My cousin, also a great follower of the brooding Irishman with a booming voice that was Peter O'Toole, called his the look of "broken glass." It was as if his inner life was cracking out of him, coming piece by piece from the depth of his soul.
I saw that look for the first time when I was about 8 years old when he was Lawrence of Arabia. He was Lawrence, for he inhabited the role. I was far too young to see such a film about such a complicated historical figure with such a complicated emotional life, but I could not take my eyes off that face nor could I fail to grasp the talent.
He was wild in his youth and well beyond, threatening his health and no doubt shortening his old age by several years. But never did he lose his great capacity to act. To watch The Lion in Winter is to be enthralled--he and his great friend Katherine Hepburn, Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitane tearing each other apart verbally and strategically. To watch him as the broke drunken actor in "My Favorite Year" watching the daughter who does not know him from afar, regret expressed in a slight but telling movement of head, and eye, was to feel something endemic to his real life being.
His crazed creative director in "The Stunt Man" is magical. He could be alternately comedic and gravely dramatic. He could do it in the same movie.
I had the good fortune to see him twice in my life. The first time was in 1987 after I had moved to California, but was back in New York for a visit. He was Professor Higgins in a Broadway production of Pygmalion, along with Sir John Mills and Amanda Plummer, alas the latter a miscast that affected the effectiveness of the production. I had been the recipient of house seats by a friend who knew of my life long admiration of Mr. O'Toole. I could see Mills and O'Toole staged banter spoken with a little spit, gleaming eyes and slight smiles, clearly friends working together. I watched outside the stage door as he signed autographs, looking deeply and unsettlingly into the eyes of the recipient of his largesse. The look of broken glass. Of a passionate, unsettled seeming man. He was at the time in some kind of suit over the custody of his only son, Lorcan, I think. The boy was with him. I sent my second fan letter to the theatre (my first was to James Stewart) a silly expectation that he'd ever get it, or have any interest in it.
It would be more than twenty years, in 2011, before I'd see him again, on this coast. It was after the 2006 film "Venus" in which he played an old actor on his literally last legs having a kind of innocently lasciviously fling with a young woman who had no idea of the man he had been. Turner Classic Movies was having its first film Festival, and O'Toole was going to be at one or two of the films, including Lawrence, that featured him, but more importantly, he was going to be interviewed before a live audience at the Henry Fonda theatre, for broadcast at a later time on the channel. If I saw nothing else at that festival, it was going to be this interview with Robert Osborne.
He was presented to the audience, accompanied at each arm. He was still tall, but frighteningly frail. He walked haltingly. He looked every bit his 79 years or so, and well more.
As Osborne explained to us our roles, he sat quietly, occasionally wiping his mouth, with great discretion, with a handerchief. I wasn't sure he was up to this interview. He was very nearly vacant. A woman to my right complained that she couldn't see him. Couldn't they position him in a manner that would give her a better view? Osborne explained that he had to be in the view of the camera, so no.
And then the show began, the camera was on. Action. And O'Toole reanimated, an easy raconteur about his early life, his acting life, and his life as a happy European in Ireland.
At one point, he turned his head to look in the direction of the woman who had interposed her desire to have him face her. He commented that he wanted to be sure that he was seen on that side of the theatre.
He had been observing us all. I couldn't tell you how delighted I was to be there, and how I wished my companion at the festival had joined me, two once children of Mount Vernon and the Bronx, transplanted to the Hollywood wonderland.
TCM did not show the piece unstil 2012. And it seems that around then, O'Toole announced his retirement from acting.
At the end of "My Favorite Year", the young writer who has been herding the unruly, emotionally wounded, actor watches him being applauded by the audience of the fifties television show. The actor, Alan Swan, dressed as a swashbuckler from one of his old movies, is smiling in acknowledgment and waving his sword. The young writer says, "This is how I'll remember him."
This is how I'll remember Peter O'Toole. I was 8 years old. He was 29, and beautiful.
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