Hellraisers

by Robert Sellers

  When he wasn’t boozing with pals at home Ollie was at his local pub restaurant. During one lunchtime drinking binge Reed left a group of friends at their table and without them knowing climbed up a massive stone fireplace, stretched out on the chimney ledge and fell asleep. Unable to locate him Ollie’s friends left and the landlord locked up for the afternoon. Six hours later Ollie woke up to the smell of food wafting into his nostrils and climbed down. Dirty and dishevelled he bowed as regally as he could to the dumbstruck diners before planting a sooty kiss on the barmaid and walking out.

  Reed was just as much a menace in the grounds of his own home. Returning with his gardener from a drinking session, driving his open top Rolls-Royce, he approached the gates of Broome Hall. A mischievous grin took over. ‘Let’s see how fast we can get this up the drive.’ He speeded up and smashed into the masonry of an old bridge. The car was a complete write-off. He got out and slammed the door. ‘Never fucking liked it anyway.’

  Rip-roaring weekend parties were still a regular occurrence at Broome Hall and most evening get-togethers with friends would begin with Ollie drinking a full bottle of wine from his fabled Thorhill glass. ‘If anyone refuses to follow, I tend to sulk.’ He loved to shock first time houseguests too by shouting at his girlfriend Jacquie when the meal arrived, ‘This food is filth,’ and hurling it against the wall. When she entered one evening with a big pot of gravy Reed put his shoe in it and made gravy marks all over the walls. Unable to reach the ceiling Ollie got a broom, dipped his shoe back in the gravy, popped it on the handle and covered the ceiling in dirty foot prints. After the dining room was redecorated such frivolity had to stop. One is amazed how poor Jacquie managed to survive it all, although to the press at least she confessed how she loved living with the madman because she couldn’t predict anything: ‘There are never two days alike.’

  But as the years went by Jacquie found life at Broome Hall increasingly difficult to cope with. It all came to an end on New Year’s Eve when Reed couldn’t wait for it to become midnight, so he put the hands of the clock on the kitchen wall to twelve o’clock and bellowed, ‘Now it’s midnight, now it’s New Year,’ and, getting out his shot gun, blasted the time piece off the wall, bits of it ricocheting round the kitchen causing more damage and mess. It was the final straw. ‘That’s it,’ said Jacquie, and left. Reed sold Broome Hall within a month of her departure.

  Richard Burton continued to tread the boards in his American tour of Camelot but was growing increasingly weak and ill and the pain became intolerable. Witnesses told of how the sheer will power Burton employed to combat the pain, not to mention the eight performances a week to packed houses, would have killed a lesser being. But the man was in a terrible state; even the pills he took to deaden the pain caused nausea. Sometimes in between scenes he’d dart off stage to be sick. He also suffered from a pinched nerve in his right arm, which often meant he couldn’t even lift Excalibur. Still he battled on. When the tour hit LA, however, Burton survived only six performances. When the end came it was sudden. ‘I was sitting in my dressing room. I had my cape on and my crown on my head and I was staring blankly into the mirror. I was paralyzed.’ At the hospital it was agreed that a back operation was the only course of action, but Burton was so underweight and exhausted he was sent to rest in order to build himself up.

  It was almost a month later that a team of top surgeons opened Burton up and discovered that his entire spinal column was coated with crystallized alcohol, which had to be scraped off before they could rebuild the vertebrae in his neck. It was a dangerous operation that carried with it the risk of permanent paralysis. Susan was by his side, as she’d been throughout the Camelot tour. Elizabeth Taylor sent flowers. The world waited. The news was good, Burton was out of danger and two weeks later was released from hospital, though still taking a considerable amount of medication to kill the pain. Months later he collapsed again, this time undergoing an emergency operation for a perforated ulcer. Released from hospital, because of the ulcer Burton was unable to take the painkillers for his back, so had to cope with even greater discomfort.

  It was obvious to everyone that the star’s touring days were over, but Camelot was booked up for months in advance. A replacement was needed, but who the hell could replace Richard Burton?

  Richard Harris was in New York when he received a frantic phone call. The Camelot producers had come to the conclusion that the movie King Arthur was their only salvation. Problem was, Harris had decided to take a break from acting. ‘But Burton himself has requested you to take over from him,’ said the producers. ‘If it’s true,’ Harris answered, ‘let him call and ask me personally.’ Later that day Harris’s phone rang. It was Burton. ‘Dickie, you’d be doing us all a favour.’ How could Harris refuse?

  Harris hadn’t set foot on a stage for nearly 20 years, but he needn’t have been nervous about his return; the tour was a huge success, fractured only by Harris’s own illness. In Detroit he collapsed in the middle of the first act. When a call for a doctor in the house came up on the loud speaker 28 people queued up outside his dressing room to examine him and ask for autographs. In hospital the diagnosis was not good. ‘I think if it goes on like this you have about 18 months to live,’ a doctor said. Harris asked what he had to do to survive. ‘Stop the piss.’

  Harris’s intake was as prodigious as ever, two bottles of vodka a day or 25 pints of beer in a single session. Harris knew he was drinking himself into oblivion. Once he collapsed suddenly in the street; a few days later he lost consciousness during a dinner with friends. They urged him to check into a specialist New York clinic for blood tests and it was here, finally, that the life-threatening hypoglycaemia, the root of years of suffering, was revealed. A chronic condition, hypoglycaemia involves a lack of sugar production in the body. ‘I’d fucked up my pancreas when I was drinking too much.’ The organ was releasing too much insulin. His blackouts weren’t the after effects of booze sessions, but insulin comas. ‘And one day,’ his doctor warned, ‘you won’t come out of it.’

  The medical verdict was that booze had to go; otherwise he was staring death in the face. One summer evening in 1981 he walked into Washington’s Jockey Club for one last drink. On the wine list there were two bottles of Chateau Margaux 1957 at £600 each. He ordered them and slowly and methodically drank the lot. ‘I treated them like you’d treat making love to the most gorgeous woman in the world. If you knew you only had one orgasm left, you’d say, “I’m holding it up, babe, because I don’t want this to end.”’

  Harris was true to his word this time and friends were astonished when he kept the pledge for 10 years. ‘The liquor industry went into a panic when they heard I wasn’t drinking any more,’ Harris joked. ‘Have you noticed how much the shares have dropped?’ In the early 90s he did return to the booze, but only moderately, having a glass of Guinness which remained his daily companion till the day he died. Friends said that he became a different man once the demon drink was conquered, more mature and reflective. The only problem was that much of his past was unknown to him. Whole days, even months, over the last 20 years had been erased from his memory banks because of booze. He kept running into people who’d say, ‘Remember me?’ and Harris would answer, ‘I’ve never seen you before in my life.’ They then would have to explain things like, ‘But Richard, you spent four weeks at my house.’ One man even told Harris that he’d proposed marriage to him. ‘He should have accepted,’ the actor joked. ‘I pay very good alimony.’ One of the reasons Harris gave for turning down a £1m advance to write his autobiography was, ‘Because I was far too drunk to ever really recall what happened.’

  Back on the Camelot tour Harris found it punishing but satisfying. He was nearly killed during one rehearsal but for a diving stagehand who bundled him clear of a rapidly descending one-ton piece of scenery. His life long love affair with booze had also caught up with him. One critic in his review of the show said, ‘Let me describe Richard Harris to you. For those who may not have seen his mo
vies, from his neck down he’s built like an Adonis, but from the neck up he looks like a dried-out prune.’

  Spurred on by his success in Camelot Harris negotiated to buy the touring rights. The deal was the canniest and most rewarding of his life. Over the next six years Camelot earned $92m, of which Harris personally grossed almost $8m. It put him in the wonderful position of making movies only if he wanted to. ‘What Camelot has given me is fuck off money,’ he said, with a hint of hard-earned pride.

  After the very public humiliation of Macbeth Peter O’Toole’s next film project went a long way to rejuvenating his reputation. My Favorite Year (1982) was produced by Mel Brooks’s film company and based on his own experiences when, as a young comedy writer on a TV show in the 50s, he was drafted in to keep Errol Flynn sober and out of trouble until he’d made his guest star appearance. Flynn was a notorious rabble-rouser and drunk and was frequently banned from drinking on film sets. Necessity being the mother of invention, the savvy star soon developed a solution which was to inject oranges with vodka and eat them during his breaks. Indeed, Flynn’s drinking at Warner Brothers, where he was under contract, got so bad that he directly influenced the studio’s policy on serving alcohol during studio hours. On the set of 70s disaster movie The Swarm Michael Caine, Henry Fonda and Ben Johnson were enjoying lunch at the Warner Brothers commissary when they were joined by Olivia de Havilland. There were complaints that no booze was being served. ‘That’s because of Errol Flynn,’ said de Havilland. ‘He used to get so drunk he couldn’t work so Mister Warner said no more booze.’

  The script of My Favorite Year also drew heavily upon another Hollywood acting legend, that of John Barrymore, who once said, ‘You can’t drown yourself in drink. I’ve tried; you float.’ Barrymore was the movie’s earliest hellraiser, a distinguished actor who boozed and whored like a good ’un and who sired a family of thesps that still permeates Hollywood; Drew Barrymore is his granddaughter. Barrymore was a legend and hero-worshipped by many, not least Errol Flynn. When Flynn retreated to a house up in the Hollywood Hills it became a refuge of sorts for Barrymore and every night the old guy stood by the bedroom window and urinated out of it in the hope of spraying the Warner Brothers studios in the valley below.

  The best Barrymore story goes like this: after a few drinks too many at a popular Los Angeles bar the great man stumbled by mistake into the ladies’ room. Slashing away merrily in a conveniently located pot plant he was disturbed by a female visitor. ‘How dare you! This is for ladies.’ Turning around, his penis still exposed, Barrymore responded, ‘So, madam, is this. But every now and again, I’m compelled to run a little water through it.’

  To many O’Toole seemed perfect casting for the role of a sozzled and faded Hollywood film star. At first he refused the offer, ‘Because of the possible danger that someone might think that this washed-up, clapped-out drunken old fart was actually me.’ In fact so allergic to drink had O’Toole become that even a drop of it passing his lips could prove dangerous. One scene in My Favorite Year had his character waking up in bed with a stewardess and immediately downing one of those mini airline-size bottles of scotch. A whole case of little bottles had been prepared, each one emptied of liquor, washed and re-filled with coloured water, but somehow a real bottle slipped through and when O’Toole drank from it during a take it made him so ill he had to leave the set for several hours.

  In the end he enjoyed the filming immensely, but for one strange incident that occurred during a scene in which a crowd of extras playing crazed fans mobbed his fictional film star. ‘I don’t think I’ve witnessed anything quite so bizarre in my career. God only knows what was on their minds. These extras – these animals, as it turned out – were supposed to simply mill around me, very passively I might emphasize. Instead of that they jumped all over me like rabid dogs. One cheeky prick took hold of me by the ear and wouldn’t let go. I mean, he would not let go! I finally had to bash him in order to get free. They went absolutely bonkers. I think they’d been in Hollywood so long, they’d lost their grip on reality.’

  Playing a faded star must have given O’Toole pause to ponder his own rapidly approaching old age. ‘One of the lovely things about being an actor is that you can go on forever, although I have no intention of uttering my last words on the stage in fucking Macclesfield or something. No thank you. Room service and a couple of depraved young women will do me quite nicely for an exit.’ My Favorite Year earned for O’Toole yet another Oscar nomination.

  Sadly Oliver Reed had never truly conquered Hollywood; though the chance had at one time presented itself to him on a silver platter, only for it to be totally spurned. ‘He was offered the Robert Shaw role in Jaws and turned it down,’ reveals Michael Winner. ‘Had Oliver done Jaws he’d have been a big star, a serious star, not sort of wobbling about starring in British films. But he was nervous about going to Hollywood, he was nervous of being where he didn’t feel secure. Drinking of course is often about insecurity. He was very shy and he needed the drink to give him confidence.’

  Reed occasionally made American films, but generally inferior ones, such as the spy comedy Condorman (1981) starring his old Jokers comrade Michael Crawford. Reed was playing a Russian nasty and as time went by grew ever deeper into his character and began speaking with a heavy Russian accent. One night, on location in Switzerland, Crawford sat by himself in a local bar and saw a grim-looking Ollie barge in. ‘Come here and haffff a dreeenk!’ shouted Reed when he caught sight of Crawford. ‘It’s OK, Ollie, I’m meeting someone.’ Again, he growled, ‘Come here and haff a dreeenk!’ ‘No, Ollie, really…’ Reed rose majestically from his seat and pressed his not inconsiderable chest against the increasingly nervous Crawford. ‘Cummmmm here into Russian Embassy and haff a dreeenk, you little feathered fart!’

  Crawford had no choice but to comply. ‘Of course, from that moment on and throughout the rest of the film production, I was known as “Condorman, the Feathered Fart”. Thank God it didn’t make the billboards.’ According to director Charles Jarrott, ‘I think Michael was a little afraid of Oliver.’

  Reed’s other co-star, the glamorous Barbara Carrera, fared even worse. Reed didn’t quite feel that Barbara was giving her all in the movie. For instance, they shared a scene together in a helicopter where she was supposed to be terrorized by him, but in take after take, she was entirely unable to project enough fear for Ollie’s taste. ‘So,’ Crawford recalled, ‘while they were in flight for a final shot, Ollie actually opened the ’copter door and threatened to throw her out. She had no doubt that he meant every word, and the glance of fear that crossed her face at that moment was very real.’

  Jarrott, who’d worked with Burton in the 60s, was initially going to cast Klaus Kinski in the villain’s role. ‘Thank God I didn’t! I rather looked forward to working with Reed. He was such a character and worked like a real professional. Only after the day was over, did he lift the elbow. Strange: at work he was fairly quiet; at night, he was always boozed up and boisterous. One tended to steer away from him then. He spent a day and a night on a British cruiser visiting Nice. I hear the rum flowed like water!’

  The first occasion Jarrott worked with Reed was a night shoot in the Casino at Monte Carlo. Reed was immaculately dressed in a white tuxedo and his scenes went like clockwork. He was cool, stone sober. ‘We finished at about 2am and I went back to my hotel. After changing and enjoying a drink, I sauntered out on to my balcony, overlooking the Mediterranean. It was a beautiful moonlit night. I glanced down at the calm sea, and noticed a white tuxedo floating away on the waves. Looking back up at the hotel I saw Ollie, stark naked, climbing from balcony to balcony. An English King Kong was abroad!’

  Ollie decided to spend the Christmas of 1981 in Los Angeles. He found for a drinking companion an ex-British Army squaddie and, fuelled by whisky and beer, the pair set off for the city’s Latin Quarter to search for a tattooist willing to emblazon Reed’s cock with the image of two eagle’s claws. A visit to several of the more
orthodox establishments met with flat refusals. The cab driver ferrying them around came to the rescue. ‘I know who’ll do it,’ he said. ‘Then take me there, my good fellow,’ said Reed. They travelled down side streets and alleys to a less salubrious district and stopped outside a rundown shop. Inside Reed made his request. The tattooist shook his head, unprepared to work on so vulnerable an area of the human body. At that moment the man’s wife appeared. ‘I’ll do it,’ she said. ‘Make bigger, please.’ Ollie had rather a nice time engineering his cock to a suitable size for the woman to work on. Two hours later he returned to his hotel room, his manhood wrapped in bloodied cotton wool.

  Not long after, Reed had an eagle’s head tattooed on his shoulder so when people asked why he had an eagle’s head on his shoulder he could reply, ‘Would you like to see where it’s perched?’ On holiday in the Caribbean once Ollie got carried away and, as was his usual way, flashed his prick at fellow hotel guests. Alas, the eagle’s claw tattoo on his cock was interpreted as a voodoo image and he was chased out of the bar.

  Ollie’s forays across the Atlantic were never dull. Director Peter Medak recalls standing outside the Beverly Wilshire Hotel when a limousine pulled up, the door opened and somebody on all fours backed out onto the pavement. ‘And it was Oliver. He’d arrived at the airport at four o’clock that afternoon, he’d stopped at every bar, and now he was checking into the hotel. We fell into each other’s arms and he said, “Come on let’s go to the bar, they’ll take the luggage upstairs.” We go into the bar and within two seconds he had the bartender by his neck; they threw him out of the hotel before he could even check in. Oliver was the darkest of those hellraisers. Oliver for no reason would start a fight. If he didn’t like someone’s face or someone said the wrong thing, boom.’

  Ollie’s dark side manifested itself even when he was in playful mood. Being interviewed in a restaurant he suddenly stood up in front of the journalist, unzipped his trousers and pissed into a half-empty champagne bottle. Finished, he zipped himself up again, placed the bottle back in the ice bucket and grinned puckishly: ‘That’ll give someone a shock when they pour out a glass.’