What Fresh Lunacy is This?
What Fresh
Lunacy is This?
Also by Robert Sellers
Hellraisers: The Life and Inebriated Times of Burton,
Harris, O’Toole and Reed
Hollywood Hellraisers: The Wild Life and Fast Times of Marlon Brando,
Dennis Hopper, Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson
An A–Z of Hellraisers: A Comprehensive Compendium of
Outrageous Insobriety
Don’t Let the Bastards Grind You Down: How One Generation of
British Actors Changed the World
Very Naughty Boys: The Inside Story of
Handmade Films
The True Adventures of the World’s Greatest Stuntman
(with Vic Armstrong)
James Robertson Justice: What’s the Bleeding Time?
A Biography (with James Hogg and Howard Watson)
Little Ern!: The Authorised Biography of Ernie Wise (with James Hogg)
What Fresh
Lunacy is This?
The Authorized Biography of Oliver Reed
Robert Sellers
Constable • London
Constable & Robinson Ltd
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First published in the UK by Constable,
an imprint of Constable & Robinson, 2013
Copyright © Robert Sellers 2013
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ISBN 978-1-47210-112-9 (hardback)
ISBN 978-1-47210-114-3 (ebook)
Printed and bound in the UK
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‘I do not live in the world of sobriety.’
Oliver Reed
Acknowledgements
I received invaluable cooperation from the family of Oliver Reed. My sincere thanks go to his brothers David and Simon, his children Mark and Sarah, and his widow Josephine. I felt privileged talking to them.
I would also like to thank the many friends and work colleagues who agreed to share their memories of Oliver, memories that were often funny, sad, traumatic, and bemusing, often all at the same time:
Carole André, Michael Apted, Vic Armstrong, David Ball, Karen Black, Stan Boardman, Leslie Bricusse, Eleanor Bron, Barbara Carrera, Geraldine Chaplin, Stephan Chase, Michael Christensen, Bernie and Joyce Coleman, Don Coutts, Michael Craig, Wendy Craig, Jacquie Daryl, Pierre David, Brian Deacon, Quinn Donoghue, Greg Dyke, Mark Eden, Samantha Eggar, Julia Foster, Stuart Freeman, Paul and Nora Friday, Mick Fryer, Ray Galton, Terry Gilliam, Menahem Golan, Johnny Goodman, Stuart Gordon, Sheba Gray, Piers Haggard, Georgina Hale, Noel Harrison, Paul Heiney, Fraser Heston, Mike Higgins, John Hough, Glenda Jackson, Charles James, Peter James, Charles Jarrott, Kerrie Keane, Paul Koslo, Sir Christopher Lee, Mark Lester, Carol Lynley, Nico Mastorakis, Peter Medak, Murray Melvin, Eben Merrill, Jane Merrow, Mick Monks, Oswald Morris (1999 interview), Brian Murphy, Steve Neill, Barry Norman, Pat O’Brien, Gerry O’Hara, Ian Ogilvy, Anthony Perry, Johnny Placett, Warren Raines, Reginald Rea, Muriel Reed, Selwyn Roberts, Maria Rohm, Yvonne Romain, Ken Russell, Jimmy Sangster, Janette Scott, Alan Simpson, Elke Sommer, Louise Sorel, Pierre Spengler, Graham Stuart, Brian Thompson, Barry Turner, Jonathan Vanger, Patrick Warburton, Douglas Wick, Jack Wild (1999 interview), Billy Williams, Ali Wilson, Michael Winner, Katherine Woodville, Sir John Woolf (1999 interview), Michael York, Richard Zanuck.
Pilgrimage
On 2 May, the anniversary of Oliver Reed’s death, the small village cemetery of Churchtown in County Cork, Ireland, is host to a very special pilgrimage. Family and friends congregate beside a small grave, sit on the grass and chat, laugh, drink, and share stories about an extraordinary individual, not forgetting to regularly douse his grave with a gin and tonic; just so the old man doesn’t feel left out.
As the years pass – remarkably it’s almost fifteen since Reed’s death – the number of family members who visit the grave lessens, understandably so, but a few still make the special effort to come over for the anniversary. His son Mark is especially keen to uphold the tradition, so that his dad shouldn’t be alone on that day of all days.
Conveniently situated opposite a pub, the spot is visited by fans and tourists too, who pop in to buy a pint of beer to throw over him. ‘I’m surprised that anything grows on that grave, the amount of alcohol it’s seen,’ observes Ollie’s daughter Sarah. Gifts are also left at the graveside, some weird and wonderful things, like a toy bulldog in honour of Bullseye, Bill Sikes’s loyal companion in Oliver! And money, so much in fact that one year his widow Josephine collected it all and gave it to a local charity.
But if you look closely at the inscription on the headstone you’ll notice a flaw. Oliver liked to think that as a film performer he made the air move, an essential quality in cinema, he always thought. Indeed, Orson Welles once said of him, ‘Oliver was one of those rare fellows who have the ability to make the air move around them.’ There was electricity about him, because you didn’t know what he was going to do next. And not just on the screen but in real life too. He was so strong a personality that you could not deny him, you could not ignore him. When he walked into a room every head turned and he took control, without even trying. ‘He did have this amazing energy around him, which was quite remarkable,’ says Mark. ‘And you can’t teach someone that, they just have it.’
So the family decided they wanted ‘He made the air move’ engraved on his headstone. The night before it was erected, they all went down to have a look, and there it was, this brand-new gravestone in big thick slate:
Robert Oliver Reed
1938–1999
‘He made the earth move.’
It was an awkward moment as they tried to explain to the stonemason that wasn’t quite what they meant. So it was changed. And if you rub your hand over the stone you can still feel the gentle hollow where the stonemason had to sand down the slate to etch in the word ‘air’ rather than ‘earth’.
Oliver Reed died as he lived – in his own unique way. And the fact that he died in a pub has only added to the legend. While a lot of actors have a romantic notion of conking out on stage like Molière, Oliver died drinking. ‘We always said, if he could have picked that for himself he would have been delighted,’ says Josephine.
Of course, his death was a total nonsense. It should never have happened. He’d just done Gladiator and shown that he was still a fine actor and was all set for one of cinema’s greatest comebacks, and then he resorted to drinking copious amounts of rum and arm-wrestling with eighteen-year-old sailors. It was a terrible waste. ‘I remember the shock of his death but realizing that it was perhaps inevitable that it would happen that way,’ recalls Michael York. ‘Because even as Athos in The Three Musketeers he had a line that read, “Life is so much more rosy when seen through the bottom
of a glass of ale.”’
Indeed, Oliver’s principal relaxation in life was going to the pub. He always said that you met a better class of person there. It was his drama class, his school, his psychiatrist, his doctor, his everything. Once asked to summarize his career, Ollie replied, with scarcely a hint of exaggeration, ‘Shafting the girlies and downing the sherbie.’
A Village Boy
Back in the early sixties Ollie initiated the now infamous Wimbledon run, a glorified pub crawl that incorporated eight hostelries dotted around the village: the Rose and Crown, the Dog and Fox (where he downed his first ever pint), the Castle (now the Fire Stables), the King of Denmark (long ago demolished), the Swan, the Brewery Tap (now gone), the Hand in Hand, and the Crooked Billet, where Mark shared a pint for the last time with his dad just a few months before he died.
The rules were simple: circumnavigate the course as quickly as possible, downing a pint in each pub, and arrive back at where you started from. ‘It was like a race,’ recalls friend Mick Monks. ‘The last one back got the next round in. It was also an endurance test because by the time you got to the fourth pub you’d have lost three people. And there was no throwing up: that meant disqualification. I think the record for whizzing round was something like an hour and ten minutes. Ollie sometimes went round twice, but he didn’t always win.’
The Wimbledon run remains a tradition carried on to this day by fans and wannabe hell-raisers. Mark has seen them firsthand. ‘It is remarkable how a dozen or more years on from his death there are youngsters who come into the pubs wearing T-shirts with “Ollie Reed died in action” on them. And then they go off to Malta, to Valletta, to drink in the pub where he died. It’s all a bit weird, to be honest.’ At the same time it does prove the continuing significance of Oliver Reed as a cultural figure in our nation’s psyche, although the ultimate tragedy is that here is a man more famous today for getting drunk on television or playing the public fool than as the distinguished actor he unquestionably was. ‘That’s the thing,’ says Mark. ‘You’ve got this new generation who probably don’t know everything that he stood for or what he was about in terms of acting, but they still feel the need to adopt his antics, having fun and drinking, because it’s a good boysie thing to go and do.’
A lot of these people miss the point entirely, that for Ollie it wasn’t always about the booze. Often the drinking was just the social grease that brought people together and lowered the inhibitions. ‘He loved the fact that he had the constitution of an ox,’ says his daughter Sarah. ‘And that he could drink people under the table and then just see the effect. It was a terrific wind-up, that was all part of it, it was all part of the crack.’ It was fun and games and if it wasn’t fun he wouldn’t do it. ‘Like the Wimbledon run,’ says Mark. ‘Yes, he would get arseholed, but it was much more about the fun and the challenge and the endurance of being able to do it. It wasn’t really about the drinking. For him it was the journey, not the destination. So being out of his tree was not what it was about.’
The Swan was among Oliver’s favourite pubs in Wimbledon village: it was where he played darts and met up with his mates for drinks and laughter. His brother Simon remembers popping in one evening – this must have been in the mid-sixties – on the way to the cinema with a date. ‘We went inside and Ollie was there with about six guys. He saw me and said, “Sit down, Sausage.” He always used to call me Sausage. “Can I get you a drink?” I could see they’d been at it all day.’ Everyone was playing a card game called Jacks. Now, Ollie was a sucker for pub games, the more ludicrous the better. There was, for instance, the Slippery Pole Contest, held every year during the seventies at the Royal Oak in Rusper, West Sussex. It featured a piece of old gas pipe supported by a trestle at either end over a load of manure-covered straw. The idea was to edge along the pipe, which was covered in washing-up liquid, and with a heavy cushion try to knock your opponent off. Ollie realized that if he wore an extra pair of jeans the absorbability would be better and so allow him a greater grip on the pipe. Alas, one year the organizers used a very strong detergent. Mark remembers the consequences for Ollie. ‘After the competition he carried on drinking through the night with the same jeans on and the next day he thought, that’s a bit uncomfortable, and basically the corrosive qualities in this soap had taken all the skin off his goolies. At the time he was making The Class of Miss MacMichael (1978) with Glenda Jackson, so when he wasn’t required for a scene he was walking round in a kilt with camomile lotion all over his knackers.’
More bizarre was a contest to see which two men could keep the longest French kiss going, the prize being a case of Scotch. Ollie’s opponent one night made the mistake of divulging to Ollie’s pal Michael Christensen his intention of filling his mouth with Colman’s mustard. Michael recalls, ‘I told Ollie what this bloke was up to, so just before the bout he emptied an ashtray into his own mouth and as they came together mustard and fags squirted everywhere. It lasted about three seconds. It was called a draw.’
Jacks was a particular favourite among the pub games Ollie liked to play. The rules were that you dealt out cards and the first person to draw a Jack had to order a drink, putting into the same glass shots of hard liquor for however many players there were. The second person to draw a Jack sipped the drink, the third Jack downed it in one, and the fourth Jack paid for it. ‘And I don’t know if it was by luck or design,’ says Simon, ‘but I had two of these within about twenty minutes of arriving: that’s fourteen spirits, full on. It soon began to take effect.’ He stumbled over to Ollie to explain that he had to go because his date was waiting. ‘Tell you what, Sausage,’ said Ollie, ‘the best thing you can do is to come outside and get some fresh air.’ The two men went for a stroll on Wimbledon Common and carried on walking towards a large pond. ‘Keep going,’ cried Ollie as Simon walked straight into the murky water. ‘He wanted to see me shit-faced, and now he’d got me wrecked as well because I came out the other side of this pond with bits of twig, mud, and crap all over me, and this girl took one look and said, “That’s it!” and stormed off. Actually, however good it may have turned out with her, it wasn’t as funny as that incident. I laughed all night.’
Most of the pubs Ollie drank in were situated around the village, and he rarely ventured into London’s West End or even down to the pubs in Wimbledon town a short distance away. He felt safe in the village, where everyone knew him and looked out for him, especially when he started to become famous. That was the reason why he loved the place so much, spending the first thirty years of his life there. It was an anchor in an often turbulent existence, and why the great majority of the friends that really lasted all through his life were Wimbledon people.
Ollie was very much a local character in Wimbledon, as was his father. Most people knew Peter Reed. He was unmistakable as he took his afternoon constitutional around the village: distinguished-looking, very upright, and tall, he never left the house without a smart suit on. ‘He was a very refined gentleman,’ is how Joyce Coleman, then the landlady of the Dog and Fox, remembers him. ‘And he was always immaculate, always. He’d walk through the village like he was the local squire.’
A newspaper racing correspondent, Peter Reed had married Marcia Beryl Andrews, the daughter of a London businessman, and they lived modestly in a small cottage in the village of Fetcham in Surrey, a short drive away from Epsom racecourse. Here Marcia had given birth to their first child on 7 February 1936, a boy they christened David Anthony Reed. It was an event that may well have prompted them to move to Wimbledon, so as to be closer to their respective families.
They rented a spacious detached property at 9 Durrington Park Road, near Raynes Park railway station, which sent weary commuters up to Waterloo and the vast metropolis of London. The house was also close to Wimbledon Common and a good, spirited walk from the All England Lawn Tennis Club. In short, this was a suburb about as middle class as they come. And it was into these genteel surroundings that Oliver Reed (‘Robert Oliver’ on his birth certi
ficate) was born on 13 February 1938.
His earliest years Oliver would recall as disconnected images: ‘A burning fire in a grate. A potty overturned on a linoleum floor. The taste of cold urine. A world of legs – table legs, chair legs, sideboard legs, human legs.’ David, a full two years older, is able to remember things a little more clearly, although again these are ‘just little flashes of memories’. He describes, from a distance of over seventy years, a household that might have looked to the casual observer to be residing in an Edwardian time warp. There was a man downstairs who was the family’s dogsbody, gardener, car washer and so on, and upstairs a nanny who looked after both children, to all intents and purposes so that Marcia didn’t have to. At six o’clock every evening David and Oliver would be brought downstairs and presented; ‘and that was the only time we were seen by our parents,’ recalls David.
Moving from Durrington Park, the Reeds rented a house in North View, right on the edge of Wimbledon Common. ‘My first memory of us living as a family was at North View,’ says David. ‘I remember being given a grown-up gas mask and Oliver was given a Mickey Mouse one which had a little nose on the front. The other thing I remember is the house had French windows out on to a garden, and Ollie went out one day and kicked over all these flowerpots and my father went up and gave him a two-shilling bit, saying, “You’re the only person who’d go out and knock over six flowerpots in a row.”’
On the outbreak of war with Germany Peter made a monumental decision that not only had a bearing on his own circumstances but deeply affected Oliver throughout adulthood and right up until the very last moments of his life. The thought of ordinary decent men killing each other, no matter what country they were from, was barbaric, Peter announced, and so he’d registered to become a conscientious objector. It was a laudable point of view, but a tough argument to win in the face of the threat from Hitler and Nazism. Marcia didn’t sympathize in the slightest with the principles behind her husband’s stance: all she saw was a coward and a man for whom all her love had evaporated. Their marriage was effectively over and for months the household crackled with tension.