What Fresh Lunacy is This?

by Robert Sellers

  He was rather less thrilled with having to kiss Ollie full on the lips in one scene. Although he has long since forgotten the plot relevance behind the kiss, he still shudders at the memory of it. ‘I had to kiss Oliver Reed five times, I was counting. After we wrapped I was heading to my car when somebody yelled, “Hair in the gate.” In the days of shooting on film you used to get hairs in the gate, but that very seldom ever happened, so I didn’t even stop walking because I knew it was a joke, it had to be a joke, this would not be the shot where there would be a hair in the gate and I’d have to go kiss Oliver Reed’s wet moustache again. It was not a joke – it was not a friggin’ joke! I had to go back and kiss the guy two more times. Actually the fact he drank so much was the reassuring part of kissing him because I’m sure there was no bacteria in his mouth. But it was definitely an act of endurance.’

  The film was shot on location in Corfu, with the cast and crew staying at the Hilton, and one afternoon Mastorakis met Ollie in the lobby. He’d obviously been drinking and started complaining that he wasn’t being put to work enough. Mastorakis reminded him that they were fully on schedule. Ollie nutted him. ‘Fortunately I wasn’t seriously injured,’ says Mastorakis. ‘I went straight to my room but he followed me and started banging on the door.’ Unable to get in, Ollie called security and told them that the man inside was a friend who was about to commit suicide. For an inebriated man, that was quite a ruse. In the end Mastorakis talked to security and Oliver was politely removed. ‘The very next day he came to the set and was warm, polite and disciplined as if nothing had happened.’ Mastorakis empathized with Oliver, as he considered him to be ‘a sick man. Even today I don’t know if I ever liked or hated him. He was a split personality, really: one personality I hated for the problems and delays he created, another personality (sense of humour, fun) I liked. But I did chew razor blades working with him and never wanted to see him again after he left the movie.’

  Oliver saved his best for the very last day of the shoot. He’d met a wealthy couple staying at the hotel and the three of them had indulged in a very late breakfast, consuming nine bottles of champagne by noon. And Oliver’s set call was noon. Somehow they managed to get him out of the lobby and into a car and on to the set, which was some kind of old fort. ‘They got him into wardrobe,’ recalls Thompson. ‘But the wardrobe lady had a pretty hard time getting his pants on because he kept pulling out his penis, which he was fond of calling his chopper, and showing her his tattoo.’ Finally they managed to get him into costume. Oliver was playing the dictator of a fictitious country. This was the final climactic shot of the movie and all he needed to do was stand in the middle of a courtyard, surrounded by rebel soldiers, and drop his gun. That was all he needed to do. ‘So finally he’s on the set,’ says Thompson. ‘Its been quite a delay, the director is furious. All Oliver has to do is drop his gun. We’ve got two helicopters in the air, we’ve got fifty rebels surrounding him. So the cameras start rolling and Oliver’s kind of staggering in the middle of this courtyard, and he unzips his pants and pulls out his chopper. Niko goes nuts: “Cut! Cut!” And everybody’s in shock, including myself. Oliver walks off the set and like an oasis in this moment of confusion he makes eye contact with me and comes charging over and throws his arm around me and says, “Brian, that stupid director wanted me to drop my gun, but you know, the rebels, if I’d dropped my gun they would have killed me. So instead I wanted them to think that I was crazy and that is why I pulled out my chopper.” Then somebody escorted him into the back of a car and closed the door, and that was the last we saw of Oliver Reed.’

  Obviously in his befuddled mind the film had become very real for Oliver. ‘But that is part of what made him such a dynamic actor,’ believes Thompson. ‘That he could just drop into the reality of the script.’

  Next Ollie flew to Italy for a new version of the classic Edgar Allan Poe story The Pit and the Pendulum. Director Stuart Gordon, who a few years earlier had achieved notoriety with the gross-out horror film Re-Animator, had been a fan of Ollie’s ever since The Curse of the Werewolf and cast him in the small but crucial role of a cardinal from the Vatican with orders to shut down the bloody Spanish Inquisition. Of course, Gordon had heard stories that Ollie could be difficult, but nothing prepared him for the phone call he now received after the star’s arrival at the film’s location, a castle in Umbria. ‘Oliver had told Tunny, the cook and caretaker of Castello Giove, that he wanted every bottle of wine in the castle to be lined up before him on the enormous banquet table. Tunny thought he was joking, but was soon convinced Reed was not, and so Tunny and his wife Julia had done as they were told. Reed then proceeded to drink bottle after bottle, becoming so inebriated that he began chasing Julia around the table, causing Tunny to lock his wife in their apartment to protect her from being ravaged by this madman who at over 230 pounds was quite a formidable presence.’

  When Gordon arrived, Ollie loudly invited him to join the celebration. ‘How could I refuse? By this time Oliver was so drunk that he could no longer even get up to pee, so he grabbed an empty bottle and whipped out his dick and pissed into it while still sitting at the table. Before he put it back in his pants he showed us his tattoo.’

  The star of the film was Lance Henriksen, who had been employing the Method in playing his role of inquisitor supreme Torquemada. According to historical testimony, this Dominican friar drank only water and ate only stale bread, so this had been Henriksen’s diet since the beginning of shooting. ‘But the presence of the wild Oliver caused him to join the party and drink for the first time in weeks,’ remembers Gordon. ‘Oliver took him out on the town and soon Lance was unconscious on the floor. “Can’t hold his liquor,” Reed said dismissively and again whipped out his dick. I was afraid he was about to piss on his co-star but Josephine handed him another bottle and he quickly filled it.’

  The following morning Gordon showed up on the set and nervously asked an assistant if Mr Reed had shown up yet. Indeed he had, Gordon found him in his dressing room already in costume and make-up, totally sober. As for Henriksen, he later stumbled on to the set with a massive hangover. Their scene involved drinking Amontillado wine in a nod to another story by Poe, and Gordon had procured a cask of real Italian white wine, but after a couple of takes Ollie asked for coloured water instead, saying that if he had another glass he wouldn’t be able to remember his lines. ‘So I discovered that Oliver Reed was a consummate professional,’ says Gordon. ‘Doing what he wanted – raising hell – on his own time but ready to get the job done, and done magnificently, when on yours.’ Gordon was also never to forget another evening, this one much quieter, when he sat with Oliver in front of the castle’s enormous fireplace and listened as he recited poetry by Lord Byron. ‘It was the most beautiful recitation I have ever heard.’

  Ollie was required on the film for only a few days. ‘After he had left,’ recalls Gordon, ‘we discovered the hard way that he had left his urine-filled bottles in the refrigerator. No one drank white wine again.’

  ‘I’ll Put My Plonker on the Table If You Don’t Give Me My Mushy Peas.’

  Early in 1991, at the height of the first Gulf War, Channel 4 decided that it would be a great idea to invite Oliver on to its high-brow and critically lauded live discussion programme After Dark, which had been running on and off for several years. The format was simple and effective, assembling a group of experts to debate in depth a particular topic. The 28 January edition was entitled ‘Do Men Have To Be Violent?’ and questioned militarism, masculine stereotypes and violence to women. For those who stayed up late to watch the ensuing mayhem, it was a spectacle they’d not easily forget.

  Over the years many myths have grown up about this programme, principally that Ollie was brought on deliberately to cause chaos and be obnoxious, which of course he ended up doing in grand style. Don Coutts directed just about every episode of After Dark, including this one, and remains adamant that Oliver was a legitimate guest. ‘I think he was there primarily because he
played the stereotype of the male, the drinking and the womanizing male, but underneath all that there was knowledge about his fears about his father, who had been a conscientious objector. I think he had a very vulnerable side and a very soft side.’

  Of course, After Dark was a highly provocative show that didn’t pull its punches and certainly there was a sense that having Oliver on might be a little bit wild. ‘Because you can’t control what goes on, you can get that frisson,’ says Coutts. ‘I mean, inviting the feminist writer Kate Millet on with Oliver Reed was quite a contentious booking. And it worked.’

  Then there was the drinks cabinet, fully loaded with bottles of wine and liquor that Ollie made predictable full use of. ‘One of the things about After Dark was that everybody could drink,’ says Coutts. ‘It wasn’t a case of, let’s get Ollie pissed and he’ll make a fool of himself. If people wanted to drink or smoke it acted as a great relaxant and worked really well until obviously Ollie couldn’t resist drinking more than he should have.’

  According to Coutts, Oliver arrived at the studio sober and feeling quite nervous. And you can’t blame him: a man who had been self-conscious about his intellectual capabilities his whole adult life was about to go on a live television debate with academics, historians and professors. He was incredibly brave to accept the invitation. Then it began and it didn’t take long for the programme makers’ hope that Ollie would ‘liven things up’ to prove horribly accurate. Drinking wine from a pint glass, he became increasingly aggressive and incoherent and lashed out at his fellow guests, who clearly looked intimidated. Sitting next to Kate Millet, who on at least one occasion he called ‘Big Tits’, Ollie asked the host, ‘Is it after midnight yet? It is, good. Well, a woman’s role in society depends on whether or not she wants to get shafted.’ This didn’t go down very well with Ms Millet, nor did Ollie’s assertion that ‘I’ve had more punch-ups in pubs than you’ve had hot dinners, darling.’

  If anything, Ollie’s behaviour got steadily worse, much to the delight of viewers and the discomfort of his fellow guests, such as when he curtly dismissed an eminent anthropologist by saying, ‘What do you know, sitting there covered in dandruff?’ In the control room Coutts and his staff watched with a mounting mixture of mirth and incredulity. They could do nothing. One of the show’s unwritten rules was never to interfere. It took someone else to take the initiative. The phone suddenly rang in the control room: it was Michael Grade, head of the station, demanding the show be taken off the air immediately. Coutts refused to stop directing. When the commissioning editor repeated Grade’s demand to pull the plug, Coutts told him to fuck off.

  In the green room nearby, David, who’d driven his brother to the studio, was watching a transmission monitor showing what was going out live to the nation when it suddenly went blank. All the other monitors had the show still running, but David knew the thing had been taken off air. ‘What on earth’s going on?’ he demanded to know. One of the producers reassured him the show was still on. ‘No it’s not,’ said David, pointing to the transmission monitor, which was now running a film about British coal mining in the fifties. Goodness knows what the folk watching at home were thinking.

  Back in the control room, Coutts was livid that he had been overruled when somebody mentioned the fact that Michael Grade was currently not in the country. It was a hoax call. ‘And no one had taken any kind of proper look into it,’ he says. ‘So we came back on air and the guests didn’t realize that we’d been off them for something like twenty minutes.’ In the interim things hadn’t changed much, unless it was that Ollie was in an even worse state. After going off to the toilet he came back stumbling through the dark, ran on to the set, and did a leap over the settee into the middle of Kate Millet and kissed her on the cheek, quite aggressively, and you could audibly hear everyone gasp.

  Finally stirring his loins, one of the guests suggested to Oliver that he really should go. Then somebody else said it. Ollie took his chastisement like a guilty schoolboy. ‘Do you want me to leave?’ He asked. ‘Yes, yes,’ was the chorus from everyone else. Standing up, he apologized gracefully and slouched off. ‘The group were terribly proud of themselves that they’d got rid of Ollie,’ says Coutts. ‘Because Ollie had taken centre stage a lot and they weren’t being very assertive and it was amazing watching the group suddenly having the confidence to throw him off. They suddenly felt empowered.’

  Ollie didn’t leave immediately, but stood beside one of the cameramen for about fifteen minutes watching the debate continue, before bursting into the control room shouting, ‘Kissed the bull dyke and they threw me off. Get me a taxi, I’m going clubbing.’ Coutts thinks he went off to the Groucho Club in Soho. ‘It was just very funny. I laughed for days after. In a funny way he did what they wanted him to do.’ And that’s exactly the point, but was Ollie deliberately making mischief here or was he just pissed out of his box? It was now difficult to tell: one had become so indistinguishable from the other. Whatever the truth, Channel 4 received a record number of complaints and the tabloids had a field day. Critics were divided. One wrote that it called to mind ‘a carriage full of people on a train, reading their papers and chatting amongst themselves, while a drunken loony raves away in the corner . . . superbly entertaining, nail-biting adult television.’ Others derided Channel 4 for its mock outrage at the actor’s grotesquerie. ‘It’s just like asking Dennis the Menace to a little girl’s birthday party and then throwing up your hands in horror when he jumps on the cake.’

  If such a thing were possible, Ollie’s appearance on After Dark eclipsed even his Stone Age-man rendition of ‘Wild Thing’ on Aspel & Company and sundry other chat show high jinks. Over the years these had been watched, nay endured, by his immediate family. ‘And looking back, a few of them do make me cringe,’ admits Sarah. ‘Because it’s, you were better than that.’ There was now a very real feeling that Ollie was being exploited, made to dance like a monkey in a cage. ‘What do you do if you want to create good telly?’ argues Mark. ‘You put him in the green room for far too long, you put him up against academics and feminists and you drop him in there with a trolley full of booze and then ask him a very bright question; he doesn’t even know where he is. A lot of the people behind those programmes suddenly go, oh, isn’t that terrible? Look what happened. Well, actually you instigated it, you made it, you put all the components there for the fireworks and when you get the fireworks you go, oh, we didn’t expect that to happen.’

  Oliver’s nearest and dearest had thus far kept their own counsel, never admonishing their famous relative either publicly or in private. The mood in the family had now changed, for his behaviour had become unacceptable and embarrassing, and it was ruining his career and tarnishing his reputation. Simon remembers watching Ollie’s After Dark antics literally from behind the sofa. ‘Like a kid watching a horror film, I was trying not to look, but not being able to stop myself. Half of me was laughing, half of me dreading what was coming next. Of course, Ollie didn’t give a sod.’

  After much thought on what to do and how to make their feelings known, his closest relatives wrote a letter to Oliver along the lines of, ‘You’ve got to stop this because it’s going to affect your career, and it’s affecting the people around you, you’re causing a lot of damage. Please understand this is done in love.’ Simon, David, Ollie’s father Peter, and Oliver’s aunt Juliet, for whom he had always had a soft spot, all put their signature to it. ‘And it was quite a shock to him,’ recalls David. ‘Because it came from the closest people to him, within the family. And he didn’t like it because we said things like, the reason you’re on Guernsey is because you’re hardly allowed anywhere in England. We laid it on a bit thick. But it had an element of truth to it because there were so many pubs that had banned him because of his outrageous behaviour. And that’s the only time I can remember the family ever getting together and dealing with the situation. Before that he was so successful you couldn’t say anything and just had to admire him for what he’d done. And
we were very proud.’

  Sarah confirms that the letter deeply upset her father. ‘He was very hurt by it. He didn’t see himself as a bad guy, he just saw himself as wanting to have fun, and he didn’t see what was wrong about having fun.’

  As Ollie liked to remind people, he discovered very early on that the best way to get flames to rise is by poking the fire. Consequently the room warms up. And Ollie happened to prefer a warm room to a cold room. ‘So, if I find the embers dying down, I’ll act like a good boy scout and give the fire a good poke. I simply refused to grow up. And it’s too fucking late to start now.’

  A New Homeland

  By the end of 1991 Oliver’s career was in a perilous state. Whereas before David had managed to persuade some producers to take a gamble on his client, mostly in inferior product, his hell-raising reputation was now so firmly entrenched in everyone’s consciousness that the work had completely dried up. Oliver wouldn’t make another feature film for four years. As for David, he was having to sell insurance policies to compensate for the lack of income now that ‘Ollie’s career had virtually come to an end.’ After over twenty years as his brother’s manager David was left with no other decision but to quit.