What Fresh Lunacy is This?

by Robert Sellers

  Next up was an advert for low-alcohol wine with Paula Yates. Of course, the joke is that as Ollie is putting the glass to his lips Paula tells him it’s 99.9 per cent alcohol-free and he almost chokes. ‘Then I was approached by a very well-known advertising agency who mooted the idea of using Ollie for Bacardi white rum,’ David recalls. ‘I went in, hard-nosed, and we got the payment up and up and in the end it was going to be the equal of a full-size movie fee. Then, I’m just about to sign the contract and Ollie disgraced himself somewhere, alcoholically, which meant that he wasn’t an icon for Bacardi rum, who apparently are rather straight, and they withdrew.’ Instead the company sent him a crate of bottles as a goodwill gesture. Paul Friday was visiting one day when Ollie gave him one of them, saying, ‘You won’t believe how much that bottle of Bacardi cost.’

  With no mainstream producer prepared to touch him with a twenty-foot boom mike, Ollie took advantage of a current explosion in the South African film industry, thanks to a government tax shelter scheme that made it cheap to shoot there. Because of apartheid the big Hollywood studios and companies couldn’t be seen to be doing business there, but a lot of independent filmmakers took advantage. The same problem arose in relation to actors, so a lot of the high-profile stars didn’t come, but people like Ollie, whose careers had stalled but still had name recognition, couldn’t afford to be so choosy and saw it as a means to make a fairly quick buck. But the films in question were universally dreadful, starting with Dragonard and its sequel, Master of Dragonard Hill, shot back to back outside Johannesburg in 1987. Ollie plays the villainous Captain Shanks in this steamy tale of the slave trade in the British colonies of the West Indies in the late 1700s. For young actor Patrick Warburton this was his first job. Now a successful voice-over artist and actor with the US TV series Rules of Engagement and Family Guy, Warburton doesn’t seek to hide both his embarrassment and shame about being roped into playing the story’s dashing lead. ‘They’re horrible films and Oliver was relegated to do these shit movies because I guess he was too much of a liability. But what I always found interesting was that, although he would start drinking in the morning on the set, he’s the only watchable thing in them.’

  Warburton’s first day on the picture was his big sword-fight scene with Oliver. The swords were made of wood and painted to look like steel. ‘Oliver must have broken somewhere between seven and nine swords crashing into tables and landing on the extras, and I was doing my best to get out of the way. I was terrified because he was big and scary and if you didn’t know him he was very intimidating.’ Warburton knew of Ollie’s legendary status as a drinker, and as this was the drinking time in his own life, decided to throw it out there on that first day and ask if he’d care to knock a few back. ‘And that was the beginning of four months of doing the best I could to keep up with the man. He would offer me a whisky on the set at 10 a.m. and I just let him know that he had to give me till 5 p.m. I’ve gotta pace myself. But we ended up getting trashed every night.’

  One evening after an investors’ party Ollie and Warburton were being driven back to their hotel by a local black driver at something like two o’clock in the morning. Ollie suddenly wanted to visit Alexandra, which, along with Soweto, was one of the main townships in Johannesburg, extremely impoverished and entirely black. The driver shook his head violently, but Ollie wouldn’t be dissuaded. ‘We’re going in,’ he ordered. ‘And when we walked into this shebeen [unlicensed bar] it was like a scene in a movie. There were about fifty townsfolk and everything stopped, their eyes went wide like headlights, and for the very first time ever they saw two white men walk into their shebeen at two o’clock in the morning, this had never happened. Reed says nothing, absolutely nothing. I wanted immediately to put their minds at rest, because there was so much strife and ill will on all sides, so I took Ollie and we walked to the bar and I said, “We’re Americans, we’re just here to hang out and party.” And things were good for about an hour. But then voices started to get raised: the alcohol could only suppress the underlying tension for so long. Some of the men in there were getting very, very angry and looked as though they were going to get violent. We were just drinking and having fun, not exactly understanding what was happening, but then our driver came up to us in a literal panic and said, “You must leave now. You are in danger,” so we just got the fuck out. Then we couldn’t get out of the township and he hid us in this flat until five in the morning when it was safe to leave. We escaped by the skin of our teeth. We could have been dead and buried and nobody would have known. That driver probably saved our lives and I don’t even recall tipping him.’

  While stuck in that flat Ollie and Warburton passed the time arm-wrestling. Warburton had been the Southern California arm-wrestling champion in his weight category. He also had youth on his side: he was twenty-two, Oliver forty-nine. ‘But he beat me, and that’s one department where I still to this day have a pretty good track record. I was amazed the man beat me.’

  Another night they were in Ollie’s hotel room, living like Romans, eating and drinking, when there was a knock at the door. In walked an elderly gentleman, who, it transpired, was a very well-known South African actor; an executive on the film had brought him up to meet Mr Reed. ‘I saw them shake hands,’ reports Warburton. ‘Then I turned around and within five minutes Reed has this man up against the wall. I have no idea what’s going on. Then before you know it he’s bundled out of the door and that was it. I was astonished. I don’t recall even asking, what the fuck happened? We just carried on our drinking.’

  These antics were just killing time, since the whole production was a mess, the dialogue, the acting, everything, was tenth-rate, and the director had a background in blue movies. ‘This is garbage like you can’t fucking believe,’ says Warburton. ‘And yet Oliver in these films just has a presence.’ Worse, it was amateurish. For one scene Warburton was given a flintlock that he had to fire at Ollie. He was told where to stand, but the distance was nowhere near far enough and so when he fired, the gunpowder burned into Ollie’s eyes. ‘I could tell he was in pain and just raging inside that something as fucked up and stupid like this could happen on a set, but it did. He didn’t come after me, he didn’t even say anything. I apologized but I don’t think he held me responsible. He was so calm in his reaction, I was stunned. And it was then that I realized the guy must have cared for me a little bit.’

  Two other films Ollie made in South Africa were produced by Jonathan Vanger, Rage to Kill and The Revenger, both of them action thrillers that went direct to video and were indicative of the kind of films Ollie now found himself involved in: poor-quality, exploitative fare.

  Vanger, of course, knew of Oliver’s reputation when he was asked to pick him up at Johannesburg airport. ‘The stairs went up to the side of the plane and a couple of people came out and then nothing happened for about ten minutes, no one came out of the aircraft. Suddenly Oliver literally popped out, accompanied by a couple of air hostesses to walk him down the steps. Obviously he’d been having too much of a good time on the aeroplane and getting him off had caused them some problems. They managed to get him through Customs and one of the air hostesses came up to me and said, “You’re welcome to him,” and pushed him my way.’

  The drive to the hotel was strained and uncomfortable. Ollie wasn’t belligerent but Vanger guessed that neither was he in the best of moods. The next day the producer was walking through the hotel foyer when Ollie spotted him and invited him to share some lunch. Vanger was nervous, to say the least, about what might happen. ‘But he was so polite and charming I was actually taken aback. That was Oliver, he vacillated between this unbelievably charming character whose manners were impeccable and was delightful to talk to, and then once he’d had too much to drink the devil in him came out.’

  By and large the devil was on show at night in the hotel, where Ollie got up to all sorts of japes. Vanger remembers him getting into a scuffle with some people who were in the country for a golf tournament. ‘I’m n
ot exactly sure what happened but Oliver arrived on set with a black eye. We had to shoot on him from the side so you couldn’t see it.’

  Josephine was there, as usual, and Vanger recalls that she was for the most part a calming influence. If things got a bit out of control she’d put her hand on Ollie’s lap and tell him to calm down, on one occasion stopping him just in time from showing the tattoo on his cock in an exclusive five-star restaurant. ‘But sometimes he went so far that there wasn’t any way of bringing him back,’ says Vanger.

  Intimidated at the beginning, Josephine had matured into the marriage, she was now more of a woman than a child and had become a stronger person too, no longer the frightened creature who stayed silent on the fringes. ‘As I got older, and perhaps felt a little more secure in how I could behave, I did now and again admonish him. It wouldn’t necessarily work but I might have voiced things a little bit more.’ But still Josephine didn’t feel she could stop Oliver drinking or behaving as he’d always done. ‘That was the way he was. This was a man who had lived a lifetime before me, so who was I to come in and say, don’t do that? Obviously at times one would wish perhaps not quite so much was taken, but otherwise he was able to control his own drinking, he knew what he was doing. He’d stop and then have several days of quietly being at home, gardening, walking the dogs, listening to the radio, watching sport. Then he’d go, “Right, I’m going off to the pub today.”’

  As in the past, Oliver’s drinking was entirely social. Like Jacquie and members of the Reed family, Josephine never once saw him take a drink on his own. ‘He wouldn’t come home of an evening and have a glass on his own. He wasn’t interested in that. He loved the craic and the laughter, but drink didn’t govern his life. He didn’t need drink to have a good time. He could equally have a good time without it. But it certainly would create an even wilder time.’

  One day director John Hough, who happened to be on business in Johannesburg, bumped into Ollie, and they were having a quiet drink in the hotel bar when the South African rugby team walked in, fifteen really big guys. One of them recognized Oliver and came over and said, ‘You’re Oliver Reed, aren’t you?’ ‘Yes,’ Oliver replied. The guy then sat down next to him and started to have a conversation. In that very quiet and distinguished voice of his Ollie said, ‘Sir, did I ask you to sit down?’ The guy was perplexed, ‘No,’ he said. ‘Well, fuck off then,’ said Ollie. Hough remembers the guy just stood there, with all his mates waiting in the background to see what was going to happen. ‘It was just like a western. I thought, oh no, there’s going to be chairs flying everywhere. There was a long silence and then the guy sort of shrugged his shoulders and went back to his rugby team. But Oliver was prepared to go the distance. He would never back down, he would have stood there fighting to the very end. He was a genuine tough guy.’

  In spite of such escapades Ollie’s professionalism remained intact and he was always ready to work and knew his lines. ‘And he never seemed to act like he was a movie star,’ says Vanger. ‘It was never, I want this and that, being a right pain in the neck, not at all. And the crew loved him. Unfortunately you could see that the booze had taken its toll, but what struck me the most about him was the fact that when the director said, “Action”, it was almost as if he’d sober up for the take. It was quite extraordinary that he could turn it on and off like that. And the man had the constitution of an ox because I don’t know how he drank what he did and managed to carry on, he had many a younger man under the table.’

  On The Revenger, Oliver’s second film with Vanger, the producer had learned his lesson and sent his brother to the airport to fetch him this time. ‘I didn’t say anything and he came back looking pale, going, oh my God, I couldn’t believe it, this happened and that happened, and I’m like, oh really?’ Josephine wasn’t there this time, either, and so by the time he came to leave, Oliver hadn’t spent any of his per diem and there was four thousand dollars’ worth of South African money stuffed in his hotel wardrobe. When the director and producers came to see him off, Ollie ordered several bottles of Dom Pérignon and informed them to take the money and distribute it to the entire crew.

  With films like this – and also Gor, a sword-and-sorcery turkey that co-starred another legendary bad man of cinema, Jack Palance, and Skeleton Coast, a mercenary actioner, both of which were again shot in South Africa – Ollie knew that he was making crap, but either didn’t have the inclination to try to combat it or had resigned himself to his fate. ‘If you look at Oliver’s career as the career of an artist,’ says Michael Winner, ‘it went into the toilet. It basically vanished.’

  Many of these films were produced by Harry Alan Towers, ‘about the only person who would employ Ollie during this period,’ claims David. Unlike others in the film business, Towers had no qualms at all about hiring Ollie. ‘We loved and adored him,’ says his widow, Maria Rohm. ‘He was such an unequalled actor and an amazing person. He never failed us in any way. Ollie could fill a room with his presence – how many people can one say that about these days?’ The shame was that Towers was associated with the low end of the market. ‘It just seemed to be an awful shame that here was this obviously talented man doing work that was plainly beneath him,’ says Vanger. ‘OK, he was making money out of them but they couldn’t have been terribly satisfying.’

  This lack of artistic challenge may well have led to his chronic dependency on alcohol, theorizes John Hough. ‘A lot of artists drink because their creativity is not finding an outlet and I think Oliver was a star case for that. He had to do roles he didn’t want to do, and he never realized his full potential, he really was a top-line artist. He had the same sort of inner power that people like Kirk Douglas and Bette Davis had, and I don’t think he got the chance to really exploit it. And I think he began to see his career slipping away. He needed a part like Richard Burton got with Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf, he needed a part where he could show what he could really do. He just wasn’t getting the screenplays that he deserved and the parts he deserved and I think he started to drink more.’

  One director who believed it a complete travesty that Oliver’s talents were being wasted in low-grade films was Terry Gilliam, who early in 1988 was shooting his lavish comedy fantasy The Adventures of Baron Munchausen in Rome. For months he’d been pursuing Marlon Brando to play the god Vulcan in a short sequence. When he finally gave up, a list of replacements was drawn up and Ollie’s name leaped out. ‘I remembered he’d been so unbelievably funny in Tommy and I thought it strange why nobody had really used him in that sort of way since.’

  Ollie loved making the movie and working with Gilliam, ‘and you can see it,’ says Josephine. ‘There’s a twinkle in his eye.’ Ollie would remark that Gilliam was one of the very few directors who allowed him the freedom to take a character to the limit. ‘And he’s just breathtaking in it,’ says Gilliam. ‘He and Robin Williams are the funniest things in the film.’ And so much of what makes the character work was down to Ollie, who plays Vulcan with a broad Yorkshire accent like some demonic Victorian pit owner. There’s one scene where Vulcan throws Munchausen and his gang into a whirlpool and Uma Thurman’s goddess Venus tries to soothe his rage. ‘Just before the take,’ recalls Gilliam, ‘he asked me, “Do you mind if I do this?” and he batted his eyelids like a bashful child and it was so funny. He was a great, great comedian. He gave weight to the comedy and his comic timing was just spectacular. I just wish he had a few more films to show how brilliantly comic he was.’

  In another scene the Baron and Venus indulge in a romantic waltz and before they shot it Gilliam told Ollie to dance along to the music. ‘Just start letting the rhythm get to you.’ And as the scene built up Ollie began to bounce slowly up and down and lift his feet in the air. ‘I think it’s one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen,’ says Gilliam. ‘Because you have this dangerous guy suddenly becoming this helpless little dumb creature. And that’s the secret to the success of the character, he’s so frightening and so funny all at the s
ame time. And Ollie could be absolutely terrifying. On screen he was definitely terrifying and sometimes in life; the first assistant director was scared to death of him. But that’s what was so interesting about Ollie, how he could be so utterly dangerous and yet so utterly vulnerable the next moment.’

  Uma Thurman was a little over seventeen when she made Baron Munchausen and, like the rest of the crew, Ollie vainly lusted after her. One afternoon he took her sightseeing around Rome. ‘And there’s a story of him taking maybe his frustration out on some Japanese businessman,’ says Gilliam. ‘I never heard the whole story but I know it got a bit unpleasant and unnecessary, but I think Ollie needed an outlet for his frustration.’ Gilliam also remembers how much Oliver enjoyed working with John Neville, the respected stage actor playing Munchausen. ‘The two of them got on like a house on fire. There was tremendous mutual respect.’

  Ollie was only a couple of weeks in Rome and when he flew back to London he caught the same flight as Gilliam, who remembers him sitting in the back, ‘taking advantage of the in-flight drinking’. After they landed, Ollie discovered a bar in the short distance between getting off the plane and getting to Immigration. ‘And I have never found that bar again,’ claims Gilliam. ‘But I swear it was there. The next thing we’re walking along, and he’s clearly had quite a bit, and he’s telling me about this disagreement he had with a director and the story ended with Ollie saying, “And then I headbutted him.” By this time he’d swung me round to face him and he then headbutted me! But he didn’t touch me: he stopped within a millimetre of my skull. And I knew I couldn’t move: if I flinched I would have lost and he would have been angry because he wouldn’t have been able to prove to me that despite the fact that he was really pissed he was in complete control.’