O’Toole hadn’t been long back from Mexico when all the stomach problems that had plagued him for years and his reckless drinking conspired to almost put him into an early grave. Repeatedly he was warned that the amount he was drinking was unhealthy but O’Toole had been born with extraordinary restorative powers and always seemed to come out of the other end of a drinking binge seemingly none the worse for wear. When he shared a flat with Kenneth Griffith in Belgravia, Siân learnt that some nights O’Toole would sit there drinking Scotch from one glass and white ulcer medicine from another, while alternately puffing on Gauloises.
Was all this drinking a death wish, as some have suggested? Highly doubtful. On the night he returned to Guyon House after an evening boozing and complained of stomach pains evidently greater and more acute than any he had hitherto experienced, Siân could see the worry etched out on his face. When their local doctor arrived he decided that O’Toole should be immediately hospitalized and called an ambulance to take him to the nearby Royal Free.
Curiously among the first things that happened to him was a vigorous shave. O’Toole had grown a handsome beard to play Judas in Lew Grade’s TV mini-series Jesus of Nazareth and went to remonstrate with the nurse given the task of removing it: ‘Hey, don’t do that. I need it.’ No he didn’t, he could barely walk let alone act. So ill was he that he couldn’t keep solid food down and pure water had to be fed directly into his stomach through a pipe.
As tests began Siân was kept away, they wouldn’t even let her see him until the next day. When she walked into the room he was hooked up to so many machines that it looked like his life force was being drained away. When the tests came back inconclusive his team of doctors decided to carry out exploratory surgery. It was to be the first of several serious operations. ‘I suggested they put in a zip, they were opening me up so often,’ O’Toole later joked.
Inevitably the press found out and began to speculate that O’Toole had alcohol poisoning or something wrong with his liver. They didn’t know the full story, only Siân, the doctors and Jules Buck knew how perilously he was clinging on to life. The children, who were luckily on holiday in Ireland with Siân’s mother, hadn’t been told and together Siân and Buck tried to keep the media in the dark as much as possible, though it didn’t help that Siân was sometimes called at home by journalists asking if she’d help update her husband’s obituary. Siân knew things were bad when talking to the ward sister one day, ‘It will get better, won’t it?’ she burst into tears and fled the room. For the weeks that O’Toole lay in that hospital in a comatose state Siân stood a lonely vigil by his bedside, watching as the man she loved ‘hovered between life and death’.
With some convinced he wasn’t going to pull through, O’Toole finally opened his eyes, looked across at Siân and gave her a lopsided grin, before ripping out the tubes stuck in his body and demanding to be fed. Shortly afterwards Jules Buck arrived, beaming. ‘He’ll outlive us all, kid,’ he said.
Discharged, O’Toole was gingerly taken back home and placed in bed to convalesce. Bored after a week, he fancied recuperating somewhere a bit more exotic than his own bedroom. Siân tried to reason with him, that doctors had urged him to rest and stay put. O’Toole would not be dissuaded and they booked a month in a hotel in Positano on the Amalfi coast that in the end did him the world of good.
Returning to London, O’Toole was open to a barrage of press intrusion about his time in hospital but refused to comment. ‘My plumbing is nobody’s business but my own.’ American tabloids reported that his pancreas was removed, other rumours were that he’d got stomach cancer, but O’Toole denied them. What was true was that he came as close to dying as you can do without actually snuffing it. ‘It was a photo-finish, the surgeons said.’ However, there was now so little of his digestive system left that even the smallest amount of alcohol might kill him. He was ordered off the booze. And this time he heeded his doctor’s advice, while at the same time insisting the wine cellar at Guyon House remain fully stocked, as indeed was the drinks cabinet in his study.
In 1980 on the set of the American TV mini-series Masada O’Toole confided in his co-star Barbara Carrera about his operation and the consequences of his years of drinking. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I’ve got to tell you I’ve got no stomach, my whole stomach has been removed because of alcohol. And if I were to drink a mere spoonful of alcohol it would kill me.’ Barbara was so shocked that every one of those words she’s never been able to forget. ‘Then he unbuttoned his shirt and showed me this scar that went from his chest to his abdomen. It was horrific.’
It’s very easy to stop drinking when your actual life depends on it. But what’s it like for someone who made virtually a career out of it, an ex-hell-raiser, to no longer be the rip-roarer of old? ‘The pirate ship has berthed,’ is how he put it. O’Toole simply stopped playing the bad boy, cut out the wild antics, no more binges, no more lost weekends, no more taking his two daughters into pubs under his coat just as his father had done with him. ‘It was all becoming a bore. The pleasure wasn’t worth the pain.’ But what remained was a ravaged shell of a man, and the loss of his looks too early in life. Yet he remained unrepentant till the end, telling a US magazine in 1989, ‘I wouldn’t have missed one drop of alcohol that I drank.’
He was actually coping quite well, having been prescribed plenty of vitamins to chew and hefty doses of Valium, though still chain-smoked his Gauloises using a long black holder, equipped with a filter in a concession to health. Such was his devotion to the habit that a friend once complained. ‘Peter, you smell like a French train.’ Actor Michael Craig recalls a strange incident when the two of them were making Country Dance in 1969. ‘We both smoked Gauloises, Peter smoked his without filters then and I smoked filtered ones. And he got in a terrible rage. “What’s the matter with you, bloody filters!” And he took my fags and broke all the filters off. “Now have a proper cigarette,” he said.’
After giving up the booze O’Toole had little patience with drinkers, even if they were friends, or so it seemed. One of his closest acting buddies was Donal McCann, who took great pride in his association with O’Toole. ‘He idolized O’Toole,’ claims Billy Foyle. ‘He was a god to Donal.’ Visiting the Connemara area, McCann got in touch with Foyle asking if O’Toole was around and if they could set up a meeting. O’Toole’s number was ex-directory, Foyle was one of the few people who had it, so he called the house. After a short pause O’Toole spoke, he wanted to know if McCann was drinking. Foyle said he didn’t think he was. In fact, unknown to Foyle, McCann, who was an alcoholic, had been seen drunk in Clifden, something that O’Toole soon discovered after making a few phone calls of his own. When Foyle and McCann arrived at the house O’Toole was down near the beach exercising a pony on a long rope. The two men rested on the gate to watch. O’Toole ignored them. McCann was holding a stick and put a white handkerchief on the top and started waving it. O’Toole continued to ignore them. Fed up, Foyle went down to O’Toole to tell him in no uncertain manner what he thought of him. O’Toole returned his glare. ‘You told me McCann wasn’t drinking.’
‘He’s not drunk,’ said Foyle.
O’Toole’s face remained impassive. ‘I didn’t ask you that. I asked was he drinking!’ Things got a bit heated and Foyle ended up telling O’Toole where he could go and left. ‘Poor McCann was very upset that Peter wouldn’t see him,’ says Foyle, ‘and spent three days in the town drunk until they got him out. You know, there’s nothing so pure as the reformed whore, and O’Toole not being the drinker and McCann still at it, I thought Peter would have shown a bit more generosity and sympathy, but he didn’t.’