During the filming of Tommy Reed developed a close friendship with Keith Moon, drummer of The Who. Moon was the undisputed wild man of rock whose antics were already legendary when he hooked up with Reed. This was a man who once gulped down a horse tranquillizer that put him out cold for two days. Their first meeting was auspicious indeed. Reed was relaxing in the bath at Broome Hall when he heard an almighty roar from outside. It was Moon paying a visit, but being a rock star he was turning up in a helicopter. Reed thought he was being invaded by some lunatic and ran downstairs in his bathrobe brandishing an antique sword that he kept for such emergencies. Reed also kept a double-barrelled shotgun by his bedside and was quite open about his threats to shoot any trespasser. He’d been known to take pot shots at photographers. Moon stepped out of the helicopter and introduced himself. The pair spent a riotous weekend together. Halfway through dinner Moon suggested that they should play a game. ‘I was supposed to run round the fields,’ remembered Reed, ‘while he chased after me with a car to see if he could hit me.’ They also had a sword fight with those big double-edged swords up and down the hall. The next night Moon came in and asked Reed to see a dirty home movie he and his girlfriend had made. ‘I didn’t know what to say. Well, what are you supposed to say about this delightful girl with no clothes on? I just said, yes, that’s pretty, Keith; artistic – very artistic. Good night.’
One of their parties resulted in Reed being banned from two Los Angeles hotels, something of a record. It was a huge birthday bash for Reed’s brother David at the plush Beverly Wiltshire, and when a naked lady burst out of the cake that seemed to be the signal for mayhem. Moon demolished the place, shattering the huge crystal chandeliers with a chair and then slashing at the expensive wallpaper with a fork. Guests started screaming and running out, while bodyguards began punching the odd person. Sitting on his own in a corner was Ringo Starr, shaking his head as if he’d seen it all before (he probably had). Reed was forced to manhandle his friend into the kitchen. ‘He had gone completely berserk.’ And was later lumbered with an £8,000 bill for damages and barred. When word got around he was also barred from the Beverly Hills Hotel. Richard Harris had earlier been barred from the same establishment for bringing back hookers to his room and then broadcasting the fact on the Johnny Carson TV Show. However, when the Sultan of Brunei bought the hotel in the early 90s he lifted the ban on Harris and Reed.
Kindred spirits Reed and Moon were practically inseparable during the filming of Tommy, sharing the same hotel away from the rest of the cast and crew. One night they sat up drinking in Moon’s suite, emptying a bottle of brandy. When the drummer tried to order up another, the porter wouldn’t answer the phone – so Moon picked up the television and threw it out of the window. It landed outside the main door of the hotel, and the porter came running out. He thought a bomb had exploded. Moon yelled, ‘Answer the fucking phone or my bed’s coming next!’
Within a few days, as word spread of Moon’s wild all-night parties and groupies, the rest of the crew moved in with them. It was like Sodom and Gomorrah. One night Reed was besieged in his bedroom with six bunny girls pressed up against the glass fire escape door, all waving dildos at him, trying to get in.
Even the mighty Reed sometimes found it tough keeping up with the anarchic Moon. Roger Daltrey occupied the bedroom next to Reed and one day Moon discovered he’d left his favourite jacket in there and no one could find the key. No problem, he borrowed an electric drill from the film crew and was in the process of hammer-drilling his way through the adjoining wall when the key was discovered.
On another occasion Reed arrived early one night to find yet another of Moon’s parties in full swing and 14 girls drinking champagne in his room. ‘Good evening, what can I do for you?’ They told him, but Reed was too damn tired and instead ordered them to leave. They refused to budge so Reed went in search of Moon. He found his friend flat on his back, totally starkers, with two Swedish models sitting on his face. ‘Excuse me, Moony,’ Reed said. ‘Umm,’ said Moon, or something equally unintelligible. Reed began to explain the difficulties he was having removing several bits of crumpet from his bedroom. ‘Just tell ’em to fuck off!’ Reed said he’d tried that with no success. ‘Oh all right.’ Moon stood up. ‘Excuse me darlings,’ he said to his Swedish playmates and marched down the corridor naked, causing one maid to flee in terror. Barging into the room he picked up a tray of champagne glasses and hurled it at the girls who ran out screaming. ‘See you in the morning,’ Moon said to Reed as he walked back.
After Tommy Moon left with The Who for a US tour and asked Ollie to look after a few things for him while he was gone. Asleep in bed at Broome Hall Reed was awoken suddenly by the sound of a large removal lorry. The foreman handed him a note from Moon which asked Reed to take care of his Great Dane called Bean Bag who’d inherited several of his master’s bad habits, such as head butting glass doors, and also a rhinoceros called Hornby. ‘What bloody rhino?’ Reed demanded. ‘This one,’ said the foreman, dragging out a full size replica of a charging rhinoceros. Ollie ended up keeping them both for years.
After being told by doctors to rein back on the booze or die Richard Burton entered a period of convalescence. From time to time, when dangerously out of condition, Burton would go on the wagon for months on end; but just as suddenly resume drinking to excess again. It was part of his well-worn image, most people saw him as a great extrovert who lived only for booze, rugby and women and he did very little to dissuade them from this opinion. ‘I rather like my reputation, actually,’ he said as he approached the big 50. ‘That of a spoiled genius from the Welsh gutter, a drunk, a womanizer.’
It was during this period that he finally decided to divorce Liz Taylor. ‘We burn each other out,’ he said once of their love. Well the flames had gone out at last after ten years of marriage. The divorce settlement was considerably weighted towards Liz, though Burton didn’t complain, he just wanted out. The joke around town was that Liz got the diamond mine and he got the shaft.
Burton was asked to play Winston Churchill in a television co-production between NBC and the BBC called Walk with Destiny (1974), but when shooting was due to start had gone AWOL and was eventually tracked down by director Herbert Wise to his home in Mexico at Puerto Vallarta. ‘We found him there,’ recalls Wise, ‘in the swimming pool. We chatted and he told us how he was on the wagon and that he had a nurse. But then when the producers were talking to his lawyers on the phone Burton slipped off to the kitchen and I saw him open this huge ice box and take out a bottle of vodka and just drain three-quarters of it, put it back in the fridge and come back out. This was him being on the wagon!’
Burton invited Wise and his two American producers to dinner the next night, a special occasion he promised that also included the presence of the American consul and his wife. ‘We arrived the following evening,’ recalls Wise, ‘and there was Burton sitting on a veranda which had a whole open vista looking out to sea. He sat there, with his nurse in attendance, and we started chatting and he was obviously pissed. Then he insisted on reading bits of the script because he wanted to show us what he was going to do with it and bored the pants off us and he was getting more and more plastered as well. After an hour of this we all looked at each other and began wondering when we were going to eat, because there was no sign of this meal we’d been promised. Then in mid-sentence, as Burton was reading the script, he fell asleep. There was complete silence, the nurse didn’t know what to do, she just sat there. Finally the wife of the American consul said, “Well I think we’d better go.” And we said, “I think we’d better.” So we went. To leave that room you went down some steps, there were several levels to that house, and we went down and I hung back because I found it so dramatic, and I was the last one to go down and as I went I looked back and I saw this idol of millions of people, this film star, totally out for the count with this glorious vista behind him, it was wonderful.’
Wonderful, yes, unnerving, too. Could Burton pull himself toge
ther for what was going to be a challenging and arduous film? Wise didn’t think so and told his American backers that they were taking a tremendous risk hiring him after what he’d witnessed. ‘What’s the alternative, then?’ they asked. ‘What about Peter Ustinov?’ Wise said. ‘Usti…who?’ was the in-glorious reply. ‘How about Richard Attenborough?’ Wise next suggested. ‘No, never heard of him.’ ‘Olivier?’ said Wise, feeling confident this time. The American executive picked up his phone and bellowed down it, ‘What were the ratings for the last TV show Olivier did?’ They came back. ‘Not good enough.’ All these names bounced around but in the end it was Burton they wanted and Burton they got. It was up to Wise to keep him under control.
Rehearsals for the film had yet to begin when Huw Weldon, then head of BBC television and a fellow Welshman, organized a reception for Burton. ‘So at lunchtime in the BBC club there was this huge assembly of everybody connected with the show,’ Wise recalls. ‘Burton appeared and I was standing near him and behind me was the table with all the drinks. Then Huw Weldon leapt on a table and said how wonderful it was to have Richard Burton here, a great honour etc, and finally he said, “I want you all to raise a glass to this enterprise, you too Richard,” and Burton turned round and said, “I’ll have a large vodka.” He was supposed to be on the wagon but from that moment on the whole show was ruined because he was on the piss again. Now, who needs enemies when you’ve got friends like that! Obviously Huw Weldon didn’t do it deliberately but I mean how fucking stupid can you be when everybody knew what Burton’s reputation was. So, that was the start of it.’
Almost from day one Wise had problems with Burton, ‘because a lot of the time he was pissed but also all that drinking from years gone by and all the detoxing had had an effect on his brain, so he was not the sharpest and sometimes could not follow my direction. He was a nice enough man, I had no personal grudge against him whatsoever except he posed a tremendous problem because I couldn’t rely on him and in performance he was very inconsistent. One morning he arrived at the studio in his Rolls-Royce, still dressed in his tuxedo from the previous night’s festivities, absolutely plastered, and I saw him and said, “Richard.” He went, “Urghhh.” I said, “Richard, turn round.” He turned round. “Get back into your car.” He said, “What!” I said, “Get back into your car.” He did and drove away. I knew he couldn’t work that day.’
During the course of the film drink was never very far from Burton’s mind. Midway through shooting they tackled one of the film’s most emotional moments where Churchill sits alone at night time writing in his diary, with the menacing booms of an air raid going on outside. ‘Burton asked me,’ says Wise, ‘“What shall I write?” and I said, “Write whatever you like; I’m not going to do a close up on it.” So he wrote something and at the end of the day the production manager said, come and have a look at what he wrote, and it was: I can’t wait for this film to finish because I’ve got to get back to my drinking.’
Despite all the troubles Burton did endear himself to Wise, turning up with just a make-up man and the ever-dependable Brook Williams. ‘He was quite modest in that sort of way. I would say he was a very nice man if he hadn’t been poisoned by alcohol. But it is a disease. Funnily enough a lot of Welsh and Irish, all that Gaelic lot, they do seem to have that propensity for booze, like Harris and O’Toole.’
Amazingly, less than a year after the divorce the Burton/Taylor circus was rolling again. In October 1975 they remarried in Botswana, toasting their vows with champagne amid the distant grunts of hippos. ‘The best man was a rhinoceros,’ Burton joked. It was indeed an odd place to be married. ‘I remember thinking, what am I doing here,’ Burton said later. ‘It was very curious. An extraordinary adventure, doomed from the start of course.’ The omens looked bad when Burton came down with malaria.
Richard Harris was still making shit movies, like the disaster movie The Cassandra Crossing (1976), which he only did because it meant playing opposite two sex sirens. ‘I’m a Limerick lad,’ he explained, ‘so it was a wet dream to be acting with Ava Gardner and Sophia Loren in their corsets and bras.’
When he did make a good film, like Richard Lester’s wonderful Robin and Marian (1976), it was only a cameo appearance; the star role of Robin went to his pal Sean Connery. Harris didn’t even get to play the sheriff of Nottingham; that went to Robert Shaw, so he had to make do with King Richard and just two scenes, powerful though they were. ‘Practically the whole of that cast were bloody tax exiles,’ recalls Lester. ‘So we shot in Spain. There were some fair drinkers there too, Shaw, Harris, and Denholm Elliott who left the hotel quite early, found himself a cell in a monastery because there was a tasty red wine made there and we never saw him again, except for the shooting. He stayed there and very piously drank them out of house and home, or rather out of monastery and home.’
Distressed at the low calibre of scripts he was being offered Harris decided to write his own, but no studio was prepared to back these projects, scared of his reputation. Harris knew he had only himself to blame. ‘I was a loose cannon. Who would trust me? I was a casualty of 20 years of photos in the paper with some big titted scrubber, with a glass in my fist, telling the world, fuck off! I crucified myself. Then when it came to walking humbly back and saying, gee, could I have ten million dollars to make this…doors shut in my face.’ The experience did little to endear Hollywood to him, a place Harris had little warmth towards anyway. ‘If you go to a whorehouse you expect to get fucked, don’t you.’
At least there was the ‘supposed’ stability of his marriage to Ann Turkel, who was determined to create a happy family home in spite of Harris’s penchant to smash it all to pieces. There were periods of time when Harris stayed off the booze but for Ann these were too few and far between. ‘Richard didn’t drink if we were alone together, but the minute anybody else was with us, he would start drinking into obliteration – a true symptom of an alcoholic.’ Harris liked to joke that he’d formed a new group called Alcoholics-Unanimous. ‘If you don’t feel like a drink, you ring another member and he comes over to persuade you.’
Divorce for Ann, at first, wasn’t an option; she was determined to stick to her marriage vows, literally for better or worse. ‘It was terrifying,’ she said, aware that, if Harris had drunk excessively the night before, just saying the wrong thing could make him explode in anger. Inevitably a degree of violence entered the marriage. According to Ann, she was physically abused by Harris, ‘beyond anything you can possibly imagine.’ His drinking and erratic mood swings were also, she later claimed, why she chose not to have children with him, despite Harris’s desire for a daughter: ‘How am I going to handle a baby and handle Richard?’ But the bad times were often outweighed by the good and Harris, prone to extravagant gestures, could be incredibly loving. He threw a surprise wedding anniversary party for Ann and flew their families over from the US and Ireland to London. It was this side to Harris’s character that made it so difficult for Ann to leave him; later Ann admitted that she should have walked out the first year after it dawned on her what Richard was like.
Peter O’Toole was also suffering marital problems. However, in early 1975 he needed Siân as never before. An abdominal irregularity he’d been carrying for years and persistently ignored (he hated doctors and hospitals) finally erupted and he had to be rushed to hospital. The press believed it was a liver complaint as a result of his drinking, but it was worse – O’Toole believed he was dying. He was incapable of taking solid food, and pure water had to be fed down a pipe directly into his stomach. Tests proved nothing so it was decided to carry out exploratory surgery. Something very wrong was going on inside O’Toole’s digestive system and what they found caused such alarm that a major operation was hurriedly performed. Several yards of intestinal tubing were removed, leaving an eight-inch scar. ‘I suggested they put in a zip, they were opening me up so often,’ he later joked.
For years O’Toole was nervous about disclosing what the surgeons discovered. ‘M
y plumbing is nobody’s business but my own.’ American tabloids reported that his pancreas was removed, but O’Toole denied this. What was true was that O’Toole came as close to dying as you can do without actually snuffing it. ‘It was a photo-finish, the surgeons said.’ Stomach problems had been the bane of O’Toole’s life since the age of 19. No one really knew what was wrong with him and so he drank sometimes just to ease the pain: ‘Madame Bottle, the great anaesthetic.’ But no more. There was now so little of his digestive system left that any amount of alcohol would prove fatal to him. Having come so close to death O’Toole was determined to live each day to the full.
Years later in interviews O’Toole stressed the point that he gave up the booze not because of his near-death experience but out of fear that he might one day become addicted and not be able to stop; he’d watched that happen to too many of his friends.
Following his recovery from his illness, though, Siân finally left O’Toole for a young actor, Robin Sachs, 17 years her junior. O’Toole bought her out of the Hampstead house, but she got almost nothing else; even her jewellery was sold at Sotheby’s. She left behind her two daughters, even her mother, who continued to live with O’Toole, who affectionately called her ‘the old witch’. The star also learnt that he was practically uninsurable in Hollywood. To cap it all his father died, as did his beloved dog. ‘The things that happened to me were almost biblical.’ But at least he was still alive, though the ravages of alcohol would be clear in that haggard (if still lively) face forever more.
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