What Fresh Lunacy is This?

by Robert Sellers

  Adequately told, the drama featured a top-notch supporting cast of Max Von Sydow, Faye Dunaway and Eli Wallach. In a small role was Murray Melvin, who hadn’t seen Ollie since his antics in Budapest on The Prince and the Pauper. Everyone was flown to Naples, where the Achille Lauro was docked.

  Murray remembers Ollie turning up at nine a.m., already on the vodkas. Once aboard they set sail, with the ship merely steaming round in a very large circle for the entire three days. The press were on board all the time and so the actors had breakfast, lunch and dinner at the same table, talking with different media people. And the drink flowed. Like a limpet mine, Ollie attached himself to Murray. ‘I used to have to pour my gin and tonics into a plant pot because there was no way I could keep up. Ollie was a big lad, so he absorbed more. I was a matchstick. So after the evening meal it was, “Right, come on, Murray, to the bar.” I’d say, “Oh, Ollie, no. Listen, I need an early night.” “Don’t be ridiculous, come to the bar.” So I was in the bar and I’d pour my drinks away when he wasn’t looking, but then he’d see my empty glass and go, “Another gin and tonic for Murray.” There wasn’t a way out. So then I used to try and sip it slowly and of course Ollie would roar, “Drink the bloody thing, Murray!” Two nights I was with him.’

  One particular night a group of Italians had gathered round a piano to sing songs, and Murray thought it all rather enchanting. ‘Oh, Ollie, let’s go over and join them.’

  ‘Italians – don’t want to go anywhere near them.’

  ‘Ollie, listen, they’re just having a nice time.’

  As the clock struck one a.m., Ollie downed another vodka and bang, he was past the point of no return, his face screwed up in pain and confusion. ‘Fucking Italians, look at ’em.’ He started to make his move.

  ‘Ollie, no, Ollie, you really mustn’t, Ollie, no, you cannot,’ screeched Murray.

  ‘Why not? They need a jolly good punch.’

  ‘No, Ollie, please don’t.’ All the time Murray was straining to hold him back.

  ‘Why?’ asked Ollie.

  ‘Because you’re Brown Owl,’ said Murray.

  ‘What do you mean, I’m Brown Owl?’

  ‘You’re the head of the English contingent, you’re Brown Owl.’ Oliver started to laugh and ordered another vodka. ‘And that’s how I did it,’ says Murray proudly. ‘All the time I kept saying, “Ollie, you cannot, you’re here representing ENGLAND. You’re representing the Queen.” And of course he was very patriotic, very “raising the flag”. And this went on till something like half past two every night, and I’m starting to flag, and you had to be up next morning for interviews, but I had to wait for him to go, “I can’t stand this any more, I’m off to bed.” And I’d go, “All right, Ollie, I’ll see you at breakfast, love. Have a good sleep.” I’d get back to my cabin and think, I’ve got another night of this. But I did it, because it would have caused a diplomatic incident, a scandal beyond belief.’

  As for Josephine, who was there for the entire trip, Murray found her no help whatsoever. ‘She would sit quietly while he was tipping tables in restaurants. She just sat quietly until he said, “Come on, let’s go.” It was quite extraordinary, she never said, “Ollie, darling, don’t,” as most women would have done, but not Josephine, not a word. None of us understood it. I always equated it to, sort of, like the gangster’s moll, who just sat there quietly, because sometimes you did think, Josephine, come on, say something.’

  To be fair, Josephine was by nature a fairly tolerant, quiet person, and when it just got too rowdy, or Ollie’s drinking friends came and things got out of hand, she’d simply take herself out of the situation and go somewhere else. ‘I didn’t shout, pout, stamp, or berate him. What was the point? This was a man who had been doing this all his life. Who was I to suddenly say, don’t? And he did say, right from the outset, that’s the way he was. I always said I never wanted to change him. You fall in love with somebody. What’s then the point of changing that, because then you end up with someone else. So I would just sit quietly in the corner if it was just generally exploding.’ Ollie also reassured her that if he said something untoward he generally didn’t mean it, and if he behaved badly he wanted her to know that wasn’t really his true personality and that things generally looked better in the morning, which invariably they did. It was also one of the reasons why he’d put on hold any thoughts of marrying Josephine until they’d been together for five years, ‘Because by then I think you’ll know me well enough.’ Those five years were now up.

  Not long after they first met, Oliver put a ring pull from a Coke can on Josephine’s finger. It was meant as a joke but she wore it for quite some time, and kept it as a memento for years afterwards. When the couple were having dinner with David and Muriel at Pinkhurst one evening, Muriel suddenly blurted out that really it was about time the two of them tied the knot. Oliver looked over at Josephine and she looked at him. ‘Yeah, shall we?’ he said. ‘All right,’ replied Josephine. ‘We’ll get married this year then.’ She was twenty-one.

  The wedding took place on Saturday, 7 September 1985 at the register office in Epsom. The couple tried to keep it quiet, with only family members and close friends aware that anything was happening. It was poor Peter, Ollie’s dad, who let the cat out of the bag by mistake. Phoned up by a reporter asking if the ceremony was at such and such a venue, he replied, ‘Oh no, it’s at nine o’clock in Epsom. Oops!’ Realizing what he’d done, Peter phoned Ollie to apologize. ‘So the press were there,’ says Josephine. ‘I remember having to drag my brother through the melee to get in.’

  They quickly forgave Peter, and Josephine’s memories of him are of a ‘lovely, sweet, old-fashioned gentleman’. She also met Oliver’s mother for the first time at that wedding, one of only two meetings she ever had with her. Just before the ceremony was about to begin, Marcia came over to where Josephine was standing and said, ‘So, you’re the one marrying Oliver.’

  The event passed off without a hitch, much to the disappointment of the press no doubt. As did Oliver’s stag party, held at home in a marquee and catered by the local pub. ‘I was at the other end of the house watching a film,’ Josephine remembers. ‘When I went upstairs to bed he was already there, having quietly snuck off and left the others to “party on”.’ Ollie was appearing at the time in a film called Captive, a hostage drama, and was due back on location at London’s Albert Docks on the Monday. ‘So he was well behaved,’ says Josephine. ‘He didn’t go crazy over the wedding period and we had a lovely day. It was fantastic.’ She always loved to lay claim to the fact that she must be one of the only people ever to spend her honeymoon at the Albert Docks.

  Oliver’s previous important relationships, with Kate and then Jacquie, had produced children, and now he was married he felt a strong desire to begin raising a family with Josephine. ‘I remember us arguing about where they’d go to school before we’d even had any,’ says Josephine. ‘Which we then actually burst out laughing about.’ Oliver was full of hope and expectation about having children, talking about it with almost everyone. ‘He’d announce it in supermarkets,’ says David. ‘He’d be stroking babies’ heads and saying, “Well, of course we’re going to have a baby. We’re going to call it Barty.” Of course, that was never to happen.’

  Perhaps Oliver felt duty bound to give Josephine a child because of her young age, and when it became obvious they couldn’t have one (the problem lay with Oliver, not Josephine), the guilt kicked in and it was he who kept insisting they have tests, refused by Josephine, and later that they should think about adoption, again an idea she rejected. ‘I had it in the back of my mind that, for us to work and to carry on, I don’t think necessarily a child was going to be a good thing. He might have been briefly troubled by this, but then it passed and we were fine. But he loved babies. He spent hours on aeroplanes entertaining babies, especially when he had a big moustache and these little kids would peer back at him and he’d be wiggling his moustache and pulling funny expressions.’
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br />   Once when Paul and Nora Friday were visiting Pinkhurst, Oliver turned to their daughter Louise, who was three or four at the time, and said, ‘Have you seen the winter dragon?’ Louise looked puzzled. ‘Dragon?’ she replied. ‘Yes,’ went Ollie. ‘A winter dragon. You’ve not seen the winter dragon?’ Louise shook her head. ‘Come on then,’ said Ollie, grabbing her hand as they all trudged into the woods, ‘I’ll show you the winter dragon.’ Secretly he had got Bill Dobson to hide behind a tree with a large pile of leaves doused in petrol. ‘It’s over there!’ Ollie shrieked. With that, Bill lit a match and, whoosh, a huge flame shot out. Louise looked wide-eyed at her father and mouthed, ‘No way,’ then turned round, and ran back to the house. ‘And Louise believed in dragons till she was fourteen,’ says Paul. ‘Because she’d seen one! That’s the sort of imagination Oliver had.’

  Ollie also adored his two nieces, and loved playing with them whenever he visited David and Muriel, which sometimes could be late at night, when he was in a dishevelled state. ‘When our girls were very little he used to go up and terrify them and they’d wet their beds for the next three nights,’ claims Muriel. But then he’d leave money on the stairs for them to collect in the morning. ‘Despite those experiences they all adored him,’ says David. ‘Oliver loved children. He just didn’t know how to cope with them.’

  Castaway

  Of all the roles he would play in his career, many people have commented upon the fact that Gerald Kingsland in Castaway was perhaps the closest to the real Oliver Reed. ‘He is a bit of an eccentric and so am I,’ revealed Ollie. ‘He will do things – not always completely sane – on an impulse and so will I.’ The whole ideology of Kingsland’s approach to life, going off to a desert island with a very pretty girl who’s going to take her clothes off, to live on coconuts and fish, was certainly something Ollie found appealing. And it’s no surprise to learn that he was the first and really the only candidate to play Kingsland. The script, too, was almost certainly the best Oliver had read for a very long time. Put simply, Castaway was an oasis in the middle of a degenerating run of poor films and poor choices.

  Directed by Nicolas Roeg, who’d made such acclaimed films as Performance and Don’t Look Now, Castaway was based on true events. Kingsland was a journalist who advertised for a woman to spend a year with him on a deserted tropical island. Lucy Irvine, almost twenty years Kingsland’s junior, answered the ad and what should have been an idyll turned into a nightmare.

  Ollie took to the role of Gerald wholeheartedly and wore his skin like his own. ‘It wasn’t often that he’d become a character from one of his films,’ reveals Josephine. ‘But he was unfortunately a bit of a Gerald for quite a while.’ Filming began in London and Oliver had his beard and hair dyed an unflattering ginger, which Josephine found ghastly. The process took place in a make-up van parked in Hanover Square just before his first scene and, according to associate producer Selwyn Roberts, Ollie insisted they also dye his pubic hair. ‘The next second Oliver is running around this incredibly exclusive square stark naked, apart from a plastic bag over his cock, shouting, “Look at that!”’

  The film’s main location was Praslin, the second largest of the Seychelles Islands, and Selwyn Roberts had gone on ahead of the cast and crew to sort out the logistics. He also went to pick up Oliver when he arrived at Seychelles International airport. ‘The plane arrived, the door opened, and guess who fell down the stairs first. Yep, Oliver. And of course he also played the game of coming in on the baggage conveyor belt, he did that one as well, and everyone was looking at him and going, “Look, it’s Oliver Reed”, which he liked.’

  Cast as Lucy Irvine was newcomer Amanda Donohoe, who faced not only the daunting task of playing a demanding role in her first film, but having to cope with an often volatile and unpredictable co-star. ‘I don’t think that anybody understood the state that Oliver was in when he came to do Castaway,’ she later said. ‘Although everybody understood that he drank, nobody knew quite how much. There was this dichotomy. There was this incredibly sweet, charming, sensitive man . . . and the next minute he’d be calling you a bitch.’ Strained would be the best way to describe their relationship. As in the past with the likes of Glenda, Redgrave and Rigg, Ollie couldn’t get to grips with a strong-willed and independent actress who refused to take any shit from him. Mark was to say, diplomatically, that his father and Amanda ‘were not each other’s favourite cups of tea’. In playful mood, Oliver summed her up as ‘A very pretty girl. Great breasts. But it was definitely a look-don’t-touch situation. There was absolutely no way that I would have dared put my mighty mallet anywhere near her bush of content and pumped away. Completely out of the question.’

  Nor did the hot and humid conditions help. An amazing experience, to be sure, but Castaway was a tough film to make. Ollie was often up early to put on make-up for the shots where his body was covered in scabs, which at the end of the day Josephine spent hours taking off as Ollie fell asleep from sheer exhaustion. At least there was a familiar face among the cast in Georgina Hale, who when she arrived at the island’s hotel found a wonderful note welcoming her from Oliver. ‘He’d also drawn a duck on it because an old boyfriend of mine used to call me Ducky. I thought that was so sweet of him. I’ve still got it.’

  Georgina had never met Josephine before and came away with the impression that, despite her being very quiet, always reading and keeping herself to herself, it was obvious that she was devoted to Oliver. ‘I just think they adored one another. Nobody thought that it would last but it did. And I think it’s because even though she was young she was just incredibly mature for her age, and she loved him and he loved her.’ As for Ollie, Georgina was more than a little concerned because the drinking had noticeably increased since the last time they’d met. ‘He was drunk most of the time on Castaway, to my knowledge. But still highly professional.’

  It was the sheer volume of Oliver’s drinking that drew concern from many on the crew and his unruly behaviour that alienated others. The director of photography, Harvey Harrison, disliked Ollie so intensely that he had it virtually written into his contract that in no way was he ever obliged to socialize with him. And producer Rick McCallum’s assistant on the film came to loathe Oliver because of his habit of dropping his trousers in front of her to reveal the old mighty mallet. ‘One day she was in the hotel having something to eat,’ reveals Selwyn Roberts, ‘when Oliver put his cock on her shoulder and without even flinching she stabbed it with her fork. I tell you, he never did it again.’

  Ollie seemed to be drinking every day. His routine was to take with him a case of SeyBrew, the local lager, which he would steadily drink through the morning and the afternoon. That was twenty-four bottles and it was quite strong stuff. ‘I used to see him sometimes going to the set and he would be as drunk as a skunk,’ says Roberts. ‘He would then be put into make-up and then when he walked on to the floor he was absolutely bang sober.’ Often Amanda Donohoe found it difficult playing scenes opposite Oliver because even though he was delivering the goods there was still a reek of alcohol. She remembers staring at him at times like this and thinking to herself, what could you be if you didn’t have this terrible disease? At one point in production Ollie caught a fever from scraping against coral, as did many others. It was easily treated with antibiotics but the doctor who saw him told the producers, ‘Oliver’s got more alcohol in his blood than blood!’

  The drinking, of course, would continue in the evening after work, to the point where the crew couldn’t take any more and so used to meet up at a secret rendezvous as far away from Oliver as possible. More often than not he’d find them, barging through the door, usually with Reg, yelling, ‘Ya bastards!’ He’d always know exactly what everybody drank ‘and he’d never buy you a single,’ says Roberts. ‘It would always be a double. And he wouldn’t let any of the crew leave. He used to catch us – gotcha! – if we were heading out of the door.’

  This lasted ten weeks and Ollie’s behaviour could get so wild i
t beggared belief, like the time he was so drunk that he attacked an aeroplane. His hotel was close to the island’s airport, in reality just a landing strip, and this two-seater job was coming in to land when Ollie charged it and the pilot had to fly over him. Roberts and even Nic Roeg tried to persuade Josephine to talk to Oliver about his drinking, but it was useless. ‘You couldn’t stop him,’ says Roberts. ‘And nobody ever made the effort to confront him about it because it was impossible, and what’s more he wouldn’t listen to you. And yet he delivered a terrific performance. The great shame about the guy was that Oliver Reed having a beer was very nice, charming and rational and funny, but after one drink too many this rather unpleasant snarling beast appeared. He truly was like the wolf man. And it wasn’t at that stage violent, it was just, the guy had gone, he was different, and you didn’t want to be in his company for that much longer.’

  It’s no surprise to learn that Roberts was grateful when filming came to an end and he and Rick McCallum deposited Ollie at the airport to fly him home. ‘My last ever image of Oliver Reed is going up the steps of the plane, turning to Rick and me and saluting. He got in the plane and away it flew and Rick and I looked at each other and went, thank God for that.’

  Towards the end of their time together on Praslin, Ollie and Reg, along with a few friends, were enjoying a meal at a seafront restaurant. As always with these two, there was a lot of banter, copious amounts of drinking, and play-fighting going on. Nobody quite saw what happened next, but Reg ended up falling off a jetty, landing awkwardly fifteen feet below on a coral beach. Was this the result of a disastrous prank that had gone wrong? ‘They would have these friendly scuffles where Ollie would think that he was the stronger,’ says David Ball. ‘But Reg would put him away every time. And I do believe that’s what led to Reg’s accident.’