What Fresh Lunacy is This?

by Robert Sellers

  It had become the habit, annually, to pack Oliver off to the Caribbean to get a bit of rest and recuperation. ‘I forget why I first did it,’ says David, and he doesn’t know whose idea it was. ‘But one winter, in between maybe girlfriends or wives, I sent him on holiday to Barbados. I put him on a plane and off he went.’

  As he walked out of the airport looking for a cab, Ollie’s eyes fell on one particular taxi driver. His name was Ivan. ‘Right, Ivan, you are my driver whilst I’m here. You work for no one else. You work for me.’ That was the first year. The second year David got a phone call from Ollie saying, ‘Dave, I’m going to set up a taxi rank for Ivan.’ So they bought him some cars. ‘Ollie simply loved the man,’ says David. ‘He nicknamed him Dadi. And Dadi was mad on cricket, so one year Ollie flew him over for the Test Match at Lords.’

  Ollie fell in love with Barbados. ‘It was the friendliness,’ says Sarah. ‘The culture, the rum shops. Just that raw humanity of people, kids playing in the street with a cricket bat.’ There was a place called Coconut Creek where he liked to stay and whenever David arrived for a visit the two brothers would swim across a cove to get a drink at a rather splendid hotel. But the water was over a coral reef that was razor-sharp. ‘It was one of Ollie’s party tricks to swim over this coral reef which, if you dropped down just a little bit, could slice you open,’ says David, who has never forgotten those holidays. Coconut Creek was so charming and unspoilt, with its bars on the beach with little straw roofs and houses on stilts to keep the rats out. He went back a few years after Ollie died. ‘Now it’s all concrete, full of hotels.’

  Jacquie went there a few times too, and they rented a house on Gibbs Beach on the west coast. Nothing posh, it was more like a wooden shack with wood partitions dividing the rooms. Outside the door there was almost nothing for as far as you could see. ‘We used to walk for miles along that beach. That’s why he liked Barbados so much, he felt unthreatened there, relaxed.’

  In spite of the island’s isolation, Ollie still cultivated a gang of friends he could have fun with. On The Hunting Party he had got friendly with a small-time American actor called Ritchie Adams, who’d often stay at Broome Hall while he was looking for work in London. Ritchie had just got hitched to a octogenarian millionairess and they were enjoying a honeymoon cruise. The ship came into Bridgetown, the bustling capital city of Barbados, and Ritchie heard Ollie was around, so left his new bride to have a quick drink. Predictably Ollie and his pals got Ritchie absolutely hammered and dumped him in a wheelbarrow to sleep it off. When he woke up the next morning the ship had sailed on to its next port of call. Panic-stricken, Ritchie got Ollie to drive him to the airport in order to catch it up, but Ollie deliberately bundled him on to a flight that went to the wrong island.

  Ollie was sunning himself on the beach when a package arrived at his hotel. It was a script for a film called The Triple Echo. The role on offer was only a supporting character but the story was sufficiently intriguing and it also promised the chance of a rematch with Glenda Jackson. Set during the Second World War and based on the H. E. Bates novel, the film has Glenda playing a woman living alone who meets and falls in love with a young army deserter. Determined that he shouldn’t be found by the military authorities, she resorts to disguising the lad as her sister, a subterfuge that leads to tragedy when Ollie’s bullish sergeant major enters the scene.

  As he neared the end of the script something brought Ollie up sharp. ‘It said I had to kiss a bloke while feeling his bollocks.’ It didn’t matter that his character had been deceived by the dragged-up deserter, it still meant wrapping his lips round a fella’s whistle. Ollie sent a rather urgent cable to the makers: ‘Unless the kiss is out I’m not doing the movie.’ A cable came back saying: ‘Kiss out. Come in.’

  Ollie duly turned up for shooting at a remote farmhouse near Salisbury, and, acknowledging the film’s modest budget of £200,000, accepted a low fee. Glenda did likewise. It was the only thing the pair had in common, for their relationship, distant in the extreme, had not changed one iota since Women in Love. All of which left a young director called Michael Apted feeling very apprehensive, especially after meeting Ollie at a costume fitting. ‘He was very nice but clearly going to be a handful, very boisterous, lots of laughing and larking about, and I was nervous as shit about the whole thing.’

  It wasn’t just the clash of personalities between Ollie and Glenda: the two actors had diametrically opposed ways of working, and Apted was often caught in the middle. ‘Coming from the theatre Glenda wanted to rehearse everything and have everything laid down, and then within two or three takes it was done, done beautifully. Oliver, on the other hand, would come in of a morning and not know what scene we were doing, let alone what it was about or what he said. So for me, on my first movie, this was terrifying. My first instinct was to think, well, this guy’s just a lazy slob, and some of that might have been true, but he brought incredible life and energy to the thing because he kind of discovered it on the spot, he was able to make use of the location or the set or whatever, he figured it out as we were going along.’ Glenda could see what was happening and gave Oliver space to do it. In other words, she compromised. ‘And if she hadn’t done that I don’t know where we would have been,’ says Apted.

  Later to forge a considerable reputation as a director in Hollywood, Apted came from a career in television and so Ollie was the first pure film actor whom he’d ever worked with. ‘And although he was rather extreme he taught me huge amounts about how to prepare as a film actor, how to focus on the moment and be in the moment. That was a huge lesson and I never forgot it. A lot of people that I later worked with were from my school of thought, they liked to prepare things, as Glenda did, but then other people, from John Belushi to Tommy Lee Jones, they had a way of working that was very reminiscent of what I learned from Oliver. So he was profoundly important to me, probably as important as any actor I ever worked with.’

  Ollie also left a huge impression on Brian Deacon, the young and inexperienced actor who played the deserter. Often during a scene Ollie would suddenly start improvising and there wasn’t a great deal you could do about it except try to keep up. ‘I was just out of drama school and weighed less than ten stone, so I don’t think this man with a forty-six-inch chest felt particularly threatened by me.’ Deacon found Oliver charming and well-mannered, but clearly identified a side to his nature, a dark side, that was fixated on experiencing violence for the sake of it, knowing he had people like Reg around to pull him out of situations if they got out of control. ‘Ollie was always looking to fight people. In our hotel one night there was a wedding reception – they must have been Scottish because there was an awful lot of guys wearing kilts – and Ollie got really excited about seeing if he could conjure up some guys from the crew because he said, “We’re gonna do the Scots.” He was going to go into this wedding reception and just pick a fight with any guy in a kilt. And he was relishing the idea and we had to say, “Don’t be ridiculous, Oliver, it’s somebody’s wedding. You can’t just barge in there.” That was the less attractive part of his character.’

  It was a trait that had begun to emerge in Oliver’s teenage years and never really left him, these sudden explosions of pissed aggression. He’d flatten his nose down like a boxer and puff himself up like a peacock. Sarah remembers being in Dublin once with him in the early eighties and they were at the theatre. ‘And for some reason the guy in front of him really annoyed him – he was German, I think that was his problem – and all of a sudden Oliver leaped over the seats and grabbed him and it was like, right, that’s the end of that evening. And we literally left after that.’

  One of Ollie’s favourite haunts of the late seventies and early eighties was Stringfellows nightclub in London’s Covent Garden, where he enjoyed a game he christened ‘Headbutting’. Each player was required to smash his head against his opponent until one or other of them collapsed or surrendered. A regular victim was The Who’s bass player, John Entwistle, who afte
r being knocked out three times pleaded with the club’s owner, Peter Stringfellow, to either ban the game or bar Ollie.

  Murray Melvin recalls returning with Oliver from a publicity launch somewhere and having a pleasant lunch at the airport while waiting for their flight. ‘And there was a chap who was a bit of a wide boy, a bit of a chancer, sitting opposite Ollie. And I don’t know what it was he said, I don’t know whether he referred to Josephine, but suddenly Ollie was up, grabbing the table, trying to get at this guy. And somebody said to this chap, “Go, just get out.” And we restrained Ollie and this chap just disappeared and we calmed Ollie down.’

  Jacquie learned to live with these outbursts. One time Ollie had to go to London for specialist treatment on a bad back. ‘And because he was such a huge man, they had to have him sedated for three days before they could do anything.’ Afterwards Jacquie drove him back to Broome Hall. ‘I was terrified of driving Oliver, you can imagine, him shouting and screaming. And I was on this dual carriageway and he said to me, “Go on, overtake.” There was someone in front of me. “OVERTAKE!” he yelled. I said, “I can’t, I’m on the barrier.” He grabbed and pulled the steering wheel and of course we crashed into the barrier. “That’s it,” I said. “I’m getting out. I’m not driving.” And so even though he was still reeling from all the sedation and should not really have driven, Ollie drove them home.

  Strangely, when he was drinking, Jacquie never felt things would get out of control because he’d have friends over and he’d either crash out or go off somewhere else, ‘So I never felt threatened.’ Carol Lynley is adamant that she never saw Ollie act violently towards anyone, drunk or sober. ‘Nor would I have been around if he was violent. I would have been out of there so quick.’

  Tales of Oliver’s drinking had, of course, reached the ears of everyone working on The Triple Echo, Deacon included, of nights out on the town around the pubs of Salisbury. ‘One night ended up with some of the women working on the movie having their bras removed, burned in an ice bucket, and nailed to the wooden bar.’ As for Apted, he has no recollection of Ollie ever arriving on the set under the influence. ‘I may be wrong, but I don’t even remember him showing up late. He was pretty professional about the whole thing.’ Glenda does, however, remember one incident when perhaps the exertions of the night before had taken their toll. ‘We were shooting a scene and when the director called cut Oliver literally fell flat on his face, he was flat out on the floor. But you wouldn’t have known it from seeing the shot. He’d delivered his lines and played the scene perfectly.’

  After a particularly strenuous day’s shoot Deacon walked into the hotel bar and saw Apted, Reg, cameraman John Coquillon and Ollie. ‘I went, whoops, and turned on my heels, but before I could get out I was hauled back in by Ollie.’

  ‘What do you want?’ he said, throwing his arms round the young actor.

  ‘I’ll have a half pint of Guinness, please.’

  Ollie turned to the barman. ‘Right, half a pint of Guinness and then we’ll have five triple whiskies, please.’

  ‘Oh, I can’t drink that,’ said Deacon.

  ‘Come on, get it down you.’

  It was a command intended for everyone to heed. ‘And it was so intimidating we all drank them,’ says Deacon. The drinking continued at a fearsome pace until Oliver insisted on taking everyone out for an Indian. Reg was driving the Roller and they all got in. At the restaurant Ollie ordered the meal and several bottles of wine. ‘He sent the wine glasses back, asking for half-pint tumblers, and was just tipping it straight in: “Get it down your neck,”’ remembers Deacon. ‘And we were completely smashed.’

  Back at the hotel, Deacon got out of the car and walked straight into some glass doors. ‘I’m picked off the floor and hauled up to Ollie’s room because now we’re going to smoke some joints.’ Suddenly Ollie realized Apted and Coquillon had gone AWOL and went storming around the hotel looking for them. Deacon turned to Reg. ‘I’m going. I’m outta here.’

  ‘Ollie will be really pissed off when he comes back and doesn’t find you here.’

  ‘Reg, I’ve got to go.’

  Deacon just about managed to drag himself back to his room and collapsed on the bed. The next thing he knew his alarm was going off; it was five o’clock in the morning. ‘I got into the bathroom and within about thirty seconds I was like a baby, it was projectile vomiting, made a complete mess of the place. I got in the shower and tried to get cleaned up and shaved my face and made a real mess of it, cut my chin, hopeless.’

  Arriving at the location, a couple of the crew took to marching Deacon around a car park in an effort to straighten him out. Half an hour later a car came screeching to a halt outside the make-up caravan. ‘Michael Apted got out,’ says Deacon. ‘And literally crawled inside, on all fours. I don’t think he’d been to bed at all.’

  Glenda was furious when she found out, grabbing hold of Deacon. ‘You stupid, stupid boy.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Do you think it makes you more of a man going out and getting drunk with Ollie? Is that what a man is?’

  ‘Glenda, I had no choice. I was hauled . . .’

  ‘Of course you had a choice!’ And so it went on. She really tore into Deacon, who was left scratching his head about why he’d been singled out when both Apted and Coquillon could barely stand up. And there was Ollie, as bright as a button and walking about with a huge Cheshire-cat grin on his face. He’d certainly left his mark, which of course had been the whole point of the exercise. ‘That was in a sense my rite of passage with him,’ believes Apted.

  Despite The Triple Echo failing to find an audience, Ollie remained enormously proud of it. Making his entrance in a tank churning up farm fields, he is the epitome of the macho army lout, and plays the role with just the right degree of humour, testosterone and menace. ‘I think The Triple Echo is a very under-recognized film and I think Oliver is particularly good in it,’ says Glenda. ‘I thought that he brought a lot of personal touches to his character, which were his own. I thought it was immensely layered.’

  The film’s most memorable scene is the deserter’s near rape at the hands of the sergeant major during an army dance, shot in a real barracks. Both actors weren’t relishing shooting it, least of all Ollie, who, Deacon was told, had a bottle of vodka stashed away and had already downed half of it. Getting the snog removed had been a small victory, but Ollie was still required to throw Deacon hard up against a wall and get quite friendly: ‘Come on, girl, don’t you mess about, give us a little feel, eh.’ It was an incredibly brave scene to try, especially for an actor with a highly macho public image. ‘But that’s what was so appealing about Oliver,’ claims Apted. ‘He went for it 100 per cent. Despite all the bluster and the larking about, he did take the work seriously, he took the story seriously and in those scenes when he realizes he’s been duped he was truly terrifying. I really thought he was an incredibly interesting actor. And he clearly loved what he was doing. This was a small little film, he was probably making hardly any money, but he really got with it.’

  It was at a press conference for The Triple Echo that Ollie’s most infamous party trick, that of taking out his dick in public, or as he cosily described it, ‘My snake of desire. My wand of lust. My mighty mallet’, first drew attention. It was something he was still doing as late as 1996, by which time he was referring to it as ‘a national institution’.

  The questioning had turned to Burt Reynolds’s recent decision to pose naked in Cosmopolitan magazine. Ollie revealed he’d turned down a similar opportunity and when asked why replied that it was because his dick was too big to fit on the page. ‘Prove it,’ demanded an elderly female journalist on the front row. Without hesitation Ollie dropped his pants and flashed the end of his knob. ‘Why have you stopped?’ the woman demanded to know. ‘Madam. If I’d pulled it out in its entirety, I’d have knocked your hat off.’

  Foreign Assignments

  Living it up as lord of the manor at Broome Hall, Ollie hadn’
t forgotten his old stomping ground, and if he ever had any business in London he would always head back to Wimbledon to drink and catch up with old friends. In the Dog and Fox one day he recognized a familiar face: it was Norse. They got chatting and Ollie asked how he was getting on. Christensen had joined the police but was not enjoying it, as the hours were long and the money crap. ‘Look, I’ve a proposition for you,’ Ollie said. ‘I’ve got this big pile in the country. Why don’t you come down and see what you can do with the market garden and anything else you fancy? I promise you it will be fun.’ Norse thought, fuck it, I’ll never get another chance like this.

  Christensen didn’t know the first thing about market gardens, but got tips from the local farmer, bought machinery, and started from scratch. Soon they were producing vast quantities of vegetables and the excess was loaded up in the car and taken down to local pubs and restaurants and Ollie got credit, so for weeks after he ate and drank for free. ‘And he was very hands on, if he felt like digging he’d dig or he’d be on the mower. He was involved 100 per cent.’ Ollie truly loved his market garden and always kept a salt cellar just standing inside the greenhouse so he could walk inside and pick a warm tomato right off the plant, put salt on it, and say, “How can you beat that?”

  After moving into a cottage in the stable yard Christensen pretty quickly sussed out the regime at Broome Hall, which was pretty full on, especially at weekends. It hadn’t taken Oliver long to cultivate a new gang of mates, principal among them Paul Friday and later his wife Nora. Friday was partner in a television aerial business and met Ollie one afternoon in his local. Not a keen cinemagoer, Friday didn’t have much of a clue who he was, but was told he’d recently bought Broome Hall and wanted TV aerials put up. ‘Of course, it was one of the longest jobs we ever did because every time we started to do something Ollie dragged us back to the pub, so this two-day job took about three weeks.’ The result was they hit it off almost from day one and Friday became another lifelong friend.