What Fresh Lunacy is This?

by Robert Sellers

Growing up, Mark was conscious of the fact that his father was keen for him to do well academically, helping him with his homework whenever he was around. ‘He recognized that he’d probably had a chequered past with his education, so saw it as important. For my sister it wasn’t – she would be swept off her feet by some rich young landowner and live happily ever after – whereas boys had to go out and do their bit. So he always thought that academia was important, but not hugely: he thought the university of life was of greater worth.’

  It was during these visits to his father that Mark built up an understanding and a friendship with Jacquie, who was both kind and supportive to him. And she would defend him, too, if Oliver was being awkward. ‘She would stand in my corner. Good woman, Jacquie. She probably had more of the challenging times with him than my mother did, or later Josephine. I mean, he’d bring all his mates back from the pub and suddenly she’d have to make fifty-eight fried-egg sarnies. It wasn’t an easy life to share.’

  For Mark, Broome Hall was like an adventure playground for grown-ups, and being a young lad he was the perfect age to enjoy it. ‘There were always antics going on. Because of the way he was he would have people round and it got fun and outrageous. Then they would go because they’d had enough – they could hardly see or walk or talk, most of them – and then someone else would knock on the door and go, “Hi, Ollie.” It was continuous.’

  Sarah, of course, was much younger and has always said that at Broome Hall there was play time but it wasn’t child’s play time, it was the big boys’ play time. Off went her dad and his mates to the Cricketers and when they came back they were going to be silly. ‘In which case I was usually removed, or you were around until it got overly silly or loud and leery. My mum says there was an occasion where my dad was playing with a shotgun and it went off and I was quite close by, so you always knew something dangerous could happen, but I was removed as soon as it got too much. But I do remember being very envious that they looked like they were having such fun and I wasn’t included. It was play time but not for me.’

  It must have been strange for a young child to watch her father behaving in such a fashion. ‘But he liked to do silly things,’ says Jacquie. ‘He’d play hide and seek in all those bedrooms. He liked to jump out on people.’ He’d also get Bill Dobson and others who worked on the property to be in his gang. ‘We’re on parade,’ he’d announce, and they’d all stand to attention on the gravel driveway at the front of the house and he’d put paper hats on their heads. ‘Can you imagine these people, a bit pissed, marching up and down?’ says Jacquie. ‘They fell in the roses and everywhere, screaming with laughter like children.’

  Sarah hits the nail on the head when she says that her father never really grew up. He was the Peter Pan of hell-raisers. When Space Dust first came out he bought boxes of it and was going up to people in the pub and shoving it in their mouths. ‘It’s that real childlike quality: he would just go, “Wow, this new thing’s really exciting”, and he’d get all waggy-tailed about it. He also had this thing, “I want to play – now. I’ve got to play.” It was that intense and immediate. So he’d walk in at four o’clock in the morning when you’re asleep, he’d be stoned or pissed, and want to tell you a story or show you something. I remember he came back from the pub one night with these glowsticks and shoved them down my duvet cover and woke me up, yelling, “Look, look, spacemen are coming.” And I’m half groggy, going, “What are they?” He was so excited by it. Then they all faded and he went away and I couldn’t get back to sleep again. He was so maddening at times. Looking back, though, I really wish I’d appreciated it more.’

  All this, of course, tallies with the fact that Ollie had a supremely low attention span. ‘He bored easily,’ says Jacquie. ‘He liked new adventure all the time.’ Once he decided to take Sarah and Mark to Her Majesty’s Theatre in London to show them its connection with Herbert Beerbohm Tree. A revival of The Sound of Music happened to be playing, so he bought tickets and they went to see it. Half an hour in, Ollie was bored and buggered off to the bar. Sarah also remembers the occasion Ollie and Keith Moon heard there was a circus coming to Dorking. They were like a pair of kids, let’s go to the circus, so they took Sarah and off they went. ‘We walked along endless fields and crawled up the bank of this hill and finally got to the circus and it was like, no, don’t fancy it now, and we came back. I said to Mum, “How could you leave those two men in charge of me?” And she said, “Joy Bang must have been with you.” I was like, “She was no good, she was never any good.”’

  It was almost like the idea or the planning was sometimes better than the actual event. One time when Mark had friends over, Ollie got an empty bottle from the cellar bar, all cobwebby, and put a handwritten note inside and told them it was a pirate’s message. ‘So he had this amazing childlike imagination when he really wanted to,’ says Sarah. ‘But just as you were getting into the game or the story he’d go, “I’m bored now, I’m off,” and he’d disappear. He’d want to go and play with the big children.’

  All this couldn’t have been anything other than tough for Sarah growing up. She remembers Jacquie saying once, ‘Most people’s lives are fairly mundane, with the odd up and the odd low, whereas ours was always up or down, with the odd mundane.’ And she has never forgotten what her father used to say to her when he sensed that maybe it was all getting a bit much for her: ‘Would you prefer a daddy that goes to work with a side parting and a briefcase and a suit or would you prefer me?’ And of course she always used to say, ‘Oh, I prefer you, Daddy’, but sometimes deep down she’d think, I would love just to be normal for a little while. ‘He used to occasionally turn up at my junior school and flirt with the mums and blow kisses. He used to embarrass me terribly. Unless he was in his quiet mode he would never go anywhere quietly, it was always a performance and there’d be a commotion. Now I look back and think, wow, isn’t that great? But at the time it wasn’t: it was, please, can I just be normal, I really want to be normal, and we never had that. I just wanted him for me. Everyone always wanted a bit of him, and he was good at giving out bits of himself, and sometimes you just felt, actually, what’s left for me? I just want it to be me and my dad. And that didn’t happen very often.’

  For some time Ollie had been regularly going to see fights at the Royal Albert Hall. Boxing was never going to eclipse rugby as his main sporting pastime, but it was something he enjoyed watching and knew quite a bit about. ‘Ollie did love his sport,’ says Simon. ‘He watched a lot of sport on TV. He followed horse-racing to a certain extent and football a bit, also golf, but rugby was always his big love.’

  When John Conteh fought the Argentinian Jorge Victor Ahumada for the Light Heavyweight crown at the end of 1974, Simon was part of the BBC radio team at the Empire Pool, Wembley. He’d been asked by the producer if he could persuade Oliver to be a ringside guest. Ollie agreed and a car was booked to pick him up at home at 4 p.m. The bill started at eight, with the main fight on at 9.15 p.m. ‘It got to eight o’clock and Ollie hadn’t arrived,’ recalls Simon. ‘They contacted the guy in the car and he said, “Look, we’ve stopped six times in pubs, he keeps taking me this way and that way. He’s Oliver Reed, I can’t do anything.” Eventually he turned up five minutes before the fight. Typical Ollie: the timing was perfect. And he did a decent job; he was pissed but he did what he had to do. So he did like his boxing. He was a big fan of Conteh and Alan Minter.’

  Back in the late sixties, when he still lived in Wimbledon, Oliver even sponsored his own boxer for a while. ‘Suddenly I was asked to start feeding this gentleman with steaks,’ remembers David. ‘Ollie said he was going to be the next best thing since sliced bread. Then I started getting these bills from this butcher and they got bigger and bigger until in the end I was saying to Ollie, “One man can’t eat all this meat.” So it was obviously feeding half of Bermondsey or wherever the guy lived. I do remember we used to go to watch this guy box and quite famous underworld characters would be seated in the prime chair
s round the ring.’

  When Ollie heard that in his next film, the Richard Lester-directed Royal Flash, he was going to spar on screen with one of his heroes, Henry Cooper, he could barely contain his excitement. ‘It was like going to the pantomime and meeting Jack and the Beanstalk for real!’ Oliver had been cast as the famous nineteenth-century German statesman Bismarck, while Cooper was playing the real-life John Gully, an English bare-knuckle prize-fighter and politician. As the two men started trading punches for the camera, Ollie admitted to getting carried away with the glory of the situation and deviated from the rehearsed routine. The next thing that happened was, he was lying on the floor with Cooper standing over him. ‘Sorry, Ollie, I felt that one sink in.’ As he was helped to his feet, Oliver’s head was throbbing. He’d just been stung by Henry’s Hammer, ‘his famous left hook that had spread-eagled Ali across the canvas’.

  Simon, however, recalls events a little differently: that Ollie aimed a swipe at the former heavyweight champion, ‘just because, I think, he wanted to tell me and others that he’d knocked Henry Cooper out. It wasn’t a very good move. I think Henry handled it very well.’

  Revenge may very well have been on Ollie’s mind when the two met again in 1985 on a television show called All-Star Secrets, hosted by Michael Parkinson. Henry Cooper was the subject of this particular episode and celebrity guests were brought out on to the stage to reminisce in that cringe-making way celebrities are very good at. Ollie had been booked to make a surprise appearance at the end and was psyching himself up in his dressing room, jabbing away in front of a mirror, reducing it to so many broken shards with swift left hooks. Already out on stage were Roy Kinnear and EastEnders actress Wendy Richard. They knew Ollie was coming next and were expecting him to make his entrance from the side, but instead he punched a hole in the set. ‘I thought it was part of the programme till I saw Michael’s face,’ said Wendy.

  Ever the pro, Parky took Ollie to the side of what remained of the set and began discussing his bout with Henry in Royal Flash and asking how many rounds did he fancy going with the ex-champ now. Ollie was supposed to have said the scripted line, ‘As many as he will buy,’ but instead his face was blank, unresponsive, dead like the far side of the moon. Suddenly there was movement, a powerful but hopelessly misdirected swing aimed at Cooper’s head, who ducked just in time, but the end result was almost Ollie’s fist smashing into Wendy Richard’s face. ‘I swear my eyelashes sort of fluttered, he was that close. What a night!’ As one of the production staff said later, ‘Oliver was like a hurricane that blew through but did not kill anyone.’

  Michael Parkinson had other encounters with Oliver, ‘and lived to tell the tale’. He once played cricket with him, a charity game at the Oval during which Ollie walked to the wicket wearing a turban and a sarong and carrying a tray with a pint of bitter on it. ‘The man next to me sighed at the spectacle,’ Parky recalled. ‘I said, by way of polite conversation, “I suppose he belongs to someone.” My companion said, “As a matter of fact, he does. I’m his father.”’

  Royal Flash concerned the exploits of Harry Flashman, a Victorian military bounder of the highest order, played to perfection by Malcolm McDowell. It was based on a series of enormously successful books by George MacDonald Fraser, who also wrote the screenplay. Fraser liked Oliver a great deal and thought that as Bismarck he was far and away one of the best things in Royal Flash. In lesser hands Bismarck might have come across as a bit dour, since it’s he who has to set up the rather clunky plot, but Ollie gives him gravitas and his own usual aura of malevolence. ‘As I discovered later,’ said Fraser, ‘Ollie was unusually proud of his performance. When we met again years later he hailed me with a cry of, “Not a bad Bismarck, was I?”’ Until his death Fraser kept a card bearing Oliver’s sketch of a rapier and plumed hat labelled ‘Ath’ and a top hat and moustache captioned ‘Bis’, signed ‘Ollie Reed’. It was sent to the writer in 1982 ‘and it’s a remarkably neat piece of work, considering that he did it, according to the messenger who brought it to me, in an advanced state of inebriation.’

  Ollie and Lee

  In the autumn of 1975, when Oliver agreed to appear in the comedy western The Great Scout & Cathouse Thursday, he faced the challenge of sharing the screen with a man whose hell-raising and boozing matched his own: Lee Marvin.

  ‘You know, Oliver, that Mr Marvin enjoys a drink.’ The voice belonged to the film’s English producer, Jules Buck, who was in the limo with Ollie that was taking him to Los Angeles airport to catch his flight to Mexico. ‘Could I ask you as a great favour to calm it down, because Lee’s terribly difficult?’

  ‘Of course. I quite understand,’ said Ollie, stifling a burp. ‘You can count on me to do all in my power to keep Mr Marvin away from that disgusting liquor.’

  ‘Oh, and may we ask you to do the same?’ said Buck.

  Ollie puffed himself up with fake indignation. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, er, I understand that you have a certain reputation for, well, how can I put this, you know, for having a few drinks at night and, you know, getting into fights.’

  Ollie’s face was one of alarm and bewilderment. ‘What! How dare you! Stop the car! Let me out – I’m going back to England.’

  A volley of profuse apologies followed. Buck hadn’t really meant what he said, oh no, and yes, of course he trusted him completely, oh yes. Ollie must have revelled in watching his producer squirm in his seat. It was only later, talking to Marvin, that Ollie heard that Buck had told him exactly the same thing.

  The car pulled up outside the airport hotel and Ollie walked inside. Marvin hadn’t arrived yet, or so he thought, then someone pointed to an object asleep outside on a bench which stirred when prodded by an assistant. Wearing a baggy pair of jeans, mangy shirt and shabby sports jacket, Marvin strolled into the Departures lounge, looking like a crumbled wad of ten-dollar bills. And there was Ollie, dressed in a smart Dougie Hayward suit. ‘How do you do? Pleased to meet you, I’m sure,’ he said, in his best Brideshead Revisited voice. Marvin was genuinely taken aback. ‘I was expecting to meet up with this actor who was supposed to be Britain’s hell-raiser and what do I see but this tailor’s dummy in a pinstripe suit looking more like a fucking banker.’

  During the flight Ollie and Lee were as good as their word and declined offers of beer and spirits, instead drinking orange juice. Things changed when they hit Durango. High up in the Sierra Madre mountains, the city of Victoria de Durango had long been acknowledged as a perfect location for making westerns, despite its remoteness. Back in the seventies there was just one flight a day to Los Angeles; that was the only means of getting there and the only communication with the outside world. ‘It really was a hick town,’ recalls David Ball, the film’s accountant. ‘There was no tarmac on the street and there were potholes that you could lose a car in. It really was a funny old place and very much bandit country. Our member of the secret police allocated to us by the Mexican government, who we made our transportation captain, gave me a gun on my first day out there. “What am I going to do with this? I’m from England,” I said. “You are best to have this, señor,” he replied. “Because down here banditos.”’

  Ollie considered Marvin ‘Mr America’ and claimed to have ‘crossed the Atlantic to challenge him for his crown’. It didn’t take them long to decide to have a drink one evening, once the producer was safely tucked up in bed. ‘Well, what are we going to have?’ asked Ollie.

  ‘We’re in Mexico, we’ll drink fucking tequila,’ Marvin replied.

  ‘Let’s not waste time, then,’ said Ollie as he poured himself half a pint of the stuff, took a handful of salt and a lemon, smeared the glass with it, and drank it down in one.

  Marvin watched this, said, ‘If you’re just going to fuck around, I’m not playing,’ and went to bed.

  When the drinking contest proper was finally arranged, co-star Strother Martin was elected referee. ‘Marvin was the champ and had the privilege of calling the shots,’ sai
d Ollie. It was to be vodka on the rocks, and they were knocked back, line after line, until Ollie emerged victorious after a reported ten hours. ‘He was as proud as punch about that,’ remembers Simon. ‘And he rang me about three in the fucking morning, slurring, “I want to tell you that Lee Marvin’s given me his drinking cloak, and he’s now under the table. He’s under the table as I’m talking to you now, and I’ve got his cloak.” So they’d obviously had a monumental session. Getting Lee Marvin’s drinking cloak was almost like getting an Oscar for Ollie.’

  Respectful of his drinking prowess, Ollie was also a fan of Marvin the actor and had seen all his films. He was the prime reason for taking on what turned out to be a disappointing film in which, for some reason, Ollie was playing a whisky-soaked, gonorrhoea-ridden Indian. It’s a marvellously inventive and funny performance but you can’t help thinking while watching it that Ollie was miscast. The plot has him and Marvin’s grizzled frontiersman out to reclaim a lost gold mine from villainous Robert Culp.

  David remembers just how thrilled his brother was about working with Marvin but couldn’t help feeling at the time that producer Jules Buck was ‘very, very mad’ to team the two of them together in the same movie. Incredibly Durango survived – look it up on Google Earth, it’s still there – but it was touch and go for a while. The crew were housed in a hotel called the Campo Mexico, a series of chalets on the northern edge of the city. Ollie and Marvin, though, were allotted houses, but most evenings Ollie ventured to the Campo to drink with the crew. ‘And Ollie’s drink was six bottles of Domecq, Mexican white wine,’ recalls David Ball, who along with Ollie was one of the few Brits on a crew largely made up of locals and Americans. Ball is a chief witness to the shenanigans and wildness that went on in Durango with Ollie. ‘As people came into the bar he’d invite them over, so the table would just get bigger and bigger, and Ollie would order six bottles of Domecq and, irrespective of what you drank, if you were sitting with Ollie you drank Domecq white wine. And they couldn’t chill it fast enough.’