T. E. Lawrence wanted nothing to do with the movies. When it was mooted in the 1930s that the renowned producer Alexander Korda was preparing a film of his life, Lawrence made it known that he had no wish at all to be ‘celluloided’. This British scholar and soldier who mobilized the Arab revolt against the Turkish occupying army in the First World War and wrote about his exploits in his book The Seven Pillars of Wisdom had for years been trying to find anonymity from a world that had dubbed him Lawrence of Arabia and turned him into a national figure. When in 1935 this remarkable man died as a result of a motorcycle accident, aged just forty-six, Korda pressed ahead with the project and Laurence Olivier, Robert Donat and Leslie Howard all tested for the role. Eventually Korda lost interest and after several other abortive attempts to bring Lawrence’s famed exploits to the screen it emerged in 1955 that Terence Rattigan had written a screenplay to be directed by Anthony Asquith. With financial backing from the Rank Organization, the man chosen to play Lawrence was Dirk Bogarde, then Britain’s top box-office attraction. For the next year Bogarde immersed himself in the life of Lawrence, but while Asquith was in Iraq scouting locations Rank unexpectedly pulled the plug. No reason was ever given. At least Rattigan managed to make some use of his screenplay, reworking it into a stage play, Ross, that featured Alec Guinness as Lawrence. Bogarde, however, took the film’s cancellation badly, declaring it to be ‘my bitterest disappointment’.
At much the same time David Lean had been out in India trying to set up a film about Gandhi, but budgetary concerns and logistical problems proved insurmountable and he turned his attention instead to Lawrence, a childhood idol. After the huge success of 1957’s The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lean and his producer Sam Spiegel were hot property and in February 1960 they purchased the screen rights to Seven Pillars of Wisdom.
Spiegel wanted Marlon Brando to play Lawrence, having worked well with the temperamental star on the classic On the Waterfront. Lean wasn’t so sure, anxious about his ego and that the film might turn into ‘Brando of Arabia’. In any case, Brando turned the job down. For a while Richard Burton and Anthony Perkins were considered, and every week Lean was pestered by phone calls from Montgomery Clift begging to play Lawrence. Lean, however, had come to an important decision. In life Lawrence was very much an enigma, even to himself, so it made sense to cast an unknown actor rather than an internationally recognized star. The man chosen was Albert Finney, who had just completed his first lead role in a film, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, playing working-class antihero Arthur Seaton.
Finney’s screen test for Lawrence of Arabia at the MGM studios in Borehamwood in August 1960 must rank as the most elaborate in movie history. Lasting a total of twenty minutes, it took four days to shoot at a cost of thousands of pounds, with its elaborate sets and costumes. Both Lean and Spiegel expressed delight at the result and Finney was formally offered the part, only to ultimately turn it down when he learnt he would have to sign a multi-picture contract with Spiegel that would see him tied down to the American producer for years.
Left with no lead actor, Lean took drastic action. ‘I started to spend all of my days in the cinema watching as many films as possible. I was going from one cinema to the other, everywhere in London.’ The Day they Robbed the Bank of England just happened to be playing and Lean caught an afternoon performance. He had never seen nor heard of the young actor playing a Guards officer but he had an interesting face and could clearly act. There was something else, too, that indefinable quality that actors, however good they may be, either have or haven’t got – screen presence. Could he be Lawrence? Lean was convinced of it. Wasting no time, he put in a call to Spiegel. ‘Sam, I’ve got him.’
‘What’s his name?’
‘Peter O’Toole.’
There was a slight pause. Then, ‘He’s no good.’
‘What do you mean, he’s no good.’
‘I tell you he’s no good. I just know it.’
O’Toole was still playing Shylock in repertory at Stratford when Lean contacted him to set up a meeting in London. He arrived in the full beard he’d grown for the part and scraggy hair dyed black. With his hawk-like features Lean scrutinized the figure in front of him before finally speaking. ‘Peter, what do you look like underneath all that stuff?’
‘I’m quite fair-haired, really.’
Lean appeared only slightly convinced. ‘Well, I saw you in a film called The Day they Robbed the Bank of England and I thought you didn’t put a foot wrong. And I really want you to do Lawrence.’
‘Who’s the producer?’ asked O’Toole.
‘Sam Spiegel.’
‘Not a chance.’
Lean smiled and reassured O’Toole that everything was going to be fine, that he was going to fight hard for him. And that’s exactly what Lean did, persistently badgering Spiegel. ‘Look, Sam, what do you want to do, we haven’t got Finney, we haven’t got anybody! I think Peter will be wonderful. I want to test him.’ Spiegel still cast something of a gloomy figure but Lean got his way and O’Toole was auditioned on 7 November 1960. Instead of the four days that Finney got, O’Toole was tested over the course of a single day, reciting lines from Seven Pillars of Wisdom and repeating bits of dialogue Lean threw at him from behind the camera. After it was over Lean turned to Spiegel in buoyant mood. ‘Look, Sam, look at it, come on!’ But the tycoon still remained unconvinced and suggested a couple of new candidates. ‘I’ve forgotten who they were,’ said Lean years later. ‘But hopeless, hopeless, hopeless. In the end he finally had to agree.’ It was only much later that Lean discovered Spiegel’s reluctance to cast O’Toole was due to his earlier encounter with the actor. ‘Sam thought I was a tearaway. He thought I lived up a tree. He didn’t want to have to go looking for me every day with a net.’
When O’Toole was finally offered the role by Spiegel, he couldn’t resist one last joke, asking, ‘Is it a speaking part?’
So that’s Lean’s story of how O’Toole came to be Lawrence, but there is another tale suggesting that it was largely down to the persuasive powers of Jules Buck. And there is a witness, Michael Deeley. At the time Deeley worked for the MCA agency in London and was in the office during the casting of Lawrence. ‘When Jules heard that Finney’s people were sticking on the issue of options he went to see Spiegel, who he had worked with in Hollywood, and said, “I think my boy will be better, and he’ll give you the options.” And so O’Toole signed the contract that Finney had refused.’
Whatever the truth, O’Toole’s fee was a grand £12,500 (something like £125,000 in today’s money) and to celebrate he waltzed into the Salisbury and slammed £150 on the bar. For the rest of the day the drinks were on him. There is also a story of O’Toole being rushed over to New York to be paraded in front of the big shots at Columbia, the studio bankrolling the picture. ‘When I look at you,’ one of the suits said, ‘I see six million dollars.’ ‘How’d you like a punch up the throat?’ O’Toole replied. It wasn’t his scene at all. ‘It made me feel like a prize bull.’
In the midst of all this celebrating, O’Toole knew deep down that he couldn’t possibly play Lawrence and shouldn’t have accepted it. The reason was simple, he had already made an agreement with Peter Hall to lead the Royal Shakespeare Company’s inaugural season in London at the Aldwych, reprising his Stratford successes of Shylock and Petruchio, as well as taking on an exciting fresh challenge. Hall had managed the coup of securing the rights to Jean Anouilh’s new historical play Becket, a huge hit in France, over the heads of every West End impresario. O’Toole would play Henry II opposite his old Bristol colleague Eric Porter in the title role. Hall never forgot the day O’Toole walked into his office to announce that he’d been offered Lawrence of Arabia and simply had to do it.
That Hall wasn’t entirely happy with the situation is an understatement, he was depending on O’Toole and refused to release him from his contract. Spiegel, one of the wiliest operators in Hollywood, advised O’Toole to ‘walk and let them sue you’. It was enough to make Hall think twice, he couldn’t risk the financial implications of a probably lengthy court case. ‘So Peter nearly wrecked the start of the RSC,’ Hall later claimed. ‘He was one of the staunchest people to commit to the Company and suddenly he was gone.’ Theatre director William Gaskill recalls Peter Hall telling him that after it was all over and O’Toole had got what he wanted he had the nerve to say: ‘Still friends?’ Or words to that effect. ‘Peter Hall was absolutely furious,’ says Gaskill. ‘Because it altered the whole nature of the RSC. If Peter had been leading the company it would have been a different company. That incident characterized the RSC ever after, I think, because when you have an actor of remarkable talent, it always makes a difference, it gives colour and accent to the whole work. And if you have Eric Porter and Patrick Wymark, you settle for something different, something less exciting, perhaps more manageable, perhaps finally better, I don’t know, but you lose the sheer excitement of the actor on stage.’
Not surprisingly Hall and O’Toole would never work together again, and although O’Toole always harboured a slice of guilt over the course of action he took there remained inside him an enmity towards the theatrical knight. As late as 2005 during the shooting of Venus O’Toole still spoke of Hall in disparaging terms and one day on the set when someone brought in Hall’s autobiography he tore it in two like a strong man at the fair.
With the role of Lawrence safely in his pocket, O’Toole settled down to celebrate the festive season with Siân, presenting her on Christmas morning with a brand-new Morris Minor, a huge ribbon neatly wrapped round the bonnet. Thrilled by the gift, if apprehensive of the prospect of more terror-stricken journeys, Siân hardly had time to take it for a spin round the block when O’Toole commandeered the vehicle for a sentimental journey up to Bristol to bid the city farewell before leaving for Jordan. That night Siân received a phone call from the police explaining that O’Toole had been arrested and was currently keeping one of the cells warm. Pissed, O’Toole had rammed the back of a squad car. Siân never did see her Morris Minor again; it went to that great scrap heap in the sky of cars O’Toole had wrecked.
O’Toole’s arrival in Jordan, four months prior to the start of filming in May, was accompanied by a massive hangover. It would be his last for quite a considerable time. As the film’s technical adviser, Spiegel had hired the British diplomat Anthony Nutting, who had a peerless reputation in the Middle East and had successfully negotiated with King Hussein the use of Jordan as the film’s main location, along with the participation of its army. Nutting had another important function, to keep O’Toole off the bottle, and having seen him arrive in Jordan looking more than a little bit the worse for wear decided that a stern lecture was in order. ‘Look, if you don’t stay sober you’re going to leave Jordan on your arse. You’re the only actor we’ve got for Lawrence, and if you get bundled home, that’s the end of the film, and that’s probably the end of you. So you’d better behave yourself.’
O’Toole came to admire Nutting enormously and tried his best not to let him down. As his guide to the history of Jordan and the ways of the desert, Nutting arranged for the actor to stay for a time with the Bedouin and travel across the desert with a camel patrol, sleeping rough under the stars, just as Lawrence had done. O’Toole soaked it all up. Where another actor might have cracked having to exist in the desert for three months before even a foot of celluloid was exposed, ‘Peter sniffed a battle and responded to it’, according to Beverley Cross, the English playwright Lean had hired as ‘continuity writer’. Cross had carried out his own research into Lawrence, ‘But Peter must have read every single word written by and about Lawrence – twice.’ There was also the Jordanian heat to contend with, so hot that it physically hurt. ‘But within a month I adjusted,’ said O’Toole.
One of the principal reasons for O’Toole’s early arrival was to give him plenty of time to master riding a camel, although he heard it from someone that no one in fact can ride a camel, that it was impossible. ‘All that you can do is to find a beast whose discomfort you can tolerate.’ His teacher was a sergeant from the Jordanian army and at first the lessons played havoc with O’Toole’s ‘delicate Irish arse’. Becoming more proficient the two of them would ride out into the sand dunes for hours.
O’Toole was out somewhere riding his camel when Zia Mohyeddin arrived on location. Mohyeddin, a Pakistan-born actor trained at RADA, had been cast as Tafas, Lawrence’s guide who is famously killed at the well, and as such was also required to be proficient in a camel saddle. Late in the afternoon, Mohyeddin was sitting in his tent brooding about the forthcoming ordeal when O’Toole walked in with a welcoming smile. ‘O, that I were a glove upon that hand that I might touch that cheek,’ he boomed. It was a wonderful welcoming gesture and tribute to Mohyeddin, who had recently played Romeo at Stratford under the direction of Peter Hall.
The next day Mohyeddin was invited to O’Toole’s well-furnished tent to go through their lines. ‘Around mid-day I suggested that it was time for a cold beer. Peter looked at his trainer as if to say, What are we to do? The trainer said he would see if he could organize something. He returned after a while bringing me a tankard full of cold lager. “Go ahead,” Peter said. “What about you?” I asked. He stroked his chin thoughtfully before saying, “I don’t think I feel like it.” I was taken aback. I had heard many tales about his drinking capacity. It was rumoured in the Buxton club that he could out-drink anyone. I felt a bit guilty sipping the liquid offered to me.’ Throughout his stay on the film Mohyeddin never once saw O’Toole partake of any alcohol. ‘His trainer, who stayed with him like a bodyguard, had apparently been instructed to see to it that he kept to his vow to remain on the wagon.’
After a week of camel riding all Mohyeddin had learned was how to trot. ‘Peter was already claiming that he was about to acquire the knack of galloping. We were told not to use our reins and try to feel being one with the camel. We had to ride two hours in the morning and two in the late afternoon.’
It seemed to Mohyeddin that when O’Toole wasn’t preoccupied with his camel training, he was deep in preparation about how he was going to play Lawrence. At O’Toole’s insistence Hugh Miller, one of his favourite teachers from RADA, had been brought out to Jordan as the film’s dialogue coach; his primary function to assist O’Toole with his speech. Miller was courteous enough to allow Mohyeddin to be present when he conducted his initial sessions with O’Toole. ‘Peter read out his lines and Miller interrupted him only when he felt that Peter was not inflecting the right word. I was sitting next to Hugh Miller at dinner one evening, Peter wasn’t around, and I asked him if Peter’s speech was far removed from that of T. E. Lawrence. “Mmm … No,” he said. “I wouldn’t say that, but Peter tends to flatten his vowels now and then, and we are trying to sort that out.” Peter worked assiduously with his coach. After dinner, other people either played cards or exchanged anecdotes or discussed their ailments, but Peter would sit with Miller in his tent and be engrossed in the script. It was evident that he was more than determined to spend every ounce of his energy in building up Lawrence.’
The film unit had set up base at a dilapidated army barracks in the Jordanian city of Aqaba, at the north-eastern tip of the Red Sea. A barbed-wire fence separated Aqaba from Eilat, the Israeli seaside resort. ‘You could see plump ladies swimming or sunbathing on the sand,’ recalls Mohyeddin. ‘Peter would sometimes scan the scene through his field glasses. If he ever spotted a “tasty chick”, as he put it, he would lend his glasses to me to share the view.’
While there were a few air-conditioned Nissen huts, the majority of the unit lived in two-man canvas tents with a partition and a fly-screen door. The wooden floor was reinforced by bits of balsa wood stuck around the edges to stop the scorpions getting in at night. Tony Rimmington, the assistant art director, recalls that the man sharing his tent caught yellow jaundice and had to be flown back to England. The heat was so draining that you had to take salt tablets every day. ‘I collapsed once simply because I hadn’t taken my salt tablet,’ recalls Rimmington. ‘It was rough.’ But as Lean observed, ‘Physical discomfort is the price of authenticity.’ Lean, however, did insist on shipping over his air-conditioned Rolls-Royce.
As the start of filming approached, some of the cast began to assemble in Jordan. The integral role of Sherif Ali had first been offered to Horst Buchholz, one of the stars of The Magnificent Seven. When prior work commitments ruled him out, Lean chose Alain Delon. Again conflicting schedules got in the way. His replacement was another French actor, Maurice Ronet, but when he arrived in Aqaba it was very quickly apparent that he spoke with a very heavy accent. ‘David Lean was a bit perturbed about it,’ remembers Mohyeddin. ‘He asked me and Peter to spend some time with him in the evenings. “See if you can straighten out his speech a bit,” he said. Scripts in hand, we used to go over his lines. Ronet tried, and he tried hard, but could not manage to “straighten out his speech”.’
After a few days O’Toole got bored and when asked by Lean how Ronet was getting on said, ‘Ask Zia, he has been conducting most of the lessons. I think he’s a bit poncey.’ By this time another young actor had arrived. His name was Omar Sharif. A big star in his native Egypt, he’d been brought in to play a comparatively small role. David Tringham, the film’s second assistant director, remembers the impact Sharif made when he arrived at the Aqaba camp. ‘All the Arab workers knew him and were following him, it was amazing to see, he just strode along with real regal bearing like, I’m a star.’
Tringham stood and watched as Lean made Ronet and Sharif run through a scene together. ‘Maurice did one page of dialogue and David said, “Umm, that’s good,” looking very intense, with those jumbo ears like an African elephant. “Umm, now, let’s just change it a minute. Omar, you do the lines and Maurice, you just stand there, umm, yes, mmm.” And afterwards I think David whispered to one of his assistants, we’ve got our Ali. So they paid off Maurice Ronet.’
O’Toole was introduced to his new co-star probably later that same day and the first thing that struck him was that nobody in the world could possibly be called Omar Sharif. ‘Your name must be Fred.’ Henceforth Sharif was known as Cairo Fred.
For a short while Siân visited the location. Prior to her arrival Mohyeddin had enjoyed hours of sitting with O’Toole in his tent ‘chatting’ about life and literature and learning and actors and the London Theatre. ‘He was fond of holding forth. Chatting is not the right word. He held forth. I was mostly a silent listener. I would offer an opinion now and then, but he remained much too absorbed in whatever he was saying ever to register it.’
After Siân’s arrival the scene changed, Mohyeddin’s long chats with O’Toole became less frequent. Instead Siân would invite him to join them over lunch or dinner. ‘She was a remarkably self-possessed lady,’ recalls Mohyeddin, ‘who made sure never to give the impression that she was on location to keep an eye on Peter. She had a stately presence and a calm demeanour. It was interesting to note that Peter, who spoke and behaved like an upper-middle-class chap, turned into a devil may care, flamboyant Irishman in her presence. Whether it was an act he put on for me, or whether he wanted to send up the sophisticated etiquette of Siân, I don’t know. Siân was an actress of no mean standing, but whenever there was talk of a play or a performance, she would offer her opinion guardedly as though she was unsure that what she was saying would meet with Peter’s approval.’
One evening they all walked along the beach after dinner. The sea was calm and the moon shone heavily on the bobbing waves. Inspired by the moment, Siân began to recite the famous Dylan Thomas poem ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’. Mohyeddin recalls she spoke the lines beautifully, but then stopped. ‘You do it, Peter,’ she pleaded. ‘You do it so much better … go on, darling.’ O’Toole’s version was pure Irish blarney. ‘I was in fits,’ says Mohyeddin. ‘Siân laughed as much as was befitting. She seemed to want to live up to his expectations at every moment. To be honest, there was something slightly odd about their relationship. It was too well stage-managed. I wasn’t too surprised when I learned, some years later, that they had parted.’
Principal photography on Lawrence of Arabia began on 15 May 1961 in a remote region of the desert called Jebel el Tubeiq. On that very first day Lean walked purposefully over to where O’Toole was standing and declared, ‘Pete, this is the beginning of a great adventure.’ Those words proved something of an understatement.
Mohyeddin has never forgotten that opening day of shooting. When Lean cried action for the very first time he and O’Toole had to ride their camels towards a mark and then stop. ‘Peter takes a gulp from his canteen and then offers it to me. I don’t take it. He insists that I do and I say something like, I am a Bedouin, I don’t need it. “Cut,” shouts Lean. He was obviously not satisfied. “Let’s do it again,” he said tersely. There were seventeen if not nineteen takes. Peter was sweating and so was I. After the first two or three takes Lean didn’t give us any specific directions. “Let’s try it once more,” he would say. And we went on until we heard him say, “All right, chaps, that’s a wrap.” ’
When it was time for Mohyeddin to say goodbye to Lean after he had finished his work on the picture, the actor found him quite relaxed. His face was less stern, now. ‘I think you’ll like your work when you see it on the screen,’ he said with his winsome smile.
‘May I ask you something?’ said Mohyeddin. Lean nodded. ‘What was it that I was doing wrong on the first day of the shoot? Please tell me now.’
‘Oh,’ Lean chuckled. ‘It was a bit of a joke. I wanted Peter to realize that filming is going to be a bitch of a nightmare. I just wanted to knock the wind out of his sails.’
The impression of Peter O’Toole that Zia took back to London with him was that of a man totally absorbed in himself, an extremely self-centred person. ‘Later on I changed my view. Peter was ambitious, more ambitious than any other actor I had ever come across. His was the kind of ambition that brooks no obstacles. He wanted to pluck the stars and put them in his pocket. He wanted to own the world and that is not a bad thing for a young actor to desire.’
The logistics of shooting in isolated places like Jebel el Tubeiq, 250 miles from Aqaba, were incredible, with temperatures often touching 120 degrees; film stock had to be kept in refrigerated trucks to stop it from wilting. One of the toughest things to deal with for the largely British crew was the feeling of total isolation. There was also the clash of cultures. Everywhere they went an Arab escort was provided, armed with rifles or Bren guns. ‘Everybody was armed out there,’ says Tony Rimmington. ‘Even the bloke digging up the road was carrying a Webley pistol. Unbelievable.’
One of the most famous scenes shot at Jebel el Tubeiq is when Lawrence goes back to rescue one of his men stranded in the desert, played by the Indian actor I. S. Johar. Both actors were required to ride a single camel but appeared to be having great difficulty remaining mounted. It transpired they’d been smoking hashish and were stoned out of their minds. Shooting had to be abandoned for the day.
The Lawrence unit were attempting stuff no film unit had attempted before. ‘And you never questioned that you could do it, or what was needed and what had to be done,’ says David Tringham. ‘You just did it.’ Much of that blind faith was due to the inspirational presence of David Lean, although as a director he could be a real bastard in getting what he wanted, someone who tested people to the nth degree, gave them hell. Lean was particularly hard on O’Toole, pushing him almost to the limits of endurance, though his confidence in him was unshakable. ‘David was very intense with Peter,’ confirms Tringham. ‘But I never saw Peter argue with him once.’ It was tough and there were moments when O’Toole came close to breaking down, but his admiration for Lean was unqualified. Here was someone he could learn from and he did, coming away from the experience knowing more about filmmaking than a lot of directors. ‘I graduated in Lean, took my BA in Lean.’ It meant that in his career O’Toole could look at something and immediately discern whether or not it met the standards that he was used to and he wanted. The critical eye that he cast upon everything on film came from Lean.
The two men, however, never worked together again, although there were several opportunities to do so. A real shame since creatively they worked extremely well together, and a great loss to cinema since they did make a superb team. Take the scene where Lawrence is first given his Arab robes. Lean shot it several ways but it wasn’t working, something was missing. In the end he took O’Toole to one side and said, ‘What do you think a young man would do alone in the desert if he’d just been handed these beautiful robes?’ He then pointed out towards the desert. O’Toole’s eyes followed. ‘There’s your theatre, Peter. Do what you like.’
Suddenly the scene came to life with O’Toole’s idea that the egoist Lawrence would immediately want to see what he looked like. With no mirror to hand O’Toole improvised by pulling out a ceremonial dagger from its scabbard, holding it at an angle and peering at his reflection. ‘Clever boy,’ Lean muttered to himself.
The crew drove to these desolate places in Land Rovers and Austin Gipsies every morning. Eventually Lean got so far into the desert an old Dakota was chartered to fly everyone in and out, landing on a salt flat because there was no runway. ‘There used to be much merriment among the English crew during these flights,’ recalls Rimmington. ‘Jokes about making wills and the like.’ There was one near calamitous incident Rimmington got to hear about when Anthony Quinn arrived to play the great Arab tribal leader Auda Abu Tayi. ‘They flew him in this old Dakota from Amman airport to the desert site, which was a spot in the middle of nowhere, the pilot had to find it. As he was coming in to land the other passenger, this English doctor who had been in Malaya during the war, recognized the warning horns go in the cockpit – beep – beep – beep – in other words, the pilot hadn’t put the undercarriage down and he belly landed, all in the bloody sand. Quinn got out of there shaking like a leaf, “I’m never flying in that bloody plane again!” ’
Stars of Quinn’s stature would often just pop in, play their part and then drift off again, it was O’Toole that remained a permanent fixture. When Alec Guinness arrived to play Prince Feisal, he came away highly impressed by O’Toole, writing in his diary: ‘He has great wayward charm and is marvellously good as Lawrence. He’s dreamy good to act with and has great personal charm and gaiety.’ Some time later, when the film crew were working in Spain, Guinness’ admiration had cooled dramatically due to O’Toole’s excessive alcohol intake. Notably there was the occasion they were invited to dinner by a Spanish grandee. ‘O’Toole got drunk, quarrelled with his host and threw a glass of champagne in his face. Peter could have been killed – shot, or strangled. And I’m beginning to think it’s a pity he wasn’t.’
As the weeks of shooting passed into months the strain began to show. Some members of the crew literally couldn’t take it any more and left for home. There were fears O’Toole himself would crack, go AWOL. At one point he begged Siân to come out again and raise his spirits: ‘Here, you have to be a little mad to stay sane,’ he told her. At the camp in Aqaba there was very little to occupy oneself with. ‘It was like being in the army,’ Omar Sharif recalled. ‘We sat in the bar and got pissed every night. There was nothing else to do.’ The beer marquee was very popular and used to be packed every night; there was a dart board, table tennis and the odd air-rifle competition. All the booze was provided by Spiegel. But the air conditioning never worked so it was always as hot as hell. One of the riggers marched through the tent one night completely naked except for a pair of boots, past the astonished glances of a couple of production secretaries and Phyllis Dalton, the costume designer.
O’Toole was one of the beer-tent regulars and Rimmington never forgot one particular evening when the actor walked in, clearly well gone, and punched the solid wood upright support of the marquee, punched it with his bare fist. Then walked out again. ‘His knuckles were in a terrible mess the next day. God, he was in a real state.’ There were also practical jokes he played, some more appreciated than others. One night he collapsed the tents of the crew as they lay sleeping. ‘After a day’s hard work in 120 degrees of heat, that wasn’t funny,’ said second unit cameraman Peter Newbrook.
To keep from going completely crackers O’Toole and Sharif would occasionally fly by private plane for a few days off in Beirut, to enjoy the flesh pots of what was then the sin city of the east. ‘We misbehaved ourselves appallingly!’ he later verified. They visited nightclubs and gambled. ‘We once did about nine months’ wages in one night,’ confirmed O’Toole. To keep awake, because they didn’t want to waste time sleeping, they took Dexedrine. Looking for female companionship, they ended up in one place only to be left wondering why the women there were so unresponsive. They were in a nunnery.
As filming progressed, Sam Spiegel, who resided on his yacht off the coast of Aqaba and rarely ventured inland, became increasingly fed up over the time Lean was taking, fearing he’d never leave the blasted desert or finish the picture. It’s true Lean had become despotic, paranoid and a perfection fetishist. On one occasion he found a perfect spot of desert only to return the next morning to find somebody had strayed across it leaving very distinctive footprints. ‘I want to find out who that is,’ Lean raged. ‘I want a shoe inspection!’ The culprit was never found.
After firing off several cables ordering Lean to speed the pace, which only served to antagonize him more, Spiegel took the dramatic decision to shut down production in Jordan at the end of September, after 117 days of filming, and relocate after a break of two months to the more manageable Spain. Production designer John Box recalled that Lean ‘had to be dragged screaming from his caravan’.
O’Toole felt very differently. It meant a return to Britain for a long recuperation and he began by immediately checking into hospital for a refit and recharge. Once out he went on the ultimate bender. ‘After six months in the desert, I should think so.’ Inevitably he got into trouble whilst visiting friends in Bristol. When police stopped his erratic drive down a street at four in the morning, O’Toole stepped out of the vehicle to confess. ‘OK, Skip. Let’s go to the station. I’m drunk.’ Spiegel was far from pleased. ‘You’re not supposed to get up to that kind of caper on a film like this!’ The outcome was a £75 fine and a driving ban.