What Fresh Lunacy is This?

by Robert Sellers

  On another occasion Ollie horrified a lady reporter during an interview by donning a Dracula cape and leaping about the roof of Gate House. Barry Norman, who once wrote that he ‘looks like the kind of man who might be rather nasty when drunk or even, if given provocation, when sober’, was showbiz reporter for the Daily Mail before his move to television and recalls one memorable encounter with Ollie at his house. It was only about eleven o’clock in the morning but he was well into the beer by the time Norman arrived. Journalists who visited Ollie were invariably plied with unhealthy amounts of drink and staggered home after the encounter with the battle scars of a war correspondent. ‘We did the interview and then he suggested that we go off and box each other. At that point I made an excuse and left because he was in much better shape than I was and I wasn’t about to be knocked around by him.’

  All this fame and press attention did not cut any mustard with Peter: still the son couldn’t win his father’s admiration. Relations between Oliver and Peter over the past few years had been cordial but hardly close, although Ollie had bought him a house in Epsom, near the racecourse, which he shared with Kay.

  Peter had observed Ollie’s ascent to stardom with indifference. He hadn’t been against his son becoming an actor, what with Sir Carol and Herbert Beerbohm Tree part of the profession, but in a warped imitation of his disgust at his son winning all those sports day trophies at school, he couldn’t bring himself to celebrate Oliver’s achievements as an actor. ‘He did see Ollie’s films when they came to the local cinema,’ says Simon. ‘But he wouldn’t have told Ollie. I’m sure my father was proud of him but he just didn’t show it.’ Simon can’t recall an instance of Peter complimenting his son on a particular film or performance. Not that it didn’t happen; Simon just never saw it. And with so much of a child’s achieving things being a desire to share that success and impress their parents, it was perfectly natural for Oliver to have wanted some form of recognition from his father. ‘But Pete would almost deliberately not give it,’ says Simon.

  As for Oliver’s mother, Marcia, she was an even more remote figure in his life. ‘She was out on a limb,’ reveals David. ‘But Marcia was very, very proud of him, at a distance. But really she didn’t have anything to do with him.’

  To cash in on his new-found stardom Ollie did a couple of quick, throwaway movies. Take a Girl Like You is a sweetly nostalgic, and by today’s standards terribly innocent, sex comedy based on a 1960 Kingsley Amis novel and directed by Jonathan Miller. Hayley Mills plays a virginal young primary-school teacher determined to hold on to her virtue at all costs, a situation that comes under threat when she meets Oliver’s womanizing rogue. Playing Ollie’s best mate in the film was Noel Harrison, son of Rex and still best known for his performance of ‘Windmills of Your Mind’ from the 1968 film The Thomas Crown Affair. Noel got quite close to Ollie during the filming and they often lunched together in the Pinewood restaurant, ‘at which we would usually drink a bottle of wine each, if my memory is to be trusted. A most enjoyable man. We thought we held our liquor well, but I think you might be able to tell which scenes were shot before lunch and which scenes were shot after.’

  From the rather unglamorous locations of Take a Girl Like You (Slough in Berkshire), Ollie flew to the south of France to appear in the bizarrely titled The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun. He plays the boss of a Parisian advertising agency whose English secretary discovers a body in the boot of his car – cue an intriguing and stylish, if not wholly satisfying, thriller that someone like Claude Chabrol would have made better use of.

  The film teamed Ollie with Samantha Eggar, his old friend and playmate from his childhood days at Bledlow. It was a reunion, however, not entirely enjoyed by Samantha. Awoken one night by Oliver and his friends having a noisy booze-up in the hotel bar, she complained to the hotel manager, who went to confront Ollie. ‘Listen,’ said Ollie. ‘I’ve got five friends staying at this hotel on my account and a very large bar bill. Miss Eggar is here by herself, and with a very small bar bill. So who’s right?’ The manager recognized the logic of what was being said to him and Ollie’s party was allowed to progress well into the night. The next morning Samantha moved to another hotel.

  Being the owner of one of the most recognizable faces in Britain did have repercussions for Oliver, and also for his son. Ollie often used to take Mark to the local swimming pool, but when people started asking for autographs and hassling him they had to stop going. ‘It suddenly creeps up on you, fame, and it starts to restrict what you want to do,’ says Mark. ‘I remember times when people were asking for him to sign things or pose for a photograph, and generally speaking he was very good at doing that, but there were times when you could see he was becoming very irritated, especially after you’ve had fifty people asking, can you stand next to so and so? I remember him once saying, “I’m not a fucking parrot. What do you want me to do, stand on your fucking shoulder? Leave me alone.”’

  From an early age Mark lived with not only his father’s fame but the inevitable repercussions his profession entailed. Whenever Ollie’s mug popped up on television Mark assumed that everybody’s daddy appeared on television. However, it didn’t take him long to realize that things were indeed very different in his household compared with other families. ‘And in some ways I relished the idea of having normal parents, because there was probably a bit more stability in that. He was around a lot and then he wasn’t around, he was off working, so there would be long periods of time when you didn’t see him at all. But you just got used to it because that’s the way it was.’

  Mark knew the reason for his father’s absences from home. He remembers wandering around the sets of Oliver!, in the Georgian square, and peeking into doorways and seeing bits of striped wallpaper and nothing else. No, it wasn’t Ollie’s job as an actor that caused most of the problems, it was what Mark had to deal with as Ollie’s son. ‘It was pretty tough for Mark growing up,’ says Simon. ‘It was tough in a way being Ollie’s brother, I had some shit along the way, but being Ollie’s son, yeah, there’d be some good times but also there were horrendous times. The way Ollie treated him sometimes was just horrible.’

  Take sport: every father wants their son to do well, but for Ollie it was never about the taking part, it was about winning, and winning at all costs, exactly as he’d done. ‘I think he desperately wanted Mark to be a real sportsman and play cricket and rugby for England,’ says his sister Sarah. ‘But Mark wasn’t a sportsman at all.’ David remembers when Oliver bought Mark a horse and put him on it and told him to go around and jump some fences. ‘When Mark failed to get this horse to jump, Ollie screamed at him, “You bloody slug.” Poor old Mark.’ It wasn’t enough that Mark tried his best, he had to be the top at everything, and if he wasn’t he’d face his father’s wrath. ‘Oliver was a demanding father,’ says Simon. ‘He demanded things that Mark couldn’t give and Mark knew he couldn’t give, that was the problem, and Oliver would sometimes hurl abuse at him: “You’re not the boy I wanted!”’

  This was a particularly unpleasant trait of Oliver’s, that he could be extremely vicious in the way he expressed himself. ‘He had quite a tongue on him when he wanted to,’ says Sarah. And because he was both articulate and clever he’d use it as a weapon. ‘And he would really go for people’s Achilles heel. It was spiteful and he knew he’d win with it. And he did that with Mark and myself at times when we were young, which wasn’t particularly kind, but he got his point across. Like everyone, we’ve all got good and bad in us, but when you’re that extreme, as Oliver was, the extreme is better and worse in those degrees.’

  Perhaps Ollie saw too much of his father in Mark and wanted to purge that out of him, but all he did was create anxiety and the foundation for a fractured relationship that eventually led to long periods when they didn’t speak to each other, a horrible echo of the relationship Ollie had with his own father. ‘As a child all you want to do is love your parents,’ says Mark. ‘And there were times when I didn’t p
articularly love him because he was hard and he was hurtful. There’s a saying, you always hurt the ones you love. I think that’s almost right, but you always hurt the ones who love you, is probably more pertinent and probably more accurate. You wanted it to be good all the time but he could be very awkward. He could be very dark. And the darker side was challenging for the people who did love him. It was difficult. Worse, if you tried to talk to him the next day about something he might have said or done, he’d just shrug it off. “Doesn’t matter,” was the usual response. “Water under the bridge, let’s move on.” And often that wasn’t as satisfactory a response as you wanted; it didn’t make up for the hurt.’

  But then there were times when he could be remarkable, using his spellbinding imagination to enrapture and beguile. ‘He could create wonder,’ says Mark. One morning, when Mark was six or seven, his father woke him up and together they looked out of the window just as the dawn chorus was starting. Ollie began to describe the various conversations that were taking place between that bird and this bird, as it grew into a cacophony. ‘It took you as a kid somewhere else and gave you a completely different aspect of what birds making noise meant; suddenly it became something meaningful. So yes, there were times when he could be absolutely awful, and the next minute he was spreading twinkle dust everywhere and he was the most fascinating, wonderful person to be around. It was almost like he made up for the badness. But as a kid you just want things to be fairly straightforward and sane-ish. You’re looking for that stability and it was difficult to find that stability.’

  *

  Every so often Ollie would fly to LA and spend several weeks with Carol Lynley at her place in Malibu. It was as if he was living a double life; a triple life actually, when you think he was living with Kate and also keeping Jacquie nicely tucked away; both of whom knew nothing about his liaison with the American actress. The time spent with Carol in California must have seemed like another world and another life to him. They’d take walks on the beach, shop in markets, and dine quietly in restaurants just the two of them. And for the most part there were few outbursts of delinquency or rowdiness. Carol says, ‘He would misbehave and then he wouldn’t for a very long time, and then he’d misbehave again. But when he wasn’t playing the bad boy he was very quiet, he liked to read, he liked there to be quiet around the house, he was very easy to get on with.’

  Was part of the appeal of these trips for Oliver the opportunity just to relax and unwind, away from the distractions of his life in England, with just Carol and her young daughter? One also senses that Ollie enjoyed the feeling of being part of a ‘family’ with Carol. Of course, he had a son back home, but he’d always wanted a daughter, and Carol has never forgotten the tenderness and dedication with which he slipped into the role of almost being a surrogate father. ‘Ollie helped me raise my daughter when nobody else would [Carol was divorced from her daughter’s biological father]. If he felt that I wasn’t doing something right, he’d tell me and I always listened to him because he had wonderful instincts about people, especially children. So he was tremendously helpful, because I knew nothing about raising children at all. I was nineteen when I had her. He was very patient with her, made her laugh, he was just wonderful with her.’

  Carol knew all about Mark but Oliver rarely spoke about him or other personal matters: he tended to keep such things to himself, which was his way. Carol does remember one occasion when he raised the subject of his relationship with his father, how poor and difficult it had been because of Peter’s decision to be a conscientious objector during the war, although she got the feeling that, deep down, ‘Ollie did seem to like his father’.

  As for Kate or Jacquie, one feels that Ollie never brought them up either, although Carol knew of their existence. Remarkably it didn’t bother her that when Oliver left her house it was to fly back to be with another woman. ‘I never interfered with whatever he was doing and whoever he was doing it with and he never interfered with me. But when we were together it was wonderful. He did what he wanted to do, when he wanted to do it, and there was no getting around it, there was no point in stamping your foot or pleading with him. There was never any meanness about it, and there was also no game playing, he just did exactly what he wanted to do.’

  Such a cavalier attitude about a man she obviously loved is based on Carol’s belief that she knew a normal relationship with Oliver was a practical impossibility. This was perfectly demonstrated the time he visited her when she was staying in Beverly Hills. ‘We had dinner and on our way back to the hotel he asked me to marry him. I said, “No, Ol, that will never work.” And he stopped the car and he got in front of it and said, “I’m not moving until you give me a definite yes.” I said, “Oh, now, Ollie!” We got back to my suite and he asked again and I said, “No, Ollie, I don’t think so,” and he went out to the balcony and he hung by the ledge. “Now will you marry me?” I said, “Yes, yes, Ollie, I will.” I got him back into the room and he seemed very proud that he’d gotten me to say yes. I don’t think he actually wanted to marry me, it’s just that he couldn’t stand the fact that anybody said no to him. Or maybe he did want to marry me, I don’t know, but I didn’t think it would ever have worked.’

  Later that same evening Oliver gave Carol some money to go down to the hotel shop to buy the latest issue of L’Uomo Vogue, the Italian men’s version of Vogue magazine; he was on the front cover. ‘I left,’ says Carol, ‘and I just kept on walking. I didn’t get the magazine, I kept the money, got in my car, and drove away.’

  Seemingly without much concern about the possible consequences, Oliver had also continued to see Jacquie. She’d visited film sets and been introduced to his friends, even family members. David met her first, going round to see her at a flat in Teddington that Ollie had provided for her. ‘I was astounded because I’d hardly known she’d existed and in this room she had this shrine of photos of him in this little alcove.’ Muriel seems to remember there being candles there too: ‘Jacquie worshipped Ollie.’ This arrangement made things precarious for David, who every time he was with Kate had to be very careful not to give the game away.

  It was at the same flat that Simon remembers first meeting Jacquie. ‘I was playing cricket locally and Ollie came to watch and afterwards invited me back to this flat and I could not believe it. I was polite and everything, and Jacquie was really nice. Obviously it was difficult for her, it was a tricky moment.’

  Jacquie didn’t stay a secret from Kate for long, and when she found out it led to an even frostier atmosphere at home and more blistering rows, but she didn’t walk out of the door, and neither did Ollie. That all changed when Jacquie fell pregnant. ‘That was the catalyst for Kate,’ says Jacquie. ‘I mean, God, it must have been awful for her.’ It all came to a head at Mark’s sports day. Ollie arrived late, having been to the pub, although he still won the fathers’ race. And there was Mark with his plimsolls on, ready to run as fast as he could, watching instead the spectacle of his mother and father tearing lumps out of each other. ‘I remember by the long-jump pit my mother whacking him round the head with her bag and then dragging me off. We went back to the house to pick up a few belongings and left. And that was that, we went and lived with her mother. You get told that your mum and dad love each other, but they don’t necessarily like each other, so it’s better if they don’t live together any more. As a kid you get on with it, don’t you, although the sense of a family unit was never particularly strong because he was away working so much that I didn’t often see him, so in a strange way it didn’t feel like a great loss.’

  Jacquie’s pregnancy wasn’t exactly planned, even if Oliver kept pleading, ‘You don’t love me, you won’t give me a child.’ The thought of having a baby with Ollie gave Jacquie pause. Before taking their relationship to the next level by bringing a new life into the world, she wanted to be reassured that they were doing it for the right reasons. But it was plain to see that Oliver desperately wanted Jacquie to give him a child, preferably a daughter. Fo
r years David, who had two daughters of his own, would gently tease his brother about it. ‘You know what they say, don’t you, Ollie, that you haven’t proved yourself a man until you’ve had a daughter.’ And that really got Ollie’s goat. So, when Jacquie gave birth to a girl they christened Sarah, he was ecstatic. ‘Oliver thought it was the greatest thing ever,’ says Jacquie. And once mother and baby were safely asleep Ollie got in his car and drove up to his brother’s, arriving there at two o’clock in the morning. ‘He knocked on the door,’ remembers David, ‘and there he was holding a bottle of champagne and a tin of caviar, and proudly announced, “I’ve done it!”’

  Ollie had attended the birth, and indeed was more there than Jacquie, who by the end was knocked out because of complications. Oliver had frantically hunted down a member of staff, yelling, ‘She’s in labour,’ and they replied, ‘No, no, no.’ He said, ‘She really is.’ Just then the baby’s head appeared and the doctors all went, ‘Oh my God!’ It was panic stations and in the confusion Ollie was mistaken for one of the medical team and given a gown and a mask and told to get in there. ‘As a normal member of the public he shouldn’t have been there because it was becoming a problem delivery,’ Jacquie recalls. ‘So he was there the whole time.’