Hellraisers

by Robert Sellers

  To the hellraisers of the world, who have swapped vodka shots for cocoa, whores for

  a nice cuddly pair of slippers and a night in the cells

  for a book at bedtime

  ‘God put me on this earth to raise sheer hell.’

  – Richard Burton

  ‘I was a sinner. I slugged some people. I hurt many people. And it’s true, I never looked back to see the casualties.’

  – Richard Harris

  ‘Booze is the most outrageous of all drugs, which is why I chose it.’

  – Peter O’Toole

  ‘I don’t have a drink problem. But if that was the case and doctors told me I had to stop I’d like to think I would be brave enough to drink myself into the grave.’

  – Oliver Reed

  Contents

  Spitting Image television sketch

  Introduction

  An Aperitif

  Legends are Born

  The Plastered Fifties

  The Soused Sixties

  The Sozzled Seventies

  The Blotto Eighties

  The Pickled Nineties

  Last Man Standing

  Credits

  Spitting Image Sketch: © Spitting Image.

  Richard Burton

  Burton holding a skull © Getty Images; Burton and O’Toole © Rex Features (From Becket, DIR: Peter Glenville, PROD: Hal B. Wallis); Burton and Taylor © Popperfoto; In later life © Corbis; With a glass of wine © Rex Features.

  Oliver Reed

  Reed wearing a striped shirt © Popperfoto; Sporting a moustache © Mirrorpix; At Broome Hall © Getty Images; Balancing on the bar © Mirrorpix; Night clubbing © Rex Features; Gladiator (DIR: Ridley Scott, PROD: David Franzoni, Branko Lustig & Douglas Wick) © Movie Store.

  Richard Harris

  Harris and a bottle mountain © Getty Images; Hands framing face (From The Bible, DIR: John Huston, PROD: Luigi Luraschi) © Movie Store; Smoking a cigarette © Wire Image/Getty Images; The Wild Geese (DIR: Andrew V. McLaglen, PROD: Euan Lloyd) © Pictorial Press; Wearing a beanie © Rex Features.

  Peter O’Toole

  Lawrence of Arabia (DIR: David Lean, PROD: Sam Spiegel) © Popperfoto; O’Toole and Sian Phillips © Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images; What’s New Pussycat? (DIR: Clive Donner, PROD: Charles K. Feldman) © Getty Images; Caligula (DIR: Tinto Brass, PROD: Bob Guccione) © Rex Features; 2002 Oscars © Corbis.

  Spitting Image television sketch

  (A telephone rings. A hideously unrealistic Oliver Reed puppet, looking like a hybrid of Father Christmas and Hannibal Lecter, and sitting in a luxurious chair near a roaring open fire, picks it up.)

  REED: Hello.

  (Cut to a skeletal Peter O’Toole alone in bed.)

  O’TOOLE: 023 0923, that is your number.

  REED: Oh, O’Toole.

  O’TOOLE: Oliver Reed, by my beard. Tell me, was I with you last night.

  REED: (laughs) Indubitably. We quaffed a few as it were, and quaffed and quaffed again.

  O’TOOLE: Well the damndest thing, I appear to have lost me leg.

  REED: Yes, you bet it.

  O’TOOLE: What!

  REED: You lost your leg in a wager.

  O’TOOLE: What bloody wager.

  REED: You bet you could piddle on Nelson from one of the lions.

  O’TOOLE: What about the sex change operation?

  REED: Ah, you’ve noticed.

  O’TOOLE: Noticed! I woke up this morning with a hangover and a pair of titties. I’m a bloody woman, Oliver. My didgeridoo’s been turned inside out.

  REED: It was double or quits.

  O’TOOLE: Why didn’t you stop me?

  REED: I fancied a quickie.

  O’TOOLE: My God, you didn’t have me.

  Reed: ’Course I had you wench, you were a woman.

  O’TOOLE: I think I’m going to be sick again.

  REED: Again.

  O’TOOLE: Yes, I think I’m having a baby.

  REED: Oh what a night, it shall be etched bold in legend wherever men revel and quaff.

  O’TOOLE: God, God. What am I going to do? Once I was Peter O’Toole, now I’m Peter No Toole. A one-legged, pregnant single woman.

  REED: Pity the GLC’s been disbanded, you could have had a grant.

  O’TOOLE: What am I going to tell people?

  REED: Tell them; just tell them you went for a drink with Ollie Reed! Ha Ha.

  Introduction

  They are the four most extraordinary and controversial film stars Britain ever produced, men who at their peak had the whole world at their feet and lived through some of the wildest exploits Hollywood has ever seen. But all that fame had a price. Richard Burton’s liver was shot by the time he reached 50; just one more drink would’ve killed him. Insurance companies wouldn’t touch Richard Harris with a barge poll and his film career stalled for over a decade. Peter O’Toole’s drinking almost put him in the grave before his 43rd birthday and his generally eccentric behaviour led to public humiliation and one of the biggest disasters the London stage has ever known. Oliver Reed ended up dying prematurely after an arm wrestling contest with a bunch of 18-year-old sailors on the eve of scoring his biggest ever movie triumph with Gladiator.

  What follows is the story of four of the greatest boozers that ever walked – or staggered – into a pub. It’s a story of drunken binges of near biblical proportions, parties and orgies, broken marriages, drugs, riots and wanton sexual conquests. Indeed if you or I had perpetrated some of the most outrageous acts it would’ve resulted in a jail sentence; yet these piss artists were seemingly immune from the law. They got away with the kind of behaviour that today’s sterile bunch of film stars can scarcely dream of, because of who they were and because the public loved them. They were truly the last of a dying breed, the last of the movie hellraisers.

  This book traces the intertwining lives and careers of Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Peter O’Toole and Oliver Reed, plus an assortment of other movie boozers who crawled across their path, people like Lee Marvin, Trevor Howard and Robert Mitchum. It’s a celebratory catalogue of their miscreant deeds, a greatest hits package, as it were, of their most breathtakingly outrageous behaviour, told with humour, affection, lashings of political incorrectness and not an ounce of moralising. Enjoy it; they bloody well did.

  An Aperitif

  Throughout the history of movies there have always been hellraisers; actors and booze go together like Rogers and Hammerstein or eggs and bacon. Film producer Euan Lloyd, who worked over the years with Frank Sinatra, Robert Mitchum and Dean Martin, says that drinking simply went with the job. ‘Whether it was lack of confidence or just habit, it was hard to tell, but a destroyer could comfortably swim in the ocean of liquid consumed by actors.’

  Lloyd’s association with Burton and Harris was the boy’s own adventure, perhaps the archetypal hellraiser movie, The Wild Geese, which also starred veteran boozer Stewart Granger and Roger Moore, himself not averse to a bit of elbow-bending, but able to hold it more than most. By 1978, after decades on the piss, Burton and Harris were mere shadows of their former selves. One day during a break in filming they sat together under the African sun reminiscing and trying to make sense of their lives. ‘We were like two old men,’ Harris said. ‘Once the greatest hellraisers in the world, we were now too tired to stand up and pee. After two hours of philosophical discussion, we came to the conclusion that the tragedy of our lives was the amount of it we don’t remember, because we were too drunk to remember.’

  So why did they do it, Burton, Harris, O’Toole and Reed, why did they drink themselves to death, or – in the case of O’Toole – come within a hairsbreadth of it? Burton said it was ‘to burn up the flatness, the stale, empty, dull deadness that one feels when one goes offstage.’ M
ore likely it was to get over the realization that he was appearing in a piece of shit. Nor was he averse to getting pissed on the job. Maybe it went hand in hand with his reputation as a legendary womanizer: not long after starting his infamous affair with Elizabeth Taylor on the set of Cleopatra, Richard Burton answered the phone at her home. It was Taylor’s husband, Eddie Fisher, demanding to know what he was doing there. ‘What do you think I’m doing?’ Burton replied. ‘I’m fucking your wife.’ Probably emptying his drinks cabinet, as well.

  Burton’s intake was prodigious. At the height of his boozing in the mid-70s he was knocking back three to four bottles of hard liquor a day. On The Klansman he was drunk for the entire production. ‘I barely recall making that film,’ he confessed. Burton loved the sheer sociability of booze, drinking in pubs, talking with mates and sharing stories; he was a man who enjoyed life better with a glass in his hand. After sex it was the thing he loved most in life. Coupled with his nicotine addiction – it’s rumoured he smoked 50 a day – Burton embraced that seemingly inbred Celtic desire to walk dangerously close to the precipice perhaps more than anyone.

  Harris too loved the communal nature of boozing. He loved nothing better than going into a pub on his own and by the end of the evening being surrounded by a new gang of boisterous pals. ‘Men, not women,’ he’d state. ‘Boozing is a man’s world.’ For years Harris habitually drank two bottles of vodka a day. ‘That would take me up to seven in the evening, then I’d break open a bottle of brandy and a bottle of port and mix the two.’ Asked by a reporter once to describe how much booze he’d consumed over his lifetime Harris was only exaggerating mildly when he replied. ‘I could sail the QE2 to the Falklands on all the liquor I drank.’

  There was also an element of being the naughty schoolboy about Harris’s drinking, of showing off. ‘I adored getting drunk and I adored reading in the papers what I had done the night before.’ He knew full well what he was doing by getting pissed all the time and ending up in police cells or brawling in public, but didn’t think it that awful. Neither did he hate himself for it in the morning or feel guilty. No, Harris just believed that the world and too many people in it were boring old farts and his mission was to live life to the fullest and spread a little joy around. ‘So I did, and damn the consequences.’

  O’Toole was another who loved the social life of a drinker, propping up bars in Dublin or London, nattering with saloon-bar poets and philosophers, putting the world to rights. ‘But I don’t really know what I get out of it,’ he once said. ‘What does anyone get out of being drunk? It’s an anaesthetic. It diminishes the pain.’ O’Toole would drink to excess for no good reason, as he became intoxicated quite quickly due to the delicate state of his insides; he suffered from ill health most of his life, particularly from intestinal pain.

  Naturally eccentric, the drink merely compounded the affliction, and fame when it came threw a spotlight on it so all the world could gawp and gasp at his escapades. This was a man who travelled the world yet never wore a watch or carried a wallet. Nor upon leaving home did he ever take his keys with him. ‘I just hope some bastard’s in.’ More than once, on the occasions when someone was not, O’Toole had to explain to the police why he should be breaking into his own property.

  There was an undercurrent of violence to his drinking, too. At his hellraising peak the gossip columns were filled with accounts of booze-fuelled antics: a brawl with paparazzi on the Via Veneto in Rome, a fistfight with a French count in a restaurant, his fleeing Italy on the eve of being arrested, even the beating up of a policeman. O’Toole’s social life often was in danger of eclipsing his talent. ‘I was silly and young and drunken and making a complete clown of myself. But I did quite enjoy the days when one went for a beer at one’s local in Paris and woke up in Corsica.’

  For Reed, like Burton and Harris, it wasn’t so much drinking he loved but the fact that it took place in pubs. He loved the companionship, the camaraderie with other men, the chance to challenge people to drink contests or bouts of arm wrestling. All his life he preferred the friendships he made in pubs to those on a film set. ‘You meet a better class of person in pubs.’

  He also loved the loss of inhibitions in a person when they drank and so found great sport in getting anyone in his vicinity totally smashed. ‘People make so much more sense when they’re drunk and you can get along famously with people you couldn’t bear at other times.’ Journalists who visited him were invariably plied with unhealthy amounts of drink and staggered home after the encounter with the battle scars of a war correspondent.

  Reed was proud of the fact that he could drink any man under the table. His favourite tipple was ‘gunk’, his own invention, an ice bucket with every drink in the bar poured into it. The Daily Mirror reported a doctor’s findings that the safe limit for any man’s consumption of alcohol was four pints a day, and then printed a story that Reed had managed to knock back 126 pints of beer in 24 hours and photographed him performing a victory horizontal hand-stand across the bar.

  Reed’s antics were perhaps unmatched by any other hellraiser – and they are legion. He once arrived at Galway airport lying drunk on a baggage conveyor. On an international flight he incurred the wrath of the pilot by dropping his trousers and asking the air hostesses to judge a prettiest boy contest. All this led one journalist to say that calling Oliver Reed unpredictable was like calling Ivan the Terrible ‘colourful’.

  All these men played up to their boozy, brawling, madcap image; some resented the press label of hellraiser, others wallowed in it, turning it almost into a badge of honour and a second career. ‘What that group of actors had was a fine madness, a lyrical madness,’ said Harris. ‘We lived our life with that madness and it was transmitted into our work. We had smiles on our faces and a sense that the world was mad. We weren’t afraid to be different. So we were always dangerous. Dangerous to meet in the street, in a restaurant, and dangerous to see on stage or in a film.’

  Director Peter Medak recognizes that this element of danger was a significant part of the hellraiser’s make-up. ‘It was the same with Burton and O’Toole, and Harris and Reed, there was this terrible sense of danger around them, you didn’t know if they were going to kiss you, hug you or punch you right in the face. They were just wonderful.’

  Legends are Born

  Like father, like son. Richard Walter Jenkins, the father of Richard Burton, was a fearsome boozer, a 12 pints a day man, incapable of passing a pub without stepping inside for a quick one. ‘My father considered that anyone who went to chapel and didn’t drink alcohol was not to be tolerated,’ said his son. A coal miner and inveterate gambler, Jenkins thought nothing of buggering off for days on end, his family unsure if he was alive or dead; once, for three whole weeks only to turn up as if nothing had happened. Yet his charm beguiled all those who met him. Burton claimed his father looked very much like him, ‘That is, he was pockmarked, devious and smiled when he was in trouble.’ Others thought the future film star got his handsome looks from his mother, a real Welsh matriarch who was responsible for keeping the household going, with scant help from her husband who was often penniless a few hours after getting his wage packet.

  Stories are many about Burton’s father. How he never arrived at a rugby match because the route to the stadium was cruelly lined with pubs. How he was burnt in a pit explosion and covered in bandages, looking like Boris Karloff as the mummy, but still insisted on going out boozing where his mates charitably poured beer down his throat. At closing time he stumbled home but bumped into a work colleague who had a score to settle. Trussed up as he was Jenkins stood no chance and had his teeth knocked out and was bundled over a wall. The family didn’t find him until the morning.

  Burton’s grandfather, Tom, was just as much of a character. He too had been crippled in the mines, and celebrating a big win on a horse called Black Sambo one night got dreadfully pissed. In his wheelchair he raced downhill all the way home yelling, ‘Come on Black Sambo,’ but lost control and c
rashed into a wall. The old fool was killed instantly.

  Richard Jenkins (later Burton) was probably spoon-fed such tales about his bonkers relatives from the day he was born on November 10th 1925. His chances of escaping them, however, or the environment in which God had chosen to dump him, the bleak coal-mining village of Pontrhydyfen, South Wales, were thin at best. To have achieved the fame and fortune that he did was nothing short of a miracle, especially coming from a household of 13 siblings. Having escaped his Welsh heritage Burton’s patriotism for his country never dimmed, although its glow was barely visible from the tax haven of Geneva.

  With a father who was absent most of the time, or wandered through life in a beer-induced haze, Burton was made to feel even more isolated when his mother died not long after his second birthday. For the rest of his life he’d regret not having even one recollection of her. Burton went to live in Port Talbot with his elder sister Cecilia. With household finances there on an altogether better keel, life suddenly became easier, although the threat of poverty was never far away.

  In reaction perhaps to the crummy hand fate had dealt him Burton, from an early age, got into trouble, dirtying or tearing his best clothes, kicking the soles off his school shoes and worse, starting a smoking habit aged just eight. He’d scrape the money together to buy a packet of five Woodbines and illicitly smoke them while watching his favourite Western serial at the local cinema, popularly known as the ‘shithouse’. Fighting was another occupation and Burton punched his way to the top of several local gangs. His dad declared proudly, ‘You’ve got a face like a boot. Everybody wants to put his foot in it.’