What Fresh Lunacy is This?

by Robert Sellers

  Ollie then joined in the festivities by jumping atop the main table and throwing a cake into one of the producers’ faces before falling backwards on to the floor. For his pièce de résistance Ollie poured a bowl of chocolate trifle over his head and goosestepped out of the room. ‘When he worked Ollie was completely straight and very professional,’ reaffirms Lester. ‘But there was this other side to him. It was more than just naughty schoolboy-type pranks, it was actually things that were so embarrassing you wouldn’t expect the local rugby team to behave in such a manner, jokes not appreciated by everybody.’

  More antics followed, much of which, according to the film’s publicist Quinn Donoghue, was instigated by Reg rather than Ollie. Entrusted with the job of keeping Ollie out of trouble, Reg became a cohort rather than a protector, especially after six drinks, when his protective sense got skewered and he either joined Ollie as a partner in crime or they started fighting among themselves. ‘Then the police would come but they’d be bought off,’ says Donoghue. ‘One night Ollie and Reg gatecrashed a party and it was full of cops and secret police and Ollie was pissed and calling them all cunts in English. Luckily they couldn’t understand and when they were eventually thrown out Ollie asked who were they and was told, “That was the cops, and not the sort of cops you want to mess with.”’

  Another evening Ollie rounded up several of the crew, along with Mark Lester, for a meal with a difference, the difference being that each course would be served and eaten in reverse. ‘So we started off having brandy and a cigar,’ says Lester. ‘Ollie was drinking all the time this Bull’s Blood wine, but we were all fairly merry. Then, when the chocolate pancakes came, one of the camera crew lobbed his pancake across the room and within minutes there was this huge food fight and everyone was just covered in chocolate and the manager came over and just threw us all out. We were literally thrown out into the street.’

  Joining Ollie and Lester was a supporting cast almost comparable in star power to the Musketeer films: Ernest Borgnine, Raquel Welch, Rex Harrison and Charlton Heston. The gruff American George C. Scott also featured. A fearsome drinker himself, George MacDonald Fraser was instructed to rewrite a key scene to ensure that Scott and Oliver would not be called upon to perform together. Some risks are just too great to run.

  There was also a role for David Hemmings, who’d last worked with Ollie on The System, when he was hung upside down from a window over spiked railings, something you don’t forget in a hurry. After that he’d become something of an iconic figure in late-sixties British cinema as a result of his role as the trendy photographer in Antonioni’s Blow-Up. But as the seventies rolled on, good parts dried up and there was also a chronic problem with alcohol which eventually devastated his youthful looks. According to Spengler, Hemmings and Ollie were practically inseparable while Hemmings was on the film. ‘They got on very well and went out drinking together all the time.’ Their big scene together was a dust-up in a horse-drawn carriage, where, Hemmings recalled, he was ‘beaten to a pulp on the pretext of making it look real’. When director Richard Fleischer called ‘Action’ the next thing he knew he was out of the carriage and sprinting off the set with his trousers falling down and Oliver in hot pursuit, his sword out of his scabbard.

  Raquel Welch was due on location towards the end of the shoot, but news reached Spengler that she had been held up in America and it was going to be another four weeks until her arrival in Budapest. Since Ollie had now completed all his scenes, save for those with Raquel, this meant that by the time she arrived he would be over his stipulated schedule, thus triggering a penalty clause costing about $20,000 a week. Spengler put in a frantic call to David to explain the situation and to seek a solution.

  ‘Let me talk to Ollie,’ said David. Later that afternoon David called Spengler back. ‘I talked to Ollie and it’s going to cost you something.’

  ‘I imagined that it would. Have you got any thoughts?’

  ‘Yes,’ said David. ‘Ollie told me to tell you that he needs a sofa.’

  And that was it. So instead of $80,000 the producers bought him a sofa for Broome Hall. Ollie was nobody’s fool and he knew full well that he was entitled to that money by virtue of his contract. It was a gesture that Spengler has never forgotten. ‘Oliver was incredibly generous.’

  With a month’s free time Ollie took himself off to the south of France, where he often holidayed. He’d rent a fabulous villa and invite all manner of friends to stay. ‘We arrived one day,’ says Paul Friday, ‘and Ollie moved out of the main bedroom and into a cupboard downstairs. It was literally a cupboard with a single mattress that curled up at the end because it was so cramped, and he’d moved in there because he’d given all the bedrooms to his friends.’ Upon arrival these friends tended to split into two separate groups to go off drinking, exploring, and having fun with Ollie. ‘We had to take turns,’ confirms Nora Friday. ‘We had to do night shifts and day shifts. You couldn’t do a day and a night with him because you wouldn’t survive.’

  During this particular visit Ollie acquired a Chinese junk. Mark seems to think that it was a part payment for a film that went down the tubes. Called Ding Hao, the boat was built in Hong Kong in 1959 for a trade fair in Montreal, after which it spent several years in the Caribbean before ending up in the south of France. ‘Ollie didn’t know how to sail it,’ says David. ‘He didn’t know how to get it out of the harbour. So he had this skipper who’d hire a crew on the day. It only went out infrequently. Basically it was a houseboat.’

  Ollie kept the thing moored at the marina at Cap Ferrat, where it stood out like a sore thumb among the bright, shiny yachts of millionaires. David Niven came aboard one afternoon and, hardly impressed, wrote in the logbook, ‘This is not a film star’s yacht.’ But Mark, who lived and sailed in it, remembers the Ding Hao as a beautiful craft. ‘It was sixty-five foot long and had a master cabin with a seven-foot-square bed in it. The thing was full of old Chinese antique carvings and had marble bathrooms. It was just a delight.’

  The plan was to hire out the Ding Hao whenever possible, so in the end the thing paid for itself. ‘He used to charter it to the Monaco Grand Prix,’ recalls Mark. ‘And James Hunt used to come on board, and there’d be lots of girls in tennis costumes serving canapés and champagne. For a sixteen-year-old it was great.’ After he’d taken his cut, the idea was for the skipper to reinvest any profits into the upkeep of the vessel, but it didn’t quite work out that way as each season the thing looked tattier and tattier. Mark was on the boat one day when Oliver came down and just looked at the state of it and went, ‘That’s it, I’m out.’ He didn’t want to play this game any more. After just three years Ollie sold the junk. It then promptly sank, not in a storm, but in the middle of the Mediterranean in fine weather. A suitably confused Lloyd’s investigator came to see David, asking about water-tight bulkheads and things like that. Lloyd’s simply couldn’t understand how a boat could sink on a calm day.

  Oliver returned to Budapest two days before the arrival of Raquel and immediately got into a spot of bother. A newspaper had published an interview in which he’d fired a slingshot in the direction of fellow bad boy Richard Harris. Boasting of his forthcoming love scenes with Miss Welch, Ollie announced that he was offering Harris a job as his stand-in, providing his wig didn’t fall off in the clinches. ‘What with his toupée and her falsies they would be perfect for each other,’ he said. When Spengler read this he was furious; what if Raquel saw it? Ollie protested his innocence. ‘I promise, I swear to you, Pierre, I never said that.’ In the end a statement was put out on his behalf denouncing it all as tabloid bullshit, and when Raquel arrived everything seemed fine. ‘Then one night,’ remembers Spengler, ‘I was sitting at the bar at the Gellert Hotel and I hear these loud voices. I look and it’s Oliver and Raquel screaming at each other, really going at it. I started to get extremely nervous but when I approached them they both burst out laughing.’

  Three days later Spengler was at the hotel’s very chic nig
htclub. Oliver was sitting at a private table with Raquel having drinks. A guy, who, it later turned out, was a black marketeer, came over to them. ‘Would you like to dance, Miss Welch?’ he said. ‘No thank you,’ came the reply. The guy walked away. Two minutes later he returned. ‘Now would you like to dance, Miss Welch?’ Raquel again declined. He walked away. A few minutes later he showed up a third time, only now Oliver took charge of the situation. ‘Hey, listen, fella, the lady says she does not want to dance with you, so enough.’ He walked away. Spengler describes what happened next: ‘Two minutes later the guy comes and jumps over Oliver, attacks him. Raquel runs towards me shrieking, “I promise Oliver did not start this.” Then we had a fight like in the western movies, we had tables and chairs flying in the air, just unbelievable. The entire nightclub was fighting, because there were about seven of these black marketeers and most of our crew was there. The result was that the nightclub was pretty much upside down, quite destroyed. The manager wanted to call the police. I said, don’t call anybody, I’ll pay for the damage.’

  The next morning Spengler returned to the nightclub, which had been put back into some semblance of normality. It was completely deserted except for the solitary figure of a drunk Oliver fashioning an improvised weapon of really quite menacing quality. He had taken a fork and twisted the metal teeth so that he could fit it into his fist like a ninja fighting device. A shiver went down Spengler’s spine. ‘What are you doing, Oliver?’

  ‘I’m waiting for the Germans.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ The guys from the night before had in fact been Yugoslavs but probably, in Ollie’s befuddled mind, villainous Europeans were all Germans.

  ‘It’s my honour, Pierre,’ said Ollie. ‘I cannot let this go by.’

  ‘Oliver, you really mustn’t do this. Let’s go back to the hotel.’

  ‘No, Pierre, this is my honour.’

  Just then Spengler remembered something Ollie had said to him when they had dinner together before shooting began. He’d grabbed Spengler’s hand and looked him straight in the eye, saying, ‘Anything you want from me, you can always ask.’ Spengler composed himself. ‘Oliver, now I’m asking. Give me that fork.’ Ollie gave him the fork. Spengler went outside and threw it into an alleyway. When he came back inside, Ollie was preparing another one. ‘Ollie, please.’

  ‘You really want me to go back to my hotel, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, Ollie, I do.’

  ‘All right, I’ll go.’ Spengler walked him back to the Intercontinental.

  Really, at moments like this, dealing with Ollie was akin to dealing with an errant child. ‘It’s true,’ says Spengler. ‘But that was also the reason why you’d have so much affection for him, because there were some childish aspects about him. He really was like a child, with the outbursts of a child but also the forgetfulness of a child, so that even if he would have an outburst, the next minute he’d be in a good mood again, happy and all smiles.’

  As he’d done on the Musketeer films, Spengler watched Ollie’s drinking from a safe distance. Not once was he tempted to go out on the town with him. That path led to ruin. There was a party Oliver held after filming that everyone was invited to, and it said on the invitation: ‘Starting at 8 p.m. until crash-out.’ Spengler declined. ‘I heard it lasted something like three days. Madness.’

  Certainly Murray Melvin had grown concerned that Ollie’s drinking wasn’t merely tipping him over into the depths of oblivion but might also have more short-term personal repercussions. For he’d heard stories that on his days off Ollie would go boozing in Budapest’s roughest nightspots with Reg, expeditions that usually ended in brawls. One local who’d been beaten up came back for revenge the next night, only to be knocked out again by Ollie. The police intervened and Ollie and the other guy spent a night in the cells. Murray remembers taking his friend to one side and saying, ‘Ollie, you do have to be careful because time’s creeping on and one of these nights you’re going to hit somebody and he’s going to be the equivalent of a nineteen-year-old Oliver Reed and he’s going to hit you back harder and quicker than you’ll hit him.’

  For the rest of the filming Ollie remained something of a handful, so much so that reinforcements were sent for. A huge press call had been announced, with Fleet Street’s big hitters flown out to the location, but Oliver stubbornly refused to go unless Simon was there. Arriving in Budapest on the first plane from England, Simon was taken straight to the hotel, where he expected to meet Ollie, but his brother was nowhere to be seen. He’d disappeared. It was now lunchtime and the press call was scheduled to start at eight that evening. So where to begin the search? Simon tried Ollie’s room first. No answer. Next he went into the hotel bar. No sign. He asked the barman where Ollie normally drank and was directed to a watering hole in the centre of town. ‘I’m sitting there,’ says Simon, ‘and it’s gone six o’clock and it’s getting dark. Suddenly the barman comes over and says there’s a note for me. I take it and read it: “Meet me under Elizabeth Bridge in twenty minutes.” Elizabeth Bridge divides the two sides of Budapest. So I’m on this bridge and it’s enormous. I walk from one end to the other and there’s no sign of Ollie. Suddenly I hear, “Psssstt”, and there underneath the bridge, hanging by the rafters, it’s Ollie. And he’s had a few drinks. “What’s the story?” he asks. “They want you to come to this press thing, they’ll all be there, Raquel’s dressed up to the nines,” I said. He said, “Oh fuck, what do you think, do you think I should go?” I said, “Yeah.” He went, “All right then.” So he climbed up and we both went to the press conference. Amazing.’

  It would also prove Simon’s swansong as far as handling Ollie’s press was concerned. It had been fun and, he recalls, probably the easiest job in the world in the early seventies, when Ollie was at his peak. ‘Everything I did looked like it was genius. Trying to sell Ollie to the press, you’d have to be an idiot to get it wrong. It was a fantastic time.’ But Simon had always been ambitious to get back into broadcasting and in 1973 began doing television work. With his services being more frequently required he was having to squeeze Ollie’s stuff into his busy schedule until he made the decision to leave. Ollie completely understood and was a keen follower and admirer of Simon’s work over the years as an accomplished sports presenter and journalist.

  Where Ollie’s antics had been previously confined to after hours, and on set he had been nothing but patient and cheerful throughout long and difficult days, his last two weeks on The Prince and the Pauper represented something of a fall from grace. According to George MacDonald Fraser, Ollie often turned up drunk, once so far gone that he began loudly telling Fleischer how he was going to perform a fight scene, waving his sword wildly in the air and throwing himself about the set, and not hearing when the director said, ‘But, Ollie, we’ve shot that fight, remember?’ Fraser recalled thinking at the time, ‘Plainly booze is going to be the ruin of a fine but undisciplined actor.’ As for Fleischer, he was adamant that he would never work with Oliver again.

  The Hurricane

  To mark Her Majesty’s Silver Jubilee in June 1977, Ollie decked out Broome Hall with Union Jacks and held a giant garden party. In the middle of the festivities he went down on one knee and proposed to Jacquie. It wasn’t unexpected, as Ollie was always saying things like, ‘You don’t love me, because you don’t want to marry me.’ Jacquie would tell him he was being ridiculous. Deep down she believed that being married again would only make him unhappy. But, looking at him now, on his knees, holding a bouquet of long grass because there were no flowers handy, gave her pause. In those few seconds of silence before she replied, her mind must have been bursting with conflicting thoughts. Finally she answered. It was no.

  Jacquie never regretted her decision. She didn’t feel the need to make it ‘official’, as things were working fine the way they were, even though, as she admits, ‘we were never really a proper couple. I was there at Broome Hall, he would go off on a movie, I would stay there, he would come back. It
was extraordinarily strange. It was almost like we were best friends stroke lovers.’ Surely then, in such a situation, it made sense to tie the knot. Didn’t she feel, with Ollie away for long periods of time, a sense of insecurity? ‘Not really, because I wasn’t in the relationship for what I could gain out of it, I was there because of him. It didn’t enter my mind that if it ended I might have to go and dig potatoes in Ireland or something. I didn’t think of things like that. We really did have an extraordinarily good relationship. People used to say we were the mirror image of one another.’

  In many ways they had very similar personalities. ‘So when it was good it was good,’ says Sarah. ‘But when it was bad it was horrid.’ Ollie liked women who were a little bit like boys, tomboys, girls who would muck about and indulge in his playmaking; ‘women who didn’t have too many airs and graces,’ says Jacquie. Take the time they were holidaying in the south of France and went out to sea with a few friends on a motor boat. After a couple of hours they were running dangerously low on booze and the captain decided to head for shore to get fresh supplies. Ollie turned to Jacquie. ‘We’re not going back. Jump over the side.’ After grabbing the last few bottles and sticking the corks back in, they hit the water as the boat sped off. ‘So we bobbed around in the ocean, having a cocktail party at sea. We’d take the cork out, have a swig, and put the cork back. Just treading water until the boat returned. Bloody mad, but that’s the sort of thing we used to do.’

  Undoubtedly what also helped the relationship was Jacquie’s tolerance, for she wasn’t the sort of woman who had the sulks and took umbrage at Ollie’s antics. ‘I think that’s probably why there weren’t that many rows; what’s the point?’ So life at Broome Hall carried on much as before. Unfortunately, the place also continued to haemorrhage cash. It had got to the point where Ollie was having to take movies just to pay the bills, which did nothing for his long-term career prospects. ‘When you think about it, no one in their right mind would have taken on Broome Hall and do what he did,’ says Mark. ‘He just threw money into it.’