Peter O’Toole’s Wonderful Tales About ‘Loitering’ May Yet End Up in a Book

Peter O’Toole once planned to be a newspaperman. On the positive side, he’s been puttering around with what old-school newspapermen always claim they’re puttering around with: a book.

The title of O’Toole’s tome?

“Loitering With Intent,” the actor said. He would have much to write about. He has loitered and taken the waters with hearty companions such as Richard Burton, Richard Harris and John Huston, and he tells wonderful tales about all.

Has he set himself a deadline for the book? O’Toole, who no longer takes the waters, shook his head. “Not a deadline, a start line,” he said.

He was a bit weary when interviewed. He’d risen at dawn in London and zipped across the Atlantic via Concorde jet to help drumbeat for “Crossing To Freedom,” a two-hour CBS film. He left the next day for a film in Tunisia.

In the CBS movie, airing Sunday, he plays a sad, grumpy old Englishman who reluctantly shepherds seven children to safety early in World War II when Hitler’s armies invade France.

Upon arriving here to tout the film, O’Toole taped an interview for “CBS This Morning.” Then he was shepherded to the United Nations, where the United Nations Children’s International Fund hailed the movie and served him lunch.

O’Toole, still so gaunt he’d be marked absent if he turned sideways, was good-natured and gracious about it all. Like many who began on the British stage, he realizes publicity is part of the actor’s territory.

But he isn’t sure why he became an actor. His first desire was to fight Hitler. That would have been difficult, though; he was only 8 when the war began. So he did the next best thing.

At 16, he went to work at a newspaper in Yorkshire, England, where he’d grown up after his family left Ireland. “I did love it--we shot out four editions a day,” he says of his days as an ink-stained wretch.

“But something happened, I don’t know what, and I joined the Navy,” he says. He served on a submarine, and later a corvette, the latter the small, always-rolling ship about which Nicholas Monsarrat wrote in “The Cruel Sea.”

That isn’t the usual preparation for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. But after leaving the service, he attended that distinguished school, where he began learning his actor’s craft, Shakespeare and all that.

In time, he also learned of the slings and arrows of outrageous critics. How does he regard critics now? He smiles. “I disregard them. When you’ve been punching along in the game as long I have . . . you find they go away and die.”