What Fresh Lunacy is This?

by Robert Sellers

  Freeman remembers another incident at a pub when Ollie was challenged to an arm-wrestle by an elderly man and the actor scoffed at the very idea. ‘But this old guy shamed him into acceptance and then thoroughly beat him. The elderly man then told Ollie that he was a heart surgeon and had to have strength in his arms and hands to perform his work. Ollie bought him a drink.’

  Very early on in the shoot Carol found herself drawn to Ollie. She admits that the attraction to begin with was fairly physical. ‘He was very sexy. I noticed right away he was a very sexually attractive man. And very masculine. He made a point of being masculine.’ As time went on the attraction grew deeper. Not only did they share the same birth date but Carol recognized that they were not too dissimilar as people. ‘Although he was obviously more dramatic than I am. He was also very plain-spoken and very gentlemanly. He couldn’t have been nicer.’ She was falling in love with him and by the close of filming they’d begun an affair.

  Ollie didn’t appear to give a damn who knew it either, taking Carol to the London premiere of The Trap and also parties and nights out with friends who were well aware that he was married. Those who didn’t saw a couple that appeared blissfully besotted. But what of Kate? Certainly Oliver still loved her and Mark remembers their marriage being ‘very happy. But I also remember when it became more argumentative. I never grasped the contents of the rows, my mother naturally shielded me from most of it, but I do remember there being a continual sense of friction.’ The rows could be colossal. One day they were getting ready to go to a friend’s wedding when an argument erupted. Kate was all done up in her finery, when Ollie blasted, ‘Go to the wedding on your own then.’ Shooting him a hurt look, Kate screamed, ‘I will.’ As she left the house Ollie tipped a bowl of water all over her from the top window.

  ‘They were young and naive,’ says Mark. ‘And if you’ve got one person in that couple starting to ascend it’s very easy to see how things do start to divide, especially when there’s a lot of pretty women around and everyone thinks you’re the best thing since sliced bread and you start to believe a little bit of that. But she was quite good at knocking him back down, tapping him on the shoulder and going, could I have your autograph, please?’ But it was tough for Kate, as there would be one crowd of people that he’d meet in the pub, take back home, get them all pissed, and when they staggered off new people would arrive. ‘I don’t know how Kate stood for it,’ is Johnny Placett’s view. ‘Having people in her place all the time one after the other. He did love her, though. But then again, she wasn’t the kind of woman who sat on the sidelines. Kate always wanted to be in amongst the action.’

  In the early weeks of Ollie’s relationship with Carol he enjoyed taking her to old-fashioned London pubs and touristy landmarks like Covent Garden fruit market. ‘He seemed to like to show me very English things, so I got to know London very well. He was very patriotic and he loved the Queen. Whenever I see a picture of the Queen or something on TV about her I always think of Ollie. He just adored the Queen and was passionately proud of England.’

  At the time Carol was living in the capital and Ollie would sometimes take her young daughter to school, or they’d all go for long walks in Kensington Gardens. Often he used to turn up unannounced at her flat. One day he appeared declaring, ‘I’m going to show you what I used to look like.’

  ‘Fine,’ said Carol.

  ‘I was actually quite pretty, you know.’

  ‘Pretty!’ said Carol.

  Ollie had already explained to Carol how he’d got the scars on his face, ‘and when I first met him they were still quite visible.’ They went to this rather rundown, seedy movie house to watch The System, the film he’d made just before the glassing. ‘And I could see that he was indeed very, very pretty. And there was an old lady in the seats in front of us, it was kind of an empty theatre, but people kept coming and sitting next to her and then moving off. Then two bobbies came down the aisle and took the old lady away. She had been giving people hand jobs. She was literally right in front of us and neither Ollie nor myself had noticed it. Ollie thought it was terribly disrespectful to the film.’

  Just as memorable was the time Ollie showed up at Carol’s flat to tell her that he’d left Kate and wanted to move in with her. Fine, great, she said. The following day Ollie arrived in a car that was loaded with his clothes. ‘And he stayed around the house for maybe two days, but he never took the clothes out of the car, so every time he had to change he’d go down and change in the street. He just couldn’t bring himself to move his possessions in.’

  So it was back to Kate. But Ollie’s affair with Carol, remarkably, would continue on and off for the next seven years.

  Michael Winner was pacing up and down his office in Piccadilly puffing away on his trademark cigar as he related the plot of his latest movie, The Jokers, to his star Michael Crawford. ‘It’s about these two brothers who steal the crown jewels, dear. It’s a comedy.’ Circa 1966 Crawford was Britain’s hot new comedy talent, launched by Richard Lester in The Knack. Such was his kudos at the time that Universal were backing The Jokers only if Crawford played the lead. ‘So who’s my brother in this?’ asked Crawford.

  ‘Oliver Reed,’ announced Winner proudly.

  Crawford’s jaw hit the floor. ‘You must be bloody joking! Audiences will never accept Oliver Reed and myself as being even remotely related.’ Crawford was currently appearing in a West End show and Winner suggested Oliver see it and then they could all meet up afterwards. Crawford’s response was: ‘Don’t bring Oliver Reed to the theatre. I’m telling you right now. If you bring him to my dressing room I’m going to throw him out.’

  ‘If you’re going to throw Oliver Reed out of your dressing room, dear,’ said Winner, ‘you’ve got about six hours to go to the gym and train, because he’s a very fit fella and you’re not.’

  The meeting went ahead anyway and Oliver turned up with David: a wise move, if it was planned, because Crawford took one look at Ollie’s fair-haired brother and announced, ‘He could be my double.’ So ended any arguments about Ollie’s suitability as Crawford’s cinematic sibling. In fact, when shooting started the pair were almost inseparable and much of the film’s appeal is their on-screen chemistry, dubbed ‘The best double act since Laurel and Hardy’ by the London Evening Standard.

  On set there was much mischief-making and Winner’s life was quickly made a misery. First they stole his designer sunglasses, which ended up mangled beneath the wheel of a bus, then, with the aid of the crew, jacked his Rolls-Royce clear off the road. The humour reached infantile levels when black boot polish was smeared around the mouthpiece of Winner’s prized megaphone and laxative was put in his tea. Nor was Crawford immune to Ollie’s japes. He was not a heavy drinker and Ollie sometimes spiked his co-star’s feeble half pint of bitter with double vodkas during lunchtime visits to the pub and Crawford would stagger back to work barking insults at a mystified Winner, while Ollie stood in the background tut-tutting, ‘How unprofessional, turning up on set drunk, outrageous.’ On another occasion Ollie stood outside Crawford’s Clapham flat shouting instructions to a heavy goods vehicle. ‘OK, back a bit, back a bit.’ When Crawford opened the door Ollie’s face opened out into a broad smile. ‘Oh hello, Michael. I’ve got that ton of horse shit you wanted.’

  Crawford puts the close bond he shared with Oliver during the making of The Jokers down to the fact they were playing brothers. ‘Whenever we walked about the set together, Oliver always kept a fraternal arm around me and every now and again he’d give me a brotherly squeeze, the kind of squeeze a fruit-extracting machine would give a ripe orange.’ The physical side of Oliver was always bubbling away very close to the surface. While not a Method actor, he was nevertheless an instinctive one and ‘tended to live the part he was playing,’ according to Crawford. In one scene Ollie’s character believes he’s been double-crossed by his brother and left to the mercy of the police, and so attacks him. ‘I was really dreading it because as we shot the scene Ol
iver took my “betrayal” as something entirely real and completely personal and suddenly my life wasn’t worth tuppence. His ham-like hands were fastened so tightly round my neck, I felt the end of my life was imminent. It took four people to get him off me – and only two of them were scripted.’

  If there was one crack in the relationship it was Crawford’s perceived tight-fistedness, or, as Ollie put it, ‘Michael has very short arms and very long pockets.’ At many a lunch it was Oliver’s recollection that Crawford always ended up leaving just before the bill arrived. So imagine Ollie and Winner’s surprise when Crawford invited the pair for drinks at a flash restaurant. As usual, when the bill was presented Crawford legged it but the pair hunted him down. ‘Oliver held Michael over the fountains in Trafalgar Square and threatened to drop him in unless he stumped up,’ recalls Winner. ‘Oliver was always sensitive to injustice, especially in the way of paying for rounds.’

  Yet again, Winner came up trumps for Ollie, for The Jokers was a perfect vehicle to showcase his considerable comedic gifts, which sadly were not to be exploited by filmmakers as much as they should have been. It also proved to be his first big exposure in the United States. Cashing in on the swinging London scene, The Jokers was a reasonable hit over there. As one critic noted about Ollie, ‘The brutal, brooding hulk of volcanic masculinity was beginning to intrude on the dreamland of women both sides of the Atlantic.’

  With Winner now a firm champion of Ollie (they were already planning their next feature together), the actor’s other benefactor, Ken Russell, came calling. The project was Dante’s Inferno, another BBC television film, this one about the flamboyant and sensual Victorian English poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Again the two men worked seamlessly together. Ollie really was the perfect foil for Russell, who, like Winner, herded his actors along with a megaphone. Russell was never much interested in an actor’s motivation, as Glenda Jackson ribs: ‘Ken wouldn’t have known acting if it came up and hit him in the face!’ Like Oliver, he thought all that Method stuff was a load of old bollocks and often made the claim that the two of them quickly devised their own private way of working, labelling it: Moody 1, Moody 2 and Moody 3. Depending on the amount of intensity required for the scene, morose sullenness or outright rage, Russell would indicate, ‘I think a Moody 2 here’ and Ollie pitched his performance accordingly. It was a form of directorial shorthand that continued for the rest of the time they worked together.

  Sheba Gray, whose father Tony was in the film, was nine years old when Dante’s Inferno was made and appears in some scenes as Rossetti’s daughter. She’s never forgotten Ollie, who I imagine cut quite a striking figure for a pre-pubescent young girl. ‘Oliver was utterly charming towards me and my younger brother. He played a great game which involved throwing half crowns on to the lawn and letting us keep as many as we could pick by the time he counted to twenty. He also took me punting on my own and made me feel like such a lady. I always remember him with the highest regard.’

  Oliver delivers yet another consummate performance as Rossetti, managing the feat of making the famed artist both a playboy and a rogue, yet retaining that fatal element of charm that won over friends and lovers. When he reads some of Rossetti’s poems he makes you regret that he never did Shakespeare or the classics since his voice was a superbly rich instrument, and his line readings were always extraordinarily good. What a Macbeth he would have made (why didn’t Polanski cast him in his blood-soaked 1971 version?) or, had he lived longer, what a wonderfully stately decaying King Lear.

  During his time in the industry Oliver was known as ‘the whispering giant’ and was the bane of soundmen owing to his soft, low, mellifluous voice. It was almost a gentle voice which belied his fierce image. ‘I had the misfortune to look like a prizefighter and speak like a public schoolboy.’ Or as one journalist put it, ‘looking like an aristocrat’s bastard masquerading as a builder’s labourer’. It was a whisper that screenwriter George MacDonald Fraser called ‘the most menacing in the business, and, unlike many whispers, it was always audible; he would vary it with sudden, unexpected roars’. This was a technique Oliver cultivated quite early in his career. ‘I concluded that if I were ever going to achieve anything, I had to pretend to be a volcano, a sleeping volcano always with the threat of eruption.’

  As soon as he read the script for Michael Winner’s new film, I’ll Never Forget What’s’isname, Ollie knew he wanted to do it, not least because it gave him one of British cinema’s greatest ever opening scenes. As the credits roll he walks through the streets of central London nonchalantly holding an axe over his shoulder, drawing looks of bemusement and shock from passers-by. Arriving at his workplace, he takes the lift and, once inside his plush, shiny office, takes the axe to his desk, reducing it to kindling wood in seconds. The man’s name is Andrew Quint, an advertising executive, and this is his unique way of resigning from his job and escaping the rat race.

  The casting of Orson Welles as his boss was another inducement. Oliver was to describe working with the cinema legend as ‘an honour. He taught me a great deal.’ He was positively in awe of the man, calling him a force of nature, and out of the film grew an unlikely friendship. They’d meet only infrequently and in the most unlikely of places. Ollie might be in the middle of Greece and hear this unmistakable voice: ‘Oliver, my boy, let me take you to lunch.’ He’d turn up at the appointed time only to find that Orson had invited what seemed to be the entire local population. ‘The place would be packed to the rafters. And the meals! Course after course. Hugely expensive. And, just as the coffee arrived, Orson would rise to his feet and, in that great booming voice, say, “Excuse me for one moment, my friends, I have to pay a visit to the little boys’ room.” We’d never see him again. He’d nip out the back, leaving some poor sod, usually myself, to pick up the tab. I lost count of the number of times that happened.’ Of course, Ollie couldn’t stay angry for long, as Orson was a one-off and you always knew that he was going to be good value for money.

  The last time Ollie met Orson was in the eighties, when he was stranded at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris one Christmas Eve, desperate to get back home. Outside the snow was gathering momentum and all flights had been cancelled. Then, behind him, he heard that familiar voice: ‘Oliver, my boy! Why don’t the two of us hire a private plane and make our own way to England? It’s my shout.’ And Ollie thought, oh Christ, here we go again.

  Winner shot in all the fashionable London places, Mayfair, Chelsea, the Biba shop in Kensington, and it was a brilliant advertisement for the London Tourist Board. For a week his cameras went to Cambridge, where a young actor called Mark Eden (later a regular on Coronation Street) joined the cast, playing a private detective hired to follow Oliver’s character. Delighted to be working with ‘an actor I admired’, Eden witnessed firsthand Ollie’s close relationship with Winner, which was just as fraught as it was creative. ‘They argued an awful lot, although they really did like each other very much. They had blazing rows and disagreements. He stood up to Michael and I think Michael quite liked that, he liked somebody standing up to him.’

  Eden highlights one particular incident. Oliver was in a punt gently bobbing along the River Cam, with Winner and the cameraman crouched down at the far end. As usual, Winner was shouting directions, probably through a megaphone, at an increasingly irate Oliver. Eden watched from the bank as there was take after take. ‘All of a sudden Oliver threw the pole into the water and stepped off. He literally stepped off the boat as though he was going for a walk. Swimming towards me, he got out and walked back to the hotel. Marooned in the middle of the Cam, Winner was shouting and screaming and gesticulating so ferociously that he almost capsized the boat.’

  That night Eden had dinner with Ollie and asked what had happened. ‘Michael wouldn’t stop fucking rabbiting on in that grating voice of his, giving me instructions. So I told him, if you don’t shut up I’m going back to my hotel. And Michael said, “How are you going to
do that, dear, in the middle of the Cam?”’ Well, Ollie certainly showed him. On top of all that, the crew didn’t have any replacement clothes, so had to send Ollie’s costume to the cleaners, and it held up shooting for the rest of the day.

  Eden enjoyed Oliver’s company immensely. ‘He was an enormously likeable man, great fun. Mind you, he did drink an awful lot and he always wanted to have a fight with somebody when he’d had a few. I think he had a bit of a death wish. The way he used to drink was just ridiculous. Funnily enough, the night I had dinner with him he hardly drank anything. I think he had a big scene the next morning. We had some wine but he only had a couple of glasses.’

  This was quite often the case when Oliver was working: he’d look at the next day’s schedule and if it was a particularly difficult scene he’d lay off the sauce or only partially indulge. If, however, it was a reaction shot or something else minor, well then it was no holds barred. ‘He was very professional in that way,’ says Simon. ‘But he did get increasingly worried and nervous about lines and so wouldn’t let the drink get in the way.’

  This kind of professionalism was typified for Eden in a scene where their two characters engage in a fierce fight. Ollie choreographed the whole routine himself and Eden found him completely focused and utterly in control; had he not been, then mistakes and injuries could have resulted.

  Off set, Oliver generally kept himself very much to himself, racing back home as soon as the day’s work finished. ‘The impression I got was of a rather shy and quiet man, which surprised me rather,’ recalls co-star Wendy Craig, who played his wife in the film. ‘He was quite reticent, really. I never knew anything about his private life. I did know he quite liked a tipple but when we were doing the film he was absolutely on the wagon, he never took a drink. And I thought that was highly professional.’