and I know I’m drunk but I give you twenty-four hours to set this movie up, otherwise I’ll never make another film.” ’

  In order for the deal to happen, according to Medak, O’Toole had to agree to make the musical Man of La Mancha. ‘They wanted him to do La Mancha first,’ claims Medak. ‘And we said, no, no, no, first we do Ruling Class.’

  Before filming was due to begin O’Toole wanted Medak to fly with him to Ireland to work more on the script. ‘I remember the plane for some reason couldn’t land,’ recalls Medak. ‘And it made three passes, we thought we were going to fucking die.’ Finally landing, they were picked up by a chauffeur and driven to Clifden, where O’Toole had rented a cottage. ‘We were alone there for a week in this cottage. One night he said, “Come on, let’s go to the pub.” We hopped in the car, I don’t think he had a licence any more, we drove and I didn’t think I was going to be alive the time we got to this pub. And we sat in this wonderful little pub and everybody was the missing link to the IRA, and everyone was listening to Peter telling all these wonderful stories. We used to spend hours there. But then we also worked through the script, read it to each other and talked it out.’

  Medak had learnt all about O’Toole’s relationship with alcohol and come to the opinion that because of the sheer amount of drink he consumed it often only needed a small amount to put him over the edge. This was only too apparent on the occasion Peter Barnes came over and all three of them went to this quiet restaurant in Dublin. ‘We were having lunch and in deep discussion about the film when the waiter arrived. “No, no, no, no drink for me,” says O’Toole. Nothing. He didn’t touch a drop. When I asked for the bill the chef came over to our table with a bottle of champagne, “With the compliments of the restaurant.” He opened it and Peter just took a sip. I turned away to pay the bill and when I turned back he wasn’t there any more. I looked around and he’d fallen all the way down these stairs, he just went, whoops!’

  Filming began in May 1971 at Twickenham Studios, where O’Toole was largely a detached presence, some might have interpreted it as aloof. Actress Carolyn Seymour found him to be intensely private, happy to tell stories about himself (‘They all involved bars and pubs, and a lot of them were chauvinistic’), but never revealing any of his emotions or feelings. There was always a barrier. He’d been quite different at her audition. Carolyn arrived absolutely terrified only to be put immediately at ease by O’Toole. ‘He gave me everything at 150% and supported me throughout; it was quite an intense screen test. Then he found out that I’d already started a relationship with Medak and he never really looked at me again. He wasn’t a playboy or anything, Peter, he didn’t play around, but he liked to know that if he wanted to, the ingénue was available.’

  There may have been other contributory factors since O’Toole was at the height of his alcohol addiction. On an average day Medak was lucky to get four or five hours out of his star. He wasn’t much use very early in the morning and even worse after lunch. It probably didn’t help that O’Toole installed his own bar in his dressing room. ‘But in those days everybody was drinking,’ insists Medak. ‘Each of us used to drink a bottle of wine at lunchtime at the studio and I don’t know how we went on working after that, but that was the culture.’

  What is interesting is that even in this state O’Toole was capable of putting together a performance that was later Oscar nominated (losing of course, this time to Marlon Brando for The Godfather). ‘That is the measure of his talent,’ says Carolyn. ‘And being prepared. He was always prepared. For somebody who was so un-sort of put together in his personal life, he was incredibly professional.’ Certainly he never drank on the set, but at the end of the day off he would go drinking with co-stars James Villiers and Michael Bryant.

  It was a long and strenuous shoot that lasted fifteen weeks and wore pretty much everybody out. ‘Peter was incredibly intelligent and bright, on a genius level,’ says Medak. ‘He also had a photographic memory so it took him only one reading to remember a script, and everybody else’s lines. Working with him wasn’t easy though. Sometimes he really got upset with people but it was always for a reason. All these great actors were incredibly demanding but once they knew that the person directing them is not a total idiot then you can get anything done.’

  Carolyn, too, has never forgotten the experience: ‘O’Toole was one in a million, they don’t come along very often, that talented. He could have read the phone book and I think everybody would have fallen on the floor.’

  When The Ruling Class opened it divided opinion amongst critics, some loved it, some despised it. In London at an early screening Carolyn remembers, ‘All the Sloane ranger types got up in a block and walked out.’ The New York Times thought the film acquired another dimension by O’Toole’s mere presence. And Time magazine believed O’Toole’s performance to be of such intensity ‘that it may trouble sleep as surely as it will haunt memory – funny, disturbing, finally devastating’. While it flopped badly on initial release (O’Toole took no salary and put money into the film and lost out quite heavily), The Ruling Class has gained admirers over the years and is today widely regarded as a minor classic.

  By the early seventies O’Toole’s career was in pretty poor shape, The Ruling Class was his fourth commercial flop in a row and there was a sense he was drifting out of fashion with little prospect of ever again attaining the fame he commanded in his sixties heyday. The emergence in recent years of a new breed of American actor typified by Dustin Hoffman, Gene Hackman and Al Pacino had rendered O’Toole’s theatrical performance style almost prehistoric and certainly affected the kind of films he was being asked to appear in. O’Toole never had much truck with ‘gibberish spouting’ Method actors. He knew nothing of th
e Stanislavski school, nor did he wish to know anything about it, that kind of introspective style of acting he felt did not fit in with what he believed to be the actor’s main job – the telling of a story.

  As promised, O’Toole had signed on to play Don Quixote in the film version of the hit Broadway musical Man of La Mancha. Based on the seventeenth-century novel by Miguel de Cervantes, it told the story of an eccentric Spanish knight and was essentially a play within a play performed by Cervantes and his fellow prisoners as the writer awaits trial before the Spanish inquisition.

  O’Toole’s Becket collaborator Peter Glenville had agreed to direct the film provided the original Broadway script by Dale Wasserman was jettisoned in favour of one by British writer John Hopkins. He’d then set about surrounding O’Toole with top talent, Sophia Loren as the cliché whore with a heart of gold, and James Coco playing Sancho Panza, Cervantes’ manservant. Setting up the movie in Rome, Glenville heard that United Artists intended to go back to the Wasserman treatment, since the Hopkins script, which leant heavily on the Cervantes book, would necessitate a much higher budget. Glenville walked and the project was thrown into temporary disarray. As he waited for the studio to sort itself out, news reached O’Toole that writer/director Andrew Sinclair had acquired the rights to Dylan Thomas’ classic 1954 radio drama Under Milk Wood, about the day in the life of an imaginary Welsh fishing village and its curious inhabitants. O’Toole knew Sinclair slightly, their paths having crossed around the time of The Long and the Short and the Tall when John Osborne and Tony Richardson wanted O’Toole for the lead in a planned musical version of Sinclair’s first novel, The Breaking of Bumbo, a satire on the modern military. While nothing came of the idea, O’Toole and Siân did travel up to Cambridge to meet Sinclair, who was then sharing a grotty flat above a cafe with future satirist John Bird. ‘O’Toole sang songs all night in Gaelic, or thereabouts,’ Sinclair remembers. ‘When a policeman came up the stairs towards dawn to stop us disturbing the peace, O’Toole persuaded him to drink whisky from his helmet and join in the choruses. Peter always had enough charm to steal the brass off a bobby’s badge.’

  Dylan Thomas was something of a hero to O’Toole and Burton and both men had tried without luck to bring Under Milk Wood to the screen. Now, Sinclair was offering O’Toole the chance to play Captain Cat, a part he’d performed years before in a RADA production. He couldn’t resist the idea and committed immediately to the venture. By a stroke of good fortune Burton and Liz Taylor just happened to be in the country. ‘And once he heard O’Toole was on board and it was going ahead, Burton had to do it,’ says Sinclair. ‘How could he not do it.’

  A few days later Sinclair was sat in his office when the phone rang. It was Jules Buck. ‘Andrew, you’re a lucky bastard. You haven’t got the two biggest stars in the world, you’ve got all three.’ Elizabeth Taylor had consented to appear.

  ‘But what bloody part,’ said Sinclair, rather ungratefully. ‘It’s Under Milk Wood. She’s not Welsh.’

  ‘Your problem,’ said Buck. ‘You’ve got her or no picture.’

  Incredibly, O’Toole, Burton and Taylor agreed to appear for a paltry fee of £10,000 each, although their representatives demanded a hefty chunk of any potential profits. But Sinclair was going to have to work fast, with Burton and O’Toole only available for five days each, and Elizabeth even less, just the two days.

  Fishguard, a charming fishing town in Pembrokeshire, had been selected to act as Dylan’s mythical village and Sinclair brought with him the Debrett’s of Welsh thespian talent: Glynis Johns, Ryan Davies, Victor Spinetti and also a young David Jason. Siân Phillips also appeared, wearing her own wedding ring. Burton arrived in grand style in his Rolls-Royce but indisposed. The next morning he collared Sinclair. ‘I am not drinking on your film, Dylan was one of my greatest friends.’

  ‘What’s sober mean, Richard?’

  ‘That’s only two bottles of vodka a day, not four.’

  O’Toole made much the same promise and remained the ultimate professional, insisting on wearing milky-blue contact lenses to play the blind Captain Cat, taking them out after half an hour when the pain became unbearable. ‘If he had not been capable of five-minute takes hitting an unseen mark without a wrong word, we could never have completed the shots on him without his sight,’ says Sinclair. ‘He played the whole part word-perfect literally as a blind man. Absolutely stunning.’

  Once work was finished for the day it was a different story, with O’Toole leading the nightly singing and dancing at the Fishguard Bay Hotel. Sinclair remembers it was ‘The Cuckoo Song’ that was his favourite. ‘In the middle of a line of a dozen cavorting grave men, who had all dropped their trousers, he high kicked and belted out the words like a soubrette.’

  Midway through the shoot Sinclair had to dash off to the Lee Studios in London to film the few scenes involving Elizabeth Taylor, who due to continual back problems hadn’t been able to travel to the Welsh location. The role of Rosie Probert, the sailors’ whore, had been assigned to Elizabeth and her main scene would be played with O’Toole. Arriving on the set that morning Sinclair was informed that Elizabeth would not be making an appearance for several hours. With time short (the Burtons had to leave the country by midnight the next day for tax reasons), Sinclair braced himself and went to her dressing room. There before a mirror, slapping on the rouge and big eyelids, was Elizabeth, every inch Cleopatra. ‘That won’t do,’ said Sinclair. ‘You’re a Welsh sailors’ whore of the fifties. You can’t look like that!’

  ‘I always look like Cleopatra,’ said Elizabeth and waved the director out of the room.

  It was noon before she arrived on the set, and there was O’Toole as the young Captain Cat, all eager beaver on a brass bed ready to make hay with his Welsh whore. When Elizabeth snuggled in beside him, he lifted his shirt and there scribbled across his stomach in biro was the legend: ‘I love you Rosie Probert.’ Elizabeth burst out laughing.

  After three takes the scene was done and everyone broke for lunch. As Sinclair sat in his office making preparations for that afternoon, O’Toole popped his head round the door. ‘You’ve lost your filum, Andrew,’ he said, in a matter-of-fact tone. ‘Liz is not appearing after lunch. But for what I am about to do for you, I deserve the Victoria Cross and bloody Bar.’

  All that was required of Elizabeth was to stand in front of a microphone and dub her lines but she had resolved not to do it. ‘So off they went, O’Toole, Burton and Taylor, and they all got drunk from one till four over lunch,’ says Sinclair. ‘They must have drunk six bottles of wine, and in the end O’Toole and Burton carried a dead drunk Elizabeth into the studio and held her up between them, an arm over each shoulder while she read out her dialogue. In that moment O’Toole saved the film.’

  Sinclair liked O’Toole, without his initial and continued commitment the film would never have been made. He judged him to be amongst the most intelligent and witty men he ever met. ‘And irrepressible, unpredictable and daring. Of all the stars I worked with he was the greatest by a long way. He had a terrific life-force, an incredible inner charisma which made him a meteor.’

  After a brief rest O’Toole flew to Rome in January 1972 to begin preparations for Man of La Mancha, which now had a new director in Arthur Hiller. To his utter delight O’Toole discovered he was sharing a hotel with Burton, who was in the Italian capital working. One evening Burton had arranged a quiet meal at a discreet restaurant with a young actress. Suddenly O’Toole burst in, making something of a grand entrance. Not to be outdone, Burton leapt onto a table and broke into a song in Gaelic. O’Toole leapt atop another table and sang the second verse, and on it went; so much for a quiet, unobtrusive meal.

  They met up several times after that for the odd snifter, activity frowned upon by Elizabeth, who was trying to keep her wandering husband on the wagon. One evening assistant director Norman Priggen received a call from Liz explaining that Burton would not be working tomorrow. ‘Why’s that?’ asked Priggen. ‘Well, yo
u’d better get back to our hotel and look in the bar and see for yourself.’ Priggen drove quickly to the hotel and found Burton and O’Toole, both as drunk as lords, lying on the floor fondly embracing each other and singing ‘Happy Birthday’. They had been there since lunchtime.

  It was exactly this kind of hell-raising that Liz hoped to put an end to. When Burton had a place in Hampstead, O’Toole would often be round or Burton would pay Guyon House a visit. ‘And then we’d carry the other home,’ explained O’Toole. ‘Elizabeth wasn’t keen on that. She probably thought I led him astray. I don’t know. She didn’t approve. That was a bone of contention between me and Richard.’

  One afternoon O’Toole put a call through to Burton’s suite at the hotel. As always a secretary answered. Mr Burton was busy, could he try again later. For two days Burton didn’t return his calls until finally a member of his entourage came with a message and led O’Toole to a clandestine meeting in the corner of a dark bar tucked in the back of the hotel. ‘Elizabeth,’ said Burton, in a meek voice, ‘does not approve of our racing around together.’ And that was pretty much it. ‘I didn’t see him again for many years,’ claimed O’Toole. ‘Poor soul.’

  Henceforth O’Toole referred to Elizabeth Taylor only as ‘That Woman’, though according to Andrew Sinclair hostilities between the two dated back to the days of Becket. O’Toole told Sinclair that he was in the back of a limo with Liz and Burton on their way to London from Shepperton Studios. Also in the car was Eddie Fisher, Liz’s ex, who was attempting a reconciliation. They were all crammed inside when O’Toole nodded to the chauffeur saying that he was the only one here who hadn’t fucked Elizabeth Taylor. ‘I was thrown out of the car,’ O’Toole told Sinclair. ‘Somewhere towards Twickenham.’

  When filming began on Man of La Mancha, O’Toole quickly made an impression on Hiller, the director who had made 1970s box office hit Love Story, having immersed himself in Cervantes and the historical period. ‘I didn’t do very much directing because he was so well prepared.’