Hellraisers

by Robert Sellers

  To give you some idea of the terror Marvin could inflict on a production, this is what Joshua Logan said about him after directing the star in Paint Your Wagon in 1969. ‘Not since Attila the Hun swept across Europe leaving 500 years of total blackness has there been a man like Lee Marvin.’

  Burton had never worked with the wild American before and they met for the first time on location at Oroville, a small town in California standing in for a bigoted community full of Ku Klux Klan supporters. Before a gathering of pressmen Marvin announced, ‘I suppose you know I get top billing in this.’ Burton countered, ‘Yes, but I’m getting more money.’ Liz Taylor, who had arrived to be by Burton’s side, a desperate last chance to save their marriage, saw the perfect photo opportunity and sidled up next to the two men and audibly wished Marvin luck. ‘Why don’t you just fuck off sweetie,’ responded Marvin. They never spoke again for the rest of the shoot.

  As part of the ongoing publicity Marvin was invited to a nearby hotel to cut a big St Valentine’s Day cake. He listened to innumerable speeches from local dignitaries, getting gradually more pissed, until as guest of honour it was time for him to cut the cake. Rising unsteadily to his feet Marvin opened his mouth and then collapsed headfirst into the sponge. Staggering back up, dripping with cream, he walked outside to address a crowd that had gathered. ‘Cocksuckers of Oroville,’ he shouted. ‘United we stand.’ The townsfolk were not amused and demanded an apology.

  The tension between these two macho hellraisers was so taut that private bets were laid among the crew on which of them would take the first swing at the other. But as the film progressed Burton and Marvin got chummy and often went out to lunch together. Only the courageous or plain stupid ever went with them: lunch might consist of 17 martinis each before going straight back to work. One crewmember later recalled how he saw Burton down an eight-ounce tumbler of vodka in one gulp before breakfast.

  Burton had arrived to work on The Klansman drunk and stayed drunk throughout filming, consuming three bottles of vodka a day, a routine he’d been following for the past six months. The film’s publicist announced to the press, ‘If you want to interview a drunk or see a drunk fall in the camellia bushes, come ahead.’ His drinking got so bad that midway through the schedule doctors informed the actor that he only had three weeks left to live. ‘I’m amused you think I can be killed off that easily,’ he answered them. But director Terence Young was so concerned that he seriously wondered if Burton would be able to finish the picture. He was getting progressively more ill and having to force his whole body just to speak a line of dialogue. His complexion was white, sometimes blue, and then yellow. When Young was shooting Burton’s death scene in the film he complimented the make-up man, ‘You’ve done a great job.’ The make-up guy replied, ‘I haven’t touched him.’

  Young quickly shot the scene and then organized Burton to be raced to hospital in Santa Monica where he received an emergency blood trans-fusion. He was on the edge for about a week but pulled through. By getting him to hospital when he did Young was convinced he’d saved Burton’s life, which he probably did. Burton was hospitalized for six weeks as doctors fought to repair his battered system and wean him off alcohol. During the drying-out process Burton had to be fed through a tube because he was shaking so much. Eventually he recovered, even getting back into some semblance of shape, but he would never be quite the same man again.

  By the mid-70s it seemed Richard Harris, like Burton and O’Toole, was finding good films difficult to come by. 99 and 44/100 Per Cent Dead (1974), a dismal gangster picture that even its director John Frankenheimer called ‘probably the worst movie I ever made’ was a case in point. Harris himself admitted that he gave a performance on autopilot and that he was only making such films ‘to get money for booze’.

  The only good thing to come out of the experience was meeting former model Ann Turkel who’d secured her first acting role in the film. As a teen Ann had idolised Harris, Camelot was her favourite movie and she’d pinups of Harris as King Arthur on her bedroom wall. During filming they fell in love despite the fact that Harris was 25 years her senior and she was closer in age to his son than she was to him. They enjoyed an old-fashioned courtship for months, during which they’d exchange nothing more than kisses. Harris proved a hopeless romantic. Having always said he’d never marry again, and condemning the institution as ‘a custom thought up by women where they proceed to live off men, eating them away like poison fungus on a tree’, Ann changed Harris’s mind and they married in 1974. However, she was blissfully unaware of the psychological and alcoholic dependency of her husband and over the next eight years her life became dominated by his unpredictable mood swings and drinking bouts. ‘The stories I could tell would make every other Hollywood exposé look like a Disney movie,’ she once explained.

  Ann realized what she had let herself in for when she organized a surprise birthday party for her husband. ‘Harris got very drunk. He didn’t even know who I was. He then broke a mirror and slashed his wrist so his driver and bodyguard took him to hospital. I was terrified. The next day he came to me and said, “This only happens once a year, to release pent up energy,” and I believed him! I had no idea what was in store for me.’

  A much better film vehicle arrived for Harris courtesy of Three Musketeers’ director Richard Lester. Juggernaut (1974) was one of a rash of disaster movies inflicted upon the public in the early to mid-70s, though this one ranks amongst the best. Harris plays a bomb disposal expert out to stop a mad blackmailer blowing up a cruise liner. The exceptional supporting cast included Omar Sharif, Anthony Hopkins and David Hemmings. Lester found Harris ‘always a delight, I thought he was terrific and a wonderful actor’. But his hellraising was never very far from the surface. ‘There was only one time I had a problem with him. Richard had had a fairly heavy night and when he was having his hair extension put on for the part fell sound asleep, sort of recovering, and didn’t realize quite how tight it was. We started shooting a very tense sequence about trying to defuse a bomb, and suddenly he said, “I’ve got to stop, the wig’s on too tight and it’s pulling me to pieces, I’m in terrible agony.” And I said, “Look, just cut the bloody thing off, we’ve got to keep going.” We were in the middle of this import ant sequence and couldn’t stop. So between us we came up with the idea that he would suddenly reach into his bag and put on a woolly hat, which he did. It seemed a good idea at the time but when you see the film you think, why the bloody hell does that man – trying to defuse the bomb, and with cutters in his hands – suddenly stop and put on his woolly hat!’

  Harris didn’t prove very helpful either when it came time to shoot the most hair-raising moment of the film, when a team of bomb disposal experts parachute into the sea and then climb up the ladders of the boat in a force eight gale. ‘All the stunt men were flown in by helicopters the night before,’ recalls Lester. ‘And we’d hired this Russian ship and the vodka was about threepence a shot, so you could have triple vodka for nine pence. So the stunt men arrived and Richard was in the bar and one thing led to another and at one point I thought, this is getting ridiculous because it’s three o’clock in the morning. I said, “Lads, you know, we’re in a force eight, there’s a huge swell out there, and you’ve got to climb about a hundred feet in frogman suits up these swinging ladders.” The leader turned round and said, “Piece of cake, guv. Don’t worry about it.” And of course they were all being egged on by Richard. Well, by the following morning when we shot the sequence they were dropping off the ladders like flies. Thank God we had four zodiacs swirling round the boat picking them up and dragging them back. Most of it’s in the finished film.’

  Peter O’Toole also seemed to be bouncing from one nonentity movie to the next, and even then he wasn’t first choice, such as the time he was asked to replace Robert Mitchum on Rosebud (1975), a kidnap drama about Palestinian terrorists, because the American’s drunken antics had so exasperated director Otto Preminger. During one scene Mitchum and some hoods had to
survey a map, only this young actor repeatedly got his lines wrong. Pissed off, Mitchum roared, ‘I should take out my dick and show him the map.’ ‘Take out what?’ asked Preminger incredulously. ‘I should piss on his arm!’ Mitchum spluttered. ‘Bob, we are rolling!’ said Preminger. ‘I’d take out your dick, if I could find it,’ Mitchum continued. ‘Bob, please, there are ladies present.’

  After more rows with Preminger, Mitchum quit the movie and within days O’Toole was hired. When Mitchum heard the news his response was. ‘That’s like replacing Ray Charles with Helen Keller.’

  Filming in Paris O’Toole was the victim of a bizarre practical joke. He turned up to work one day and found a note in mirror writing in the apartment where they were filming: ‘To Peter O’Toole, the so-called Irishman…we have planted a bomb in the building.’ It was signed by the IRA. Preminger was taking no chances and cleared the building. ‘This was the height of the bombings,’ O’Toole recalled years later, ‘Bloody Friday, Bloody Sunday, my forebears were getting together and blowing things up. You had to take these things seriously.’

  Eventually word got back that there had been a party in the apartment the night before and that the note had been written as a gag by critic Kenneth Tynan. Preminger was furious and phoned the critic’s Paris home to let him know it. When filming resumed O’Toole went missing. He’d found Tynan’s address and arrived there with two beefy members of the crew and proceeded to beat the crap out of him. ‘But I thought you’d see through it!’ Tynan kept repeating in his defence.

  Tynan threatened to sue O’Toole for assault but in the end nothing came of it, although the two never spoke to one another again, an awful result since Tynan had been such a champion of O’Toole, whom he called an ‘insomniac Celtic dynamo’. When Tynan’s diaries were later published this episode was discreetly cut out. ‘I wouldn’t tell the story,’ O’Toole explained. ‘Well, I didn’t want to make him look too much of a twat! He claims I kicked him in the balls…I may have done. So that was the end.’

  Ten years earlier, Tynan had interviewed O’Toole for Playboy magazine, and they’d had this wonderful exchange: Tynan: ‘Are you afraid of dying?’ O’Toole: ‘Petrified.’ Tynan: ‘Why?’ O’Toole: ‘Because there’s no future in it.’ Tynan: ‘When did you last think you were about to die?’ O’Toole: ‘About four o’clock this morning.’

  Preminger had a fearsome reputation as a director. During the filming of Saint Joan, Jean Seberg (playing Joan) was about to be burned at the stake. To the horror of the cast and crew, the pile of wood below her actually caught fire. Despite cries and screams of horror Preminger would not allow the flames to be extinguished until he had finished the scene. O’Toole, however, found him an absolute delight. ‘We were in Berlin, filming, and Otto, as you know, fled the Nazis…and he was fine for a few days, and then he got more and more and more depressed. He wouldn’t even get out of the car when we were filming. All he’d do was wind down the windows and go: “Action! Cut!”’

  O’Toole next made a couple of films in Mexico, a country he fell in love with, buying property in Puerto Vallarta, where Burton and Liz Taylor had a house. He also began an affair with a local woman 20 years his junior. Not surprisingly his marriage to Siân began to unravel; it had been under strain for some time. It was not unknown for O’Toole to arrive home drunk as a lord and loaded with friends and expect Siân to cook a meal for everyone. Some of O’Toole’s friends were as potty as he was: Donal McCann for instance. He came round for drinks one day, sank two bottles of vodka and collapsed asleep on a sofa. Siân came into the room and saw that McCann’s cigarette had set fire to his hair so grabbed a soda siphon and put him out. McCann woke up, surveyed the scene and then held out his glass for a refill.

  He might have been the greatest Shakespearean actor since Olivier but during one rehearsal Burton was refused permission to go to the bathroom, so he simply urinated on the stage.

  Burton and O’Toole were booze soul mates, so much so that the crew on the set of Becket at Shepperton Studios spent more time getting them out of the local pub than they did filming them.

  Burton and Taylor’s marriage was like tying two cats in a bag. Once she caught him canoodling with a starlet and promptly attacked him with a broken bottle.

  Burton was crippled by ill health in later life. In fact, during one operation surgeons were astonished to discover that Burton’s entire spinal column was coated with crystallised alcohol.

  Burton would go on the wagon for months, then dramatically fall off again. ‘I like my reputation. That of a spoiled genius from the Welsh gutter.’

  Actor for hire. So there would be no confusion, at one private audition with a gay director Reed’s wife scrawled ‘This is mine’ on her husband’s cock.

  Reed made a habit of dropping his trousers in public to show off his ‘wand of lust. My mighty mallet.’

  Reed, the country gent, at his 18th century mansion Broome Hall, scene of many drunken rampages and wild parties.

  Filming The Three Musketeers, even the stuntmen were terrified of fencing with Reed, who often lost control during fight scenes. ‘He was a menace,’ says co-star Christopher Lee.

  At nightclubs Reed played his own game of ‘head butting’. The rules required each player to repeatedly smash his head against his opponent until one collapsed or surrendered.

  Perfect day: drink himself insensible, rampage all night and then read all about it in the newspapers the following morning.

  When pissed Harris’ behaviour could be eccentric and violent. It was not unknown for him to run into traffic and attack passing cars.

  King Arthur in Joshua Logan’s 1967 film Camelot is perhaps Harris’ most famous role. But during one particularly rocky patch, co-star David Hemmings had to persuade a depressed Harris not to jump off a ledge and kill himself. They went for a drink instead.

  Harris often had no recollection of his hellraising. One morning, he was bemused to find stitches in his face, totally unaware that he’d wrecked a restaurant the night before.

  Well into his 60s Harris remained a womaniser. He invariably answered the phone in his hotel suite not with ‘Hello’ but ‘Come straight up and take your knickers off.’

  One of his last roles in Gladiator. Shortly before he died, Harris collapsed at the Savoy hotel. As he was stretchered out in front of horrified fellow guests, he yelled ‘It was the food!’

  Whilst publicising Lawrence of Arabia in New York, the film made all the wrong sort of headlines when O’Toole was caught up in a drugs bust with controversial comic Lenny Bruce.

  Mutual friend Kenneth Griffith warned Sian Phillips off marrying O’Toole, saying ‘He is a genius, but he is not normal.’

  Filming Lord Jim in Cambodia included dysentery and encounters with deadly snakes. O’Toole said how much he hated the place and was banished by the king.

  Caligula – notoriously the director, Tinto Brass, inserted hardcore porn scenes. Unimpressed, O’Toole remarked, ‘It was about as erotic as bath night on HMS Montclare.’

  With journalist and fellow boozer Jeffrey Bernard whose life O’Toole immortalised in the stage play Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell.

  At the 2002 Oscars, O’Toole was to receive a lifetime achievement award. However, on discovering the bar served no alcohol, he threatened to walk out. Panicked producers had some vodka smuggled in.

  Another of O’Toole’s daft friends was Irish actor Jack MacGowran. The pair had known each other at Stratford when MacGowran owned two goldfish called King Lear and Cordelia. After a pub crawl MacGowran returned home pissed and peckish and had one of the unfortunate fish grilled on toast. On another occasion MacGowran made a bet with O’Toole that he wouldn’t drink for a whole month. ‘You’re on,’ said O’Toole. MacGowran’s dry month was to begin the next morning. It lasted exactly 17 seconds. O’Toole joyfully timed it.

  Since the late 60s it seemed that Oliver Reed and Ken Russell were inseparable. Even when he wasn’t starring in Russell’s films he still turned
up for work, appearing as a railway guard in just one scene in Mahler (1974), his payment three bottles of Dom Perignon, and in Lisztomania (1975) turning up merely to open a door for Roger Daltrey – this time his reward was four bottles. Tommy (1975) was different.

  The Who, on whose rock opera the film was based, expressly asked for Ken Russell to direct and Russell in turn insisted on casting Reed for the part of Tommy’s uncle Frank, a strange decision considering that the whole film was to be sung and Ollie couldn’t carry a tune in his head. When Reed arrived at The Who’s recording studio in Battersea for his first Tommy rehearsal, a disturbed Pete Townshend was pacing up and down, and swigging neat brandy from a half-pint beer mug. Russell was waiting in the control room. ‘OK, Ollie. Grab a mic and start singing.’ Accompanied by Townshend on the piano Reed croaked as best he could through one of the songs. Townshend stopped, downed the remainder of his brandy and blasted in Reed’s face, ‘Are you fucking joking?’ Reed was sent home with a tape of the score and ordered to learn his numbers by heart.