What Fresh Lunacy is This?

by Robert Sellers

  Yet if this was the first flowering of Oliver’s acting ambitions, he gave no indication of it. James for one does not recall at any time his friend mentioning a possible career as an actor even though he exhibited some of the skills. ‘He was a very good mimic. He’d stand up in front of the class before a master came in giving impressions of people like Robert Mitchum and James Stewart and the films that he’d seen them in. He had them off to a tee and used to have the whole class in stitches.’

  Oliver was never to forget the kindness shown to him by Geoff Coles and remained in touch with him for the rest of his life. Coles was a keen motorcyclist and Ollie later bought him a top-of-the-range bike on which he travelled all over Europe, never failing to send his former pupil postcards from all the places he visited.

  Coles wasn’t the only master to take an interest in the young Oliver. Mr Douglas taught him English literature and had been connected in some capacity with the theatre; he was always quoting plays and actors’ names. ‘He favoured and dwelt on Ollie very much,’ says James. ‘He was always very impressed in anything Ollie did at the school. It was a strange relationship.’

  James can’t be sure that Mr Douglas wasn’t homosexual but Ewell Castle was not alone among schools of this kind in having its fair share of scandals and masters being forced to leave. The problem was, you never saw a female there, apart from the matron, who didn’t really count, because all the teachers and other staff were men. So, in spite of the copies of Health and Efficiency magazine that circulated about the place until the pages disintegrated, Oliver and his fellow pupils ‘were no wiser about the facts of life than Irish virgins entering a Victorian nunnery’. Certainly Peter didn’t want Oliver’s education sidetracked by urgings going on below the belt, and, like most parents of that generation, believed the thorny subject of the birds and the bees was to be avoided at all costs; ignorance was seen as the best form of contraceptive. When Peter spotted his son out of school one afternoon chatting up some girls, he phoned the headmaster. Another time Ollie was discovered canoodling with a girl on a local bus and severely reprimanded by the headmaster.

  Discipline at Ewell Castle was borderline Colditz. Boys would be beaten for getting poor marks. Certainly bad behaviour was swiftly dealt with and Oliver often fell foul of the headmaster and his dreaded bamboo cane. ‘Whenever he got six of the best he wouldn’t flinch,’ says James. ‘That didn’t seem to bother him at all.’ Just as well, since the outrageous prankster and rascal to be was beginning to take shape. ‘He’d do one or two outrageous things from time to time,’ James recalls. ‘On one occasion he took bets off us all that he would not jump into the school’s open-air swimming pool with all his clothes on. We all agreed and he went round collecting the money and then jumped straight into the water. Needless to say, the master came along and all hell broke loose and he was soundly beaten.’ The school also had a strict uniform code, but the teddy boys were all the rage and so Ollie would turn up wearing drainpipe trousers and sporting a DA, or duck’s arse, a hairstyle popularized by Tony Curtis. Both totally against school rules, ‘but Ollie seemed to get away with it,’ says James.

  This defiance carried over into the classroom. Ewell had a science laboratory and the headmaster used to take Ollie’s class for both physics and science. ‘I used to sit in the raised seating at the back with Ollie,’ James remembers. ‘And he always used to bring with him a copy of the Reveille, which was a pin-up newspaper with scantily dressed women, and he never listened to what the science master would say, he’d just sit there reading the Reveille under the desk. And he seemed to get away with that too.’

  The only thing Oliver seemed to take seriously was athletics. After Ollie came third in the All England Cross Country Championships, Geoff Coles made him captain of athletics in his final year. It was a prestigious appointment in which Ollie took extreme pride. ‘Boys don’t admire the intellectual at school,’ he once said. ‘When a kid reaches puberty it’s physical prowess that’s looked up to – not brains.’ True enough, while Ollie still required fingers to add up, he had few equals on the athletics field and relished each sports day. Indeed, so confident of his abilities was he that in his final year he entered himself for every single event. Such bravado was not welcomed by his father. Peter never understood his son’s obsession with proving himself physically, or ‘what it meant for a non-starter in academics to breast the tape as Victor Ludorum in athletics’, as Ollie described it: all he saw was aggression and rabid ambition, and it turned his stomach. To Peter it was plain showing off, and he refused to attend the event. ‘He wouldn’t go to see it because he didn’t want to applaud this kind of fanaticism,’ says Simon.

  One can only imagine the emotional distress Ollie must have felt over his father’s decision. But this sort of attitude was very typical of Peter and it was the same story when, a few years later, Simon began to achieve a similar status in school sport. ‘I was captain of a very successful cricket team and I was a very aggressive player, I celebrated far too much. There was a bit of Ollie in me there, I think. Pete would always arrive for the start of a match and watch me bowl – I was a fairly decent bowler – but on those occasions when I knew it was going to be my day and I was going to take wicket after wicket after wicket, on those days I would see my dad’s old car chuntering out of the school gate because he didn’t want to see it, particularly if this aggression was coming out, he didn’t want to see me behave like that.’

  That sports day was a pivotal moment in Oliver’s early life. He won every single event and at the prize-giving the teacher’s announcement of ‘Won by Oliver Reed’ was greeted by cheers from his classmates. It was a feeling and an achievement Oliver never forgot. ‘The fathers of boys who could spell came up and shook my hand.’

  Travelling home afterwards, a rucksack flung over his shoulder with all the cups he’d won clanking and clinking noisily, Oliver was stopped on Wimbledon High Street by two policemen. Not for a minute did they believe this kid’s cockamamie story about winning them all, especially when, on closer examination, it was evident they were made of real silver. ‘The police thought he must have nicked them,’ says Simon. ‘So my dad had to go to Wimbledon police station, which just compounded the situation, because here he was trying to put a dampener on Oliver. Pete was forever saying to Ollie, calm down, it’s not important, it doesn’t matter, and now he had to go to the police station to get him out. That was the problem really: Ollie was fervently ambitious, just absolutely fanatically ambitious, and very tough, and Peter was not tough.’

  Nor was he much pleased when Oliver showed off his trophy haul after they got back home. Ollie was expecting some kind of praise, but his father gave him none, instead saying that he’d only won the prizes because of his size and strength compared with the other boys, and adding, ‘What are you trying to prove, boy?’ Peter believed that mind always won out over brawn in the real world and used the example of a gorilla captured by a far weaker but more intelligent human able to spring a trap using a banana. ‘So if you want to be an ape, Oliver, by all means continue running round the field. But it will get you nowhere in later life. So don’t bring your cups back here to impress me.’

  For a sixteen-year-old who had at last found something he excelled in at school, to have those achievements thrown back in his face by his own father must have been deeply painful. Fleeing out of the house, Oliver ran to Peter’s mother, Granny May, who called in the maid and the gardener, and told them, ‘Look what my clever grandson has won.’ For Oliver it was consolation of a kind, but it did nothing to hide the stark reality of his father’s wounding indifference.

  Father and Son

  Oliver left Ewell Castle an O-level dropout, possessing a mathematical mind, in his words, ‘as astute as a calculator without a battery’. Peter was more succinct, suggesting his son was fit only to be a burglar or an actor. He really was at a loss as to what to do with him now he was no longer in the clutches of the education system, as David remembers: ‘My fat
her and I used to say, well, what’s Ollie going to do with his life, because he was always getting into trouble.’

  Glad to be rid of school at last, Ollie nevertheless didn’t find life any easier in the cramped confines of the Merton Mansions flat, where he felt unloved, unwanted and a burden. Living 24/7 under the same roof as his father led to horrendous, quite often explosive, tension. ‘There were constant rows going on,’ is how Simon remembers it. ‘Even in those early days Oliver was a feisty character. It was always a difficult relationship between them because my dad was a very mild and peaceful man, but he was provocative, very bright, his language could be rich and strong, so he would tell Oliver what he thought needed to be said. Oliver didn’t always appreciate this, so they were either falling out or falling in love with each other.’

  The fact that Peter had always been a little bit uncomfortable with Oliver being Marcia’s favourite also added to the friction. Where David was fair-skinned and blonde and took after his father in both looks and personality, Ollie, with his free spirit and dark, almost exotic, features, came very much from Marcia’s side of the family, who were supposedly of Moorish descent. It must have been the reason why, in moments of anger, Peter would spitefully call Oliver ‘gypsy boy’, not merely because of his olive complexion but because, as Ollie later said, ‘I wouldn’t conform to his Victorian ideas.’

  But there was something else too, something dark and deeply ingrained, inside Oliver. He’d never been comfortable with his father for being a conscientious objector, nor able to forgive him for it. ‘To Ollie that was cowardice,’ says David. Ollie’s stance on this not only polluted whatever relationship he might have chosen to have with his father while Peter was still alive but remained with him for the rest of his own life. ‘Oliver didn’t think my dad was a real man, that he wasn’t the father he wanted him to be,’ admits Simon. ‘Deep down he loved him, but he didn’t like what he stood for, this pacifist nature and being a conscientious objector. He hated that and could never come to terms with it. I think initially he was ashamed and then found it tough to deal with. As he got older he may have understood it more but it was underpinning a lot of his behaviour.’

  Throughout his adult life Oliver compensated, consciously or otherwise, for the shameful stain he felt his father’s ‘cowardice’ had left on the family honour, by indulging in displays of rabid patriotism. In interviews he often referred to himself as ‘Mr England’, flew the Union Jack in front of his house, forced people in pubs to stand up and join him in drunken choruses of ‘God Save the Queen’, and had a vehement opposition to foreigners, particularly the French and the Germans. All very funny, and some of it no doubt exaggerated for public consumption, but this patriotism, when fuelled by alcohol, had the propensity to get dangerously out of control. Shooting a film in Austria, Ollie was dismayed to find a pub decorated with every major national flag in the world save for Britain’s. Grabbing hold of the startled manager, he threatened, ‘I’m coming back tomorrow night. If you haven’t got a Union Jack by then I’m going to trash this place.’ The following evening no Union Jack fluttered over the bar and within seconds Ollie was hurling chairs through the window.

  Ollie’s life was also punctuated by ridiculous tests of strength, almost always when he was drinking. One in particular had him grabbing the back of a chair and performing a perfect planche, a phenomenal physical feat in which the body is held parallel to the ground by the arms, but for what purpose? His son Mark never saw the point. ‘Don’t do that, Dad,’ he’d protest, because invariably Ollie would go purple in the face when attempting it. ‘Just don’t do it. One day a little capillary up there will just pop and it will be lights out, so why are you doing it? To impress who? There’s no need to do that sort of stuff.’ There was, though, and that was the whole point: it was to prove some kind of warped notion of masculinity. It was the same reason why Ollie could never back down from a fight if someone wanted to take him on. It was almost as if he had constantly to prove he was a man. ‘And he would have been aware of that himself,’ believes Josephine. ‘He would do these silly feats of strength at times that were definitely pushing it. And he knew he was pushing it and why he was pushing it.’ Think of what he was doing just hours before he collapsed and died in that pub in Malta, challenging sailors half his age to arm-wrestling bouts. What Mark always feared would happen eventually did: Ollie’s body gave up on him.

  Charles James saw early signs of this in Oliver at Ewell Castle, when practically every day he engaged in arm-wrestling competitions with other boys. ‘It seemed to be his favourite occupation at school, he was very keen on that. The other thing he did was to lie on the classroom floor and with one arm lift up a chair by just one of its legs. He did crazy things like that. He was a bit of an exhibitionist.’

  The teenage Ollie was all about aggression, a show of masculinity that Simon believes also came from ‘a deep insecurity’. That aggression manifested itself in sudden fits of temper. ‘If you think of the most difficult teenager, you have just a fraction of what it was like for my parents trying to live with Oliver.’ Often Peter threw him out of the house and there’d be peace and quiet for a week, only for Ollie to return and then another row would start up and out he went again, often for days at a time. It was a vicious circle.

  There must also have been some resentment towards his father for his part in the marriage break-up, as well as towards his stepmother Kay, whom Jacquie Daryl, Ollie’s partner for the entire seventies, says Oliver ‘hated’. That is a very strong word, ‘but he did hate Kay. I don’t know why, he just didn’t like her at all, which was so sad.’ It was an extremely difficult period for everyone. It wasn’t Kay’s fault that she’d replaced Marcia or that he’d been packed off to live with various relatives. ‘I just think it was difficult for Ollie to love my mum,’ Simon accepts. ‘It’s true, Oliver and Kay didn’t really have a very close relationship, but I don’t remember rows between them, in fact she would be more or less the peacemaker between Pete and Ollie, trying to keep the peace as best she could.’

  Every time Oliver was kicked out he’d make his way over to Marcia’s mother, Granny Olivia, or ‘Granny Dardin’ as she liked to be called, who ever since his youngest days had been a stalwart in his life. She was much more reliable than Peter’s mother, Granny May, who, as David says, ‘was a wonderful relative that Ollie and I were very close to, but she was always sort of somewhat up there, not down on the ground. Whereas Granny Dardin was very hands on and in times of trouble was there for us, an absolute constant. Ollie and I knew that 74 Marryat Road, where she lived, was a secure place while all this trouble and upheaval was going on in our lives.’

  In the early seventies, when Oliver used his superstar wages to buy Broome Hall, a magnificent country mansion, Granny Dardin was a frequent visitor. David used to collect her on a Friday in Wimbledon and drive her down there to stay the weekend. ‘And Ollie did his best to get her drunk, and there she was, approaching ninety, getting a bit wobbly. She was a very important person in both of our lives.’

  Back at Merton Mansions the rows between Peter and Ollie raged on. And there was always going to be that one argument that went too far. Peter had insisted on a curfew of nine o’clock, but when Oliver came in one night at some ungodly hour tempers were lost and some of Ollie’s verbal blasts were directed at a tearful Kay. Furious, Peter ordered him to his room to write out several times: ‘I must not be rude to my mother. I have been insolent and I must not do it again’, as if he were still in kindergarten. Bollocks to that, said Oliver, and jumping on his bike made a fast getaway. He was approaching the Common when Peter caught up with him in his car and screamed out of the window, ‘Come back, gypsy boy. You’ll end up like your mother.’ Oliver sprinted for the sanctuary of the woods and his father lost him. They would not see each other for the next five years.

  Oliver now went to live on a permanent basis with Granny Dardin and gained a modicum of independence by withdrawing money from a Post Office savings a
ccount he’d had since early boyhood. His grandmother allowed him the freedom of the house and gave him his own key so that he could come and go like a lodger. With a tube and train station nearby, the eager seventeen-year-old began exploring central London with a keen eye. Almost instinctively he was drawn to the bright lights of Soho, with its buskers, pimps and teddy boys, and it didn’t take him long to wind up in one of the many strip joints that dotted the area. What happened there on one visit passed by almost in a blur. Violence kicked off between rival football fans and without thinking Ollie grabbed two and hurled them hard against a wall. As a third contemplated levelling a right hook against the Reed nose a pair of burly bouncers walked over and the hooligan fled. When the manager was told what had happened, Ollie was offered a job on the spot.

  The club was in St Anne’s Court, just off Dean Street, in the heart of Soho, and at first Ollie couldn’t believe his luck. Here he was being paid five bob (25p) to stand around watching women take their clothes off, and occasionally escorting a dirty old man in a mac off the premises. But the novelty quickly wore off as he got to know the girls: sad, pathetic waifs who travelled all over London to perform in grubby clubs, ‘showing more inside thigh as they got in and out of taxis than they did on stage’. One girl, Liz, had an act that climaxed with her astride a chair sporting a G-string that, Ollie recalled, ‘was about as alluring as a Pontypool prop forward’s jockstrap’.