Don O'Toole of La Mancha

CONTINUED

loss. What are they doing with this great actor? you are inclined to ask upon seeing him in a lesser work.

He well knows that his pictures have been mixed. What did he think of "Goodbye, Mr. Chips."

"I never saw it," he said abruptly. "Or rather, I saw, alas, about two reels. I called up MGM and told them to stop it.

"Such a fragile, gentle little thing! And they coarsened it! A line drawing and they splashed oil all over it! "Horrible, horrible, horrible!"

A picture known as "Country Dance" in England and as "Brotherly Love" in the United States was differently afflicted.

"They cut 24 minutes out of it," said O'Toole. "The 24 minutes that made it make sense. You were left with Susannah (York) and me doing pyrotechnics."

"Murphy's War" (which to me was one of those tedious wastes of OʻToole's genius) was to him "good fun."

O'Toole always has been gifted with the ability to see things through different eyes. He claims to have wept a lot at the Marx Brothers.

"I remember Groucho arrived at a hotel with a suitcase. In it, he said, were his 'effects.' His effects were a celluloid collar and a bow tie and it made me cry.” He reflected a minute. "What made me laugh then would probably make me mourn

now."

Someone asked if O'Toole had played Lawrence (of Arabia) as a homosexual. "No," said O'Toole; "although I gave him a hint of the feminine.

"He was a masochist, you know, a flagellist. This is known. But no evidence at all of homosexuality."

Such information could come only from intensive preparation for a role; but this sort of detailed search doesn't necessarily betoken a solemn character. No one clowns more, within reason, than O'Toole. During the filming of the death of Quixote he got into bed long before the camera exposed any film.

To accomplish this he rose sturdily from his chair and began tottering. He took little old-man steps toward the bed on trembling legs, making mewling sounds the while, a pathetic sight in a nightshirt as he put on a show for either the crew or the visiting newspaper men.

At the brink of the bed he was stricken with so severe an attack of acting that he couldn't get-into bed by himself and Jimmy Coco (who plays Sancho) had to boost him.

Ónce in, O'Toole pulled the covers up and lit a cigarette in a long black holder.

He has given considerable reflection to both Cervantes and Quixote. "Cervantes is a supreme ironist. His natural son is Swift.

"I think that Cervantes builded larger than he knew. I don't think he set out specifically to write a book of universal truths.

"He had been writing for 24 years but it was only latterly when he abandoned rhetoric and took up common speech-which was just not done at the time-that he began perhaps a little adventure about a foolish knight. And it just took over from him."

O'Toole is trying to put into his role as Quixote:

"His idealism, his courage, his humor and the great Quixotic notion of coming in a world of iron to make it a world of gold. These are the principal aspects. I've had to slip in a few others."

O'Toole has received encouraging words from all sides about his acting. Praise for his singing has been less flowing. Who's doing the singing in "Man of La Mancha?”

"I am at the moment," he said with a grin. This may have been a cryptic way of intimating that some other voice may be put into his screen mouth later. It's been done before.

He is not a great singer. He sort of chanted in "Mr. Chips." He sang once on stage ("I was the first man to sing in English, 'Oh, My Papa!' Think of that!") and since then he has had vocal training. “It didn't do me a scrap of good."

His voice, he said, he would describe as a Coca-Cola bottle being crushed under a door. "They are hard to crush, aren't they?" he asked innocently.

Someone asked if he had had any trouble with the paparazzi, the pestulant photographers who used to haunt celebrities in Rome hoping for an unposed nose-picking picture or worse to sell to magazines.

O'Toole once was thrown into prison in Rome for expostulating with a paparazzi who got hit in the