‘If you want to know what it’s like to be lonely, really lonely,’ O’Toole told a reporter once, ‘try playing Hamlet.’ Burton hadn’t much enjoyed the experience either, and over a boozy lunch one afternoon on the Becket set announced, ‘Let’s be masochists. Let’s do Hamlet again and get it out of our systems.’ They drew up an audacious plan, one of them would perform it on the London stage, the other on Broadway. They flipped a coin: O’Toole got London. Next their choice of director, Gielgud or Olivier. Again the decision was made on the toss of a coin. Burton won and chose Gielgud.
In order to fulfil his end of the bargain O’Toole set up a meeting with Olivier at his Mayfair offices. Larry wasn’t interested at all in directing O’Toole in a short West End run of Hamlet, he had something much bigger in mind. In the last few months he had been chosen as the first artistic director of the National Theatre, an institution a hundred years in the making. Since the late 1800s cultural and political figures from Dickens and Churchill to George Bernard Shaw had bemoaned the fact that Britain had no National Theatre of its own and something really ought to be done about it. In 1962, after several false starts, a board was constituted to run a National Theatre Company and a derelict scrap of land on the South Bank next door to the Royal Festival Hall was earmarked as a perfect site. Nobody was surprised when Olivier was chosen to spearhead the enterprise, given his status and international reputation, combined with the fact that he was the last of the great ‘actor-managers’, a breed that stretched back to the likes of Kean, Garrick and Henry Irving.
It was also assumed that Olivier himself would headline the company’s inaugural production, but snaring O’Toole was too good an opportunity to miss. He would direct O’Toole as Hamlet not amidst the bright lights of London’s West End but to launch the new National Theatre. Recognizing the historical import of what was being suggested, O’Toole readily agreed and they shook hands on the deal.
With construction of the new theatre on the South Bank years away (that was officially launched in 1976 with a production of, yes, Hamlet, with, guess who – Albert Finney), the governors of the Old Vic in Waterloo, scene of some of Olivier’s early stage triumphs, agreed to offer their theatre as a temporary base. Olivier immediately set about making renovations, including putting in a revolving stage and taking out the first two rows of the stalls so that the stage could be extended beyond the proscenium arch. Into this building-site chaos came the Hamlet rehearsals. Max Adrian, cast as Polonius, remembered starting work while ‘the whole place was still littered with rubble and mortar and there was a bloody enormous hole in one wall which allowed the wind to blow straight in from the Waterloo Road.’
As rehearsals got underway it became clear that O’Toole and Olivier did not share the same artistic vision. ‘Peter was like the young buck and Sir Laurence the old bull,’ recalls Rosemary Harris, who had been cast as Ophelia. ‘Peter had played a very successful Hamlet at Bristol and must have thought, oh I’ll just polish it up a bit and do it again, but Sir Laurence seemed to have different ideas about it so they did cross swords a few times. It was clear that they were tolerating each other. But both of them couldn’t have been under more pressure.’
One battle was over whether O’Toole, as he’d done at Bristol, should play the role in full beard: ‘Why should I be the only man in Elsinore with a razor blade?’ Olivier baulked at the suggestion and made his star perform not only clean-shaven but in bleached blond hair and dressed in what O’Toole derogatorily called his ‘little Lord Fauntleroy suit’. Olivier also insisted on the uncut version, five bloody hours on stage, as opposed to the cut version O’Toole had so much success with previously.
While O’Toole held Olivier in the highest reverence (‘I mean, he’s done it. He’s sat on the top of Everest and waved down at the Sherpas’) he simply refused to bow down and bathe in his living legend-hood. More than anything he resented Olivier’s belief that because ‘I know my way about the map of Hamlet much more than you possibly do’ this entitled him to dictate every nuance of his performance. As William Gaskill, who worked under Olivier at the National, observed, ‘He tried to make O’Toole act Hamlet as he, Olivier, would have done.’ Well, O’Toole was having none of it and fought his corner through sheer bloody mindedness. ‘Peter wasn’t too keen on changing his performance,’ observed Rosemary Harris. ‘And I got the feeling that Peter pretty much stuck to his guns and did what he was comfortable with and Sir Laurence in the end sort of shrugged and gave up and realised that there was no point. I thought Peter was giving a wonderful performance, really.’
Years later O’Toole labelled Olivier ‘a tiny, strange, vain fucker. He used to lecture me: “Do you think it’s a good idea to have a drink after the show?” For fuck’s sake!’ It’s true Olivier could be overbearingly rigid when it came to direction, but he was also capable of kindness and encouragement and had much of the cast eating out of his hands from the get go, simply because he exuded such massive self-confidence from the mere fact that he had nothing to prove to anyone. He was, however, more than capable of coming up with his fair share of crackpot ideas. On Hamlet, he wanted the ghost to be a dummy which flew on wires. ‘So the actors came on and then this thing would fly across the stage,’ recalls Gaskill. ‘And we said, “You can’t do that, Larry. It won’t work.” ’
In that inaugural company, Olivier had cleverly sprinkled experienced players such as Michael Redgrave amongst a largely unproven group of young thoroughbreds bristling to make an impact: Robert Stephens as Horatio, Frank Finlay as the gravedigger and Derek Jacobi as Laertes. As a lowly spear carrier was twenty-three-year-old Michael Gambon, who described O’Toole as ‘a God with bright blonde hair’. Terence Knapp, fresh from the very first Chichester Festival, where Olivier had plucked much of his cast, recalls the general reaction at the news O’Toole was to play Hamlet. ‘People were very excited at the thought of what kind of Hamlet he would be. He was already recognized as a very, very distinguished actor, and despite the titled actors like Olivier and Redgrave and Guinness there were many of us who thought that O’Toole was the most exciting actor of the day.’
Hamlet opened at the Old Vic on 22 October 1963. Just as the curtain began to rise Olivier grabbed O’Toole as he waited expectantly in the wings. ‘Are you ready?’
‘For what?’ O’Toole replied.
‘For them. They’re out there with their machine guns. It’s your turn, son.’
It was the critics he was talking about and their opinion of O’Toole was decidedly mixed. ‘I don’t understand why Peter was criticized,’ says Peter Cellier, who played Rosencrantz. ‘Because I thought he was a very good Hamlet, most excellent. It was a clear cut, interesting and vital performance. And the audience reaction was ecstatic.’ Derek Jacobi has gone on record as saying, ‘O’Toole was a smashing Hamlet. There was one rehearsal run-through where he was, I thought, the definitive Hamlet, just wonderful.’ In the end O’Toole perhaps fell between two styles, trying to appease Olivier while doing his own thing. Siân, who sat in the front stalls racked with nerves, had to admit that this Hamlet was ‘a pale shadow’ of the one in Bristol.
As for the production, while not heavily criticized, it was deemed to be lacklustre. ‘I think the critics felt, we mustn’t knock this new venture too much, we’ve waited so long for a national theatre we can’t kill it at birth,’ says Gaskill. ‘But I don’t think anybody thought it was very good.’ Only the set design by the celebrated Sean Kenny was seen as a triumph. Positioned on a revolve, it had the appearance of a snail’s shell, beginning life as battlements facing the audience, quite high, before the whole thing slowly turned around to reveal the royal court. ‘It was a very clever idea when it worked,’ says Rosemary. ‘One night it seized up and refused to budge and there was dear Terence Knapp in his pumpkin hose manually pushing this set around and of course it got gales of laughter from the audience.’
The stress of performing the uncut Hamlet six blasted nights a week and two sodding matinees was punishing on O’Toole. At a party, feeling depressed having to play ‘the Moody One’, a cast member gave him a green pill. ‘I was on the ceiling for forty-eight hours. I was cuckooing and crowing from chimneys, hurtling about and gambolling and skipping – and I never stopped talking. I wept at weather forecasts.’
This exhaustion might excuse an amusing lapse that occurred one matinee, at which the cast had been informed that Noël Coward was out front. When it came time for the famous ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy, O’Toole was discomforted to hear a bout of guffawing emanating from the front stalls. Undeterred, he carried on. ‘Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind …’ – snigger – ‘… to suffer the slings and arrows …’ another laugh, louder this time. What’s going on, he thought. On came Rosemary, and O’Toole put his hand to his forehead and realized he was wearing horn-rimmed spectacles. Just minutes earlier he’d been in the wings with the stage hands picking winners in the Sporting Life and had walked on totally oblivious to the fact they were still on. It had been Coward hooting like mad. Now, how to get rid of them. Turning to Rosemary, O’Toole spat the lines, ‘We will have no more marriages,’ and flung the specs at her.
Luckily for O’Toole’s mental and physical well-being, Shakespeare had obligingly provided a lengthy period in the play where Hamlet is not required on stage. Usually O’Toole took this opportunity to visit Rosemary in her dressing room, who having gone mad and died as Ophelia was now just waiting for the curtain call. ‘We used to have lovely chats about all sorts of things, but during that time he did drink quite a bit and so he was pretty wild when he came back on stage.’ The person who bore the brunt of this was poor Derek Jacobi, who lived in dread of the famous sword fight. During rehearsals O’Toole had voiced his dissatisfaction with the duel as planned and grabbing Jacobi one afternoon said, ‘Let’s work out our own fight.’ He wanted it more ‘swash and buckle’, jumping up on tables, a touch of the Errol Flynns. So the pair of them came up with a new routine, but during one rehearsal instead of jumping O’Toole ducked and the sword went straight across his face. Clamping his hand to the wound he ran to his dressing room mirror. Luckily Jacobi had caught him with the flat of his sword and there was only a slight mark where there might have been blood. Indeed it was Jacobi who was the more shaken and O’Toole poured him a large brandy to quieten his nerves.
The next day Jacobi was summoned to Olivier’s office and told that if he did that again it would cost the company tens of thousands of pounds in insurance money as the makers of O’Toole’s next film would be unable to shoot on his face. This did nothing to lessen Jacobi’s nerves, nor did the knowledge that O’Toole never stuck once to the agreed routine. ‘I was fighting, literally, for my life at the end of the show every night. Peter wasn’t always at his most sober, and he’d wink at me across the stage and I knew I was in for it.’
Two of his old RADA classmates, Gary Raymond and Malcolm Rogers, came to see a performance. Since leaving RADA everyone had tried as much as possible to support and attend each other’s shows, and there was a sense of real camaraderie. Neither man, however, had enjoyed the evening. ‘It was very long and Peter wasn’t very good,’ recalls Rogers. ‘And we weren’t looking forward to going to see him in his dressing room. We thought, what on earth are we going to say.’ This was always a problem, what to say to a friend after a particularly poor performance. What O’Toole always did on the first night, he would never criticize an actor’s performance, it was too sensitive an issue, he’d simply go in and say, ‘Spun gold!’
Fortunately, or rather unfortunately, this was the evening of the Kennedy assassination. ‘So we didn’t have to discuss his performance,’ remembers Raymond. ‘Peter was in a great state. I’m amazed, actually, that he didn’t make some sort of declaration at the curtain call. But he didn’t, so when we got backstage we knew nothing about the Kennedy thing, and Peter was in his dressing room anxiously listening to the radio and the news coming from America.’
During all this, the young company looked to O’Toole as a rock to cling to and he gladly led from the front. ‘This was the beginning of the National Theatre so we were all very conscious that we were making history,’ says Peter Cellier. ‘And we would have done anything, we’d have died for one another to make it a success, there’s no question.’ That O’Toole coped and didn’t appear, at least on the surface, to be affected by it all was extraordinary. He even indulged in a few practical jokes, such as the time he filled the main dressing-room showers with ice. ‘I must say I took to Peter enormously,’ says Terence Knapp. ‘It was great fun as well as being a privilege to be on the same stage with him. He was amazingly modest off stage. On stage it was different, he had a tremendous, vibrant, dynamic personality. But off stage he was a quieter, simpler, nicer man.’
Knapp remembers there had been a disaster in Yugoslavia where a beautiful old theatre had burned down. British Equity organized an appeal to rebuild it and as one of their deputies it was Knapp’s duty to go round backstage at the Old Vic asking for donations. ‘One night after the performance I went into Peter’s dressing room and asked if he would contribute and he called for his cheque book and he signed it and gave it to me – and it was blank. I said, “Peter!” He said, “Just round it off, OK.” ’
This generosity of spirit was often in evidence, especially when it came to his friends. When the actor James Mellor, who had appeared in Baal, died aged just forty-three, O’Toole arranged the funeral and then the wake at Gerry’s drinking club. There was a memorial event at the Old Vic to raise funds for Mellor’s young family, which O’Toole also helped organize. Another anecdote has the actor Tony Selby in the Salisbury having half a bitter, all that he could afford, as he made his way home from the Labour Exchange. O’Toole plus entourage entered and on their way to the snug, where O’Toole liked to drink, he asked Selby to join them. Tony declined pleading a previous engagement to conceal his lack of funds. Just a few minutes later O’Toole came rushing out heading for the exit. Passing Selby he clapped him on the shoulder: ‘Good to see you.’ When he had gone Selby found that O’Toole had left £50 in the breast pocket of his jacket.
O’Toole’s Hamlet came to an end on 4 December, since he was required to start work on a picture. He departed with the gnawing truth that he had far from given of his best on such an august stage. Months awaited him on the other side of the world to search for the reasons why. Perhaps it all stemmed back to that piss-up with Burton, the fact that they both loathed and despised the piece. ‘Of course, I think it’s the worst bloody play ever written. Actors do it out of vanity. I only did it because I was flattered out of my trousers.’
Just days after Hamlet closed, O’Toole called on Rosemary Harris. She was renting a little one-bedroom flat in the Pimlico Road and her two nephews had come to stay the night, bringing along a girlfriend. ‘I’d put them all to bed, the boys roughing it in sleeping bags in the lounge, when the doorbell rang, it must have been about one in the morning, and it was Peter standing there with a bottle of champagne in a bucket and a napkin over his arm. “Are you good for some champagne?” I said, “Yes, come on up.” ‘ The bottle was quickly emptied. Rosemary could tell O’Toole was getting drowsy so tucked him into the twin bed next to her nephew’s girlfriend, then took an eiderdown and some pillows and fell asleep on the floor. ‘The next morning, my nephew’s girlfriend woke up and said, “Who is that in the bed?” After a short pause she suddenly exclaimed, “Oh my goodness, oh my goodness, it’s Lawrence of Arabia!” Peter stayed there for the next three days, he didn’t wake up for three solid days and I had to call Siân to tell her that her husband was fine and that she needn’t worry. I mean, he’d had that huge success as Lawrence and he could have thrown his weight around and been obnoxious or difficult but he was a lamb, he was a sweetheart.’
Rosemary kept in touch with O’Toole and they tried to meet up whenever he was in New York, where she now lived. In 1984, when Rosemary’s daughter, the actress Jennifer Ehle, was at school in London and O’Toole was appearing on stage in Pygmalion she took her and some friends to the matinee. ‘I said afterwards, come on, we’ll go and see Peter. He had the star dressing room and he was waiting for us in this beautiful dressing gown and he held me in his arms and we gave each other a great big hug, and I looked at all these little girls with their big round eyes and I said, “You’ve just seen the oldest Hamlet and the oldest Ophelia in the world.” ’
Not long after regaining consciousness in Rosemary’s flat, O’Toole was pumped full of eighteen inoculations against tropical diseases, then raced to catch a flight to Hong Kong, where he was to start shooting Lord Jim. ‘The next bloody day I’m in a blazing small boat, wearing a funny hat and paddling like a man possessed.’ This was another mammoth Lawrence-like epic, with an international cast that included James Mason, Eli Wallach and Jack Hawkins, and a gruelling exercise for O’Toole whose idea of a workout was ‘carrying a pint of bitter from one smoke-filled room to another’.
Based on Joseph Conrad’s classic philosophical novel, Lord Jim was set in the Orient of the nineteenth century and told of a sailor branded a coward who is looking for a way to redeem himself and finds absolution inevitably in his own death. Columbia (the backers of Lawrence of Arabia) had given nearly ten million dollars to director Richard Brooks, who had started in the business working with John Huston as the script writer of Key Largo, convinced he could deliver an adventure story out of the material.
During his time in Hong Kong, which did not endear itself to O’Toole, ‘Manchester with slanted eyes’, he dubbed it, the actor got up to his usual antics. Staying in the plush Peninsula Hotel, he horrified the management by personally pulling a rickshaw and its driver into the main lobby at 2am and buying the fellow a drink.
Brooks made extensive use of the city’s waterfront, though when it came to filming on a junk the director learned of his star’s lamentable time in the Royal Navy and aversion to any sort of choppy water. For the eight days the crew shot on the ocean O’Toole vomited profusely. ‘He’d rush to the side of the ship and heave, and then go before the camera as if nothing had happened,’ said Brooks. ‘In eight days he must have tried every known medical and non-medical remedy. Nothing worked.’
After six weeks the company left Hong Kong and arrived for the bulk of location shooting in Cambodia. Despite an anti-West ferment brewing amongst the country’s populace, Brooks had managed to get permission to shoot in the ancient temple ruins of Angkor Wat, where technicians built school houses, shops, a stockade and a tribal palace. To accommodate the large cast and crew, the studio had to sanction a huge payment to add a forty-seven-room wing onto a little hotel near the location site. ‘That hotel!’ raged O’Toole. ‘More expensive than Claridge’s; ten flaming quid a night and a poxy room at that. Nicest thing you could say about the food was that it was grotesque.’ Soon everyone was suffering from dysentery and prickly heat rash and being set upon by giant stinging insects amidst insufferable temperatures. When Siân visited, a massive spider fell out of a pristinely folded towel in her hotel bathroom.
Then the snakes arrived. Walking down the middle of a jungle road, O’Toole came face to face with a huge black cobra. ‘They say no snake can travel faster than a scared human,’ he recalled, ‘but I ain’t so sure.’ When the snake pounced the speed of the thing was dazzling, luckily it went in the opposite direction to a frozen O’Toole. Another time a cobra slithered onto the set and dropped to the floor of the makeshift ladies’ toilet. Of particular dread was a snake called the two-step. ‘It bites you, you take two steps,’ explained O’Toole, ‘and then you die.’
In truth the snakes were less of a problem than the local officials, who constantly sought bribes. Brooks was forced to hire Cambodian soldiers instead of local extras, and with half a dozen or so dialects spoken there were translators for the translators. For good reason did Brooks call himself ‘a lunatic in the middle of the jungle trying to make a movie’. As for O’Toole, he took enjoyment in the company of the stuntmen, playing poker with them in the evening.
During filming the pulse of political violence beating just below the surface grew louder. Cambodia’s pro-China Prince Sihanouk was currently in a war of words with the United States over Vietnam, foreshadowing the horrors that were to come. O’Toole remembers him paying the set a visit. ‘He started yelling the usual anti-British crud. I walked up to him and said, “I couldn’t agree with you more. I’m Irish meself.” ’
One day a stranger appeared on the location and advised Brooks to get his company out of Cambodia by 12 March 1964. Deciding to take no chances, Brooks ordered the work schedule to be doubled. Shooting went on seven days a week and from noon until nearly dawn in order for everyone to be safely out of the country. One week later the US and British embassies were attacked by mobs. O’Toole was convinced that some of the trouble-makers had worked on the film. When the Prince denounced the movie company as ‘Western imperialist invaders’ on national radio, O’Toole took revenge by telling a reporter from Life magazine: ‘If I live to be a thousand I want nothing like Cambodia again. It was a bloody nightmare.’ Not forgetting to mention that he once found a live snake in his soup. When word of the interview reached the Prince, O’Toole was persona non grata.
Once out of Cambodia, O’Toole and Siân flew to Japan for a brief holiday, where they were invited to watch the great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa shoot his new movie with Toshiro Mifune, whom O’Toole insisted on calling ‘Tosher’. The two stars seemed to get on, though Mifune could speak no English at all, but that didn’t stop them getting roaring drunk that evening. Next the couple flew to New York for the opening there of Becket. A nervous flyer at the best of times, ‘I can’t believe all that tonnage can float in the air’, by the time the couple reached the city O’Toole hadn’t had a proper kip for thirty-six hours. After the usual press conferences and inane meet and greets, O’Toole hadn’t slept for sixty hours when he agreed to go on the Johnny Carson Show, one of the most watched TV programmes in America. Three minutes into the interview O’Toole, having been unable to put two words coherently together, collapsed, broke his glasses, excused himself and walked off. The effect was sensational. No one had ever walked off the Johnny Carson Show before. ‘I came home in a box.’
For years afterwards Carson was asked what really happened in that interview: was O’Toole jet-lagged, drunk or both? Finally, in 1978, O’Toole was invited back and gently reminded of the incident by his host. He decided to come clean: ‘We’d left Japan on Monday and arrived in New York on Sunday, which alarmed me. And coming from Japan one stopped at lots of places, Hawaii and all over, and our stopping coincided with the cocktail hour. Everywhere we went it was the cocktail hour. And one doesn’t want to be discourteous. So we were pissed, that’s true.’
Chosen as a Royal film performance, Lord Jim turned out to be a dud at the box office and a critical failure, with the main complaint being that Brooks didn’t know whether he was making a full-blooded, no-holds-barred adventure yarn or a psychological study. O’Toole was particularly singled out for attack. Variety called his performance ‘self-indulgent and lacking in real depth’. Observing the wreckage, O’Toole admitted he suited neither the film nor the role and that it had been an error of judgement. ‘I was in danger of becoming known as a tall, blond, thin dramatic actor, always self-tortured and in doubt and looking off painfully into the horizon. Lord Jim was my comeuppance. It was a mistake and I made the mistake because I was conservative and played safe. And that way lies failure.’ Perhaps, he mused, he should have taken on the challenge of James Mason’s villainous river pirate, but of course at that time nobody would have let him, it was not the star part. O’Toole might have scoffed at the idea of himself as a handsome leading-man type, preferring to mould his image into that of a ‘star’ character actor, but the studios didn’t see it that way. He was learning the hard way the limitations and burden of stardom.
Whatever the levels of fame, O’Toole tried desperately to keep his feet on the ground. He was often asked whether success had changed him and he liked to think it hadn’t. ‘I like having money,’ he told one reporter. ‘I like to know I can take care of my wife and kids. I’ve had enough of poverty. I once wrote a poem with the line, “My thighs are bruised by poverty,” meaning that pennies are heavy, not like that crisp paper stuff which is what you want. But, of course, success changes other people toward you.’
As often as he could he made trips back to Leeds to visit his parents and retained a small yet loyal group of friends, including Patrick Oliver, now trying to make his way in the art world. Later in the decade O’Toole bought a rather splendid early Victorian house in Potternewton Lane in Leeds with the intention of making it his domicile in his home town. Instead he ended up giving it to Oliver and it became his family home until the mid-nineties.
The two men would often meet up. Oliver’s son Richard recalls his father saying how he once arrived at a theatre to see O’Toole perform with a complimentary ticket but without an allocated seat. ‘A splendid throne was dragged out of the props room and placed prominent side-stage for him to observe the proceedings from … and be observed.’ On another occasion Oliver missed a train home due to extended drink-taking by both parties, and O’Toole provided him with a VIP air ticket to get him back to Yorkshire, and a chauffeured limousine to take him to the airport. ‘Now, my father was, to say the least of it, visually striking in his younger years with an unforgettable shock of wildly unkempt hair and a beat’s disdain for conventional norms of sartorial cleanliness. Apparently the assortment of well-to-do business persons gathered there waiting to board the plane were somewhat taken aback when the immaculate Daimler rolled up, the smart chauffeur opened the passenger door and a wild-looking scruffy tramp with three days’ stubble and a red-eye hangover stumbled out, to be escorted to the posh end of the aircraft!’