What Fresh Lunacy is This?

by Robert Sellers

  Then there was a trip to the hospital, because the authorities required a second person to identify the body. Brother and sister stood outside the mortuary door debating whether or not they should go inside, then William went in alone. Coming back out, he shook his head and said, ‘I wouldn’t.’ For Sarah, the decision had been made. ‘I don’t think I wanted to go in anyway. He was so vibrant that to see him like that was not the right way.’ Afterwards both made a plea to the hospital authorities to dispense with a post-mortem since it was obvious he’d died of a heart attack. ‘We didn’t want him interfered with in a foreign land,’ says Mark. ‘It was a sprawling hospital with people outside smoking fags, it was just really quite horrid.’ But for the hospital to have dealt with this request would have caused a further week’s delay, so the post-mortem was carried out, since everyone felt the need to get Ollie back home as quickly as possible.

  Given this aim, the Reed family will be for ever beholden to the film company, who behaved with remarkable compassion and kindness. ‘They were incredible,’ says Josephine. ‘They looked after everything and told me not to worry about a thing. They were amazing.’ In Hollywood, when news broke of Ollie’s death, Steven Spielberg, whose DreamWorks was behind Gladiator, sent an assistant to Malta to help smooth things over and sort out any problems. Some of the cast also helped, doing simple things like taking the family out to dinner, and Mark found a strange bond developing with Joaquin Phoenix. ‘There were a few people on the set that instantly identified with my father, and one of them was Joaquin: he just instantly identified with and related to him. Obviously Joaquin had been through his own challenges with his own family.’

  It was people like Joaquin Phoenix who helped Mark get through what he describes as ‘a weird, empty, hollow time’. Having to go and see the British consulate and collect his dad’s passport and have the corner of it chopped off, picking up his few belongings, and being whisked back to the hotel, driving in through back entrances to avoid the press, using service lifts. ‘My memories of it were just remarkably sad and horrid and just wanting to get out of there.’

  After a couple of days a flight was arranged for the family to take Ollie back to Ireland. Everyone had just sat down in the plane when they realized they had company: the entire British press contingent had booked the same flight. ‘And there we were,’ says Josephine, ‘laughing hysterically and blubbing the next, emotionally all over the place. But they didn’t write a dickie bird, and they didn’t print any pictures when we left Malta. So, as grotty as the press boys can be, I think some of them had a soft spot for Ollie.’

  From Cork airport the family drove thirty-six miles by hearse to the town of Buttevant, not far from Churchtown, where the funeral home was conveniently located next door to one of Ollie’s favourite pubs. ‘The Garda had blocked the street so that we could get in with the hearse and unload Oliver,’ recalls Josephine. ‘And then we went next door to the pub.’ By the time they arrived in Churchtown it was late, but still the street was full of people who’d been waiting to welcome them home. O’Brien’s pub was crammed with friends and, although exhausted, Josephine found the strength to speak with each and every one.

  ‘People were just absolutely and utterly genuinely touched and lovely,’ remembers Mark, for whom one incident in particular stands out. The following morning he was in O’Brien’s when he took a call from a friend. The signal was awful, so he stepped outside into the street. ‘And there was this young boy with a hurley stick and a ball just knocking it around, and as I was talking to this friend I suddenly started crying. When I finished the call and was walking back inside, this little boy came up to me and said, “Mister, I thought I’d let you know, there’s a man over there in a car with a camera.” Ireland was amazing in terms of the affinity that people felt for Oliver. They were very protective of who he was to them. So when I go back there each year, it’s just the same, it’s like walking into a community where I only left yesterday. Amazing people.’

  It had been a long day and Josephine was tired as they left O’Brien’s well into the evening, but she wasn’t looking forward to returning to a home that was going to seem incredibly empty without Oliver’s presence. Opening the door, Mark walked in first, and suddenly Ollie’s dogs ran into the hall, going crazy. ‘They thought it was my dad,’ says Sarah. ‘Because there was this big tall man who looked like him and sounded like him and then they were all scrambling around looking for Ollie and couldn’t understand why he wasn’t there. They all ran in going, where’s Dad?, waggy tails, and he wasn’t there.’

  The Mother of all Wakes

  Normally in Ireland you’re under the sod in two days, but it took Josephine two weeks to make the arrangements for Oliver’s funeral, simply because she wanted to give everyone a chance to come over for it. All the while Ollie was being kept in cold storage at Cork University Hospital. Only no one had thought of informing Josephine and she made several trips to the undertakers in Buttevant to talk to Ollie in his coffin not realizing he wasn’t there. It was an extraordinary time.

  Oliver hadn’t really made any arrangements for his funeral. David recalls him once saying, ‘If I die I want everyone to come to my funeral and cry. And if they don’t cry they’re not allowed in.’ As for his final resting place, he’d always been rather fond of Bruhenny cemetery in Churchtown, a beautiful quiet spot just across the road from O’Brien’s, its ancient gravestones lost for centuries under weeds and brambles. Sometimes at dusk he’d wander out with a drink in his hand to watch hundreds of crows flock into the graveyard to settle on the trees for the night. It was an extraordinary sight that he once shared with Sarah. ‘We were sat in the bar and he said, “Come on, girlie, I’ve got to show you this.” And we went out and sat and watched this spectacle and I remember him saying, “Isn’t this graveyard amazing?” So it was just so ideal when they allowed us to plant him there.’

  As the day of the funeral drew nearer family and friends began arriving. For people like Simon, for whom Ollie’s time in Ireland was when he knew him the least, it was to be an enormously moving experience. Seeing where he lived and who his friends were, he sensed a contentedness that must have been Oliver’s life in Churchtown. And when Josephine invited him to go through and see the garden, Simon felt a rush of powerful emotions. ‘It seemed a tranquil existence. Josephine was telling me that it was his pride and joy and that he used to sit on a seat out there for hours. And I thought, oh my God, that was so far removed from the Ollie that I knew, that I think he had fundamentally changed. I think he’d had enough of the aggression. I think he more or less had come to terms with exactly who he was and why he was like it. Josephine played a big part in all that.’

  The funeral service took place at St James’s Church in Mallow and was a simple yet memorable affair. From early in the morning people had started to gather outside and by the time the family arrived there was a crowd of several hundred. When Ollie’s coffin came out of the hearse spontaneous applause began, along with a few raised voices of, ‘Go to it, Ollie’, while a lone piper played a melancholy tune as the congregation walked into the church.

  Among the first to enter was Michael Winner. Walking down the aisle to where the coffin stood, he touched it gently with his hand and sobbed. ‘I didn’t cry at my mother’s funeral. I didn’t cry at my father’s funeral. I wept at Oliver’s funeral. I was in floods of tears.’

  Seated down at the front with the Reed family was a gentleman dressed all in black. Muriel thought he was a priest. It turned out to be Alex Higgins. The snooker ace had insisted on sitting with the family and was his usual twitching, paranoid self, scanning the congregation and nudging David, saying, ‘He’s IRA. And so’s he. He’s IRA, too.’ Then, with penetrating eyes, he stared at the coffin and yelled, ‘Oliver, they’re all phonies, get them the fuck out, all these fucking people, they’re all fucking phonies.’ Mark grabbed hold of him. ‘Alex, don’t ruin this fucking day. You can fuck around with any other day but you’re not fucking aro
und with this day.’

  As for the service itself, the family didn’t want anything too solemn. ‘We wanted to sing “Jerusalem”,’ says Mark. ‘But the vicar thought that might be a little bit hefty in County Cork.’ They ended up with ‘Abide with Me’ and ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’, all the verses. ‘We tried to keep it light and not too religious, tried to keep it akin with the things that had value to him rather than the godly,’ says Mark, whose own contribution was a reading of Robert Frost’s poem ‘The Road Not Taken’. Sarah also read and Simon did the eulogy, which he’d done just two years before for his father. Afterwards there was a round of applause.

  The cortege of at least a hundred cars pulled away from the church to begin Ollie’s final journey towards Churchtown, a few miles away, down lanes, roads and streets, every one of them lined with people. ‘It was amazing,’ remembers Simon. ‘There must have been ten thousand people and they all doffed their caps when the cortege went past. Part of it was curiosity, of course, he’s a big star, and partly because I think he connected with everyone who lived there. It was an extraordinary day.’

  Finally the cortege arrived in the centre of Churchtown, but could barely move for the throng of people. Cheers rang out and there was spontaneous applause. Some onlookers broke out into a verse of ‘Consider Yourself at Home’ from Oliver!. ‘I remember getting out of the car and going, wow, this is extraordinary,’ says Sarah. ‘It was amazing, and lovely as well that he was that loved. He really had come home over there. They understood him.’

  The coffin was carried into the cemetery, where the grass had been mowed and the weeds and brambles cut back to clear a space for Ollie. And as the coffin was lowered into the grave, people started throwing in coins.

  Of course, the press were much in evidence: TV crews and reporters. Just behind Ollie’s grave was a wall and behind that a tree. David has never forgotten it, but suddenly out of the branches fell a cameraman, who landed with a heavy thud. ‘So that caused a bit of a distraction.’ Afterwards, as is the local custom, Josephine, Sarah and Mark remained at the graveside for something like forty minutes, just shaking hands with people walking past to offer their condolences: ‘Sorry for your troubles.’

  Oliver had always admired the way the Irish treated their dead, that someone’s passing was a cause for celebrating a life that had been well lived. ‘I’ve had some fearsome hangovers burying the dead,’ he’d said. So Josephine was determined to throw the mother of all wakes. And it was an open house: Josephine put the word around the village that everyone was most welcome to come. ‘And it went on apparently for three days,’ reveals Muriel. ‘Ollie would have loved it.’

  At Castle McCarthy a large marquee was erected in the garden and a microphone set up on a platform so that anyone could go up and tell a story about Ollie or read a poem or sing a song. The place was full of friends, four hundred at the height of the wake, and there was lots of booze and lots of curry and bacon rolls in the morning. There was music, dancing, Irish and rugby songs, a proper celebration. ‘And everybody got pretty pissed,’ says Simon. ‘It was really lovely. Of course, there was a sense of loss, but there was also a sense that we had to get at it because that’s what Ollie would have expected.’

  Faces from the past mingled with those from the present, and everyone carried with them their own private thoughts and memories of Ollie. Michael Christensen, still in the police, hadn’t been able to make the funeral because he was giving evidence at the Old Bailey that day. ‘But even if I hadn’t I couldn’t have gone, to see him in a coffin, he was too larger than life, and to think that he was mortal would just shatter too many of our thoughts and dreams.’ However, other old Wimbledon friends were there, like Johnny Placett, Mick Fryer and Mick Monks. Paul and Nora Friday too. And the women in his life: Jacquie came, and so too Kate: ‘His harem,’ jokes Jacquie. It was the first time the two women had been in the same place since that episode in the pub. It was Jacquie who took the initiative. ‘I went up to Kate and told her how sorry I was about what happened with Oliver and she was absolutely gobsmacked. I don’t think she liked the fact that I had approached her, so I quietly went away again.’

  As the evening wore on people began trickling away, although plenty were still arriving and going strong. For David and Muriel, it was time to leave. Their cab dropped them at their hotel, but before getting out David quietly asked the driver, ‘Today was too public for me, would you be very kind and come early tomorrow morning to drive me back out to the cemetery? I’d like to say a private bye-bye.’

  Years before, when their friend Pat Clancy died in Ireland, Ollie rang David from some far-flung movie location and told him, ‘Go and give him a drink.’ David knew what he meant and bought a bottle of hard stuff and poured it over Pat’s grave. ‘And so I thought, I’ll do the same with Ollie. We drove out at the crack of dawn with a bottle of Scotch and I went out to the grave and stood there with my private thoughts, saying bye-bye, Ollie, here’s one for the road. It was a bit emotional. I got back in the car and we drove back.’

  When David arrived at Cork airport, the Departures lounge was filled with Ollie’s friends and family waiting for flights. He decided to buy a paper ‘and there on the front page was a photograph taken from the fella who’d fallen out of the tree, and it showed the coffin lying there in the hole and I suddenly realized I’d poured the whisky over Ollie’s feet, because I could now see which way up he was. And I can just imagine him saying, you ******!!!’

  The Comeback that Never Was

  The final shot of Gladiator was supposed to have been Proximo, the old entertainer, entering the empty Colosseum and burying in the sandy arena the wooden sword given to him by Marcus Aurelius, the symbol of his freedom. ‘That would have been incredibly moving,’ says Douglas Wick. ‘And what a great final image of Oliver’s performance and of his career.’ Sadly it was not to be.

  Once the shock and tragedy of Oliver’s death had passed, the filmmakers were left with what looked like an insurmountable problem. At least 20 per cent of his performance was incomplete, including his most important screen moment, where the cynical Proximo redeems himself. A meeting took place, with the insurance people looking into the option of going back and reshooting all of Proximo’s scenes with another actor. ‘At that meeting, it was the first time I’d ever seen Ridley Scott really distressed,’ recalls Wick. ‘Ridley is so impermeable, but he just looked crushed, because aside from the loss of Ollie he knew something extraordinary had happened and he was determined to save that performance. It was irreplaceable.’

  Very early on in the production there was a buzz surrounding Oliver’s performance. Everyone on the movie was talking about it. And those who knew a little of his history were beginning to speak about a glorious comeback. ‘We knew we had lightning in a jar,’ says Wick. ‘It was a very original performance, just the way his particular qualities, his magnetism, his primitiveness, this strange honesty, intersected with that character. He had found a balance of roughness and cynicism, and you could see just the beginnings of a rumble of a heart. It was a part that he was so wonderfully suited for and it evolved in his hands – Oliver was Proximo.’

  The only solution left was to somehow create a new storyline for the character using a combination of body doubles and existing footage. This was done with consummate skill and technical brilliance. What we have in effect is Ollie’s ghost saving Crowe’s Maximus from imprisonment and meeting his end with nobility at the hands of Roman assassins. It’s a fitting denouement to Oliver’s cinematic odyssey, and a great rescue job on the filmmaker’s part, but one is still left to lament what might have been.

  Oliver’s death was tragic on so many levels, not least because here was a man thriving and about to have a complete rebirth with the public. The world was going to rediscover Oliver Reed. The enormous success of Gladiator would surely have re-energized his career. Producers who had been shit scared of him would have suddenly gone, OK, it’s worth taking a little bit of a risk
with him, and that would have led to better roles and perhaps some of his best performances because he still had what Ridley Scott termed a ‘fantastically powerful screen presence’. As Terry Gilliam notes, ‘He’s one of the best things in Gladiator. If you want to see acting, don’t look at Russell Crowe, look at what Ollie’s doing, he’s magnificent.’ When Georgina Hale went to see it at her local cinema she remembers walking out afterwards thinking, ‘he was fabulous, drunk or sober, who cares? He was just magic to watch’.

  When Gladiator was finished, Mike Higgins remembers, there was a private screening in London before the film opened. ‘And when the credits came up at the end and it said, “To our friend: Oliver Reed”, the entire audience, which was made up of the crew and the actors, burst into applause.’

  Ollie

  Newspapers everywhere carried the news of Oliver Reed’s passing and, as with Richard Burton before him, commentators spoke of a life of waste, a career of great promise thrown away in pubs, chat show embarrassments and gutters of puke. ‘When Oliver died a lot of the papers said he had a wasted life,’ says Winner. ‘It wasn’t a wasted life at all: he had a wonderful life. He enjoyed himself. He did a lot of movies, he had a long career considering, he didn’t end up broke, he lived in a lovely house in Ireland which he loved, and he had a lovely wife and lovely children. How can that be a wasted life?’

  A wasted life perhaps not, then, but a life that ended too soon, unquestionably. ‘When he died there was a part of me that felt it was too young,’ says Mark. ‘But it was a life that he chose to lead. In sixty-one years he packed in a couple of lifetimes. I could never see him lying in a hospital bed with tubes running in and out of him; he couldn’t have handled that because to him that would have represented the end of the fun. Lying there suffering, rotting and dying, there was no quality of life in that. But it would have been interesting to have seen him at seventy-one. I really do think he would have been a spectacularly grumpy old fucker. It would have been good to see him live a little longer, for him to have seen the success of Gladiator, and to have been recognized: yes, you can still do it, Ollie, you’ve still got it.’