What Fresh Lunacy is This?

by Robert Sellers

  Carole can recall only two incidents when she saw Ollie get out of hand through drinking. At breakfast one morning in her hotel she was told by a crew member that Ollie and his gang had made quite a mess the previous evening. ‘They’d had a lot of fun and thrown things around in the hotel bar. And then another day I remember Oliver coming on to the set and he didn’t look great, he looked really hung over, in a bad, bad way. We tried to shoot but it just wasn’t working. We could all see that it wasn’t going to look good on the screen, his face was puffy, his eyes were bloodshot, so the director decided to shoot something else. “Oliver, go, just go, and when you’re better we’ll finish you up another day.”’

  Ollie’s drinking certainly wasn’t Marcello Mastroianni’s cup of tea. One of the biggest names in Italian cinema, Mastroianni was his co-star in Dirty Weekend, playing a wealthy industrialist on holiday with his lover, played by Carole, when he’s kidnapped by Ollie and his gang of bank robbers. So it’s no surprise to learn that Oliver and Marcello didn’t exactly bond. ‘They were respectful to each other,’ remembers Carole. ‘But Ollie was just running wild at that time, so I think it probably wasn’t easy to even try to socialize with him.’

  It was on Dirty Weekend, David recalls, that one of the Italian actors fancied himself a bit of a boozer and challenged Ollie to a drinking contest. ‘They drank for two days solid and on the third day this Italian bloke said to one of his assistants, “For fuck’s sake, get me on a plane out of here, I can’t stand the pace.” He just couldn’t keep up with Ollie, who just had this incredible capacity, he had this limitless ability to drink.’

  Of course, such behaviour has always been frowned upon on the Continent, where they have a much more cultured approach to alcohol consumption. They drink, of course they do, in some cases prodigious amounts of wine or beer, but the loutish boozing that Ollie seemed to excel at is much less prevalent. ‘For them it’s like acting like a wild man,’ says Carole. ‘But you know, when somebody behaves bad with everybody else but is sweet to you, it makes you feel even more special. Ollie could be rough and even just by showing up you were scared of him, but to me he was absolutely adorable.’

  In the early seventies very few British actors were working in Continental cinema, and certainly not in starring roles. Dirk Bogarde was the most high-profile, but then he was a very English-style actor; Oliver, in looks and mood, was much more European. ‘He could be Italian, he could be Serbian, he could be Russian,’ says Carole. ‘He came across as much more than just English.’ Ollie had found himself immensely popular and in demand, especially by Italian filmmakers, because films like Women in Love and The Devils had become causes célèbres. He was very much a hot box-office proposition in Europe, much more so than in America. His performances in these European productions, for which he was paid well – the main reason for taking them – were largely ignored by critics back home and the films themselves little seen by the British public. Maybe they thought he was slumming it, but this was an unfair accusation, especially when levelled against his next Italian-made film, Revolver. For not only is this movie a superior crime drama (with a great Ennio Morricone score) but it features one of Oliver’s best performances as a no-nonsense prison warden whose wife is kidnapped by the Mafia and the only way to get her back is to spring a criminal from jail.

  What’s even more remarkable about this performance are the circumstances under which it was delivered, namely that Oliver was knocking back lethal doses of booze every day. He’s clearly intoxicated in many of the scenes. Usually he was highly professional when it came to not drinking on the set, but for some reason this went completely out of the window here, as his co-star Fabio Testi and director Sergio Sollima revealed in a documentary for the film’s 2004 American DVD release. ‘Oliver was a very lovely person until two or three in the afternoon,’ he said. ‘Let’s say around the twenty-fifth or twenty-sixth bottle of wine. He could hold his liquor, no problem, then after that it would get more difficult. Therefore, we had to shoot his scenes during the early bottles.’

  Testi got to like Oliver a lot, finding him amusing and likeable, but a real handful. ‘When he came on the set drunk, he had the tendency to become violent. I was the only one able to restrain his violence because I was always humouring him.’ During the filming of a scene where Ollie was required to release Testi from handcuffs and drag him out of a car, he found the key too small and couldn’t fit it in the lock. After several takes Ollie got so frustrated he threw the key into the road, where it fell into a drain and down into the sewers. Testi was left handcuffed for two hours while a replacement key was found.

  Not only did Ollie zero in on his director, with the intention of getting him hammered, he also challenged Testi to several drinking games, but, like a good Venetian, Testi could match him drink for drink. ‘And Oliver couldn’t stand the fact that he couldn’t get me drunk. So at the end of the drinking, as a final challenge, he would break some light bulbs and eat them.’ As strange as it may sound, this was not a one-off incident. Wendy Kidd, the wife of showjumper Johnny Kidd, from whom Ollie had bought Dougal, recalled one dinner party at their London apartment where Oliver was a guest. He sat at the table drinking incessantly but not uttering a single word, and refusing to eat any of Wendy’s carefully prepared cuisine. Suddenly he stood up, removed a lampshade hanging over the table, and unscrewed the light bulb. ‘The next thing I knew he put the glass bulb to his lips and, without taking his eyes off me, proceeded to eat the end of it!’

  Eating light bulbs was one of Ollie’s favourite party tricks. Mark recalls a couple of visits to restaurants when his father couldn’t resist calling the waiter over and, even if the food was great, saying, ‘Excuse me, this food is shit, in fact I’d prefer to eat one of those,’ before unscrewing a light bulb and munching away. ‘You’ve got to chew the glass very finely before you swallow it,’ he’d caution. ‘It was to shock people and a demonstration of physical prowess,’ says Mark. ‘He also had this thing for a short time of putting cigarettes out on his tongue. It was shock value.’

  Ollie also liked to make people squirm. Sarah remembers going out with her father one evening in London when she was in her late teens. Before heading off, Ollie said, ‘Right, you’ve got to pretend that you’re my lady of the night.’ Arriving at a very posh restaurant, he went up to the doorman. ‘Good evening,’ he said, and then, pointing to a decidedly awkward Sarah, ‘This is miss, er . . . this is my niece.’ Nudge, nudge, wink, wink. ‘Er . . . actually no, it’s not, she’s a lady of the night.’ Poor Sarah would be standing there not carrying it off at all. It was just to see how people reacted. It was mucking about. ‘I hate being bored, you see,’ he once explained. ‘And, most of all, I hate it when I’m boring myself. So I pull faces. I dance around a bit. I act the goat. If I’m sitting in a pub and nothing is happening, I’ll climb up the chimney and pretend to be Father fucking Christmas. Anything to get a reaction.’ When he arrived on location in Italy for Dirty Weekend Ollie showed up unshaven and dishevelled, then fell out of his car and lay motionless, apparently unconscious, on the road. No one noticed, or cared, so he got up and went and had a coffee.

  Ollie’s behaviour on the set of Revolver, however, did not go down at all well with the majority of the Italian crew. So badly in fact that Sollima sensed something might happen and took precautionary steps, as Testi recalled. ‘The crew was told that Oliver would finish four days later than he actually did because some people were waiting until the end of the shoot to settle scores with him.’ Testi was the only person of the entire cast and crew that Ollie said goodbye to when he left.

  All For One, and One For All

  The origins of what would prove to be one of the most popular and entertaining movies of the seventies date back to a dinner party held by the father-and-son producing team of Alexander and Ilya Salkind, later responsible for the Superman movie franchise. It was Ilya’s girlfriend who mentioned that Alexandre Dumas’ classic novel The Three Musketeers would make a
great movie. Both Ilya and Alexander seized on the idea and from the very outset had in mind a comedic take on the much filmed tale and the bizarre notion of casting the Beatles as the musketeers. They even hired Richard Lester, who’d made his name directing A Hard Day’s Night and Help!, but the American filmmaker wasn’t keen on the idea, telling them, ‘The Beatles have such huge personalities, they are so well known that they will take away from the characters of the musketeers. If I’m going to do this I want to find great actors.’ He wanted not just great actors but big stars, to help sell the film on the international market. Ilya firmly believes that it was Lester’s involvement that encouraged the participation of some of Hollywood’s biggest names. ‘Richard was an absolute magnet for actors and when I look at that cast now it’s possibly one of the most perfect in cinema history.’

  The first star to be approached was Charlton Heston, who was offered the plum role of Athos. Heston loved the script but thought he was a bit long in the tooth to jump off horses and wave a sword around, so opted to play the Machiavellian Cardinal Richelieu instead. This still left the producers with the task of finding the perfect Athos, who is really the group’s heart and soul. Drawing up a list of actors that included the likes of Alan Bates, the Salkinds returned to Dumas’ description of Athos as a man who ‘lives hard and drinks too much’. There was only one candidate, surely. ‘Unanimously we thought, Oliver is the one,’ says executive producer Pierre Spengler. ‘Simply because he was a great actor and we figured this was a role that required great acting. And when you watch the film, Oliver brought so much depth to that role. You can feel the past of Athos.’ Oliver did like to claim that Athos was ‘probably the nearest to myself that I’ve ever played. I identify with his drinking habits, his playing habits, his suspicion of women.’

  The other musketeers fell relatively quickly into place. For D’Artagnan Lester wanted Malcolm McDowell, while the Salkinds preferred and got Michael York. As Aramis, Lester cast his friend Richard Chamberlain, and then Frank Finlay was brought in to play Porthos. The rest of the cast was filled out by other top acting talent such as Faye Dunaway, Christopher Lee, Simon Ward and Raquel Welch.

  An essential part of the film was going to be the sword fights, which Lester wanted to be both realistic and exciting. Very quickly Ollie and his fellow musketeers bonded as a unit, largely because of all the rehearsal and time spent together on set. ‘We were also totally involved in Dick Lester’s vision for this film, which was highly physical,’ says York. ‘We were doing crazy, crazy stunts, riding horses without stirrups and jumping this way and that, and all the fighting that we had to do. We just got caught up in the heat of the moment. Without doubt it’s the most physically demanding thing I’ve ever done.’

  At the grand age of fifty Christopher Lee was the most disadvantaged of the swordsmen, because, playing the villain, he was involved more than most in the duels. ‘You’ve got to remember we all had costumes on, boots, hats, capes, wigs, beards, moustaches . . . now you try and move fast with a real rapier. They were real swords, they weren’t fake, it’s not easy.’ William Hobbs, the fight arranger, had gone for total realism, not the hokey sword fighting of the Errol Flynn days. And because everyone was using real blades rehearsal was essential – except, that is, for Ollie, who just went hell for leather when the cameras rolled. ‘Oliver sometimes would go totally berserk and start to really fight 100 per cent real,’ recalls Ilya Salkind. ‘And we’d have to say, Oliver, it’s just a movie!’ Such was his, shall we say, exuberance that the forty-strong stunt team drew lots to determine who would fight him. ‘He terrified the stunt men,’ Lester recalled, ‘who would be seen retching in the corner.’

  The problem was, Oliver was good at picking up a planned routine, but then, when the cameras whirred and Lester cried ‘Action’, he would often lose himself in the moment. ‘Oliver did nothing by halves,’ confirms Christopher Lee. ‘I remember during a fight scene he came at me with both hands on the sword, like an axe, and I parried it and stopped totally. I said, “I think we’d better get the routine right.” Then I said to Oliver, “Do you remember who taught you how to use a sword?” He said, “You did.” And I said, “Don’t forget it.” You see, I made The Pirates of Blood River with him for Hammer and he was a bit of a menace in that, quite frankly. People leaped out of the way when he had a fight, because he went at it absolutely flat out. Nothing wrong with that, provided you stick to the routine.’

  In the end Oliver received a sword injury. ‘He was always going at them like a maniac,’ says Ilya. When it happened Ollie halted the scene and clutched himself in pain, saying, ‘The sword went through my arm.’

  ‘It’s not possible, Ollie,’ said Lester. ‘These swords are not sharp enough.’

  ‘I’m telling you, that’s what happened.’

  Everyone decided to humour Ollie, no one wanted to contradict him, and after the scene was finished he was taken to the local hospital for an X-ray. ‘And the sword had definitely gone through,’ reports Spengler. ‘But thank goodness only half of it had gone through the muscle so there were no real consequences.’ Save for a spot of blood poisoning that resulted in a short stay in hospital. After Ollie complained about the food, Reg climbed through the window every night with a plate of pasta and a bottle of red wine.

  It may have been disconcerting for his co-stars and the stunt team, but Ollie’s madcap sword-fighting style in The Three Musketeers was later to bring praise from an unlikely source, director Quentin Tarantino. ‘Oliver Reed is just fucking GOD in this movie. Oliver Reed owns the film. During the fight training Reed threw himself into the fighting so much he made all the other musketeers work twice as hard. They knew if they didn’t, Reed was going to own the movie completely. He was that good. You’ve never seen sword fights the way Reed fights them in this movie.’

  An arduous twenty-week slog, The Three Musketeers was shot in Spain, which, then under General Franco, was a very conformist country. Still, the production managed to land unprecedented access to sundry royal palaces and other locations, which helped lend the film a real sense of time and place. This attention to detail is one of the reasons why it has endured as a movie classic. ‘If you look at the Gene Kelly version of the story, it was so Hollywood of the 1940s that you can immediately place when that film was made,’ says Spengler. ‘I don’t think our Musketeers are actually placeable, because they are so authentic.’

  The cast and crew mostly stayed in Madrid, with Ollie put up at the illustrious Hilton Hotel, the only member of the cast staying there. ‘We deliberately kept him a little bit aside from the others,’ admits Spengler. Pretty soon the pranks began, including one of Ollie’s all-time best. The centrepiece of the hotel’s foyer was a large fish tank replete with very expensive goldfish. In the dead of night, when the building was asleep, Oliver crept down, removed the fish, and took them back upstairs to his room, placing them safely in his bath. The next few hours were spent whittling large carrots into the shape of the fish, and then popping them into the tank. Come morning, when the foyer was thronging with tourists and guests, Ollie announced himself loudly, then walked casually over to the fish tank, grabbed the ‘goldfish’, and started munching on them, to the horror of everyone. The hotel manager called the police and Ollie was hauled off the premises, bellowing, ‘You can’t touch me! I’m a musketeer!’

  It sounds like one of those apocryphal tales, so preposterous does it seem in the telling. Only there is a witness to it, as Michael York happened to be arriving for breakfast and saw the whole thing. ‘It was such a great prank. I really applauded it. Oliver could be pretty wild sometimes, though. Unfortunately this was now his image with the press, and I think he rather lived up to this wild, carousing, sort of latter-day Errol Flynn tag. This is what they expected of him and he duly delivered.’

  More problems followed. Drinking one night in the hotel bar, Ollie started challenging his fellow guests to tests of strength. ‘I am the greatest. I’m a British true blue and will take on
anyone.’ When no one obliged he started overturning tables and smashing glasses. Again the police were called and he was dragged away. It took five officers to bundle him into the interrogation room. ‘Oliver, God rest his soul, was incredible,’ remembers Ilya Salkind. ‘He could go out and get totally smashed until six in the morning and show up on the set at seven and be ready to go. That was pretty fantastic.’

  In court the hotel manager revealed that this skirmish wasn’t the first problem he’d had with Señor Reed: there had been several insulted guests, broken chairs, and a hole punched through a bathroom door. As a result Ollie was ordered to leave the hotel. ‘So I was thrown out on to the streets with my bags,’ he explained a few months later on Russell Harty’s ITV chat show.

  ‘All life seems to be a kind of adventure to you, doesn’t it?’ said his host.

  ‘I think it should be,’ Ollie replied, smiling. ‘I think that everybody would like that. It’s just that very few people have the opportunity.’

  ‘But thank God there are people like you through whom we can actually live vicariously,’ Harty wound up the interview.

  It had got to the stage in Ollie’s life where his reputation preceded him and his invitations to come out drinking were met with either trepidation or a 100-yard dash in the opposite direction. ‘If you wandered into a restaurant or a bar and Ollie was there you spun around and hoped you weren’t seen because you could become his captive all night,’ says Quinn Donoghue, publicist on The Three Musketeers. ‘If you wanted to go home at 11.30 p.m. or midnight he would not have that and at two o’clock in the morning he and Reg would start arguing or would pick a fight with somebody and a scene was made. I was there frequently in the beginning and realized, nope, don’t want to do this much any more. That’s the dark Ollie and everyone’s seen that at one time or another, and that’s not the good side. Ollie was fun to be with until, let’s say, drink number eight or whatever it was. When he wasn’t drinking, though, he was a pleasure.’