What Fresh Lunacy is This?

by Robert Sellers

  Ollie – The Saint

  The success of The Pirates of Blood River spawned a slew of other costume adventure films from Hammer, including The Scarlet Blade. Shot in early spring 1963 at Bray and good old Black Park, this was an enjoyable drama set against the backdrop of the English Civil War and enriched by the company’s usual quality production values. A second-billed Ollie smoulders as yet another dastardly fellow, this time a duplicitous Roundhead. One can’t help feeling that Hammer missed a trick here, though, for surely Oliver’s all too obvious screen charisma would have been better employed in the title role of the Scarlet Blade himself, a sort of steak and kidney pie Scarlet Pimpernel, instead of the rather wooden Home Counties acting supplied by Jack Hedley.

  With his finances on an even keel, Ollie moved his family into a much larger flat in the basement of a converted Victorian house. Number 1 Homefield Road was conveniently located near the Dog and Fox, ‘so after the pub it was round the corner to the curry house and then all back to Ollie’s for a bit of a night cap,’ remembers Mick Monks. It was at Homefield Road that Monks won the nickname he still carries with pride, ‘tractors’, when after a party his new shoes left so many scuff marks on the carpet that it looked like a newly ploughed field. Ollie revelled in bestowing often ludicrous nicknames on his drinking crew: John Placett was ‘the Major’ because he was a good organizer, Ken Burgess, being ex-navy, was ‘the Admiral’, Raymond Guster was ‘Gus’, Mick Fryer was ‘Mickus’. There was also ‘Eddie the Arab’, a chap of Middle Eastern descent who ran a flower stall outside the Rose and Crown. Whenever he came in Ollie would pipe up, ‘Here comes Eddie the Arab. What are you having?’ Eventually this chap got fed up with this and said, ‘Do you know, Ollie, I really object to being called Eddie the Arab. I’m not actually an Arab, I’m Armenian. And my real name’s Edwin not Edward.’ Ollie said, ‘Don’t worry about that, we’ll call you Edwin the Bedouin.’

  As for the actor James Villiers, he was ‘Old Cocky Bollocks’, ‘eleventh in line to the throne, dear boy’. Villiers only occasionally drank with the group and Ollie suffered his presence because he adored pricking his pomposity. ‘When I was in Henry V part 1 and 2,’ he’d go, and Ollie would let him have it. ‘He loved baiting old Villiers,’ recalls Monks. ‘He loved nothing better than, if someone was showing off, to put them down.’ It was something that remained a large part of his personality. ‘He hated all the bullshit,’ says Terry Gilliam. ‘If he detected just a whiff from anybody being pompous or bullshitty he would go for them. He’d be like a bullmastiff whenever he felt that.’

  Homefield Road is where Mark’s earliest memories reside, including one extraordinary incident when aged about four he set fire to his bedroom. ‘It was waking up just after Guy Fawkes Night with a box of matches and lighting comics and things, and they seemed to burn quite well, and then when it got a little bit out of hand I didn’t really know what to do, so I closed the door and climbed in next to my mum and dad.’ Ollie ordered him back to bed but Mark wouldn’t leave. ‘And I never disobeyed him.’ But this time the answer was no. Ollie asked again, and the answer was still no. ‘Why not?’ asked Ollie. Mark replied, ‘Because I’ve fired my room.’ Mark still has visions of his father with saucepans of water opening the door and throwing it in and asking Kate to phone the fire brigade. ‘I can’t,’ she replied. ‘I’m naked,’ as if they could see her down the phone line. ‘The end result was that it badly burned out my bedroom,’ says Mark. ‘There was a lot of smoke damage.’

  In quick succession Oliver won two guest spots on the highly popular TV series The Saint, starring Roger Moore. In the episodes ‘The King of the Beggars’ (transmitted in November 1963) and ‘Sophia’ (February 1964) Ollie had prominent roles, but it was his appearance in the first of these that left the most lasting impression. Playing a heavy, during the climactic fist fight (The Saint always finished with a compulsory public-school-type ruckus, usually in a cardboard box warehouse in Hertfordshire), Oliver lunges at Moore’s supremely coiffed Simon Templar, who shoots him at point-blank range. On take one, when the gun fired, Oliver dramatically, and as it turned out ridiculously, hurled himself backwards into the air with such force that he knocked himself out cold on the studio floor. As the scene played on, Moore heard a gurgling noise emanating from Ollie’s prone body and immediately assumed it was a spot of play acting, but the gurgling continued. ‘I looked down to see Oliver lying spark out, with his purple tongue hanging from the side of his mouth.’ Immediately Moore went to his aid.

  ‘What have you stopped for?’ asked the director.

  ‘Oliver’s concussed,’ yelled Moore. ‘He’s going blue.’

  ‘Oh yes. Fair enough. Cut.’

  Johnny Goodman, the show’s production supervisor and later associate producer, has never forgotten the incident, indeed has probably dined out on the tale ever since. ‘We had to carry him up to the dressing room and call for the doctor. I sat with him for something like two hours. He had mild concussion. I must say, it was the best example of method acting I have ever seen, real Stanislavski stuff. I did like Oliver. He was an amiable sort of chap when he was off the sauce. But when he was drinking heavily he always wanted to take on people; dangerous to be around.’

  We are not quite finished with The Saint, though. Flash forward to 1978 and the show was resurrected with Ian Ogilvy, who had a most memorable encounter with Ollie. Here it is, told in full by Ogilvy himself:

  ‘In 1978 I was filming the television series The Return of the Saint, playing the hero Simon Templar. Several of the episodes were set in the south of France, which is why, on one particular evening, I was in the crowded bar of the Voile d’Or, a fabulously elegant and fabulously expensive hotel in Cap Ferrat on the French Riviera. With me was my episode co-star, the beautiful Gayle Hunnicutt, together with the episode director Cyril Frankel, the series producer Bob Baker, and the creator of the Saint himself, the then septuagenarian Leslie Charteris, who was on a rare visit to the film unit to see how we were treating his hero. A group whose good opinion of me was, in my mind at least, a priority.

  ‘Gayle seemed nervous. She leaned over and whispered in my ear, “Ian, do me a favour and go to the window and look down at the harbour and tell me if there’s a Chinese junk there.”

  ‘An odd request, I thought, and a “yes” answer highly unlikely, but I looked out of the window anyway and there in the harbour, incongruous among the sleek white yachts of millionaires, was a full-sized Chinese junk in polished teak. I reported back to Gayle. “Oh God,” she moaned, burying her face in her hands. “He’s here.”

  ‘A moment later he was. There was a bellowing noise from the bar’s entrance and a large beer barrel dressed in a striped rugby shirt advanced into the room. “HUNNICUNT!” it roared, its arms stretched wide. “GIVE ME A KISS, YOU FUCKING LOVELY TEXAN WHORE!”

  ‘The barrel staggered over to our table, resolving itself on the way into the unmistakable figure of a fairly well-oiled Oliver Reed. Bob Baker tried to make the introductions. “Oliver, lovely to see you again . . . we’re filming the new Saint series. . . I think you know our director Cyril Frankel . . . and Gayle of course . . . this is Leslie Charteris . . . and last but not least, our Saint himself, Ian Ogilvy.”

  ‘Reed glared at me balefully and silently for five seconds. Then: “YOU? THE SAINT? YOU’RE A POOF! YOU’RE A FUCKING POOFTER!”

  ‘Elegant French heads turned and stared. Gayle and Bob and Cyril and Leslie all looked at me. There was only one thing I could do.

  ‘“Right, Reed. Come on. You and me. Outside.”

  ‘I’m not a brave man and have never been in a real fight in my life, but the shame of yielding to Oliver Reed – without even a token resistance, and under the gaze of so many people, some of whom needed to think I was at least a little bit like the hero I was portraying – overcame any fears of French hospitals and French orthopaedic surgeons and French nurses, all of whom were probably very good, of course, but all the same.

  �
�I found myself marching towards the exit, with Reed at my side. Suddenly he grabbed my head and tucked it under his arm in a vague sort of wrestling hold. I got myself out of that with surprising ease and took up a boxing stance. So did Reed. We danced around each other, our arms wind-milling away and I found myself thinking, He’s not as tall as me, and his arms are a lot shorter than mine, and he’s very drunk . . . I might even have a chance here.

  ‘I never got the chance because Reed suddenly lost interest in having a fight and decided to be my best friend instead. “YOU’RE NOT A POOF! YOU’RE ALL RIGHT! COME AND HAVE A FUCKING DRINK!”

  ‘Arm in arm, we returned to the group but, before I got my fucking drink, Reed appeared to experience a sort of epiphany when – through his drunken stupor – he realized he’d just been introduced to the creator of the Saint himself, the legendary Leslie Charteris. Abandoning me, he stared fixedly at Leslie and screamed, “YOU’RE LESLIE CHARTERIS? I CAN’T BELIEVE IT! YOU . . . ARE . . . LESLIE . . . CHARTERIS! FUCKING FANTASTIC! AN HONOUR! JESUS FUCKING CHRIST! LESLIE CHARTERIS! FUCK!”

  ‘Then a wonderful thought occurred to him. He lurched to the bar, shoved aside the bartender, reached over and picked up a very small, slightly serrated fruit knife – the sort barmen use to shave off a slice of lemon peel or spear a maraschino cherry. Brandishing the tiny knife, Reed advanced on Leslie. “WE’RE GONNA BE BLOOD BROTHERS!” he howled. He grabbed the old man’s hand and was about to press the sharp edge down on his wrist when it occurred to him that, since it was his idea, perhaps as a matter of form he ought to go first. He dropped Leslie’s hand and then made a very small, non-bleeding scratch on his own wrist and held it up for all to see.

  “BLOOD BROTHERS!” he bellowed and once again grabbed Leslie’s hand.

  ‘A sort of general paralysis gripped all of us and, anyway, I felt I’d done my bit and really shouldn’t be required to do any more. Then, to everybody’s relief, in the moment before Reed could get round to performing the same operation on Charteris, the captain of his junk arrived – an enormous German sailor, who (I learned later) was hired mostly to keep Oliver out of trouble. The unsmiling and silent captain took Reed firmly by the arm and escorted him – now meek as a lamb – out of the bar and I (with my reputation now up a couple of notches) never saw him again, which I must say was something of a relief, although not, perhaps, as great a relief as the one Leslie Charteris was feeling.’

  Winner

  Critics had always looked down their noses at Hammer’s product and it appeared that the rest of the British film industry did likewise. When a young director by the name of Michael Winner was casting a film called West Eleven he wanted Oliver for the lead role. ‘But my producer thought he was a B-picture actor, which in Oliver’s case was true at the time.’ It did appear that Ollie’s identification with horror movies was limiting his career choices.

  Winner, who died in January 2013, first met Oliver in the winter of 1962 when the actor came to his West End office with a film script he’d written. Eyeing a future as a commercial filmmaker, he found Oliver’s story about a man who carried his house on his back up a hill simply too esoteric for his tastes. However, he felt inexorably drawn to him: the way Oliver spoke with passion and was alive with ideas, while at the same time remaining ‘very shy and sensitive’.

  After West Eleven Winner started work on a new film, The System. Installed as both producer and director, he could cast whom he damn well pleased, and he wanted Oliver to play Tinker, the leader of a gang of young men preying on female tourists at a seaside town in search of sexual kicks. Winner thought Oliver had it all as an actor. ‘He was very good at being still, which is the essence of stardom, not to do too much. He was incredibly handsome and had a great quality of danger. I was convinced he would be an international star.’

  Ollie and Winner just seemed to click straightaway and over the course of thirty-five years made six films together. Undoubtedly he was Oliver’s closest friend in the industry and perhaps even out of it. ‘He loved Michael,’ says Josephine. ‘They were very close.’ Speaking to Winner about Oliver, one can be forgiven for thinking the director is describing a brother or some other close relative, such is the fondness and warmth in his voice, always, though, with a detectable sense of loss that never really goes away. ‘I absolutely loved Oliver. He was the kindest, the quietest, and the gentlest man in the world, and the most polite and well behaved, except when he had a drink. But I very seldom saw him drunk on set because he knew I didn’t like that. Once or twice he may have had a bit of a hangover from the night before, but nothing remotely serious; not like today, where half of them are on drugs. But he was a menace at night, no question. Utterly professional on the set – in the evening a disaster.’

  Winner does not claim to have a fondness for drunks and so always tried to stay away from Ollie during the hours of darkness. ‘Drunks on the whole are immensely quiet and dignified when they’re sober. But when they’re drunk, they’re drunk. They’re two people; they’re Jekyll and Hyde. I remember once I met Ollie in a restaurant and he went out and challenged someone to a fight, he was always doing that, and he always lost the fight. So he went out into Hyde Park in a beautiful Savile Row suit to fight this bloke and came back having been thrown in the round pond; he was soaking.’

  The System was shot almost entirely on location around Torquay during the spring of 1963, a halcyon time for its young cast of Ollie, Jane Merrow, David Hemmings, John Alderton and Julia Foster, all of whom clicked as a group, so there was a lot of larks and a lot of laughter. ‘We all stayed in the same hotel and there were some mad moments,’ recalls Jane. ‘There were a lot of drunken parties there. I remember my father came down to visit and one night went into the communal bathroom and found one of the actors drowning in the bath and rescued him.’

  The instigator of most of the mayhem, predictably, was Oliver. ‘He liked to have physical challenges,’ says Jane. ‘He was quite into fighting and things like that, manly challenges. I think he was always trying to prove his manhood in a funny sort of way and then he would laugh it off as a joke. And he challenged David Hemmings to hang outside the second-floor window of the hotel, saying he’d hold on to him and not let him fall. And David agreed, which was a stupid thing to do. It was a really dangerous, silly stunt.’

  As Hemmings recalled forty years later in his autobiography, he was held upside down sixty feet over a vicious set of spiked railings. ‘How do you like this, boy?’ Ollie growled. ‘Wanna come up, boy?’ Hemmings did indeed and was hauled back in. For the rest of his life Hemmings freely admitted to being more than a little wary of Oliver. ‘He was never a man you would miss – broad, intelligent, funny, frightening, and deeply unpredictable. He could drink twenty pints of lager with a gin or crème de menthe chaser and still run a mile for a wager.’

  This kind of reckless behaviour was more than just larking about, fifth-form high jinks gone bad: there was most assuredly an element of male posturing going on. ‘He was like the leader of the pack, always proving himself to be the king,’ Jane points out. ‘There was a bit of a conflicted personality there with Oliver. He wanted to be the rough boy, but on the other hand he did have a sensitive side to him, which I didn’t see very much of if I’m honest because it was predominantly a male cast and there was great competition going on between them all.’

  There was the time, however, when Jane got very badly stung by bees and her arm swelled up and she couldn’t work for a few days. Oliver visited her, fussed over her, and made sure everything was all right. ‘So there was a really gentle, soft side to him. He was two people, he really was. He could be very kind. Then again he could be extremely unkind. For instance, he would get into drinking competitions with people who he knew couldn’t drink or shouldn’t drink. I think that was unkind. There was a bit of cruelty in that, but then he would have just thought it a very funny thing to do.’ Hemmings, too, picked up on this unpleasant characteristic. ‘At the time I concluded that Oliver, for all his ch
arismatic, cavalier efforts as an apprentice hell-raiser, was inclined to bully anyone smaller than himself – like me.’

  For Jane, Oliver’s sensitive side was at its most appealing during what was a potentially stressful scene where she was obliged to run completely nude along a beach with him. ‘Oliver was a real gentleman: after we did the shot he covered me up; he was very kind.’ This was very racy indeed and caused brief problems with the censor. Indeed, the whole tone of The System is fairly daring for a British film of that period with its matter-of-fact depiction of casual sex. It was the same with Julia Foster, another young actress playing one of Ollie’s conquests, who in the film had to appear in bra and panties. Again Oliver was nothing less than supportive and understanding, endearing himself totally to Julia, who says, ‘My overriding memory of Oliver is that he was devastatingly attractive, just drop-dead gorgeous. I think every woman who came under his eye responded almost in the same way.’

  Julia was not privy to any of the destructiveness in Oliver and was genuinely shocked to hear of the Hemmings incident, for this was a side of Ollie she just didn’t encounter. ‘He had an ability to make you feel you were the only person in the whole wide world that he was talking to. At that time he was a very thoughtful man and very intelligent. And everyone was very excited about him, he was a really exciting young actor who was obviously going to do well, and this film was certainly going to be a part of it.’