Surviving O’Toole: A stage star is reborn

There are some things in Sian Phillips’ account of her troubled marriage to Peter O’Toole in her autobiography “Public Places” that make it good to see that she has come out alive to tell her tale. The tall, handsome, young Welsh actress glowing with ambition was lucky. Although O’Toole was charming, witty, delightfully outrageous in public places, on the domestic scene his behavior was quite different.

Other wives whose husbands were geniuses at taking traditional art forms and re-creating them were not so lucky. There were poor Vivienne married to T.S. Eliot and poor Zelda married to F. Scott Fitzgerald. There were poor Vivien Leigh married to Laurence Olivier and poor Vivien Merchant married to Harold Pinter -- and, if I may intrude myself -- poor me, married (1951 to 1964) to English drama critic Kenneth Tynan. Well, to each her own monstre sacre.

In the English postwar cultural explosion in the ‘50s, actors like Richard Burton, Albert Finney and O’Toole strode across the boards like young lions. In their wake came a bouquet of young actresses: Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Vanessa Redgrave, Rosemary Harris -- and Phillips, who, in theatrical circles, was predicted to be the brightest star of them all. Except it didn’t happen.

She writes what happened instead with grim and unnerving clarity. People kept telling her how lucky she was for keeping so busy. Phillips disagrees: “There is a world of difference between being courted, chased after, getting the first bite of the cherry, and [that of] keeping busy, mopping up the crumbs that fall from the big table.” She looks back at all the chances she missed, and wonders if she will get another. “I doubt it. Life isn’t that sweet,” she concludes. What exactly happened to make her outlook so bleak? She met, fell in love with and married O’Toole. There was trouble in paradise, and 11 months after the wedding in 1959, this young actress was reduced to jelly.

Before they married, they’d told each other everything about themselves. She told him that, rebelling against her strict puritanical upbringing, she had done what she pleased, coupling on equal terms with men. Then, one day, O’Toole, drunk, announced that he found her past “no longer just appalling but utterly unacceptable.” She came to see herself in the same light. Time after time, O’Toole would go home drunk and spend the rest of the night raking her over the coals for her lurid past. She was heartbroken to be the cause of such blackness in him. She wished to atone. Part of her wondered how she dropped so low, so fast. It was as if an infection, at the core of her being, had been waiting to spread throughout her system.

An Irish actress friend lays out the ground rules for dealing with Irish men who drink: When he’s drunk, Phillips is not to answer back, nor is she ever to refer to this behavior when he’s sober. She suffers from sleeplessness and physical exhaustion. When “Lawrence of Arabia” gave him overnight stardom and money, she found a five-story house in Hampstead, which she decorated to her ideal of perfection. Her mentor was Joyce Buck, whose husband, Jules, was in film partnership with O’Toole. Phillips, a woman from humble beginnings, was a quick study. The household consisted of two young daughters, her mother (as cook and granny), as well as a nanny and a housekeeper. Phillips, as befitted a wife of a movie star, was perfection -- “thrillingly thin” (from rigorous dieting), dressed by Dior and Saint Laurent, tended by her own hairdresser.

O’Toole’s career took him to Jordan, Spain, Venezuela, Poland, Cambodia, Hong Kong and Tokyo. Phillips would join him for a while in each place and they would have excellent adventures. Her rather lengthy descriptions of their often life-threatening escapades reveal the positive side of their relationship: O’Toole was the daredevil captain of her body and soul and she the stalwart lieutenant alert to his every command.

Back home, all was calm for a while, but then came the tensions, the responsibilities, his binge drinking and her busy-ness with a series of acting roles. In 1965, she had a star turn in London playing the spinster who looks after her blind poet grandfather in Tennessee Williams’ “The Night of the Iguana.” Phillips rose to the part’s every nuance, and overnight her home was filled with flowers and requests for interviews. Williams took her everywhere and became a lifelong friend.

Enter O’Toole from Paris to take the leading role in David Mercer’s play “Ride a Cock Horse,” about a writer, his wife, his new girlfriend and his older unhappy mistress. He insisted on buying her out of the last two weeks of “Iguana” so she could play the mistress. It didn’t occur to her to defy him. He refused to rehearse their scenes together and treated her throughout the run with “colossal disrespect.”

And just when it was beginning to look as if she might have an old Welsh atavistic yearning to have a bad time if a bad time is to be had -- to paraphrase humorist Robert Benchley -- she went to Venice with O’Toole in “total harmony, total happiness.” With his charm and her tact, they befriended Venetians, who applauded and admired them. Back home, they were calm for a while, until the same old tensions drove them apart. Despite her gloomy view of her own career, Phillips had built a reputation. She was never out of demand.

In the winter of 1975, O’Toole lay in the hospital covered with feeding tubes. She was told he might die, but never of what. Suddenly, to everyone’s surprise, he pulled out all the tubes and demanded to be taken home. They went off to a small hotel near Positano, Italy, where she gently but firmly led him through the valley of death to the restoration of his health. Again, all was happiness and harmony.

For his next film, to be shot in Baja California, he refused to let her accompany him. She was puzzled but realized she didn’t care, even when she suspected there was a girl called Anna who might be joining him.

When he left, she did what she always did: a play. And then something extraordinary happened. She was rescued from the wreckage of her 20-year marriage by a “pretty youth,” a cheeky, mostly out of work actor, Robin Sachs, 16 years her junior. He not only succeeded in bedding her on the first date, he also made her love it. Phillips stepped into the brave new world of adultery and felt exhilarated and elevated. She felt at fault and liked the feeling. Her marriage was, in effect, finished.

When O’Toole found out about Sachs, he kicked Phillips out of their house. She bought another one in a working-class area of North London, and gentrified it. She learned to cook and gave Sunday dinners for friends. The divorce was ugly and took two years, during which she lost everything she had bought with her own money for the Hampstead house. The unkindest cut: Phillips writes that O’Toole took the jewelry he had given her for 20 years of Christmases, birthdays and anniversaries and put them up for sale at Sotheby’s.

To everyone’s astonishment, including her own, Phillips soon married Sachs. She appreciated how different he was from O’Toole. He was a careful, considerate driver; she recalled how frightening it was to be with O’Toole at the wheel. She did plays by Shaw, Shakespeare, Chekhov, Williams and Beckett. She was a huge hit in the West End in the Rodgers and Hart steamy musical “Pal Joey” as the bewitched, bothered and bewildered sophisticate in a red-hot affair with a sexy young scamp. Sachs at first was rapturously flattering and encouraging. He took care of her accounts. He was so good with the trio of cats that dominated the household, so good with the fish in the pond he fed by hand, so good with the garden. But he rarely found work, and it rarely seemed to bother him. It began to bother her. With his new clothes and car, he had become an expensive item. It irritated her that he spent his time working on his tan and watching quiz shows. He began to gamble. She suspected he was having a secret life but, as with O’Toole, was unable or unwilling to confront him. She flew from one job to another like an elegantly groomed Welsh witch.

When she found out he was having a serious affair, she kicked him out of the house. The lead cat, Spencer, died of grief. Phillips buried the cat and in a fury threw her king-size mattress out the window and felt good about it. She broke a set of china Sachs was fond of and she felt even better. She then broke down herself. But it was more like a walking pneumonia; she never stopped working. She learned to open up to close friends -- something she had never done before.

The book leaves her in 1992 in New York, finally feeling at home in the town that had always frightened her. She had just finished her role in “The Age of Innocence” and was looking forward to her next film. On a beautiful spring day she found herself running like a child through Central Park, the future unknown but understanding what a Welsh poet told her about the importance of living “on the knife edge of insecurity”: To live perilously is to live safely. Which leaves open the question: Did Peter O’Toole put out her light or did he ignite it?