What Fresh Lunacy is This?

by Robert Sellers

  While in Toronto, Ollie and Josephine bumped into Yvonne Romain, who automatically assumed this pretty young girl was Oliver’s daughter. Yvonne’s husband Leslie Bricusse had a musical playing in the city and they invited Ollie and Josephine to dinner. ‘I hadn’t seen him for years,’ says Yvonne. ‘And we had a lovely meal. He was so charming, reminiscing about our Hammer films and that he’d wished we’d done more together. And then he ordered a bottle of Armagnac and drank it in twenty minutes and turned into something completely different. It was Jekyll and Hyde. And we thought, what a shame.’ It was the last time Yvonne ever saw Ollie. ‘I think I respected him more than anyone else I worked with. He was so knowledgeable and had a great instinct as an actor. I think of him now with huge affection. He was so helpful to me as a young actress and we laughed so much together.’

  From Toronto Oliver and Josephine flew a short distance to the US mountain resort of Stowe in Vermont for a short break. In the early morning hours police officer Eben Merrill was at the Stowe Police Department office with Stowe Patrolman Edwin Webster, when they received a call about a disturbance at Ye Old English Inne on Mountain Road. When the two officers arrived they were told by the pub’s owner that Oliver Reed was inside causing a disturbance. ‘We were asked at that time not to intervene,’ Merrill recalls, ‘as the owner, his staff, and Mr Reed’s friends were trying to get him to leave. The owner and some of his staff had been physically assaulted by Mr Reed, and each time the owner came outside to see us more of his clothing was torn. On his last trip to see us, the owner had had enough and wanted to file charges against Mr Reed.’

  By this time Ollie had made his way outside to the parking lot. It was then that he caught sight of the policemen and cried, ‘Come on, let’s have a go,’ while trying to lift up a car by grabbing hold of its fender. ‘He then walked over and shook hands with Officer Webster and myself,’ continues Merrill, ‘and then promptly fell over backwards on to the ground. At this point, Officer Webster and myself placed Mr Reed into handcuffs. Since Mr Reed did not like the idea of being arrested, he was helped to the police car by Officer Webster, myself and State Police Sergeant Loren Croteau, who had just arrived on the scene to lend a hand. The Dispatch Center had been giving area officers up-to-the-minute accounts of Reed tearing apart the pub, and Sergeant Croteau was the first to arrive to assist. Mr Reed was then taken to the Lamoille County Sheriff’s Department where he told the alcohol worker to “Bloody well piss off”. I returned to the pub to document what had been destroyed and to take statements from those who were assaulted. After his release, Reed sent flowers to the Sheriff’s Department Secretary and also made a donation to the Stowe Fire Department.’

  Still on the lookout for fun, Ollie decided to see out 1981 in Los Angeles with Josephine. While she was out shopping one day he hit some bars and in one of them met John Miller, an ex-SAS man who was part of the team who earlier that year snatched Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs from his bolt hole in Rio and whisked him away to Barbados, in the hope of extraditing him to the UK. Anyway, the two got pally and went from bar to bar and a boozed-up Ollie suddenly decided that he wanted to get a tattoo done. Not on his forearm, or on his knuckles, not even on his backside. No, Ollie wanted a tattoo on his cock.

  The pair of them went to the city’s Latino quarter but every tattooist they approached was unwilling to perform the task. A cab driver came to the rescue, saying he knew just the place. ‘Then take me there, my good fellow,’ said Ollie. It was a bit of a slum area and the shop was run by a Chinese man, but even he baulked at Ollie’s request. ‘I’ll do it.’ The voice came from the back; it was the man’s wife. ‘Make bigger, please.’

  Two hours later it was finished: an eagle’s claws emblazoned on his manhood. He returned to his hotel room with it wrapped in bloodied cotton wool. Josephine remembers being vaguely shocked. ‘That possibly wasn’t my most favourite thing that he ever did.’

  Ollie’s tattoo was to become infamous, and indeed world famous. He already had a very small tattoo on his shoulder in the shape of an eagle’s head. ‘So his party trick in years to come,’ says David, ‘when the conversation got to him and he couldn’t cope, he’d say, “Do you want to see my tattoo?” and show them the eagle’s head. Then he’d say, “Do you want to see where it’s perched?” And he’d undo his flies and bring out the old sausage.’

  Even Carol Lynley got to hear about it, from, of all people, David Niven Junior. ‘Have you seen Ol’s tattoo?’ he said. Of course, Carol hadn’t. Niven Junior had run into Ollie and Josephine at Madrid airport and Ollie said, ‘Oh, David, I’ve got to show you my new tattoo,’ and dropped his trousers and underpants and said, ‘Look, look, David.’ And Niven Junior found himself on his knees in a crowded airport lounge staring at Oliver Reed’s dick!

  In quick succession Ollie made a couple of throwaway American movies. Backed by big studios, the first by Universal and the second by 20th Century Fox, they had a lot of hope riding on them, but both were critically lampooned and tanked at the box office. The Sting 2 was a belated and lacklustre sequel to the 1973 classic but sadly minus Newman and Redford, their places taken by the less than stellar Jackie Gleason and singer-songwriter turned actor Mac Davis. Strangely, Ollie played Doyle Lonnegan, the role he had turned down in the original movie.

  You’d have thought he was on safer ground with Two of a Kind, the film that reunited John Travolta with Olivia Newton John, five years after the smash hit Grease. In this comedy fantasy Ollie has great fun playing the devil as a poncy Englishman with a walrus moustache, and he also developed a major crush on Olivia Newton John. ‘She sent him a Christmas card which he kept for ages,’ reveals Josephine. But the film is dreadful rubbish and proved the last he’d make for any of the main Hollywood studios until Gladiator over fifteen years later. The problem was, Oliver never came to terms with working in America, never quite felt at home there. ‘And he didn’t like his American agents, ICM,’ confirms David. ‘Because they were too po-faced and correct. Ollie was a true Brit.’

  So it was back home to the relative tranquillity of Pinkhurst, where he indulged in a sport he’d first taken up during his last years at Broome Hall: lawn-mower racing. This annual event took place in the nearby village of Wisborough Green in West Sussex. ‘The first year we entered a standard seated lawn mower from the garden,’ says Mark, ‘which was, chug-chug-chug-chug, and we were just overtaken by sixty lawn mowers going at great speed.’ The following year Ollie was determined to return better equipped and to this end roped in a team of racing car mechanics from a local garage to build a special racing mower made out of aluminium. The sport became something of an obsession that he pursued for years, and at considerable expense, getting these souped-up mowers up to speed, building bigger and better ones. Ollie didn’t race them himself, because of his bulk, but instead roped in friends and work pals, including Mark and Bill and Jenny’s son Ian. ‘Ollie was always pit boss,’ says Mark, ‘standing in the pit lane with a bottle of beer with his mates, enjoying it, drawing in the atmosphere of it all. It was very serious and very intense for what it was, and in its way very British, the eccentricity of it.’ There was even a twelve-hour race, a sort of poor man’s Le Mans, in which Ollie entered two machines with three riders for each. The event started on the Saturday night and went through to the Sunday morning, and motor-racing celebrities like Stirling Moss would turn up.

  So seriously did Ollie take the sport that he asked David to make a documentary film of one of the twelve-hour races using a video camera. Scenes included footage of the race and Oliver interviewed in the pit lane. The completed film was shown to anyone and everyone, whether they wanted to see it or not. ‘That lawn-mower video was one of Ollie’s most revered possessions,’ says David.

  One afternoon producer Harry Alan Towers and director Gerry O’Hara paid Ollie a visit at Pinkhurst. They wanted him to play a small role in their adaptation of John Cleland’s eighteenth-century erotic novel Fanny Hill. Ollie’s involvement in th
e project was crucial to getting sales interest and a distribution deal. Even though all of his last few films had flopped, Oliver Reed was still a recognizable name. ‘We had a drink with Ollie and Josephine, who was a very nice girl,’ remembers O’Hara. ‘Then Ollie said to me, “Come on, I’ll take you round the grounds.” So he took me for a walk, we chatted, he was very friendly, very amusing. We went upstairs, he showed me all the bedrooms and everything. We went into the master bedroom and he opened the mullion window and pissed on the flowerbeds outside. I think that was a little demonstration to me about what a wag he was. I didn’t comment, we just kept on talking as if he was blowing his nose.’

  Harry Alan Towers was an old friend of Ollie’s from when they made And Then There Were None together, which had also starred Towers’s wife, Maria Rohm. Maria remembers being introduced to Josephine for the first time on the set of Fanny Hill. ‘We both felt that she had “the right stuff” to stay with Ollie and be as much of an anchor as possible. She was very young, yet she seemed to be the mature one.’

  Ollie wasn’t required on the film very long, in a role that amounted to little more than a cameo. ‘But I must say he turned in a very neat performance,’ says O’Hara. ‘And the one thing I knew about Ollie was, you didn’t direct him, that would have been fatal. If you said, wait a minute, Ollie, could you stop doing that silly thing with your eye?, he would have gone mad. You had to go, OK, so he’s got a funny eye, very good, Ollie, would you mind doing it just once more, it’s so funny?’

  Ollie did seem to have a love-hate relationship with many of his directors, commenting once, ‘If someone starts dictating to me, I just switch off and think about how much they’re paying me. I just phone it in.’ Clearly there were directors whom he admired and respected, but there were others who he thought didn’t know perhaps as much as he did, and that’s when the problems could start and he’d go into misbehave mode. ‘If he thought the director was a tosser he’d probably say it,’ says Mark.

  As a director, John Hough always found Oliver perfectly compliant. If he wanted him to do fifty takes, he’d do it, and he’d do as many or as few as Hough wanted. ‘He was great if you had his respect. I’m sure he’d trample all over you if he didn’t have respect for the director.’ And it was these directors who got into trouble with him or perhaps weren’t strong enough to stand up to his bullish nature. ‘Some directors never got out of Ollie what I knew was there,’ recalls David. ‘And a lot of the blame is Ollie’s. He was wayward, power corrupts, he began to believe in his own image.’ That’s why Winner and Russell were so important and why invariably Oliver performed his best for them. ‘It wasn’t that they were strong,’ says David. ‘But they knew how to cope with him. Most other directors didn’t.’

  The Coke-Can Wedding Ring

  In spite of their age difference Oliver and Josephine behaved like any normal couple. They dined out quite often, even went to the theatre a couple of times, and were regular moviegoers, despite the fact that Oliver was a nightmare to go to the cinema with. He’d sit there saying, ‘The lighting in this film is hopeless.’ He’d complain he could see a shadow or the lighting was too harsh, or it was too this, or too that. ‘We’d walk out of so many films,’ says Josephine. ‘He did have his favourites at home that we’d watch again and again on video. He loved Anthony Hopkins. He enjoyed watching his work, he was a big fan. And The Duellists he absolutely adored.’ Ridley Scott’s debut feature as a director was a film Ollie had been obsessed with for years, as Sarah can testify. ‘We were all bored to tears by The Duellists. That was one of his favourite films. There was a period of about four years where I knew probably every line in that film. He’d say, “Come on, girlie, come and watch this,” and it would be something like four o’clock in the morning.’

  Mostly, though, Ollie and Josephine were homebodies. A perfect evening for Ollie was snuggling up with Josephine on the sofa watching television or a video after a quiet dinner, which they always ate at six o’clock. Or he might just relax and listen to the radio. ‘He loved Radio 4,’ says Josephine. ‘He was passionate about Radio 4.’ For much of his adult life Oliver had terrible trouble sleeping and needed something in the room making a noise, such as the radio, and sometimes very loudly. Jacquie remembers that, rather than walk round and wake him, she would often resort to crawling under the bed to turn down the volume. With Josephine his sleeping disorder persisted. The cause was diagnosed as tinnitus, or ringing in the ear, which Oliver claimed was due to being too close to loud sound-effect bangs on film sets. The radio would be tuned to Radio 4 all night and when they were abroad it was the World Service. If they were filming in a country where the World Service was not available they’d put the television on and cover the screen with a towel. Much later Oliver started taking audiobooks with him to play through the night.

  As for television, it was mainly documentaries and sport he watched, primarily rugby, cricket and horse-racing. He loved his gardening programmes, of course. ‘Also One Man and His Dog,’ remembers Josephine. ‘He was really into that show. And Come Dancing. We used to watch that.’ One of the most popular programmes on television in the mid-eighties was In at the Deep End. It was a simple format: each week two presenters, Chris Searle and Paul Heiney, undertook various professional jobs as complete beginners, maybe ballroom dancing or becoming a chef at a top London brasserie. The show’s producer had come up with a brilliant idea for Heiney’s next challenge, playing a movie baddie. ‘Our producer was very good at finding people to act as your mentor and adviser,’ recalls Heiney. ‘And because Ollie was the most famous bad man on the screen at that time they persuaded him to give me a lesson in how to play a screen baddie.’ It was an experience Heiney has never forgotten.

  Not just Heiney but the whole TV crew were nervous about meeting Oliver. When they arrived at the allotted time outside Pinkhurst and knocked on the front door, there was an ominously long silence. Perhaps he’d forgotten. They knocked again. This time the door opened very, very slowly and an eye appeared, and then the door closed again. It then reopened and Ollie revealed himself. ‘He was wearing a heavy army overcoat,’ says Heiney. ‘Like the ones the Russian army wear, and he said there was nothing underneath. I had no reason to disbelieve him. He was wearing a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles; one of the lenses was cracked. He had a sort of look of death about him, although I’m sure that was put on, and he had in his fist a pint mug with this clear, colourless liquid in it which he said was vodka and tonic, and I’ve got no reason to doubt that, either. Clearly he’d decided from the outset that he was going to play the bad man every inch of the way. Come in, sit down, shut up, don’t sit there, all that kind of stuff, and he was clearly enjoying it. And I wasn’t enjoying it.’

  The advice Ollie gives in this interview is like a master class in how to play a villain on film. His big thing was not to blink: bad men do not blink. ‘You don’t see a cobra blink, do you?’ he says. The next thing was the voice. Villains don’t shout, they don’t need to. Dangerous men have a great silence and stillness about them. ‘Then when he told me to do my villainous foreign accent he took the piss out of me mercilessly.’ Tension seemed to be building, until, exasperated at Heiney’s feeble line readings, Ollie put down the script, got up and bodily threw the presenter out of the house. ‘Piss off!’ he yelled as Heiney was unceremoniously deposited on the driveway and the door slammed in his face. ‘Now, he clearly planned on doing that. And I remember at the time being really quite scared. Then once the interview was all over he was a completely different man. He was a really nice guy. It was, come on in, have a drink, how are you?’

  The team stayed on for maybe an hour or two, during which time Heiney was taken to a room at the back of the house by either a cleaner or the housekeeper. ‘This is the games room,’ he was told. ‘Do you know what that means?’ Heiney didn’t have the first idea. ‘It all happens here,’ came the reply. It was now that the presenter noticed a bar in the corner, and was told, ‘What happens is that Oll
ie gets all his mates in here and they drink and they drink and they drink and they drink, and then they smash up all the furniture. Then we come in the next morning and clear it all out and buy some more furniture and then a week later it happens all over again.’ That was the games room.

  Looking back, the most disturbing aspect of the whole day for Heiney was the sight of Josephine, who sat on the periphery the whole time, observing but not participating in any way in what was going on. ‘She looked like a rather nervous creature, like a cat afraid that the dog might go for it. She just sat there all the time at the very back of the room and never moved and never said anything, just sat there completely silently and watched everything. It looked a very strange set-up.’

  As a rule Ollie disliked doing publicity. He understood his responsibilities when it came to publicizing a new movie, but premieres and large press junkets left him cold. Some were obviously more bearable than others. Take the occasion in the summer of 1985 when he was asked to take part in a three-day press jamboree on the cruise ship the Achille Lauro, a vessel that just a few months later made headlines around the world when she was hijacked by members of the Palestine Liberation Front. The terrorists had obviously waited until Ollie was safely no longer aboard. Scores of journalists and film critics had been invited to watch and then interview members of the cast of a new, Italian-made epic TV mini-series on the life of Christopher Columbus. Gabriel Byrne starred as the famous explorer, while Ollie played Martin Pinzon, who sailed with Columbus on his first voyage to the new world as captain of one of his ships.