Hellraisers

by Robert Sellers

  ‘If I live to be a thousand I want nothing like Cambodia again,’ O’Toole confessed on his return home. ‘It was a bloody nightmare.’ Cambodia’s crowned prince took exception to this and banned O’Toole from the country. ‘That is the sort of thing that tends to make tourists nervous,’ was the royal quote.

  Finishing in Cambodia O’Toole flew to New York for an appearance on the Johnny Carson Show, despite his aversion to planes. ‘I can’t believe all that tonnage can float in the air.’ When he arrived on set he hadn’t slept for over a day and was exhausted. Three minutes into the interview O’Toole, having been unable to put two words coherently together, collapsed, broke his glasses, excused himself and walked off. The effect was sensational. No one had ever walked off the Johnny Carson Show before.

  With O’Toole in Lord Jim was his old Lawrence co-star Jack Hawkins and they enjoyed many a boozy night together. Hawkins was a fearsome drinker. One of his most famous roles was in Zulu as a fire and brimstone preacher with a soft spot for the bottle, one of the greatest instances of playing to type in movie history. According to one of the cast Hawkins was pissed all the time on location in South Africa and they couldn’t get him up in the morning. It wasn’t the booze, though, that ultimately led to the downfall of this popular and respected actor, but fags. Hawkins was a chain smoker and not long after Lord Jim was found to be suffering cancer of the throat and was forced to undergo an operation to remove his larynx. It was O’Toole who gave Hawkins his first post-op role in The Great Catherine in 1968, the only film in which he used his new voice, produced in the oesophagus by belching wind from the stomach. For the remainder of his films Hawkins’s voice was dubbed, usually by Charles Gray. Desperately seeking a way to restore his distinctive voice Hawkins underwent an operation in 1973 to install an artificial voice box, which would allow him to speak normally. Tragically the incision in his throat developed an infection and kept haemorrhaging, resulting in his premature death.

  O’Toole’s next film appearance was in the cult sex comedy What’s New Pussycat? (1965). He’d won the part of a sex-crazed Parisian fashion designer after Warren Beatty pulled out and was delighted at last to have lots of glamorous babes like Capucine and Ursula Andress about the place. ‘Usually in a movie I’m in love with Richard Burton or camels.’ Also sharing the screen were comedy giants Peter Sellers and Woody Allen. O’Toole first met Sellers in the company of mutual friend Kenneth Griffith. They’d arranged to meet Sellers in the foyer of the theatre he was appearing in after curtain down but instead spent the evening waiting in the pub next door entertained by a busker who had a pram with a dog sitting bolt upright inside. ‘I bet that dog is nailed down,’ O’Toole said to Griffith. ‘Look carefully at its paws. Can you see the nails?’ When the pair remembered their rendezvous with Sellers the comedian was nowhere in sight and they spent an age crawling around the empty auditorium on their hands and knees searching underneath the seats shouting, ‘Come out Peter, come out, come out, wherever you are.’

  O’Toole adored Sellers and cherished their time working together. On the set he met the comedian’s pregnant new wife Britt Ekland and said, ‘Isn’t it shocking? You’ve only known him a short while and he’s got you into trouble already.’

  While in Paris O’Toole demonstrated that he still harboured a grudge against figures of authority when, returning to his hotel from filming one night, he saw two policemen roughing up a prostitute. One had the helpless girl by the hair while his mate whacked her with his truncheon. The outraged O’Toole was in a nightclub a few nights later when he noticed another policeman, not connected to the incident, but a policeman all the same, and under the cover of a packed dance floor took the opportunity to take revenge. ‘By the time I’d finished with him I don’t think he was in any condition to whack any poor old whore around the head for a night or two.’

  By coincidence Burton and Taylor were also in Paris, shooting interiors for their dreary romance The Sandpiper in the same studio and O’Toole decided to play a prank on his drinking pal. In one of Burton and Liz’s interminable love scenes two drunks appear and disturb them. O’Toole did a deal with one of the actors, smuggled himself onto the set and as the cameras rolled exploded into bad Welsh, cursing the bewildered Burton. Not to be outdone Burton had a small cameo role in Pussycat. ‘How’s what’s her name?’ O’Toole asks Burton as they pass each other in, where else, a bar.

  For about a year Oliver Reed carried the red angry scars of his close encounter with a smashed bottle and no producer would hire him. Strapped for cash, with a wife and young kid to support, Reed had no choice but to find a ‘normal’ job. He’d just passed his driving test and owned a red mini so took up employment as a minicab driver. A big mistake since he quickly became convinced his mini was jinxed. On the day he passed his test he executed an emergency stop only for the car behind him to plough right into his arse and for a police car to ram the other man up his boot. Reed naturally got the blame. Weeks later he picked up a hitchhiker and just avoided a head-on collision with a car which was on the wrong side of the road by throwing the mini into a ditch. The hitchhiker called Reed a fucking maniac and refused to get back inside. Then during his first fare as a cab driver proper he hit a milk float in Earls Court Road and was threatened with court action.

  Then as now minicab drivers were mistrusted and unpopular, especially with black-cab drivers who hated them for taking away their fares. ‘We’d drop off old ladies at Victoria Station,’ said Reed, ‘and the black-cab drivers used to be very grumpy with us – in fact they used to punch you very hard in the mouth. So when I used to drop the old ladies off, I’d always give them a kiss goodbye – then the other drivers would think they were my granny.’

  An Australian pal of Reed’s called Roddy often accompanied him on his taxi jobs. He was there one night when Reed drove at 90 mph to London airport with a client who was late for his flight. Driving back Reed was cut up by another vehicle and flashed his headlights at the offending driver who replied with a two finger salute. Pissed off Reed chased after him and forced the car off the road. He yanked open the door to thump the driver in the face and announce that he was making a citizen’s arrest when the stranger suddenly sped off down the road again shouting, ‘Bollocks!’ This served only to incense Reed further who followed the car to a house at which point the man’s wife bailed out to call the police. ‘I amused myself by jamming the man’s head against a rising main while we waited for them to arrive,’ said Reed. Sure enough two constables turned up. ‘Arrest this man,’ said Reed. ‘He has been driving dangerously and nearly killed me.’ The driver protested, declaring Reed to be the madman. The copper tried to calm the situation by suggesting it was all a storm in a teacup. Meanwhile Roddy scrambled out of the mini smelling like a sewage works. ‘Storm in a teacup!’ he blasted. ‘What about you Ollie, you crazy bastard, driving to the airport at a hundred miles an hour, no wonder I shit myself.’ Reed put his head in his hands, wishing it was Roddy’s head he’d jammed against the rising main.

  Again it was Michael Winner who came to Reed’s rescue casting him in a couple of movies, principally The Jokers (1967), a swinging 60s comedy about two brothers out to steal the crown jewels. Playing Reed’s brother was Michael Crawford, who in just a few years time created the immortal television comic character, Frank Spencer. Crawford thoroughly enjoyed his time working with Ollie. The only sticky moment between them came during the filming of a scene where the script called for Reed to half-strangle Crawford’s character. (In the story, his brother had supposedly betrayed him.) ‘I was really dreading it,’ recalled Crawford, who’d seen first-hand how Reed often ‘lived’ the role he was playing. ‘Quite rightly, because as we shot the scene Oliver took my “betrayal” as something entirely real and completely personal and suddenly my life wasn’t worth tuppence. His hands were fastened so tightly round my neck, I felt the end of my life was imminent. It took four people to get him off me.’

  Fifteen years later the pair worked to
gether again on the insipid comedy adventure Condorman (1981) for Disney. Crawford was the butt of numerous practical jokes perpetrated by Reed on location. One night Crawford woke up to see Ollie in his hotel room silently turning every piece of furniture upside down. He then quietly crept out again. ‘Thank you, Oliver,’ Crawford whispered.

  There was also a strange film Reed made in Canada called The Trap (1966), in which he played a sullen, brutish trapper who bought a young mute girl (Rita Tushingham) for a wife. It remained one of Ollie’s personal favourites. ‘It was the first time I’d ever come into contact with Indians. In actual fact a very drunken Indian once said to me, “White man taught the Indian to drink so now he must pay the price.” He wanted to scalp me, but he was hit on the back of the head with a stool by a rather large Canadian called Moose. I didn’t meet him again until they gave a party and it was there that I saw this same young Indian, with a rather large bruise on his head, pretending to be an eagle. Still pissed.’

  After the turgid The Sandpiper (1965) that made money but did little for Richard Burton’s reputation, his next film role was a real challenge, that of a down at heel spy in the gritty John Le Carré thriller The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1966). But it was not a happy film to make. Director Martin Ritt clashed with Burton over his drinking habit and co-star Claire Bloom was still smarting from their love affair. It didn’t help that at their first meeting off the set, Burton snubbed her with such callousness that she never forgave him. Claire noticed that Burton was still drinking hard and that he had a slight tremor in his hands early in the morning that was lessened by an early cup of coffee sipped from a mug emitting a whiff of the hard stuff. This was nine o’clock. By midday he was drinking champagne in his dressing room followed by several bottles of wine. ‘By late afternoon Richard was pretty well out of commission,’ recalled Claire.

  During one particular scene Burton was required to down a whisky. The props department brought in flat ginger ale, the movies’ usual substitute for scotch, but Burton waved it away. ‘It’s only a short scene, won’t need more than a couple of takes. Bring me some real whisky.’ In fact the scene needed 47 takes. ‘Imagine it, luv,’ Burton bragged to a journalist later, ‘47 whiskies!’

  Burton on his own could match anyone for the sheer quantity he drank; he and Liz together were a formidable team. In 1967 they attended the wedding reception of Richard’s close friend Brook Williams. The small gathering of a dozen people consumed 36 bottles of Dom Perignon champagne and 14 magnums. In their suite the Burtons continued drinking, then Ivor, Richard’s brother, fell over in the bathroom and cracked his head open. When Liz got down on her hands and knees to clean up the blood she dropped one of her diamond earrings down the toilet bowl. Finally at 4 am the party drew to a close and Burton was urged to help send poor Ivor home in a car. ‘Yes, when I finish this drink we’ll be off.’ He wasn’t holding a glass, though, but a bottle of brandy.

  Another evening, Burton got so drunk in a restaurant that after the meal he fell down the steps on his way out. Liz, having had every bit as much to drink, fell about laughing. Burton was enraged and snatched off the wig she frequently wore. Furious, Liz refused to share the marital bed that night, instead pouring out her woes to Burton’s buddy Stanley Baker. In truth, Elizabeth could be every bit as uncontrollable as Burton. Many friends attest to the fact that she was the heavier drinker. Burton enjoyed boasting that he could drink any man under the table, but not necessarily every woman, meaning Elizabeth. Both being drinkers inevitably led to rows in public, usually about who could drink the most. Like Burton, Elizabeth never showed any ill-effects from her boozing. Around this time it was usual for her to start every morning with Bloody Marys, made with special salt and pepper flown in from America to wherever she was currently in the world. At noon she moved on to Jack Daniels whiskey. ‘I had a hollow leg,’ Liz said once about those days. ‘I could drink everyone under the table and not get drunk. My capacity was terrifying.’

  Their drunken antics sometimes ensnared the most innocent of parties, including on one occasion the noted theatre critic Kenneth Tynan, who was filming an interview with Burton. The star drank wine steadily all day (around five bottles) and after wrapping invited Tynan to the villa he was renting outside Rome. Liz Taylor was shooting Reflections in a Golden Eye at the time with Marlon Brando, who a day earlier had presented the couple with two memorial antique silver goblets. The first was engraved: ‘Richard: Christ, I’ve pissed in my pants.’ And the second: ‘Elizabeth: That’s not piss, that’s come.’

  At the villa Tynan continued the interview when suddenly Burton, with a wolfish grin on his face, asked, ‘How do you think Elizabeth is looking, Ken?’ ‘Fine,’ said the critic, inwardly thinking, Fat. A pause, then, ‘How would you like to go to bed with her?’ Tynan panicked; to answer in the positive meant one had the hots for the host’s wife, to answer in the negative meant she must be a dog. Tynan tried to get out of it with self-deprecating wit: ‘To be quite candid Richard, I doubt whether I’d be capable of making it with Elizabeth.’ Burton leapt on this: ‘You mean you couldn’t get it up.’ ‘Something like that,’ Tynan apologised. ‘Elizabeth!’ Burton bellowed across the room. Breaking away from the other guests Cleopatra herself walked over. ‘Yes Richard,’ she said. ‘Do you know what our friend Ken just said about you,’ went Burton. ‘No dear,’ Liz replied. ‘He said he didn’t think he’d be able to get it up for you in bed.’ Elizabeth’s eyes blazed right through Tynan’s soul. ‘That,’ she yelled, ‘is the most insulting thing that has ever been said to me. Leave my house!’ Tynan was now even more confused; here he was being thrown out for not making a pass at the hostess. The next morning the phone rang at his hotel. It was Liz apologising profusely for their behaviour. Flowers were also sent to his room. But as Tynan later wrote in his diary: ‘The scene sticks in memory, not inspiring affection.’

  Richard Harris’s promise to curb his boozing hit the dust on location for his new film, Hawaii (1966), when he discovered the local cocktail Mai Tai – rum, cointreau and grenadine. It was as seductive as neat brandy and he devoured it, paying no heed to the intensified warning symptoms. Elizabeth arrived on the island to see first hand the horrendous after effects, notably his violent outbursts. Sometimes Harris would rush into fast moving traffic on the local main road and mindlessly attack passing cars with his bare fists. He was also barred from a nearby hotel when he took a swing at the manager for having the impertinence to suggest that he’d had enough to drink.

  Hawaii’s director, George Roy Hill, found Harris ‘an interesting force of nature’. But his co-star Julie Andrews took a dim view of his rabble-rousing and Harris reciprocated in kind after filming. ‘When I worked with Julie Andrews I think I experienced the greatest hate I ever had for any human being.’

  When filming was completed Harris had trouble getting off the island when a clerk at the check-out desk wouldn’t let him on the flight home. ‘They said I was drunk. I’d have to come back next morning. I said, you might as well let me on now because I’ll be drunker tomorrow.’ But it was no good. Harris picked up his luggage and headed for the nearest bar and kept it open all night. In the morning a different clerk was on duty and let him on.

  So bad was Harris’s drinking at this stage – sometimes he’d booze for days on end without even eating and make himself really ill – that a group of friends bet him $25,000 that he’d not survive into the 1970s. ‘I never thought of my health, never worried about what drink was doing to me.’ Harris would walk into a bar and never ask for just one vodka and tonic, he’d ask for four and line them all up, ‘because by the time the bar tender had taken my money I’d want another.’ Harris did, of course, make it to the new decade, surprising himself probably, and happily collected his winnings.

  In America Harris became pally with Frank Sinatra and his rat pack gang and hit the nightspots of Sunset Boulevard with a vengeance. He was determined to live for every moment, ‘grabbing life by the balls’ as he hedonis
tically put it, and having fun. ‘People spend the first half of their lives being cautious and the second half regretting it.’ He was also highly promiscuous, getting involved with swingers and daylong orgies. He behaved like a married bachelor.

  One Hollywood party Harris attended was hosted by fading star Merle Oberon. She was then in her 50s, but Harris didn’t care; as a kid back in Limerick he’d fallen in love with her, watching her movies at his local fleapit. ‘I’d masturbate about her all night. With the lights off, so God couldn’t see me.’ Summoning up the courage to approach her Harris stared into her eyes and spoke. ‘Merle, I have fantasised about you, kissed every part of you and made love to you in every position that man has conceived.’ The startled actress said nothing and walked away. But deep down Harris knew he’d have her that night. Sure enough when all the other guests were leaving Harris was invited to stay. ‘These fantasies of yours,’ enquired Merle, ‘do you think you would like to make them come true?’ Harris, in a trance of utter disbelief, followed his dream goddess into the bedroom. Undressed he waited breathlessly for Merle to appear from the bathroom. She came out in a see-through nightgown, ‘with nothing on underneath and all I could see were these fabulous tits and a gorgeous black bush.’ In bed she went to turn off the light but Harris stopped her. ‘Merle, if you are going to turn the lights off I might as well be back in Limerick.’ Smiling she put them back on. ‘The fantasy was better, though,’ Harris later sighed, disappointedly. ‘Fantasies always are.’

  Peter O’Toole’s next film appearance was as no less a personage than God himself in John Huston’s The Bible (1965), one of the most ironic casting decisions in movie history. Richard Harris was in the film too playing Cain and O’Toole joked that Huston ought to re-title his picture ‘The Gospel According to Mick’. O’Toole struck up a close friendship with Huston, helped no doubt by the fact that the Hollywood director lived the life of Riley in a stately pad in Ireland. During one visit the pair planned a hunting trip on horseback but come the morning it was pouring with rain. Huston crept into O’Toole’s room, wrapped in a garish green kimono, to announce, ‘Pete, this is a day for getting drunk!’ For breakfast they shared a bottle of whiskey and ended up on the horses anyway, still in their pyjamas, tearing through the countryside. ‘John in his green kimono, me in my nightie in the pissing rain, carrying rifles, rough-shooting it – but with a shitzu dog and an Irish wolfhound, who are of course incapable of doing anything. John eventually fell off the horse and broke his leg! And I was accused by his wife of corrupting him!’