What Fresh Lunacy is This?

by Robert Sellers

  Because Ollie hardly ever socialized with the film set, it was perhaps as an act of revenge that he invited Miss MacMichael’s director, Silvio Narizzano, and its producer, Judd Bernard, to Broome Hall for dinner, giving them an evening they’d never forget.

  Jacquie was instructed to put on a posh dinner. David and Muriel arrived, Bill and Jenny were there too, as was Ollie’s mate Gus. Everyone now waited for the guests of honour. Through the window came a flash of car headlights. Moments later in walked Narizzano and Bernard and dinner was served. Almost as soon as the soup arrived Ollie began the entertainment, starting off by bending some spoons. When that didn’t get enough of a reaction he got up and went over to the wall and pulled down a huge Scottish broadsword. ‘I tell you,’ recalls David. ‘It was as tall as a man, it had a huge long blade, and Ollie said, “Do you know what this is?” And the two film people said, well it’s a sword, Ollie. There were these candlesticks glinting on the table. “You watch that flame,” said Ollie and he started swinging this broadsword across the tops of our heads and these film guys were ducking under the table. And of course he missed the bloody thing and went, damn! So he had another go. And that got them really worked up.’

  Nothing, though, quite prepared them for what happened next. Ollie went off into the library and came back with an old flintlock pistol and threw it into Gus’s soup. ‘Gus simply put his hand into the soup and brought it out,’ continues David. ‘But the look on those two guys’ faces was unbelievable. By this time Muriel, who normally didn’t put up with much from Oliver, said, “Ollie, this isn’t really good enough.” She got up and led Ollie out of the room and into the library and you could hear off-stage Muriel saying, “Ollie, put that gun down. Put it down, for God’s sake.” And these two film people are nearly in shock. Then suddenly we hear bang!, followed by Muriel’s voice saying, “He’s bloody shot me.” And she came out of the room clutching her arm and these two guys leaped up and ran for it. Amazing. We didn’t even get to the main course. We got as far as the soup.’

  Paul Friday remembers a similar occasion when Rick Parfitt of Status Quo came round to Broome Hall ‘and Ollie got this bloody shotgun out and blew a hole in the dining-room table and Parfitt freaked out completely’.

  Anyway, Muriel lived to tell the tale, as the pistol had in fact been a starting pistol and it was the wad that hit her arm, leaving a nasty bruise. But it was perhaps indicative of her relationship with Oliver over the years, which can best be described as cool, largely because Muriel was one of the very few women who stood up to him. ‘And, funnily enough, he respected her because of that,’ says David. ‘And another funny thing was that Ollie could never understand how Mickie and I endured. As a couple we were a constant, and to him that was alien.’

  Quite often, though, Muriel and Ollie didn’t see eye to eye and she always resented the fact that he kept David out drinking. ‘It’s sad because he was such fun in the early days,’ Muriel says. ‘We always laughed. There wasn’t this aggression; later on there was always this aggression. You went out with him and you didn’t know how the evening was going to end. Sometimes Ollie was very dangerous to be with, very dangerous.’

  One Christmas Muriel bought Ollie a cuckoo clock which he naturally hated so kept in the kitchen where it wouldn’t be seen by anyone. ‘We’re in the kitchen one day,’ remembers Christensen. ‘And I’d just got back from doing some shooting and I had my gun but it was unloaded. Ollie said, ‘Give me that one second.’ So I gave it to him and out of his own pocket he took two cartridges and he blasted this clock off the wall, blew it to fucking pieces. Not the safest thing to do because there were people in the kitchen and bits flying everywhere. ‘I’ve fucking always hated that clock,’ he went.’ Sarah is also pretty certain her dad once pissed into Muriel’s cooking sherry bottle during a party and then put it back in a cupboard giggling like a little school boy because he knew the next time she made a trifle . . .

  The Class of Miss MacMichael was the last time Oliver worked with Glenda Jackson. Their personal relationship had not improved in the interim; in fact it had stayed exactly the same: non-existent. Professionally it was an entirely different story and Glenda still has great admiration for Oliver the actor. ‘Even at his worst, be it exhausted, or hung over or whatever, he was immensely professional in front of a camera. And he had great energy as an actor. On Women in Love Ken used to like to shoot a lot, and Oliver was never, ever not with that energy. And I think the performance he gave in The Triple Echo and again in Miss MacMichael, which were essentially comic roles, I thought he was marvellous.’ Ollie does a wonderful job with his headmaster, all mock prissiness to important visitors but treating his charges like so much flotsam. It’s an outrageous comic turn, skirting dangerously close but never falling into outright farce. ‘He had a capacity for being funny,’ confirms Glenda, ‘which he was not aware of, I don’t think. So when he tried deliberately to be funny or do stupid things to make people laugh, it wasn’t at all funny, but he had a real comic flair as an actor that I don’t think he recognized in himself.’

  Back at Broome Hall, Ollie heard the news that Christensen was leaving and going back into the Metropolitan Police, where he was to have a distinguished career, retiring in 2010. They kept in touch and often met up for further antics, but it’s the Broome Hall years that Christensen looks back on with the most fondness, though by no means with rose-tinted glasses. ‘There were times when Oliver was in a foul mood and you’d think, what the fuck am I doing down here? I’m not trying to gild it and make out he was a saint, because he wasn’t: there were times when he was horrible. I got fired five times. I’d say, “OK, fine, I’m off. But do me one favour: re-fire me tomorrow morning when you’ve slept on it.” And come the morning it would be, sorry, Norse.’

  On the whole it’s the good times Christensen prefers to remember, and Ollie’s zest for life and appetite for fun, especially when it came to practical jokes, such as the time he rubbed Boursin garlic cheese into his hair instead of the usual hair tonic when he was introduced to Princess Anne. As he bent to kiss her hand the stink rising from his head was just ghastly. Another time he was invited to a posh dinner do by an old Ewell Castle classmate he happened to bump into in the Cricketers. ‘But I warn you, Oliver, it’s formal dress, penguin suits.’ Driving home, Ollie was already regretting agreeing to go. ‘Why don’t you call a theatrical costumiers and get a real penguin suit?’ suggested Christensen. Ollie smiled and said, ‘Fuck it, I will.’ When the outfit arrived it had a huge beak, enormous stomach, feet about five foot long, and wings. Turning up at this big, mock-Tudor mansion, Ollie could hardly walk up the gravel track, the feet were so big. Wobbling up, he rang the bell and a flunky opened the door, took one look and started smirking. Of course, this bloke had told all his City dealer mates that his old friend Ollie was coming. ‘It was just hilarious,’ recalls Christensen. ‘He pricked this guy’s pomposity.’ When the host complained, Ollie just answered, ‘You did say it was penguin suits.’ There was also the time he hired a British Rail uniform and strode through the compartments on the Victoria to Dorking train asking passengers to identify their bags and briefcases and saying, ‘That’s not a bomb in there, is it?’

  One time Ollie bumped into John McNally, singer and guitarist in the famous Merseybeat group the Searchers, in the Royal Oak in Rusper. They got chatting and McNally was invited up to Broome Hall. Ollie was between films and revealed his plans to become a pop star and asked McNally to join a band he was putting together with a few mates. Ollie was after a hard-looking image and over the course of a few days they’d written a song called ‘Everybody’s Gonna Be Butch’. Then suddenly Ollie turned to McNally and said, ‘There’s only one thing wrong, John, you’re not butch enough. You need a broken nose.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with my nose,’ said McNally.

  ‘There is,’ insisted Oliver. ‘Look, I’ve got a busted-up nose and if we’re going to sing, “Everybody’s Gonna Be Butch”, you’ve got
to look butch, for Christ’s sake!’ Ollie took McNally to one side. ‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll give you a quick whack now or we’ll get it done professionally.’

  ‘You’re not touching my nose,’ reiterated McNally.

  A few days later he was persuaded to meet Ollie in the Cricketers. They were drinking together when Johnny Placett, obviously in on the wind-up, walked in. ‘Hello, Mr Reed,’ he said and went over and began examining his nose. ‘Ah yes, it’s come on well, hasn’t it?’ After a few gentle prods of the Reed hooter he said, ‘Who’s the patient?’ Ollie pointed at McNally. Placett walked across and gave his nose the once-over. ‘I hope you don’t mind, Ollie wanted it done privately but I thought the best thing locally is, we’ll do it on the billiards table up at Broome Hall. There are nurses up there. I’ve got everything ready for you.’ You’ve never seen anybody move so fast. McNally was gone, never to return.

  Inevitably some of these practical jokes went too far, such as the time Ollie invited Simon to a house and suddenly threw himself out of the top-floor window. Ollie had reconnoitred the joint beforehand, so knew there was a ledge below, and was hanging by his fingertips. ‘I thought that was the last I would see of him,’ Simon confessed. There was also the episode when Ollie threw shotgun cartridges into an open fire, and when they exploded David and Simon leaped from their chairs and ran for their lives.

  Christensen’s own favourite Ollie jape was when Ollie’s American actor friend Ritchie Adams came to Broome Hall for dinner one night. Before he arrived Ollie took Christensen to one side. ‘I want you to pretend that you’re my bodyguard and you’re carrying a gun,’ he said, handing him a toy pistol that looked pretty realistic and a shoulder holster. ‘And can you wear a black polo neck and a black jacket. And say very little, just be in the background.’

  Adams arrived and after dinner he and Ollie walked into the study and started talking. After a few minutes Ollie gave Christensen the nod, then turned to stare straight into Adams’s eyes. ‘Rich, you don’t really suppose that I’m just an actor, do you?’

  Adams looked a tad nervous. ‘What do you mean, Oliver?’

  ‘Do you really think I fund all this and have ex-special services bodyguards if I’m just an actor. Norse, show him.’ Christensen deftly opened his jacket to reveal the gun. Adams’s eyes widened. ‘I’ve been working for Her Majesty’s government for a long time now.’ By this point Adams was shitting himself, wondering what the hell he’d got himself into. ‘I can have you killed at any time,’ Ollie continued, completely straight-faced. Then, relaxing, he said, ‘Enough of that now. What were we talking about?’ He looked over at Christensen. ‘Norse, you can go now, thank you, unless I need you.’ So Christensen drifted out of the room. The next morning, after Adams had gone, Christensen said to Ollie, ‘How did he sleep?’ And Ollie replied, ‘I don’t think at all.’

  Shot in Zambia, Oliver’s next film was a political comedy called Touch of the Sun that remained virtually unreleased, so abysmal was it. It reunited him with his old Hammer stalwart Peter Cushing, but the film is irredeemable in every department and Ollie simply mugs his way through his role as a US Marine captain sent to a despotic African nation to retrieve a lost space capsule.

  About the only good thing to come out of this disaster was a safari holiday with Jacquie and Sarah, followed by a trip to Victoria Falls. Sarah remembers this holiday as one of the very few she enjoyed with her father. As a family they never really did holidays, because Ollie was away working so much that any free time he had he preferred to spend at home. Occasionally, on school holidays, Sarah would visit him on a film set, ‘which was quite exciting. But then after a bit you just got bored sitting and waiting and I remember him saying to me, “This is what I do, this is my job, I sit around and wait a lot.” And you couldn’t communicate much with him, either. He just wanted to be in his trailer thinking and going over his lines.’

  In the town of Livingstone, near Victoria Falls, Oliver befriended a white farmer, who invited him back to his home. The whisky pretty quickly made an appearance and the two men got steadily pissed. It just so happened that this farmer used to be a hunter of big game. ‘Oh really?’ said Ollie, fascinated. ‘I used to be in the army. As a matter of fact, I was a marksman.’ Ollie’s porky pies knew no sane boundary. ‘Her Majesty keeps me in her special file in case there’s another war, you know.’

  This bullshit impressed the farmer so much that he produced a rifle and pointed to a washing line at the end of the garden. ‘Do you think you could hit one of those clothes pegs? The second one from the right.’

  Ollie picked up the rifle, took aim, and fired through the window. To his utter amazement he scored a bull’s-eye.

  ‘Wow, man, that was fantastic!’ the farmer hollered. ‘I’ve never seen shooting like that.’

  ‘That’s nothing,’ said Ollie, milking the moment.

  ‘Do you think you could shoot this cigarette out of my hand?’ asked the farmer, considerably upping the ante.

  Ollie figured that since he could hit a clothes peg from forty yards, a fag a few feet away would be a doddle. ‘Easy,’ he said. ‘Just hold it up.’ He took aim, fired, and shot the farmer straight through the hand. The man just stood there, blood pumping from the wound. Ollie was about to leg it when the farmer announced, ‘That was fantastic, man. You were only about an inch out.’

  Oliver was in Cap Ferrat in the south of France, taking a short break, when he heard the news, on 7 September 1978, that Keith Moon had been found dead in his London flat. ‘He was inconsolable,’ remembers Jacquie. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it. He couldn’t believe Moonie had gone and deserted him and left him to play on his own.’

  Moon’s spirit, however, lived on at Broome Hall in the shape of two quite different objects that the musician had bequeathed to Ollie when he went to live in the USA. One morning a removal lorry drove up to the house. ‘We’ve got a delivery for Mr Reed. It’s a dog and a rhino.’ Yeah, very funny, was the first reaction. ‘No,’ said the removal man. ‘It’s a real dog and a fibreglass rhino.’ The rhino was life-size and Ollie called it Hornby. It was an incredible thing to behold, but for days he wondered where to put the damn thing. Finally its home was in the middle of the rhododendron bush at the top of the driveway, with its face just poking out, always with fresh grass in its mouth. ‘The trick was,’ says David. ‘That people arrived at night in their cars and their headlights would come up the drive and they’d pick up this rhino charging out of the bushes, which caused a wobble or two.’

  The dog was called Beano, a huge Harlequin Great Dane that Moon had been devoted to since it was a puppy. It had a nasty habit of headbutting doors and smashing windows to get to its food. Another trick was to lead guests by the sleeve and bash open the back door, which was on a spring, and walk them into the kitchen. Nicknamed ‘the Pink-Nutted War Dog’ because of its huge pink balls, Beano was employed by Ollie in some of his army games, or they’d play together in the bluebell woods. Ollie would whistle and then hide and Beano would sniff him out. Over time some of Beano’s more deranged Moon-induced habits were erased and he lived to a ripe old age. ‘He was very much part of our family,’ says Sarah. ‘He was a great dog, we all loved him.’

  Ollie never truly got over Moon’s death, so closely were they linked spiritually, so closely matched as individuals. Their lunacy was inspired. They really were like kids, and one would set the other one off. ‘My father really loved him,’ says Sarah. ‘Because they were so alike. But Moonie would get on his nerves towards the end because Moonie really was like a child, he needed looking after and he didn’t know when to stop at all, whereas my dad could stop. Moonie was magic and mad.’

  Ollie said this once of his friend: ‘I knew the way to the bar, but not to the bizarre. His shadow is always on the sunny side of the street with me, always, because of that path he showed me.’

  A Date with Cronenberg

  Oliver had been sent a script that he called the best thing
he’d read since The Devils. It was from a cult Canadian director called David Cronenberg who’d been responsible for a pair of highly controversial horror films, Shivers and Rabid. The part on offer was that of an egocentric and slightly mysterious psychiatrist conducting experiments at a private institute where he encourages patients to externalize their rage. Unfortunately his prize patient, played by Samantha Eggar, has taken to ‘hatching’ homicidal mutant children. The film was The Brood, considered today to be one of Cronenberg’s finest works, certainly his most personal, written when the director was undergoing huge personal trauma as a result of a divorce and a battle for child custody.

  Whenever Ollie received a script of the quality of The Brood it was always difficult to contain his excitement and he’d be raring to get started. Whether a film was good or bad, though, he always approached it in the same methodical and professional manner. Around six weeks before a job he’d pack the circus away, not see his friends or drink, and start learning the script. When he thought he’d got it, then he’d start to play again. ‘But he’d be in a local pub like the Cricketers,’ says Mark, ‘and suddenly start spouting these lines and people would say, “What the fuck’s he talking about?” He would always try out bits of dialogue to see what reactions he got from people.’ Then, maybe two weeks before cameras rolled, he’d put the blinkers on again and totally focus on it, and that included staying off the booze. ‘I’m on the dry,’ he’d announce. It was like an athlete in training. Jacquie would always sense when an important film was pending, ‘because he became quite morose and into himself, so obviously he was getting involved with what was coming’.