What Fresh Lunacy is This?

by Robert Sellers

  Not just a drinking companion and gardener, Bill would be roped into all sorts of other activities; Ollie always made him dress up as Father Christmas for Sarah. And Jacquie has never forgotten one of Sarah’s birthday parties when the clown they’d hired cancelled at the last minute. ‘I thought, what are we going to do? We had Sarah’s entire class from school, about forty children. Ollie said, “Don’t worry,” and he grabbed Bill and said, “We’ll be the funny men.” And they entertained the children all afternoon doing stupid things like pulling faces, making silly noises, and giving everybody piggyback rides. The kids loved it.’

  With Bill’s help the grounds began to take shape and Ollie also installed a walled garden with vegetables and fruit trees. ‘And rhododendrons like you’ve never seen in your life,’ recalls Jacquie. ‘He also built a terrace in front of the house and put in two hundred standard rose trees; when they came out it was just beautiful. In a sense Broome Hall was his little piece of England.’

  Maximum Excess

  There really wasn’t anything else to do but get drunk every night; that’s Geraldine Chaplin’s recollection. They were in some far-flung place in Denmark and at night she’d accompany Ollie and Reg as they searched for any bar to get sloshed in. Never once did she feel in any danger, that the evening might get out of hand, as both men looked after her as if she was their kid sister. ‘Ollie would always protect me. He was a real gentleman, beautiful manners, beautifully brought up. And the drunker he got the better manners he had, I found.’ Ollie misbehaved, of course, walking over to tables and demanding people stand up to join him in a chorus of ‘God Save the Queen’, which rather mystified these simple Danish folk, but there was no menace about it.

  Geraldine is a member of an exclusive club because Ollie rarely invited women to join him on his drinking binges. And it was hard liquor, too, which Geraldine matched. ‘I drank what Ollie did, what everyone was drinking, and Reg too. Reggie drank an awful lot. Reg was very protective of Ollie. They always had a good time together and Ollie would make fun of Reg and Reg would take it like an adoring dog.’ What was most refreshing for Geraldine was how utterly non-showbiz Ollie was. He didn’t seem like an actor at all, and never talked shop. Although if somebody came up and wanted to talk to him about movies, then he was happy to do that. ‘One night someone congratulated him on his performance in Women in Love and afterwards he turned to me and said, “Well, they’ve all seen it now, there’s nothing to hide, they all know what it looks like.”’

  The barrenness of the location suited the film they were making, Zero Population Growth, a rather ponderous and grim science fiction tale about a future earth where population control is mandatory and children are replaced by android dolls. Directed by Michael Campus, it was an odd choice, one of many Oliver was to make. He was now entering a phase where he was to take films largely on instinct or to pay the bills for Broome Hall, especially when the energy crisis of the early seventies kicked in and the price of oil hit the roof. ‘In heating terms alone Broome Hall could not have been too dissimilar to the cost of running a ship of war,’ says David. In Zero Population Growth Ollie and Geraldine play a couple who defy the law by having a child and are forced to go into hiding. There wasn’t much rehearsal beforehand for the two actors to familiarize themselves with each other and the first thing Ollie said to Geraldine when they met at the hotel bar was, ‘Look, we’re playing man and wife, so we have to get used to touching each other – so let’s dance.’ And that’s what he did. ‘He proceeded to grab me and dance in this absolutely bear-like grip and felt me up and down. It was actually very funny.’

  In truth, there didn’t seem to be very much direction going on at all, at least in the sense of helping the actors shape their performances. In the end Geraldine turned to Oliver. ‘He was very generous. Some actors do it all for themselves, but Ollie was so helpful on the set with your performance. He’d take me aside and say, don’t do this, do that, try this, much more help than the director. I don’t think Ollie clashed with the director but he knew that he was crap basically. That’s why he helped me a lot. But he didn’t take it out with the director. I never saw him being rude to anyone, unless they didn’t stand up and sing “God Save the Queen”.’

  Some shooting took place in Copenhagen and Carol Lynley flew there to stay with Ollie for a while. One night they were invited to a very grand house for dinner, along with Geraldine and her partner, the Spanish film director Carlos Saura. Usually Carol had nothing to worry about when going out with Oliver. ‘He was good company and most of the time he was very quiet. Once in a while he would misbehave and get banned from certain establishments. I remember when he was in New York at this hotel, I think it was the Sheraton, I had to go with him into the dining room because he’d been banned and they wouldn’t let him in without somebody to take care of him.’ But generally Ollie would be on his best behaviour with Carol. Indeed, the only time she can remember ever really losing it with him was at this dinner in Copenhagen. ‘Halfway through the meal for some reason, I guess he’d been drinking, Ollie got up and stood on the table, dropped his trousers, and tied the napkin around his prick. I was so furious. We were thoroughly thrown out of the house; I don’t even remember getting to the car it was so quick. And as soon as we got back to the hotel I was just furious at him. But he would do things like that from time to time. I’m still angry at him for doing that.’

  As 1971 drew to a close Oliver was in south London shooting the Get Carter-inspired thriller Sitting Target with Ian McShane and Jill St John. He liked the hard-edged contemporary subject and his role of Harry Lomart, a violent criminal who breaks out of a top-security jail to kill his unfaithful wife. Ollie always attempted to play these kinds of villains – who in lesser hands had a propensity to come across as one-dimensional – as proper rounded human beings, not totally evil. ‘They wouldn’t be believable if they were only one colour, with no light or shade.’ Lomart was no different, and like most men of his ilk, there was a sad, pathetic side to his nature. ‘Evil is not, in my view, an abstraction; it is compounded of some very human flaws.’ The result is one of Oliver’s most brutal and mesmerizing performances.

  Director Douglas Hickox came away from the experience full of admiration for Oliver as an actor and for his generosity of spirit. Late one afternoon three young actresses arrived on the set to test for a small role. Although he’d finished his work for the day, Ollie stayed on for two hours to read the lines for them off camera. ‘How many other stars would do that?’ Hickox asked. ‘They would normally just have the director or somebody else do it.’

  Carol Lynley remembers being on the London location of Sitting Target. Often she would visit Ollie’s film sets, something he never reciprocated. ‘He was much too egotistical for that. So I would sometimes go and see him when he was working. Mainly it was just keeping him company, he liked to have company.’ Nor was Ollie at all supportive of Carol’s career as an actress, and she never discussed with him what roles to take or heard a comment or opinion from him about any of her performances. ‘I don’t think he really thought about it one way or the other. He was very centred on himself, as most actors are. The only thing that he ever asked me about was, did I really sing the song in The Poseidon Adventure? Other than that, he was never particularly interested in what I was doing or who I was filming with.’

  Since their meeting back in 1966 Carol had watched Oliver progress from a reasonably well-known actor to an international star. He’d never been at all showbizzy, one of the reasons why she liked him so much, but now Carol couldn’t help but be impressed by the way Ollie had not allowed fame to change him. ‘He was a very moderate person, he never had a big head, never really ordered people about. He made movies and hung out with movie stars on the set, but most of his friends that I met were just regular people. He didn’t change at all, except that his clothes got better.’ And it would remain so for the rest of his life: the glitz and the glamour of the business, the premieres, the limos, and all t
hat bullshit just wasn’t him. ‘He didn’t need the fame in order to make him complete,’ says Mark. He was about as far from being a luvvie as it was possible to get. ‘Ollie wasn’t a star in the sense that he frequented glitzy parties,’ reports David. ‘None of that, he didn’t go near them. He was a film star only in the sense that people knew who he was and he was rich. He loved to go into a pub and say, right, everyone a drink, because he wanted everyone to have a good time. But he didn’t play the film star. I can’t remember him doing that at all. But he would act the part if called upon. If it was a professional thing, then he knew how to make an entrance.’

  There was, however, one significant change that Carol noticed about Oliver: his drinking had increased. On the set of The Shuttered Room Carol hardly noticed him hitting the bottle but over the past few years it had become more and more of an issue. One evening she brought the subject up. ‘Why don’t you just drink wine?’ she asked. ‘It’s better for you than hard alcohol.’

  ‘I can’t,’ he said.

  ‘Sure you can. I’m not saying, don’t drink. I’m just saying, have a bottle of wine. Have two. Just don’t have a bottle of Scotch.’

  ‘No, I can’t.’

  ‘Well, why not?’

  ‘Because I can’t feel anything unless it’s hard alcohol. I can’t feel anything on wine.’

  Carol never raised the subject again. Often they’d go to pubs and although Carol rarely drank much herself, Ollie always made sure that she had a shandy. ‘Once he saw me take a drink of hard liquor, a vodka and tonic, and he was horrified, absolutely horrified. “Only order a shandy,” he said. Looking back, you just wish that he had been able to control his drinking, because that did accelerate. He did try but he never really tried for long enough.’

  Simon was another who saw a quite definite shift in Ollie’s drinking from the early to mid-seventies and onwards. ‘That’s when I think the drinking became less fun. He was still after the Happening. It was probably just more difficult to find and it needed more drink, whereas in the early days he only needed a couple of drinks and the Happening would arrive.’

  The amount of booze Ollie was buying was startling. David recalls their accountant saying at the end of one year, ‘God, how do you spend this much on drink? This would keep any normal family in luxury.’ Jacquie recalls Ollie going on a binge that lasted something like three days, ‘then even he had to give in and he collapsed on the front lawn and violently threw up – and grass never grew on that patch in my time at Broome Hall.’

  Ollie was also a well-known face around the hostelries of Dorking. He’d drink there rather than Horsham, a town about the same distance from Broome Hall, mostly because the police round Horsham, Sussex police rather than Surrey, were a bit heftier when it came to drink-driving. ‘They were more on it,’ claims Mark. There was the Dorking run, for example, where Ollie and his pals would ask for a quadruple gin and tonic and down it before the barman came back with the change, then dart off to the next pub. The White Hart was where Ollie did most of his drinking in town, though sometimes he ventured to the White Horse Hotel, until he got barred for setting the chimney alight. Seated next to a large, roaring open fire, Ollie kept lugging on log after log until it was a blazing inferno and the fire brigade had to be called. He was told by the management his presence was no longer desired.

  He even took Mark to the pub aged twelve and got him pissed. He started the lad on half a shandy. It tasted like shampoo but Mark asked for another one, this time with a small lemonade top. Yuk, still tasted like shampoo. Right, Ollie thought, let’s give the little bugger some beer. He drank six pints of their best bitter. ‘I remember him driving me back home, and he kept looking at me because he couldn’t work out how I was fine – I was shit-faced. Back home I was puking in the bathroom and he was fussing around me giving me a blanket and I just wanted to be left alone to die.’

  Jacquie never spoke to or lectured Oliver about his drinking. ‘It wouldn’t have entered my mind. I would have had a thick ear. In passing I might say, you’re not bloody pissed again.’ Often she’d join in. ‘One just went with the flow and tried to keep up.’ Ollie liked to have people around him when he drank, and he’d never crack open a bottle on his own. Nobody from his immediate family ever recalled seeing him do that. ‘He never, ever drank alone,’ confirms Jacquie. ‘He always had to have a drinking buddy, even if he had to pick one up on the way to the pub.’ Or drag poor old Bill Dobson out of bed or go round to David’s. ‘He used to wake us up, sometimes three or four in the morning,’ remembers David’s wife Muriel. ‘He’d break a window if we didn’t let him in.’ What was it that he was after? He feared being alone, that’s for sure, so was it purely for the company, somebody to talk to? Or, as David believes, wasn’t the reason all too obvious? ‘Most people who drink don’t do it by themselves. They always do it in the company of others because it gives them the feeling that they’re not the only one. It gets rid of the guilt feeling.’

  All this raises the obvious question, was Oliver Reed an alcoholic? Of course, it depends how one defines alcoholism. To Mark it’s someone who wakes up in the morning and the first thing they think of is getting a drink down them; certainly that was not Oliver. ‘He loved it, had great fun with it, enjoyed the buzz of it, but it had to have a reason. So if there was a good enough excuse, like he had people around and they were up for having a drink, then off it would go.’

  Like her mother, Sarah grew up never trying to stop Ollie drinking, and along with Mark is convinced her father was not an alcoholic. ‘Which some people find quite weird, but you never found empty bottles lying around. He could turn it on and off, that was the extraordinary thing, his willpower. I’ve never met anybody with such willpower as my father. He wouldn’t drink for days or months if he had to.’ What he’d do, then, was binge-drink, go off on benders, sometimes five days at a time, and then return to the land of sobriety. After these benders Ollie checked himself into what he called ‘the clinic’. He’d not leave his bedroom for sometimes upwards of three days, just lying in bed alone watching television and feasting on chocolate, ice cream, sardines on toast, and bottles of Lucozade. Eventually he would venture out, potter around the garden, and walk the dogs. It resulted in a very strange childhood for Sarah because there seemed to be no happy medium. If he wasn’t absent through filming Ollie was in drunk mode or being solitary and quiet. ‘I was too young to understand or question it, but I knew there was quiet time and there was crazy time, and not a lot in between. That was pretty much the pattern of his life. There were times I was disturbed, probably not by how much he drank, but by how it made him; if he was being unpleasant or embarrassing, then I’d wish he drank less, but I don’t think I ever questioned it.’

  When he was drinking, it was a case of riding the wave with him. Sarah remembers one morning she and Mark came down for breakfast and Ollie had prepared apple juice; except it wasn’t: it was Calvados and apple juice. ‘So he was clearly pissed from the night before and that would just be it, you’d keep going. So, ten o’clock the next morning, Calvados, and you were on a roll.’ Other times it was best just to get out of his way. Those who lived with Ollie developed this inbuilt radar: they could walk into a room and sense where the energy level was. ‘I think both Mark and myself got that from a young age. We could walk in and go, OK, it’s a good one, it’s a bad one, it’s a fun one. Like most drinkers, there’s a good drunk and a nasty drunk, and he could be a nasty drunk, and in those cases we would literally go and hide.’

  According to Michael Winner, ‘There was no greater pendulum swing in any human being that I’ve ever met than Oliver Reed sober to Oliver Reed drunk.’ The transformation when it happened was extraordinary. It was truly Jekyll turning into Hyde. What triggered it? It was like a Plimsoll line, that one drink, that one vodka and tonic too much and then there was this monster. ‘Ollie wasn’t an alcoholic,’ believes Murray Melvin. ‘But there was a need, because without it he was lovely. But that one drink and he h
ad to hit somebody. He just had to hit somebody. He really was Jekyll and Hyde. You could almost see the change in him – ohh, that’s the one – and you knew to get out or, like a typhoon, you put the shutters down and hoped it blew over and your house was still standing at the end of it.’

  Family and close friends could always tell when the switch had gone and Ollie was turning nasty. In fact they coined a phrase: Mr Nice and Mr Nasty. They might be at a restaurant with him and suddenly sense the shift in atmosphere. ‘Then Mickie and I would just say bye-bye and go,’ says David. ‘Because we knew within ten minutes the other character would come out. Oh dear, here comes Mr Nasty. You actually saw the change, it was physical.’ As Muriel says, ‘He was like Jekyll and Hyde, it was black and white with Ollie, there was no grey.’

  In the morning, as with most drinkers, remorse and guilt would set in and he’d go to a florist and buy lots of bouquets and go round depositing them at houses, apologizing with that wonderful excuse ‘I’m sorry, I don’t remember’. ‘There were times when he wasn’t lovely and he could be troubled and awkward and stroppy,’ admits Mark. ‘My grandfather Peter used to come down and visit us and always made sure the car was aimed in the right direction and that he knew where his car keys were should he want to make his exit, because it wasn’t fun any more.’