Hellraisers

by Robert Sellers

  Harris remained friends with Hemmings and never forgot the day he saved his life. The filming of Camelot had hit a rocky patch for Harris, and Hemmings had come to collect him one morning from his house up in the Hollywood Hills. When Hemmings arrived he found his friend had clambered out of a window and shuffled along a very narrow balcony which overhung the swimming pool. ‘I’m going to jump,’ Harris announced. ‘You can’t do that,’ Hemmings pointed out. ‘There’s no water in the pool.’ Harris looked down to see the evidence for himself. ‘I don’t give a fuck. I hate fucking Warner Brothers and fucking Hollywood, the people here are all fucking assholes.’ By now Hemmings had managed to climb up onto the balcony and edge his way towards Harris. ‘Do you really want to do this?’ he asked. Harris’s face fell. ‘No I don’t. Let’s have a fucking drink.’

  Camelot represented a career peak for Harris but the actor had still not reconciled himself to the collapse of his marriage and as a result channelled his energy and rage into boozing and whoring. He embraced the party scene in LA, dancing and singing most of his nights away, the oldest hippie in town. Yet he always managed to get to the studio on time every morning. Franco Nero sometimes joined Harris on the party circuit but always left at eleven, ‘which for Richard would have been the equivalent of lunchtime’. Nero saw the amount of booze Harris was throwing down his neck and remained incredulous how he withstood it, let alone how he was able to turn up coherent the following morning for filming. One night a Life magazine reporter ventured out into Harris’s nocturnal party world, noting that the star was, ‘never happy without women at his feet. But, in truth, Harris’s lust is for life.’

  Such was Harris’s drinking during this period that in an interview he boasted that whenever he landed in New York he’d make a beeline to one particular bar on Third Avenue where Vinny, the regular barman, would see him walk in and line up six double vodkas. ‘That’s a load of bull,’ said the journalist. ‘It’s got to be one of your bullshit stories.’ Harris stood up. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Call me a taxi.’ The pair got in and drove to Third Avenue and the bar in question. As soon as Harris walked in through the door he caught the barman’s eye: ‘Vinny, my usual.’ Seconds later six double vodkas appeared on the bar.

  Camelot was a success around the world when it opened at the end of 1967. At the London premiere Harris bumped into his wife, now dating Christopher Plummer. Princess Margaret was the royal guest and asked Harris if he and Plummer were acquainted. ‘We share something in common,’ he said.

  Harris’s career as a film musical star might have continued post-Camelot had he accepted an offer to appear alongside Barbra Streisand in On a Clear Day You Can See Forever. He said he’d do it on condition he got to sing as much as the female diva. Composer Alan Jay Lerner invited Harris to his home to listen to the full score. ‘I knew immediately something was afoot because Streisand wasn’t there.’ Harris sat at the bar and listened intently. Lerner played five songs intended for Babs. ‘And now here’s one for you,’ Lerner said, before then playing another five Streisand numbers. ‘Fuck this,’ said Harris and walked out.

  After a slew of mainstream pictures Peter O’Toole’s next few films were commercial clangers. There was The Great Catherine (1968), a moribund historical effort that hardly got a cinema run. During filming O’Toole’s habit was to go back to his dressing room when not required, ostensibly to rest and perfect his dialogue. In reality he opened a bottle of champagne and chatted to his minder, whose job it was to drive the star everywhere and get him home safely after a night on the sauce. One particular afternoon the director, Gordon Fleming, needed O’Toole for a scene and dispatched his first assistant to fetch him from his dressing room. The assistant knocked on the door. No reply. He knocked again, still no reply. Opening the door the assistant discovered the room devoid of O’Toole; there was just a TV in the corner showing horse racing from Sandown Park, not far from the studio. Suddenly the TV camera zoomed in and amongst the crowd was O’Toole gamely cheering on the nags. The assistant rushed over to Fleming. ‘Peter’s not in his dressing room. He’s at Sandown races.’ Fleming looked puzzled. ‘How do you know that?’ he asked. ‘I’ve just seen him on television.’ A car was dispatched to bring the errant actor back to the studio. O’Toole arrived all smiles, thinking it was one big joke.

  Then there was a musical version of the sentimental school drama Goodbye Mr. Chips (1969). Before shooting he announced his intention not to drink during the production, except for Dom Perignon champagne, which he didn’t count as alcohol. In fact behind closed doors he was swigging away at the hard stuff as liberally as ever.

  Lastly there was the little seen (and plainly ignored) Country Dance (1969), about a love triangle, focusing on a woman and the two men in her life: her husband and her brother. Filming in Ireland O’Toole took some of the crew out on one of his customary pub-crawls through Dublin which ended in a restaurant at 3.30 in the morning. When the group became too boisterous for comfort the owner asked them to leave and when they refused brought out his Alsatian dog to reinforce the point. O’Toole demanded he be allowed to stay and was bitten for his trouble. Meekly everyone left, but when the front door was slammed behind them O’Toole spun round in anger and started kicking it in. The owner burst out screaming and yelling only to come into contact with O’Toole’s fist. A policeman observed the whole incident and O’Toole was arrested, humbly accepting a fine of £30 the next morning in the magistrate’s court.

  O’Toole was drinking heavily during this period. Monday morning shooting schedules were arranged without his participation because it was a foregone conclusion that he wouldn’t have recovered from his weekend boozing. After another monster pub-crawl O’Toole invited the crew up to his cottage in Connemara at the dead of night, leading them all to the edge of his property, which during the day looked out across the sea. O’Toole pointed and asked his guests if they’d ever seen a more beautiful sight. The drinking party gazed into the pitch-blackness and after a pause agreed that the view was indeed a splendid one.

  Poor Siân had now become exasperated by her husband’s hellraising image. ‘All those newspaper articles which begin “O’Toole poured a bottle of whisky down his throat and said, let’s have another one.” It’s not him at all…’ Journalists weren’t really convinced and nor quite frankly was Siân, adding, ‘…though it may be part of him.’ O’Toole once arrived late for a ferry back to Ireland, the gangplank having just been raised. When the captain refused him entry O’Toole seized the ship’s papers, without which it couldn’t sail. He was only persuaded to hand them over by the arrival of a policeman. O’Toole then chartered a plane to Dublin, hired a taxi upon landing and raced from the airport to the harbour. When the ferry arrived there was O’Toole waiting on the dock to challenge the officer to a fistfight.

  Now a household name thanks to his performance as Bill Sikes, Oliver Reed went back to work with the director who’d been championing his talents since the mid-60s, Michael Winner. The film was a wartime drama with a difference, Hannibal Brooks (1968), in which Reed was cast as a POW working in Munich Zoo who escapes with a bull elephant after a bombing raid and makes a dash for neutral Switzerland. Filming on location in Austria, Reed understandably upset the locals when after a drinking binge he tore down the Austrian flag from outside the crew’s hotel and urinated on it. ‘In Austria we had to change the hotel every half an hour because Oliver was always throwing flour over people, running up and down the corridor or pissing on the Austrian flag,’ lamented Winner.

  In the end Winner had to apologize in order to restore the townsfolk’s goodwill towards the film unit, but later got into hot water himself when a stunt driver careered into a group of German tourists injuring a 19-year-old boy who had to be hospitalized. ‘That’s one back for the six million,’ was the director’s only response.

  Reed himself was a rabid patriot. Filming in Germany he entered a bar only to be dismayed to find it festooned with every national flag in the world save fo
r Britain. He grabbed hold of the startled manager and menacingly threatened, ‘I’m coming back tomorrow night. If you haven’t got a Union Jack by then I’m going to trash this place.’ The next evening Reed walked in and still no Union Jack fluttered over the bar. Within seconds he was hurling chairs through the window.

  In Hannibal Brooks, American actor Michael J. Pollard, hot after his appearance in Bonnie and Clyde, had been cast as WWII’s most unlikely resistance fighter. At the time Pollard was heavily into drink and drugs. One day on the set Winner confronted the actor and told him he ought to clean himself up. ‘Why is it you have to keep taking drugs and keep taking pills? There’s no reason for that.’ Pollard looked at the director and said, ‘You don’t share a hotel with Oliver Reed.’ Winner said, ‘Michael, you just won the argument.’ Winner himself had wisely booked into a hotel at least ten miles away from Oliver’s.

  Reed’s other co-star in the film was several tons of elephant whom the actor insisted on sleeping with for three nights in order to build up a relationship, and vice versa one presumes. ‘Oliver,’ said Winner, ‘the elephant won’t give a fuck that you’re sleeping with him.’ But Reed insisted, and according to Winner the elephant tried its level best to kill Ollie during filming. One scene had them both walking along a narrow mountain path with a 2,000-foot sheer drop on one side and hard rock the other, and the elephant would try either to squash Reed against the rock or flip him with his heavy tail over the edge.

  Back in London friends became concerned about just how much booze Reed was consuming. Many feared he was plunging headfirst into alcoholism. After one party at a friend’s house it was discovered he’d swallowed the contents of every perfume and scent bottle on the host’s wife’s dressing table. Whenever Reed checked into a hotel he’d immediately drink the minibar then complain to the management that it was empty and demand a new room with a fresh stock of booze. This ruse was ultimately uncovered when he was banned from a hotel for changing rooms five times in one night. ‘I do not live in the world of sobriety,’ Reed once confessed.

  After a string of box office clangers Richard Burton returned to paydirt with the classic ‘boy’s own’ war film Where Eagles Dare (1969) based on the bestseller by Alistair MacLean. Burton was a Swiss neighbour of MacLean but the author disliked him intensely. The two men fell out big time at the film’s post production party at The Dorchester when a fierce argument led to a fistfight in which MacLean, in his own version, landed a punch on Burton that put the Welshman on his arse. They never spoke to each other again.

  The action-packed script required the use of so many stunt doubles for the actors that co-star Clint Eastwood quipped, ‘They ought to change the title to Where Doubles Dare.’ Stunt veteran Alf Joint was Burton’s double and loved the experience of working with the Welshman. ‘He was a fantastic raconteur. One Friday he was in his dressing room from about four in the afternoon and he never left until five the following morning! Everybody was enthralled by his stories.’

  Numerous old friends popped by the studio, including Trevor Howard, O’Toole and Harris. Burton and his drinking buddies helped give producer Elliott Kastner a few hairy moments. Alf Joint recalls one of them. ‘It was really hysterical. One time they left on the Friday night on a plane for Paris. Harris and Howard were there – all the Alcoholics Anonymous – and Kastner was a bit worried. He said, “Well, you will be back Monday?” Richard said, “Oh, don’t worry.” They turned up on the Wednesday.’

  Bizarrely, on location in Austria, Burton was drinking with Eastwood and Liz Taylor in the hotel bar when a man came up and pressed a revolver against his stomach. ‘I thought with Clint there and Liz, who’s tough enough for two men, I’d leave them to deal with him. So I stood up, excused myself politely and went off to have a slash.’ When Burton returned the man was gone and Liz sat purring in triumph.

  This wasn’t the first time Burton had stared a gun straight in the face; twice before, angry husbands had brandished firearms at him for indiscretions with their wives. The first time happened on location in Africa when a man came at him with an elephant gun. ‘And you know what sort of damage that can do. I had to give him several large bottles of booze to persuade him to go away.’

  Next for Burton came a very different role, that of Henry VIII in the historical drama Anne of the Thousand Days (1969). For Charles Jarrott, a prolific TV director, this was his first feature and the prospect of working with Burton was a daunting one. Their first meeting was in the star’s trailer on the set of a film that he was making with Tony Richardson; Burton naturally had director approval. ‘We began a little hesitatingly,’ recalls Jarrott. ‘But as I had been an actor, we had a common bond on discussing the theatre. I remember him talking about how the theatre made you respond to discipline, that it was the backbone for an actor, that it made you punctual and made you learn your lines. I agreed and we got on well.’ Two weeks later Jarrott read in the paper that Richardson had fired Burton because he was always late on the set. ‘I think that fact reassured me in a funny sort of way,’ says Jarrott. ‘Richard Burton, star extraordinaire, was a human being after all.’

  Of course Jarrott was fully aware of Burton’s reputation, that he was often very late back on the set after lunch. But for the whole duration of the shoot Jarrott can recall only one moment of lapse. ‘I had a two day shoot on a scene when Henry tells the councillors that he is going to form a Church of England. They all sat on benches around long tables while he sat in a throne, giving them the news at some length. On the first day he came in, and said, “Can you shoot around me today, love. I feel a bit hung-over.” And indeed he looked it. So I spent the whole of that day shooting over his shoulder. I think he felt a bit embarrassed, just giving lines to the others, while he swayed a little now and again. The next day I was scheduled to put the camera on to him the whole day. I felt a little nervous that he would be the same. Not a bit of it. He asked to speak to the cast and crew, apologized for his condition the day before, and said to me, “OK, let’s go.” And his performance was as sharp as a razor blade. I never had a problem again.’

  It seemed appropriate that here was Burton making a film about royalty, while he and Elizabeth arrived at the studio with an entourage fit for a king. So many were their staff and collective hangers-on that several dressing rooms were knocked down at Shepperton Studios to make one big suite to house them all. Despite this show of ostentation Jarrott found Burton a pleasure to work with. ‘He had a great sense of humour and was wont to tell a few too many stories to the other actors and they were great stories. They were so good, it was hard for me to break it up to work! He was a trifle lazy. Sometimes he would come down on to the set at the end of a day, dressed in his Henry costume, but only the top piece. The lower half was a pair of immaculate trousers and brilliantly shined shoes. He was looking for a fast away after the wrap.’

  On the whole, though, Burton conducted himself with supreme professionalism, happy to carry out Jarrott’s wishes to perform some of Henry’s long speeches in a single take. ‘In one scene opposite Anthony Quayle as Wolsey, Henry has an explosive speech when he says he will split the world in two like an apple if he can’t have his way. For some reason, Burton began to get a little tangled up. As I was doing the whole scene in one shot, it demanded another take. We went to Take 18, and I suggested to him that I could break the scene up, so that he could do it in pieces. The whole stage, including myself, was a little tense. He refused. He was determined to do it – and he did – in Take 22.’

  So good was Burton’s performance as Henry in Anne of the Thousand Days that he was Oscar nominated for Best Actor: the sixth time, and for the sixth time he lost out. Some have theorised that the reason Burton never won an Oscar was that the long list of women he’d shagged over the years were either the wives or mistresses of Hollywood’s bigwigs. No one was going to vote for a man who’d shagged his wife, however many years ago it was. Burton’s infidelities had perhaps returned to haunt him.

  The winner
in 1969 was John Wayne for True Grit, a popular choice and Burton left the ceremony to go back to his hotel in no mean spirit. Just as he was about to have a cup of tea in his suite the door burst open and there stood Wayne holding his toupee in one hand and his Oscar in the other. ‘Why, you limey son of a bitch,’ he bellowed, ‘why don’t we both have a real drink?’ They started on the hard stuff and later in the evening Wayne turned to Burton’s companion Brook Williams and snarled, ‘That’s a really lousy rug you’re wearing.’ Brook replied rather stiffly, ‘This happens to be my own hair.’ Wayne didn’t believe him and tried pulling it off. A female guest of the Burtons, who’d joined them in their drinking, felt suddenly groggy, made her excuses and left for one of the bedrooms. Later Wayne got up desperate for a piss and went in search of the bathroom only to fall over her sleeping form. When Burton told the woman the next day she was mortified. ‘That’s the trouble,’ she said. ‘When one drinks one misses such a lot.’

  By the late 1960s Richard Harris claimed to have mellowed. ‘I found it better to wake up feeling a success than clawing, hung-over, through a fog of self-disgust wondering whether I, or some other fella, still had the same number of teeth he went to bed with.’ The 60s had been Harris’s decade for punch-ups; evenings out in pubs or restaurants invariably ended in an argument or a kerbside brawl. Like Ollie Reed, he seemed to be a magnet for the wrong kind of person who, with a couple of pints inside him, wanted to test his manhood against the screen tough guy. Harris confessed that he probably lost more fights than he won. ‘I was dangerous; you’d have to knock me out to beat me. I’d whack you with a glass if it was necessary. But fighting wasn’t about winning; it was about having some fun.’