What Fresh Lunacy is This?

by Robert Sellers

  Ollie was caught in a trap of his own making. It seemed pointless having a beautiful house with fantastic gardens and horses and everything else if he was away so much of the time working on up to three films a year. There was also a prohibitive tax regime, put in place by the then Labour government, whose Chancellor Denis Healey’s battle cry of tax the rich ‘until the pips squeak’ had resulted in a large exodus of top earners from the worlds of film and music. Because Oliver fell into the top tax bracket, being required to pay 98 per cent tax on income, his financial advisers had to develop very sophisticated arrangements to minimize his liability to UK tax, and this meant he needed to spend time abroad, usually in Ireland or Guernsey.

  Sometimes Jacquie and Sarah joined Oliver, but for the most part he was holed up alone, a prisoner in a luxurious hotel suite. One time Mark and Mick Fryer visited him when he was staying at the Gresham in Dublin. ‘But if Ollie gets shitty, I’m straight on the plane back,’ warned Fryer. ‘Because that’s the way he used to go,’ says Fryer. ‘After a few days he could turn into a different kind of man. As it turned out, we stayed five days and he was lovely the whole time. And when we left he started crying.’ Fryer had with him a new pair of shoes and asked Ollie, ‘What do you think?’ Ollie nodded his approval. That afternoon they went on the piss and Fryer drew attention more than once to his new shoes. ‘What do you keep on about the shoes for?’ said Ollie. Back at the suite, Fryer fell asleep. ‘All of a sudden I felt this shaking. “Mick, wake up.” It was Ollie. “Look at the fire.” My fucking shoes were on the fire. He said, “Fuck you and your shoes. Don’t talk about them no more.”’

  This enforced solitary existence of living in hotel rooms for long periods was something Ollie deeply resented, and a strange price to pay for success, but it was either that or leave the UK altogether and become a tax exile, which he wasn’t prepared to do. His patriotism wouldn’t have countenanced such a move, for after all this was a man who had a collection of Churchill’s wartime speeches on LPs and only backed horses if they had a royal name or connection. So he continued to spend heavily and be taxed heavily, cursing the name of Healey whenever the subject of income tax was raised.

  Leaving Jacquie and Sarah, Ollie flew to Montreal to start work on another movie, Tomorrow Never Comes. He was playing a police detective about to retire who is suddenly thrown into a deadly hostage situation. The props department had given him a police badge which had his full ID and photograph, the only difference between it and the real thing being that it was signed by the producer of the film rather than the chief of police. Mark had flown to the location with his father and they were arriving back at the hotel after a day’s shoot when Ollie noticed a couple of teenagers smoking a joint outside and indicated he’d seen them. When they asked if he had his badge on him, he smiled and got out of the car. Flashing his badge, he said in his best Canadian accent, ‘You guys smoking a joint?’ Nervously they replied, ‘Yes, sir, yes, sir.’ Ollie said, ‘Good on you, carry on,’ and walked back to the car. Only then did they go, ‘Wow, Oliver Reed!’

  Ollie is in good form in Tomorrow Never Comes, though the film barely rises above the average, looking too much like a TV movie. But it did reunite him with his co-star from The Ransom, Paul Koslo, playing the policeman taking over from Ollie’s veteran cop, and it was on this movie that the two men really bonded. Often that meant lavish lunches in fancy restaurants, to which only a select few were invited. ‘And of course everything had to be top-notch,’ remembers Koslo. ‘And Ollie would literally spend two or three thousand dollars for lunch; today that would be something like fifteen thousand bucks. It really was incredible. I mean, bottles of wine that cost a few hundred dollars each.’

  And then there were the dinner parties Ollie held in his three-room hotel suite, where guests could number between twenty and thirty. Extra tables would be laid on and waiters would serve food. At these parties he would recite from Winnie the Pooh, his favourite book. ‘That was like his bible,’ says Jacquie, whom Ollie nicknamed Tigger; Sarah was Roo. ‘I think he almost memorized the whole book from cover to cover; he could bring out quotes at the most extraordinary times,’ Koslo recalls, adding that Ollie would jump on the table and act out every character and the food would go flying. ‘He would be so funny, so entertaining and so loud.’ One evening things got a little out of hand and when complaints were made about the noise, the hotel’s security staff went up to the suite. Ollie threw them out. ‘And when I tried to calm him down,’ says Koslo, ‘he actually tried to throw me out of the window. Reggie was downstairs trying to pacify the management, so he was not there to protect me, and I was literally hanging on to the ledge and the side of the wall so he couldn’t throw me out. I was terrified. We were something like three or four floors up. And he was so strong, he was a lot stronger than me, he was built like a warthog. Finally I got him in a headlock: if I was gonna go I was going to take him with me. And he started laughing like a crazy person and dragged me into this closet. He knew the shit was gonna hit the fan and yelled at me, “Now, you say one fucking word in this closet and I swear to you I’ll fucking kill you.” So he locked us both in this fucking dark closet with no light. Nobody could find us for a couple of hours until everything had quietened down.’

  Someone who refrained from attending any of Ollie’s wild nights was John Osborne. The renowned British playwright, who, with the ground-breaking Look Back in Anger had instigated the Angry Young Man acting movement that so heavily influenced the young Oliver, had a very small role in the film, and Koslo remembers how much in awe of him Ollie was. ‘A group of us would sometimes go to dinner and I saw how much Ollie would listen and behave himself when John was there. It was a totally different scene, it was very cordial, almost monastic. I remember vividly how much he thought of John Osborne. He respected the hell out of him.’

  The rest of the cast was filled out by a host of distinguished actors such as Raymond Burr, who took an instant dislike to Oliver, and the feeling was mutual, Susan George, and Donald Pleasence, whom for some reason Ollie targeted for ridicule. ‘He’d send him up all the time,’ says Koslo. ‘At the read-through Ollie would act out everyone’s part. Of course, everybody thought this was hilarious, except for Donald. Ollie told Donald that he was a fucking idiot actor and he couldn’t fucking act his way out of a wet paper bag and this is how it should be played, and Donald had no fucking sense of humour, Donald was very serious about his work. He was kind of a strange bird, like he didn’t really fit in. But I wonder if there wasn’t a bit of competition there between the two of them, I’m sure there was.’ Or was it Ollie just being his old mischievous self? ‘Who would ever think of memorizing everybody’s part and acting it out?’ offers Koslo. ‘But he did that because it was fun, he did it to get reactions, to see where people were coming from and who they were. He had that much fun inside of him and that much adventure and that much talent.’

  Halfway through shooting, Mark had to go back to England to start a new school term. Before his son had to leave for the airport Ollie invited him to the hotel bar for a beer and said he’d go and fetch his passport. ‘I’ve already got it,’ replied Mark. Silence. Then, ‘What! You’ve been into my room.’ It all kicked off. ‘We had a phenomenal row. The next minute the concierge was involved and then the manager of the hotel. We used to have these sorts of arguments and, looking back, they were silly and about nothing really, but at the time they were very big.’ They were also symptomatic of where their relationship was at. Mark was now sixteen and starting to become independent, and as a consequence Ollie felt his role as father growing increasingly marginalized. ‘Because a lot of him was based on physical prowess and strength, probably he felt that that was being contested,’ is Mark’s belief. And one event had been the catalyst.

  Going out to Hungary to see Ollie shoot some of The Prince and the Pauper, Mark had met his father at the airport. There, Ollie followed Mark into the toilets to wash his hands and, looking in the mirror, suddenly realized his
son was taller than he was. ‘It changes the complexion slightly,’ says Mark. ‘OK, you might be taller than me but I’m still tougher than you. So it was quite often a contest between us, me the young buck and him still asserting his seniority and strength and prowess. It was, so you think you know it all. You know fuck all. We spent a lot of time through my teens and into my twenties contesting each other and there were times where I just didn’t want to invest any more of me because I found it too sapping. So we did fall out, sometimes quite magnificently, sometimes for a number of years where we just wouldn’t talk. And then when we got back together it was as though nothing had happened and we’d carry on from where we were. If I look back I could have perhaps been easier, he could have been easier, I could have taken things slightly less to heart and been more understanding, but then I was a young guy trying to work out who I was within all of it.’

  At the helm of Tomorrow Never Comes was Peter Collinson and it didn’t take long for open hostilities to resume. They erupted on a night shoot featuring Koslo and Susan George, naked save for a very thin negligee. It was something like three in the morning and colder than hell. Collinson was shooting from about a block away and during breaks Koslo wrapped a coat round Susan to keep her warm, but several times the director made no effort to tell them he’d stopped shooting, with the result that Susan was repeatedly standing there freezing when there was no need to. Boiling with rage, Koslo let fly at Collinson, who fired him on the spot. After frantic phone calls to the studio, Koslo was rehired the next day. Later he heard that Oliver had given Collinson an ultimatum: ‘Listen, if you fucking fire this actor, then I’m gone!’ Reggie told Koslo this, ‘because Ollie would never have told me that himself’.

  Koslo is a member of a rare group, an actor whose company Ollie enjoyed off set, and, even rarer, an actor whom Ollie invited to his home. Whenever Koslo was in England he would contact Ollie and they’d meet up. He remembers going to Broome Hall at least three times. ‘The first time I got there, he had this dining-room table that must have been fifty feet long and he gave me this big carving knife and told me to carve my initials where I was sitting. Then he showed me around. It was absolutely unbelievable.’

  Koslo also remembers Jacquie. He liked her a lot, calls her a sweet lady, but got the impression that she didn’t like Ollie drinking. ‘She knew that he could get wild and crazy, and so did everyone else in the county of Surrey, including the police.’ During his last visit Ollie took him on a pub crawl that took in all the local hostelries. ‘And every time Ollie walked in anywhere everybody stood up and applauded and cheered. We finished off at this five-star restaurant and I swear to you, we were swinging off the chandeliers. Ollie said to me, “You ever do this?”, and he got up and jumped off the table on to this chandelier and he started swinging. So, of course, I had to do the same thing. The management totally lost it and they called the cops, so Ollie decided we’d better get out, but the police later pulled his car over and arrested both of us.’

  It’s no surprise to learn that Oliver was well known at the local police station, and he got his usual reprimand and talking to. ‘Ollie, you’ve got to stop this. You’re going to hurt yourself or you’re going to hurt somebody else.’ Because Koslo held a Canadian passport, the police didn’t quite know what to do with him until Ollie started raving, ‘If you’re releasing me, you’re releasing him. If you’re not going to release him, I’m not going anywhere, I’m staying here and I’m going to make your fucking life hell.’

  Koslo has never forgotten Oliver. In spite of the fact that he tried to throw him out of a hotel window, he classes him as ‘A special kind of man. He had that wonderful charm and forcefulness. I’ve never met anybody like him, never met anybody that had so much talent and had so much strength and gentleness all at the same time. And he was a great judge of character. He could sense what kind of person you were in an instant. He could analyze you with his eyes, look right into your soul, look into your heart to see whether you had one or not. That’s how I felt about Ollie, and of course you just give yourself up to a person like that because he’s so powerful.’

  Another celebrity who was becoming a very frequent visitor to Broome Hall was Alex Higgins, especially since Ollie had put in a billiards room. Higgins was one of the first people to play there. Intrigued by the Irish snooker ace, Ollie had engineered a meeting, sending his driver to collect him from Dorking railway station. When the car pulled up outside Broome Hall, Oliver greeted Alex warmly. ‘So you’re “the Hurricane”. I shall call you Hig the Pig.’

  When Higgins was shown into the opulent billiards room, the décor certainly met with his approval, as did a lemon tree planted nearby that allowed players to pick fruit to freshen up their drinks. Having only recently taken up the sport, poor Ollie was obliterated, but afterwards invited Higgins to the cellar bar for a drinking contest. The snooker star drank like he played, fast, and soon got very drunk and was thrown out. But Ollie was certainly intrigued by the man and they remained matey for the rest of his life. ‘I think Ollie liked him because he was Irish and he’d come from nowhere to be a success,’ believes Christensen. ‘He was dedicated to what he was doing and was fantastically good at it. I saw a few exhibition matches on Ollie’s table and even pissed out of his head the bloke was phenomenal.’

  In many ways it was a relationship that parallels the one Ollie still shared with Keith Moon. ‘I think Ollie was attracted to kindred spirits,’ says David. ‘People who broke the rules and didn’t lead a conventional life. Although Hurricane became more dependent on Ollie than Ollie was dependent on Hurricane.’ When Higgins was in trouble with the press or having women or money problems he often rang Ollie, who was always willing to give him shelter and help. There was the occasion when Alex was breaking up with his wife and Ollie arranged for him to stay at David Hunt’s villa in Majorca until he’d sorted himself out. ‘Well, he wrecked the joint,’ reveals David. ‘And this Hunt chap wasn’t very happy. So it was a relationship very similar to Keith: they gravitated towards each other. Both Keith and Alex were destructive characters and I think that’s what attracted Ollie to both of them.’

  But, according to Christensen, Higgins often wore out his welcome and was not a happy influence at Broome Hall. ‘I never saw Higgins buy a drink, ever. Ever. In the pub he’d sit there and Ollie would fill him up.’ The thing with Ollie was that he always bought his mates drinks. He didn’t expect you to return the favour but was always appreciative of the gesture when you did it.

  Famous for his own terrifying behaviour, Higgins did admit that Oliver was more than capable of frightening the shit out of him. After a particularly hectic afternoon in the pub, Higgins passed out in an armchair back at Broome Hall. He was rudely awoken by a sword jabbed into his ribs. ‘Get up,’ growled Ollie. ‘How dare you fall asleep in my company. For that insult, sir, I require satisfaction.’ Higgins was thrown a rapier. ‘Now, sir, prepare to die.’ Ollie attacked with a series of mighty blows and Higgins did all he could to defend himself. On another visit Higgins made the mistake of falling asleep again in Ollie’s presence and this time was hunted down with an axe. When Higgins bolted the door of his bedroom Ollie started chopping at the solid oak like Jack Nicholson in The Shining. ‘I was terrified,’ Higgins later admitted. ‘I honestly thought I might be about to breathe my last if he got through.’

  Bye-Bye, Moonie

  Oliver got a call from Michael Winner offering him a small but pivotal role in his all-star remake of the Raymond Chandler classic The Big Sleep, jockeying for space on screen with the likes of James Stewart, Joan Collins and Sarah Miles. His first instinct was to refuse, until, that is, Winner revealed the name of the actor playing Chandler’s anti-hero Philip Marlowe: Robert Mitchum. Hooked, Ollie signed on. Sharing scenes with an actor he considered one of Hollywood’s ‘biggies’ was too good an opportunity to miss. ‘It was his reputation,’ Ollie explained. ‘Tough. Uncompromising. Son of a bitch. I had to see how I measured up to him.’ He also admir
ed Mitchum’s relaxed acting style and screen presence, one not too dissimilar to his own. Here was another actor who ‘made the air move’. As Eddie Mars, a London casino owner you wouldn’t want to cross, Ollie shared a number of scenes with Mitchum and they positively crackle with electricity.

  Winner hadn’t worked with Oliver for almost ten years and noticed that his old friend was drinking more than ever. He still never drank on set but sometimes would arrive for work a little wasted. Famous for his gourmet lunches, Winner invited Ollie and Mitchum to a very prestigious London restaurant. Booze was not on the menu, given Winner’s aversion to it. Mitchum whispered in Ollie’s ear what his tipple was: ‘Gin and tonic.’ Clicking his fingers, Mitchum got the waiters to bring over two bottles of gin, one of whisky, another of brandy and all the mixers. Winner was just tucking into his lunch when they arrived. Straightaway, his eyes fixed accusingly upon Ollie. ‘Who ordered these?’ he said.

  ‘I did,’ went Mitchum.

  ‘Oh,’ said Winner, clamming up.

  The next day on set Winner, in a foul mood, accosted Ollie. ‘You mustn’t encourage Robert to drink, Oliver. You’ve no idea of the terrible trouble we had with him last night.’

  Mitchum then arrived, having heard every word. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It was because you’d been drinking,’ said Winner. ‘Do you know you drank a whole bottle of gin at lunch?’

  ‘It wasn’t the gin,’ said Mitchum. ‘It was the whisky I chased it down with.’

  Ollie remained in London to play a tyrannical and scheming headmaster at a school for unruly teenagers in a low-budget British film called The Class of Miss MacMichael and co-starring Glenda Jackson. It was shot during the winter of 1977 in a disused Victorian school in Bethnal Green in the East End. Ollie was happy to make a film he knew had little international appeal, calling it ‘Home grown for home grown audiences. We don’t get paid a lot of money for these films, but we make them because we want to make them.’ He baulked, however, at the cack-handed way he perceived it was being done. ‘They cheapskated it. Even in the most complicated scenes there was no time for rehearsals. It was just, turn on the lights and fucking shoot it.’