What Fresh Lunacy is This?

by Robert Sellers

  ‘Don’t be so bloody silly,’ snapped Ollie. ‘And stop involving politics in your profession.’

  That statement was like a wet haddock across the chops to Vanessa and they had a barnstorming row that lasted ten minutes. Ollie was vehement in his opposition to such a strike, for, as he made clear, the British film industry was in a perilous state already without people like her making it worse. Ollie also had a personal stake in The Devils, taking a percentage of the profits rather than a fee. ‘So I’m not jeopardizing the film’s success and my income by coming out to support a cause I don’t believe in anyway.’

  After enough brickbats had been lobbed to and fro, Vanessa burst into tears. ‘So I put my arms around her,’ said Ollie, ‘and gave her a cuddle. Then I slapped her on the bottom and sent her back to her own dressing room.’

  When The Devils opened in July 1971 it was treated like a soiled nappy by the British censor: they held their noses up at it and wanted to dispose of the bloody thing as quickly as possible. Had Russell gone too far this time? Er, yes, and numerous cuts were made to the film, including shots of Redgrave’s Sister Jeanne using a charred bone of Grandier as a dildo. What was left after the hatchet job was still without doubt the most savage film ever released in Britain. The US version was even more heavily cut. Ollie lapped up all the controversy, of course, and even challenged famed American critic Judith Crist to face him on a live TV chat show to explain the reason why she thought the film pornographic and disgusting; she refused. Alexander Walker, film critic of the Evening Standard, who denounced The Devils wonderfully as ‘the masturbation fantasies of a Roman Catholic boyhood’, did appear with Russell on live TV and got thwacked over the head with a rolled-up newspaper for his trouble.

  The media onslaught had its origins in an editorial in the Daily Express which called The Devils ‘the most shocking film of all’ and claimed that at the press show two female journalists walked out in disgust. The Sun then barged in and labelled it ‘filthy, perverted, degrading and vile’, while in America reviewers on New York magazine couldn’t recall in all their broad experience, wading through something like four hundred movies a year, ‘a fouler film’.

  While Mary Whitehouse foamed at the mouth at the mere thought of her local Odeon screening the film, Russell’s monster was banned outright in Ireland and caused chaos in Italy, where the Vatican condemned it as a ‘perverted marriage of sex, violence and blasphemy’. Needless to say, after such an endorsement half the country wanted to see it. ‘Why this hypocrisy?’ Ollie lambasted a frenzied press conference in Venice, where the city’s chief magistrate had slapped an embargo on it. ‘Why is it permissible to describe historic events in books and plays, but they must not be shown on the screen?’ A good point, and outside crowds of students who agreed with him burned an effigy of the civil servant suspended from a lamppost. The Devils was eventually allowed to be shown and its success did much to change the rather antiquated Italian laws on cinema censorship. It also resulted in the lifting of the ban that existed on Women in Love, which could now be safely released. ‘So we had two films running there at the same time,’ said Ollie. ‘And I got the Silver Mask award [from Italy] for being a pornographer.’

  The Devils is an almost unique cinematic experience, by turns gross, comedic, tragic, dramatic and shocking: quite an achievement. What stands out today when you look at it are two things. First, the sheer beauty of it, the costumes, the make-up, but especially the production design by the then unknown and untried Derek Jarman. And then there is Oliver. ‘It is his greatest performance,’ says Murray Melvin. ‘And seeing it again recently with some of the gang we were all in tears at the end, saying, God, he was brilliant, why the bloody hell isn’t he here to see this now, to really appreciate what he did, because in retrospect it’s double the performance that it was when he gave it?’ Certainly it was an achievement utterly overshadowed by all the controversy surrounding the film. Ollie felt at the time that his performance was slightly compromised by Russell’s operatic visuals. ‘There was so much going on that it was difficult to make a performance live. The performances got lost in the tirade of masturbation, flagellation and kissing God’s feet.’

  It’s also incomprehensible to learn that Oliver wasn’t nominated for a single acting award for The Devils. If a top-class actor gave a comparable performance today, as Murray says, ‘He would take the world by storm with it. But don’t forget, at that time Ken was persona non grata, of course, and so the film was pushed aside, so unfairly.’

  The whole experience of making The Devils left Oliver physically exhausted and emotionally drained. Working with Russell yelling and screaming in your ear for four months was akin, he said, to parking your backside on a firecracker. Indeed it was tough on both of them, and their relationship took a battering. ‘Ken and I finished up very disturbed by the experience. Relations between us had to lie fallow for a while after that.’ But they would be back.

  Master of Broome Hall

  Oliver was making a western, his first, out in Spain, called The Hunting Party. Most British actors make a pig’s ear out of playing cowboys: they just look false, out of place. Not Ollie, who looked perfectly at home in a western setting and thoroughly enjoyed the experience, practising his draw sixty times a day and borrowing his cowboy’s accent from a New York hamburger seller he’d overheard. His dark, menacing looks also suited his character, outlaw Frank Calder, leader of a band of rustlers and thieves who kidnap a schoolteacher (Candice Bergen), unaware that she’s the wife of a ruthless cattle baron. Played to the hilt by Gene Hackman, the cattle baron mercilessly hunts down the gang and systematically kills them as if he’s on some perverse safari.

  It sounds nasty and that’s exactly what The Hunting Party is. Without doubt it’s one of the most savage and nihilistic westerns ever made, and again Oliver found himself having to defend one of his films against accusations of violence. ‘But it’s not nearly as violent as pantomime,’ he said. ‘Hansel and Gretel for instance!’ An interesting argument but the film is loaded with brutal slayings, mostly in Peckinpah-style slow-mo, and Candice Bergen is repeatedly raped and thrown about like a piece of hand luggage. She did not enjoy the experience, and in her autobiography, published in 1984, revealed that Ollie stayed in his outlaw character off set as well as on, ‘brawling drunkenly and flinging plates of food after fleeing waiters’. But most revealing is Candice’s memory of Oliver ‘presenting me with an ultimatum that he actually delivered straight-faced. Either we had a sexual relationship during the film or we had no relationship at all. Direct contact would abruptly cease and we would speak no further. After I declined his courtly offer, he immediately imposed a vow of silence, speaking to me only when necessary and then through intermediaries, referring to me succinctly as “The Girl” – “Tell The Girl to get off my mark.”’

  That is a fascinating insight, especially since Jacquie believes Ollie might very well have had an affair with Candice, ‘because he was very taken by her’. Whatever the case, his behaviour does beggar belief, the more so as Jacquie had arrived on the set with their one-year-old daughter Sarah with the intention of introducing her to Mark, who was now ten and also out there and knew nothing of her existence, or for that matter Jacquie’s. ‘I remember my father had a quiet word with me and announced that I had a sister and that she had blue eyes and that her name was Sarah.’ What could have been an awkward moment was instead the beginning of a deep and meaningful relationship that has lasted to this day. ‘Mark absolutely adored her,’ remembers Jacquie. ‘He took over, he was definitely the big brother and very protective of Sarah. There was an immediate bond between them.’

  It came as no surprise, making a western, that horses were involved and that Ollie was required to look at least reasonably expert in the saddle, so he hooked up with a couple of horse wranglers. His mount in the film was called Archibald and so deep did his affection run for the animal that after the shoot he offered to buy and ship him back to England. Archibald, as it tur
ned out, wasn’t for sale, so Ollie decided the next best thing to do was buy or rent one. ‘But like a rented woman, a rented horse doesn’t give you a good ride. So I bought one.’ Ollie was introduced to the showjumper Johnny Kidd, grandson of Lord Beaverbrook and father of future supermodel Jodie Kidd. He and his sister Jane ran a stud farm in Ewhurst in Surrey and believed they had the perfect horse for Ollie. It was an enormous hunter called Dougal, supremely agile and powerful; Ollie had a ride and the horse almost threw him over a gate. Impressed, he wrote out a cheque on the spot.

  It was decided to try Dougal at showjumping, but that proved a bit of a disaster since it transpired he had an aversion to coloured poles. Cursing Dougal, Ollie paid a visit to the Dog and Fox and got chatting with Bernie. The idea was arrived at that what Dougal required was his own little bit of land cluttered up with coloured poles so he could get used to them while grazing. Darting across the road to the estate agents, Ollie announced his wish to buy a field.

  ‘What sort of field, sir?’ the man asked.

  The question temporarily threw Ollie. ‘A field with grass in it.’

  The estate agent said he’d see what he could do, so Oliver returned to the Dog and Fox and his pint. ‘And it seemed like every hour Ollie ran across the road into this estate agent’s office,’ recalls Bernie. ‘Dodging the buses which come around the corner there quite fast.’ By the end of the afternoon the estate agent asked Ollie, if this field he wanted had a house in it, would that be OK? and handed him a brochure for a place called Broome Hall, a Grade II-listed stone mansion, some of which dated back to the mid-1700s. Flicking through it, Ollie was delighted that it had a field – sixty-five acres, to be precise. Back at the Dog and Fox Ollie passed Bernie the details. ‘This is what I’m going to buy.’

  Bernie looked at the brochure incredulously. ‘But you only wanted a small bit of land.’

  ‘Well, this is all they had.’

  The next morning, nursing a not inconsiderable hangover, Ollie was driven down to the outskirts of Dorking, along narrow, winding Coldharbour Lane, and soon, there it was: Broome Hall. Magnificent. It was love at first sight and the sale was agreed. Broome Hall was his and would remain so for the next eight tumultuous years.

  The purchase of Broome Hall was in many respects an act of madness. Even Ollie’s father tried to talk him out of it, and when Simon was first invited there he couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing. ‘It was a nonsense in many ways. Why would you have sixty bedrooms? I think there was a sense of grandeur about it, going back to Beerbohm Tree and Peter the Great. He loved all that lord of the manor stuff.’

  That’s certainly how he saw himself and at first he had no intention of sharing it with anybody else, as Jacquie recalls. ‘He was going to live there alone, with me and Sarah in Teddington, Kate in Wimbledon, and be the lord of the manor. Then he came to see me one day and said, “I can’t manage sixty bedrooms on my own, you’ll have to come and join me.”’ So they moved in, living in a three-floor section of the house. It was stunning with its ancient oak floors and wood panelling, a big, sweeping staircase, beautiful library and six bedrooms. The rest of the house was left pretty much empty.

  For the past twenty years Broome Hall had been in the hands of an order of monks called the White Fathers, missionaries in Africa, who used it as their British Novitiate, with sometimes up to a hundred people staying and undergoing training before taking their vows. ‘When Ollie took over Broome Hall it wasn’t up to scratch at all,’ says David. ‘It was very derelict, an enormous wreck of a place.’ And so it became a labour of love to restore Broome Hall to its former Victorian splendour. ‘He employed a whole gang of people and we had them on the payroll for years because there were constant renovations going on.’

  These workers weren’t local builders or carpenters. Ollie had come up with the inspired notion of hiring expert film craftsmen usually deployed in decorating and manufacturing film sets, and they revelled in the job. After all, the tragedy of their normal work was that all their fabulous sets were pulled down after a film was finished. Their work at Broome Hall was different: it would last, it was for posterity. And they were a great bunch of people. Jacquie remembers one chap who went by the name of Jack Sparks. ‘He was the electrician and he was a little old man and he used to literally crawl under the floorboards doing all the electrics; quite amazing.’

  The work did seem to drag on for years, for which Ollie himself must take a portion of the blame. If he was around and up for play it was, ‘Right, chaps, no more work today, we’re going wine tasting at the winery in Dorking.’ Or he’d fancy a quick one down the local. ‘Only for a short time, mind you. You’ve got fucking walls to build.’ Instead they’d usually take up residence. ‘David used to turn up on a Friday with his briefcase and his little PAYE envelopes to pay the boys,’ recalls Mark. ‘By which time they’d done no work and they’d been in the pub for a week on the beer.’ David recalls that they used to have a van and as the guys became unconscious, one by one they’d be thrown into the back of it and returned to Broome Hall.

  It wasn’t just the workers whom David paid on a Friday but also Ollie. So reckless was his brother becoming with money that David had taken away his credit cards, because he simply didn’t know how to manage them. Instead he received a wad of notes as spending money. But then Ollie would walk into his local bank and say, ‘I’d like some money.’ Everyone recognized him, his face was his ID, so they’d give him a counter cheque, he’d sign it, and off he’d go.

  At the height of the restoration there’d be around twenty people working at Broome Hall six days a week. ‘It was colossal the amount he spent,’ says Michael Christensen. ‘And it wasn’t crap. If he put wallpaper up it was William Morris, hand-printed, beautiful stuff, hundreds of pounds a roll, and some of the rooms were enormous.’ Ollie also hated plastic with a vengeance, so everything had to be copper; you couldn’t have plastic pipes anywhere. If he wandered into one of his greenhouses and saw plastic pots he’d break them all and have them replaced in terracotta, again at huge cost.

  The enormous pride Ollie bestowed upon his home had much to do with the history of the place. During the Great War Broome Hall had been used as a military hospital, while in the Second World War the estate was given over to the Canadian special forces, who turned it into their headquarters for secret training, laying down tons of cement on the gravel drive to withstand the weight of tanks. On the parapet of a bridge that spanned a local stream the names of the long since departed soldiers had been left in perpetuity. When Ollie saw it was being damaged by the modern tractors that worked on a nearby farm he rescued the stone and placed it at the front of the house. Every Poppy Day he’d pour a bottle of whisky over this monument and salute it.

  From the south-facing upper windows the views were spectacular, with wide rolling green pastures and small copses that gave way to trees and fields and then in the far distance the outline of the South Downs, an unhindered view that stretched some thirty miles. Outside his bedroom window Ollie had installed a searchlight so he could survey the fields at night. ‘He was a real bugger with it: “Get off my land!”’ remembers Sarah. There was also a huge lake at the bottom of the hill with a small island in the middle and streams with weirs that ran off it. A small, decrepit boat was moored there for special occasions. ‘We’re sailing to France,’ Ollie might sometimes order, and then he and his mates would all go wobbling down to the lake and get in this silly little boat and they’d reach the other end and announce, ‘No, we don’t like France,’ turn around, and row all the way back again.

  This kind of madcap, Outward Bound activity was often the norm with Ollie, who treated the grounds like one giant outdoor activity park. There were war games, for instance. Friends would arrive for Sunday lunch in their finery and suddenly find themselves putting boot polish on their faces and screaming around woodland, or split into two parties, one to attack the boat house, the other to defend it, invariably rat-arsed pissed, and tooled up w
ith .303 rifles. Ollie had a whole stack of them which had been decommissioned. Or they’d swim across to the island and hang a chandelier from one of the trees and then review their handiwork from the house. ‘How people didn’t die I’ll never know,’ says Mark. ‘Because you took very pissed people and they’d jump into this lake in just a pair of underpants, breaking the ice in winter, swim across and back. Anyone who was associated with it will look back and say, those were days of absolute madness. But they were great fun because they were mad, pushing those limits was really where we all were at that time. So it didn’t seem mad, but with your sensible head on, thirty-five to forty years later, you look at it and go, wow, that was really quite out there.’

  For the most part, though, the grounds of Broome Hall were a great relaxant, and much of Ollie’s free time when he was at home was spent pottering around in the garden. He embraced it and loved being amid its sheer splendour. ‘He was very traditional,’ says Mark. ‘He was quite a square individual underneath all of that macho/hell-raising stuff. For example, he had a fascination for bluebells. On Leith Hill, where Broome Hall was, at a certain time of year you had the bluebells coming out, just this lovely carpet of blue, and he just adored all of that. Absolutely loved it.’

  When Oliver first arrived the garden was very rundown, there were lawns with grass eighteen inches high and thistles, and he just set to work on it. As head gardener he installed Bill Dobson, a comrade from his Wimbledon days. ‘He was just the most loyal person you could ever come across,’ remembers Jacquie. ‘And he was magic in the garden. Whatever he touched just flourished.’ Bill’s wife Jenny was a cleaner and so it made perfect sense for her to become Broome Hall’s housekeeper and the pair of them lived on the estate. ‘They were very normal people,’ says Jacquie. ‘And Ollie treated them like his own family.’ He even taught Jenny how to drive and then insisted on buying her a car. ‘No you’re not. I’m going to buy my own car. I wouldn’t touch a car that you’d given me,’ said Jenny, who was Irish and fiery. ‘So they cherished their own little bit of independence,’ says Jacquie. ‘But I think Oliver could have broken up their marriage if Jenny hadn’t been as patient as she was, because he was always taking poor old Bill out drinking and when he was delivered back home he wasn’t much good to anyone. God, what Bill must have gone through.’ Quite a lot over the years, it has to be said.