What Fresh Lunacy is This?

by Robert Sellers

  Return of the Musketeers

  In the midst of the heat, dust and mayhem of the original Musketeer films, Richard Lester said how much enjoyment he was having and that it would be fun to do another romp in a few years’ time when everyone was a little older, and maybe even a bit wiser. ‘Then you can see the musketeers having trouble getting on their horse, they’ve rusted, wouldn’t that be fun?’ Luckily Dumas had reached that very same conclusion and the result was the novel Twenty Years After, a sequel that brought his immortal quartet out of retirement to cross swords once again with the enemies of France. As always in the movie business, Lester and the producers discussed the idea and then it was quietly forgotten.

  In 1986 Pierre Spengler was in Los Angeles having dinner with Michael York and mentioned the idea. ‘Would you come back and play D’Artagnan?’ A smile developed across that still boyish face of York’s. ‘Sure, I’d love it.’ The next call Spengler made was to Oliver in Guernsey. He would be the hardest nut to crack, thought Spengler. If he could persuade Ollie, he could get the rest. Far from reticent, Ollie couldn’t wait to get started, his enthusiasm was total. Still, Spengler was concerned enough to contact David to enquire about Ollie’s current drinking status. ‘He’s OK,’ was the answer. Later that afternoon Spengler’s phone rang: it was David. ‘Ollie’s told me to tell you that he won’t touch a drop.’ Nothing was written down, Ollie’s contract did not have a specific clause in it, but he’d promised Spengler he wouldn’t drink on the picture and he kept his word. ‘We didn’t know if it was possible,’ remembers publicist Quinn Donoghue. ‘But he just turned it off. Evidently it was an effortless feat that he could stop drinking. And he was his charming and good self without any bad side to it. A lot of people are charming and fun when they drink but when they stop they become dull and withdrawn. This was not the case with Ollie: during those months shooting The Return of the Musketeers he was a pleasure to be with. It was a shame that he ever went back to the drink because, of course, it killed him.’

  Things were very different after the film was in the can and due for release. Spengler had arranged a publicity tour in Paris and asked for Ollie’s participation. ‘I don’t like to do promotions,’ he told Spengler. ‘But I’m doing it because you asked me. But be warned.’ That sounded rather ominous. Spengler picked Ollie up at the airport in Paris. ‘And when we arrived at the hotel he asked for a quadruple cognac – this was nine o’clock in the morning! I said, “Take it easy, Oliver,” and he replied, “During the shooting I didn’t, but promotion is different.”’

  When filming started in the summer of 1988 it was a chance for Ollie to renew former acquaintances. He and Michael York hadn’t seen each other since the last Musketeer picture and meeting him again, fifteen years on, York identified a stark change in his old colleague. ‘He’d actually started to mellow a bit, the wildness had gone slightly. He was getting on a bit now, so I suppose that was bound to happen.’ Or was it Josephine’s calming influence beginning finally to reap benefits? ‘She was fantastic,’ says Geraldine Chaplin, back playing the Queen. ‘She’d subdued him completely. I suppose she saved his life because if you drink that much and behave that wild it will get to you eventually. I sensed on this picture that he was being a good boy and also I think probably his health was endangered. If you can say “frail” as a term to describe Oliver Reed – you can’t really – but he seemed a lot more frail. Of course, we were all getting on a bit, but Ollie was beginning to look his age. He was still handsome, though. He was a beautiful man.’

  While it was terrific getting everyone back again – Frank Finlay, Richard Chamberlain, and even Christopher Lee, in spite of the fact he died in the last picture – some began to get the sense that, far from the old magic just not being there, something was seriously wrong. ‘It was a very different film and a very different feeling making it,’ says York. ‘Things were going wrong almost from day one.’ There was a general belief that the schedule was too short for what they were trying to accomplish, the same kind of dangerous filming they’d managed on the original Musketeer films with actors doing their own stunts. York remembers Christopher Lee saying to him that the film was being made at breakneck speed. ‘And he meant it, literally.’ On 19 September, shooting in Toledo in Spain, popular British comedy actor Roy Kinnear was thrown from his horse and later died of complications in hospital. Beloved as he was by the cast and crew, Roy’s death dampened everybody’s spirits, but it was like a knife in the guts for Richard Lester, who as director felt personally responsible for the accident. He would never make another movie.

  Back in Guernsey, Ollie and Josephine had settled into life on the island, where the multitude of restaurants and pubs meant that Ollie was never without a place to socialize and have fun in. Sometimes too much fun. One pub banned him and for years after whenever he walked past the place he’d stick his nose in the door and the barman would shout, ‘No!’ It was a running joke between them. There were less pleasant incidents, like the time he got fined for drink-driving, or the occasion, reeling from the effects of too much rum, when he was arrested in a hotel for trying to smash down the door of one of the chambermaids’ quarters in the mistaken belief that Johnny Placett was in there having it away with her. Placett, who was visiting Ollie, remembers the police carting him off on the Saturday night and, because it was a bank holiday, with the magistrate not due to sit until the Tuesday morning, Ollie was moved from the police station cell to the island’s prison, where Josephine and Placett were not allowed to see him. In the end Ollie received a heavy fine but reacted to his ordeal with surprising restraint. ‘I think he liked the idea of being in prison,’ says Placett. ‘Because I think if Ollie hadn’t been an actor he’d liked to have been a criminal, he’d have liked the excitement. I’ve always thought that.’

  Curiously Ollie and Josephine never entirely warmed to Guernsey: they had a sense of being isolated, cut off. ‘Lots of friends did come over and visit us,’ says Josephine. ‘You could almost say we shipped friends in.’ During one stay Christensen couldn’t help noticing a change in his friend. ‘I saw him looking pensive and sort of wistful on a number of occasions where before I never, ever remember seeing him look like that. Whether he was thinking about things in general or the future, or whether he was looking back on the past, and my being there reminded him of Broome Hall days, I don’t know. But things seemed to have changed. Healthwise he still looked pretty good, but he just didn’t seem to be that happy. Maybe because all his old mates weren’t there.’

  At night if Oliver couldn’t sleep he’d sometimes call Simon and regale him with some of his poetry. When these recitals, which Simon equated to being like ‘someone who had taken LSD every night of their lives’, became too much for any human being to bear, Simon took to leaving his answering machine switched on all night. If it wasn’t Simon it would be some other luckless friend who’d receive a call, sometimes in the early hours. ‘You’d never get a phone call off my father to find out how you were doing,’ says Sarah. ‘You’d suddenly get this drunken or stoned phone call at four in the morning, and he’d sing you a song and put the phone down, or he’d want to know something or tell you a story. And then that would be it: bored now, gone. Just so childlike, it’s like my three-year-old.’ Johnny Placett was so pestered by Oliver repeatedly calling him at one or two o’clock in the morning that he ripped out the phone and never replaced it.

  One of Ollie’s pleasures in Guernsey was walking his dogs along the beach every morning. Whenever she came to visit, Sarah always used to join him, ‘and we’d take these long walks together over the golf course and the beaches, a lot of the time in silence, but those were lovely times’.

  Oliver had always shown compassion towards animals, dogs in particular. Those who are at odds with the world often prefer the company of animals. ‘He found animals easier than people,’ says Sarah. David Ball recalls, while on the Mexican set of The Great Scout & Cathouse Thursday, taking Ollie and Reg one Sunday afternoon to a bu
llfight. ‘It got started and Ollie couldn’t bear it. “Come on, Reg,” he said. “Let’s fuck off, I can’t watch any more of this.” He was visibly moved by it. He thought it was cruelty personified and couldn’t see any reason for anyone to go to a bullfight. But because it was a tradition he never mentioned it to anybody, he never made a big deal out of it, but he wouldn’t go again.’

  Ollie was also a sucker for a stray animal, and many a time he’d turn up at Broome Hall with cats, dogs and goodness knows what else, much to the exasperation of Jacquie. While filming in Italy he rescued a street dog that used to hang around the trailers, living on scraps. He paid for it to go through six months of quarantine and the mongrel came to live in Guernsey, going by the name of General. One weekend David and Muriel came to visit. Ollie was out in the garden trying to age some statues he’d bought, white female nudes. He’d heard that if you put yoghurt on them it would turn them green and mouldy. Someone left the back door open and out ran General, who of course went up and started to lick it all off. ‘Ollie laid into it so violently I thought he was going to kill it,’ says Muriel. ‘I had to pull him off it and scream at him.’

  Again the conflicting parts of Ollie’s personality were at play even when it came to the treatment of his beloved pets. ‘I remember dogs not obeying Ollie, because Ollie liked to be obeyed, and him kicking them,’ says David. ‘And they used to fawn in front of him. It was if they didn’t do his bidding. And that also applied to human beings. He didn’t like people contravening him.’ And yet there are stories of Ollie spending hours into the night, with a spade and a torch, rescuing one of his terriers that had got stuck below ground in a rabbit warren.

  Professionally, film and television work was still coming in but mostly of low artistic quality, like a couple of all-star TV-movie adaptations of Barbara Cartland novels, The Lady and the Highwayman, starring a young Hugh Grant, and A Ghost in Monte Carlo. ‘If there are any decent roles going, they’re certainly not coming my way,’ Oliver told one reporter. ‘People are wary, you see. It’s my reputation. Undoubtedly, that’s been the ruin of my career.’ And it must have been tough to come to terms with because Ollie was a very proud man. Not too proud, though, since Simon remembers him saying more than once that if the career went tits up he could always go back to minicabbing. In fact it had once been his intention to retire at thirty-five and perhaps spend the rest of his life farming or breeding horses. ‘That was a dream he had,’ confirms David. ‘He also firmly believed he was going to be knighted.’ But it must have been galling to realize that the booze and the hell-raising that had played such an important part in making him an iconic figure had played an equally important part in his downfall.

  The problem was that because everyone thought he was a drunkard, directors didn’t particularly want to use him and insurance companies wouldn’t underwrite films that he was in, so he was being overlooked for most things that were any good. ‘His reputation was worse than what he was,’ says Pierre Spengler. ‘People would sort of roll their eyes when you’d say Oliver Reed and I would always say, why are you rolling your eyes, the guy’s a great actor, and the fact that he drinks is his private business and it doesn’t interfere with the work.’ The result of all this was that Oliver was left virtually on the sidelines for the next decade, as no one had the balls to give him a chance. ‘After Munchausen I would have thought Ollie would have been offered all sorts of work,’ says Gilliam. ‘That’s what I dislike about the film industry, they listen to gossip and they’re timid. The man had such extraordinary power on screen.’

  David had also noticed a difference in Ollie’s work ethic. Where before he had always prided himself on his professionalism and dedication, it now seemed that he didn’t give a shit any more. ‘I’d take a script to him and he’d say, “How many lines?” and he’d flick through it and see how many times he appeared and say, “No, it’s too much.” So he got lazy. He wanted an easy life and didn’t want to put the effort in.’

  It wasn’t quite as black and white as that: Ollie had grown disaffected with the movie industry, perhaps because it had largely turned its back on him. On the one hand he needed it to make a living, but on the other hand he didn’t miss it when he wasn’t working, mainly because he didn’t enjoy the process any more. He still loved the crews, but as he’d often complain to Josephine, there was no longer any craft in the business: the whole thing was run by accountants and it was all about the money.

  One interesting offer was the chance to play Captain Billy Bones in an American TV movie of Treasure Island starring Charlton Heston as Long John Silver and directed by his son Fraser. A long-time fan of Oliver, Fraser was delighted when he accepted the job. ‘I had always felt that he was an immensely talented and versatile actor, and he was perfect casting for Billy Bones. He was born to play that kind of period stuff, whether it was Bill Sikes or Athos or Billy Bones: he had that kind of quality. He didn’t have to do anything, he just had to look you in the eye and you’d believe that he could skewer you into the wall with his cutlass. He had that kind of truth about him.’

  Fraser approached this new adaptation of the classic tale with the idea of making it gritty and realistic; he didn’t want to do a jolly Disney pirate film. His first meeting with Oliver took place in the large restaurant at Pinewood, which has a separate little bar, ‘and, of course, Oliver knows everybody in the world and people kept dragging him off into the bar, and he’d come back with another gin and tonic under his belt’. Later that day Fraser had arranged for Ollie to have a little time to rehearse his big sword fight in the Admiral Benbow inn. ‘But by the time we finished lunch he was about three sheets to the wind, to use a nautical expression. So we arrived at the rehearsal studio and Peter Diamond, our sword master, was standing there with a fistful of rapiers in his hand and went pale as he saw Ollie stagger in. He looked at me and I looked at him and I said, “Ollie, you know, I think you are actually so experienced at sword fights that you can just watch the lads do it today and see how they get on,” and he said, “Oh yes, bloody good idea.” Fortunately I averted that disaster.’

  Then another thought popped into Fraser’s head. ‘I was completely screwed because, oh my gosh, this poor guy really has a drinking problem and it’s too late to replace him: we start shooting in three days.’ So he went to his producer, Peter Snell, who listened to his concerns and then replied, ‘You know, Fraser, I’ve been in this business a long time, and I’ve seen a lot of problems like this come up from time to time, and in this case I would say that you’re actually right, you’re completely screwed.’ As it happened, three days later Oliver showed up on location in Cornwall on time and sober. ‘I never had a problem with him,’ confirms Fraser. ‘He would have one or two beers at lunch and take a little nap and then get on with the day. We learned to really respect Ollie. It was sort of like directing a slightly grumpy and very talented grizzly bear. He was a little prickly at first but I’m kind of a stubborn son of a bitch myself and hung in there with him, and he respected that and we got to have quite a good working relationship, we developed a rapport, and I think he gave us a magnificent performance.’

  Ollie dominates the opening of the film, revealing to Jim Hawkins, played by a young Christian Bale, the location of the treasure map before perishing. There’s also a wonderfully menacing scene with Christopher Lee as Blind Pew. For one shot Fraser wanted Ollie looking out to sea and found the perfect spot: it was quite safe but near the edge of a crag some one thousand feet above the rocks. It was decided to wire Ollie into a climbing harness, worn under his costume. It was then that Fraser discovered his star’s phobia of heights. ‘I got Peter Diamond to come and help me rig the harness, and Ollie seemed a little nervous. We were about ten yards from the edge of the cliff and the more we started fiddling with the wire and the shackles the more fidgety he got and pretty soon it turned into a wrestling match, with Peter and I rolling around with him on the ground. And the closer we got to the edge of the cliff the crazier it became unt
il finally I yelled, “Wait a second. We don’t have to do this, guys. There’s another way.” It was clear by then that Ollie was not comfortable, even with a harness.’ A double was used instead.

  Next came a chance to work with an old friend, Ken Russell, even if the part on offer was again relatively small. Oliver hadn’t worked with the director since 1975, although in the early eighties they very nearly made a Beethoven biopic together called Beethoven’s Secret. Russell had written the script and Ollie would have played Ludwig himself, which would have been glorious to see. All the pre-production arrangements had been made, with Russell earmarking locations in Vienna to shoot, when their backers, a German bank, pulled out just days before filming and the project collapsed.

  Now Russell was holding the reins on an American television movie starring Richard Dreyfuss and called Prisoner of Honor that told the true story of a French army captain sent to Devil’s Island for espionage at the close of the nineteenth century. Ollie was cast as a French general and bestowed upon the role his usual gravitas. Well received upon its broadcast, Prisoner of Honor marked the last time Ollie and Ken made a film together. During the shoot Russell couldn’t help but notice that the spark in his old sparring partner had burned out. ‘There was always an animal lurking under the surface and the animal had either been tamed or driven out of him. It wasn’t the same Oliver. He was a different man.’

  Ollie was soon up to his old tricks, however, on his next film Hired to Kill, yet another low-rent actioner. Director Nico Mastorakis found him a delight to work with when he was sober, ‘but when he had downed a couple of bottles of champagne for breakfast he was a nightmare. He never drank on the set but he did come to the set a few times as a raging lunatic after drinking a lot.’ As far as co-star Brian Thompson could tell, Ollie was drinking constantly. ‘You never saw him with an open bottle on the set, but I do remember smelling alcohol on him.’ Thompson, an American actor with a distinctive square-jawed profile and imposing stature, which led to his being cast mostly in action movies, came on to the film a little bit in awe of Ollie and admits, ‘He’s one of the few actors I’ve ever performed with that I felt intimidated by because, regardless of his state of inebriation, when those cameras rolled he was a consummate actor, he knew his lines, he hit his marks. It was as if he could sober up and become an artist. It was something to behold.’