What Fresh Lunacy is This?

by Robert Sellers

  A highly intelligent actress and light comedienne, Eleanor found herself changing her mind about Ollie as filming began. ‘Fortunately, whoever cast Oliver was infinitely more discerning than me. Oliver’s performance, I thought, was great, because he conveyed a man who seemed locked in, inarticulate, and prey to mighty passions. A haunted soul unable to express himself. I don’t know if Oliver was like that himself, but he certainly understood it. I do think the film is wonderful, based on a script that was so faithful to Lawrence’s novel, that is to say, retaining a combination of splendour and absurdity.’ It was perhaps those two elements that first attracted Russell to the material, or maybe made him the ideal director for it.

  Cast opposite Oliver was Alan Bates, who by the late sixties was one of Britain’s most critically lauded actors. In turn sensitive and poetic, then unfeeling and cruel, Bates’s character Rupert Birkin also has the hots for Gerald, but this homosexual subtext isn’t laboured upon by Russell, so audiences back in 1969 largely missed the elephant in the room. Women in Love is notorious for cinema’s first-ever full-frontal male nude scene, when Gerald and Rupert undress for a bit of indoor wrestling and go at it hammer and tongs. Both Oliver and Bates were understandably nervous about doing it. ‘I was scared stiff,’ Ollie admitted. ‘And that’s definitely not the right word, as anyone who has seen the film will confirm.’

  This piece of cinema history, however, may very well have turned out completely differently had it not been for Jacquie. One night Ollie appeared at her flat with the news that Russell had changed the location of the wrestling scene from inside to a meadow by a river at night. ‘That’s an absolute travesty,’ said Jacquie, a fan of the book. ‘The most beautiful thing about that wrestling scene is that there’s guilt attached to it. There’s a library with a fire burning and they both go in and in the book they lock the door, which means they want to be alone. Now, if Ken doesn’t do that, the whole film’s going to be ruined.’

  Ollie grabbed Jacquie’s hand. ‘Right, come with me.’

  Ken was enjoying a quiet romantic dinner with his wife Shirley at his London home when there was an almighty hammering on the door, ‘as if all the gods of retribution had finally caught up with me’. Should he ignore it? wondered Russell. ‘I know you’re in there!’ Those dulcet tones were unmistakable. ‘I saw your poofy candles through your poofy lace curtains.’ It was worse than the gods of retribution, it was Ollie. ‘If you don’t open up, Jesus [Ollie had taken to calling Russell ‘Jesus’ because of his long, unkempt hair and preference for sandals], I’ll kick your poofy purple front door down!’ There he stood outside, resplendent in a black tuxedo and bow tie, with Jacquie. Russell invited both of them inside. ‘Jacquie’s got something to say to you,’ said Ollie.

  ‘Well, I’ve got nothing to say to her,’ replied Russell.

  ‘You’re going to bloody listen,’ stormed Ollie.

  ‘So I went in really quite heavy,’ Jacquie recalls. ‘I said, “I think this is going to be the most terrible thing you ever do,” and I went into my reasoning. “There, I’ve had my say and I want to go home now.” But Ollie wouldn’t let me leave.’ He wanted his bare buttocks rubbing against trophies and rhino heads in a posh manor house, manly stuff, not daffodils and daisies. Russell was trying to explain that the whole thing worked better outside, ‘When suddenly I was hurtling through the air in a Japanese wrestling throw and crashed to the ground.’ It was a most persuasive argument on Ollie’s part.

  Two days later the phone rang in Jacquie’s flat. It was Ollie. ‘You’ve won.’

  ‘What do you mean, I’ve won?’

  ‘Ken’s going to do the nude scene as it is in the book.’

  But, as the fateful day drew closer, Russell suspected that his two stars were beginning to have second thoughts. ‘Oliver said he’d sprained his ankle and Alan said he had a dose of flu. Both of them said they had doctor’s certificates to prove their illness. Oh yeah, I thought, because they’d just done one scene perfectly without limping or coughing.’ Ollie confronted Russell, telling him he wasn’t going to risk permanent damage to himself just to excite a few birds who hadn’t had it yet and a lot of frustrated old spinsters who never would. Then, much to Russell’s surprise, the next morning both men turned up on the set in their dressing gowns, ready to go. It was a miracle cure.

  In truth, a little Dutch courage had been the saviour. On the morning of the shoot Ollie knocked up the landlord of his local and bought two bottles of vodka. Arriving at Bates’s caravan, he saw an actor looking as if he hadn’t slept all night, which he probably hadn’t. ‘How do you feel?’ he asked.

  ‘Bloody terrified,’ replied Bates.

  ‘Drink some of this,’ said Ollie, and they polished off a bottle each.

  Oscar-winning cameraman Billy Williams still vividly remembers the moment Reed and Bates walked on to that set for the first time. ‘When they stripped off to begin the scene Alan was very cool and collected and Ollie was making a big deal of the whole issue. He said, “Oh, he’s got a bigger donger.” And we were all falling about laughing. And they sort of sized each other up and then Ollie disappeared into the corner and said, “I’m going to have a quick Jodrell.” I suppose he wanted to give nature a helping hand. Then he’d come back for the take. And then we’d have a break and Ollie would say, “I’ll have another quick Jodrell,” and go off to the corner again. It was fooling around, of course.’

  All the time the continuity girl, sitting on a low stool, had a bird’s-eye view of Ollie’s cock. Giving it a towelling down between takes, he noticed her watching him with ever mounting interest. She broke out in embarrassment when Ollie returned her gaze and went even redder when he suggested she fetch a ruler to measure it, ‘Just for continuity, of course.’

  The whole scene took three days to complete and was filmed in a magnificent room with a vaulted ceiling at Elvaston Castle in Derbyshire. ‘It had this enormous fireplace,’ Williams recalls. ‘And Ken agreed that we should shoot using the real fire, but it was so hot you could barely stand near it. I recall we shot it with two hand-held Arriflex cameras because we wanted the flexibility of being able to follow the actors. The wrestling took place on this huge rug and all the protection they had was a rubber underlay, so they were risking life and limb in front of this blazing fire and getting very close to it at times. But both Ollie and Alan just entered into it with no holds barred.’ By the end Ollie had severe bruising from landing sometimes on the hard stone floor and Bates had dislocated a thumb.

  It’s difficult today to appreciate just what impact that sequence had on audiences when Women in Love opened in the spring of 1969. It was a watershed moment, though now, of course, it’s terribly tame, quaint even. Russell described how a friend of his went to see the film in the nineties at a revival screening in a small English town. He was the only person in the auditorium save for two old dears in front of him. When Reed and Bates stripped off and started throwing each other round the room one of the pensioners said to the other, ‘Nice carpet.’

  Predictably, Catholic countries gave the film short shrift. Italy banned it completely. ‘Russell and I were warned that if we ever set foot in the country, we would be arrested as pornographers,’ revealed Ollie. A bit harsh from the country that popularized fascism. In some South American countries the wrestling scene was deleted altogether. Audiences saw our Ollie lock the door, both actors undress, and then a vicious jump-cut had them clinched in a sweaty, naked embrace on the floor. It became known as the great buggering scene and filled cinemas for months.

  Ollie largely relished the honour of becoming the legitimate cinema’s first full-frontal male nude. ‘It will be something to tell my grandchildren that I was once seen stark naked by millions of women all over the world.’ Certainly the scene played a part in turning him into a household name and a bona fide sex symbol, but conversely may also have had a detrimental effect. Oliver’s entry in the BFI’s The Encyclopaedia of British Film says of it: ‘The famous nude wrest
ling scene got so much attention that it tended to obscure the fact that Reed’s was one of the finest performances of the decade – any decade really – in a British film.’

  Oliver’s tackle wasn’t the only cause for alarm: his sex scenes with Glenda Jackson were some of the most explicit yet seen in a mainstream film. Gudrun is really the heart, soul and voice of Women in Love, and Russell required an actress of remarkable ability to play her. He found Glenda Jackson, attracted by her stage pedigree and striking, if not classical, beauty. She described her own image as ‘varicose veins, piano legs and no tits’. Women In Love is the story of sisters Ursula (Jenny Linden) and Gudrun, emancipated young women of the twenties. They live in a depressing coal-mining town where Ursula is a schoolteacher and Gudrun a budding sculptress. Gudrun meets and is drawn to Oliver’s callous and brutish Gerald, who appears to be the story’s strongest character but is in fact the most vulnerable, the most fragile. They begin an affair that is more a test of wills than anything to do with love, and ultimately leads to tragedy.

  It’s unlikely Oliver had met anyone quite like Glenda before, and the stories and rumours about their fiery relationship continued for years. Their first encounter was at Russell’s home during the first script read-through, a fortnight before filming began. When Glenda arrived, Russell whispered, ‘You’re going to work with an actress from the Royal Shakespeare Company’ into Ollie’s lughole. ‘Oh, jolly good,’ he replied.

  Looking back at that meeting, Glenda doesn’t think Oliver was at all intimidated by her from a personal standpoint. ‘I just think he was slightly unsure about people who had come to film from a predominantly theatrical background because it was something that he had not experienced and he presupposed, which is not the case, that people who came from the theatre tended to look down on the cinema or regard film actors as being somehow lesser. So here I was with mostly a theatrical background and I think his first impression was that I would try to put one over on him or be patronizing towards him.’

  Once Ollie realized this wasn’t going to be the case he did begin to loosen up but would always keep Glenda very much at arm’s length, and the feeling was mutual. The sparks certainly flew on screen and each respected the other as an artist, with Glenda especially impressed by Oliver’s grasp of film acting. ‘He was very secure on a film set, he knew exactly what he was doing, there was absolutely nothing about the technique of filmmaking that he didn’t know. He took the job seriously. It was part of his ethos to pretend that he didn’t.’ However, on a personal level their relationship was non-existent. ‘We were like chalk and cheese,’ admits Glenda. ‘Apart from the script we had nothing to say to each other and no understanding of each other. He was the antithesis of everything I am.’ And it didn’t take the actress very long to suss all this out. ‘It was immediate as far as I was concerned. It was his attitude to women, it was his excessive behaviour, his endless, endless bravura, all of that.’

  Not surprisingly, Glenda didn’t go out in the evening with Ollie; nor was she ever asked. ‘But these stories were always related to me the morning after; people were only too willing to tell you the terrible things he’d done the night before.’ Frankly it bored her, this going out and getting drunk. ‘It was a very narrow spectrum of life that he was engaged in and from my perspective desperately repetitive; how he liked the same people around him, and he liked the same activities.’

  Nor did cameraman Billy Williams indulge, as he’d heard the same stories Glenda had and so refrained from getting involved. ‘But whatever happened in the evening, and it was pretty excessive and went on into the early hours, Oliver seemed to be absolutely fine at the beginning of the day and was up for whatever needed to be done.’ How he did it amazed everyone. David remembers going out during the first week of shooting to a Chinese restaurant with Ollie and drinking liqueurs all night until both of them were absolutely plastered. ‘Ollie was required early on set the next morning and he got up, went over to the wash basin in the hotel suite, and just put cold water over his face, shook his head, looked at the mirror, and said, “Right, how’s that?” And he was ready to go. How he did it, I don’t know. I came back shattered.’

  Ollie’s powers of recovery were one of the marvels of the age. He was never late on set. And whatever he had to do he was always prepared. ‘He prided himself on his professionalism,’ says Mark. ‘He would turn up knowing his lines, he knew what was required of him, he would do the job, and then he would piss off back to his local pub.’

  It was Oliver’s sheer professionalism that Williams recalls most fondly, that however extreme the conditions or arduous the task, Ollie jumped in with two feet, no questions asked. Take the sequence in Women in Love where a young couple drown in a lake and Ollie’s Gerald leaps into the cold water in a desperate attempt to find them. That shot had to be done at what filmmakers call the ‘magic hour’, the final ten minutes of daylight before darkness falls, because there were rowing boats with Chinese lanterns creating an atmospheric effect. ‘With this being so long and complex it took three evenings to shoot it,’ says Williams, ‘which meant that Ollie had to dive into the lake dozens of times and go underwater and it was freezing, yet he didn’t complain a bit, he was magnificent. He just got on with whatever he needed to do.’

  That went for the location shooting in Switzerland, too, which formed the film’s dramatic climax. Driven to utter despair, Gerald almost throttles Gudrun before walking off alone into the snowy wastes. ‘Ollie was so brave about that because it was very arduous,’ remembers Williams. ‘We were underneath the Matterhorn, it was very deep snow, it was quite a long sequence, and he walks a long way. And of course it could only be done in one take because there was no hope of ever doing another one. Everything was perfect, the lights, the camera, the performance, it was a great moment.’

  One cannot emphasize enough just how important Ken Russell was to Oliver’s career. Both had found they worked together well on the BBC films but Women in Love was different: it was a major movie, much anticipated, so the stakes were high. ‘Ken had a marvellous relationship with Oliver,’ recalls Williams. ‘They were like brothers really. They had many similarities, temperamentally. They understood each other. Ollie had a lot of confidence in Ken and was prepared to give whatever Ken wanted.’

  Glenda also recognized this, that Oliver put himself completely into the hands of Russell. ‘They were very, very close, on a level of genuine affection. It was something about Oliver’s wildness and physical willingness to be in danger, or to endanger, that I think Ken liked. But there was real affection and real respect, I think, on both sides. Oliver would have done anything for Ken, absolutely anything.’

  With the film a huge international success, the cast were flown over for the Paris opening and stayed at the prestigious hotel where Oscar Wilde ended his days. When Ollie arrived he was informed that he wasn’t staying in the actual building but the annexe. ‘No I’m not. I’m staying here,’ he blasted and sat down in the middle of reception and started drinking champagne.

  The manager arrived. ‘Will you please desist from bedding down here for the night, monsieur.’

  ‘Look, mush, if this hotel was good enough for Oscar Wilde to die in, it’s certainly good enough for me to sleep in.’ A room was eventually found.

  Walking up the grand staircase, Ollie spotted the film’s associate producer, Roy Baird, up ahead. Manhandling him from behind, Ollie pulled down the guy’s trousers, causing him to fall backwards a few steps. Like a big soppy dog he bounded down after him and started landing soggy wet kisses on each cheek. Only then did he discover that the man wasn’t Roy Baird at all but a lookalike, a lookalike who just happened to be an important French businessman. He tried to explain that he hadn’t pulled down the gentleman’s trousers because he fancied him, but this proved rather difficult as he knew not one word of French. Suddenly the real Roy Baird walked in and Ollie gesticulated frantically that this was the man he’d mistaken him for. The businessman finally twigged a
nd broke into laughter.

  After the premiere Ollie got really quite dreadfully pissed and, while being driven back to his hotel by Bates and his fiancée Victoria Ward, started to sing bawdy rugby songs. Bates took great offence to this – ‘Not in front of my fiancée, Ollie, if you don’t mind’ – and in the end chucked him out into the street. ‘So I ended up singing to a crate of horses’ heads in the market.’

  Fame

  The success of Women in Love radically influenced the way critics and the public viewed Oliver Reed. With his performance as Gerald Crich, full of subtlety and hidden depths, he broke real ground as a leading man. It also shot him into the top rank of British stars. He continued to drink in his local Wimbledon pubs but Mick Monks for one noticed a definite change. ‘The pressure was starting to build, there were a lot of people starting to get at him, wanting to exploit him. And sometimes he couldn’t walk into a bar because he used to get mobbed by the girls.’ He had become something of a pin-up, much to his surprise and often embarrassment, and described his sex appeal as ‘looking like a Bedford truck but somehow unconsciously giving the promise of having a V8 engine’.

  Of course, as he was a permanent fixture in the village hostelries the press always knew exactly where to find Ollie and he started to get regularly stalked by journalists hoping for an interview or a report of some misdemeanour. As much as possible Ollie liked to talk to the press on home turf: his local. Simon had arranged for a well-known Japanese journalist to meet him at the Hand in Hand for an extensive interview. Mick Monks remembers this diminutive woman walking in. ‘She was about five foot one and six stone, soaking wet, just a little slip of a thing.’ Ollie, with a wide grin on his chops, told her, ‘We have this old tradition in England, if you’re interviewing me we always have three pints before the sun goes over the yardarm,’ or some such bollocks. ‘Anyway,’ recalls Monks, ‘she managed to down the first one, but was struggling through the second one, so the boys decided she’d better not fall over too early, so we took her to the Common for the pissnic. Over there she had about four shots of hard liquor and was in a terrible state; she started giving Ollie a foot massage on his back. The interview had gone completely out of the window. It was an absolute hoot. But being the gentleman he was, Ollie got her a cab back to her hotel and the next day he turned up and she got the best interview she’d ever had.’