What Fresh Lunacy is This?

by Robert Sellers

  The press intrusion was far from over, for this was a sensational story and there was no way the tabloids were going to let go of it. ‘The press labelled it as this quiet little schoolgirl going out with Britain’s biggest hell-raiser,’ says Josephine. ‘It was fantastic copy, absolute bliss for them all. We couldn’t have written it for them better, could we?’ It got to the stage where reporters were following her on the school bus. ‘I remember my sister and I walking to the bus one morning and spotting this photographer and I just burst into floods of tears and legged it back to the house, and my sister, who was thirteen at the time, screamed at this guy, “You fucking bastard!” It was pretty awful.’

  Another time Josephine got off the bus after school and there was a pack of reporters waiting for her. Running across the road into the pub, she phoned the local policeman to see if there was anything he could do to get rid of them. Nothing, he said. If they were outside on the street it was public property. Josephine had to stay in the pub for hours until they went away. This kind of thing went on all the time, so it wasn’t much fun, especially since the press were also hounding the Burge family, trying to get an interview with Anne. ‘I know my mother got so fed up once she actually tipped water out of a window on to them because they were at the front door constantly. Oliver did his best to help me but it was a kind of sink or swim situation. Get used to it or don’t. I just learned to get used to it.’

  Pretty soon the harassment Josephine was facing began to impinge upon her education. Back at school she suffered the usual taunts, and a favourite was to walk behind her singing the chorus of Typically Tropical’s 1975 hit ‘Whoa, I’m Going to Barbados’. Josephine suffered this in silence, although what she’d done had probably shocked the pants off her classmates too, since she was always considered the quiet shy one, the one least expected to get into any sort of trouble. But when reporters started hanging around outside the school gates, sometimes necessitating Josephine to be smuggled into the building, it couldn’t go on. ‘It was just quite horrendous. Difficult for everybody. So the headmaster came to see me at my godfather’s house and arrived at the decision that it would be best if I left.’

  The next decision to make was what to do about her education. Josephine declined to have a private tutor, opting instead to take up a correspondence course since that meant she could travel with Oliver to film sets and locations. ‘I wanted to be with him and he wanted me with him when he was working, because it was better for him, more settling, I think. So I’d lug my suitcases around, which my brother William in later years had great fun telling me he packed with the heaviest academic books he could find. And I remember being in Baghdad in this hotel, looking out of the window, and there was Oliver and his mates sunbathing around the pool while I was busy working on my English literature. And I sat there thinking, why am I doing this? So I wrote a very nice letter to my tutor, thanked her very much, but I was quitting. That was my A levels done.’

  Baghdad was the first of many locations Josephine remembers going to with Oliver. The film was A Clash of Loyalties and was very much a personal project of Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, detailing as it does the end of British colonial influence in the region circa 1920. Ollie stars as a British army major. Ironically there was a real war going on at the time between Iraq and Iran, and, Josephine recalls, you couldn’t help but notice. Every night you’d hear the blare of air-raid sirens, or spot a missile go streaking across the cloudless sky. Many of the extras were Iraqi army personnel overjoyed to be away from the front for a few weeks, although filming had to be cancelled once when the soldiers were suddenly ordered to the front to stem an Iranian offensive.

  The production itself was totally disorganized, so weeks went by without any filming at all and everyone just sat around getting bored in this beautiful great hotel. ‘Luckily Oliver was there and kept us royally entertained,’ remembers stunt man Vic Armstrong. ‘God, he used to get us into so much trouble. One night we were all drinking in the bar, ending up seeing how many of us could stand on a coffee table. I think we got up to about twelve before it collapsed. It was just killing time.’ Then, looking inside the restaurant, Ollie saw a Texas businessman whom he knew. He rushed upstairs to his room, to emerge fifteen minutes later wearing a western shirt and cowboy boots. Strolling into the restaurant John Wayne style, Ollie gave his buddy a Texas handshake, as he called it, which basically meant smashing his cowboy boot down on the table. Cutlery and glass went flying in the air. ‘Ollie then stopped and looked at the guy and it wasn’t his buddy at all,’ recalls Armstrong. ‘It was some Arab with his entourage, deeply offended that this Westerner had come stamping on his table and upset everything. The police were called and Ollie was arrested. He didn’t go to jail, thank God.’

  Ollie very quickly discovered the pool at the hotel and on his days off could be found from fairly early in the morning in a sun chair with a huge bowl of sangria beside him. ‘How the hell he ever got sangria made the way he wanted there, I don’t know,’ remembers Stephan Chase, who had a small part in the film. ‘And he’d be there for hours and hours and you can imagine he got very hot, sweaty, and pretty pissed.’ This would result in games by the pool, which like everything else with Ollie when he was in this mood, went a bit further than anybody else wanted them to go. ‘There was the possibility of being drowned or strangled under the water,’ says Chase. ‘And Ollie quite liked this, he loved the mischievousness of starting games that would then develop into something potentially really quite dodgy.’

  Every night Ollie and Reg would show up in the bar in white suits and there would be the usual jostling and wrestling with each other. After a few days of this the rest of the cast did their best to avoid them whenever possible, even though Chase admits you couldn’t help but like Ollie. ‘But at arm’s length. He was the kind of man who’d walk into a door when it was shut, it might give way and it might not. If it didn’t, he’d have a good pummel to try and get through it.’

  One night the whole cast had dinner in this vast dining hall in the hotel, along with a number of Arab guests. All of a sudden Ollie leaped to his feet, grabbed the tablecloth and yanked it off. Cups, plates and glasses hit the floor with a loud crash and several of the Arabs jumped to their feet brandishing guns, thinking the hotel was being invaded. Few of Ollie’s fellow actors appreciated the prank. ‘But Ollie always had that mischief behind the eyes,’ admits Chase. ‘When he was on form he was amusing, almost scallywaggish, impish. If he was drunk, then you didn’t know where it was going to go. Otherwise he was quite sweet, which is a curious word to use about him, but he was. You can almost see him as a little boy with his socks down and a bandage on his knee and a black eye because someone had bashed him.’

  To say that Josephine’s life had changed out of all recognition since meeting Oliver would be a gross understatement. This was a girl who in just a year had gone from catching a bus to school, and earning spare bits of pocket money babysitting and selling horse manure, to rubbing shoulders with the greats of the film world. Just before they went to Baghdad, Josephine’s first taste of Oliver’s professional world was a trip to New York for the premiere of Lion of the Desert, an experience she’s never forgotten. ‘That was fantastic. I mean, Anthony Quinn dancing round a handkerchief at dinner. The film was financed by these wonderful people who had far too much money but were very generous and gave us lots of spending money. I remember Oliver saying, “This is ridiculous. What am I going to do with it?” and giving it back. He told them to give it to a charity.’ Before the trip both had suits handmade for them at Dougie Hayward the tailor. Josephine’s still got hers. ‘So all this was happening and then flying out to New York. I remember nearly passing out at one point because I just found the whole thing quite overwhelming.’ She was barely seventeen.

  Her age certainly wasn’t lost on Oliver, for not only did he feel duty bound to protect her from the feeding frenzy of the media but her emotional welfare was also of deep concern. He was fully aware of the fac
t that for her this whole affair might be nothing more substantial than a schoolgirl crush. These were largely immature and brand-new feelings Josephine was experiencing, emotions that at her tender age she may have had trouble deciphering. It’s the reason why he insisted she take her time before committing herself to any serious relationship with him. Yet the subject of her moving into Pinkhurst had already been broached. ‘He’d given me the key and said, whenever I felt comfortable and thought it was the right time, I could go and live with him. So I did. I moved in.’

  It was a culture shock, no doubt about it, because living with Ollie called for quite a bit of fast growing up on her part. ‘Josephine was suddenly thrown into an adult world,’ says David. ‘She did not experience those teenage things that other girls do, clubbing, dating. She never did any of that, she went from childhood into a drinking, adult life of excess.’ And very quickly it began to overwhelm her. ‘I was still at school and trying to do some homework and Oliver and one of his friends, Mad Michael, were being utterly annoying, and I thought, what am I doing? So I got on to my moped, with my satchel, and left and went home. It was over half-term and I had a long, hard think about it and realized, no, I miss him, desperately. I wasn’t relieved to have got out of it. I thought, I actually really, really do miss him. So I went back and never left again.’

  Considering the scandal their love affair caused, Josephine was integrated and accepted surprisingly quickly into Oliver’s family and inner circle. Once everyone had got over the initial shock, of course. Simon has still never forgotten the moment Ollie phoned him, not long after he’d first met Josephine, announcing his intention to one day marry her. ‘I could not believe it. It was insanity, it seemed to me. Looking back on it, I can absolutely understand it. Yes, it could have been a disaster, but actually it was just what was wanted. But at the time it was just, what on earth are you doing?’ And when David and Muriel were first introduced to Josephine they were genuinely shocked, not least because she was only six months younger than their youngest daughter.

  That she provoked such reactions from people is something that Josephine can completely understand. It must have been especially difficult for Mark, as here was his father dating a girl who was four years younger than he was, and Josephine admits that it took a little bit longer for them to gel, but eventually a firm friendship developed. ‘I’ve always got on with Josephine,’ says Mark. ‘I felt that it was brave of her in many ways to get involved with him, because she could have been totally smothered. But then I suppose there was part of him that wanted his own form of normality, for someone to be there. In some ways he had toned himself down a little bit, to become a little bit more acceptable. But it was a challenging time for her. But she stood up to it very well and was a strong enough character to cope with everything.’

  As for Sarah, she was relatively unfazed when the news broke. ‘I remember everyone else being more affected by it than me. I was eleven. It was like, yeah, OK. I didn’t really question it. I remember at school being called into my headmistress’s office and her saying, “Listen, Sarah, we need to talk about this, this must be an issue.” And I’m going, “It’s not an issue. It really isn’t.” I think I was actually incredibly laid-back in that respect. I’d been used to this madness.’

  Ollie’s friends were wonderful too, although Johnny Placett used to enjoy endlessly playing Sam Cooke’s ‘Only Sixteen’ on the pub’s jukebox until Ollie refused to come in any more and the offending disc was removed. And they were extremely protective of Josephine. ‘Bill and Jenny were incredible. There was never a nasty word said to me, no insinuation that I may have been with Oliver for the wrong reasons.’ It was said by some, observers looking in from the outside, that Josephine was only with Ollie because he was a rich film star. This couldn’t have been further from the truth. Before they went off to Baghdad Ollie took her to Harrods, thrust a wad of cash in her hands, and told her to get whatever she wanted. Josephine came back with a pair of white boots and a skirt. ‘Oliver just couldn’t believe it, so I was dragged around Harrods by the arm with him going, we’ll take that, that and that, and that and that. So the money thing was never an issue for me.’

  There was also the suggestion that Oliver chose a young partner so that she would be more compliant and he could carry on misbehaving and indulging his child-like nature. Josephine hopes that it wasn’t true, that he was more intelligent than that. Besides, she was no giddy teenager but mature beyond her age. Because her father died when she was young and her mother spent time in hospital, she’d coped with hardship and helped to manage the family. She was also very countrified and proper. In difficult situations it was very often Josephine who came across as much more of an adult than Ollie.

  She was also shy and not particularly talkative, especially in the early years when she was still getting used to her new life and was sometimes overwhelmed by things. Ollie liked to tell the story of when he was in New York for the Lion of the Desert premiere and sought advice from the film’s Arab director, Moustapha Akkad. ‘I’m going crazy, Moustapha. I’ve got this young girl and she’s said absolutely nothing, and it’s just driving me potty. I don’t know what to do.’

  Akkad looked genuinely perplexed. ‘Are you mad, Oliver? That sounds like the perfect woman.’

  The trials and tribulations Josephine faced in the early months of her liaison with Ollie were to serve her well for the rest of the time she spent with him. But, looking back at that period over thirty years later, she can’t quite believe that as a seventeen-year-old she could have behaved in the way she did. She’s also equally certain that if her father had still been alive he never would have allowed it.

  ‘Quick poke in the bush, boy?’

  As was the pattern for the rest of their lives together, Oliver flew out to his next movie location with Josephine by his side. The destination was Toronto and the film was a hopeless mess called Spasms, directed by William Fruet, about a demonic serpent captured from a remote island that goes on the rampage. Oliver, very much on autopilot here, plays a millionaire explorer with some kind of telekinetic connection with the beast. Cast as his daughter was newcomer Kerrie Keane, who, to prepare for her role, read Oliver’s then recently published autobiography to get a sense of who he was. ‘I learned enough from that book to know that I could never flinch with this man.’

  On their first day of shooting, Kerrie was called to the set for her first scene with Oliver, not having met him before. ‘There he stood as still as a monument, charismatic and frightening. I was introduced, and he said nothing. He simply stared at me, those eyes boring into mine. I knew that this was some kind of test, so I stared back and didn’t blink. Everyone and everything around us stopped in silence. After what felt like for ever, he finally grinned and mumbled something like, you’re all right, girl. From then on he seemed to have a respect for me and we worked well together.’

  For Kerrie, Ollie was no trouble at all and she remembers his generosity in often inviting her to share lunch with him and Josephine, though for some reason he took against the way she sipped her wine. ‘One day he reached over and tipped the stem of my glass. I managed not to choke as I gulped the wine, at least the wine that didn’t spill all over me. “That’s the way to drink,” he spat. Yes, there was always that potential for violence in him. I guess that’s what made him so exciting and exasperating, never knowing what to expect.’ Kerrie also observed Ollie and Josephine’s fledgling relationship at close quarters. ‘He treated her like a doll, always adjusting her hair or clothing.’

  There were plenty of night shoots on the film, which had a tendency to drag through inefficiency and delays. One damp, cold night there was a huge lighting set-up. Oliver kept warm drinking Courvoisier, which Kerrie remembers he guzzled like soda pop right out of the bottle. As the night wore on, and the crew were no nearer fixing up the shot, Ollie went for a wander into the neighbouring woods. The crew could hear him in the distance howling like a wolf.

  After several hours the
director was happy to commence with the scene, only Oliver was still AWOL. A young assistant was sent into the woods to find him. Everyone waited as the clock kept ticking. ‘Suddenly, out of the woods came the assistant, his face ashen,’ recalls Kerrie. ‘He could hardly speak, but he recounted how he had been tracking the wolf sounds when out of a tree dropped Oliver, stark naked, and in a most demonic manner he whispered, “Quick poke in the bush, boy?” I’ll never forget the look in that assistant’s eyes.’

  Oliver did finally show up, back in his costume, and the scene was completed just before dawn. ‘I don’t think Oliver wanted us to lose the shot that night,’ says Kerrie. ‘But he needed to protest the lack of professionalism.’

  With antics like that, is it any wonder that when Peter Fonda heard Ollie was in the film he accepted the job immediately? ‘There was no way I was going to pass up the chance of working with this legendary actor.’ Fonda himself liked his booze, and the pair of them were often spotted in Toronto’s numerous bars. One evening consisted of drinking Cuba Libres, and when Fonda awoke the next morning, fully clothed on his hotel bed, the several hundred dollars he’d taken with him to pay for his drinks was still in his jacket pocket. Ollie had paid for the whole party.

  The drinking, though, did get out of hand. Quinn Donoghue did some publicity for Spasms, meeting up with Oliver after a gap of several years, and noticed a significant change in him. ‘I went out to interview Ollie and Fonda and I found them both pretty incapacitated. Ollie was drunk and Peter was stoned and they were both enjoying one another’s company without any communication whatsoever. This was like at two o’clock in the afternoon, and this was something that surprised me with Ollie because during the Musketeer period he didn’t drink during the day, maybe a little wine at lunch. It was a night-time problem back then. But on this picture with Fonda they were both heavily indulging and this was the middle of the day.’