Hellraisers

by Robert Sellers

  After his run in with Heston, Richard Harris faced the even more fearsome Robert Mitchum in his next film A Terrible Beauty (1960), an IRA drama shot in Ireland. At first Harris disliked Mitchum but warmed to him when the Hollywood legend came to his aid during a pub brawl. Another time Mitchum sat drinking in a Dublin bar when a short Irishman came up and poked him in the ribs with a pencil. ‘Hey movie star, give me your autograph. It’s for my wife.’ Mitchum eyed the midget up and down with undisguised disgust. ‘Will you look at the little leprechaun,’ and then told him to wait until he’d finished his drink. But the man persisted. Finally an exasperated Mitchum snatched the paper and pencil and wrote: ‘UP YOUR ARSE – KIRK DOUGLAS.’ The man was not best pleased and threw a punch, but Mitchum just sat there looking at him. ‘If that’s the best you can do, little lady, you better come back with your girlfriends.’ The man did indeed return with some rather hefty mates. Mitchum head butted one of them, sending him reeling before two more came into the attack. Harris leapt into the fray and a massive punch-up ensued resulting in the police being summoned to break it up.

  In between film roles Harris returned to the theatre in a play he pursued fervently, The Ginger Man. It was when he’d been cast that the trouble really started. Harris threw himself into the role like no other, rehearsing 40 hours non-stop, half-pissed, and then collapsing with exhaustion. ‘I can’t do the fucking thing,’ he’d yell and storm off to the pub. Co-star and friend Ronnie Fraser was always the one sent to retrieve him. During these hours Harris introduced Fraser to what became his drink of choice, vodka, lime and soda, a love affair that almost wrecked Fraser’s life.

  For months The Ginger Man consumed Harris’s entire being, to the detriment of his home life, which, combined with his constant drinking, led to regular arguments. Before the play opened Elizabeth left, taking their child with her. When told of this event years later Harris said, ‘Did she? I wasn’t fully aware.’ The Ginger Man was hailed as another Look Back in Anger and Harris as theatreland’s new angry young man. But the rave notices went over the Harris bonce. ‘By the time we opened, I was living on Pluto.’ When the production moved to Dublin, with Harris eager for a triumphant homecoming, the play ran into censorship trouble over its sex scenes and angry mobs barred the actors from getting into the theatre. The play was abandoned after just a few days.

  Harris drowned his sorrow in booze. He drank every kind of alcohol but had a particular liking for brandy. His tolerance of spirits and beer was high, but brandy brought out the worst in him. His fits of temper were legendary. Sometimes they would arrive without warning, like on a trip to Spain when he suddenly leapt out of a taxi, dodged onrushing traffic on a main road, and ran to the nearest house where he began attacking a solid oak door with his bare hands. The elderly owner of the property emerged only to grab a chair and sit down on the porch to watch the spectacle of this mad stranger pounding away with bloody fists.

  Harris truly hit rock bottom when his mother died of cancer. At the funeral he hid behind a tree weeping, unable to witness the coffin go in the ground. Mentally he was all over the place and convinced himself that the world was going to end in 1965. ‘We’d been fucking around with nuclear science like lunatics for 20 years,’ he rationalised. ‘I had no faith in humanity. I thought we were fucked.’ Harris had something of a fascination with death. For years he’d play a macabre game where he’d disguise his voice and pretend to be a policeman and phone his wife and close friends to report that Richard Harris, film star, had been killed in a nasty accident.

  Things brightened up considerably when he and Elizabeth patched up their marriage, although friends admitted that Harris just wasn’t cut out for domesticity and warned Elizabeth that her husband liked chaos and that more rows were inevitable. They were right.

  His film career, however, was progressing very nicely thank you with roles in ever more prestigious productions, including the screen version of The Long and the Short and the Tall (1960) co-starring Laurence Harvey in the role O’Toole had played on stage. Harris and Harvey spent each lunchtime in the Red Lion pub, just across the road from Elstree studios. Director Leslie Norman got increasingly frustrated as, even though they returned on time, they were always pissed. It was a relationship between actor and director that never improved, as Norman’s son Barry, the film critic and writer, recalls. ‘Harris was a bit of a bully, and my father was not about to be bullied by an actor, so they were at loggerheads. In later years Harris avoided being interviewed by me because I remember him saying once, “I don’t want to talk to him, his father hates me.”’

  As senior member of the cast Richard Todd took it upon himself to get things under control and one evening invited Harris for a chat in his dressing room. Todd ordered Harris, in no uncertain fashion, to stop behaving like an asshole. Expecting a torrent of abuse back Todd instead watched in amazement as tears welled up in Harris’s eyes as he apologised and promised to cut down on his drinking for the rest of the film.

  In later years Harris and Harvey became great drinking pals. One game they enjoyed playing was to visit as many bars as possible and down a different drink in each one. The last man standing was the winner. Sometimes these pub-crawls went on for hours as they went from regular pubs, to nightclubs and then the all-night drinking dens Harris knew and loved. One famous session started at lunchtime, went through the night and found the pair still drinking at dawn in Covent Garden.

  Harris then made a brief cameo in the war classic The Guns of Navarone (1961), co-starring Gregory Peck and David Niven. Niven had been in the army and loved to recall the occasion when he was a guest at a posh military function. Sitting next to his commanding officer Niven was desperate for a piss after drinking far too many aperitifs, but couldn’t leave the table before the royal toast at the end of the meal. The Colonel remained silent throughout the meal as numerous courses came and went, accompanied by countless glasses of wine, until by the time the cheese arrived Niven was in agony. He was saved by the intervention of a knowing waiter who placed an empty magnum of champagne underneath his chair. Gripping the huge bottle with his knees Niven proceeded to blissfully piss away for several minutes. Suddenly his CO remarked in a booming voice. ‘I have fucked women of every nationality and most animals, but the one thing I cannot abide is a girl with a Glasgow accent. Pass the port.’ It was the one and only time the Colonel ever spoke to Niven.

  After a couple of negligible film appearances it was back to the theatre for Peter O’Toole, becoming at 26 the youngest leading man ever at Stratford. Director Peter Hall was scrambling for a replacement for Paul Scofield, who had suddenly left the Royal Shakespeare Company, when he remembered how mesmerised he’d been by O’Toole at Bristol, recalling particularly his ‘enormous hooter of a nose’. It was indeed perfect for one of the lead roles in the forthcoming season, that of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. O’Toole was summoned but when he arrived at the first rehearsal Hall was shocked to see he’d had a nose job, that big nose was no more. ‘What have you done?’ said Hall. ‘I’m going to be a film star,’ O’Toole answered back.

  Playing Shylock one night, during the intense court scene, O’Toole spied a packet of fags close to the front of the stage. ‘I was wondering what they were doing there, my cue came and I was off, “Now we have expressed our darker purpose…” It was the wrong play. I’d gone into King Lear.’ Despite the occasional lapse O’Toole was a hit from the first night and critics hailed him as a major new force in acting. Even Elizabeth Taylor was interested in him playing opposite her as Mark Antony in Cleopatra, a role that eventually went to Burton. ‘I’m marvellous. I must be,’ O’Toole announced. The BBC even sent an interviewer down to profile him but the man clearly hadn’t done his homework: ‘Well, what have you done?’ he asked. ‘Eh,’ said a startled O’Toole. ‘Let’s see,’ the interviewer continued, scanning his rough notes. ‘There was that army thing. Come on, come on, what else have you done?’ O’Toole had had enough of this. ‘Well, I played the d
ame in Puss in Boots once.’ The BBC man’s face turned sour. ‘Look, we don’t have to do this interview, you know.’ ‘In that case,’ O’Toole replied, ‘I suggest you fuck off.’

  It was also at Stratford where O’Toole’s reputation as a hellraiser was sealed. ‘The best that you can do when you are drunk is to meet your mates, have a lot of giggles, break glass, kick people and get into trouble,’ he once declared. At one after show party O’Toole held court on stage sitting on a throne, sustained by two pedal bins on either side of him, one full of beer, the other of hard liquor into which he would alternately scoop two-pint mugs. At another party ex-RADA chum Roy Kinnear watched O’Toole down a bottle of whisky without pausing for breath. O’Toole’s favourite pub in Stratford was the Dirty Duck where he broke the house record by downing a yard of ale (that’s two and a half pints) in 40 seconds. ‘You only do that kind of lunacy because there’s nothing else to do,’ he excused. O’Toole went back to Stratford late in the 60s and on a visit to the Dirty Duck tried to repeat his earlier feat, without success. ‘Either I wasn’t that parched or my stomach had shrunk. Frankly I just don’t have the stamina any more.’

  This tearaway existence (not for nothing did he earn himself the nickname ‘the wild man of Stratford’) finally caught up with O’Toole when his doctors ordered him to cut out the booze. For the rest of the season O’Toole made a great show of downing large quantities of milk. He was acutely aware of his tearaway image though and played it up to the hilt. ‘I get drunk and disorderly and all that, but I don’t really think it’s true that there is any danger of me destroying myself.’ Maybe others, though. Fellow cast member Denholm Elliott, himself a boozer, found O’Toole so overpowering that he could hardly bear to be in the same room. ‘I get awfully nervous with the kind of actor who looks as though he might be about to hit you, even though he never does.’

  To escape the rigours of the theatre O’Toole went on a grand tour of Italy with Kenneth Griffith, both men finding themselves staying near Lake Como. One evening O’Toole received some news that distressed him greatly and dashed out into the night leaping onto a wall that overhung the lake. ‘Griffith,’ he shouted. ‘It’s got to end!’ And into the water he went – feet first. ‘At that moment, Lawrence of Arabia, The Ruling Class, The Lion in Winter, My Favourite Year were in mortal jeopardy,’ is how Griffith later recalled it. ‘However, fate is fate, and at that particular point, unknown to either of us, Lake Como is only two feet deep.’

  This wasn’t meant as a real suicide bid; O’Toole says he has never contemplated suicide, despite bouts of depression, the ‘black dog’, as he calls it, which plagued him all his adult life. He tried psychiatry, without much help. Asked once if anyone in the world really knew him, he laughed and after a moment’s silence said, ‘I think probably my mother and father had a better hint of the plot than anyone else. My sister once turned round to the very famous actress I was about to work with and said to her, “At the end of the picture, will you tell me who my brother is? What goes on in there, in the fucking thing he calls a mind?”’

  Oliver Reed’s film career started as near the bottom as it was possible to be, as an extra. Working at Elstree, he had a few lines in the Tony Hancock comedy The Rebel (1960). Reed went searching for his drinking pal Ronald Fraser, working at the same studio. He knocked on his dressing room door only for it to be opened by Richard Harris. ‘What do you want?’ the Irishman snarled. Reed asked if Fraser was there. ‘Yes, he is,’ said Harris and slammed the door in Reed’s face. The two hellraisers never crossed paths again until the 70s when they began a mock-macho rivalry, threatening each time they met to knock seven sacks of shit out of each other.

  The Rebel was written by Hancock’s regular writing team, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson. The comedy giants, who later went on to create one of the all-time great TV sitcoms Steptoe and Son, were often on the set and in Reed sensed that here was someone out of the ordinary. ‘He was mesmerising and it was obvious that the camera loved him,’ remembers Simpson. ‘But he kept fluffing his lines. Now on a film you have a tight schedule and for one little speech there’s a limit to how many takes they’re going to do. And he was so good, but he kept fluffing it and the director yelled, “Cut. Go again.” I think they got up to seven takes and Reed fluffed every one.’ The producer was standing next to the director and witnessing all this, shaking his head in dismay, according to Galton. ‘He was saying to the director, “He’s got to go, if he doesn’t get it right now he’s got to go, we can’t waste any more film, it’s costing money.” I don’t know whether anybody said anything to Oliver because on the next take he was absolutely perfect and it made the final cut.’

  In between bouts of waiting for the phone to ring for possible jobs, Reed was invariably in the local boozer with an ever-widening circle of friends. At the time he lived in Wimbledon in a house that had several balconies and he wasn’t averse, at some risk to himself, to leaping from one to the other. Reed had invented a pub-crawl that took in the eight public houses that circled the Common. The rules were simple; everyone had 15 minutes to down a pint of beer in each establishment before dashing on to the next one. It would take something like two hours to complete the route. Arriving back at the first bar Reed nearly always wanted to repeat the whole circuit again and would have to corral his mates into joining him, though they’d all pass out halfway through leaving Ollie on his own. Even he only ever managed to complete the course a second time on one rare occasion.

  Staggering back home from the pub with a mate Reed sometimes enjoyed testing his friend’s loyalty and bravery by lying spread-eagled on the road with him in front of oncoming traffic. The first to get up and leg it was chicken.

  It was around about the start of the 60s that Reed became an unlikely horror star. An audition for the Hammer film company, who just a few years before had become notorious and hugely successful for a string of horror pictures like The Curse of Frankenstein and Dracula landed Reed a day’s work as a nightclub bouncer in The Two Faces of Dr Jekyll (1960). Now he was off to Ireland for bigger and better things as a villainous nobleman who slays Peter Cushing’s Sheriff of Nottingham in The Sword of Sherwood Forest (1960). It was a dream come true for Reed, running around a forest with a sword emulating his childhood hero Errol Flynn. The great swash-buckler of Hollywood’s golden age had only recently died. Reed was in a pub when he heard the news and ordered a Guinness; standing to attention he downed the pint in a single gulp.

  Reed’s breakthrough arrived when Hammer cast him in the title role of The Curse of the Werewolf (1961). It was Hammer’s make-up artist Roy Ashton, who had turned Christopher Lee so effectively into Frankenstein’s monster, who suggested Reed would be perfect for the role because of his powerful bone structure. ‘And the fact he resembled a wolf when he was angry.’ It took five hours every day to complete Reed’s make-up. ‘Then I’d just be ready and they would shout “Lunch everybody,” and I’d be left strutting around the studio covered in fur and teeth. I would slowly make my way to the restaurant and drink three pints of milk through a straw, and people would shout out, “There’s that well-known homosexual actor!”’ At the close of the day Reed would have to spend an hour and a half peeling the make-up off hair by hair. ‘Sometimes I wouldn’t bother taking it off completely. It was great fun sitting in the car at traffic lights.’

  After yet another string of dud movies salvation was at hand for Richard Burton when he was asked to play King Arthur in a new Broadway musical – Camelot. The show’s lyricist, Alan Jay Lerner, was a big Burton fan and one night tried to keep up with him drink for drink and failed utterly. ‘It was no classified secret that Richard’s devotion to the bottle was almost religious, and his capacity was one of the wonders of the 20th century. If the Atlantic Ocean had been made of whisky, Richard would have been able to walk across.’

  During the run Burton took on a bet that he couldn’t down an entire bottle of 100% proof vodka during the matinee and then a fifth of cognac during the e
vening performance without any ill effect on his acting abilities. His co-star, Julie Andrews, unaware of the bet, would be the judge. ‘What did you think I was like today then, love,’ Burton asked as they both left the stage to rapturous applause. ‘A little better than usual,’ was Julie’s reply. The two stars actually got on surprisingly well. When Burton later claimed that she was the only one of his leading ladies he’d never slept with, Julie responded, ‘How dare he say such an awful thing about me.’

  Burton was a rock as the production literally fell apart around him. On its pre-Broadway run the opening night lasted an epic four and a half hours and critics labelled the show ‘a disaster area’. Then Lerner, who had only recently got over a nervous breakdown, collapsed and was rushed to hospital. Well again, he was carted out only for his vacant room to be occupied by his writing partner in Camelot, Moss Hart, who had just suffered a heart attack over the strain of hammering the show into a workable length. When it finally opened on Broadway reviews were mixed and members of the audience walked out, some nights as many as 300; it looked doomed. Everything changed when Burton and Julie Andrews guested on the hugely popular Ed Sullivan Show and the next day there were queues around the block; Camelot was a hit. It so nearly wasn’t and Lerner owed Burton so much – he acknowledged that without him Camelot would never have been the huge success it was; Burton was endlessly patient and tolerant about being messed about, having lines and whole songs changed night after night, and by keeping his own spirits high he did much to prevent the whole company’s morale from sinking.