What Fresh Lunacy is This?

by Robert Sellers

  Certainly none of the cast went out on the lash with Ollie. Chamberlain, for instance, classed him as ‘A terrifying presence, an extremely dangerous man. He could be very sweet, but if he turned on you, he could make life terrible for you.’ This attack would normally take the form of a vicious verbal assault, during which he’d play on a person’s weakness. If he found you had a weakness he’d home in on it. ‘But he’d admire you if you stood up to him and stood your ground,’ says Paul Friday.

  Because of the tough schedule and early starts, most of the actors retired to their hotel rooms at a respectable hour anyway, and behaved themselves. ‘The only one that was always carousing was Ollie,’ says Donoghue. And, as always, news of his excessive behaviour would filter back on to the set the next morning. ‘And he relished this,’ adds the publicist. ‘He was like the little boy getting his wrist slapped but never really being chastised. He was regarded fondly among the crew as somebody who got into trouble.’ But all this had personal repercussions for Ollie’s driver. The poor man was taking him to parties and clubs and bars, and God knows what else, at all hours of the night, so he was hardly ever home and his wife asked for a divorce.

  Incredibly, over the course of the shoot, Spengler can only recall possibly one day when Oliver turned up drunk. ‘The rest of the time he would be extremely tipsy between 7 p.m. and 7 a.m., but he was showing up knowing his lines and knowing his stuff. He was a great pro. I had a real soft spot for him.’

  Because the film was so star-laden, acting heavyweights were popping in and out of Madrid all the time. Geraldine Chaplin, Ollie’s co-star a few years back, had been cast as the Queen and recalls, when she arrived in Spain, coming down the steps of her hotel and there was Ollie, bowing reverentially to her. ‘Your majesty,’ he said, and kissed her hand. Invited up to his room, Geraldine was fussed over even more and served champagne. ‘He treated me as the Queen, he was already in his part. It was very funny. During that whole film I was the Queen. He absolutely wouldn’t give up, on set, off set, I was the Queen, it was relentless.’

  The arrival of Raquel Welch and Faye Dunaway on location was a hotly anticipated event. Playing the devilish Milady, Faye didn’t have very much to do with Ollie, as they shared only a couple of scenes. One of these, however, where Athos threatens to shoot her in the stomach if she doesn’t hand over a compromising document, is easily the best acted scene in the movie and one of Ollie’s finest screen moments, truly electrifying. Relations were much better with Raquel, and they even went out drinking together a few times. Simon was in Madrid, as Ollie’s press agent, and got drunk one night with Raquel’s hairdresser. ‘She was out of her head because they’d been drinking vodka all day. Getting up to leave, she told me to follow her up in five minutes. She was beautiful. “Thank you,” I said. Reg was opposite me and winked, “You’ve scored there, sunshine.” I got up, grinned at Reg, then I realized I’d forgotten her room number. Fuck it. Apparently she collapsed outside the lift on the wrong floor anyway.’

  Early the next morning Simon was sitting outside a Winnebago when Ollie came out with a cup of tea. ‘Raquel wants to meet you,’ he said. Just then a door opened. ‘And out came this unbelievable vision. I’ll never forget, she had “No 1” written on her T-shirt, and if anybody looked like the No 1 in the world she did. She walked straight across to me, obviously her hairdresser had said something, looked me right in the eye, and said, “You must be Simon, I’ve heard so much about you.” I remember thinking, fuck me, wait till I tell my mates about this, it’s just ridiculous. But it was that kind of life. From living in Raynes Park to suddenly handling Ollie’s press stuff and doing all this, it was just amazing.’

  Simon also sensed that something was going on between his brother and Raquel. ‘She was after him, no question. David was having to field calls from her.’ Much to Raquel’s frustration, Ollie didn’t seem remotely interested. ‘She just couldn’t understand it,’ says Simon. ‘Because anywhere she went everyone wanted to get inside her knickers and all of a sudden here’s this guy ignoring her. So I don’t know if she was really attracted to him or she was merely curious, what’s going on here?, why doesn’t this guy want me? kind of thing.’ Not long afterwards Ollie was back at Broome Hall with Johnny Placett when the phone rang. Jenny Dobson picked it up. ‘It’s Raquel.’ Ollie took the phone. ‘Hello, Raquel, how are you?’

  ‘I’m staying at the Savoy. I’d like to invite you up for lunch.’

  ‘Oh, Raquel, I’ve already prearranged to go out and have drinks with the major. You see, he’s a good friend and he’s come round, so we’re going out to have a few jars.’ Ollie glanced over at Placett. ‘You have a word with her.’

  ‘Hello,’ said Johnny, in his best phone manner. ‘I can’t believe what he’s saying, Raquel. To get the chance to take such a beautiful woman like you out to lunch, but he’s decided he wants to see me. There’s something wrong in his head.’

  Raquel laughed. ‘Well, you sound interesting, why don’t you come along?’

  Johnny put his hand across the receiver. ‘She wants me to come along, Oliver.’

  ‘Give me that,’ said Ollie, snatching the phone out of his hands. ‘It’s no good, I heard all that, I’m going out for drinks with the major.’ And then he hung up.

  Was all this an elaborate joke on Ollie’s part, to snub a woman who was every hot-blooded male’s wet dream? ‘It could have been a bit of that,’ says Simon. ‘Also, don’t forget at that stage Ollie was drinking.’ And the drinking is perhaps where the answer lies.

  In the sixties Ollie had been something of a boozy ram. Johnny Placett is convinced he knocked off Princess Margaret. Ollie went off with her on some social engagement but was uncharacteristically coy about discussing what may have happened on his return. He sort of left the possibility dangling. However, by the early seventies his sex drive had gone. ‘The wandering eye finished probably after his mid-thirties,’ claims Simon. ‘He wasn’t that keen on it any more.’ What had been a flood now resembled something approaching a trickle, because of either a lack of interest or the booze. ‘I think he preferred the drink rather than the sex,’ says Georgina Hale. ‘If you’re pissed all the time I don’t really see you having a lot of sex.’ David believes that the drink did indeed play a part and had begun to effect him physically. ‘Ollie was a very virile person, but later, either through drink or whatever, he was probably not able to perform always. My very firm belief is that by that time he found it very difficult.’

  Jacquie does admit that booze had now become the all-consuming component in Oliver’s life and that the physical side of love no longer held much attraction for him. ‘It was too much fuss.’ And while it’s true to say that drinking does have an effect on a man’s libido, she denies that he was physically incapable. It was more that the desire had gone. ‘And I think a lot of it was the drink.’

  He still kept his relationship going with Carol Lynley, but it remained a curious relationship in that it didn’t seem to be going anywhere constructive. Sure, when they weren’t together he’d sometimes write letters to her, send telegrams or call. But if Carol began a new love affair with someone, Ollie wouldn’t display an ounce of jealously, ‘because they didn’t exist for him,’ she says. ‘I only existed when I was with him. Outside of that I didn’t exist and the other people in my life didn’t exist.’ Still, she dutifully flew into Spain for a time to keep him company on the Musketeers picture. ‘And he was so very excited about doing that film. He just seemed to be having a really good time and kept his musketeer hat with him everywhere he went.’

  Sadly for Carol, it proved the last film set of Oliver’s she’d visit. Just a few months later he flew out to break the news in person that he couldn’t see her any more. Their parting was amicable: there was no storming out, no screaming, no arguments, he just gave his reason, that he had a young daughter to look after, got on a plane and left. ‘And you can’t argue with anybody who says that. You can try and say, no, I don’t want you to, but
in the end you have to let them do what they think is best.’ And looking back some forty years later, Carol has no regrets about the relationship. ‘It was a wonderful seven years. I remember good times, and how very, very attractive he was. And I remember the fun and the originality of him. He was just so original.’ They never saw each other again.

  For years Oliver referred to The Three Musketeers as one of his happiest times on a film set. Much of that was down to Richard Lester, who instilled in his company an atmosphere of collaboration. ‘If you came up with something creative and better, it often made the cut,’ remembers York. And Lester fair galloped along, too. His style was to use multiple cameras, as he loved spontaneity. If he got what he wanted in the first or second take, he’d move on, no messing about. That was something Ollie could appreciate and invest in.

  Imagine, then, having put all this effort into the movie, you found out that the producers had sliced the thing right down the middle and intended to release it in two separate parts, but somehow forgot to tell any of the actors about it. According to Christopher Lee, the deception was unveiled at the Paris opening. ‘When the lights came on at the end everybody started leaving the cinema. We just looked at each other and said, “Wait a minute, it’s only half the movie.” Then somebody came up and told us, “Oh no, there’s another film to come out, it’s called The Four Musketeers.” Well, you can imagine the reaction. What in effect we’d done was make two films and we’d only been paid for the one film!’

  A feeding frenzy ensued, with lawyers and agents claiming their clients had been royally shafted. In the end the Salkinds came up with a financial deal that appeased everyone. The rationale behind the decision was that a family audience would be unable to sit through a three-and-a-half-hour movie, so it made better sense to release them over two successive summers. It was a point of view the actors pretty much agreed with, as the alternative would be to lose a whole bunch of great material. ‘I’m glad they did it,’ admits Michael York. ‘Because there’s not a dud sequence and there’s no sense of padding in either of those films.’ Indeed, of the two, Oliver much preferred The Four Musketeers. ‘In my opinion it’s a better film, not only because I’m in it more, but because you get more into the characters.’

  Ollie’s Athos ranks alongside his Bill Sikes, Gerald Crich, Father Grandier, and Proximo in Gladiator as one of the finest achievements of his career. So good is he in fact that you can’t see anyone else coming close to matching him. ‘Oliver was blessed with that rare quality that is beyond mere acting: style,’ claimed the film’s screenwriter, George MacDonald Fraser. ‘He had it by the bucket. Flynn and Fairbanks never swept a cloak or threw out a challenge with greater panache.’

  There is something else about Oliver. It may or may not have been a throwback to his ‘alleged’ Peter the Great heritage, but he seemed just to fit perfectly into historical settings. ‘He had a face that looked real in very many centuries,’ says actor Stephan Chase, who worked twice with him. ‘And there aren’t many people that you can cast like that. If you see things on telly or in movies that are meant to be medieval, most of the faces don’t look right. I think Ollie had a quality where you could put him in a film set in the time of William the Conqueror, or earlier or later, or even possibly a future film, and his looks would have worked, you would have believed he was a person from that time.’

  It wasn’t just the bombastic elements of his performance as Athos that are memorable, for Oliver also brings softness and vulnerability to the role, especially in his relationship with the young D’Artagnan. ‘I think the affection between Athos and D’Artagnan is certainly there,’ says York. ‘And during filming I got very fond of Ollie. I had to look up to him. He was a sort of role model, but not off the set.’ York also counts himself as one of Oliver’s biggest fans. ‘He’s one of the icons of the British film industry. There were performances like his Bill Sikes, which used his physicality and that dark, dangerous energy that he seemed to carry around with him. He used it triumphantly. And the great thing about his Athos, and why he made the part his own, was Oliver was raised in the middle class, if not quite the aristocracy, so I think some of that came through. He may have been pretty wild and rough, but there was something that tempered his personality that he couldn’t help, that was in his upbringing. In short, the class system.’

  York raises a fascinating point about class because the musketeers themselves were a cut above the average French soldier, having been founded by King Louis XIII and becoming a popular fixture at court. ‘And certainly Oliver was an aristocratic sort. I knew he had a house in the country and I could see him as the country squire type, wearing tweeds with his gun dogs. He fitted in perfectly with that kind of image. He’d been brought up in good schools, with good manners. Oliver wasn’t run of the mill. He was like an aristocratic ruffian, a complete contradiction in terms.’

  Hollywood Calling

  Back at Broome Hall, Oliver did indeed continue to play at being the lord of the manor. However much of a folly the place was, bought on a spectacular whim, as a home it was an extension of his personality and played host to some great parties. One of the most memorable occurred in the winter of 1974, after a home win at Rosslyn Park, when Ollie celebrated with twenty-five squad members, including star player Andy Ripley. The evening started off at the Cricketers when everyone sang ‘Get ’em Down, You Zulu Warrior’ and crammed fifteen of their party into a single cubicle in the ladies’ lavatory. They all arrived at Broome Hall after midnight, and that’s when the real fun began. Jacquie remembers it well because Ollie insisted she and Jenny dress up like little serving girls. ‘The rugby players thought we were the hired help. We also had to give them a few whacks over the head with French rolls because rugby players get ideas after they’ve been drinking.’

  To keep everyone’s strength up, a local chef made huge bowls of chilli. ‘Very hot,’ remembers Christensen. ‘And fucking inedible.’ Meanwhile Ollie made pints of hot buttered rum, a bygone coaching drink that drivers used to keep themselves warm, consisting of butter, rum and Demerara sugar poured into boiling water. ‘We drank gallons of that until everyone was nice and warm,’ says Christensen. ‘And then Ollie suggested a follow my leader. Everyone stripped off to their jockstraps and underpants and ran round and round the grounds, culminating in a swim across the lake, which was madness really because everyone was pissed and it was freezing cold. Everyone came back blue with their teeth chattering.’ By morning sixty gallons of beer had been consumed, thirty-two bottles of whisky, seventeen bottles of gin, four crates of wine and fifteen dozen bottles of Newcastle Brown.

  After these booze bashes little Sarah got quite used to going down to breakfast in the morning and finding lying on the floor various bodies, which she’d have to step over to reach the kitchen. ‘People would just come and get drunk, keel over, be sick, and I’d go, OK, that’s so and so there, and this was just completely normal.’

  For a time Ollie hosted a spate of dinner parties, even though he usually abhorred such social occasions. ‘He got bored very quickly with people,’ says Jacquie. ‘So he would never go to a family cocktail party or dinner party, it would bore him to death.’

  But the grand dining room, with its huge stone fireplace, seemed to be going to waste, so several dinners were arranged, though only for very close friends. Ollie also had a huge dining table built from an oak tree – it could seat almost thirty people – and everyone who came to dinner was encouraged to carve their name in the wood.

  It’s unlikely that Oliver’s father was ever a guest, although he did visit a number of times. Sarah remembers him as ‘a bit of a cold fish’ and notes that David and Simon were much closer to their father than Ollie was, and had a very good relationship with him. ‘My dad didn’t. I think Pete never felt that my dad fitted. He didn’t understand where my father had come from.’ When Ollie was best man at Paul Friday’s wedding to Nora he played a dastardly trick on Peter. Showing up at his father’s house in Epsom on the way t
o the wedding, he intimated that it was in fact he who was getting married. So poor old Peter turned up, in his gardening clothes, convinced that it was Ollie and Jacquie, sitting happily in front of the registrar, who were the ones tying the knot.

  As for Marcia, in the eight years Jacquie lived at Broome Hall she only ever remembers her visiting on one occasion. Looking round the place, all she had to say was, ‘What a waste of money. Such an extravagance.’ It was also the only time Jacquie ever met Oliver’s mother, but her memories of her remain strong. ‘She was very formidable and very beautiful; that’s obviously where Oliver got his beauty from. She was just incredibly beautiful, with blue eyes and black hair.’

  For one memorable dinner party Ollie invited an elderly couple whom he’d only met a few weeks before in the Cricketers. ‘For some reason Oliver used to suddenly take to people,’ says Jacquie. You could say he collected people. Once he was returning from visiting Mark at school and some Welsh kid was thumbing a lift. ‘Where are you going?’ asked Ollie. ‘London,’ said the kid. ‘I’m gonna get a job.’ Ollie had a think. ‘Well, I need a butler.’ So he drove this kid back to his house, where he was a butler for a week. ‘But he never did any butler duties,’ recalls Paul Friday. ‘All Ollie did was get him pissed for the week, then give him £200 and put him on a train and off the kid went.’ Jacquie also remembers the time he picked up a band of road diggers who were carrying out roadworks outside the Cricketers. ‘They didn’t go home for a week.’