What Fresh Lunacy is This?

by Robert Sellers

  The next best thing, suggested Carol, was to meet the right people. ‘Put yourself about a bit at the Ritz grill.’ Oliver hadn’t the faintest clue where the Ritz grill was, let alone the money to pay for lunch there; he currently existed on a diet of spaghetti and tomato soup and hadn’t even got a shilling to put in the gas meter. He began to get the feeling that dear uncle Carol ‘was drifting about in an Edwardian summer’. His next suggestion got Oliver thinking that he might very well have cracked: ‘Seek out the people that can help you, Oliver, pitch a tent outside their front doors and every morning when they leave to go to the studio, step out of your tent and say, “Excuse me, I’m Oliver Reed, I would like you to give me a job.”’

  Carol did offer one piece of advice that Oliver would always be grateful for. If he wasn’t going to bother with drama school, then he should spend as much of his spare time at the cinema, watching and observing. Henceforth Oliver’s local Odeon became his university ‘and my only training school’. The pub, too, was another great source of learning that served him well for his entire career. All human life was on display, the flotsam and jetsam of society, the working class, and the aristocracy mingling in the saloon and public bars, like a human zoo. ‘Oliver told me once that this was the way he learned how to do a part,’ reveals Bernie Coleman, owner of the Dog and Fox pub in Wimbledon. ‘He loved observing people. If he came in early he’d sit by himself with a pint and just watch and listen to people.’

  Ollie was remarkably perceptive and his knack for observing human nature never deserted him throughout his whole life. ‘He picked up on things around him that you just wouldn’t notice,’ says Mark. ‘They’d pass you by. But not him. Just little details that he would see and no one else. He prided himself in it.’ As Ollie once said: ‘Everyday life is my favourite theatre. People are my favourite actors.’

  With Jack Burke’s help Oliver managed to get into the film extras’ union and his first job was in Hello London, a musical-cum-travelogue so obscure that it has virtually disappeared. Its star was Sonja Henie, three times Olympic figure-skating champion, but when she arrived in London in early 1958, after years of touring ice revues across the United States, she was very much a faded personality and Oliver couldn’t help but feel disappointed. ‘Her legs were muscle-bound and unattractive and didn’t give me the urge to give her one.’

  Ollie had been hired by the film’s director Sidney Smith because of his ‘hungry face’, and is one of a haggle of journalists greeting Sonja as she steps down from her flight smiling inanely as if rigor mortis had set in midway across the Atlantic. Unimpressed with the costume the film production company had offered, Oliver phoned his dad and asked if he’d lend him his reporter’s mac. It was the first time in something like three years that he’d contacted his father. It would be another two years before they progressed from speaking on the phone to actually sharing the same oxygen in a room.

  The rest of 1958 was taken up with sporadic bits of extra work. Ollie featured in crowd scenes in Norman Wisdom’s The Square Peg, an agreeable slice of army antics. It’s the one where Norman finds he’s a dead ringer for a Nazi general and swaps roles, flirts with a pre-Avengers Honor Blackman, causes chaos on a parade ground, says ‘Mr Grimsdale’ a lot, and pours champagne down Hattie Jacques’s cleavage. Life is a Circus, directed by Val Guest, featured the Crazy Gang, the pie-and-mash equivalent of the Marx Brothers, whose mix of nerve-shredding cockney songs and insipid zaniness today looks about as funny as a dead parent. This was their last film and saw them trying to save a circus from closing down. Ollie is barely visible in the background as a punter in a few of the crowd scenes. Then there was a couple of days’ work sunning himself as a passenger on a cruise ship on Pinewood Studios’ back lot in The Captain’s Table, a sort of sub-Carry On comedy. These jobs never paid very much, so Ollie was generally destitute, bedding down with friends or casual lovers.

  Waking up one morning, he was perturbed to discover nasty red blotches across his chest, followed by blinding headaches and a 100-plus temperature. Thinking it to be nothing more than the onset of influenza, he still called in at his local GP and was alarmed when the doctor reached for the phone to order an ambulance. At the hospital it was confirmed that Oliver had bacterial meningitis, a life-threatening ailment known to strike with incredible speed, so without delay Oliver was pumped full of antibiotics and ordered to rest.

  With nowhere to go, Oliver convalesced with his mother, now remarried and living in Cheshire. Oliver had yet to meet his stepfather, Bill Sulis, but had heard stories of his wild antics in the RAF, from which he was dismissed for damaging a plane while flying upside down. Such devilry immediately endeared him to Oliver and at first the appreciation appeared to be mutual. Thanks to a family fortune derived from the manufacture of rope, Bill and Marcia lived in relative splendour in a mansion set in its own grounds. Bill was determined to show off Marcia’s son to the country set at various parties and hunt balls, but Ollie’s prized collection of Hong Kong suits was now history save for one, and that had seen better days. ‘I now regretted scrubbing it with Daz on the side of the bath to remove all the beer stains and the dried puke.’ Aghast at the thought of his stepson meeting local dignitaries in anything other than flash attire, Bill loaned him a few of his dinner jackets. These, alas, did not last long: one went west after Oliver chased a farmer’s daughter across a ploughed field, while another shrank to infant size when Ollie crawled home drunk one night in a rain storm. ‘When my stepfather had run out of suits I went back to London.’

  Marcia had arranged for her son to stay at a mews flat near Notting Hill Gate tube station that belonged to an aunt who lived in Egypt. With a secure roof over his head, Ollie began to look for work again, but this time he faced competition from a most unlikely source: his own brother. Out of the army, David had also set his sights on a career as an actor and together they made the daily rounds of casting offices and advertising agencies. It was a depressing time: Oliver had spent what was left of his army savings on a photographic portfolio but nobody was interested in hiring him. ‘You’re too Continental-looking,’ many complained. Years later and an international star, Ollie loved going up to those same agents and producers whenever their paths crossed and saying, ‘Hey, remember me? I’m Oliver Reed. You used to tell me to piss off!’

  David saw a lot of his brother during this period. Their operations base was a coffee bar in Earls Court run by a man called Tiny, who of course was an enormous fellow. ‘We used to meet down in the cellar and for us everything gravitated from there. We’d meet on a Friday evening and Ollie and I would buy a bottle of Merrydown cider and two straws and drink that until it gave us a buzz and then we’d say, right, where’s tonight’s party?’

  The Ollie that David encountered after National Service was very different from the one he last saw at Ewell Castle, if only in appearance. ‘He went into an odd period of dressing very, very strangely, of going around in an open-top shirt tied in a knot above his bare waist, with a big chain around his neck with a skull on it. I suppose it was part of that period where youth were beginning to express themselves as a revolt against the stodginess of the adult world. It was the days of rock and roll, mods and rockers, and beatniks. It was the start of creating one’s own culture, youth culture. The social barriers were starting to be broken down, girls and boys were getting their emancipation from the protection or governance of their parents and so earning enough to have their bedsits. We were self-supporting. It was a very important period, but it’s only when you look back on it all; you didn’t realize it at the time.’

  Craftily David was able to make practical use of his brother’s rather menacing look. At the time David hung out around Wimbledon with a chap called Mike. ‘We were both rather po-faced, we’d been young subalterns in the army, so we used to go to clubs in London and pretend Ollie was our bodyguard. So there would be Mike and I dressed terribly correctly and we used to make a thing of sending Ollie across to a girl to say, my boss wan
ts to dance with you.’ A few months later when David met his future wife Muriel (Mickie to her friends) he arranged a get-together with his brother at a coffee bar. In Ollie walked, in tight-fitting jeans, the open-neck shirt, and that skull on a chain. ‘I was shocked out of my brain by him,’ admits Muriel.

  All that time leafing through the actors’ newspaper The Stage looking for work finally paid off when Ollie noticed a story about producers casting for a new seven-part BBC historical drama serial called The Golden Spur. Arriving late, he found himself at the back of a very long queue of other hopefuls. Handed a scrap of paper with some dialogue on it, he used the time to learn it by heart, something that no one else appeared to be bothering to do. When it was his turn he rattled the speech off effortlessly, a display of professionalism that perhaps swayed the panel to give him the small role of Richard of Gloucester. It was a remarkable feat, given that Oliver had no real acting experience.

  When his sole episode aired in the summer of 1959 Oliver’s brooding image attracted the attention of an agent, Pat Larthe. ‘You were brilliant, darling,’ she said down the phone. Moderately well known in the business for supplying top models for television and magazine assignments, Pat only handled a limited number of actors, including the young Michael Caine, who joined her books at roughly the same time as Oliver. Thrilled to have an agent at last, Ollie saw this as proof that he was heading in the right direction and his days of poverty were over. The only downside to the arrangement was the 10 per cent of his earnings that Pat would claim for the next ten years. ‘And she held me to that,’ Ollie later complained. ‘Even after I left her and went to another agent.’

  Pat went to work immediately on Oliver, sending him to Pinewood for a day’s work as an extra on The League of Gentlemen. Now considered a minor British classic, it stars Jack Hawkins as a former army officer, bitter at his early retirement, who recruits a group of disgraced colleagues to perform a bank robbery with military precision. They hire a room at a theatre club for one of their clandestine meetings and a couple of obviously gay chorus boys barge in. When one of the young actors couldn’t quite manage to access his feminine side and needed to be hurriedly replaced, Ollie sensed his chance. ‘I can do that!’ Director Basil Dearden quickly gave him the once-over and told him to give it a go. ‘And that was Oliver’s very first speaking role in a film,’ says David. And Ollie made the best of this opportunity, managing the almost impossible feat of out-camping Kenneth Williams with his mincing entrance, hands on hips, and a voice resembling Edith Evans overdosing on helium.

  Next was The Angry Silence, a highly praised film featuring one of Richard Attenborough’s finest performances as a factory worker who refuses to support an unjustified wildcat strike and is ostracized and victimized by his colleagues. Ollie can be seen in several scenes set in the factory, mingling with a group of other young thuggish workers. His glowering looks are unmistakable and he handles his few lines of dialogue with a sort of naive brutishness.

  Playing Attenborough’s character’s best friend in the film was Michael Craig, on whose original storyline the picture was based. Craig, something of a screen heart-throb in the early sixties, vividly remembers Ollie being on the film since during shooting he stayed with Craig and his first wife in their house in London and behaved impeccably. ‘He was very young at the time and just out of the army, where he’d been an officer and a gent, which he still was. Oliver was very polite and good to work with. I suppose I thought he might do well as a screen actor, he was good-looking, very macho, and with presence. We ran into each other over the following years and he was always friendly until after he had the fight in the club when someone shoved a glass in his face and left him badly scarred. He became quite different after that and I don’t think we ever met again.’

  Kate

  Using her contacts in the advertising industry, Pat Larthe sent Ollie off to audition for a television commercial for Cadbury’s Milk Tray. In the room was the usual motley crew of models and hard-up actors, but Ollie felt drawn to one girl in particular, who had devastating eyes and a natural beauty that knocked him sideways. ‘The vibes started immediately.’ It was the girl who made the first move, introducing herself as Kate Byrne. She’d auditioned already and hadn’t got the job. ‘They told me I was too beautiful for the girl next door type.’ Kate had been with Pat as a model for some time and knew all about Ollie, even mentioning his meningitis scare. The two began to chat away idly when there was a sudden commotion in the room and Ollie was distracted, and when he turned back she was gone. He now had a decision to make, go after her or wait for his audition. In the end he opted for both and barged into the office to the shocked surprise of the casting director. ‘Listen, you’ve got to interview me now because a gorgeous redhead has just left and I want to chase her.’

  Taking one look at Ollie, the director replied, ‘You’re not the sort.’

  ‘How do you know what sort she likes?’

  ‘No, I mean for the part. You’re not the boy who lives next door sort.’

  ‘Thank you very much,’ said Ollie and darted out into the bright sunshine of Oxford Street. Among the crowds of shoppers it was going to be difficult if not impossible to find her, but Ollie got a huge slice of luck when he literally crashed into her as she came out of a department store. They agreed to have a coffee, and as they sipped their cappuccinos Kate suddenly flashed a very expensive engagement ring. Oh bugger! Not to worry, because Kate revealed that all was not well with the relationship. And so it proved, for a few days later she called Oliver in tears: her fiancé had pushed her around and threatened violence. Enraged, Ollie armed himself with a walking stick and went looking for the bastard. Nowhere to be found, so instead he sent out a message that rather than hit on young women this chap ought to take on someone his own size. A showdown was arranged at a local pub, but when high noon struck he didn’t turn up ‘and I had nowhere to shove my stick’. Instead, standing there was Kate, and out of the tatters of one relationship grew another.

  Oliver, however, just after meeting Kate, had become smitten with the sister of a previous flame. Her name was Tina, she was very sexy and impossible to resist, and so Ollie juggled both affairs at the same time. Of course, it ended in disaster when he had to go to hospital again, this time suffering from German measles, and the two women turned up at the same visiting hour. There they stood on opposite sides of the bed staring daggers at each other. Kate crumbled a box of a hundred cigarettes over Ollie’s head, while Tina bombarded him with a few well-aimed grapes; it was like a scene from Carry On Doctor. ‘You can’t have both of us,’ said Kate finally. ‘You will have to choose between us – right now!’

  The choice was simple really: he’d known all along Kate was the one, but was rather less enthused with her idea of getting hitched immediately. No amount of, I think it would be better if we both wait a bit, would dissuade her: it was down the aisle or goodbye. Ollie eventually gave in, but it was still a bit of a shock when just a few days later Kate walked into the flat holding a marriage certificate. In a 1976 interview for Penthouse magazine he put his own predictable spin on the reason why he relented in the face of Kate’s marital overtures. ‘She was a little spitfire, who wanted me to sign a contract saying I wasn’t going to fuck anybody else.’

  High on Ollie’s list of reasons for not getting married were their precarious finances. Kate did the odd bit of modelling but he’d been out of work for months. So skint would he be sometimes that he’d take half a crown (12½p) out of Kate’s purse to go down the pub to drink and gamble at darts, always making sure to replace it by the end of the night. Things picked up by the close of 1959 when Oliver was requested to go out to Bray Studios, home of the Hammer horror films. Stuart Lyons, one of the casting directors there, had seen The Golden Spur and thought this new young actor warranted closer inspection. Lyons was to become an early champion of Oliver, keeping faith with him for years, even attempting, though without success, to win him a role in the Elizabeth Taylor/Richar
d Burton behemoth Cleopatra, on which he was casting consultant.

  As he waited for the results of his Hammer audition, Oliver’s thoughts turned to his planned nuptials with Kate. The ceremony took place on 2 January 1960 at Kensington Register Office and as he was the nephew of Carol Reed the union attracted the attention of Fleet Street (thanks to a tip-off from Pat Larthe), and so for the first time Oliver got his name in the papers. It was a quiet affair, with only a few close friends in attendance, and David the only member of either family to be invited, it seems. ‘I remember afterwards we went to our local pub and the landlord cut a champagne cork and wedged a silver coin inside and gave it to Ollie and Kate for good luck.’ Certainly Kate’s father wasn’t there: Patrick Byrne didn’t altogether approve of his good Catholic daughter marrying a struggling actor.

  The marriage didn’t get off to the best of starts thanks to an almighty row that was allowed to fester for an entire week. It was over the most trivial of matters, David’s wedding present of a voucher that could be exchanged for an LP or a night out at the recently opened Talk of the Town. Ollie rather fancied the night out, while Kate wanted the record, and all hell broke loose. Finally Kate got her way, but there were no winners and it was sadly all too symptomatic of what turned out to be a tempestuous and traumatic marriage. ‘Kate was very strong-willed, a vibrant personality,’ says Simon. ‘And because they were both so similar, who was going to back down in that relationship? That was the problem. So the rows were horrendous.’