Exit: "Last Man Standing"

Digby's appreciation links to this last interview.

"It's 1962; Lenny Bruce and tall guy with posh accent get into a cab, toting a bag of drugs... ." It's an interesting story. Like the other stories, interesting not just for daring or outrageousness, but in hinting at real substance to the man.

The long ago Dick Cavett Show episode I saw must have been this one: from 1972, with Peter O'Toole the sole guest. As I remember it, the actor emerged from the curtains to lurch around and do some jokey mugging. That changed as Cavett said, "I notice you have 'Areopagitca' written on your hand." A reminder to himself, said O'Toole, to raise the subject of censorship. Which he then did, seriously and passionately (if also tipsily).

That show came to mind a few years ago, when I spotted this memoir.

O'Toole tells of his 1930s childhood in northern England, where he grew up in a working poor neighborhood of Leeds. With great zest for it all, young Peter observes the world of his bookie father (and Damon Runyonesque associates), while he and his sister absorb his mother's love of reciting poetry.

As O'Toole opens the book, he's about five years old when he "meets" someone who, if not local, will be more that a secondary character during the years he grows up. Immersed in the pleasure of being taken to the movies by his father, Peter wonders—

...Will Donald Duck be on today? Or a king or a cricketer, or a boxing match or The Three Stooges, or a hurricane or a Zulu? Who's this? A uniformed fat man with a big chin, all wobble and posture and rant. The audience is booing him. It's Mussolini, and he's being booed; cheerfully and vulgarly and ripely booed; but booed in the way you'd boo the Demon King in a pantomime. Comical villainy to be encouraged with a raspberry jeer.

Shortly after, in that cinema, Hitler and I met for the first time. It is impossible to tell you what I felt because, other than being temporarily unhappy, I cannot remember what I felt. When that profoundly strange, mincing little dude from Linz came all unexpectedly onto my screen, not his hideous mouth nor his noise nor his moustache nor his forelock, swastika, salute, eyes or frenzy disturbed my mind; it was the look on his face. He was booed, too. The audience boos, though, were of another colour; a grimmer lowing, an ugly note not for pantomime villains capering about banana skins...

A motif throughout is that of Hitler and top Nazi figures as childhood familiars. While the adult O'Toole's serious study of their history and psychology is much in evidence, the writer often approaches the subject with slangy nicknaming—Hitler as "Alf"; Goering as "Fat Hermann." Unlikely as this may sound, I found O'Toole's writing strong enough that he pulls off this cutting of the bizarre figures to size, while writing an excellent outline of Hitler's rise and fall.

RIP to the last of British "Cinema's Biggest Hellraisers," and an impressively multi-talented one.