Peter O'Toole

by Robert Sellers

  Visibly shaken and in tears, O’Toole knew his gamble had failed. He returned with Lorcan to Guyon House and together they packed his small suitcase and for a while played in the garden, perhaps for the last time as father and son.

  In July, O’Toole and Karen renewed their legal fight in a New Jersey court. O’Toole testified behind closed doors, giving what was described as ‘fairly emotional’ testimony. Karen too was emotional, accusing O’Toole of using her as a ‘brood mare’ to produce a longed-for son. Both parents claimed the other had violated the original joint custody agreement.

  At issue, primarily, was the welfare of the child. ‘It’s a lifestyle question,’ explained Karen’s attorney, Raoul Felder. ‘One parent is an international movie star, and the other is a homebody. She wants her son brought up as a typical American boy.’

  Just days before the verdict was due to be given, Johnnie Planco was at home in New York with his wife Lois and young family. O’Toole rarely ever called him at home, so when the phone rang that evening and it was O’Toole, Planco thought something was wrong. ‘What are you doing?’ O’Toole asked.

  ‘There’s a baseball game on television I’m going to watch, why?’

  ‘Oh, mind if I come over?’

  ‘We haven’t got anything fancy for dinner or anything, Peter, we’re just watching the game.’

  ‘It’ll be fun,’ said O’Toole. ‘I love baseball.’

  O’Toole came over and almost immediately Planco sensed he was on edge and nervous. He tried talking about the game but O’Toole was somewhere else. ‘Then our son came in, he was just a baby at the time, and when Peter saw him he just took off like a rocket and started playing with him. They must have played together for hours, myself and Lois could have left the house and he wouldn’t have known. Then he profusely thanked us and left.’

  When the verdict finally arrived it was good news, the judge had ordered that the boy be allowed to stay with his father and carry out his schooling in London. He would live with his mother during the holidays. ‘Peter went through the roof,’ confirms Planco. ‘He was so happy. The court gave him a whole list of things he had to do to keep custody of Lorcan, he had to agree not to work certain times of the year, he had to stay at home and look after Lorcan and lots of other things, and he did it.’

  For this most private of men, who only consented to interviews out of necessity and had always shunned the glitzy media spotlight, to have to live out this personal trauma in the glare of the public was an agonizing ordeal. But the reward was sweet and the remaining years of Lorcan’s childhood that O’Toole was now able to share brought out the very best in him. ‘Lorcan had a particular significance for Peter,’ says Planco. ‘It wasn’t just a father and son relationship, he saw something in Lorcan that made his whole life worthwhile.’

  Having won a great personal victory, O’Toole was in the summer of 1989 on the cusp of one of his most spectacular professional successes on stage, with Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell. Based on the real-life columnist of the Spectator, whose weekly accounts of disasters caused by booze, women and horse racing became cult reading, Jeffrey Bernard was a proper London character, his stomping ground the pubs and drinking dens of Soho. Written by Keith Waterhouse, the story has Bernard waking up to find that he’s been locked in his favourite pub, the Coach and Horses, after closing time and spends the night reflecting on a life of dissolution with the help of people and faces from his past. Waterhouse saw his play as not just about one man, but about drinking, about friendship and failure, vulnerability and coming to terms with the person you are.

  Once finished Waterhouse sent a copy to his friend Ned Sherrin. They agreed that their perfect Jeffrey was John Hurt, a close friend of Bernard’s and fellow habitué of Soho’s drinking clubs. To their surprise Hurt turned it down, saying how he thought it might work as a radio play but didn’t think it was right for the theatre. A year later when it was a triumph Hurt bumped into Sherrin at a party and admitted, ‘God, you were bloody lucky you didn’t finish up with me!’

  A little disappointed by Hurt’s rejection, the very next day Waterhouse biked a copy of the play over to O’Toole’s house. The rumour was that O’Toole had a season of three classical productions planned for the West End, so Waterhouse was careful not to raise his hopes. Returning home that evening Waterhouse saw there was a message on his answer phone. It was O’Toole: ‘Keith, you bastard, you have screwed up my fucking life. I had this whole year mapped out and now I have to change all my fucking plans. I hate you. Love Peter.’

  At the press launch, held of course at the Coach and Horses, O’Toole told Bernard that he had no intention of doing an impersonation of him. ‘Just as well,’ replied Bernard. ‘I’ve been doing an impersonation of you since we met thirty-odd years ago.’

  According to Sherrin, the pair were introduced when Bernard was a stage hand and they were rivals over a girl. Stumbling to remember anything through the blurred mists of time, O’Toole conceded that Bernard had won that particular round. ‘No, you won,’ said Bernard. ‘I married her.’

  The play was in rehearsal for three weeks with Sherrin proving the ideal director, especially when it came to O’Toole. ‘He did nothing, absolutely nothing,’ reveals co-star Royce Mills. ‘Laziest director you can imagine. He had nothing to offer, but he let it happen. He had very good judgement.’ According to Sherrin, O’Toole had recorded the entire script on tape in order to learn it prior to rehearsals. ‘In this way he likes to arrive on the first day word perfect, and expects the other members of the cast to have done likewise.’

  O’Toole rarely if ever brought his script to the theatre but on the one occasion he did Royce Mills was able to take a sneak peek at it and was amazed by what he saw. ‘It was like music, every movement, every gesture, every inflection was marked. And that’s the extraordinary thing about him, he made it fresh and new, but he’d worked it all out. I found that amazing, however methodical he may have been about something, if the emotional part of it overtook him suddenly he’d just run with it.’

  Prior to its London engagement, the play opened at Brighton’s Theatre Royal in September 1989. As a treat the entire cast went for a day at the races, accompanied by Jeffrey Bernard, who proved such a nuisance that he was put on the first available train back to Victoria. ‘We gave him twenty Benson and Hedges and a quarter bottle of something,’ recalls Mills. ‘He was smoking in the carriage and then put the cigarette in his trouser pocket to smoke later. Unfortunately by the time he got to Hayward’s Heath station he was on fire and his trousers had to be put out.’

  After its successful debut, the play moved to the Theatre Royal Bath and met with a similarly enthusiastic response. Staying in the historical city, someone suggested everyone have afternoon tea in the famous Pump Room. ‘Oh fucking hell,’ declared O’Toole, deeply uninspired by the prospect. In the end he was persuaded to go and had a bit of trouble walking through the city centre, being followed by a party of Japanese tourists who kept hiding behind lamp posts. He finally made it and joined everyone at a table. ‘The place was packed,’ recalls Mills. ‘At one point this Irishman came up to our table and said, “Excuse me, now which one of you is Peter O’Toole!” ’

  In spite of the positive reactions to the play it was obvious that it was too long and cuts were needed. O’Toole certainly had his own ideas what should go, delighting in whispering to members of the cast whilst playing certain scenes, ‘This one’s a corpse.’ Royce Mills was perhaps the most experienced of the supporting cast, famous for his TV comedy appearances with the likes of Morecambe and Wise and Frankie Howerd, all of which did not impress O’Toole in the slightest. ‘He didn’t trust me at all.’ They had in fact already met many years before, when Mills appeared in a play with Siân. ‘And Peter used to spend the evening in my dressing room. He had no recollection of it.’

  One afternoon Mills suggested his own ideas for where a sizable cut should be made. ‘You know that three or four pages you do about Jeff as a stage
hand at the Royal Opera House, Peter. I think most of that can go. It’s not very funny.’

  ‘Oh, do you. Mind your own fucking business.’

  For the following day’s matinee performance a car had been sent to bring Nat Brenner down to see the show. Afterwards Mills overheard Brenner chatting to O’Toole. ‘I see you’ve got Royce with you then. He was at the Bristol Old Vic, you know.’

  ‘Was he,’ said O’Toole.

  ‘Yes,’ Nat went on. ‘Played leads and everything.’

  When Mills arrived at the theatre for the evening performance he was passing O’Toole’s dressing room and heard a voice booming out from the half-closed door. ‘Come in here for a moment.’ Mills entered. ‘You went to the Bristol Old Vic.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I think we understand each other, don’t we,’ said O’Toole. ‘Put the cut in.’

  Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell opened at the Apollo Theatre in October and was a massive success. In the Financial Times, Michael Coveney wrote: ‘Waterhouse and O’Toole present one of the greatest comic creations of our day.’ It was agreed by almost everyone that O’Toole gave a tour de force performance of which few actors would have been capable, bestowing a Beckettian melancholy upon this anti-hero and pub philosopher. There were standing ovations every night, sometimes lasting the length of four long curtain calls. And there was the added spectacle of the man himself, Jeffrey Bernard, propping up the bar in the royal circle, basking in the adulation and free vodkas.

  Many friends and colleagues came to see the show. Andrew Sinclair thought O’Toole exceptional. ‘It was the most marvellous, spectacular performance.’ Johnnie Planco flew to London to see it and after the performance was taken to the Groucho Club for a small celebration.

  At one point who should walk in but Jeffrey Bernard. ‘And he looked just like Peter in the play,’ remembers Planco. ‘It was quite scary. And Peter goes, “There’s Jeffrey,” and ran over to him and introduced me, and the guy was obviously barely standing. But that was so freaky to meet Bernard right after seeing Peter do it, and then realizing how brilliant he was, because he did become that guy.’

  O’Toole was a hit back on the London stage, but his film career was faltering badly. He was starting to make pictures that went either unwatched or unreleased, like The Rainbow Thief, which at least reunited him with his old Lawrence of Arabia co-star Omar Sharif. Filming a dangerous stunt, Sharif almost drowned on the set of a flooded sewer. O’Toole naturally saw the funny side of it. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing funnier than an angry, wet Egyptian.’ The two men had managed to remain close friends over the years, seeing each other periodically in a bid to relive their golden heyday. ‘The last time Omar and I were together was in Cairo a few months back,’ he said in the early nineties. ‘And we misbehaved ourselves all over again. Even though we’re venerable gentlemen, we can still misbehave ourselves appallingly, only perhaps marginally more slowly.’

  Another misfire was King Ralph, about a brash American who becomes King of England when the entire Royal Family are killed in a freak accident. O’Toole knew he was slumming it. ‘The film was meant to be a light-hearted, quick little frolic that suddenly turned into this dull, plodding nightmare.’ At least he found pleasure in the supporting cast of fruity British thespians. ‘The only thing that got us through was that John Hurt and James Villiers were in it, so at least we had a decent poker school.’ The star was John Goodman, who during a break in filming, asked to borrow an ashtray. With characteristic flair O’Toole flicked his ash on the floor: ‘Make the world your ashtray, my boy.’

  TWENTY-THREE

  While he confessed to friends that it was tough bringing up a son on his own, O’Toole still wholeheartedly embraced late fatherhood, believing it to have been a positive in his life. ‘I think Lorcan’s birth provided a pivotal, stabilizing and important turning point for O’Toole,’ said family friend Sarah Standing. ‘It gave him a second chance. It tethered him.’ Certainly he was taking his responsibilities seriously. Back on the booze as he was, his drinking was measured, he only accepted films that fitted in during school holidays when Lorcan was with his mother, and when appearing in Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell insisted that the curtain went up no earlier than 8.15, so he could put Lorcan to bed.

  It had also meant leaving the costly and now far too big Guyon House and moving to a more moderate though still large home in Brondesbury, in north-west London, turning most of the back garden into a functioning cricket pitch. ‘There was a proper twenty-two-yard strip and I think there might have been a net at the end,’ recalls friend Michael Neilson. ‘He used to practise bowling against Lorcan, and batting against Lorcan’s bowling. He was passing on his cricket knowledge to his son.’ O’Toole had enjoyed a lifelong passion for the game. He’d played in the streets as a kid in Leeds, with a lamp post for a wicket, planks of wood for a bat and a round stone for a ball. During the filming of Lawrence of Arabia he and Sharif, himself a keen cricketer, would partake in a few sessions in the 120 degree desert heat. The watching Bedouin tribesmen never quite got the hang of the game, more interested in the potential of the ball as a weapon.

  While appearing on the David Letterman Show in the mid-nineties, top American baseball pitcher Mark Langston of the California Angels was a fellow guest and Letterman, talking about the differences between cricket and baseball, thought it might be fun afterwards for Langston to pitch a few to O’Toole and see if he could hit them. ‘They all went to a hallway,’ remembers Johnnie Planco. ‘And this guy Langston threw at something like a hundred miles an hour, you couldn’t see it, and Peter smashed it. Everyone was astonished. And they kept doing it over and over again and afterwards Peter said, “Well, that was fun.” ’

  O’Toole classified himself as an opening batsman and off-spin bowler with a really special delivery. ‘It does absolutely nothing. From leaving the hand to pitching – nothing at all. This confuses many batsmen.’ He also liked to field at slip, ‘for observational purposes’. He was particularly proud, and often brought it up, that the Irish beat the West Indies in 1969 when they were in the country on tour. Only because, so the story went, the Irish took the West Indian team to the Bushmill’s whisky factory first and got them absolutely plastered and then managed to beat them in a little one-day friendly game.

  Around 1986, to put his cricketing prowess to good use, O’Toole founded his own cricket team, the Lazarusians. He joked it was named after Lazarus who rose from the dead, something he himself felt he had done not so many years before. It consisted of a few acting buddies like John Standing, his godson Timothy Ackroyd, and another young actor called Michael Neilson. Kenneth Griffith was club president. ‘It took off very quickly,’ recalls Neilson. ‘A lot of teams wanted to play against us.’

  O’Toole had proper cricketing caps made for everyone and also provided a suitable mascot. ‘It was a life-size plastic vulture,’ recalls Neilson. ‘This vulture was called Lazarus and before each game, it was Peter’s idea that we all encircle Lazarus and give our team chant of “Lazarus, Lazarus, you fucking beaut.” This was the typically theatrical and very naughty touch that Peter brought to everything. We won more games than we lost, but the main thing was to enjoy the match. Peter was always more interested in having fun than winning. We never took the cricket seriously. That wasn’t the aim of it.’

  On Saturday match days everyone would meet early outside Lord’s, where a coach would take them to wherever they were playing. Sometimes if they arranged a second game on the Sunday they’d stay overnight. They were a wandering side with no home ground, playing amateur and charity teams all around the country in places like Kew in West London, Ampleforth College in North Yorkshire and Lustleigh, down in Devon, O’Toole’s favourite cricket ground. They even played at the invitation of Earl Spencer at Althorp. Playing once in Northampton, O’Toole was at the crease batting when a drunken spectator ran out onto the pitch and poured a can of beer over his head with the words, ‘You like a drink, don’t yo
u, mate.’ O’Toole ignored it and carried on batting. When he came off Neilson went over to him. ‘God, Peter, if that happened to me I would have chinned the bloke.’ O’Toole looked over with a resigned expression on his face. ‘Michael, I can’t hit him because the following day in the papers it would just say – Peter O’Toole hits spectator.’ It was then that Neilson realized what it must be like to carry that amount of fame around.

  Not that O’Toole couldn’t handle himself when things got physical. ‘He always looked extremely fragile,’ says Neilson. ‘But he was quite tough. He’d get hit by a cricket ball at the crease and he’d shrug it off. He was made of strong stuff.’ And while some drinking went on, Neilson once wandered to the crease to umpire a match drinking cans of Foster’s, he doesn’t recall ever seeing O’Toole with an alcoholic drink in his hand. ‘Although he used to get through three packets of Gauloises a day.’

  It wasn’t unusual for O’Toole to sometimes counsel the young actor. ‘He always used to say to me, it’s nine-tenths tenacity and one-tenth talent.’ And during a discussion about acting one day he told Neilson: ‘You can’t get away with what I got away with these days. When I was a young actor theatres and movie companies were run by artistic people, but the trouble is now, Mike, the business is run by accountants and that’s a very different ball game. An accountant won’t let you come to work with a hangover.’

  The Lazarusians carried on into the early nineties until one Saturday, having arranged to play at Lustleigh, a long trip from London, only six people turned up. ‘What happens in cricket teams is guys grow up,’ says Neilson. ‘They get married and they have kids, they can’t go gallivanting off on a jolly with the lads any more. So it became obvious we couldn’t as a team continue like that. And we couldn’t get new players in all the time. So it just faded away. But they were happy days. It was just eleven blokes having a laugh and really enjoying being in each other’s company.’