Three decades ago I truly thought Peter O'Toole had died on my watch. It was 1982, the year he was to star in My Favorite Year and I was being paid £50 a week to wake him up every morning. He was in Toronto staying at the Four Seasons hotel, filming a TV version of Pygmalion for Showtime. Playing opposite him were Margot Kidder and my husband John Standing. I was just 23 and as Johnnie and I were sharing a suite the producer had decided to enlist my services. "Your job is simply to get Peter up," he explained. "Order him some breakfast, make sure he eats it and get him into the car and on to the set." It sounded like easy money to me. I had no inkling that O'Toole's off-screen persona was alarmingly similar to that of the swashbuckling, reprobative Alan Swann character he subsequently immortalised on celluloid.
The first day of filming, Johnnie had an early call and was picked up by his driver at 7am. O'Toole wasn't needed until 9am, so at 7.30am I dutifully knocked on his bedroom door. Nothing. I knocked again. Silence. Next I tried simultaneously knocking and shouting. No response. Finally, I took my courage in both hands and went in.
Carnage. The room was pitch-black and smelt of Gauloises.
Through the gloaming I could just about make out the form of a body in the bed. A motionless, silent corpse. I tiptoed across. "Peter?"
No response. Louder this time. "Peter, it's time to get up."
He remained totally immobile. Gingerly, I pulled back the sheets. He didn't appear to be breathing. With mounting hysteria I knelt beside the bed and shook him. "Peter, wake up! You've got to go to work!"
Very slowly he cocked one eyebrow and let out a deep, guttural moan. "Be a love and crack open the curtain," he instructed, eyes firmly closed. I did as I was told, but by the time I turned around, he'd rolled over and had gone back into flatline mode. I picked up the telephone and decided to order room service: "I'd like porridge, wholewheat toast, orange juice and a large pot of coffee, please." "Bollocks, darling. The film company are paying for breakfast,"
O'Toole muttered from beneath the blankets. "Order everything they've got. Say you want breakfast for eight."
Then it occurred to me I didn't want to be writing the story - I wanted to be the story (Peter O'Toole)
I was so relieved he was alive, I did just that. Minutes later a procession of trolleys were wheeled into my bedroom by a series of bemused foreign staff needing O'Toole's signature. "Mr O'Toole is in the next-door bedroom," I said gesturing somewhat helplessly towards the interconnecting door. "You need to go in there and get him to sign - it's his breakfast." "No, madame. We knock already. Mr O'Toole say he in bath. Do not disturb. He say for you to sign on his behalf."
My day had suddenly become a whole lot worse. I had now put my name to £150 worth of waffles, hash browns, steak, muffins, bacon and eggs. Yet my "charge" was, if not unwell, then certainly still indisposed. Time was fast running out; I had to get him down into the lobby in less than ten minutes. I followed the waiters into O'Toole's bedroom with trepidation. The scene had changed. The bed was now empty, the bathroom door ajar. There were bubbles - lots of bubbles - lapping against the carpet, a wall of steam and an overwhelming sickly smell. "Peter? Everything okay?" I enquired nervously. "Your breakfast has arrived." "I think..." Long dramatic pause. "I think... I think... Lazarus is slowly rising from the dead," he announced mischievously, spitting out each syllable with exaggerated voice projection, volume and enunciation before appearing through the mist like an apparition.
He was naked, had an oversized powder puff the size of a Frisbee in one hand and was liberally covering himself and the room with Penhaligon's Bluebell talcum powder. "Autograph, boys?" he asked the trio of stunned waiters. "I've done it, Peter," I replied briskly, handing him a towel. "Good girl," he said, grinning. "Be a love, and pour me a cup of Rosie Lee, will you? Make it strong."
Fast-forward 30 years. Last July, just before his 80th birthday, O'Toole announced his immediate retirement. Typically, he penned the press release himself. "It's time for me to chuck in the sponge. To retire from films and stage. The heart for it has gone out of me: it won't come back.
My professional acting life, stage and screen, has brought me public support, emotional fulfilment and material comfort. It has brought me together with fine people, good companions with whom I've shared the inevitable lot of all actors: flops and hits.
However, it's my belief that one should decide for oneself when it's time to end one's stay. So I bid the profession a dry-eyed and profoundly grateful farewell."
I remember O'Toole telling me years ago that it was imperative for actors to continue believing they had a future. His initial reluctance to accept an Academy Honorary Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences aged 70 was because he considered himself to be still very much in the game and had it in him to "win the lovely bugger outright".
In the end, he capitulated, but only because he was seduced by the fact his eldest daughter, Kate, "fancied a little jaunt" to Los Angeles. He spent the evening backstage giggling with Meryl Streep. "She was terrified to go for a wee because her beautiful frock was too heavy to lift up. She wanted a cigarette, I wanted a joint. In the end I just got the vodka going because she's a game girl. Likes a drop. The trick at those Oscar awards is to stay sober, because the evening goes on for-ev-er," he tells me. "Actors have to stay optimistic. The moment we start thinking otherwise, we're dead." Fighting words. Having been nominated for Best Actor an astounding eight times (from Lawrence Of Arabia in 1962 to Venus in 2006), and although each time going home empty handed, he was very moved to be honoured by his peers. "Yeah. Of course I was. It meant a lot. But awards are just trinkets, baby. Pretty trinkets. That's all. I've got a mantelpiece of them. There is only one I truly treasure," he says on his way to the cupboard, dragging out something heavy, wrapped in a grey cashmere sock. "I treasure my David [David di Donatello Award - the Italian "Oscar"]. Solid gold, made by Bulgari." He caresses it tenderly. "I got him for Lawrence. It's Donatello's David in miniature, made by a proper goldsmith. I was going to sell him but I'm pleased to report I've heard from the post office my savings account is all right. Isn't he gorgeous?"
We are sitting in his book-lined conservatory in the suburbs of Brondesbury, London; overlooking the slightly dishevelled garden, solely cultivated for its ability to serve as a functioning cricket net. O'Toole was 50 when his only son Lorcan was born and wholeheartedly embraced late fatherhood, becoming a qualified cricket coach and enthusiastically running an after-school club in his backyard. "The only thing I've ever been interested in teaching anyone in life is cricket. I loved teaching the babies because they've no clue how dangerous or skilful the game is - they just want to whack it. I'd offer them a quid for every window they broke," he recalls nostalgically. "I wanted Lorcs to know I still shared his sense of adventure - a merriment. I was an older father and I had to keep up without conscious effort."
I think Lorcan's birth provided a pivotal, stabilising and important turning point for O'Toole. It gave him a second chance.
It tethered him. Divorced from actress Siân Phillips (with whom he has two daughters) he'd unapologetically accelerated his sybaritic lifestyle. And in doing so, in the same fashion as his hell-raising drinking buddies Richard Burton and Richard Harris, he'd succeeded in diluting his talent. His much-anticipated performance as Macbeth at the Old Vic theatre in 1980 (coincidentally directed by my father, Bryan Forbes) made headlines and front-page news for all the wrong reasons. Despite completely selling out, both in London and later on tour, it had a wanton, car-crash, voyeuristic appeal and the moments of genius were buried beneath a John Barrymore bravado that almost certainly left O'Toole bloodied, if not quite unbowed. He brazened out the prurient furore that followed opening night with typical aplomb and insouciance, greeting the door-stepping press that besieged his house the next day unshaven, dressed in a nightshirt, holding a cup of tea and refusing to get caught up in the mounting hysteria. "It's just a bloody play, darlings," he declared. "The show will go on." And go on it did. To unprecedented packed houses and with tickets selling on the black market for in excess of £200. Watching dangerous performers is like gulping neat oxygen to an audience, but only truly enjoyable if they keep to the hidden boundaries. O'Toole kept everyone gasping.
Lorcan was born three years later, serendipitously on St Patrick's Day in Dublin. O'Toole had brilliantly managed to convince Lorcan's mother - a stunningly beautiful and sophisticated American called Karen Brown Somerville - that Dublin was the cutting-edge gynaecological centre of the universe. She gave birth in an establishment that I doubt had been significantlymodernised since the days of Oscar Wilde. It was positively archaic - boot-faced nuns begrudgingly administering a whisper of gas and air. O'Toole was ecstatic, waking Johnnie and me up at the crack of dawn to share his good fortune. "A boy. On St Patrick's Day," he crowed. "I shall call him Lorcan - Irish for Lawrence." "Were you there at the birth, Peter?" I asked. "What was that like? Bit gory?" "A piece of cake, baby. Piece of cake. To be honest, I've seen far worse things come out of my nose."
It's early afternoon and the room is flooded by hazy, watery sunshine. Those legendary Corinthian-blue eyes are still like lasers, the skin a little more translucent perhaps, the Alan Clark, long-legged, predatory stride a tad floppier, but mentally he's still razor sharp.
My tape recorder breaks and O'Toole kindly donates his, saying he wouldn't be needing it anymore. It's seen a lot, this tape recorder. "It's such a relief for me to sit in front of a tape recorder and not be using it to learn my lines," he explains, nursing a glass of red wine. "No rush. Take your time. I learn my lines - no, I beg your pardon, I learnt my lines - everything, every comma, every pause on one of these little machines. I'd record it, record myself. I became adept at autohypnosis. So to use this fiddly little machine for an interview is thrilling. I'm never giving another one. This is it."
So why have you retired?
Long, dramatic pause. "It wasn't a sudden decision. I'd been a bit poorly. I'd caught some vicious viral infection in my lungs and bladder. Perhaps when filming in Kazakhstan, perhaps on the way back. The recovering gave me a lot of time to think. I had a lot of doctors buggering about, a lot of antibiotics. All the minor sports injuries you acquire over the years begin to multiply like flies when you get over 70. I can no longer walk from the check-in desk to an aeroplane - that's a f***ing journey in itself - and I have to wrap these things up in elastic bands," he says, rolling his trousers up to show me his legs. "Look at my knee, baby. Swollen.
It's like a sackful of dead babies. And I refuse to have my cruciate ligament done, or knee reconstruction because I'm not in any pain. I've a nice new hip, but my bowling arm's completely buggered. Have to be careful putting on a jacket now."
Being ill gave him time to reflect. "I thought of all the things I never wanted to do again. Getting up at sparrow fart. Getting up in the mornings full stop. Slit-eyed blunderings, putting on trousers at 5.30am in the morning, lovey, putting down the porridge. Eating steak for breakfast when I'm filming just to keep the energy up. Drinking 'soothies' - smoothies, whatever they're called. Getting the old vocal equipment up to concert pitch at eight-a-fing-clock in the morning, and keeping at concert pitch until eight at fing night. And I played leading roles right the way through."
So no regrets? "I'm not bloody Edith Piaf you know," he says. "No. No regrets. Nothing that's going to fester." He looks at me defiantly, suddenly energised. "I'm 80. I don't fancy shuffling on as a butler. I gave up the stage in 1999 (Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell) because I could no longer move easily, and I don't want to take on the agony and terror of making another movie. No thank you. I never found it easy to learn my lines. It was slog, slog, slog. It wasn't because I was on the brink of dying when I was ill. It wasn't an easy decision. I will miss all the good bits."
And what were the best bits? "The companionship," he replies without hesitation. "We all had such larks. Yes, it was hard work but the friendships and the genuine respect we had for one another, that side I shall miss greatly. I've stopped acting, but I don't think I've finished using my voice. I could, and probably will, record the whole of Shakespeare's sonnets. They live at the side of my bed and are my constant companions."
He compares the relief of retiring to the way he felt when he gave up competitive swimming at 16 in Leeds, where he was raised (there is some confusion about the exact location of his birth in 1932). "I'd done it since I was 12 years old. I was good at it and at first I loved it. But then the dread crept in. I'd get on the tram with two cossies and my towel in a bag. I'd do it for half an hour with no audience. No one ever watched competitive swimming.
And then I'd change in a filthy cubicle - invariably being watched by a hairy poof - and I reached a stage when every time I finished and touched the bar, a warmth and relief flooded over me. That's what I feel right now. Relief. Relief I don't have to turn up to act any more. Done it as a leading man for half a century. That's enough."
I've always thought of O'Toole as a complex, tripartite character invented by JM Barrie. He's capable of seducing with the irresistible, innocent charm of Peter Pan. He can produce a nonchalant, urbane sophistication worthy of Mr Darling, before intentionally self-sabotaging with Captain Hook-like flashes of dangerous, deranged derring-do. You never quite know which personality to expect.
As a boy, O'Toole scribbled a promise in his notebook: "I will not be a common man. I will stir the smooth sands of monotony." He doesn't disappoint. He has a wonderful, eccentric way of using language when he talks. Although he rolls certain words out with the theatricality of a carpet salesman in New Delhi, he is the antithesis of a "luvvie". When he is being interviewed, O'Toole's conversation is more likely to be peppered with quotes from Dylan Thomas and James Joyce than anecdotes about other actors. He spits his syllables out like Morse code and gives them a unique sound. He loves words. Loves the writers. "The text", as he calls it. "I became an actor completely by accident," he concedes. "Started out as a journalist on the Yorkshire Post. That's what I thought I wanted to do. Then it occurred to me I didn't really want to be writing the story - I wanted to be the story. But before I did anything to alter circumstances
I was called up to do my national service. I joined the [Royal] Navy as a signaller in a submarine. Best days... they were the best days. I was with men. Real men. Men who had been torpedoed in the Battle of the Atlantic, men who had knocked out ten German destroyers and three cruisers at the loss of a great many lives. I had a lot of time to think when I was in the Navy. But I became an actor completely by default. There was no master plan."
After the Navy he returned to Leeds where he "accidentally" made his stage debut. "It was a complete fluke," he insists. "I was doing a [poetry] course at the Arts Centre and there was a professional production of Fathers And Sons going on at the Civic Centre down the road. The leading man fell down [some] stairs - his name was Gordon Luck. I'd done a Christmas skit there in 1952 and they asked me if I wanted to go on. I played it for two weeks and I got the bug, baby. And I got it bad."
There followed a brief stint in Leeds working as a steeplejack and demolition man. "Blowing things up and knocking things down with a bloody great hammer. Nobody gave a flying shit for health and safety in those days. It was glorious," he says. "And," he adds, with a glint in his eye, "I earned enough money to live on for six months." He and a friend were in Stratford-upon-Avon watching "old Rita [Michael] Redgrave give his [King] Lear and we decided to hitch a ride to London on a lorry." As they aimlessly wandered down Euston Road trying to find a YMCA so they could "go down for a snore", they passed Rada and, according to O'Toole, his friend Patrick pointed it out to him saying: "That's your shop isn't it, Pete?"
He went in, just to have a "butchers", and immediately bumped into the principal, Sir Kenneth Barnes. Barnes told him they were holding auditions the following week. He did the auditions, only to be recalled into the Navy. When he returned, he got a telegram from his mother telling him he'd won a scholarship. "My fees were paid, as well as a small grant, books and leotards. I was in heaven." He claims he was so outnumbered by girls he didn't do any work in his first year - "just f***ed myself stupid."
He then met a teacher who not only took a shine to him but also forced him to take acting seriously. "And I did," says O'Toole sounding astonished at his own tenacity.
From Rada he got into the Bristol Old Vic. "It never occurred to me to become a movie star," says O'Toole with the beauteous irony of hindsight. "That was something John Gielgud or Ralph Richardson did occasionally. It was a possibility, sure. But way out of my league."
He spent the next five years steadily honing his craft in the theatre.
And then came Lawrence Of Arabia. "I was at Stratford playing Shylock. There were rumours. I'd read that Albert Finney was cast, that Marlon Brando was cast..."
And then? "David Lean rang me. He'd got a script by Michael Wilson. I read it and rang him up and said: 'Well, it's a wonderful adventure story, David.'" O'Toole roars with laughter. "I actually said that.
Lean said, 'Is it as bad as all that?'"
According to O'Toole, the original script was dire, and Lean asked him who the young, exciting new writers were. "I said, there's John Osborne who writes bitchy dialogue and Robert Bolt who's a clever Marxist fart who I like very much. And David went for Robert."
Long pause. "And me."
He knew from the second he started filming that it was going to propel him to stardom. "Of course I did," he declares. "I knew."
Despite the fact he and Omar Sharif were paid "buttons", it was a life-changing experience. "It was the hottest heat I've ever known," recalls O'Toole. "Sand everywhere. Sand as fine as cornflour. It was uncharted desert and I was usually to be found covered in vermin, sitting on top of a camel, learning my lines.
Everyone else was there for six months, except me. It took two years of my life. We were a family at the end of it. A tight family."
He got on extremely well with director Lean, who treated him like a younger brother. "He did 'love-cuts'. He'd call me up and invite me over to see footage. 'Look at this bit, Pete,' he'd say.
'You come off the Jeep and stumble. Bit clumsy. I'm going to "love-cut" that bit. Cut away to Tony Quayle. It will make you look better.' I adored him."
O'Toole maintains that Lawrence wasn't an overnight success. "England thought it was a bit lightweight and iffy.
America got it immediately. It was huge."
He was struck by mega-fame at a time that predated the constant 24/7 media scrutiny that exists today, and is scathing about celebrity culture. "Keith Waterhouse and I had a theory about
'celebrity'. It's a newspaper fact that when capital punishment was abolished and photographs of the likes of [the murderers] Ruth Ellis and James Hanratty were no more, a replacement had to found, and 'celebrity' filled the void. All the larks I got up to as a young actor were never reported. Thank God. If anyone had dared to talk about my sex life when I was in my prime I'd have said very simply, 'Remove your eye from my keyhole.' I am a solitary beast. I like my own company. I hate press intrusion. And yes, I admit, I have put two or three who crossed the line in hospital. I just won't - and wouldn't - put up with that sort of invasion. In my day it was only ever really bad in Rome. But nowadays... no, thank you.
Impossible way to exist."
He adored filming Becket with Richard Burton and claims they both were clean, dry and sober throughout. "Weekends we'd go potty," he admits. "But during the week we were angels. It was proper acting. Lovely words, lovely mates."
Two of the loveliest mates of all were his old drinking buddies, Keith Waterhouse and Jeffrey Bernard. Waterhouse came up with the inspired idea of turning Bernard's celebrated "Low Life"
Spectator column into a vehicle for the stage, having spent an early evening drinking at the Coach & Horses pub, Soho, with him. According to O'Toole, Waterhouse was in black tie "downing a quick tincture" before taking his wife to the opera. "He got there and hated the f***ing thing. He thought: 'Hang on, I was having so much fun in the pub', and his brain went tick, tick, and suddenly he knew he had his play. Old Keith had been savouring Jeff's columns forever and by setting it in a pub he could have characters popping in and out, but he could create the boozer's dream: a monologue uninterrupted."
Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell was a huge success, the perfect marriage of playwright, muse and performer. "It was nectarous. Pure joy. Forty per cent of the text was neat Jeff, but there was a lot of Keith in it and a lot of me." According to O'Toole the audience laughter was so uncontrollable it had to be factored in to the running length of the play. "Nothing I have ever done has made me laugh more on stage. We were always in stitches.
Night after night. Jeff adored it. Adored it. Loved coming to see it. One night he was so pissed he took a wrong turn from my dressing room and ended up on the empty stage. He thought he was hallucinating." "It was an ideal play to bow out on. I'd done it three separate times between 1989 and 1999 and I was dreading saying goodbye on the last night at the Old Vic. Dreading it. But it turned out OK. I got through it just fine." He sighs. "I just thought, well that's it. The stage days are over." He looks up, smiles and pours himself another drink. "Acting is just being a man. Being human. Not forcing it. Some make it their entire life. Big mistake. Laurence Olivier fell into that category. He was a tiny, strange, vain fer. He used to lecture me: 'Do you think it's a good idea to have a drink after the show?' For f's sake. When he did The Prince And The Showgirl with Marilyn Monroe it didn't work because she wasn't attracted to him. She simply couldn't work with someone she didn't fancy. She knew she was on a losing wicket and had no intention of doing anything except suffer. She was disenchanted. She couldn't fake it. And who could blame her? [Greta] Garbo was the same. As was I. I couldn't have pulled off Lion In Winter if it hadn't been with Kate [Katharine Hepburn]. We had chemistry. Real chemistry."
O'Toole leans forward. "No one should ever know where conduct ends and acting begins," he confides. "Conduct unbecoming. That's what acting is. It's people doing it, not for themselves, but for the audience. That's the magic, baby. That's what matters. That's what an audience remembers."
He's right. We do. Thanks for the memories.
Originally publsihed in the June 2013 issue of British GQ.
