LIKE FATHER, LIKE son. Richard Walter Jenkins, the father of Richard Burton, was a fearsome boozer, a 12 pints a day man, incapable of passing a pub without stepping inside for a quick one. ‘My father considered that anyone who went to chapel and didn’t drink alcohol was not to be tolerated,’ said his son. A coal miner and inveterate gambler, Jenkins thought nothing of buggering off for days on end, his family unsure if he was alive or dead; once, for three whole weeks only to turn up as if nothing had happened. Yet his charm beguiled all those who met him. Burton claimed his father looked very much like him, ‘That is, he was pockmarked, devious and smiled when he was in trouble.’ Others thought the future film star got his handsome looks from his mother, a real Welsh matriarch who was responsible for keeping the household going, with scant help from her husband who was often penniless a few hours after getting his wage packet.
Stories are many about Burton’s father. How he never arrived at a rugby match because the route to the stadium was cruelly lined with pubs. How he was burnt in a pit explosion and covered in bandages, looking like Boris Karloff as the mummy, but still insisted on going out boozing where his mates charitably poured beer down his throat. At closing time he stumbled home but bumped into a work colleague who had a score to settle. Trussed up as he was Jenkins stood no chance and had his teeth knocked out and was bundled over a wall. The family didn’t find him until the morning.
Burton’s grandfather, Tom, was just as much of a character. He too had been crippled in the mines, and celebrating a big win on a horse called Black Sambo one night got dreadfully pissed. In his wheelchair he raced downhill all the way home yelling, ‘Come on Black Sambo,’ but lost control and crashed into a wall. The old fool was killed instantly.
Richard Jenkins (later Burton) was probably spoon-fed such tales about his bonkers relatives from the day he was born on November 10th 1925. His chances of escaping them, however, or the environment in which God had chosen to dump him, the bleak coal-mining village of Pontrhydyfen, South Wales, were thin at best. To have achieved the fame and fortune that he did was nothing short of a miracle, especially coming from a household of 13 siblings. Having escaped his Welsh heritage Burton’s patriotism for his country never dimmed, although its glow was barely visible from the tax haven of Geneva.
With a father who was absent most of the time, or wandered through life in a beer-induced haze, Burton was made to feel even more isolated when his mother died not long after his second birthday. For the rest of his life he’d regret not having even one recollection of her. Burton went to live in Port Talbot with his elder sister Cecilia. With household finances there on an altogether better keel, life suddenly became easier, although the threat of poverty was never far away.
In reaction perhaps to the crummy hand fate had dealt him Burton, from an early age, got into trouble, dirtying or tearing his best clothes, kicking the soles off his school shoes and worse, starting a smoking habit aged just eight. He’d scrape the money together to buy a packet of five Woodbines and illicitly smoke them while watching his favourite Western serial at the local cinema, popularly known as the ‘shithouse’. Fighting was another occupation and Burton punched his way to the top of several local gangs. His dad declared proudly, ‘You’ve got a face like a boot. Everybody wants to put his foot in it.’
But Burton’s real passion was sport, principally rugby. ‘I would rather have played for Wales at Cardiff Arms Park than Hamlet at the Old Vic,’ he once said, meaning every word. Wherever he was in the world or whatever he was doing Burton always managed to get hold of important rugby results. During one matinee stage performance he installed a portable radio in the wings and kept straying across to it all afternoon to keep tabs on a crucial Welsh international, whether stage directions merited it or not. Often he’d travel to Cardiff from London to attend the big matches. After one such outing he and his brother Ifor were involved in a brutal and bruising encounter with English supporters. Burton would later trace the beginning of his lifelong painful and ultimately crushing spinal problems to the beating he received that day.
On the field the young Burton was a fearless player, never pulling out of heavy tackles, despite the opponents sometimes being miners and therefore big bastards. He was also loyal. When a teammate was picked on by an opponent Burton laid the bully out cold when the ref wasn’t looking.
By 15 Burton was an independent, tough and troublesome man-boy who’d already developed a taste for beer, and who brazenly answered back to his teachers when he thought he was in the right. He bragged too of having girlfriends from the age of 12. One early date didn’t go exactly to plan. From adolescence Burton suffered terribly from boils on his neck and face. He even had nicknames for them. One Olympic contender was smack bang on his arse and when this poor girl inadvertently grabbed hold of it Burton let out such a scream that she ran off terrified.
Being academically gifted Burton was saved from a life of drudgery down the mines but when his family hit a rocky financial patch he was forced to quit school and take a job as a shop assistant, his way out of the valleys through education seemingly strangled at birth. It was then that acting presented itself as a new means of escape when Burton joined a local club and began performing in shows, so impressing the youth leader who managed to persuade the council to readmit the boy to school after almost two years’ absence. It was an unprecedented move.
On his first day back Burton lobbed his gym shoe across the classroom smashing a window. The tearaway hadn’t gone away. He got into numerous fights, would return to school reeking of beer after lunch and at half time in rugby matches gathered the team around while he coolly smoked a fag. There’s a story of him pissing out of a carriage window as the train roared by a station platform filled with people, and also of belting a teacher who had hit a friend for something he hadn’t done. So his fearlessness was still there, too.
This was wartime and Port Talbot with its large steelworks was a target for the German Luftwaffe. But the air raids didn’t trouble Burton who’d stay in bed while the rest of the family rushed to nearby shelters. On the evening of his first trip to London there was a heavy bombing raid. While other hotel guests scattered for safety underground Burton casually walked up onto the roof to watch the whole glorious spectacle. As during the rest of his life, he was unafraid of the obvious dangers around him.
Unlike Burton, Richard Harris was born into relative luxury, on October 1st 1930. His father, Ivan, was the owner of a local mill and bakery and his house in Limerick, Southern Ireland, was a large affair with maids and gardeners and big cars in the drive. Then suddenly, almost overnight, it was all gone when the bakery closed down. ‘One day was luxury, the next morning my mother was on her knees scrubbing floors,’ Harris recalled. ‘I was too young to understand anything, but I knew we’d lost a lot.’ In order to survive Ireland’s worsening economic situation the family moved into more modest accommodation.
The Harris brood was a large one, as families were back then, and Harris all but got lost amidst the scrum of seven brothers and sisters. ‘What’s his name again?’ his father frequently asked over the top of his newspaper. ‘Dick,’ said mother. ‘Oh yeah, Dick, I remember.’ Harris learned early on to be a rabble-rouser, an attention seeker, it was all he could do to make his presence felt in the household, but he was usually ignored until such boisterousness inevitably led to friction. Sometimes he’d flee home, sleeping rough outdoors. No one ever came looking for him, knowing full well that he’d eventually return meekly to his bed. But all this fostered in him a feeling of neglect and isolation. ‘I never got to know my parents and they never got to know me.’
Instead Harris channelled his pent-up energy into sports, becoming a natural athlete, and also into a good deal of larking about. He was banned from virtually all his local cinemas for causing a nuisance. As keen film fans but always short of money, his mates would pool their resources to buy a single ticket and then Harris would go in and as the lights dimmed let his friends in through the fire exit or a window in the toilets.
School and Harris didn’t mix either and he was often expelled, once for setting fire to the toilets, another time for attacking a nun. She took exception to Harris’s boisterousness and thwacked him with a ruler, as nuns in Irish schools tended to do. Harris wrestled the ruler back from her and hit out violently. In his own words Harris was ‘wild and uncontrollable’.
Had Harris been able to avoid school he would have, the underlying reason being his inability to read fluently. ‘I just couldn’t hack it.’ It wasn’t until he was well into his 30s that Harris learnt he was dyslexic. At secondary school he survived by focusing on rugby, and like Burton became obsessed with the sport, dreaming of one day playing for his country. Aged 12 Harris was already a big bugger and a real bruiser on the pitch, able to dish out punishment as well as receive it. One such occasion was when he was a player for a local junior team and took on the legendary professional front row forward Ducky Hayes. ‘If the stand was full of surgeons they couldn’t have done anything for my nose I got such a wallop,’ Harris ruefully stated afterwards. Carried off, his face smeared in blood, Harris was treated in the casualty department of the nearby hospital, and with his face heavily bandaged and only the slits of his eyes visible, sportingly returned to the field of play to be greeted with shouts of derision such as: ‘’Tis the return of the Phantom; no, ’tis the Mummy.’
Harris ended up breaking his nose a further eight times in subsequent collisions with various walls, doors and fists. The last time he broke it was when he plunged headfirst through the windscreen of a car. It was reconstructed using bone from his hip as there was no bone left in his nose. ‘Each time a girl kisses my nose,’ he joked, ‘she doesn’t know how close she is.’
Away from the sports field and in the classroom Harris tended to doze off or fart to get attention, the lesson going completely over his head. The teachers simply gave up on him. Even caning or the occasional whack didn’t work. At one exam he made houses out of the test papers and when he’d exhausted that outlet simply put his head on the desk and fell asleep. This don’t-give-a-fuck attitude was like a magnet for the other kids who gravitated towards him as their natural leader. It was a role Harris happily cultivated. Nor did he much mind his dunce status. One story had a student complaining that Harris was sound asleep during a lesson, to which the teacher replied, ‘For God’s sake don’t wake him.’
Such attitude surely would’ve seen Harris booted out had it not been for the rugby coach who kept the lad on because he was the best second row forward amongst the pupils and the school prided itself on its junior rugby team. Harris’s parents, both very much the outdoor type, forgave their son’s academic lapses on account of his prowess on the rugby pitch. Just as well. Harris left academic life with nothing much to show for it. Even when his teacher secretly passed him the answers for the intermediate exam, in a bid to help him on his way, Harris, with days to prepare, still flunked it.
To the north west of Limerick, in County Galway, is the picturesque Connemara, birthplace of another legend who could booze for Ireland. Peter O’Toole arrived just two years after Harris on August 2nd 1932 and like him, and akin to Burton’s rabid Welsh patriotism, being Irish was the most important thing in his life. O’Toole said it accounted for his passion, his unruly behaviour, his disregard for authority, his natural capacity for acting, and of course his love of drinking. It was to an isolated cottage in Connemara that O’Toole would always retreat whenever illness or personal tragedy befell him. It was his sanctuary. ‘I go to Ireland for a refit, just like a car.’ He liked to brag to journalists the preposterous notion that he was descended from the ancient kings of Ireland. Throughout his life O’Toole would also never venture out of his front door without wearing something green, usually socks. It was his own private homage to the fact that in the late 19th century the British authorities made it a capital offence for any Irishman to wear his national colour.
Perhaps O’Toole’s attachment to Ireland is so strong because he was forced to leave it at an early age. When his father, Patrick Joseph O’Toole, couldn’t find suitable work any more he moved the whole family to England and a small terraced house with an outside loo in a working class area of Leeds. O’Toole was a year old. The area was well known for its large population of Irish expatriates. ‘A Mick community,’ O’Toole described it. His father never again set foot on Irish soil.
The Leeds neighbourhood where O’Toole grew up was rough. Three of his playmates went on to be hanged for murder: one strangled a girl in a lover’s quarrel; one killed a man during a robbery; another cut up a warden in South Africa with a pair of shears. It was, he recalled, a heavy bunch.
Although it was his mother, Connie, who instilled into O’Toole a strong sense of literature, by reciting poems and stories to him, by far the biggest influence on his life was his father. Patrick was an off-course bookie, illegal before the war. He was feckless, a drunk and occasionally violent. ‘I’m not from the working class,’ O’Toole liked to say. ‘I’m from the criminal class.’ One day Patrick stood his son up on the mantelpiece and said, ‘Jump, boy. I’ll catch you. Trust me.’ When O’Toole jumped his father withdrew his arms leaving his son splattered on the hard stone floor. The lesson, said his father, was ‘never trust any bastard’. One Christmas Eve Patrick came home rather the worse for wear. The excited young O’Toole asked him if Father Christmas was coming. Patrick went outside, burst a paper bag, came back and told his son that Father Christmas had just shot himself.
When his occupation turned legal Patrick became a familiar face around the racecourses of Yorkshire. The young O’Toole idolized his father and never forgot the times when he was allowed to accompany him to the racetrack. Sometimes Patrick would miscalculate the odds, or would lose so heavily on one of his bets that he would not have enough cash to pay off his winning customers, so, immediately after the race was over, Patrick would grab little Peter’s hand and say, ‘C’mon, son, let’s be off!’ and the two of them would slip through the shrubbery and disappear quickly from the track, not to return for a few weeks.
To grow up with a father who lived so recklessly inevitably led to O’Toole approaching life in a similarly happy-go-lucky way. The whole family income rested on success or failure at the racetrack. ‘When he’d come home after a good day, the whole room would light up. It was fairyland. When he lost, it was black. In our house, it was either a wake or a wedding.’
Patrick also liked to drink and wasn’t averse to picking a scrap with a policeman when drunk. Father and son often got plastered together, like the occasion in London when Patrick came down to celebrate the birth of a grandchild in 1959. The O’Tooles got customarily slaughtered and as everyone retired upstairs to bed Peter lay spread-eagled on the floor: ‘Not asleep, but crucified.’ Patrick tried lifting his flagging son to his feet, but to no avail. Instead he opened another bottle and joined him on the floor. That’s where the pair were found the following afternoon.
O’Toole can thank his father not just for his love of booze, but for his sheer durability. ‘He was physically quick – whatever else I got from the old sod I got that. A little while before he died he was hit by a car as he came out of the bookies and knocked into a saloon bar without being much damaged.’ Alas, O’Toole also inherited a lifetime of ill health. As a child he suffered from TB, a stammer and poor eyesight that resulted in several major operations. The constant illness played havoc with his education. Although he could read by the age of three, O’Toole did not attend school on a regular basis until he was 11 and then only stayed for two years. He disliked school intensely and was a rebellious and poor pupil. Being devout Roman Catholics the O’Tooles entrusted their son to the goodly care of nuns and Jesuit priests, but it was an experience that led O’Toole to later describe himself as ‘a retired Christian’. In art one day he drew a vibrant picture of a horse. When asked by a nun whether there was something else that might be added to the picture, the young O’Toole agreed and drew a huge dangling dick with piss coming out of it. Wildly, and with both hands, the nun began to flail the boy. Other nuns rushed over to join in.
In a 60s interview with Playboy O’Toole heavily criticized his religious upbringing and the Catholic Church in general. For weeks after he got angry letters from priests and nuns. ‘They were shocked. I wrote back saying I was shocked – what were they doing reading Playboy.’
Whereas O’Toole and Burton hailed from the working classes and knew poverty as children, Oliver Reed knew only privilege, with a nanny, a maid and a butler serving the household. Born on February 13th 1938 in Wimbledon, South London, Reed said his earliest memory was of seeing patterns sprawled across blue skies during dog fights in the Battle of Britain. Evacuated from London to the Berkshire countryside Reed happily played in fields, drank lemonade in the village pub and waved to pilots from the bottom of his garden as they taxied their planes along a nearby runway for take off. One day a blazing aircraft narrowly missed obliterating the house and ditched in the next field. Villagers ran to the crash site where children were already clambering over the smoking husk for souvenirs. Reed could see the pilot slumped over the controls of the downed Messerschmitt. It was the first time he’d seen a dead man and he began to cry.
Reed’s introduction to the opposite sex was equally vivid and a result of that age-old game of doctors and nurses. Barely five Reed had just pulled the knickers down of an obligingly cooperative local lass when her mother walked into the room. That little girl grew up into the actress Samantha Eggar and fate made sure she and Ollie would make a movie together, where they laughingly recalled the incident. ‘I didn’t attempt to consummate the memory,’ said Reed.
Perhaps in the hope of ending such liaisons, at age seven Reed was bundled off to boarding school by his divorced parents and left to feel even more abandoned and betrayed. Nor did he take much to education. Often his impatience resulted in a smack across the head from a ruler, or he’d be lifted from his desk by his ear and deposited in the corridor. His antics, Reed realized, drew the attention and enjoyment of his mates and he began wearing the persona of class clown with pride.
When his family could no longer afford the school fees Reed went to live in Tunbridge Wells to be looked after by a series of nannies and au pairs. One particularly nubile au pair, Swedish of course, called Ingmar, took Reed and his brother David into bed with her one evening telling them that if they all stripped off and squeezed together their joint temperature would shoot up from 98.4 to 160. Every few minutes Ingmar would diligently slide a thermometer under their little cocks and say, ‘Not yet varm enough.’ To get things really moving Ingmar helpfully guided Ollie’s hand onto hers as she repeatedly slotted the thermometer in and out of her rapidly dampening vagina, while at the same time pressing his free hand onto her breast until his fingers felt the stiffening of her nipple. Every time she presented the thermometer to be read all the boys could say was, ‘Wow!’ and think what a great science experiment they were having. Today if Ingmar had been a man and Reed and his brother little girls it would quite rightly be a case of child molestation. ‘Later in school,’ said Reed, ‘when boys would say that girls get excited and get babies if you push your donger into them, I mourned for Ingmar.’
A succession of schools were unlucky enough to have Reed fostered upon them and in every one he sank to the bottom of the class as he daydreamed his time away, the bane of many a teacher’s life. He had particular trouble with reading and writing due to poor eyesight. Like O’Toole he underwent a series of operations but still the problem persisted. It wasn’t until his late thirties, the same age as Harris, that Reed uncovered his dyslexia.
By the time Reed was 11 he was already built like the proverbial brick shit house, a fearsome image slightly offset by the fact he still wore short trousers, at his father’s insistence. ‘I looked like Charles Bronson dressed up as a Boy Scout.’ But no one dared tease him. It was Reed who did the bullying, able to pick on feeble youngsters at will. Hanging on the ropes in the gym one day Reed watched as one such weakling entered. ‘Hello, Cammel,’ Reed said. ‘Oh, hello.’ Reed was having none of that. ‘When you speak to me, Cammel, you say sir.’ ‘Sorry, sir.’ ‘That’s much better, Cammel.’ Reed moved onto the wall bars. ‘Do you know what tits are, Cammel?’ ‘Sort of birds, sir.’ ‘No they’re not, Cammel. Tits are round and hang around ladies’ chests.’ Reed was swinging about like Tarzan as he elucidated on the subject. ‘Tits don’t fly, Cammel, tits wobble.’ A matron entered, her face purple with rage. ‘You filthy boy,’ she hollered. ‘Wash your mouth out with soap and water, you disgusting boy.’
In the headmaster’s office Reed watched as he carefully selected a vicious looking cane and struck him hard on each hand. ‘That didn’t hurt,’ announced Reed. Silence. ‘Right lad, if that’s the way you want it.’ This time the headmaster raced up and delivered such stinging blows that Reed’s fingers swelled up like sausages. ‘That didn’t hurt either,’ said a defiant Reed. The headmaster yanked Reed over and walloped his backside. ‘That hurt sir. That hurt like bloody hell.’ ‘Don’t swear at me, boy.’ Another wallop. ‘Get out.’ By this time the headmaster was physically shaking with temper, or ‘probably excitement’ Reed guessed. The incident made him a hero to the other boys but it resulted in his expulsion and yet another new school.
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 knowledge 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 heart 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 something 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.