What Fresh Lunacy is This?

by Robert Sellers

  Ollie arrived in Toronto in the winter of 1978 to begin shooting The Brood. Neither Cronenberg nor his producer, Pierre David, had ever worked with a mainstream star before, certainly never one like Ollie, and the experience was to be a massive learning curve. ‘We were pretty naive at that time,’ admits Pierre. ‘And we didn’t really know what we were getting into with Ollie. But the fact of the matter is The Brood was one of the most entertaining movies that we ever did because Oliver’s adventures at night were pretty amazing.’

  Take the time Oliver was enjoying a drink with some of the crew at a bar in the city centre. At the height of the revelries he announced an outrageous bet, that he’d take all his clothes off and walk back to his hotel in the buff. Don’t forget, this was winter in Toronto, so it was not particularly warm. ‘I got a phone call saying Oliver Reed is at the police station,’ remembers Pierre. ‘He’d been arrested for walking up the street nude. Somebody from production went to get him out. Nothing came of it, in fact everybody found it pretty funny. He was at the police station for about an hour delighting all the cops.’

  That was the first thing. Then he threw a party one night in his suite at the Four Seasons Hotel and began hurling his bedding from the window down to the street below: sheets, pillows, you name it. Pierre called Ollie’s agent. ‘Guys, this is crazy, we never know what to expect from him. What’s gonna be the next thing?’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ they said. ‘There is only one solution to your problem: fly in his brother.’

  So that’s what happened: David was flown in from London. ‘And it was much calmer after that,’ says Pierre. ‘We had no more crises.’

  Oliver thoroughly enjoyed making The Brood, a movie that is creepy and unsettling. And, sensing in Cronenberg a director of huge talent, he upped his game accordingly to deliver an exceptional performance, beautifully understated. ‘However drunk Oliver would get at night, he would be perfect on the set the next day,’ confirms Pierre. ‘And in terms of performance he was great on every level, he got it, he understood what to do, he was perfect. Ollie really was an excellent actor, but it was, like, oh my God, what’s he going to do tonight?’

  Make-up artist Steve Neill was relaxing at home when he took a phone call from colleague and friend Rob Bottin. ‘I’ve got a job for you, Steve. It’s going to be a bit of a tough one for you, but I think you’ll have a good time, you’re just the right guy for it.’

  ‘What is it?’ asked Steve, already curious.

  ‘You’re going to work with Oliver Reed and do his make-up.’

  ‘Oliver Reed! Oh my God, that’s incredible.’ Neill was a huge Hammer fan and of course knew Ollie from The Curse of the Werewolf.

  ‘But you’re going to have to be a bit more than a make-up artist,’ cautioned Bottin. ‘You’re also going to have to keep an eye on him.’

  The film in question was Dr Heckyl and Mr Hype, directed by Charles B. Griffith, who’d made the original Little Shop of Horrors for Roger Corman. It was a tired comic variation on the well-worn Robert Louis Stevenson story, with Ollie playing a hideously deformed scientist who turns into a handsome but evil pervert. The prosthetics involved were fairly extensive: coloured eye contacts, false teeth, big ears, a fright wig, talons and skin pieces, and required Ollie and Steve Neill to be on set at something like four o’clock. A week into the shoot a crew member came storming into the make-up trailer demanding Oliver’s presence on the set. Neill had been working on him for just an hour and explained that he’d been given four hours to do the job. ‘No, we’ve got to have him now,’ pressed the assistant. ‘Do whatever you can do, just get him on the set.’ Neill refused: it was impossible to get Ollie ready that fast. Then the assistant turned nasty. Ollie, who had been observing all this, looked at Steve and waved his hand. ‘Let me deal with this.’ Getting up, he grabbed the assistant by the scruff of the neck and lifted him off the ground and bellowed, ‘Steve’s an artist. Leave him alone.’ Then he threw him backwards out of the door of the trailer. Slamming the door shut, Ollie settled back in the chair and said, ‘Steve, you may continue.’ From that point on Neill knew he and Oliver were going to get along just fine.

  Part of the monster make-up was a set of false teeth, and to get them to fit Ollie’s mouth Neill made some dental impressions. Looking at them, he could see clearly that at some point his jaw had been broken, rather badly too. ‘Shush,’ said Ollie. ‘Never tell anyone, that’s your secret, you’re the only one who knows.’ Neill guessed the injury must have happened when he was glassed all those years ago.

  In the make-up chair Ollie was perfectly compliant and tolerant of the whole process and paid close attention to everything Neill did, sometimes during the day pointing out where the make-up was coming loose or needed a touch-up. This was totally refreshing for Neill, because so many actors he has worked with over the years would let things like that go or just not care. ‘He was the most incredibly professional actor I’ve ever worked with in my whole career and I worked with a lot of big stars. All through that production he was always on time and never once missed a line.’ That said, at two each afternoon out came the Stolichnaya and Oliver always insisted Neill have one too. ‘Of course, after a while it got a little difficult for me to do my job, so I started leaving the vodka out and then one day he grabbed the glass from me and smelt it, then poured me this huge tumbler. “Naughty, naughty.” Needless to say, we got a little tipsy, but we never got out of hand.’

  That was usually reserved for the evenings. ‘He was always hard to escape from at night,’ says Neill. ‘Because he always wanted to go out partying.’ Most memorably on Neill’s twenty-eighth birthday. Ollie got to hear about it and asked what his plans were. Nothing much really, a quiet night in with the girlfriend. Ollie scoffed at that. ‘No you’re not. I’m taking you out. Call your lady and tell her you won’t be home tonight.’ It all sounded rather ominous. Ollie was staying at the Montage Hotel in Beverly Hills and its world-renowned restaurant was their destination, except they were hardly dressed for fine dining, having just come from the set. As they went up in the elevator, a man recognized Ollie. ‘Oh my God, you’re Oliver Reed. Can I have your autograph?’ Ollie smiled. ‘Sure, can I buy your shirt? I need a clean shirt.’ He took out a wad of cash and the exchange was made. That still left Neill looking in a bit of a state and, sure enough, the maître d’ barred their entrance. ‘A bit of money later and a lot of talking from Oliver, we were in,’ recalls Neill. ‘And everybody was staring at us. We sat down and had a great dinner with lots of drink. Later on I looked over and saw Gene Hackman, who I’d worked with before. I could see that Gene recognized me, but I also could see the horror in his eyes of, oh God, don’t let Oliver see me. Of course he did and up he shot and ran over and grabbed Gene and brought him back to our table.’

  As the evening wore on it turned into something of a drinking contest, slightly soured when Ollie wanted to start a bar-room brawl. Neill managed to talk him out of it. ‘Over here, Oliver. They’ll come and get us and throw us in jail.’

  ‘Yeah, I know, won’t it be great?’

  ‘No,’ said Neill. ‘We have to be on the set tomorrow.’

  ‘Yeah, you’re right.’

  The night ended at Ollie’s penthouse suite. ‘Do you like to box?’ Ollie asked, shoving another drink in Neill’s hand.

  ‘I’m not much into boxing and brawling, Oliver.’

  ‘It’s great, let me show you some moves.’

  The pair started sparring, little jabs at first, then Ollie launched a haymaker that accidentally caught Neill in the face and down he went. ‘I was practically out cold.’ Hauled up by an apologetic Ollie, Neill dusted himself down and then noticed he was alone. His host was gone; where the hell was he? He started a search, ending up outside, and there was Ollie hanging off the balcony. ‘All I can see are his hands on the railing, and then he leaps back over and shouts, “That makes me feel so alive!” And I’m thinking, this guy could have fallen to his death. But of course he d
idn’t because he’s Oliver Reed.’

  It was at that point of the evening that Neill decided it might be a good idea to try to go home. After easing his sports car out of the hotel car park, his next memory was of waking up in bed the following morning not knowing how the hell he got there. ‘I went to work and got in the trailer and there was Oliver sitting in the chair giggling and pointing. I don’t know what he’s laughing about and he tells me to look in the mirror and I’ve got this black eye. I consider that something to be proud of. I got a black eye from Oliver Reed.’

  Neill counts his experience working with Oliver as one of the best of his career, which later included stints on Ghostbusters and Fright Night, and often thinks of him. ‘He was someone who really becomes a friend to you, it was a relationship that was more than just, you’re the make-up guy, I’m the actor. We were buddies.’ Neill remembers an occasion when a gang of people were in Ollie’s trailer. ‘Everybody wanted to be close to him, he was very charismatic. He drew people in because he was a fascinating person and highly intelligent. You could speak to him about almost any topic. He was extremely well read.’ There was this female assistant on the set who was overweight and one of the production team said, ‘Look at that fat chick. Why doesn’t she lose some weight?’ Ollie went through the roof and threw the guy out. ‘He was always a man of the people,’ says Neill. ‘He was always on the side of the underdog. And he always hung with the crew, not the money people. He was really quite unique. When I saw Gladiator it really drew a tear because that was the real guy. It was a fitting last picture.’

  End of an Era

  After spending several months in the Libyan desert, it was nice to get back to the green, rolling hills of Surrey and Broome Hall. Ollie had been there for months on end shooting The Lion of the Desert, an overlong if historically accurate epic about Omar Mukhtar – played by Anthony Quinn – who led guerrilla resistance to Italian rule in Libya until his capture and execution in 1931. In the movie, filmed on a lavish scale and bankrolled by Colonel Gaddafi, reportedly to the tune of thirty-five million dollars, Oliver plays the fascist General Graziani, appointed by Mussolini to crush the rebellion. It’s a noble performance, full of the required gravitas, and it was a film he was justifiably proud of, in spite of its eventual failure at the box office.

  There was always something special about coming home to Broome Hall for Ollie, his own little piece of England, especially from such an alien and far-flung location as Libya. ‘He aspired to be what he probably always wanted, that was to be an English squire and a gentleman, and he was,’ says Christensen. ‘He loved all that bullshit about being related to Peter the Great. It was a great source of pride to him. To sit on that ancestral pile and to look across the land as far as you can see, and the woods and the lake and the horses and the croquet lawn, and that half-mile drive going to the huge gates, he just loved it.’

  But the place had never stopped being a millstone round Oliver’s neck and by the end of the seventies it had finally brought him to his knees. He simply couldn’t afford to keep it running any more, a stark reality that broke his heart. It must have been awful to watch all his belongings being packed into tea chests and the large furniture sold off, the stables cleared out and his beloved horses going, to see his personality totally erased from a house that had so often played host to the sound of laughter and marvellous antics until it was completely empty and soulless. ‘I remember when the whole thing was starting to fragment and Broome Hall was going,’ says Mark. ‘And being down in the cellar bar with him, a place that was a shrine to fun rather than a shrine to alcohol, it was his play place. I remember him breaking the place up almost, breaking pictures, the Thorhill Glass got broken and the Penicillin Glass was smashed. There was a sense of finality about it all, that mould was being broken, because it was time for a transition. He was moving on.’

  Worse, his gang of loyal workers had to be dismissed. Too upset, Ollie couldn’t face them himself, so it was left to David. ‘I got them all together in the hall and gave them a speech about our problems and they took it well. Some of them had been there years.’

  Although leaving Broome Hall was, as David puts it, a ‘huge wrench for Ollie’, for about a month now it had ceased to resemble a proper home. The reason: Jacquie and Sarah were no longer living in it. It hadn’t always been happy families between everyone but the last year or so had been particularly rough and Jacquie had walked out on Ollie several times. ‘They’d have a big old barney and then we’d go and stay with my grandparents or somewhere else for a few nights,’ recalls Sarah. ‘Then we’d go back home again. But obviously it was just getting to the stage where it wasn’t manageable any more.’

  That Christmas was particularly miserable. On New Year’s Eve Oliver sat sullen in the kitchen, imploring the clock to reach midnight. Unable to wait any longer, he changed the hands to twelve o’clock and shouted, ‘Now it’s midnight! Now it’s New Year,’ and, taking out his shotgun, he blasted the timepiece off the wall.

  Just ten years old at the time, Sarah couldn’t help put pick up on the changeable atmosphere in the house. ‘I was aware that it was quite volatile. They tried to hide a lot from me, but there were moments when they couldn’t and there were occasions it got quite physical as well. My mum did have the odd black eye.’ Jacquie even turned up at Millfield once to visit Mark with a rather obvious shiner. ‘By helicopter. Can you imagine it? The things I did. But it wasn’t that often. Maybe it was my fault: I provoked him too much. It would be a complete sudden outburst and one just happened to be in the way. If you have a really awful row, sometimes it reaches a point of no control and also no return. But it happened so seldom.’

  Such incidents can’t be so easily dismissed or swept under the carpet, especially coming from a man who all too often embraced violence. ‘Jacquie had a horrific time,’ says David. ‘I wasn’t there but Bill and Jen were and there are stories of Ollie pulling Jacquie along the passageway by her hair. Towards the end it was gruesome. Jekyll and Hyde again.’

  Still, Jacquie was more than capable of sometimes giving as good as she got. ‘She tried to stab him once,’ reveals Sarah. ‘He always used to show me these marks. “Look at this scar on my arse, girl! That was your mother with a carving knife.” I don’t know if that’s true or not, but he used to show me this scar on his bum. I wouldn’t put it past her, she was very feisty.’

  Then one night Jacquie grabbed her daughter, put her in the back seat of her car and drove off, this time never to return. She’d finally had enough. A few days earlier they’d all been at the pub and after returning to Broome Hall Jacquie was as usual dispatched to the kitchen to cook Ollie and his mates dinner. ‘I had a great big bowl of pasta sauce that I’d heated up and was ready to serve and he just tipped it all over me. I didn’t react, I just went on serving it out, I didn’t do anything, I didn’t go and clean myself up, I just sat there for the rest of the evening covered in pasta sauce. It had come to a stage where I thought, I don’t think I can take any more of this.’

  Jacquie was under the impression that Ollie wanted things to change anyway. ‘I think he needed to move on and I think I was wise to go.’ She’d suspected, or knew, that he’d been seeing other women. ‘And, looking back, I think in a sense he was trying to make it so that I would be the one to leave rather than him; which I did in the end.’

  By walking out Jacquie knew exactly what she was doing, that by not being married to Oliver she had no legal right whatsoever to his property or wealth, not that it bothered her one jot. ‘Even if we had been married I would never have gone to a solicitor, it just isn’t in my nature. When I took Sarah and left I expected nothing in return. I was with the man because I loved the man, I wasn’t with him because of what he had.’ In any case, without having to raise the issue Oliver made sure that Sarah was provided for, and that included continuing to pay for her education. ‘That’s what he was like,’ says Jacquie. ‘He was supportive of everybody in his past, Mark, Kate, everyone.’<
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  Broome Hall was eventually sold to a property developer and Sarah remembers spending a final day there with her father, saying goodbye to the place before it was carved up into apartments. They walked around the grounds and in and out of empty rooms, finally coming to rest in what had been Ollie’s bedroom. ‘We both stood there and just looked out of the window. It was a view he’d always loved. As a ten-year-old you don’t really understand what’s happening, but there was this sense of sadness. Broome Hall had been his dream and it had gone.’

  Ollie moved into a seven-bedroom Grade II-listed sixteenth-century farmhouse called Pinkhurst Farm, just outside Oakwoodhill, near the Surrey–West Sussex border. Jacquie meanwhile moved to Guildford, close to where Sarah was attending boarding school, and found a job working for a medical magazine. For the first time in her life, aged nearly forty, she took out a mortgage, the first step towards independence and trying to build a new life for herself. Every weekend she drove Sarah to Pinkhurst to stay with her father, dropping her off halfway up the drive, not wishing to get too near the house. She’d do the same when picking her up, and there would be Sarah waiting alone near the bottom of the driveway. ‘One time I came and he was there with her. “Why don’t you come to the house,” he said. So I did, and we had a couple of glasses of wine. Sarah had a bedroom there and while she was upstairs Oliver said, “Why don’t you stay?”’ It was a difficult position to be put in and Jacquie was tempted. Of course she was: they’d had a great life together and shared a child. ‘But then it flashes back: do you really want to go through all that again?’ So in the end the answer was no. And after all these years Jacquie still thinks she made the right decision. ‘Do you ever know if you’ve made the right decision? I so very nearly did say yes, but I didn’t, I said no. And that was the last time I saw Oliver.’