Ollie was soon put to work in a more upmarket nightclub, but quickly discovered it was a knocking shop. After working there for a month he was taking a leak one night when he heard a commotion outside and shouts of ‘Police!’ He clambered through the toilet window, ran all the way to Waterloo Station and caught a train home. It took him a couple of weeks to muster the courage to return, only to find the place boarded up and the management done for living on immoral earnings. There was a twinge of sadness about it: crooks all of them, yes, but such interesting people. Ollie found the nearest pub and drank a toast to them, ending up pissed and nursing a horrendous hangover. He was supposed to be at his new job, putting flower and vegetable seeds into packets for £2 a week at a garden centre in Raynes Park. It was mind-numbingly dull. He decided to go to bed instead and never went back.
Son of a Bastard
Word reached Oliver that Granny May wasn’t long for this earth. Since running away from home and going to live with Granny Dardin, he had cut himself off somewhat from Granny May, which caused him some concern. In more ways than one Granny May was an extraordinary woman. David remembers her as being ‘very correct, very proud, but she wasn’t aloof. I remember she would sit there very regal, very old-fashioned. She was also very tall and she wore extraordinary hats, always with a veil, a very theatrical veil. I think she had been on the stage. She was known as a character in Wimbledon because she’d walk imperiously around the village.’
At this time in her mid-eighties, Granny May lived at 12 Lingfield Road in a house bought for her by Oliver’s uncle, the film director Carol Reed. For some months now she had spent her days a near-invalid, propped up in bed either reading or delighting in the photographs of her children and grandchildren that adorned the walls. It was into this room that Oliver crept one afternoon to sit next to her. Hours passed and when he got up to leave he kissed her gently and lovingly on the cheek. Granny May smiled and whispered, ‘I’m quite tall, Oliver. I only hope they make the coffin long enough.’
The very next day Oliver heard that she had died during the night. He ran over to the house and tried to climb through the downstairs window to see if the coffin was indeed long enough, but was shooed away by the servants. Walking into the garden, he was suddenly overwhelmed by emotion and burst into tears. ‘She was the only one who understood me, listened to me, encouraged me, kissed me,’ Oliver later wrote.
Oliver did not attend the funeral, fearful of meeting his father there most likely, but instead cherished his final moments with Granny May, when she’d taken his hand and placed in it Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘If’. Ollie treasured that piece of paper, which had been given to his grandmother by his grandfather and was the only link he had to a quite remarkable man. From earlier conversations with his father Ollie knew all about Granny May’s past, which was, he thought, a terrific story and one he later regretted never having made into a film. Her love affair with the great Victorian actor-manager Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree and the illegitimate children she bore him, including Sir Carol Reed and Oliver’s father Peter, was a secret that some sections of the Reed family had tried their best to erase, out of pure shame. Back in those days illegitimate children were simply not tolerated by society and were regarded as a blot on a family’s good name. ‘Our family was very Victorian,’ says David. ‘Neither Carol nor any of the elder members of the family ever talked about it. I mean, Carol wouldn’t have it mentioned that Beerbohm was his father and I remember it was a very strict rule that we never referred to it, it was to be kept very much under the carpet. Although our father always mentioned Tree, so we knew about it, many of the others were old-fashioned enough that it was not the done thing – because they were all bastards. I proudly declare I’m a son of a bastard.’ And what a line to be descended from.
Oliver called Herbert Beerbohm Tree ‘the most flamboyant, daring and versatile actor-manager in the record of the British stage’. Certainly there was grandeur about the man, who had, according to his biographer Madeleine Bingham, ‘a vagabond nature’. His social circle included the likes of Whistler and Oscar Wilde, he performed all the great Shakespearean roles to critical acclaim and popular success, acted opposite Lily Langtry, traded insults with George Bernard Shaw, founded the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and built Her Majesty’s Theatre in the Haymarket, still one of the most beautiful in Britain. For services to the theatre he was knighted in 1909.
Researching the life of Tree, one is struck by how many similarities there are in both his personality and lifestyle to Oliver’s; so many in fact that one is left wondering how much of him in his grandson was genetic and how much was manufactured. ‘Ollie was very affected by Tree,’ says Simon. ‘He almost skipped my father’s generation to be like Herbert in every way.’ Oliver’s daughter Sarah recalls that her father ‘worshipped the history of Herbert’. He’d even engage in conversations with him. Whenever Oliver was stuck about how to play a certain character he’d lie in the bath for hours, a flannel over his face, and ask the spirit of Tree for advice. Then it would click. ‘I’ve got it. I’ve got the character,’ he’d say, rushing downstairs to announce, ‘Herbert came.’ We should take this with a very large dose of salt, of course. David likens it to some kind of ‘romanticism’, adding, ‘I don’t know if there’s any more to it than that.’
Yet the similarities between the two men are intriguing. For starters, they shared a poor education. Tree never came to terms with even rudimentary mathematics and in adult life liked to give the impression that he hardly went near books. ‘I never read. I’m afraid of cramping my style.’ It was a blatant lie, just like Oliver’s often made claim, including in his autobiography, that the only book he ever read from cover to cover was Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows.
Tall, slim, with carrot-coloured hair and, thanks to his Eastern European background, blessed with exotic, dark features, Tree tended to be cast as the villain early in his career; as was Oliver in Hammer films. By the late 1880s Tree was a popular figure in the West End and a great lover of life. Actress Julia Nielson remarked that he behaved ‘like a schoolboy’ in his private hours but at the theatre was always dedicated to the job at hand. Very much like Oliver, the ultimate professional on set, but at night invariably a hell-raising maniac.
Both men were great womanizers, indulging in casual affairs with their leading ladies in spite of being married. Tree’s wife was Maud Holt, eleven years his junior, an actress whom, after several lead roles in his company, he began to use less and less, preferring her to be, in his words, ‘a domestic angel’, looking after the children and entertaining his guests. A traditionalist point of view that certainly found resonance with Oliver.
That Tree had taken a mistress, Beatrice May Pinney, Oliver’s Granny May, was scarcely a secret within the theatrical fraternity. Incredibly their affair, or shall we call it a romance, lasted some twenty years and produced six illegitimate children. There was Claude (born 1891) and Robin (born 1903), or Uncle Robin to Ollie, one of his favourite relatives as a boy. Peter used to say that Ollie and Robin were very alike in that Robin ‘attacks to defend his shyness’. Some of the tales Ollie was told about Robin’s wild youth instantly placed him on a pedestal, for instance the time he visited New York and stopped the traffic on Broadway by standing on his head in the street. He also walked across the frozen Hudson River, broke through the ice with an axe, and dived into the freezing water for a mad wager. Then there was Guy (born 1905), who became an artist and restored old paintings, Carol Reed (born 1906), and Juliet (born 1910), the couple’s only daughter. And finally there was Peter, the last to arrive, in 1911.
Somewhere in the middle of all this Beatrice decided to change her name by deed poll from Pinney to Reed, announcing, ‘I am but a broken Reed at the foot of the mighty Tree.’
While Tree was busy manufacturing what was in essence a second family which ended up twice the size of his legitimate one, his career in the theatre was attaining new heights. In many ways he was ahead of his ti
me. He produced a Shakespeare festival, putting on six of the Bard’s plays in a week and performing in all of them. His was the first London theatre to stage Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People and Oscar Wilde’s A Woman of No Importance. His impeccable taste was occasionally suspect, though. A friend arrived at Tree’s home one afternoon to read his latest play. During the second act Tree stood up, waving his hands. ‘You must be mad,’ he said. ‘It will never be popular.’ The friend was J. M. Barrie. The play was Peter Pan.
In 1904 Tree staged a successful production of Oliver Twist, playing Fagin. It was still packing them in two years later when Beatrice gave birth to Carol, who would go on to direct arguably the best version of Dickens’s classic tale. But for many, Tree’s finest triumph was the staging of Pygmalion in 1914, which gave George Bernard Shaw his first great commercial success. The two men did not get on and relations were strained during rehearsals. Shaw, who was directing Tree as Professor Higgins, learned to live with the actor’s eccentricities and said, ‘If he had not been so amusing, so ingenious and so entirely well intentioned, he would have driven me crazy.’ Such sentiments were to be repeated many times about his notorious grandson.
Following a trip to Hollywood to make a silent film version of Macbeth – with himself in the title role, John Emerson directing and D. W. Griffith as producer – Tree returned to England and suffered a fall in a friend’s house. After recuperating from surgery he died of pulmonary blood clots in 1917. Peter Reed was then just six years old and for the remainder of his life had only a few memories and impressions of his father. One of his favourites, which Ollie remembered being told, was that at the breakfast table he would sometimes rub marmalade into his sons’ hair and roar with laughter, ‘Now we are all redheads.’
It’s hard to doubt that Oliver grew up feeling special as a child, coming as he did from a family that had Tree and Carol Reed among its ranks. Add to that pair Max Beerbohm, Tree’s younger half-brother, a world-renowned caricaturist, writer and wit. ‘Ollie and I were brought up with Max broadcasting on the radio at Christmas from Italy, where he lived,’ recalls David. ‘The BBC used to go down there and virtually ask him to talk about anything because he was credited with the greatest command of the English language.’ David also read Max’s one and only novel, Zuleika Dobson, a tale about life at Oxford University in Edwardian times. Oliver must have read it too, since he later bought the film rights, but was never to see it materialize on screen. ‘So, growing up, Ollie and I were aware we had this wonderful heritage.’ A heritage that may very well have influenced Oliver’s decision to become an actor.
There’s someone else too, another possible ancestor who was to have a profound influence on a young and impressionable Oliver: Peter the Great, Tsar of Russia from 1672 to 1725 and one of the bloodiest monarchs in history. Again the connection was courtesy of Granny May, whose mother Henrietta Rowlatt was the daughter of Canon Rowlatt of Exeter, whose family was said to have been founded by a bastard child of the Tsar. The story goes that Peter the Great came to England in 1698 to study shipbuilding with the intention of starting his own navy, fell in love with a local girl, took her back to St Petersburg, and had two children who ultimately returned to England.
Discovering and hearing stories about this grand forebear added a certain exoticism to Ollie’s childhood daydreams and fuelled his imagination. ‘I was a lost prince,’ he said, and he would fantasize about riding with Boadicea against the invading Roman hordes or donning the armour of the Black Knight. ‘It was half play, half dream. The romantic musing of a dunce.’ He even half-expected to be whisked off at any moment to rule some desert kingdom or far-flung dark European realm, as he couldn’t help but feel ‘a certain contempt for the common lot I played with and rubbed shoulders with at ink-stained desks’. It never happened, but in his chosen profession of acting wasn’t Oliver still ‘living out my fantasies’?
While insufficient evidence exists to support any claim of alignment to this royal bloodline, the point is that Oliver grew up believing it to be true. It wasn’t until the late seventies that he finally set about researching into the matter himself, at great expense. One of his cousins, John Brooke-Little, was a world-renowned writer on heraldic subjects at the College of Arms in London. After much foraging in the past, Brooke-Little produced a fairly comprehensive family tree that went back centuries. Ollie also carried out his own research and, as he read more about Peter the Great, ‘I felt a frightening relaxation about the odd touches of paranoia and the strange impulses that had marked my personality and driven me to buck the system with outrageous horseplay.’ Was Ollie seeking to use the shadow of his illustrious ancestor as an excuse for some of his hell-raising behaviour, and asserting that this kind of infamy was in the genes?
As Tree’s personality had chimed with Oliver, so Peter’s exploits in England struck a chord, for instance how he’d invite noblemen to feast with him at his home and post guards at the door to prevent anyone from leaving before they had drunk a minimum of four bottles of wine. At the end of his stay his rented house in London was deemed a wreck, the kitchen floor was in rubble, three hundred panes of glass had been broken, and in tests of strength the brass locks on every door had been smashed.
While Ollie confessed that he saw much of himself in Peter, ‘I don’t like all I see.’ In his autobiography he reproduced this remarkably apt paragraph describing the young Tsar, written by the historian Stephen Graham: ‘The young Peter, drunk, pop-eyed, making dreadful faces, roaring, slashing about at random with his sword, was a fearsome host. His eyes were roaming, flashing, audacious, full of inventiveness and wild humour, or else full of adventurous cruelty, vengeful, implacable. His giant frame brooded over his guests at table like a vulture among lesser birds. But he did not brood over his wine. No one knew what would be his next action. All learned to be apprehensive.’
Naturally there were many who doubted the veracity of Ollie’s claims, not least members of his own family. ‘I’m not sure if all that Peter the Great stuff isn’t bullshit,’ says Simon. ‘I’ve always been terribly unconvinced, but Ollie was, he wore it like a medal. Maybe it’s true.’
For his role as Father Grandier in Ken Russell’s The Devils, Oliver was required to have all his hair and eyebrows shaved off. The film’s stills photographer took a shot of the final result and Ollie bears a quite uncanny resemblance to a death mask that Peter the Great had made in 1719. ‘I have to say the similarity is remarkable,’ says David. ‘It’s quite remarkable.’
Lance Corporal Reed 23324533 – Sir!
Trading on his strength and sporting prowess, Oliver decided to become a professional boxer. ‘I fancied myself as a light-heavyweight.’ It was a short-lived ambition, lasting a total of two fights. His first took place in a boxing booth at a fair in Mitcham, and he won it, quite easily. ‘I thought I was on to a good thing.’ His second bout resulted in a very different outcome: he took an awful beating from a man who turned out to be a former professional. ‘So I quit. I decided I didn’t like being hit.’
Instead he found employment as an orderly at St Helier Hospital in Carshalton. At the strip joint he’d learned about women and sex, here he learned about life and death. His duties mainly involved collecting the recently departed and taking them to the mortuary. Sometimes he’d wander around the wards and play with the ill children, just to keep their spirits up, only to be told a few days later that one of them had died. It was tough to accept, staring death right in the face, ‘but always the gloom was lifted by the radiance of the nurses’. They in turn warmed to his practical jokes. One night Ollie was wrapped in a sheet and wheeled on a trolley into the office where the duty nurse checked all corpses for personal items. As she lifted the sheet Oliver grabbed her hand and sat bolt upright. ‘She nearly jumped out of her knickers.’ Another time he hid himself in a coffin and was wheeled into a lift containing a group of medical students. Unfortunately the matron was there too and overheard his horror-film intonations of ‘Let me out. I’m ali
ve!’ In the administrator’s office Ollie received a severe dressing down and was warned that if he stepped out of line again he’d be fired. Pausing outside the office, he heard the matron and the governors burst out laughing.
Oliver turned eighteen in 1956 and swiftly received his call-up papers. National Service beckoned. His brother David had already undergone his stint and stayed on after the mandatory eighteen months to become an officer in the Military Police. It was a choice that surprised many because the Reed family was not particularly renowned for its military endeavours. We already know about Peter’s objections, and even Carol Reed, who was made a captain during the Second World War, didn’t take things seriously, absent-mindedly raising his hat whenever someone saluted him. Peter described Carol as ‘blissfully unmilitary, and [behaving] as though the war was a superb invention of Evelyn Waugh’s’.
At least Oliver was keen; unlike those who swallowed perfume in an effort to fail the army medical. His first choice was to join the Royal Military Police, the Red Caps, but because of his stint as a hospital porter he was placed with the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) and sent to Queen Elizabeth Barracks in Church Crookham, Hampshire, to learn to be a soldier. In other words, ‘How to peel spuds, polish mess tins, paint stones, march in step and sing dirty songs.’
The barracks at Church Crookham were smartly laid out with the usual parade ground and officers’ mess. The Training Companies were all housed in wooden barracks arranged in a spider formation, in other words six squad huts for about twenty men and each connected to two toilet and shower blocks. Every fortnight an intake of trainees joined and after ten or so weeks a company was basic-trained and moved on. Ollie was in D2 squad and arrived at the barracks in July 1956, settling quickly into army life as he found the experience not far removed from that of boarding school. He also loved the companionship of his fellow soldiers and, according to Reginald Rea, another cadet, who got to know Ollie well during his basic training, had no problem with discipline. ‘He had no sympathy at all with any whingers or moaners.’ Nor did he get into conflict with the staff, ‘who were all razor-sharp creases and polish, with little sticks to prod towards us while shouting and bawling. The RSM was a very large, impressive bloke; not to be crossed.’
What Fresh Lunacy is This? Page 5