What Fresh Lunacy is This?

by Robert Sellers

  Ollie vs Klaus

  Before Ollie had even moved into Pinkhurst he was planning his new garden. Would it ever match the majesty of Broome Hall? Ollie was determined to give it his best shot. He had around fifteen acres at the back of the property to play with, but it was all pretty uninspiring, just your typical English country garden with very flat lawns and symmetrical rose bushes. There was also a small lake but it was fairly dull. Ollie’s plan was radical. ‘I want hills,’ he said, and they were to surround the lake. In came tractors and diggers and tons of earth were excavated and dumped on to the lawn. When out of the country Ollie would call David to direct operations. He’d be on the phone asking, ‘How big is the hill?’ and David would tell him and Ollie would go, ‘No, no, I want it higher than that. Higher!’ In the end, Mark believes, thousands of tons of earth were used before Ollie’s vision was realized. ‘Everyone thought he was crazy. And he got old lumps of York stone and dropped those in and had semi-mature trees and wild flowers put in there, and half-built brick walls that looked like they’d been there for a hundred years. Within three years of doing all this people used to wander round going, “Wow, this is just the most amazing garden.” It looked like it had been there for ever.’

  Much to the chagrin, however, of a lot of the farmers whose land surrounded Pinkhurst. As he’d done at Broome Hall, Ollie delighted in letting the fields grow wild, but this became a problem now he had a much smaller acreage. ‘The farmers used to ring up because Ollie’s fields were full of thistles,’ says David. ‘And of course on a windy day these thistles would be blowing over their newly seeded fields and the bloody farmers were going berserk.’ Ollie didn’t care, though. ‘He didn’t care because he thought that there needed to be a haven for wildlife not to be persecuted,’ says Mark. ‘Just to be able to get on and do what it does.’

  Few people did get it, and when the time came to sell Pinkhurst the new owner couldn’t understand why the garden looked like a wilderness. As for Ollie’s huge mounds and hills, bulldozers were brought in to flatten it all again.

  During those first few months of life in his new home, Oliver missed Broome Hall terribly and also admitted to being lonely. ‘Things were a little bit lost for him for a while,’ says Mark. ‘It must have been a dark time. But Pinkhurst was a stunning place, just beautiful. The interior was lovely, it had these old beams that ran through all the rooms.’ And he wasn’t entirely on his own, as Bill and Jenny came with him, living in a bungalow on the estate, although this didn’t stop Ollie dragging poor old Bill out for a drinking session at all hours. Nor from tampering with the couple’s home. Ollie thought their bungalow rather lacklustre, so built a Sleeping Beauty-style tower with a pointed roof that sat on the corner and called it ‘the Sky Rocket’.

  Changes were also made to Pinkhurst itself, but not on the same dramatic level as Broome Hall. For starters, the entrance to the house was on one side of the building and Oliver felt that it should be at the front. So a grand porch was planned. ‘That was a labour of love,’ says Mark. ‘And very expensive.’ A new kitchen was put in, and given that extra Ollie touch when all the handles of the drawers were shaped to look like penises. Generally, though, he just liked there to be workers hanging around the place, like at Broome Hall, company for him to go out drinking with. Their presence saved his life on one occasion. Mucking about, Ollie dived head first into a large barrel that was kept underneath a drain to collect rainwater. It was full and he managed to wedge himself in with his hands behind his back, so he’d no leverage to clamber out. Luckily a gang of workmen saw his flapping legs, tipped the barrel over and dragged him out before he drowned.

  Ollie was very loyal to his workers, organizing a Christmas party for them every year at the local pub. One story illustrates this loyalty. Oliver was invited to play for the Lord’s Taverners at a charity cricket match and brought along his workmen for a day out. He was marching up to the grandstand with them, when the organizer blocked his way. ‘You can come in, Oliver, but your friends can’t.’ There was a slight pause before Oliver replied, ‘Then you can stuff your cricket match up your arse.’ So off they went and Ollie commandeered the beer tent, along with his friends. After the match, when Nicholas Parsons and the like had about three urchins asking for their autograph, a thousand people surrounded the tent trying to get Ollie’s.

  At Pinkhurst Oliver also connected some of the outbuildings to the main house and converted a barn into a pub which had a snooker table, a disco, and a bar made out of the long table from Broome Hall. He christened it the Bark and Hornet. One afternoon Ollie, Paul Friday and a few others got too raucous at the local pub and the landlord chucked them out, so it was back to the Bark and Hornet, where Ollie pranced up and down, declaring over and over again, ‘You can’t get banned from the Bark and Hornet. You can’t get banned from the Bark and Hornet.’ ‘With that,’ recalls Paul Friday, ‘this guy got up on to the bar, unzipped his flies and pissed all over Ollie’s head. It was a whole bladderful, and Ollie just wiped it off, downed the whisky he was holding, and said, “You can’t get banned from the Bark and Hornet.”’ Paul saw the guy two days later and he was in floods of tears. ‘I can’t believe I’ve done that,’ he said. ‘I admire Ollie so much. He’s actually changed my life because I was a bit of a hooligan and his values I’ve taken onboard myself, so I can’t believe I did that to someone I respect so much.’ Paul gently patted him on the shoulder and said, ‘I wouldn’t worry about it.’

  Then there was the cider shed, which was much more rustic than the Bark and Hornet, with peat on the ground, an oil lamp hanging up, and a wind-up gramophone that played records of the old newsreels from the war and sirens going off. Ollie loved making his own cider. It was lethal stuff, as Sarah remembers. ‘It was weird because it went to people’s knees before it went to their heads, so people literally would collapse. They’d be walking and then their legs would completely go.’

  Christensen made many a visit to Pinkhurst and invariably ended up in the cider shed with Ollie. ‘He had a proper old-fashioned cider press in there and made different varieties of cider, all in big barrels. One would have a bottle of rum poured in it, another would have a bottle of vodka or Scotch, or gin, just to see how it developed by the time it was ready to drink. It was potent stuff. Alan the poacher went mad in there one night and Reg had to knock him out.’

  Even more bizarrely Ollie built a two-storey tree house next door which had a diving board in it. ‘So you came out of the cider shed after drinking cider all day,’ says Sarah, ‘climbed up a ladder into the tree house, and then jumped off into this field. It was so stupid: limbs could have been broken and God knows what.’

  Paul and Nora Friday often visited Oliver at Pinkhurst, and when they had their daughter Louise, Ollie took it upon himself to be the child’s godfather, grandfather and guardian all rolled into one. ‘He dressed up in a three-piece suit, with hat and opera cane, and dragged me off to the hospital on the first night,’ remembers Paul. ‘We’d had a few drinks and I was pretty pissed, so he marched in and saw the baby before I did probably.’ Oliver arrived carrying a bunch of Michaelmas daisies with a banana hanging out, and a rose. He tossed the rose into the cradle and Nora got the daisies and the banana. It didn’t end there because he turned up over the next five days, each time delivering things like potatoes, cabbages, and goodness knows what. It was like a harvest festival. ‘I had a Chinese nurse and she thought it was some sort of strange sexual rite, all these vegetables arriving in droves,’ Nora reveals. It got to the stage where she had to plead with her husband: was there a chance she could see him on his own without Ollie?

  As Louise grew up, Ollie continued to dote on the child. Returning from foreign locations, he’d toss her a banknote, a high-denomination rand note from South Africa, say, or a hundred-dollar bill, which infuriated Nora. ‘Ollie!’ she’d rage. ‘Louise is three, for God’s sake, she’s not to have paper money like that. You can’t give it to her.’ One day Nora was about to go out Chri
stmas shopping when Ollie arrived with a large carrier bag. ‘Louise,’ he said. ‘Your mummy says I’m not allowed to give you any notes,’ and he handed her this bag of silver coins he’d been collecting for a year – there must have been a small fortune inside – then he turned to Nora, beaming, and said, ‘You can’t complain now.’ Louise bought the biggest doll in the toy shop and it took an absolute age to count out the money.

  Girls of a very different nature were often to be found coming in and out of Pinkhurst, quite a few actually. ‘He wasn’t a man to be on his own,’ says Sarah. But they didn’t stay very long. Muriel remembers that these brief liaisons tended to all end the same way: ‘with their clothes thrown out of the window on to the lawn’. Then there was the time Ollie went down to visit Gus at his holiday camp. ‘He came back with a little totty girl of seventeen,’ says David. ‘And she was installed at Pinkhurst and ended up terrified, the poor thing.’ And the reason, according to Muriel, was that Oliver ‘tried to stuff bread down her throat’. David attempts to excuse this mad behaviour by describing the girl as very thin and waif-like, ‘so obviously Ollie thought she needed feeding and when she said no did it anyway. You see, the one thing Ollie didn’t like was women telling him what to do or what he couldn’t do. He wouldn’t stand for that.’ It was indeed a stupid and crass thing to do. ‘She honestly thought he was trying to kill her,’ says Muriel. ‘She had great weals round her neck. Anyway she managed to get away and shut herself in the bathroom and slept the night in the bath. She was so frightened. And early the next morning she went over to Bill and Jenny’s cottage and she left.’

  A regular visitor to Pinkhurst was, of course, Sarah. She would turn up and always wanted to visit the local stables, while Ollie just wanted to go to the pub. ‘And that’s what we’d do: he’d drop me off at the stables and then go to the pub. Afterwards we’d have these awkward dinners where we’d sit there and have no conversation. It was just an awkward relationship.’ It was not helped by Sarah’s chronic shyness. Ollie used to say to Jacquie when Sarah was young, ‘Why won’t she talk to me?’ The reason was simple: she was terrified of him, a situation that lasted well into her teens. It wasn’t helped by the fact that he’d come back after two months away filming and just want to embrace his family. ‘I have this recollection of this huge great bear of a man coming back and cuddling me with bristles and it being really overpowering. He just wanted affection and love and I didn’t know him. He’d been gone for months, and he scared me because he was so imposing and such a personality. I was scared. Plus I was a naturally shy child. We always had this awkwardness with each other.’

  Family relationships didn’t fit easily with Oliver, whether it was with his parents or later with his brothers. And, Sarah believes, also with his children. ‘He loved us but I don’t think he knew how to deal with us. I never felt unloved and he would tell me that he loved me but I don’t feel that he really understood us sometimes.’ Nor was Sarah made to feel that she was the most important thing in her father’s life. Ollie never felt that was necessary, or had the capability to express it, because he had other things going on in his life: his partner, his work, his playtime and his friends. ‘I think his friends were his family, they were the people that didn’t challenge him on an emotional level. He couldn’t take being challenged on an emotional level. We weren’t a close family. It’s weird to me when I see families that are really close, because we never had that.’

  And there was the drinking. Often when Sarah arrived at Pinkhurst Ollie’s friends were there and the booze was flowing. On one occasion they’d all been out for a long, late lunch and sent her back to school pissed, at the age of fifteen. ‘And I had a music concert that night, so I had to go and do my piano solo half-cut.’ Another time Sarah brought her best friend from school to stay for the weekend. She was Russian, so not unreasonably in Ollie’s mind he wanted to drink vodka with her. ‘He literally made her sit there and drink vodka with him. It was, you’re Russian, you must drink vodka. I mean, she was fifteen and in his charge, but it was, like, you have to finish this bottle of vodka with me.’

  Of course, Sarah had grown up surrounded by alcohol and heavy drinking. She remembers the first time she got drunk, at the age of eight, at David Hunt’s house with her dad, and they made her traffic lights: crème de menthe, apricot brandy and cherry brandy. ‘I woke up feeling not the best. I think that was my first hangover.’ Generally Ollie never encouraged it. He never said no either. ‘So it wasn’t the normal thing of have one glass at Christmas time, it was more of a free-for-all. I don’t remember raiding the drinks cabinet because I didn’t need to, it was always there.’

  Another visitor to Pinkhurst was Sarah Miles. ‘She just couldn’t leave him alone,’ recalls Jacquie. ‘I’m not sure if he ever returned the affection; she wasn’t really his type.’ The pair of them were currently working on a picture together called Venom, under the watchful eye of director Tobe Hooper, of Texas Chainsaw Massacre fame. Ollie was offered the film after a Screen Actors Guild strike delayed the start of another job, playing Bo Derek’s father in Tarzan the Ape Man, a role that eventually went to Richard Harris. Then, just a week into filming Venom, everything was thrown into turmoil when Hooper unexpectedly departed, for reasons that have never been entirely clear. The entire production was put on hold while the producers set about searching for a replacement.

  Their choice was Piers Haggard, largely a television drama director, who had Dennis Potter’s Pennies from Heaven for the BBC under his belt. Like Ollie, Haggard was intrigued by Venom’s premise, that of an escaped venomous snake inside a house where a hostage situation is being played out, but in hindsight he regrets ever going near the damn thing. Up he ventured to Elstree Studios to meet the cast, who’d been hanging around for nearly two weeks. ‘That’s when I first met Oliver, in the canteen, and he played a trick on me, pretending to throw a moody fit, that he was going to walk out and leave the film because I’d insulted him by saying something completely spurious. But it was just a hoax. He was testing me.’ Things went rapidly downhill after that.

  The problem was Ollie’s relationship with co-star Klaus Kinski. They detested each other at first sight, which was a bit difficult since they had most of their scenes together. By the close of shooting Haggard declared the black mamba the nicest thing on the set. ‘Oliver was clearly goading Klaus, who unfortunately had no sense of humour. Oliver, on the other hand, had a fabulous sense of humour, very wicked, he definitely liked a laugh, and he definitely liked a laugh at Klaus Kinski’s expense. Ollie took the most exquisite pleasure in winding him up. That was the main cause of the problem.’

  Oliver used to amuse himself by going over to Kinski’s trailer and shaking it violently, yelling, ‘Come out, you fucking Nazi bastard!’ Kinski would emerge trembling with rage and screaming back at him as best he could. Actually Kinski was born in Poland and was an immigrant to Germany. ‘But he passed for a Nazi in Oliver’s eyes,’ says Haggard.

  So what caused this feud? A clash of personalities, obviously, but also professional rivalry? Kinski was an imposing figure, and with both of them playing the bad guys in the story Ollie knew it was going to be a battle royal to see who would make the bigger impact. ‘There’s no question there was a testosterone-fuelled competition between them,’ confirms Haggard. ‘Lots of ego, too. Klaus had the more obvious ego. He was quite clearly an egomaniac.’

  Round one, which took place quite early on in the schedule, was an innocuous scene that required both actors merely to walk down a corridor and enter a room. ‘One of the things that got Ollie’s goat was that the Kinski character was his boss in the script,’ says Haggard. ‘He was the brains behind the baddies, so he had to have precedence and Ollie did not like that. Even though he’d read the script he really didn’t like that.’ When the time came to do a run-through Ollie nudged ahead of Klaus in the corridor and when he arrived at the room rested his arm on the door frame, essentially blocking Kinski from entering. Haggard called for
another run-through, and again Ollie stopped by the doorway, his arm blocking Kinski’s path. ‘What happens?’ pleaded Kinski. ‘What I do?’

  Haggard saw the problem. ‘Ollie, do you think that you could just ease over a little bit and maybe Klaus could come through?’

  ‘No,’ said Ollie casually. ‘I think I look good here. I feel comfortable here.’

  Kinski looked hard and long into space before saying, ‘No problem. We shoot.’

  ‘OK, let’s roll this,’ ordered Haggard. ‘OK, ready, stand by. Action.’

  The two actors approached the door, and it was like a pair of thoroughbreds straining to get their necks over the finishing line first. Ollie took up the same position as before, except this time Kinski came right up from behind him and with a vicious uppercut cracked Ollie’s arm out of the way, came into the room and began the scene. ‘They were so determined to upstage each other,’ Haggard remembers, ‘they didn’t give a fuck really.’ It very much seems like there was some one-upmanship going on, almost some game. But, says Haggard, ‘Klaus wasn’t playing a game. Ollie was. Ollie was a prankster. He just loved winding people up or having a laugh. And I grew rather fond of him. He could be a bastard, but he did have a sense of humour. Their behaviour, though, was completely unprofessional and childish. Disgraceful.’

  Most evenings Oliver retired after filming for a drink at the studio bar. One time he was joined by pal Mick Monks. Next to them were five stools around the edge of the bar, all occupied by young men. ‘Who are they?’ asked Ollie.

  ‘They’re the lads that do the voices for Kermit and co,’ said Monks. ‘You know, the Muppets.’