In April 1987, O’Toole accepted an offer to reprise his London success as Henry Higgins in a Broadway production of Pygmalion. It proved to be his first and only appearance on the New York stage and was not an altogether happy experience. The show ran till August, during which time O’Toole was felled by illness and poor health, resulting in him missing something like twenty-two performances. His understudy, Ivar Brogger, has never forgotten that first phone call from the stage manager: ‘Mr O’Toole has lost his voice – so you’re on.’ That was towards the end of the first month, after which O’Toole never managed to play a full week again. ‘He just could not bounce back,’ says Brogger. ‘So he would do a few shows and then he’d be out maybe for one performance, maybe three, it depended on how he was feeling.’
The rumour mill went into overload that O’Toole’s cocaine use was to blame. But Brogger firmly believes it was nothing to do with drugs or alcohol. ‘I think Peter physically was at a place where if something happened it was hard for him to recover easily or quickly.’ At one point Brogger confronted O’Toole’s personal assistant to ask if there was anything going on. ‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘He is not doing anything. When he comes home after the show he has a glass of warm milk and then goes to bed.’
When the producers began insinuating that O’Toole wasn’t really sick, that he just didn’t fancy doing eight shows a week, the hospital called to confirm his illness. ‘I found out many years later that Peter was really sick, that he could have passed away,’ confirms Johnnie Planco. ‘It was something to do with intestinal pain or internal bleeding. It was serious, no doubt about it.’
The effort and strain O’Toole exerted to get himself through that run Brogger saw first-hand. Often he was invited to his dressing room, where they sat and talked for hours, sometimes about acting. Brogger recalls O’Toole telling him about how one day he wanted to play King Lear. ‘I’ll never forget this particular night, Peter was really low, he wasn’t feeling good. He was about to get ready to go on stage and I think it was looking like Mount Everest to him. He was sitting in his chair in front of his make-up mirror. I put my hand on his shoulder and thought I’d get him onto a subject he might enjoy talking about so I said, “Tell me about your ideas for Lear.” And he put his hands over his face and said, “Oh Christ.” Then he looked in the mirror: “Just let me get through tonight.” ’
Besides being understudy Brogger was also cast in the small role of ‘sarcastic bystander’, who gives Higgins something of a hard time in the opening scene set in Covent Garden. At an early rehearsal O’Toole called Brogger to one side. ‘Ivar, do you know, I had some thoughts about the sarcastic bystander, and I think perhaps he slouches a lot, perhaps with a fag hanging out of his mouth and a cap on his head, hands in his pockets, never really stands up straight.’ Brogger’s face registered a degree of scepticism. It didn’t take long for a wry smile to emerge on O’Toole’s face. ‘Well, you see,’ he said. ‘The fact is, I want to appear very tall on stage and you and I are of the same height …’ Brogger cut in. ‘It’s perfectly OK, Peter, it gives me something to play as the sarcastic bystander, and if you want to be taller than me on stage that’s cool.’ O’Toole was nothing if not very canny.
After Brogger had appeared for O’Toole a few times he was called into his dressing room one night and asked how he was enjoying it. ‘Peter, I have to tell you, it’s a great role, and I appreciate the opportunity, but it’s not an unalloyed joy going on for you.’
O’Toole looked aghast. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, I’ve never been in a situation where just my very presence is a disappointment to hundreds of people.’
O’Toole looked at Brogger, a veneer of sympathy on his face. ‘I know, dear boy. I know.’
‘He knew he was a star,’ says Brogger. ‘He accepted it like you need water to live.’
In the role of Eliza Doolittle, O’Toole had insisted upon Amanda Plummer, the actress daughter of Christopher Plummer. O’Toole and Christopher Plummer had been friends since the sixties and delighted in each other’s company. ‘They never worked together,’ says Johnnie Planco. ‘But boy when you saw them together they were like long-lost brothers. Whenever I used to bump into Chris the first thing he’d say was, “How’s Peter?” ’
An enormous fan of O’Toole, Amanda had flown from New York to London just a few years before, when O’Toole and Albert Finney were appearing in separate plays at the same time in the West End. ‘I calculated that I would only have a few pennies left after this trip, but I went, fuck it, I’ve got to go see this, I don’t care if I don’t eat for a year.’ After one show she went backstage to see Finney and he took her out for a meal. ‘Wow – that was so friggin’ generous, unbelievable. I didn’t quite get the courage up to go see Peter backstage. But then to end up working with him – shit!’
Before the read-through Amanda took it upon herself to invite O’Toole to dinner at her apartment. ‘I was in extreme awe of him, which is like the kiss of death, so I had to overcome this aweness. God I was trembling. Ding dong – oh shit, I could hear him coming to the door – oh my God I can’t talk.’ Graciously O’Toole put Amanda at ease, he had huge admiration for her abilities and became extremely fond of her. On stage the pair clicked. Amanda marvelled at O’Toole’s ability to change things from performance to performance, to make what was light, dark, to make what was dark, light and play with all the greys in between. But above all it was his energy. ‘Playing with Peter and looking in his eyes, it was magic, the energy around him – you just let go.’
Sadly, Amanda herself came down with an illness and had to take a break from the show. O’Toole took pleasure in playing nurse maid, putting her in his guest bedroom and making her drink a concoction of his own devising. Looking at it Amanda wasn’t so sure and wanted to know what was in it. ‘Don’t ask,’ she was told.
When Amanda’s understudy, an English actress, took over, O’Toole didn’t think she was up to the job. One night during the opening scene she said her line only for O’Toole to turn away to face Brogger and say, ‘Oh Christ, she’s acting again.’ O’Toole’s goading did not stop there. ‘Another night,’ recalls Brogger, ‘she said a line to him and he said – “What!” – and made her repeat it. She repeated the line and he said – “WHAT!” – and made her say the line a third time. This was on stage, in front of an audience.’ After the famous tea-party scene, where Higgins shows off the transformed Eliza to his mother, O’Toole literally shooed the actress off the stage like you might shoo off a bunch of chickens. Brogger confronted him about it. ‘But she does nothing,’ O’Toole said in his defence. ‘So I have to do everything!’
While in New York, O’Toole was able to have Lorcan come and live part of the week with him in his Manhattan hotel. Brogger remembers that O’Toole often talked about Lorcan and it was so very evident that he doted on the boy. ‘Lorcan was the apple of his eye. He loved Lorcan. To see him light up when Lorcan came into the room was wonderful.’ Even at the age of four, Brogger could see a little of O’Toole in the precocious lad. ‘There was the occasion when Lorcan arrived at the theatre all dressed up because they were going on somewhere after the show. Preening himself he announced, “These are my smashing clothes.” Another time he wandered a bit too far backstage and one of the stagehands had to tell him not to walk any further because then the audience would be able to see him. Lorcan turned around and looked at the stagehand and there was a mischievous twinkle in his eye like, oh yeah, you mean I could just walk over there and everyone will see me.’
While business was brisk, reviews for Pygmalion were mixed. Amanda Plummer herself thinks the production was too conservative and safe. The supporting cast were very much of the old school: Lionel Jeffries as Pickering and John Mills playing Doolittle. There was also Joyce Redman, best known for the eating scene with Albert Finney in Tom Jones, playing Higgins’ mother. According to Brogger, O’Toole doted on Joyce throughout the production. ‘He loved her, and no wonder. She was seventy-five years old but walked like – I still got it.’
O’Toole’s own idiosyncratic performance, according to Brogger, divided the Broadway theatrical community: ‘I think a lot of people thought he was drunk or they were not overly receptive to what he was doing. Then there were others, and I’m certainly in that camp, who thought he was so original in that role that he was a joy to watch.’ When he was not nominated for a Tony Award, O’Toole defended himself in his usual manner. ‘Not knowing what a Tony was until I had not been nominated, I wasn’t disappointed.’
When his time on Broadway was at an end O’Toole returned to Clifden and his beloved house and garden and his trips into town. ‘When we were making The Stunt Man,’ recalls Steve Railsback, ‘Peter told me that when he was in Ireland he would go to the pubs and he would just recite poetry. This was his life. What a wonderful thing.’
He had also found a new passion, something that perhaps gave him a sense of locality and identity, breeding the famous Connemara pony. He owned three or four of them, which he’d enter in the annual Connemara pony show, held in Clifden every summer. This was like Oscar night for O’Toole. There he would be every year, always the centre of attention in his tweeds. ‘Peter was funny because at home he would come in with a dirty old rain mac and a pair of chinos and a jumper,’ says Paul D’Alton. ‘But then in the Connemara pony show, because he was then on stage, as it were, he’d dress up and it was hilarious. Although he always said he was an Irishman and patriotic, he’d dress like the full English country squire, the tweed outfit was perfectly pressed. It was like a Silicon Valley millionaire going shooting in Scotland, the Barbour jacket wouldn’t have been handed down and dirty and torn like all of ours, it would be spotless.’
According to D’Alton, O’Toole didn’t really know very much about horses, ‘and was nearly decapitated when his stallion Dr Slattery half dragged him across the show field at the Connemara pony show as we died laughing’. O’Toole thought he was on to a winner with Dr Slattery, telling everyone who’d listen what a great stallion it was. When it failed to win the top prize one year that was the last anyone heard or saw of the beast.
By the end of the year he had accepted another movie role, in the comedy High Spirits, playing the owner of an Irish castle in danger of repossession who decides to turn the place, with the help of his staff, into a haunted house for the tourist trade. The studio wanted Sean Connery, but when he pulled out director Neil Jordan replaced him with O’Toole. It was his first lead in a film for several years and it was now plainly obvious that he was no longer first choice in many Hollywood producers’ minds. In truth, his box-office status had been waning for more than a decade now, but his name and presence could still add gravitas to any production.
Jordan pulled together an impressive cast. Joining O’Toole were Steve Guttenberg, Daryl Hannah, Ray McAnally and Liam Neeson, whose girlfriend of the time was hovering around the set most of the time, a young actress by the name of Julia Roberts. Filming began with interiors at Shepperton and O’Toole’s dressing room quickly turned into the social hub of the movie, coming as it did with a well-stocked bar. Most of the Irish actors, once made up and in costume, hung out there, drinking and playing cards. O’Toole held court, either talking about cricket or studying the papers and putting bets on the horses. Often he was in raconteur mode. ‘He told us lots and lots of drinking stories,’ recalls actress and singer Mary Coughlan. ‘About when he was in the desert with Omar Sharif and they hired motorbikes from a local guy and just fucked off for three days.’
On set O’Toole was friendly and amusing, and Guttenberg has always appreciated the one piece of advice he was given. ‘He’d say, always do something different, whenever you’re acting, whenever you’re creating, always pop out from another hole.’
One day on set Guttenberg talked to O’Toole about the frustrations of the profession, that it had the capacity sometimes to make you so angry you got home and kicked the dog. ‘How do you avoid kicking the dog?’ O’Toole thought for a while before replying, ‘Don’t have a dog.’
During location filming around Limerick, O’Toole took Guttenberg to a rugby match, one presumes it was Munster, the team both he and Harris followed. It was a memorable experience for the American, the passion of the crowd and being with someone whose love of the game was matched by his knowledge of it.
Although High Spirits was panned by critics and flopped at the box office, Mary says it was ‘absolutely great craic to make’. Guttenberg, too, enjoyed his time on the film and working with O’Toole. ‘He was so theatrical in himself. When he was ordering tea he was Peter O’Toole, he couldn’t help the equipment he was born with.’
In Limerick his room was directly below O’Toole’s and every morning he could hear him methodically going through his vocal exercises. ‘Even after being in the business for so long and having done all those movies, every job was important to him.’
Over the last few years Lorcan had been shuttled back and forth between his mother and father in England and America. It must have been an intolerable situation for O’Toole and Karen, and a deeply unsettling one for the young Lorcan, having continually to say goodbye to one or other of his parents. ‘There were always tears and it was hard for me. Sometimes I think the happiest time was sitting on the plane that took me across the Atlantic because I was midway between them.’
It had now come to the point where the joint custody arrangement, set up when Lorcan was a baby and under which both parents alternated custody of him every three months, had become unworkable and both parties were arguing for a change. In April 1988, O’Toole allowed his judgement to be clouded once again when he refused to release Lorcan after his visit was over. Karen immediately ordered the courts to force him to return the boy. He refused. Tough New York lawyers threatened O’Toole with a daily fine of $1,000 from his earnings on The Last Emperor if he failed to hand over Lorcan to his mother. Karen then upped the stakes even higher, getting her lawyers to ask a US federal judge to issue an arrest warrant and a ruling that O’Toole was in contempt of court, which meant he could be arrested the moment he entered the United States.
A month later, O’Toole and Karen sat barely thirty feet apart from each other in London’s High Court, the two former lovers refusing to even look each other in the face. It was an appearance before the world’s press that O’Toole could well have lived without, he looked frail and nervous. The judgement, when it came, was a devastating setback. The son he adored had to return with his mother to America pending a further court hearing when it would be decided once and for all which parent should get sole custody.
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.’