O'TOOLE THE WRITER OUTDOES THE ACTOR

Loitering With Intent: the Apprentice. By Peter O'Toole. Hyperion, 410 pp. illustrated,

By Michael Blowen, Rocky Mountain News, 6 Mar 1997, pp. 14D.

In most actor autobiographies, the emphasis is on the auto. The celebrity as rewriter of history polishing his own image while telling endless tales on his less literary colleagues. Dependent on celebrity anecdotes and inside stories, the autobiographer often leans on a ghostwriter to recall the raucous days when the star was too busy being a star to write a book.
This is all by way of saying that Peter O'Toole's second volume of remembrances is exactly the opposite. As good an actor as he is, he is a better writer. It's tough to claim that someone whose cinematic fame includes the starring role in David Lean's epic Lawrence of Arabia and marvelously manic portraits in The Ruling Class and The Stunt Man missed his calling. But O'Toole's perceptions, carefully recalled through brain cells recovering from decades of alcohol abuse, are as keen as anything he's done on screen.
O'Toole's voice, long accustomed to uttering the words of others, has found his own voice in the privacy of pen and paper.
O'Toole's uncensored soliloquies, which meander through the text, emerge as wild incantations on such diverse topics as acting and family knickknacks. It's an unbridled voice, undiminished by rules. It seems that after speaking movie lines for decades, O'Toole has finally opened the floodgates to his own verbal ambitions. And ambitious they are.
The first volume, Loitering With Intent: the Child, gave us O'Toole's first 21 years. Through his sometimes-long-winded but nevertheless enchanting stories of growing up poor but mischievous in Ireland, O'Toole drew a picture of his sometimes-misanthropic, often-misspent youth.
In Loitering With Intent: the Apprentice, O'Toole begins his 21st year with an ornate series of circumlocutions. For O'Toole, the imagined and the fanciful are as real as the wooden banister he contemplates through the haze of age upon returning to, or recalling, the home of his youth:
``Here, though, where the wooden banister curves to loop round and end in a carved coil, is a handy spot on which to lean, where a man muffled as I in wool and fur and felt may for a moment take his shuddering ease and lean back a little to gaze at the rails rising up the stairwell, roaming in rounded oblongs through the chill deserted floors of this forsaken house.''
While still flavored by the devil-may-care, brawling and beer-soaked tone of the first volume, O'Toole's new tome focuses more on days spent learning how to act with his famous contemporaries in the theater. At the age of 21, in 1953, O'Toole left the British Navy and was accepted by the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. There he met Albert Finney, Richard Burton and other rising young stars of the British stage. Along with Richard Harris and Laurence Harvey, this gang of thespians spent considerable time carousing in pubs.
This is O'Toole's humorous recollection on his diction teacher, Denys Blakelock: ``Despite his reputation for clear speaking, he had overworked his mouth but underemployed his tongue. Yet another was that, though there was still much movement of his upper lip, he quite enjoyed munching his rubber eraser for five minutes each day, and was confident his tongue was enjoying its new nimbleness.''
Beyond the specifics of his love life, including a sweeping relationship with a woman he nicknamed Chicago, and his tough-minded assessment of his own abilities, O'Toole speaks to a larger audience with an all-encompassing sense of joie de vivre. While other actor autobiographers attempt to convince us that their lives are filled with depth and meaning behind the frivolity, O'Toole sees the marvelous meaning in the frivolous. His life is a magnificent testament to joy amid decay.
While he gave up drinking some years ago, he doesn't regret one thimbleful of the Guinness stout that fueled his youthful escapades. It's all part of what makes him.
The paperback edition of the first volume of Loitering With Intent is out this month, and it would make sense to read that one first. But, as it is, the second volume stands on its own and makes one thirsty for the third and, presumably, final volume in this unique, magnificent series. The Peter O'Toole in these pages may not be the angel his mother hoped for, but he is a devilish raconteur and a first-rate writer.