What Fresh Lunacy is This?

by Robert Sellers

  Ollie went, ‘Muppets!’ And up he got, pushed the first chap, and like dominoes they all went down, one after the other. ‘You’re not bloody actors!’ he roared.

  Venom was funded by the Guinness family, and early one morning producer Martin Bregman informed Haggard that at eleven o’clock the money was paying the set a visit. Sure, he said, and clean forgot about it. The crew were setting up a scene in the three-storey set of the house when suddenly there was an almighty rumpus from right at the top. ‘The whole thing trembled,’ says Haggard, ‘and down the stairs came Oliver, laughing hysterically, and Kinski running after him, shrieking, “You fucking English cunt.” And at that moment, with the studio resonating to the furious screams of Kinski and the maniacal laughter of Oliver, in through the studio doors comes Lord Guinness and his fragrant wife and fragrant children, along with Marty Bregman. And, I can still remember it, Marty saw Oliver and Klaus and herded the Guinness family away, saying, “I think we’ll come back later.”’

  The film did seem to be deteriorating into something resembling a battleground. ‘It was an extraordinary and very unpleasant experience,’ says Haggard. ‘An accumulatively unpleasant experience because as it went on it got more and more wearing and more tiring, and we got behind schedule.’ Ollie was also drinking heavily, especially at lunch, according to the director. ‘He was difficult in the afternoon, a bit brutalized; very unprofessional. Klaus never drank – he was just mad.’

  Ollie’s drinking was never so bad that Haggard had to send him home. It was just that one knew it was going to get laborious because there would inevitably be a problem or Ollie would get stubborn over something. ‘You know how people are a bit pugnacious when they’re drunk, but he was still capable of giving a performance. Oliver was one of the finest film actors that we had. When he was right, he was a wonderful, powerful, and authoritative and focused film actor, he really knew how to play the camera. He knew what he had in those wonderful eyes. He gave me a lecture once. “Make sure you shoot these eyes,” he said.’

  Venom’s poor showing at the box office was no great surprise to anyone, but at times the film is quite a suspenseful and exciting drama. Ollie’s death is particularly memorable: seized by shock, he’s unable to do anything but watch as the mamba crawls up his trouser leg and bites into his knackers. Great stuff.

  Josephine

  Ollie had stopped off for a quick drink at one of his local pubs, the King’s Head in the village of Rudgwick, his custom-built Panther De Ville parked outside and claiming admiring looks from passers-by and people driving through. Coming home on the school bus, sixteen-year-old Josephine Burge caught sight of the car and, curious to see who it belonged to, went inside with a couple of her friends. ‘And that’s when I first saw him.’ It was the beginning of a remarkable love story.

  Josephine only vaguely knew who Oliver was, having seen him maybe twice on television. On Friday nights she’d go to friends’ houses and often stay up late watching horror movies. ‘And I do remember seeing The Shuttered Room, which I loved. So I’d seen that. I’d also been sick and off school one day and saw him on this chat show called Pebble Mill at One. So I was vaguely aware of him.’

  As weeks turned into months Josephine often popped into the King’s Head. She lived not far away in a cottage with her mother Anne, a single parent who had done her best to raise her family since their father died when Josephine was eight. From being an irregular customer Ollie had become something of a permanent fixture in the King’s Head and always looked forward to seeing Josephine’s pleasant, smiling face as she arrived with her friends. ‘He used to call us the ducklings baby quack-quacks, and we’d sit in the corner with our soft drinks and crisps and chirp away.’ Oliver always made a point of talking to them, engaging them in conversation. ‘Then gradually it became apparent that perhaps he and I had more of an interest in each other than just chatting.’ The courtship had begun.

  There were invitations for her and her friends to come over to Pinkhurst, followed by more intimate dinner dates, always with one of Josephine’s brothers or sisters in attendance, chaperones almost. ‘An old-fashioned romance,’ is how Oliver would later refer to it. Josephine’s mother also invited Ollie over to have Sunday lunch with them. ‘And he’d arrive bearing a joint of meat and a bunch of flowers,’ recalls Josephine. ‘And poor Sarah was often dragged along as well. It was a definite courtship. And it was wonderful. Obviously it was fascinating and very flattering for a young girl to have an attractive older man pay so much attention to her. He was very charismatic, and he was very interesting and funny.’ Looking back, Josephine recognizes that part of the attraction was that tangible sense of danger Oliver carried around with him, the never knowing what he was going to do next, which countless other women had found impossible to resist ever since the early sixties. ‘I suppose being young one always looks for a little bit of danger and one certainly got that with Ollie.’ She was smitten, totally, and Oliver too must have surprised even himself that he’d fallen in love with a girl who had yet to take her O levels and was twenty-six years his junior.

  Anne Burge took the pursuit of her young daughter by a middle-aged film star surprisingly well, although Josephine admits her family didn’t really think it was the greatest thing in the world for her to be doing. ‘But I went ahead and did it anyway. My family were actually wonderful and put up with it all. My mother was supportive and mindful and always there for me, and just kept an eye on things.’ Anne must have been aware of how innocent Josephine was, a quiet and unassuming girl who had lived all her life in Rudgwick, and one is left to ponder how much of a father figure Oliver represented to her. There had only been the one boyfriend before Oliver and that wasn’t at all serious and had fizzled out. Still, this didn’t stop Ollie having a ‘man to man’ chat with him one afternoon in the pub, just to reassure the seventeen-year-old that his intentions were honourable when it came to Josephine. It must have made for a strange scene.

  What’s perhaps most remarkable about this courtship is that nobody outside of Rudgwick had any inkling of what was going on. ‘Nobody leaked it or said anything,’ recalls Josephine. ‘We quietly got along and got to know each other, and nobody phoned anybody up and said, do you know what’s going on?’ Even when they went to Dorking for a meal in one of Ollie’s favourite restaurants their privacy was respected. ‘But again they were all people who Oliver would have known, and just left him alone to get on with things,’ says Josephine. Sadly this idyll would not last for long.

  First Ollie had a job of work to do. He’d accepted a role in a James Bond-type spoof called Condorman, made under the Walt Disney banner. The budget was big, the locations spectacular and the action suitably comic-strip. Best of all, it teamed him up again with Michael Crawford, who since The Jokers had attained huge fame as Frank Spencer in the BBC sitcom Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em. Crawford was playing the dashing hero, a comic-book-illustrator-cum superhero, Ollie the main baddie, a hotshot KGB agent. ‘And remembering Ollie’s penchant for living roles, I feared for my life,’ said Crawford.

  The cast all met up for the first time in Monte Carlo, at an exclusive restaurant. Oliver was the last to arrive, with Reg in tow. Barbara Carrera, who was playing a glamorous spy in the film, remembers that Ollie was impeccably dressed in a beautiful suit, Turnbull & Asser shirt, the lot, and he couldn’t have been more courteous, walking round the table shaking the hands of the men and kissing the hands of the ladies. ‘We had a glass of champagne to welcome everybody and celebrate the beginning of shooting. And it wasn’t long after that Oliver stood up. He had this glazed look in his eyes, and ripped open his shirt and jacket, buttons went flying everywhere. Then he went around challenging all the men in the restaurant to arm-wrestling. The next thing, Oliver jumped up and started hanging from the chandelier. That was my first meeting with Oliver.’

  What surprised Barbara even more was that the next morning on the set Ollie didn’t look hung over at all, but fresh and alert. ‘And total
ly professional. He was 100 per cent focused. It was when he left the set after we wrapped that Hyde came out. He really was like Jekyll and Hyde. And it was fun working with Jekyll but then frightening spending time with Hyde because when the Hyde came out it was like he almost didn’t know what he was doing.’

  One afternoon a few of the cast went for lunch in a restaurant on the second floor of a hotel overlooking the harbour. After eating, Barbara took a stroll on to the balcony. ‘I was standing there looking out over the Mediterranean when Oliver came up behind me and grabbed me and held me over the balcony. He had this glazed look in his eyes again. It was really scary because he held me completely over the edge. I remember looking at him and I said in the softest voice I could muster, like talking to a little child who was doing something he shouldn’t, “Oliver, put me down. Put me down, Oliver.” After that I stayed away from Oliver and balconies.’

  Certainly Barbara never entertained the thought of socializing with Ollie, but the crew would go out with him and the next day she heard stories about him trying to pick fights with various people. ‘One night he was almost killed. He picked a fight with the wrong guys, some Corsicans, and they pulled a knife on him and were really going after him and it was the crew who saved him, who got him out. Although the way they told the story to me, probably by then a little jaded by his behaviour, they said, we thought about it for a second to let the Corsicans have their way with him, then we thought it would only delay the film.’

  During the first couple of weeks of production Ollie happily reminisced with Crawford about the good old days when they played brothers in Winner’s comedy. But as filming progressed Crawford watched Ollie grow ever deeper into his character, even to the extent of going around speaking with a heavy Russian accent. One evening Crawford was relaxing in the hotel bar when he spied Ollie sitting alone with a drink at a nearby table. Their eyes met. ‘Come here and haffff a dreeenk!’ shouted Ollie.

  ‘It’s OK, Ollie, I’m meeting someone.’

  ‘Come here and haffff a dreeenk!’ Ollie growled.

  ‘No, Ollie, really . . .’

  Oliver stood up and walked imposingly towards Crawford, who began to sink into his seat. ‘Cummmmm here into Russian Embassy and haffff a dreeenk, you little feathered fart!’ How could one refuse? And for the rest of filming Crawford was known as Condorman, the Feathered Fart.

  Barbara also noticed that Ollie totally immersed himself in his villainous character. So maybe those earlier stunts he’d played on her were his way of implanting fear, an emotion her character had to feel towards him in the film. ‘But I wasn’t intimidated by Oliver. I wasn’t. I was just scared of him. And I think he liked that, I think he liked people to be scared of him. He was always trying to test a person to see how scared they were of him.’ Oliver did have a sense of menace about him, a real aura. It was part of his screen image and it was how he was in real life. ‘Because his looks were so threatening, if he raised his voice people would start shaking because they thought he was about to punch them out,’ remembers Carol Lynley. ‘But he had a very sweet smile which, when it broke out in this rather ferocious face, you could almost see a little boy in there.’

  Jonathan Vanger, who produced a couple of Oliver’s movies in the late eighties, also saw it first-hand, how people were often frightened of him. ‘We had difficulty with some of the younger actors. Because Ollie was usually playing a bad guy who would shout or scream, and he did it so credibly, you could actually see them freak out.’

  Simon remembers a party held at his home where Oliver was a guest. After he left, one of Simon’s television colleagues said, ‘There’s only two words to describe your brother: fucking terrifying.’ And Ollie hadn’t done anything. ‘It was the first time this friend had met him, but he felt it. Ollie could be scary even when he was behaving himself.’

  As had been the case with The Jokers, Crawford fell foul of several Ollie pranks. By some margin the weirdest was the time he crept into Crawford’s hotel room at the dead of night when the actor was asleep and without a word began slowly and methodically turning over every piece of furniture. Stirred from his slumber, Crawford watched the spectacle and, when Ollie turned to leave whispered, ‘Thank you, Oliver,’ as he quietly closed the door.

  ‘Michael was a little afraid of Oliver,’ Condorman’s director, Charles Jarrott, always felt. As for himself, having worked with plenty of tough cookies over the years, from Peter Finch to Richard Burton, Jarrott wasn’t going to be intimidated by Oliver Reed and in the end thoroughly enjoyed the experience. ‘He was such a character and worked like a real professional. Strange, at work he was fairly quiet. At night, he was always boozed up and boisterous. One tended to steer away from him then. He spent a day and a night on a British cruiser visiting Nice. I hear the rum flowed like water!’

  One memorable night shoot took place in the casino at Monte Carlo. Ollie was immaculately dressed in a white tuxedo and his scenes went like clockwork. ‘We finished at about 2 a.m. and I went back to my hotel,’ Jarrott recalled. ‘After changing and enjoying a drink, I sauntered out on to my balcony overlooking the Mediterranean. It was a beautiful moonlit night. I glanced down at the calm sea and noticed a white tuxedo floating away on the waves. Looking back up at the hotel, I saw Ollie, stark naked, climbing from balcony to balcony. An English King Kong was abroad.’

  When the film moved to Zermatt in Switzerland, Barbara and Oliver were involved in an episode that very nearly cost them their lives. It was a scene that took place in a helicopter high up the Matterhorn, but confusion reigned when the pilot mistook the signal for Ollie and Barbara to start playing the scene for his signal to take off and swoop down the mountain. ‘The shocking thing was, both doors were completely open,’ says Barbara. ‘And the only thing that kept us in the helicopter was gravity, otherwise we would have fallen out, which is what the director and everyone on the crew thought. They thought that they had lost us, they thought that Oliver and I had fallen out of the helicopter. In the meantime we were so into the scene – our characters are supposed to be fighting – that we ended up really fighting each other. I elbowed Ollie in his stomach. We didn’t even realize that we were in danger, not until we came back and landed did we find out. I think the director passed out, he almost had a heart attack. They had to call an ambulance.’

  From Barbados to Baghdad

  In January 1981 Ollie and Josephine boarded a plane to Barbados, her sixth-form tutor having been told she would be absent from school for several days owing to influenza. Walking on the beach one day, they were spotted and the news was beamed back to Fleet Street. All hell broke loose.

  Because he went every year to Barbados, Ollie probably thought nothing of asking Josephine if she cared to accompany him this time; an offer, let’s face it, most people would find tough to refuse. ‘I looked winningly at my mother, and she let me go.’ Then the press descended. ‘They were hiding in coconut trees,’ recalls Josephine. ‘In the gardens where we were staying, in the restaurants where we went for dinner. We’d have great fun trying to avoid them. We’d get a small sail boat to come up to the beach and I’d hop on that and then go off somewhere and Oliver would get into the back of a truck and go off somewhere else and then we’d meet up at some prearranged rendezvous point.’

  While all this was going on, back home Ollie was castigated as a ‘dirty old man’ in the tabloids. But never at any stage in his life did Ollie give a damn about what was said about him in the press. ‘People slagging him off as an actor, no, didn’t worry him,’ says Simon. ‘People praising him, whatever, it didn’t matter, he didn’t care. So his reaction to the press talking about this forty-two-year-old man and this sixteen-year-old girl: they don’t understand, fuck ’em. He never did anything to cultivate publicity, and he wouldn’t have worried about any adverse publicity either.’ The problem was, the spotlight wasn’t exclusively shining on him, but on Josephine and her family too, something they’d no experience of and were totally unprepared for. One c
olumnist labelled Anne a poor mother for allowing her daughter to gallivant off halfway around the world with a famous reprobate.

  The controversy continued to run for days, reaching a climax when the news hit media outlets that the pair were heading home. ‘At the time I had a house close to Pinkhurst,’ says David. ‘And Fleet Street invaded the village. They had cars outside his main gate, a car down at my gate, they were in all the pubs. They knew they were coming back.’ So David rang his brother to warn him. ‘We’re staked out, Ollie, they’re all wanting to get a look at Josephine.’ Oliver was at a loss as to what to do. ‘Leave it with me,’ reassured David, who hadn’t the first clue as to how to solve the problem. After much thought he believed he had the answer. ‘I’d seen movies where you change your name and come into a country incognito, so I went down to the local Dorking travel agent and I said to this lovely girl behind the desk, how do we do it? Can we get him in under another name? And yes, it was possible.’ Obviously the press would have Heathrow and Gatwick covered, so it was arranged for Oliver and Josephine to fly from Barbados out to Mexico, from Mexico to Holland, and from Holland to a little grass airfield in Bournemouth. ‘When they landed, Ollie emerged from this tiny plane. I was out on the balcony and when he saw me he stuck his thumb up and then down. I stuck my thumb up, which meant it was all clear, we’d done it.’

  Once in the car, David gave them all the tabloid newspapers and the pair just sat and read them with their mouths agape. ‘Oh my God.’ He followed that with a quick update of what was happening. It wasn’t good: the press were swarming all over Rudgwick. ‘Listen,’ said Ollie. ‘Drive into the village and let me out, OK? That will distract them and you whizz up the road to Josephine’s house.’

  In theory it was a good plan, but the minute Ollie stepped out into the street all these people looking through the pub window suddenly poured out and barged right past him, desperate to get near a cowering Josephine in the car. ‘I screamed up the road,’ David says, ‘with all these guys running after us, slammed on the brakes outside the house, knocked on the door, practically shoved Josephine in, and then drove back.’ By the end of the day, once things had calmed down, everyone congregated round the bar of the pub, drinking. ‘Come on, Ollie,’ the reporters were going. ‘How did you do it? How did you get back into the country without us knowing?’ Ollie smiled and replied, ‘Rubber dinghy. Land’s End.’