The deaths, over the weekend, of Peter O’Toole and Joan Fontaine reminded us, once again, what a strange principality movie stardom is. Think of it as a kind of Monaco: few are born there, but many arrive, some to disport themselves at the watering holes and gaming tables, others to cultivate that notorious anonymity that is the last redoubt of fame. The church mouse may be the neighbor of the libertine. Costs of living (not merely financial) can be exorbitant, and personal loyalties prone to decay; expulsions are cruel and common, and you dare not appeal against them, for they are ordained not by a court of the land but by the judgment of the world beyond. On the other hand, re-admittance to stardom, after exile, is not unknown; in the case of O’Toole, he would drift away, out of sight but never quite out of mind, and then, just as we—and, by all accounts, he himself—started to ask if he were technically alive, he would stroll back into the light.
A fertile start to the nineteen-eighties, for example, with “The Stunt Man” (1980) and “My Favorite Year” (1982), was followed by five years of near-drought; then came “The Last Emperor,” much of it confined to the Forbidden City, where O’Toole played a Scotsman who is employed to tutor a living god. This was just the kind of role he relished—courteously stiff but pliably amused, far too urbane to be shocked, and perfectly at home with modes of life that other men might shy from as surreal. “Nothing is written,” he had declared, as T. E. Lawrence, and here was a new twist on that dictum: no city was forbidden. As the Chinese emperor played tennis, O’Toole sat in the umpire’s chair and called out the score, with such aplomb that a stranger, wandering past the court, might have wondered who was the deity here, and who the hired hand. A small army intruded, interrupting play and giving the Emperor an hour to pack and leave. The Scotsman remained aloft, alone, and aloof, while, all around, a dynasty hastened to its end.
O’Toole was not Scottish, of course; nor was he the fair Englishman who, on a starlit night in the desert, in the midst of David Lean’s “Lawrence of Arabia,” informs his Hashemite guide that he hails from Oxfordshire—“a fat country.” He was Irish, as tall and slim and unsnappable as a Malacca cane, and one regret, for his moviegoing fans, was that they saw and heard far less of O’Toole the Celt than their theatre-loving counterparts were privileged to enjoy. Onstage, he did a lot of Shaw: Peter Shirley in “Major Barbara,” Jack Tanner in “Man and Superman,” King Magnus in “The Apple Cart,” and Henry Higgins in “Pygmalion.” The part of Tanner—the bachelor anarchist who assumes the part of Don Juan, in the third act, for a debate with the Devil—was close to O’Toole’s heart; it was filmed, but only for TV. Shavian testiness became him well, as you would imagine, but no less important was a profound belief that the gab was more than a gift; it was a glory, to be polished and brandished as Joyce and Shaw had taught us, and it was also a passport that helped you to cross all frontiers and sail through the most trying or chastening of situations. As the tutor pointed out, in old Peking, “If you cannot say what you mean, Your Majesty, you cannot mean what you say; and a gentleman always means what he says.”
The obituaries that latched onto O’Toole’s misdeeds as a boozer missed the point, or grabbed only half of it. Like many stars, he was actually twin stars, fused together; within his nature, the gentleman cohabited with the fearsome rake, just as, within his Lawrence, something fey and dreamy, bordering dangerously on the camp, consorted with the unappeased ferocity of the warrior. Both facets shone in his sapphire stare. And that voice! By what miracle of instinct did Lean manage to cast a man who sounded, even before he reached the desert, as though his words had been naturally sanded? He could strike his consonants hard, as Laurence Olivier did, but with less of a cluck, and that soft, rasping croon of his, when he chose to deploy it, had the ominous effect of making you want to stop the action and offer him a drink. This may be sheer coincidence, but one thing that bound O’Toole to the pack that he ran with, in his lurid years, was that all of them—Richard Burton, Richard Harris, and Oliver Reed—had speaking tones so rich and nectared that the rest of us could get drunk on them as they poured into our ears. What drove the hell-raisers, heaven knows; were they wasting talent, drowning sorrow, making hay, or raising their glasses as a complaint against the world for not being a fraction as beautiful as their words would have it be?
To watch O’Toole and Orson Welles on the BBC’s “Monitor” program, in 1963, as they ruminate at length on “Hamlet” and his father’s ghost, is to realize what a real talk show is, or what it could be, when the airwaves were still haunted by the grand talkers. What takes you slightly aback, however, is not that O’Toole seems willing and able to discuss seventeenth-century Catholic doctrines of the afterlife but that, with his dicky bow, dark shirt, and thick-rimmed black spectacles, he looks like a man in disguise. His face and frame were those of an El Greco saint, caught between temptation and penance; scan his filmography and you see how seldom he made an impact in modern garb, and what elegant shelter he sought in period dress. Twice he played King Henry II, in “Becket” and “The Lion in Winter.” He was Don Quixote; he was King Priam, trembling at the sack of Troy; he was Tiberius, attending the even greater disaster of “Caligula.” He also played Conan Doyle, in “Fairy Tale: A True Story,” which only reinforced one’s disappointment that he was never fully unleashed as Sherlock Holmes. His résumé does list four appearances as Holmes, but those were in low-rent, animated versions for TV, and, for once, the voice was not enough; we needed to observe him in his finery, unfurling the long limbs, the languor, and the dread of boredom that we associate with Baker Street, not to mention the neurosis that twitched below the skin of the sleuth. Sometimes unmade films, like unmade beds, tell stories of their own.
Outside the gossip columns, then, and away from the stage, what connected O’Toole to the here and now? The up-to-date capers, like “What’s New, Pussycat?” and “How to Steal a Million,” have dated poorly. “The Stunt Man,” his most cheerful project, has fared better, and O’Toole, with a grateful nod toward Lean, enjoyed himself to no end as a tyrannical film director; even then, however, the echo of his more dandified selves proved difficult to dispel. Who was this guy, so casually clad, his hair cut and combed a touch too long? What had he done with his robes—those seraph-white ones that Lawrence sported atop the ambushed train, turning this way and that to catch the light, as if the sun were a blazing mirror? The truth is that, like many of the major stars, O’Toole was not altogether of this world, being at once indisputably present, yet with a mind dreaming of elsewhere. He seemed happiest when granted the freedom to transport himself, through drama and drink alike, out of what Tennyson called “our bourne of Time and Place.” Now he has crossed the bar.
Photograph: David Montgomery/Getty
