Burton’s next turkey, Bluebeard (1972), a tale of a lecherous aristocrat who can’t keep his hands off nubile young women and then stuffs their corpses in his wine cellar, inevitably led to the set in Budapest being awash with drop dead gorgeous co-stars. When one young actress romped too intensely with Burton and the poor bastard couldn’t help but respond Liz Taylor stormed over and gave her a vicious punch in the face. As for her husband, Liz told the press, ‘I don’t know how many plates I broke over his head.’
Burton did eventually sow his oats when Liz flew out of Hungary. On a night shoot Burton and Nathalie Delon were obliged to walk serenely down a street and then disappear round a corner. Action shouted the director. All went well. OK and cut. Everyone waited for them to reappear. They didn’t. The director sent his assistant to find out what had happened only for him to run back and report that there was no sign of either of them. Craftily Burton had arranged for his chauffeur to be waiting nearby with the Rolls so both he and Nathalie could hop in and speed off to the nearest hotel. When the couple also failed to turn up the next morning, shooting was cancelled for the day. Liz took her revenge by having a very public dinner with Aristotle Onassis, minus Jackie, which turned into a brawl between 25 paparazzi, the restaurant staff and local police.
Burton was drinking heavily on the set too. Invited to the British embassy in Budapest for an official dinner he insulted two ambassadors and their wives, swore at his hosts, condemned the privileged classes and walked out. He was a loose cannon, enjoying his booze, too, describing its charms to one reporter in the following manner: ‘If you drink it straight down, you can feel it going into each individual intestine.’
Filming on Bluebeard coincided with Elizabeth’s 40th birthday and Burton laid on the birthday party to end all birthday parties. Family, friends and colleagues were flown in from all over the world, including Princess Grace of Monaco, Michael Caine, Ringo Starr, Frankie Howerd and Raquel Welch. The festivities lasted the whole weekend; it really was the most ostentatious display of wealth and over indulgence. A few spoilsports whined about the insensitivity of such grandeur taking place in so poor a country as Hungary. Burton hit back at the complaints by donating a hefty sum of money to a children’s charity.
Many an eyebrow was raised when Richard Harris, an Irishman and nationalist, agreed to appear in a film dramatisation of Oliver Cromwell, the man who had attempted genocide in his country. The paradox was intriguing, but it bagged Harris one of his biggest paycheques yet – $500,000.
Filming in Spain, Harris had to hire a private jet to get him out there when he missed his scheduled flight. No wonder, since the previous evening he was completely sloshed and wandering the streets of Kensington in his dressing gown. He was almost run down by Bruce Forsyth, returning home in his Rolls-Royce. Harris staggered towards the car, gripped hold of its iconic mascot and stood there looking vacantly into the windscreen. ‘What shall I do?’ asked Forsyth’s chauffeur, Robbie, nervously. ‘Don’t worry,’ said Forsyth, climbing out of the car and confronting Harris.
‘Hello, Richard. Who’s a naughty boy, then. What are you up to and where are you going in your dressing gown?’ ‘Ah Bruce,’ said the rambling Harris, who’d met the entertainer at numerous showbiz dos. ‘It’s lovely to see you, lovely to see you.’ ‘Richard,’ said Bruce, pointing to Robbie at the wheel of the Rolls. ‘This man is just driving me back to my flat. Is that all right with you?’ ‘Of course, of course, away you go. But I’m going to have some fun tonight!’ I can imagine, thought Forsyth.
Depositing the great entertainer home Robbie turned the Rolls back into Kensington High Street where he came face to face once again with Harris. The Irishman stood in front of the car, blocking its passage forward. Robbie got out and said, ‘I’m with Bruce.’ A spark of recognition animated Harris’s face. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘Bruce’s friend, fine, on your way…on your way…’
Logistically Cromwell (1970) was a huge film, and the pressure of playing such a controversial and complex character, plus all the boozing combined with gruelling temperatures, meant Harris came close to a total breakdown. When the time came to shoot the execution of Charles I, played by Alec Guinness, Harris flipped. He woke up in his hotel room at dawn in a cold sweat convinced that they were actually about to cut off the King’s head. ‘We must give him another chance!’ Harris yelled down the phone to the director. ‘We must think twice about this!’ The production nurse was summoned, as was a psychiatrist. Harris’s hysteria was uncontrollable and he had to be held down by people kneeling on his chest. Harris was tranquillized and slept non-stop for 18 hours. ‘It was that bad, I had finally crossed the line from sanity to madness.’ He knew at last that the drinking had to stop. Alas, in order to help cope with the absence of booze Harris started to take drugs, first cocaine, then heroin and LSD. Harris eventually overdosed on cocaine and woke up in hospital with a priest administering the last rites. He decided then that he’d rather die of booze than drugs.
In a bid to stave off the demons Harris sank himself into a personal project, a film called Bloomfield (1970). Filmed in Israel it was the story of a 12-year-old soccer fan who hitchhikes across the country to see his hero, an ageing footballer (Harris), play his last game. Granted a gala charity premiere in his hometown of Limerick, this promised to be the ultimate homecoming, but instead it turned into a disaster. ‘A cross between a religious visitation and the Keystone Kops,’ is the way Harris later described it. At Heathrow his party of star guests, which included Roger Moore, Bee Gee Maurice Gibb and his wife Lulu, were delayed by a bomb scare. When they finally got to the cinema the streets were cordoned off because of sheer weight of numbers. Once seated the luckless audience then heard a voice come over the tannoy to say that the police had been warned about a bomb inside the cinema. There was a mass evacuation as 100 policemen combed the auditorium before the all-clear was given. ‘I can think of 50 fuckers who might have made that call,’ Harris said, ‘and none of them had anything to do with the IRA or the UVF.’
Bloomfield turned out to be a miss with critics and public alike. At the Berlin Film Festival it was booed off the screen. Harris responded by gamely booing back. Despite such bravado the film’s failure hit him hard. Ironically his singing career was proving much more popular than his films. After the success of ‘MacArthur Park’ and a series of singles and albums, Harris embarked on a world tour, playing the UK and the States. With a full entourage, parties and boozing, the Harris roadshow was just like any other rock tour. Predictably groupies were in evidence at every venue and Harris took full advantage. At one concert the orchestra struck up the intro to ‘MacArthur Park’ but where Harris should have been standing the spotlight illuminated instead an empty stage. The director sent an urgent call to ‘find Harris, for chrissake!’ as the orchestra started the intro again. Eventually he was located in his dressing room, stark bollock naked with a black beauty on her hands and knees giving him a blow job. A stagehand grabbed hold of Harris and got him dressed fast. As the orchestra struck up the opening bars of ‘MacArthur Park’ for the umpteenth time Harris bounced onto the stage, gamely pulling up his flies.
For years Peter O’Toole and Richard Burton had wanted to make a film record of Dylan Thomas’s play Under Milk Wood. Both men had known and idolised the poet, Burton especially who had a love of great drinkers generally. ‘I have to think hard to name an interesting man who does not drink,’ he once claimed. Another of Burton’s heroes was a Lancastrian he met in a Westminster pub who could down 12 pints of beer while Big Ben was tolling midnight.
There was the Dylan Thomas of the magical phrase and the mellifluous voice, the darkly seductive bard of the Celtic twilight. Then there was the unkempt, slightly bloated Dylan Thomas with the haystack hairstyle and odious dentures who would get drunk, vomit and fall down the stairs. This was the same Dylan Thomas who pissed on Charlie Chaplin’s door as he made an early exit from a party in his honour.
Dylan was his own worst enemy. He learned to
drink copiously as a young journalist in Swansea and his poetry, beautifully crafted though it was, came second to his image as a pissed man of letters. Much of his later writing consisted of begging letters to friends. Burton often lent the poet money and invariably he’d use it to buy drink. On one occasion Thomas was on the scrounge and phoned Burton asking for £200. It was for the education of his children, he claimed, but Burton knew better, and besides didn’t have the money readily at hand. Thomas offered him the rights to a play he had not yet written in return for the cash. Burton refused. They never spoke again. Thomas left for America and at one party the glamorous starlet Shelley Winters asked why he’d come to Hollywood. Very solemnly Thomas said, ‘To touch a starlet’s tits.’ ‘OK,’ Winters said, ‘but only one finger.’
Sadly within the month Thomas was dead. His final immortal words were, ‘I have seen the gates of hell’ after drinking 18 straight whiskies and keeling over in a gutter. ‘We all wanted to imitate that,’ said O’Toole.
A clash of filming schedules and Burton’s elaborate tax dodging itinerary had always scuppered the plans to film Thomas’s most famous work. Unlike O’Toole, Burton had to ration the amount of time he spent in Britain in order to avoid the taxman. In 1971 his schedule finally allowed him a few spare days so he rang O’Toole, roped in his wife Liz Taylor and Under Milk Wood went before cameras on location in Wales. All three stars claimed only £10,000 in expenses, plus a share of any profits.
During filming Burton arranged a quiet evening meal at a local restaurant with an actress friend, stipulating a table in the corner away from prying eyes. Suddenly O’Toole burst in, making something of a grand entrance. Not to be outdone Burton leapt onto a table and broke into a song in Gaelic. O’Toole leapt atop another table and sang the second verse, and so on; so much for a quiet, unobtrusive meal.
Much ribbing also went on. When he heard that Burton had just played a queer gangster in Villain, having previously essayed a gay hairdresser in Staircase, O’Toole quipped, ‘It looks as though you’ve cornered the limp wrist market, ducky.’
O’Toole continued to be pally with Burton and didn’t realize anything was wrong in their friendship until, visiting Rome sometime in 1972, he discovered that he was in the same hotel as Burton and Liz Taylor. O’Toole tried telephoning Burton but couldn’t get beyond the bodyguard or the secretary who invariably answered the phone. For two days Burton didn’t return his call, and then one of his staff came with a message and led O’Toole to a clandestine meeting in the corner of a dark bar tucked in the back of the hotel. ‘Elizabeth does not approve of our racing around together,’ Burton announced. ‘That was it,’ said O’Toole. ‘Goodbye. I didn’t see him again for many years; poor soul.’
Alexandre Dumas’s classic swashbuckling tale The Three Musketeers has often been filmed, but never so wonderfully as Richard Lester’s 1973 version. It began life as a possible film vehicle for The Beatles; instead it turned into an all-star epic featuring the likes of Charlton Heston, Faye Dunaway, Michael York, Christopher Lee and Raquel Welch. Oliver Reed was perfect casting as Athos but his extreme nature caused problems when it came to the numerous sword fight sequences. Reed didn’t bother much with rehearsals and went hell for leather when the cameras rolled, so much so that the 40-strong stunt team drew lots to determine who would fight him. Such exuberance impinged on his co-stars, too. ‘Oliver did nothing by halves,’ notes Christopher Lee. ‘I remember during a fight scene he came at me with both hands on the sword, like an axe, and I parried it and stopped totally. I said, “I think we’d better get the routine right.” Then I said to Oliver, “Do you remember who taught you how to use a sword?” He said, “You did.” And I said, “Don’t forget it.” You see I made Devil Ship Pirates with him for Hammer and he was a bit of a menace in that, quite frankly. People leapt out of the way when he had a fight, because he went at it absolutely flat out.’
The Spanish fight arranger on the film was so unprepared to be charged at the moment Lester shouted ‘Action’ that he came close to throwing up with fear and refused to go near Reed again. ‘Oliver sometimes would go totally berserk and start to really fight – 100 per cent real,’ recalls producer Ilya Salkind. ‘And we’d have to say, “Oliver, it’s just a movie.” Finally Oliver got a sword through his wrist. I guess one of the stunt men wasn’t happy with him, because he was always going at them like a maniac.’ Unfortunately this ‘accidental’ stab wound landed Ollie in hospital for four days with blood poisoning. He lay in bed receiving blood transfusions as the ever-dependable Reg Prince smuggled spaghetti dinners in at night through the window.
Ollie’s madcap sword fighting style was later to bring praise from an unlikely source, that of director Quentin Tarantino. ‘Oliver Reed is just fucking GOD in this movie. During the fight training Reed threw himself into the fighting so much he made all the other musketeers work twice as hard. They knew if they didn’t, Reed was going to own the movie completely. He was that good. You’ve never seen sword fights the way Reed fights them in this movie.’
It wasn’t just Lee and the sword masters who were unnerved about Reed; his other co-stars reacted coolly to the star as well. ‘Oliver Reed was a terrifying presence, an extremely dangerous man,’ recalled Richard Chamberlain. ‘He could be very sweet, but if he turned on you, he could make life terrible for you. He was up all night, drinking, then coming to work the next day and being fine.’
Along with the rest of the cast Reed stayed in a plush hotel in Madrid. As a practical joke Reed removed the goldfish from the ornamental pond in the dining room at the dead of night, keeping them in his bath, and replaced them with fish-shaped carrots. The following morning at breakfast he dived in and began devouring what his horror-struck fellow guests presumed were the helpless ‘live’ fish. The manager called the police and Reed was hauled off the premises bellowing, ‘You can’t touch me! I’m one of the musketeers!’
‘Oliver was a real character,’ recalls Michael York, ‘but nobody mentions the fact that he would turn up fully prepared to work, knowing his lines. The tragedy was that everyone expected him to be this hellraiser, and he often obliged; the press wouldn’t allow him to be this very serious actor. But he did have this larger than life side to him. He was brought up in good schools, with good manners; there’s a residue of that as well. Oliver wasn’t run of the mill. He was like an aristocratic ruffian, a complete contradiction in terms.’
More problems followed. Drinking one night in the hotel bar Reed started challenging his fellow guests to tests of strength. ‘I am the greatest,’ he pronounced. ‘I’m a British true blue and will take on anyone.’ When no one obliged he started overturning tables and smashing glasses. Again the police were called and he was dragged away. It took five officers to bundle him into the interrogation room. ‘Oliver, God bless his soul, was incredible,’ recalls Salkind. ‘He could go out and get totally smashed until six in the morning and show up on the set at seven and be ready to go. That was pretty fantastic.’
Reed claimed this latest arrest was all a misunderstanding, that he’d been Indian wrestling with a Finn who was seven foot two. ‘I thought he seemed like a good fellow to wrestle with,’ Reed revealed on the Russell Harty TV show. ‘Unfortunately, the table broke and we fell into the ice cream trolley. The ice cream went over an American lady’s dress, so the husband picked up a bun and threw it at me. So I picked up the glacé cherry and threw it at him. Then all of a sudden 15 boys came in dressed as policemen, with machine guns, and they dragged me off.’
The hotel manager revealed in court that this skirmish wasn’t the first problem he’d had with Signor Reed; he’d previously insulted guests, broken chairs and punched a hole through a bathroom door. In the end the judge ordered Reed to leave the hotel, ‘So I was thrown out on to the streets with my bags.’ Russell Harty, not quite believing his guest’s tale, offered this gem: ‘All life seems to be a kind of adventure to you, doesn’t it?’ Reed smiled. ‘I think it should be. I think that everybody wou
ld like that. It’s just that very few people have the opportunity.’
By this time Reed was developing a reputation as something of a sex symbol, with his dark, dangerous looks. He described himself as having the appearance of a Bedford truck, with the promise of a V8 engine. One critic was rather crueller, writing that he had a face that reminded him of a neglected part of Stonehenge. In any case Reed was now starting to win Hollywood offers. Steve McQueen came to London to meet him with the express intention of their making a film together. Ollie invited McQueen to Tramp’s nightclub where he got dreadfully drunk and vomited over the American superstar. The nightclub’s staff managed to find some new jeans for McQueen to wear but couldn’t offer him any replacement shoes. ‘So I had to go round for the rest of the evening smelling of Oliver Reed’s sick,’ McQueen complained. Needless to say Ollie didn’t get the part.
Considering the combustible nature of Richard Burton and Liz Taylor’s relationship, it surprised many when they agreed to make a pair of TV movies about the break-up of a marriage seen from each partner’s viewpoint: Divorce His and Divorce Hers. At the time Burton was once again trying very hard to give up booze and made a very big show of drinking only Perrier water during his first meeting with director Waris Hussein. ‘This unfortunately did not last once Elizabeth Taylor turned up on the scene,’ recalls Hussein. ‘This is the key to what happened in their relationship. She certainly triggered off his alcoholism. We started filming in Rome and for the first week Elizabeth wasn’t there and he was fine, very much on the straight and narrow. Then she turned up and on that first night he disappeared and drank a whole bottle of vodka.’
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