The following piece first appeared in 1994 in a DIY movie zine called Flashback. With its subject now (hopefully) knocking back a pint in the afterlife, this just seemed like a good time to dig it up and dust it off and look at it again.
Peter O'Toole sits at a small table on the main floor of the University Book Store in Seattle. Except for an empty espresso cup and a glass ashtray holding two soggy cigarette butts, the table is bare. O'Toole wears a pale yellow shirt and a neat dark suit. He looks tired. He is.
It's the last day of a grueling U.S. tour, a marathon round of interviews and book signings, promoting the first volume of O'Toole's memoirs, a free-wheeling account of his childhood called "Loitering With Intent". Several hundred readers and O'Toole fans holding newly purchased copies of the book stand more or less patiently in a line that winds back through the store, out the main entrance and down the sidewalk along University Way. Across the street, the marquee in front of the Varsity Theater reads WELCOME PETER O'TOOLE.
Out on the sidewalk, four women, in their early 40s maybe, stand together waiting in line. It turns out all of them have taken the day off work to be here. They talk to each other in slightly giggly, self-conscious voices, like schoolgirls playing hookey, out on a lark.
"I can't think of anybody else I'd do this for," one of them says. "Well, Olivier maybe, but it's a little late for that."
Sometime later, one of them leaves the others to hold her place in line and goes into the store to look around.
"Did you see him?" the other women ask when she gets back.
"Yes," she replies.
"Was it worth it?"
"YES!"
A torrent of excited giggles.
Maybe because of the characters he's played, or because of the way he's played them, O'Toole, even more than most movie stars, has always seemed larger than life. Which makes it a little spooky when you find yourself stepping up to this small table, sheepishly handing over a book to be autographed, and there they all are - T.E. Lawrence, Henry II, Robinson Crusoe, Tiberius Caesar, Lord Jim, Don Quixote and who knows how many others - crackpots and maniacs, nazis and angels, kings and adventurers and crooks and movie stars - all of them staring out from the face of this tired, middle-aged man who looks for all the world like a college professor, somebody you'd expect to find teaching English literature somewhere.
Standing in line behind the four women, I've tried to think of something profound to say when I get up to the table, but nothing brilliant has materialized, so I just say hi and O'Toole signs the book and smiles and hands it back to me and I thank him and that's it. I don't hang around long after that. I've been playing hookey myself, and it's time to get back to work.
There's something weird about seeing movie actors in person, after decades spent watching them on the screen. It has to do with the way that movies twist our perception of illusion and reality, turning them inside out. In a darkened theater, or a dimly lit living room, movies allow us to become children again, drawing us into a fragile, fleeting world of make-believe. We understand the deceit and accept it as part of the bargain, because on some primal, childlike level, we don't want to see the wires attached to the puppets, or the hands of the puppeteer. We want to believe in the puppet show.
A few nights after O'Toole's book store appearance, I slipped "Murphy's War" into the VCR, and there on the tube was this lanky, tough-talking bloke of an Irish sailor, getting shot at and bombed, repairing an airplane and teaching himself how to fly it, making torpedoes and Molotov cocktails and wreaking highly unlikely havoc on a German submarine.
As I settled back watching all that, the cinematic universe seemed balanced again. Reality had traded places with illusion, given up and gone home, at least till the end credits rolled around, and the figure on the screen making it happen, the tall, thin, familiar-looking man with the mad eyes and the cigarette stuck between his lips, bending reality into illusion and back again, that was Peter O'Toole.
Peter O'Toole
(1932-2013)
