Peter O’Toole appeared on Broadway just once, as Henry Higgins in a 1987 revival of “Pygmalion.”
O’Toole, who died Saturday, was famous for his drinking, but it wasn’t booze that made him eccentric onstage (and off) in this production.
It was cocaine.
“There was something off-kilter about him,” says a source who worked on the show. “We found out it was cocaine during the photo shoot. Martha Swope [the photographer] said to the press agent, ‘Somebody ought to powder his face because he’s very sweaty on his upper lip.’ ”
Sweat was running down from his nose, sweat mixed with gooey white powder.
The stage manager discreetly wiped his face, but then O’Toole began to run his fingers through his hair until “he looked like he’d stuck his finger in a socket,” the source says.
A few days later, Merle Frimark, the press agent, had to go to O’Toole’s suite at the Wyndham hotel to show him the photographs for his approval. He greeted her in a short bathrobe. He wore nothing underneath.
“He was the skinniest man I’d ever seen,” she says. “He reminded me of Carol Channing. She’s the only person who can put on a pair of tights, and they’re baggy. He was like that. Just a bean pole.”
Frimark had a pile of photographs. O’Toole went through them.
“Nope,” he said, flipping each one like a frisbee across the room. “You can’t use any of them. Look at my hair!”
O’Toole agreed to appear in the play on one condition: That the Shuberts, his producers, hire his friend Christopher Plummer’s daughter Amanda to play Eliza Doolittle.
But a few weeks into the run, he called the Shuberts and summoned them to his suite. “It is a matter of grave importance,” he told them. “To me, and ultimately to you.”
Shubert executives Gerald Schoenfeld and Philip Smith turned up at the appointed time and were offered tea by O’Toole’s butler. They waited for their star. And waited. Finally, he entered from a side door, doubled over and moving across the room like a crab.
“He looked like he was going to jump us,” Smith recalls.
He sat down and said, “This cast is absolutely insane. They are all crazy. But the worst is Amanda!”
“Peter, you insisted we hire her,” Smith protested.
“Chris made me do it!” he said. “But she’s insane!”
An hour later, Schoenfeld and Smith made their escape. “See you at the theater, Peter!” they said.
He crawled back to his room.
As it turned out, the critics hammered Plummer. They enjoyed O’Toole’s performance, but Frank Rich caught something of its oddball quality: “Mr. O’Toole has no qualms about making goo-goo eyes directly at the audience, if that’s what it takes to keep its attention — and, given that the eyes retain the iridescent blue of ‘Lawrence of Arabia,’ who will complain?”
“Pygmalion” was not a success on Broadway, and a few years later, O’Toole gave up stage acting for good.
“I couldn’t bear theater directors,” he told his friend, journalist Richard Ingrams, during a delightful BBC interview in 2010. “I’ve never known anything sillier in my life. People who have never been on the stage are suddenly put in charge over everybody. No, no, I can’t take that.”
O’Toole gave his final stage performance in a revival of “Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell” at the Old Vic in 1999.
Jeffrey Bernard was a writer for the Spectator and a famous lush. Whenever he was too hung over to write a column, the Spectator would publish the line: “Jeffrey Bernard is unwell.”
O’Toole and Bernard were friends and drinking buddies, and his performance was hailed by the critics.
Phil Smith saw it. “He kept getting drunker and drunker as the evening went on, and he did so beautifully,” Smith says.
O’Toole had a theory about how to play a drunk: “You stand up when everything says that you cannot possibly stand up. You take a cigarette out when everything says it’s impossible for you to find one.”
The audience jumped out of their seats to applaud O’Toole at the curtain call. “I decided there and then I wouldn’t do it again,” he said. “Now is the time to go.”
He continued to appear in movies because “I don’t have to carry a picture anymore. I just pop in, wobble and pop out.”
Asked by Ingrams if he had any sage advice for young actors, O’Toole took a sip from his Guinness and warbled: “Keep smiling through . . .”