Hellraisers

by Robert Sellers

  The last port of call in Reed’s whirlwind tour of academic establishments was another boarding school. On his first night he was subjected to an initiation test. Stripped, blindfolded and with ointment rubbed on his cock for good measure Reed was made to crawl along the floor to kiss the Blarney Stone. ‘Start kissing, Reed,’ one of the elder boys announced. Reed imitated loud snogging noises until his head was thrust forward so his nose touched bare flesh followed by a jet blast of foul air into his mouth. The blindfold was removed and there was the Blarney Stone: ‘It was the bare arse of the fattest boy in the school. He was amazing. He could fart at will.’

  Finding time not just to bully the smaller boys, Reed also bullied the other bullies. Such behaviour was not by choice. He’d observed and learnt that, like life outside, it was survival of the fittest, the strongest succeeded while the weak got abused and ignored. As for sex, it was never mentioned. Some of the older boys already had pubic hair and to the general amazement of onlookers could make their cocks stand up in the shower. There was also a lot of mutual masturbation going on, but most of his fellow pupils ‘were no wiser about the facts of life than Irish virgins entering a Victorian nunnery’.

  Sport was seen as the great antidote to sex and Reed excelled, particularly at boxing. In the holidays he earned extra cash by going three rounds against booth fighters in fairgrounds. He even turned semi-pro for a while, until some guy punched him so hard in the face his nose broke and had to be reset. So boxing was out. ‘I won my first fight, lost the next, and decided I didn’t like getting hit.’

  After his expensive education Reed ended up an O-level dropout, possessing a mathematical mind, in his words, ‘as astute as a calculator without a battery’. His father summed up his son’s future chances. He’d be a burglar or an actor.

  Where Reed fled the stuffy confines of academia Richard Burton embraced it. Readmitted to school, a man among children, he quickly came under the scrutiny of teacher Philip Burton, who saw in this rough diamond something extraordinary. Happy to play Eliza Dolittle to Philip Burton’s Professor Higgins, the youngster moved in with his teacher and subsequently became his legal ward as well as adopting his name, thus Richard Jenkins became Richard Burton.

  It was now that Burton started to drink heavily, maybe in a bid to win the respect of the area’s tough drinking miners. Drink also became one of the few things that linked him to his father, who he hardly had any contact with any more and who as he got older meant increasingly little to him. It was Philip Burton who now took that role upon himself. When he heard in 1957 that his father was dead, Burton’s immediate reaction was, ‘Which one?’

  When the young Burton confessed to Philip his ambition to be an actor, the teacher supported and coached him. When the eminent playwright Emlyn Williams was looking for supporting actors for his new play Philip Burton lost little time in putting forward his 18-year-old protégé. His impressive audition won him a place in a national tour. Burton loved it, chatting up chorus girls and boozing with the rest of the cast. His understudy was another son of a miner and future film star, 14-year-old Stanley Baker, and together they set themselves up to be hellraisers to the world. They’d have punch ups in their dressing room and break furniture and windows. Williams had to assume the role of headmaster and threaten them both with punishment if it happened again, but sure enough come the next evening the two were going hell for leather once more.

  Although girls were easy to come by sex was still a great mystery to Burton, who would always be wary of his reputation as a pin-up idol. ‘Stripped, I am monstrous.’ Yet Philip Burton testified that from the age of 15 girls used to hang around Richard, ‘like cats after cream’. On tour he and Baker would leer out of their dressing room window at the chorus girls sunbathing topless on the roof of the adjoining theatre and try to hit their tits with ammo from their peashooters. In the evening, boozed up, they’d attempt to coax them up some back alley for a quick fumble, or maybe something more. For Burton it wasn’t really the art of theatre that hooked him into acting but the side benefits, the boozing and the girls. ‘We ran totally wild,’ Baker recalled.

  In April 1944 Burton’s academic prowess won him a place at Oxford University. He later confessed to feeling terrified on his first day. Here was a boy from the valleys, the son of a miner and a barmaid, in the hallowed halls of academia, the seeding ground for Prime Ministers. One student he met and befriended there was future actor Robert Hardy, who was instantly struck by Burton’s greatness. ‘I had never met anyone like him before nor have I since. Put half a dozen hellraisers in a room with him and he would be their chief in ten minutes.’

  Hardy has spoken of Burton having almost an aura of danger around him that was intoxicating. All the students went after girls, but Burton invariably caught them. Everyone drank, but Burton out-drank them all to the extent that he won the nickname of ‘Beer Burton’. He could down two pints of college beer in 10 seconds, a record that’s never been beaten. His reputation as a drinker was so great that one night a student spiked his beer with wood alcohol causing Burton to crash down a flight of stairs. On a return visit to Wales one of his aunts asked what he’d learnt at Oxford. ‘Who can drink the most beer,’ Burton replied.

  Amidst his drinking debaucheries time was found to do a little acting, notably as the lead in a university production of Measure for Measure, before an audience that included John Gielgud and Terence Rattigan. The performance took place outdoors and so consumed by the role was Burton that at one point he rammed his fist against the wall of a church dislodging a piece of centuries-worn masonry. A spray of dust hit his eye and he staggered off-stage half-blinded with the audience roaring with laughter. Despite the incident Burton was a smash and celebrated in style at the after show party. It took place in a very grand house in town and Burton was led to a display of exotic looking drinks he’d never seen before. Compelled to try them all Burton duly did and passed out. Waking up at dawn he raced back to college, now locked up, and was forced to climb the railings. But he slipped and was impaled on a spike. ‘As I remember it,’ said Hardy, ‘the spike went slap up his arse.’ Bleeding profusely Burton had to be lifted off the spike but refused to see a doctor as he knew it would surely lead to him being grounded. He didn’t care; the night had been his.

  Burton left Oxford in the autumn of 1944 to join the RAF. His eyesight was below par, which disqualified him from being a pilot, much to his annoyance, so he trained instead as a navigator. With the war practically over by the time training was complete Burton spent most of his time drinking and playing rugby. The only action he saw was in barrack room and pub brawls; his worst injury inflicted by a commando who broke his nose with a single punch. But Burton could dish it out too, once duffing up a Welsh sergeant for trying to conceal his heritage by putting on a phoney Yank accent; an unforgivable sin. Another evening, while celebrating his 20th birthday, Burton got pissed along with a gang of mad Irishmen. Running amok through the barracks they took it upon themselves to demonstrate that it was indeed possible to punch out a window without cutting one’s fist. ‘It was all quite innocent,’ said Burton. But they smashed 179 windows and ended up with seven days’ punishment.

  Burton also showed no fear where women were concerned, having had the nerve to pick up the casting director at his first ever audition. But he could be a shit with them, too, thoroughly devoted but a week or two later moving on to the next one. It was a conveyor belt of crumpet. Burton was even caught in flagrante delicto with a high-ranking officer’s wife. His know ledge of the opposite sex was once even used to defend an Italian POW accused of raping a local girl. Burton knew the lady in question, as did most of the camp, and his line of reasoning in court was that she more likely raped him. The case was dismissed.

  It was always hoped that Richard Harris would go into the family business when education was finished with him. His father’s bakery had gone but the flourmill was still in operation, though struggling. He coped with the job for a while, but his hea
rt just wasn’t in it. Harris wasn’t the business type at all; he could hardly add two and two together. His idea of fun was brawling on the rugby pitch with his chums before going off to the pub to get royally hammered.

  Harris’s lifelong love of booze was instilled in him from an early age. Actor and friend Ronald Fraser recalled that Harris once told him that ‘he was pissed from the day he was out of short trousers.’ One of Harris’s favourite teenage tales involved driving a massive haulage truck to Dublin when aged 17, on an errand for his dad. Ordered to be back home promptly by 7.30 that evening he headed for the nearest pub after making the delivery. ‘Fuck it,’ he said. ‘I’ll make it on the back roads in no time.’ Pissed, Harris set off and soon up ahead was a bridge warning ‘Clearance 12 feet’. Thinking he could just make it Harris sped on but hit the thing, lifting it off its pillars. At the other end was an unimpressed copper. Flagged down Harris opened his window and said, ‘Sorry, officer. You see, I’m just delivering this bridge to Limerick.’

  During another delivery trip Harris amazingly knocked over a double-decker bus and lost his driver’s licence. ‘I am a bit short-sighted,’ he explained to the judge hearing the case, who responded by commending Harris for having performed on the highway, ‘an audacious and historic feat’. Years later he was up on another driving charge and the judge reportedly told him to acquire a helicopter. ‘That way jumping red lights wouldn’t be such a problem.’

  A loud and eccentric drunk, Harris got away with murder while under the influence – ‘I was a rude, bombastic, opinionated, beautifully ignorant loudmouth when I got drunk’ – because he could win you over with an abundance of Gaelic charm. Harris could call your wife a fucking whore and still elicit a smile. His boozy antics often sailed pretty close to the wind of illegality, but he didn’t care about the consequences unless word got back to his dad. He once stole the West of Ireland Tennis Championship trophy on the eve of the final. When his father found it stuffed behind the sofa in the house he exploded with rage and ordered his son to return it. Harris planted it in a hotel toilet and anonymously tipped off the police. Another time he was arrested for being drunk and disorderly in town and taken to the police station. After a caution he was released, but the local press got to hear about it and ignoring Harris’s objections ran the story. Ivan read it and went mad. Harris never forgave the paper and Ivan too never forgave his son for the public embarrassment he’d caused the family.

  Perhaps these wild exploits were indicative of a restless character that knew life was taking him nowhere. One afternoon Harris stopped in the street to catch his reflection in a glass door. ‘Who are you?’ he asked. ‘I’m the Dickie Harris you haven’t found yet,’ the reflection answered. ‘Catch me if you can.’ Whether it was fate or just coincidence, around this time Harris began showing an interest in acting. Walking past a theatre, bored one day, he saw a sign. ‘You too can be an actor,’ it said, and Harris thought, ‘Why not?’ He was 17.

  When he joined a local dramatic society no one singled Harris out as being particularly talented, although he’d yet to fully commit to a life on the stage. One thing he was committed to was women. ‘I was always a horny bastard. I just didn’t let it rip till I was 15 or so.’ Hardly the matinee idol type, but ruggedly attractive all the same, Harris was seen as a good catch among the local lasses. But life did seem to be passing him by. While he indulged in a rampant sex life his friends were starting to get married, have children and move away. There were no thoughts of a definite career, either. Secretly he knew he’d never make the professional grade as a rugby player and his father’s mill was out of the question. During a labour dispute over shorter hours and higher pay Harris had sided with the workers, a stance that didn’t surprise his father, but pissed him off all the same. ‘Dickie,’ he said one day, ‘you’re a pain in the arse. And something else, while we’re at it, you’re fired.’

  Peter O’Toole left school at the earliest damn opportunity. He’d no qualifications, as he had not sat a single exam. His only ambition was to flog second hand Jaguars. After a stint working in a warehouse wrapping cartons, O’Toole landed a job on his local paper, the Yorkshire Evening News, thanks to one of his priests pulling a few strings. Starting as a tea boy, O’Toole steadily moved his way up in the four years he worked there, even doing a stint as a journalist, reporting on stories with the likes of Keith Waterhouse and Barbara Taylor Bradford. ‘But I soon found out that, rather than chronicling events, I wanted to be the event.’ Already O’Toole sensed that his life was not going to follow the more conventional path of many of his contemporaries. As a teenager he had scribbled an oath in his notebook: ‘I will not be a common man because it is my right to be an uncommon man. I will stir the smooth sands of monotony.’

  As a junior reporter O’Toole was a regular pub goer, despite being years shy of the legal drinking age of 18. He’d get away with it by his sheer size and a few helpful props, a heavy raincoat, a cigarette, newspaper and a cloth cap that he carried around with him for the specific purpose of upping his age a bit. ‘It didn’t always work but it was well worth a try and, anyway, what could they do, shoot me?’

  Previously O’Toole’s sexual experiences had been limited to joint masturbation sessions with another boy when he was 12. ‘I joined the fraternity of MM, Mutual Masturbation, which was regarded as a healthy alternative to ordinary sex. But I got over it. You could say I pulled myself together.’ Aged 15 O’Toole decided it really was about time he sowed some of his oats in a more rewarding direction. With a friend he trawled the streets of Leeds in search of suitably obliging women. They found two likely candidates on the steps of a church. O’Toole guessed they were probably semi-professional hookers. After a few minutes of idle chit-chat O’Toole took the initiative by thrusting one of the women’s hands down his trousers. She laughed and said, ‘Put that on the mantelpiece. I’ll smoke it in the morning.’ Back at their digs O’Toole’s hoped-for initiation into the dark, secret world of adult sex was not a success. He achieved penetration and so it counted as a bona fide shag, but afterwards he was so wrapped up with guilt about what he’d done he decided to confess. The priest in the confessional booth asked just two questions. ‘Was it a woman, my son?’ And, ‘Was she married?’ O’Toole can’t recall taking confession since.

  Free of school and independent at last, Oliver Reed had taken to nocturnal jaunts to London’s West End, particularly the sleazy nightspots of Soho. In a strip joint he broke up a fight and so impressed the management that he was hired as a bouncer. He couldn’t believe his luck, here he was being paid to stand and watch women take their clothes off. But after a month the club was raided and Reed bolted out of the toilet window and ran all the way to Waterloo station and a train home, never to return.

  His next job was as a hospital porter. He had to collect the recently departed from the wards and take them to the mortuary. As a gag one night his fellow porters wrapped him up in a sheet, put him on a trolley and wheeled it into the office. The duty nurse had to check the dead person for rings and other personal items and as she lifted the sheet and reached for his fingers Reed grabbed her hand and sat bolt upright. ‘She nearly jumped out of her knickers.’

  It was national service next for Reed and because of his stint as a hospital porter he was put into the Royal Army Medical Corps. He hated the idea after discovering that there were no nurses with black stockings. ‘Only nurses with black hairy legs.’ But Reed soon settled into army life, finding the institutionalized discipline not too far removed from his experiences at boarding school. Posted out to Hong Kong the still virginal Ollie got in with a gang of experienced Jocks who took him one night to a brothel. Walking in through the door Reed was met by row upon row of white arses merrily bonking away. The going rate was two dollars for a quick one, and one dollar for a wank. The prospect of landing a dose of VD, rife in Hong Kong, caused Reed to go for the safer option of a wank. ‘But my seven and a half pence wank was a disaster.’ The woman’s age was somethi
ng approaching 75 and she alternately terrified and repulsed Reed who failed to achieve an erection, no matter how hard the old bird pumped at it. Eventually she gave up and waddled off. ‘Leaving me with my thing hanging out, still limp.’

  Regimental orders meant that excessive drinking was kept to a minimum, though Reed and his comrades always had a massive booze up at least once a month. On one highly memorable occasion they got slaughtered absolutely free of charge when the platoon was given a guided tour round a local brewery. Bored with all the technical cobblers it was the free samples they were after and eventually the men were led into a large room where a solitary pipe gushed forth beer like a burst water main. The sergeant in charge pointed to a row of mugs hanging on hooks on the wall. ‘Take a mug apiece,’ he said. ‘You’ve got exactly one hour.’ There was a stampede, like kids let loose in a candy store. When time was up the soldiers could barely stagger to the waiting truck, which took the bumpiest road in all of China returning them to camp. ‘The amount of vomit that was deposited in the back of the lorry had to be smelled to be believed,’ Reed later recalled. He also realised why their choice of vehicle was a tipper lorry. Back at barracks the commandant ordered the back end to be tipped up and out slid the vomit and the soldiers in one big revolting pile.

  The Plastered Fifties

  After his stint in the RAF Richard Burton was unsure whether to go back to Oxford or try his luck at acting. The decision was made for him when Binkie Beaumont, London’s top theatrical impresario who’d seen Burton act at Oxford, offered the Welshman a lucrative contract. That settled it. In London Burton teamed up again with fellow boyo Stanley Baker and embarked upon a sexual rampage, notching up nurses, usherettes, shopgirls and actresses with equal abandon. Their appetites knew no sane boundary.