What Fresh Lunacy is This?

by Robert Sellers

  The Portley Club was a very close-knit thing, the membership consisting of Ollie’s closest friends. Perhaps it was an attempt to recreate the male bonding and camaraderie he’d enjoyed in the army. No women were allowed to join. All his life Oliver was to have a strange relationship with women. He was far happier in the company of men. He liked to be with other blokes; women were a rather nice accessory. ‘And men almost more than women were like a magnet to him,’ says Jacquie. He was perhaps the quintessential man’s man.

  Another largely male-dominated domain that Ollie gravitated towards was his local rugby club, Rosslyn Park, who played at Roehampton, near Richmond Park. Introduced to the place by Mick Fryer, he became a keen supporter, stumping up something like £10,000 in the early seventies to pay for floodlights which enabled the club to establish the London Floodlit Sevens, a popular tournament which continues to this day. On occasion Oliver would play in the club’s B team, as did mates Mick Fryer and Ken Burgess. ‘He wasn’t very good,’ admits Simon. ‘He played in the pack. His hand–eye coordination was terrible, so you had to almost plant the ball in his midriff, but then he was difficult to shake off. If he was on a run you wouldn’t want to be the guy tackling him because he was immensely strong. Ollie was six foot and his bulk was huge, he had enormous strength.’

  It was the earthy humour and lack of bullshit of the people who played the game that Ollie loved, and when he wasn’t filming he tried not to miss a match. Some of Mark’s earliest memories are sitting in the back of coaches going to away games. ‘And on the way back stopping at every pub from wherever they’d been playing, and fifteen fellas getting off to have a pee in the hedge and jumping back on until the next boozer.’

  On one memorable occasion Ollie went to Paris with the Rosslyn squad, ‘with the idea of drinking a lot and kicking the shit out of each other’. They were all holed up in a hotel, ‘passing the time by diving off the wardrobes to see if we could land in the hand-basins’, when Kate unexpectedly arrived, hoping perhaps to catch him up to a bit of no good. ‘All she found was a load of rugger lads puking their rings up. Fucking marvellous!’

  After a few years Oliver was forced to stop playing rugby because insurance companies considered it an unnecessary risk, but he still retained a vested interest in the sport, ‘Because a part of rugby is a drink at the bar afterwards.’ England international Andrew Ripley was a Rosslyn Park legend, staying with the club his whole career. In 1999 he remembered Oliver in an interview for the Daily Telegraph. ‘Ollie used to love it down here. He would wander round, get drunk, tell outrageous jokes, occasionally take his clothes off and break a few windows or chairs and nobody would take a blind bit of notice – we’d seen it all before. After a particularly riotous evening a cheque would always arrive promptly the next morning to make good any damage.’

  Director John Hough, who worked with Ollie three times in the eighties, heard a tale of when he was making a film in Wales co-starring former American footballer O. J. Simpson. Alas, the money ran out after two weeks and the whole project was shut down, but anyway Ollie and O. J. were drinking in a bar one night and got into an argument about the various merits of American football and rugby and which was the tougher game. ‘Suddenly,’ says Hough, ‘O. J. charged across the room and crashed into Oliver, sending him flying. “That’s what it’s like in American football.” Up came Oliver and charged back and knocked Simpson all across the room. “Well, that’s what it’s like in rugby.” They kept doing it and quickly it got out of hand: they were like two bulls charging against each other.’

  Quite unexpectedly this little Welsh fellow, who’d been quietly sipping his pint of beer in the corner, stood up and declared, ‘You’re spoiling my drink.’ ‘And with one blow he knocked out O. J. Simpson,’ says Hough. ‘And with the other blow knocked out Oliver. The film’s stunt man, who was supposed to be looking after the two stars and making sure they didn’t get into any trouble, jumped in to try and restrain this Welsh guy and he felt his muscles and they were like solid steel. That was one real tough guy.’

  Now a household name thanks to his performance as Bill Sikes, Ollie, while he didn’t have the pick of the best scripts, was certainly getting his fair share of offers. And none was more potentially career- and life-changing than James Bond. When Sean Connery left the role after 1967’s You Only Live Twice there was a mildly desperate scramble for a replacement and Oliver’s name was bandied about. A popular British movie magazine of the period called Showtime even ran a poll, inviting its readers to vote for who they wanted to fill Connery’s shoes. The clear winner, beating the likes of Patrick McGoohan and Roger Moore, was Oliver Reed. When informed by the magazine, Ollie thanked the readers but stated no desire to tackle 007. He also revealed that he had been an original candidate for the Bond role back in late 1961, not long after Hammer’s The Curse of the Werewolf. ‘But I was too young. When Harry Saltzman started his 007 search, I was twenty-two. He had me in mind for some time; spent ages trying methods of making me look older!’ Are we to believe this story, or was Ollie talking complete balderdash to the reporter from Showtime?

  How seriously Oliver was considered as the successor to Sean Connery is open to conjecture; certainly he wasn’t on the final shortlist of five actors who were officially screen-tested, out of whom George Lazenby eventually emerged. The reason for his omission from the 007 race seems to have been the producers’ concern about his growing reputation as a bad boy. Albert R. Broccoli went on record years later to explain that with Lazenby they had a complete unknown whom they could mould into the persona of James Bond, but with Ollie there was more baggage. ‘I think maybe they were a bit worried that the image wasn’t right,’ says Simon, ‘because by then there had been a few negative stories and the producers went, I don’t think so. But it made sense to me because I always thought Ollie was going to do Bond and he would have been very good. He’d have loved it, too.’

  Someone else who thinks Ollie was ideal for Bond is Michael York, who worked with him several times and was a 007 candidate himself in the early seventies. ‘Oliver would have been a very good James Bond because he had that class thing that Ian Fleming had and which Sean didn’t have at all but made up for in other ways. Oliver would have been a good choice, that dark menace that he trailed around with him, which was so effective in his Bill Sikes, just the way he looked for one thing, and with that scar that added to the menace of his features.’ That scar may very well have been one of the reasons why Ollie was a candidate. In one of the few descriptive passages Fleming ever wrote about Bond’s physical appearance, from his debut novel Casino Royale, is this: ‘With the thin vertical scar down his right cheek the general effect was faintly piratical.’ A good description of Ollie.

  In the end the nearest Oliver ever got to James Bond was being punched in the face by him. Simon tells the story: ‘Ollie went to a restaurant with a group of people and George Lazenby – how or why he was there with George Lazenby, God only knows – and someone said, “George is going to be the new James Bond,” and Ollie went, “James Bond, don’t make me fucking laugh.” I think something like that might have happened. Anyway, Ollie then turned round to the girl he was talking to and Lazenby got up and gave him the biggest right hook and Ollie went smack on the ground, because his jaw was slack, he wasn’t prepared for it, and Lazenby ran out of the restaurant.’ The next thing it was in the News of the World, a huge headline, ‘007 KO’s Oliver Reed’. Normally Ollie never gave a damn what was written in the press about him, but this was different. ‘Because it was unjust,’ believes Simon. ‘Here was this bloke who had taken a pot shot at him, run away, and suddenly he’s KO’ed him. Oliver was so angry about that.’

  Having lost out on Bond, Ollie was approached by Basil Dearden, who’d directed him all those years before in The League of Gentlemen, with the chance to star in a sparkling adventure yarn, with a twist of black comedy, called The Assassination Bureau. Based on an unfinished novel by Jack London, the film has the fascinating pr
emise of a secret organization that accepts commissions to assassinate people, but only those the members of the Bureau consider deserve to die. Ollie had great fun playing its leader – ‘It gave me a chance to play for the first time a dashing, elegant David Niven-type of part’ – and he delivers an engaging and self-aware performance. His scenes with co-star Diana Rigg, fresh from television’s The Avengers, are a delight, even though, according to Oliver’s daughter Sarah, ‘They didn’t get on at all. A strong woman, you see.’

  Next Oliver went back to work for Michael Winner. At first the pair were to make an ambitious epic based on the life of William the Conqueror with Ollie in the title role. Alas, the project died when it became clear that the budget would be an unfeasible twelve million dollars. Having turned down the chance to direct The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Winner was narked, to say the least, but he had another idea up his sleeve.

  Hannibal Brooks is a wartime drama with a difference. Ollie plays a prisoner of war working in Munich Zoo who escapes with an elephant after a bombing raid and makes a dash for neutral Switzerland. It was shot in the summer of 1968 on location in Austria, where Ollie’s antics found little favour with the local inhabitants, especially when he tore down the national flag from outside the crew’s hotel after a drunken binge and urinated on it. Winner was forced to apologize in order to restore the townsfolk’s goodwill towards the production. ‘We endlessly had to make new hotel arrangements,’ he remembers. ‘Oliver would throw bags of flour over guests in the dining room, switch shoes outside people’s doors. No hotel wanted him for a second night.’

  As the Second World War’s most unlikely resistance fighter Winner had cast Michael J. Pollard, a hot property after his appearance in Bonnie and Clyde. At the time Pollard had a heavy drug problem and Norse remembers Ollie telling him that the American actor was ‘a complete headbanger. Doing Hannibal Brooks, the guy was out of his skull most of the time.’

  Winner even confronted Pollard about it on the set one day. ‘You’ve got a great career ahead of you. Why do you take so many drugs?’

  Pollard looked Winner full in the face and told him, ‘You don’t have to be in a hotel with Oliver Reed.’

  ‘You just won the argument,’ replied Winner, who had just one policy when shooting on location with Oliver: ‘Never put me in the same hotel.’

  Ollie’s other co-star in the film was several tons of elephant, two in fact, according to Jacquie, who visited the set. ‘And one of them hated Oliver and there was nothing he could do about it, while the other one absolutely adored him. They had this wonderful relationship.’ Understandably that’s the one they ended up using the most, while the other elephant was employed just for long-distance shots or to give its partner a break. Winner recalls that it was this elephant that always tried its level best to kill Ollie. One scene had them both walking along a narrow mountain path with a two-thousand-foot sheer drop on one side and hard rock on the other, and the elephant tried to either squash Oliver against the rock or flip him over the edge with his heavy tail.

  For three nights Oliver insisted on sleeping with his favourite elephant to build up an even greater rapport. Winner wasn’t impressed. ‘Oliver, the elephant won’t give a fuck that you’re sleeping with it.’ The animal’s handler arrived one morning in its stables to see Ollie fast asleep between its giant feet. Often during breaks in filming they’d play together, the elephant sucking up stones with its trunk to use it as a giant peashooter; and whenever they were near water Ollie always got a soaking. If Ollie rubbed up against her and whispered things in her ear, it did appear that she was not only listening but responsive. It was an extraordinary attachment between two living things. ‘And I can honestly say when the film was over that elephant cried when it was being led away,’ says Jacquie.

  Women in Love

  It was after a conversation with his father, during which Peter strongly advised his son to get someone to look after his business affairs properly, that Oliver made the decision to ask his elder brother David to be his manager. David, who since leaving the army had been working in radio, happily agreed. ‘My job was contracts, looking after money, organizing things, that sort of stuff.’ It did seem a perfect arrangement, for after all Oliver trusted his brother implicitly and knew he’d always have his best interests at heart. ‘Also from our point of view it went back to our childhood, when it was just me and Ollie against the older generation who were creating all the trouble.’

  David immediately got into Ollie’s good books by reclaiming a bundle of money he’d been owed. Back in the mid-sixties, when Pat Larthe was still his agent, Ollie had employed his voice in the very first Hamlet cigar commercials: ‘Happiness is a cigar called Hamlet, the mild cigar from Benson and Hedges.’ These ads, with their signature Bach music, had been running for years in cinemas and on television, yet Ollie had received not a bean. David paid a visit to Pat Larthe to sort things out and eventually managed to secure a large, and long overdue, payment.

  The next task faced by David was to raise his brother’s public profile. Yes, Ollie had been doing very nicely, appearing in a steady stream of movies in featured roles, but had yet to reach the same kind of levels of exposure and recognition as other contemporary British film stars like Michael Caine, Sean Connery and Richard Harris. So that was the plan, to get him jostling with the big boys. Again, keeping things in the family, David brought in Simon to be Ollie’s publicist. Simon had been working in BBC Radio’s sports department for a year but had left. ‘So I was looking around, wondering what to do, feeling pretty down on life, then David said would I be Ollie’s press agent as I had a background in journalism. It was the start of an amazing period.’

  Working from an office near Piccadilly, David and Simon set about making Oliver even better known. ‘So we engineered stories to bring him to the public’s notice,’ confesses David. ‘And he started being mentioned in the papers. Reporters called him “Ollie” quite quickly. “Dear old Ollie”, “Ollie’s at it again”, the headlines were always Ollie this or Ollie that.’ With the gossip columns growing in popularity, it was the perfect time for such a strategy, so Simon didn’t find it too difficult getting Oliver press attention. But there was a mighty price to pay for it later on. ‘In a way, the hell-raising was part of Ollie’s natural personality and character,’ says David. ‘But he then played on it when he saw it got a reaction. Gradually too the press built on stories of Ollie’s excessiveness and I think in the end he embellished what was already there and it began to build up; it was self-generating.’ In the end it became a millstone round his neck. ‘If I took him to an interview for TV or whatever he always felt he had to do something extraordinary,’ says David. Ollie always used to say, let them know you were there. ‘That was Ollie really,’ says Simon. ‘Wherever he was he felt he had to make an impact.’

  To some extent Oliver had it easy with the press. Imagine what it would have been like in the news-saturated twenty-first century. ‘My God, they’d be around his house the whole time,’ laughs Simon. ‘They wouldn’t need to go anywhere else.’ Back then people like Ollie, and also the likes of Burton and Harris, had a much closer and friendlier relationship with journalists and as a result some of their indiscretions were not made public, or with Oliver the general tone of the reporting was, there’s Ollie, what a lad. ‘Whereas the reality of some of his behaviour was pretty gruesome,’ says Simon. ‘And the trouble with the press now, they’d have got into the gruesome bits, so Ollie was quite fortunate in the early days.’

  Oliver was still on location in Austria for Hannibal Brooks when Ken Russell suddenly showed up. Packed in the director’s suitcase was a copy of D. H. Lawrence’s novel Women in Love, which on publication in 1920 caused a storm of controversy because of its sexual explicitness. ‘Care to read it, Oliver?’ He didn’t much, so Russell instead sat him down and went through the entire story, acting out the parts. ‘Interested?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Oliver.

  ‘There’s just one thin
g, though. I haven’t got any money, so you will have to take a percentage.’

  ‘Tell you what,’ said Ollie. ‘If we can climb up and reach the sun at the top of this mountain, I’ll do it.’

  Up they went. It was a bloody great mountain and about halfway Ollie came to regret his show of bravado. Russell wasn’t enjoying himself much either, wheezing and panting as if he was about to keel over at any moment. Finally Russell took his purple velvet coat off and threw it to the ground. ‘I’m not budging another inch,’ he announced. It was up to Ollie now, and on he went trudging through glacial snow that reached his kneecaps. When the ascent grew steeper and conditions worsened, ‘suddenly, I was frightened’. He turned back and it took three hours to return to the bottom, where he joined Russell for a refreshing schnapps in the hotel bar. ‘Sod it, I’ll do it anyway.’

  Oliver was not Russell’s first choice for the role of Gerald Crich, the repressed homosexual son of a Midlands mining magnate; Michael Caine was. When that didn’t work out, Russell turned to Oliver, and although it now seems obvious casting it wasn’t seen as such by many at the time. Eleanor Bron, playing one of Crich’s aristocratic friends, Hermione, was mystified when she first heard that Oliver had got the part. ‘My sense that he was miscast may have been based on the fact that he was dark-haired and that Gerald, in my imagining at least, was blond.’ She’s right: Lawrence describes Crich in the book as ‘fair haired’ and a ‘sun-tanned type’. However, the following passage about Crich’s appearance, seen through the eyes of Gudrun, Glenda Jackson’s character, may well have persuaded Russell to cast Oliver: ‘His gleaming beauty, maleness, like a young, good-humoured, smiling wolf, did not blind her to the significant, sinister stillness in his bearing, the lurking danger of his unsubdued temper.’ That’s Oliver down to a T.