What Fresh Lunacy is This?

by Robert Sellers

  With the obvious exception of The Third Man, Oliver! is perhaps the towering achievement of Carol Reed’s career. A global box-office hit and winner of six Oscars, including Best Picture, it continues to enthral audiences, its magic refusing to fade. And much of that success is down to Ollie’s performance as Bill Sikes, for even when he’s off screen his malevolent presence can still be felt, as if at any moment he’s about to jump out from the shadows. Much of Ollie’s screen image was brooding and rather threatening, almost intimidating, but he knew how and when to use it, that was the skill, and most importantly how to underplay it. Simon remembers his brother telling him that if there was any doubt about what to do on screen, he wouldn’t do anything, ‘because he had that sense of menace about him it looked great. He was very keen to play that menace. He felt the camera was his fan.’

  It was a performance that brought him plaudits and mass recognition; it also scared the crap out of the child actors. Jack Wild, the immortal Artful Dodger, recalled that his overriding memory of Oliver was of total intimidation. ‘As kids we were all terrified of him because he was this giant of a man and the only time we ever saw him was when he was in costume and made up for the part.’ This was a deliberate and clever move on Ollie’s part. ‘I kept my distance from the kids. With Ron Moody’s Fagin, they kept pulling his beard off and trying to take his pants down, but they kept their distance from me. I wanted Bill Sikes to be a frightening character, and I couldn’t have retained that menace if I had allowed them to become too familiar through clowning around with me on the set.’

  The only time the youngsters ever saw the ‘real’ Oliver was at the end-of-filming party, when he turned out to be just as dangerous as his screen alter ego. Mark Lester recalls, ‘He got Jack Wild and me completely drunk on vodka by spiking our Cokes. I remember getting home and my mother put me in a cold bath with all my clothes on. I think I was violently ill, but looking back on it, it’s quite amusing really.’

  Others felt equally intimidated by Ollie’s presence. Mark Lester vividly recalls the filming of the scene where Bill Sikes grabs hold of Fagin’s throat and spits out a few salacious threats. Oliver had arrived on set heavily psyched up and in character and Lester watched fascinated as the scene was played out. ‘I remember looking into Ron Moody’s eyes during that moment and, even at my age, seeing real fear.’

  Remaining an enigmatic, brooding presence was also good for Shani Wallis, who as Nancy required to be roughed up a good deal by Sikes. In one dramatic moment in Fagin’s hide-out Bill smacks her full across the face. ‘He scared me doing that,’ she later admitted. ‘I fell and almost cracked my head open. And I remember getting up from that position and I was trembling.’ She does, however, credit Oliver with the success of the film’s most shocking scene, when Nancy is clubbed to death by Sikes as the hapless Oliver looks on: the most non-U certificate moment ever to appear in a U-certificate picture. Ollie told Shani just before the take not to hold back when it came to defending herself, to kick and scream and to really go for it. The realism of her reaction was picked up by the camera and the result is truly unsettling. Most of the time, though, Shani did despair of Oliver’s carrying on and flirting, although he never once tried it on with the singer, since her husband was a daily visitor to the studio. Most of his chasing around seemed focused on the pretty dancers; well, one dancer in particular that he couldn’t keep his eyes off.

  The bulk of Oliver!’s ten-million-dollar budget went on the huge theatrical sets. The London of Dickens was built from scratch, nothing was shot on location, and art director John Box’s aim was to both capture the grimness of the time, for example the rotting stairways spanning a mud-filled canal and leading to Fagin’s hide-out, and its elegance, typified by grand houses and exclusive squares. ‘Those sets were huge, just massive,’ remembers assistant director Mike Higgins. ‘Half of Shepperton Studios was taken over and they were used for years afterwards on other films.’

  Perhaps the most eye-catching set was that of a beautiful royal crescent, built on the back lot of the studio, where one of the big show-stopping numbers was performed, ‘Who Will Buy?’. It took weeks to rehearse and shoot and involved hundreds of extras and dancers. Oliver is only seen briefly towards the end of the sequence but nevertheless was required on set every day in his Bill Sikes outfit because they would switch to shooting his scenes if it rained. ‘He’d come down in his yellow E-type and he’d park near the set and just sit there and brood,’ says Jacquie Daryl, one of the dancers. ‘And you can imagine how broody he was as Bill Sikes. He would just look and watch at everything going on. And we kind of stared at one another all the time, never saying a word, just looked at one another.’ This went on for weeks until finally the film’s American choreographer, Oona White, had had enough of it. ‘This is ridiculous,’ she told Jacquie one afternoon. ‘The whole set’s boiling because you two are just sitting there looking at one another.’ They’d still not exchanged a single word. So Oona finally went over to Ollie, grabbed him, and introduced the pair of them.

  Jacquie had come to Britain from her native South Africa to join the Royal Ballet School, after which she went into the Royal Ballet Company at Covent Garden, staying there for ten years. She was with the company when Rudolf Nureyev defected in Paris while on tour with the Kirov Ballet, and still recalls the incredible excitement of his first arrival into class at Covent Garden. After that she’d watch from the wings his dazzling performances opposite Margot Fonteyn. Entranced by Nureyev, Jacquie had also fallen in love with American stage musicals; the dancing in them was so modern and vibrant that this was where she saw her future. For the next few years she appeared in West End productions and films. Then came two separate offers, to be in the principal dancing cast of either Oliver! or Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. After much debate Jacquie chose Oliver! The schedule was longer, so she figured it would earn her more money. It was a decision that was to change her life.

  Finally introduced, Jacquie and Oliver would hook up in the studio bar during breaks or go to the local pub after filming. At the time Jacquie wasn’t a drinker and Ollie always joked about the first time he asked what she wanted to drink and she said, ‘Orange please,’ and Ollie came back with, ‘Orange and what?’ So no, she didn’t indulge. ‘It was something I acquired.’ These early dates were nothing serious and certainly not clandestine, the whole cast and crew knew about it all, with many of them playing matchmaker. ‘Get in there, girl,’ some of the dancers were urging, but Jacquie didn’t want a fling. ‘Hopefully he’ll move on to another part of the film and I’ll never see him again.’ But Oona kept saying, ‘This is ridiculous. In my day, darling, one wouldn’t think twice.’ In this respect the film world is perhaps unique: what happens on a film set usually stays there, and sometimes ends there as well, so people have got terribly involved, broken a lot of hearts, probably broken a few marriages, and then they go their separate ways. But this was different, because the floodgates of emotion had been opened and there really wasn’t any way of stopping it. Oliver and Jacquie were not being ruled any more by their heads but by their hearts, and by the end of filming they were lovers. Even Carol Reed got to hear about what was going on and one day his wife came on the set to have a good spy on this girl who was having a fling with her nephew. Afterwards she told one of her acquaintances that there was nothing in it. ‘She’s just a simple little girl from Africa.’

  Looking back, Jacquie regards her behaviour as being that of a lovelorn teenager, confused by the emotions surging through her body, totally unable to control them. ‘He was larger than life. He was very magnetic, very charismatic, he was, oh, so like a child at times. It was all of those things put together.’ In other words, he was irresistible to her. Of course, she fully understood the predicament she was in, that Oliver was married. ‘It was a big problem for him and an even bigger one for me. The whole thing was governed by guilt because both of us felt very, very guilty about the fact that this was going to affect a lot of people’s lives. It’
s not something I’m proud of. But there was nothing I could do about it. He was the most amazing person.’ Even the knowledge that Oliver and Kate’s relationship had been on shaky ground for some time because of Oliver’s womanizing didn’t ease the burden. ‘Actually you feel worse because it gives someone an option out, doesn’t it? And then there was Mark, who was at such a vulnerable age then; not a period I enjoy, really.’

  Torn between his feelings for Jacquie and his responsibilities at home, especially his duty as a father, Oliver attempted to stop the affair before it got any more serious. ‘We tried to separate, and it didn’t work,’ Jacquie reveals. ‘In fact we tried twice. We suddenly realized, well, this is what we wanted. But it was a big price to pay.’ For now, though, Ollie remained with Kate.

  The Portley Club

  The timing could have been better as Ollie had only recently moved his family into a substantial property in Wimbledon’s Ellerton Road. Gate House very much reflected its owner, with its military and hunting prints on the walls, Ollie’s growing collection of antique flintlocks, and of course a well-stocked bar. The property also had several balconies and Oliver wasn’t averse, at some risk to himself, to leaping down from one to the other, or so he boasted to a reporter.

  Back in England after his second stint in the army, David, together with Muriel, had moved into a house nearby and the two brothers rekindled something of the close friendship they’d shared as children and young men about town. One evening Ollie came round and saw a moggy leap across the lounge and out of the door. ‘Oh, you’ve got a cat?’

  ‘Yes,’ said David.

  ‘So have I,’ replied Ollie. There was a slight pause. ‘Is yours a good fighter?’

  ‘Quite honestly, I don’t know,’ said David.

  ‘Mine’s a very good fighter,’ insisted Ollie, and rushed round to Gate House to fetch it.

  The thing was called Pudding and after the furniture had been rearranged to create some kind of fighting arena the two cats were placed together. ‘And Ollie was very disappointed when our cat Twinkle saw Pudding off,’ recalls David.

  Besides Pudding, Ollie kept two large German shepherds called Scharn and Horst, ‘but he never trained them,’ says David. ‘And they went a bit wild. I think the sixteenth hole of the Royal Wimbledon golf course was just over the fence and one day these dogs escaped and bit the pants off one of the golfers.’ When you came to visit Ollie and walked up the driveway, if the dogs were in the garden it was touch and go whether you made it to the front door. In the end both dogs became so unruly that Ollie offered them to the local police force but even they wouldn’t take them on.

  Gate House backed on to the Common and Oliver often took Mark on long walks or they’d build camps out of dead bracken. And then there were the goblins. ‘He had these horrible garden gnomes,’ remembers Mark, ‘and they’d be hidden and scattered around the garden under rhododendrons and things and he’d say, let’s go goblin hunting!’ Another game they’d play on the Common was ditch jumping. There was a slope in the middle of the woods and Ollie would pick Mark up after school and he’d jump ditches all the way down. ‘I think the idea was to get me as covered in mud as he possibly could. I remember being put in the boot of his car once because I was so dirty and about every ten seconds he’d shout, “Are you OK?” because he was worried about fumes. So it was madness, but it was also care. And it was fun, naughty fun, because you knew you were going to get a bollocking when you got home with your school uniform covered in mud, but God, it was fun.’

  It also highlights a strange dichotomy within Oliver. This desire for chaos and misbehaviour co-existed with a fundamental belief in good manners, etiquette and deportment. These he drilled into Mark from an early age. There was the occasion when Mark was going for an interview at a school, and at lunch before meeting the headmaster Oliver noticed that Mark’s nails weren’t quite as clean as they could be so gave him some money to ‘find a chemist and buy a nail brush’. So there was poor Mark feverishly cleaning his nails over lunch. ‘So clean nails, clean shoes, just to be well kept was important. I remember getting lots of bollockings for losing my school cap and him saying, “They don’t grow on trees!” It was very much about knowing what was right, table manners, etiquette, manners overall, elocution. I was still being corrected by him when I was twenty years old! Those things were important to him, vastly important. I think he felt it was important that you knew how to be a gentleman. It was as though you had to know all the rules before breaking them. So he could be extremely eloquent, he could be extremely polite, he could be very gentlemanly, and alternatively he could be a complete pain in the arse.’

  While at Gate House Ollie continued to drink at his local pubs, and his favourites at this time appear to have been the Dog and Fox and the Castle. Bernie Coleman had taken over the management of the Dog and Fox in the early sixties and Joyce became its indomitable landlady. Ollie adored her and loved drinking at ‘the Dog’, and the routine was always the same: within minutes of his arrival a large group of people would appear out of nowhere, ‘all freeloaders,’ says Bernie. ‘It was almost like jungle drums and Ollie would buy them all drinks. He always paid for everything. He always had cash on him. It was like monopoly money the way he knocked it out. He was very kind to everyone until somebody tried to get him to have a punch-up, which he never did, certainly not in our pub.’ Ollie respected Bernie and Joyce too much to start any aggro, probably because he knew Joyce wouldn’t have stood for it. She remembers, ‘We used to have a few battle royals, he and I, but I liked him very much. When he was sober he was a lovely, lovely man. But when he was drunk he was a bit naughty.’

  George, the landlord over at the Castle, just up the road, indulged Ollie and his mates and allowed them to drink after hours, in fact any time they wanted. Joyce never put up with that nonsense. ‘Sometimes Ollie used to come in and say, “A pint glass, please, Joyce.” I’d say, “What do you want a pint glass for?” He said, “I want you to start that end and go all the way along the optics putting some of everything into a pint glass, till it’s full.” I said, “On your bike, we’re not having that here.” I mean, if I’d have poured it he’d have drunk it, I’ve no doubt about that even if it would have killed him. But I didn’t want that on my conscience. So we used to have a few battles, but only when he was really drunk. He loved coming to the pub. He should have lived in a pub really.’

  There was another occasion when Ollie and eight of his mates had been drinking up at the Castle. It was a Friday night and ‘the Dog’ was rammed as usual. ‘I don’t know who dared who,’ says Joyce, ‘but they came in the front door, Ollie and all these men, totally naked, pushed everybody out of the way, and went down to the end of the bar, where there was a big post, tapped it and then ran out, across the main road, back to the Castle. There was an elderly lady sitting in a chair right by the door and she threw the whole of her drink over the last one’s backside and went, “How disgusting that you let people come in here like this, Joyce.” I went, “I didn’t know anything about it.” “Disgusting,” she said. “And I hope you’re going to replace my drink.”’

  Joyce could always sense when Oliver had had enough, that one drink that would tip the balance. ‘That’s enough, Ollie,’ she’d shriek. ‘You’re not having any fights in here or beer thrown all over the place. That’s it, out!’ And he would always leave, no problem. One night he went to pick up a soda siphon and Joyce said, ‘Down!’ Oliver had indeed met his match with Joyce, and when she retired in the early eighties he was making a film abroad but still managed to organize a box of roses to be sent to her, along with the message: ‘So sorry you’re retiring. You’re the only lady that I would never tangle with, because I wouldn’t win.’

  Bernie and Ollie were close too, often going to big boxing matches at the Royal Albert Hall together. And every Christmas Bernie got Ollie to attend a charity tea dance for the local pensioners, held in the ballroom that was attached to the pub. Ollie would arrive, usually three s
heets to the wind, but gladly dance with the old ladies for hours on end. ‘He was a remarkable man,’ remembers Bernie. ‘The saddest thing about him was that he always wanted to drink a lot when he needn’t have done. When he wasn’t drinking he was the most charming man and tremendous company, you could talk to him about anything. A very, very interesting man to be with.’

  In order that he could drink in relative peace, without prying eyes or half of Wimbledon village turning up, Ollie formed the Portley Club, something he described as his own little ‘Bacchanalian society’. The purpose of the Portley Club was, as always with Ollie, to have fun. David was made an honorary member and on occasion Ollie would come round to his house and announce, ‘Right, Portley meeting.’ This could be at any time of the day or night, ‘usually two o’clock in the morning,’ says Muriel, bitterly, and one had to obey without question.

  It was largely an excuse to get drunk, yet people imagined all manner of wrongdoing and sordid excesses were going on behind closed doors, a reputation that, Simon remembers, no one did much to dispel. ‘In fact we would pretend that there was some sort of bacchanalian orgy going on, so much so that David’s wife would be outside screaming, “I know you’ve got women in there!” We created this image of a Hellfire-type club when all it was really was six of us getting wildly pissed and then ordering a Chinese takeaway.’