RICHARD BURTON TOOK a massive gamble at the start of the new decade by returning as King Arthur in a new theatrical production of Camelot that was set for a year-long tour round America. The show was a hit with both public and critics alike and played to standing ovations every night. Highly gratified Burton wondered why audiences were responding in such frenzy. ‘Is it that the audience know so much about me from my highly publicized and infamous past?’ he mused in his diary.
Off the booze Burton’s mind was rarely off the subject. He wrote this in his diary: ‘Ah! How I’d love the panacea of a drink now, a double vodka martini straight down and the warm flood of painkiller hitting the stomach and then the brain and an hour of sweetly melancholy euphoria. I shall have a Tab instead – disgusting.’
Occasionally he did drink, only moderately, but sometimes that was enough. He only drank wine, steering clear of spirits, depending on his will power. One evening, with Camelot scheduled to open in just two days’ time, he dined with its creator Alan Jay Lerner. The waiter was taking their order and Burton said, ‘I think I’ll have a vodka and martini.’ Then he looked over at Lerner. ‘Richard, don’t you look at me. You can have anything you want; because I know you won’t let this play down.’ That gave Burton pause and he called back the waiter: ‘Well never mind, perhaps I’ll have some Perrier.’
Sadly everyone was watching and waiting to see if Burton would succumb to the demon drink. A week after Camelot had opened in New York the curtain came down halfway through the first act. Burton was slurring his speech and staggering about the stage incapable. ‘Give him another drink,’ someone cried out from the stalls. The understudy took over but hundreds walked out demanding their money back. Scenting blood photographers camped on Burton’s hotel doorstep while the papers debated whether he was back on the piss for good. The excuse when it came was flimsy: he’d taken a mixture of drugs that had made him ill. In truth, Burton had indulged in a couple of glasses of red wine with Richard Harris over lunch that afternoon, so by the evening was totally zonked. He called the producer the next day saying it would never happen again.
The next night he was back on stage, terrified about the reception he would get from an audience who all would have read the papers. The moment he set foot on the stage there was a massive roar that turned into a three and a half minute ovation. ‘I just stood there, and I could feel the audience supporting me and the affection and the warmth,’ Burton said afterwards. ‘It was one of the most extraordinary experiences I have ever had in the theatre.’
Curiously it wasn’t the booze that destroyed Richard Harris’s marriage to Ann Turkel, just a gradual parting of the ways. God knows she’d felt like walking out years before. Life became an exhausting round of picking up the pieces after him: flying to a film set in Montreal where he’d walked off because he didn’t like the script; breaking up a fight at their home in the Bahamas. Such incidents might have drawn them closer, instead they spent less and less time together and Ann finally decided to leave. ‘My health couldn’t take it any more.’ Inevitably in 1981 the couple divorced, but they never severed their relationship, often meeting up in New York or London and chatting on the phone most days. ‘It was like we were still married,’ Ann said.
Harris blamed divorce number two on nobody but himself; he knew it was his behaviour that had driven away the women he most loved in his life. Harris was never going to be the type of husband who did the washing up, played with the kids, put his feet up and watched the telly on the couch. Ann and before her Elizabeth knew this; their mistake was to think they could ever change him. ‘I have made 70 movies in my life,’ Harris once confessed, ‘and been miscast twice – as a husband.’
Harris also knew he’d failed pretty miserably over the years as a father, too. Only much later did he come to realize how hard it must have been for his sons to read of his exploits in the newspapers while still at school. Many a time they’d ring up home and say, ‘Mum, what’s dad doing? He’s in the papers again. He was in jail last night and who was that woman he was with?’ Although he later developed a close friendship with his children Harris felt guilty for the remainder of his life at being an absent father.
Arguably Harris’s nadir as a film performer was his execrable turn in the infamous Bo Derek Tarzan movie. Bo first encountered Harris on the set of Orca Killer Whale and never forgot him. ‘We’d go out for dinner or to a bar, and you wouldn’t want to go to sleep at night, you’d just want to sit and listen to his stories. On the set, he’d tell stories right up to “Action!” then give some incredible performance and then go back to his story.’ She also saw the darker side of the Irishman. ‘Richard would often end up punching one of his drinking buddies. I’d find out because they’d come in the next day with a black eye, but they’d be buddies again and go drinking the next night.’ This didn’t deter Bo from casting Harris in Tarzan the Ape Man (1981), as Jane’s father, lost in deepest Africa and tracked down by his daughter.
He was still hitting the bottle, and the production was held up several times when Harris overdid it and collapsed. He also behaved rather eccentrically on location in Sri Lanka, where the heat was unbearable. Not giving a stuff for convention Harris would turn up minus trousers and sans underpants at the lunch buffet with his undercarriage swinging about, saying, ‘Excuse my balls, it’s just such a lovely day.’ His larking around concealed a growing malaise about making movies; the whole process now annoyed and, worse, bored him. Tarzan was a 44-day shoot and on his first night Harris opened his diary and wrote: ‘43 days left.’ He was seriously considering jacking acting in altogether.
While Harris endured his film nadir Peter O’Toole was about to embark upon the most controversial and embarrassing episode of his entire career, and also one of the all-time great theatrical disasters. Not for nothing do actors say that productions of Macbeth are cursed. At a preview of Laurence Olivier’s 1937 stage version his sword broke during a fight routine and a fragment flew off into the audience, striking a spectator who promptly died of a heart attack. When Alec Guinness took on the role in the 1940s he fared little better when the entire set caught fire. O’Toole’s efforts, characteristically, were to eclipse everything before it.
Returning to the stage after a 17-year absence O’Toole was aware that the role of Macbeth was a killer for any actor and required great physical stamina. Having only recently undergone major surgery and describing his current career as ‘tepid’, O’Toole was out to prove himself again. He also believed totally in the theatrical superstition that Macbeth brought bad luck to companies who staged it and refused to refer to the play by any name other than ‘Harry Lauder’. He’d rush around touching wood whenever someone mentioned Macbeth and at one point curled himself into a moaning foetal ball on the stage imploring, ‘Say Harry Lauder, please or we’ll all die.’
The play was put on at the Old Vic in London, run by actor Timothy West. But O’Toole was to have total artistic control over the production. It soon emerged that the two men were poles apart both in temperament and in their approach to theatre. It didn’t help that O’Toole always addressed West as Eddie Waring, the famous rugby commentator. Their relationship was akin to a warring husband and wife living under the same roof but ripe for divorce. It didn’t bode well for a happy working arrangement.
An already nervous Bryan Forbes, hired by O’Toole as director, was beginning to harbour grave misgivings too, particularly over his star’s obsession with making this the bloodiest Macbeth on record. ‘Do you know how many times the word “blood” appears in the text, old darling?’ O’Toole said to Forbes one day, volunteering the information that, ‘If you stab a living man, blood spurts seventeen feet.’ He also proudly proclaimed that he was having a double-handed sword made of the finest Toledo steel for his duel with McDuff and when this fearsome weapon finally arrived at the theatre the actor playing McDuff visibly paled. Oddly HRH Princess Margaret paid a visit to one rehearsal and during a break the subject of blood came up yet again in conversation. ‘What you need is some Kensington gore,’ the princess told O’Toole, meaning the stuff deployed in the old Hammer horror films. ‘We use it all the time in St John ambulance demonstrations. It’s very realistic.’ Forbes saw O’Toole’s eyes light up.
As the opening night loomed relations between West and O’Toole went nuclear. They spoke only through intermediaries. O’Toole hated the posters and tore them all down, and when West complained that the production was going over budget O’Toole had him barred from final rehearsals. Poor Forbes was caught in the middle. West defied O’Toole and secretly watched the last dress rehearsal and was appalled by what he witnessed. He pleaded with Forbes that radical changes had to be made to avert a full-scale disaster but the director felt that to confront O’Toole ‘would provoke an explosion that could destroy us all’.
Worse was about to happen. On the opening night as the audience took their seats Forbes went into O’Toole’s dressing room and was stunned to find him stark naked except for a Gauloise in his mouth. ‘Peter, old son, aren’t you leaving it a bit late to get into costume?’ he said, trying to remain calm. ‘Can’t wear them, darling,’ replied O’Toole. ‘They’re hopeless.’ ‘Ah!’ Forbes exclaimed, panic taking over him. ‘We don’t have much alternative, do we? But let me see what I can do.’
Outside Forbes grabbed fellow cast member Brian Blessed, a close friend of O’Toole’s; he was Forbes’s only hope. After hearing the sorry tale Blessed said, ‘Do you think his bottle’s gone?’ The thought was too hideous to contemplate for Forbes. ‘God help us if it has.’ Blessed shook his head: ‘Leave him to me. Can’t promise what he’ll look like, but I’ll get him on.’
By some miracle Blessed dragged him onto the stage that night, haphazardly dressed though O’Toole was, including for some bizarre reason jogging trousers and gym shoes. ‘There was madness in the theatre that night on both sides of the curtain,’ Forbes later said. Several journalists tried to get Forbes to admit that O’Toole was drunk, but Forbes knew that since surgery the actor had not touched a drop.
There was also O’Toole’s much promised bloodbath. One of the stagehands had been sent on a shopping errand to purchase several gallons of fake gore and O’Toole was slapping it on with wild abandon. Traditionally for the scene in which Macbeth returns after the off-stage killing of the King the actor soaks his hands in ‘blood’, not O’Toole, he immersed himself in a crimson-filled zinc bath. The effect produced a mixture of horror and hysteria throughout the audience. Forbes wrote later, ‘From that moment onwards the play was doomed.’ During the same scene on another night, as O’Toole came down the stairs, dripping with blood, an ambulance howled all the way up Waterloo Road. ‘I got the giggles,’ O’Toole later confessed. ‘The audience got the giggles. It was bloody marvellous.’
The first intimation that a full-blown public disaster was on the cards was when a reporter turned up in Bryan Forbes’s kitchen the next morning and a TV news crew parked itself outside the door wanting reaction to the news that West, and by implication the Old Vic, had publicly disowned the production. Perhaps for the first time ever a play took over the front pages of the national press, while the critics lambasted the production, principally O’Toole’s performance, in a way few in the business could ever remember. ‘The performance is not so much downright bad as heroically ludicrous. The voice is pure Bette Davis in her Baby Jane mood, the manner is Vincent Price hamming up a Hammer horror,’ said the Daily Mail, while The Sunday Times critic called it, ‘A milestone in the history of coarse acting. Mr O’Toole’s performance was deranged.’
O’Toole took the abuse unbowed, despite his Hampstead home being besieged next morning by reporters. His housekeeper had told him the bad news that the reviews were stinkers and that there were a couple of journalists outside the front door. ‘When I opened it, there were about 100. What could I do? My shaver is electric so I could not cut my throat.’ That evening O’Toole fought his way into the theatre through crowds besieging the box office for tickets that had already sold out. The production had transcended awfulness and, like a car crash, everybody wanted to see it. ‘It’s all wonderful,’ he said, by way of greeting his bewildered cast. ‘This is what the theatre is all about.’ Katharine Hepburn agreed, phoning O’Toole with the advice, ‘If you’re going to have a disaster, have a big one.’
When Burton heard that O’Toole had taken a pasting he called him up from America while still touring Camelot. ‘I hear you’ve had a bit of stick from the critics.’ ‘Yes,’ O’Toole replied. ‘How are the houses?’ Burton asked. ‘Packed,’ said O’Toole. ‘Then remember, my boy, you are the most original actor to come out of Britain since the war and fuck the critics.’ ‘Thank you,’ said O’Toole. Burton went on, ‘Think of every four letter obscenity, six, eight, ten and twelve letter expletives and ram them right up their envious arses in which I’m sure there is ample room.’ ‘Thank you,’ said O’Toole, no doubt touched. ‘Good night, Peter. Don’t give in and I love you,’ declared Burton. ‘I won’t,’ said O’Toole. ‘And it’s mutual.’ ‘Good night again,’ Burton finished. ‘Good night Richard and thank you.’ It was like the bloody Waltons.
Things went from bad to worse on the third night when a bomb scare halted the performance temporarily. After a quick search it was deemed a hoax and the audience was let back in. Then as the curtain was about to be raised a second bomb threat was received. ‘You didn’t take me seriously, did you,’ said an ominous phone voice. ‘It’ll go off in the interval.’ The performance was cancelled. This merely added to the play’s notoriety and tickets started to change hands at incredible prices; the West End had seen nothing like it. Macbeth went on to sell out its entire London run and played to capacity crowds during its subsequent six-month tour round the provinces.
Months later, as the scandal died down, O’Toole was able to look back more philosophically on the event and recognize it for what it was – a total fuck up. ‘The opening night was a fiasco. When I think of it, my nose bleeds.’ O’Toole admitted that banging into scenery, forgetting his lines, and wearing trainers was perhaps not the best way to approach Shakespeare.
Oliver Reed could only dream of the sort of headlines O’Toole was getting. His career was in the mire, with appearances in movies nobody wanted to see like Venom (1981), actually quite a suspenseful little thriller about an escaped snake inside a house where a hostage situation is being played out. Directed by Piers Haggard, taking over at short notice from Tobe Hooper (he of Texas Chainsaw Massacre notoriety) who left the production under mysterious circumstances, the film was chock full of larger than life personalities (polite terminology for eccentrics or drunks), including Sarah Miles and Nicol Williamson. And there was Ollie, of course. ‘Oliver was one of the finest film actors that we had,’ recalls Haggard. ‘He had enormous power. But he was a handful. And he would test you all the time. When I met Oliver for the first time in the canteen at Elstree studios he played a trick on me, pretending that he was going to walk out and leave the film because I’d insulted him by saying something completely spurious. But it was just a hoax. He was just testing me.’
Reed’s co-star was the equally outrageous and near psychotic Klaus Kinski. The two actors, according to Haggard, detested each other on sight, ‘which was a bit difficult because they had most of their scenes together.’ By the close of shooting Haggard thought the black mamba was the nicest person on the set. ‘Oliver used to amuse himself by going to Klaus Kinski’s trailer and shaking it. Don’t forget Oliver was as strong as an ox. So he’d shake Kinski’s trailer and shout, “You fucking Nazi bastard!” And then Kinski would come out trembling with rage and swearing back as best he could.’ Actually Kinski was born in Poland and was an immigrant to Germany, ‘But he passed for a Nazi in Oliver’s eyes,’ says Haggard.
The film was funded by the Guinness family and one day some of its more auspicious members arranged to visit the set. This of course coincided with a major slanging match between Reed and Kinski that was taking place on the top of the set. ‘I was on the studio floor,’ Haggard remembers, all too vividly. ‘And you could hear – “You fucking Nazi bastard” and “You fucking English cunt.” They were effing and blinding. Oliver was clearly goading Klaus, who unfortunately had no sense of humour. Oliver, on the other hand, had a fabulous sense of humour, very wicked, but he definitely liked a laugh, and he definitely liked a laugh at Klaus Kinski’s expense. Anyway, just at the point where the Guinness family, led by our producer Martin Bregman, walked in the door, Oliver and Klaus came hurtling down the stairs; you thought bloody murder was going to be done. And Martin turned round and said to the family, their nanny, the children, Lord this and Lady blah blah, “I think we’ll go and have a look in the other studio,” and led them all out as quick as he could.’
Next Reed was stuck in Iraq making the forgettable The Great Question (1983) in what was essentially a war zone; at the time Iraq and Iran were at loggerheads and occasionally sending missiles over the border, but that didn’t stop Ollie having a good time, especially since he’d only recently discovered that in his forties his capacity for booze was going up, not down.
One night Reed joined the crew for numerous drinks in the hotel bar and, looking in the nearby restaurant, saw a Texas oil billionaire whom he knew. Jumping up, obviously drunk as a skunk, he rushed upstairs to his room. ‘When he came back down he was wearing a western shirt and cowboy boots and walked John Wayne style into the restaurant to see his buddy,’ recalls stunt man Vic Armstrong. ‘Inside he gave this guy a Texas handshake as he called it, which basically means lifting your leg up and smashing your cowboy boot down on the table. So Ollie walked up to this guy’s table, surrounded by women and other dignitaries, and smash, all the cutlery and glass went flying in the air. Suddenly Ollie looked at the guy and it wasn’t his mate at all, it was some Arab with his harem, deeply offended that this westerner had come stamping on his table and upset everything. The police were called and Ollie was arrested. He didn’t go to jail thank God.’
Back home Broome Hall continued to be a huge burden on Reed’s finances, but he adored the place. A regular guest was snooker ace Alex ‘Hurricane’ Higgins. Reed had taken up the sport and turned the chapel into a snooker room. Higgins came over to play a match there one day and was mightily impressed by the fine décor, especially an installed lemon tree that allowed him to pick his own fruit to freshen up his drinks. After the match, where Reed was annihilated, Higgins was invited to the private bar, on whose walls no framed picture was intact, for a drinking challenge. Higgins drank like he played, fast, and soon got very drunk and rather nasty and was thrown out. But Reed remained impressed by his snooker skills. ‘Hurricane smashed out of his mind could beat me stone cold sober.’
The pair remained friendly for years. During another drinking session Reed put some Chanel No. 5 perfume in a glass and told Higgins it was a gorgeous malt whisky. ‘Wow Alex, it’s wonderful. Try that.’ Higgins replied he couldn’t drink whisky. ‘Fucking chicken,’ taunted Reed. Higgins grabbed the glass and downed it in one. His face screwed up in pain and he spat out what he could. Higgins was ill for two days. He had his revenge though by treating Reed to a Fairy Liquid crème de menthe. ‘Ollie was burping bubbles for weeks.’
Famous for his own terrifying behaviour, Higgins has admitted that Reed often frightened the shit out of him. After a particularly hectic afternoon in the pub Higgins passed out in an armchair back at Ollie’s home. He was rudely awoken by a real sword jabbed into his ribs. ‘Get up,’ growled Ollie. ‘How dare you fall asleep in my company. For that insult, sir, I require satisfaction.’ Higgins was thrown another sword. ‘Now, sir, prepare to die.’ Reed attacked with a series of mighty blows and Higgins did all he could to defend himself. ‘I was genuinely scared for a moment that he had at last flipped,’ said the snooker star, ‘and was going to kill me.’
Higgins made the mistake of falling asleep again in Ollie’s presence and this time was hunted down with an axe. He ran into his room and bolted the door but that didn’t deter Reed who started chopping at the solid oak like Jack Nicholson in The Shining. It took him just a few minutes to weaken the wood and Higgins saw the tip of the axe peek through the door. ‘I was terrified. I honestly thought I might be about to breathe my last if he got through.’
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 movies, 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.’
In spite of such incidents Reed claimed not to be as nasty or fierce as the press often made out. He did though admit that many of his outrageous pranks were deliberately stage-managed. It wasn’t that he wanted to shock people so much as his love of cocking a snoop at the establishment and po-faced conventionality. Perhaps more than as an actor, Reed saw his role in life as that of a showman. People had come to expect him to be outrageous and he didn’t like to disappoint them. Give the public what they want was his motto. Once, dining quietly with a friend in a restaurant, Reed realized that the manager was arranging for newspaper photographers to come and take photos, so Ollie obliged. ‘Watch this,’ he whispered to his colleague. He got up and, passing an empty table, ‘accidentally’ knocked into it sending the chairs and place settings flying. Next day one tabloid headline ran: ‘Drunken Ollie wrecks restaurant.’
Such behaviour also derived from the fact that Reed was easily bored, like a child. While he was sitting in a pub, a woman entered collecting for charity. Ollie took off his jeans and gave them to the startled woman. He also once bet someone that he could pronounce and spell the word ‘masseuse’ correctly; he couldn’t and for his forfeit shaved his head. And who else would own a racehorse called ‘Gorn Myson’? It only raced once under that name and afterwards the relevant authorities ordered a change of name as it was unfair to hear the racing commentators apparently call out, as the horses went down the final straight, ‘GO ON MY SON!’ Reed even took part in the inaugural lawnmower racing championships. Unfortunately he lost control of his machine and demolished the VIP toilet tent, without injury to driver or occupant. ‘Luckily, dear boy,’ he said, ‘because we were both seated at the time.’
By the end of 1982 Richard Burton had separated from Susan. She put most of the blame on his drinking. The final straw was a car accident that resulted in Burton being shut up in a local loony bin. Burton had enjoyed a couple of drinks in a bar near his Swiss home and driving back in his new Mercedes-Benz, up a hill, accidentally jammed the gear stick into reverse. The car went into a spin and four other vehicles smashed into it. Burton himself was thrown through the windshield. Having scrambled home Burton asked Susan to call his doctor. Instead an ambulance arrived that under her orders took him to a mental institution where he claimed he was kept for nine days. ‘I thought I might actually go mad in there.’ During his enforced stay a tall blonde woman accosted him in the wards. ‘Follow me,’ she said, and thinking it to be Susan Burton obliged. She drew him down onto a bed and they made love. ‘Then I realized it wasn’t Susan at all, but another patient – a nymphomaniac. They couldn’t get her off me.’
When he got out, Susan announced that she was leaving him, she could no longer deal with his drinking and the burden of his ill health. Burton was now a virtual cripple, his body broken. At one stage he literally couldn’t lift cutlery and had to be spoon-fed for weeks. People implored him to rest. Instead he took on the biggest and most punishing film role of his entire career, that of composer Wagner in an epic TV mini-series. The seven months of filming all over Europe, with Burton appearing in virtually every scene, was a killer, but he was determined to do it. The director was Tony Palmer. ‘We filmed with Burton for 157 days and lost four days because of … let’s call it emotional tiredness. He had a physiotherapist with him pretty well the whole time, because he knew this was going to be a long haul, which was one of the reasons he wanted to do it, he was testing himself. I think he saw the Wagner film as an opportunity to prove both to himself and to the world that he was still capable of delivering the works; a big performance.’
Another incentive was the calibre of the supporting cast, especially the chance to act opposite the theatrical knights Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud. All of them were good friends and delighted to be at last working together. ‘Richard frequently said during filming, I’ve never had so much fun,’ says Palmer.
According to Palmer, Burton knew he was an alcoholic and the director had taken advice about how to deal with alcoholics, and that it was the level of alcohol in the blood that mattered. ‘I had supper with him three nights a week, every week, for seven months and he would have on the table in front of him two glasses, one filled with wine, the other filled with water. I remember one memorable dinner we shared with Olivier, and Richard was telling funny stories and Olivier was being wildly indiscreet about practically everybody you could think of, and Richard just got carried away and his hand went to the red wine. I was sitting right opposite him, watching, and I almost stopped him, but I thought, I can’t, it’s not my place. Within five minutes, maybe ten, but certainly no more, it was Jekyll and Hyde. So, from having first been he and Larry talking about the old times, ten minutes later Olivier was a cunt who destroyed the British theatre and destroyed his career. It was just a tirade. Olivier was extraordinary; he just sat there and watched it all. Afterwards Richard said to me, “I blew it, didn’t I.” I said, “Well I think you owe him an apology.” And so he went to see Olivier and apologized; they kissed and made up.’
The Wagner crew were filming in the mountains of Austria in freezing conditions when news broke about Burton’s split with Susan Hunt. He was expecting it to leak out eventually so was quite sanguine about it, but did ask Palmer if he could do his best to keep the press away. The director managed to keep a few hacks at bay but didn’t count on the resourcefulness of Royal Correspondent James Whittaker, who’d just taken pictures of the pregnant Princess Diana on holiday in the Bahamas and was now heading with his photographer directly to Austria. ‘I kept making diversionary tactics,’ recalls Palmer, ‘but they hired a bloody helicopter and they went up the mountain to where we were filming and landed and Richard said, “Don’t worry I’ll deal with it,” and out got these two guys in their Bahamian shirts and shorts, you’ve never seen anything so funny. Richard agreed to pose for a photograph provided they went away. Only the photographer got his finger stuck on the camera; he couldn’t take the picture because the whole thing had frozen solid and his hand had actually frozen to the camera. So they asked us if we could get the hospital helicopter to come, and we did and they, humiliated, went away.’
News about Burton’s impending divorce went round the world and was music to the ears of Elizabeth Taylor who began repeatedly calling Burton’s hotel room at all hours. Unable to get any sleep, Burton asked Palmer if he would mind swapping rooms with him. ‘I agreed to this and nothing happened for two or three nights but then, sure enough, three o’clock in the morning the phone rang. “Oh darling, darling, I miss you so much.” I let this go on for a bit and then said, “Elizabeth this is Tony Palmer, not Richard.” She was desperate to get to the location, to be with Richard, she was crazy about him, always crazy about him. She was also the serious drinker; she could drink anything and anyone under the table; including Burton. So I said to Richard, “What do I do? Do you want her here?” And he said, “If she comes, I go.” So we cooked up a story. The next night she phoned again. “Elizabeth,” I said. “There’s one tiny little part for you in the film. It doesn’t involve lines I’m afraid, but it’s perfect for you.” She said, “When do I start?” I said, “I’m afraid it’s quite soon.” She said, “That’s no trouble. Can you give me a brief outline of the part?” And I said, “Well Elizabeth, it’s to play the role of an Eskimo.” There was a pause of a milli-second and she said, “I’ve always wanted to play the part of an Eskimo.” Whether she knew then that it was a joke I don’t know, but she never called back and I saw her about a month later and she didn’t refer to it so I think she got the point that she was being sent up. Richard thought this had been brilliantly done.’
On the set of Wagner Burton was to meet and fall in love with the woman who would become the last person to share his life. Sally Hay was Tony Palmer’s secretary and the director saw the burgeoning romance first hand. ‘About a month after the story broke on Suzy Hunt, Richard sidled up to me one day and said, “I’ve got some letters which I need typing out, could I possibly borrow Sally one evening.” I said, “Richard she’s over there, go and ask her.” He said, “I think I’d prefer if you could ask.” So I went to Sally and explained things and she looked at me, she was a woman of the world, let’s say, and said, “All right but will you promise to come and knock on my door an hour after to make sure I’m OK?” I saw her the following morning and asked what happened. “Nothing,” she said. “I turned up, I wasn’t even offered a cup of tea, I did the letters, went away, typed them out, brought them back, he thanked me very much and that was it.” A week or so later Richard came to me again. “I’ve got a couple more letters.” “Richard, for God’s sake ask her yourself.” “No, no.” Well, he was courting her. He was absolutely courting her. It wasn’t until the fourth or fifth occasion this had happened that I said to Sally, “What happened?” And she said, “Well, one thing led to another.” I thought that was very revealing about Richard, that he was absolutely formal and proper in his intentions.’
As Burton and Sally drew up plans to marry, Liz Taylor gatecrashed once again, persuading Burton to team up for a Broadway revival of Noel Coward’s Private Lives. Amazingly both stars were given £42,000 a week, the highest salary ever paid out on Broadway. Worth it, though, the theatre was sold out every night. The critics had a field day, however, trashing a production that was more of a circus than a show. Burton remained sober throughout, but Taylor invariably turned up late and instigated the majority of backstage squabbles and fights. The strains of her squawking, ‘This is the last time I’m working with you, you cunt,’ would fill the corridors. For Burton it was the last straw: ‘This has proved it. I can never get together with that woman again.’
It was during that Broadway run that Burton and Sally married. ‘It was the only one of my weddings at which I have been sober.’ Suddenly Burton was revitalized, managing to get back into reasonably good shape and displaying a renewed intention to give up the booze for good. ‘No doubt the distillers and the tobacco barons will be weeping over the loss of such a good customer.’ Life was looking good, with numerous projects in the pipeline, and he gave one of his most chilling performances too as the torturer O’Brien in the screen version of Orwell’s classic book 1984 (1984).
Originally Paul Scofield had been cast in the role of O’Brien, but proved unavailable and Burton’s name was mentioned. The producer rang Tony Palmer to check if Burton was reliable. ‘The last thing they wanted, being on a tight budget, was a raving drunk turning up they couldn’t control. I told them that not only was he absolutely under control, 99% of the time, but also it was a stroke of genius that casting and I was sure he’d deliver the goods, because he’s one of the few really great screen actors who understands that less is always more. It was a great performance.’ Few knew at the time that it would prove to be his last film.
At 58 he looked old and physically frail. He was in pain and weak, unable even to put on his jacket without assistance. One crew hand on 1984 remarked, ‘He’s like a wild beast whose spirit has gone.’ One day on the set an aide brought Burton a ready-opened can of Diet Pepsi and many wondered if he was having them laced with vodka. Word got back to Burton and the next day he offered everyone a swig to prove it was OK.
Mostly true to his vow of giving up drink, Burton could go on the wagon for weeks, sometimes months, and then indulge in massive binges. On the set of the TV mini-series Ellis Island, for which he provided a short cameo, he drank heavily. ‘He just hated life without drinking,’ said one crewmember. A visiting journalist to Burton’s home asked one houseguest what it was like up there. ‘Wall to wall empty bottles,’ was the grim reply.
Work was still coming in though. Euan Lloyd, the producer of The Wild Geese, was determined to land Burton for the much-anticipated sequel. ‘Get Reggie Rose to do the script and I would certainly be interested,’ went Burton. The plot this time had the mercenary gang out to rescue Rudolf Hess from Spandau prison in Berlin. In three months a script was ready and a director was in place, Peter Hunt, who’d made one of the best of the Bonds, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. The icing on the cake was the casting of Laurence Olivier as Hess. Burton and Lloyd met up in Geneva to tie up the final details. Burton told of his delight at working with Olivier again and agreed to report for work during the second week of filming.
Sadly it was never to be. On Sunday August 5th Burton complained to Sally of a headache and decided to retire to bed early. In the morning Sally noticed he was breathing very heavily and that he couldn’t be woken. Something was wrong. She called an ambulance and at the hospital it was discovered that Burton had suffered a cerebral haemorrhage. He was rushed to a medical facility in Geneva for an emergency operation. It was likely to take hours, Sally was told, she’d be better off at home instead of pacing up and down corridors, but once back there she just sat and waited by the phone, dreading its ring. When it did it was a doctor pleading with her to return fast. She was too late. Burton was dead. There was some consolation in the fact that even had the operation been successful Burton would have ended up confined to a wheelchair, unable to speak. According to one report Sally found her husband’s last words in a note on his night-stand; Burton had jotted down a line from Shakespeare’s The Tempest: ‘Our revels now are ended.’
Euan Lloyd had been shooting in Berlin for ten days on Wild Geese 2 when he got an early morning call from Brook Williams. ‘Brook was in Switzerland at Richard’s home. He gave me the devastating news. My responsibility to the cast and crew took second place to the magnitude of his passing. I slipped into depression.’ The film’s backers, EMI, gave Lloyd just seven days to replace Burton, or else. With the film collapsing before his eyes Lloyd suddenly heard Burton’s voice inside his head. It was an echo of a conversation they’d had years before in which he told Lloyd how impressed he’d been by Edward Fox’s performance in The Day of the Jackal. Bingo, Lloyd had found his replacement. ‘But alas, Wild Geese 2 turned out to be a distant cousin of the first,’ confesses Lloyd. ‘And still, the tragic loss of Richard hurts to this day.’
Tony Palmer too was shocked when he learnt of Burton’s passing, as the last time he saw the actor he’d been fit and well, ‘although Richard did have quite a serious collapse after we finished filming Wagner, just from absolute exhaustion. I visited Richard and Sally fairly frequently in Switzerland, really to support Sally who was going through quite a tricky time. She was keeping him off the drink, but he did become very depressed and rather morbid and thought he’d never work again. Then after he recovered I saw them again and he was absolutely full of beans. He was shooting 1984 and he and Sally came round several times to have supper and he was absolutely in fighting form, he wasn’t physically on the decline at all. So it was a real shock when he died.’
As in life Burton caused chaos in death. The family wanted him laid to rest next to his parents in Wales, but Sally insisted he be buried in the tiny Swiss town of Celigny that he had made his home. Still, Burton went into the ground a Welshman, adorned head to foot in red with a copy of the complete works of Dylan Thomas. His coffin was covered with a large wreath decorated with the Welsh flag and as it was lowered into the plot his family suddenly burst into song with a bawdy Welsh rugby anthem. There was only one person conspicuous by her absence: Elizabeth Taylor, reportedly too struck with grief to attend; perhaps she didn’t make an appearance out of deference to Sally. Elizabeth made her pilgrimage to Burton’s grave a week later, bringing with her, predictably, the world’s media. Even in death, Burton couldn’t escape the prying camera lens.
Harris was asked to take part in a Hollywood memorial tribute to his old friend and thought how apt it would be to start his eulogy with a quotation from Richard II: ‘Let us sit upon the ground …’ But as the words came out he found he couldn’t go on; instead he broke down and left the podium. Out of sight of the audience Richard Harris wept uncontrollably. Back on stage he forced himself to continue the line, ‘… and tell sad stories of the death of kings.’ Later in his speech Harris admitted to the audience, ‘If Richard could have seen me a moment ago he would have been howling with laughter.’
Burton’s death predictably made front-page headlines around the world. Critics hailed him, others mourned the fact that he wasted his gifts, that had he not sold his soul to Hollywood and stayed in Britain and been true to the craft of theatre he would have equalled if not surpassed the pinnacle achieved by Olivier. ‘I had an enormous amount of respect for Richard,’ claims Waris Hussein, director of Divorce His and Divorce Hers. ‘I thought he was a wonderful person. But his literally was a Faustian pact: he sold his soul and he never really got over it. He had the talent of the greats. He was a great stage actor, a wonderful voice; he looked incredible in his early years. You don’t often get that combination of looks and talent. I remember seeing him as Hamlet at the Old Vic and he was just charismatic. I was walking around in a daze for about a fortnight afterwards, I just thought I’d seen a deity come down; he was just amazing. Years later when I was working with him I told him that I’d seen his Hamlet and thought he was wonderful and he literally started to get tears in his eyes and said, “Do you remember that?” I said, “Yes,” and he said, “Not many people do.” It was very sad.’
Maybe the Hollywood fame was simply to mask a deep-seated insecurity. ‘I think Burton was a fragile man his whole life,’ says Tony Palmer. ‘I think he was desperately insecure and I think the vulgarity came as compensation because he thought, if I can be brash they won’t notice that I need two whiskies to get on stage, which is something John Gielgud told me. He said, all great actors are nervous of going on stage, but Burton more than most. So the bravura, and all the money and yachts, were all somehow to compensate for this insecurity.’
More than anything Tony Palmer was struck by Burton’s sheer magnetism; even at the end of his life, with Burton a shadow of the man he had once been, power oozed off his frame. ‘He was immensely cultured and knowledgeable. He once told me he could recite every single one of Shakespeare’s sonnets, all 151 of them. I never challenged him, but I bet he could, that would not have surprised me. Brook Williams always swore that he could. This was a miner’s son; he’d got to his position by his own power. In the end it’s the power of his personality which was overwhelming. You were aware of a presence, and it wasn’t simply because he was legendary. Of course that adds a bit of gloss, but there are undoubtedly certain people for who, when they come in the room, you stand up, and Richard never came into the room and I didn’t want to stand up; even when I’d had supper with him the previous night and knew the colour of his underpants, as it were, you always wanted to stand up, he had that effect on you.’
Rather apt was this observation from a commentator saying that Burton was Dylan Thomas as played by Casanova, directed by Mel Brooks. ‘Wealth was not enough,’ wrote another. ‘It had to be opulence. Fame was not enough. It had to be notoriety.’
Not long before his death Burton was asked to look back over his life and sum it up if he could. ‘Much of it has been a circus,’ he admitted, ‘played out in full view of the public. And, to be honest, I’ve loved every terrible minute of it.’
God bless you Richard Burton.
Not long after Burton’s death Harris and O’Toole met up in a London pub and talked into the night about their recently departed friend. ‘Richard once told me,’ Harris said, ‘that we spent a third of our lives drunk, a third with a hangover and a third sleeping.’ There they sat quietly in a corner, two of the biggest hellraisers of all, sipping their tonic water. ‘Ooh, what I wouldn’t give for one glass of red wine,’ pined Harris, ‘just one.’ A friend was sharing the evening with them and O’Toole picked up the man’s glass of muscadet, held it to his nostrils and took in the heavy bouquet before replacing it untouched on the table. ‘Aaah,’ he said, in fond remembrance of drinks past. Then a minute’s silence was called, not just for Burton, but for all thespian chums who had recently taken their final bows and moved on to that great saloon bar in the sky: ‘Richard, Finchy, Larry Harvey, Bob Shaw, all my mates,’ said O’Toole, shaking his head. ‘They did drop like flies; everybody, all young.’
Harris was not enjoying sobriety very much. It was a bore: ‘There must be other things in life besides drinking, though I haven’t discovered what they are yet.’ At least he was waking up in the morning and actually able to remember what he did the night before: ‘Trouble was it wasn’t worth remembering.’ Minus the booze, though, he was still able to enjoy the craic. ‘Richard Harris may no longer be a wildcat,’ wrote one journalist, ‘but he is certainly not a pussy cat. Perhaps the description “amiable tiger” will do.’
He still loved to go back to the pubs in Ireland where some of the best story tellers in the world congregate. ‘First rate liars all of them. I love listening to the beautiful words coming through the Guinness froth.’ But Harris knew that he couldn’t have gone on the way he was drinking and that going back would lead to calamity. ‘I can resist the first drink,’ he told the press, ‘but I cannot guarantee that I could resist the second one. I used to enjoy hangovers. I used to love to wake up the next morning with a roaring head because curing it was the perfect excuse to start all over again. But then it was taking me days to recover and I was getting genuinely sick.’
Peter O’Toole’s own battle with booze had for a long time been won. ‘I drank because I enjoyed it, not to solve a problem or because I needed a crutch. It was easy to give up.’ He missed, though, the simple pleasure of boozing and still frequented pubs, careful to order nothing stronger than lemonade. ‘I like being around men with jars in their hands. Sober people, they’re not for me.’ Such abstinence reminded him of the example he would have loved to have followed himself, that of the old comedian Max Miller who was told by his doctor to cut all his activities by half. Miller duly sat on his yacht for six months doing nothing. Then he returned to six months of working the clubs, eating and drinking heavily and bonking like mad. ‘What a perfect division,’ thought O’Toole.
Smoking was now the only act of defiance left to the actor. His preference was for Gauloise cigarettes that he chain-smoked in a long, black holder, equipped with a filter as a concession to health. ‘I give up smoking from time to time,’ he said, ‘but, as a kid, I always had what Dylan Thomas called a “conscious woodbine” hanging out of my gob.’ Such was his devotion to the habit that a friend once complained, ‘Peter, you smell like a French train.’
Even without drink O’Toole was determined to give free rein to his eccentricities. ‘I can still cause mayhem,’ he gleefully said. Too true: in October 1984 he insulted a celebrity audience at a gala night in Dublin and half the audience walked out while the rest booed. The TV station carrying the show hastily ran a commercial during O’Toole’s outburst. ‘I’ll always love to frolic, but now I can remember what I’ve done.’ Like most drinkers O’Toole had suffered memory loss. ‘That’s the great snag of booze, oblivion. So sobriety’s a real turn-on for me; you can see what you’re doing.’
Now in his fifties, those decades on the piss had taken their toll on him. O’Toole cut an almost cadaverous figure, his great mop of straw-coloured hair long faded to grey, and his heavily lined face a testament to the excesses of his past. Despite his Grim Reaper appearance O’Toole had recently been cast as a teacher who has an affair with a young student, played by Jodie Foster, in Svengali (1983). The American TV movie was shot in one of the more dangerous areas of New York where transvestite prostitutes plied their trade nearby and a pyromaniac set fire to cars in a parking lot used by the film crew.
The director was Anthony Harvey, who after The Lion in Winter had met O’Toole quite often, going for long walks over Richmond Park, but he never truly got to know the actor; few people did. The two men hadn’t met for years prior to Svengali and Harvey relished the opportunity to work with him again. ‘Peter had enormous intelligence, a great sense of humour and huge energy, like a machine. He also had what all great actors must have, and that’s an enormous sense of danger; you wouldn’t like to mess with him.’
Most notably though, Svengali marked the first time Jodie Foster had stepped back into the limelight after she was the unwitting motive in an assassination attempt on the then incumbent US President, Ronald Reagan. When John Hinckley gunned down Reagan it was to prove his warped love for the actress, after becoming infatuated with her ever since she’d played a prostitute in Taxi Driver. It was O’Toole who helped Jodie face the movie camera again, his wealth of experience proving invaluable; after all he was a star before she was even born. ‘It is all so unfair,’ he told reporters, ‘that this tremendously nice and talented girl should have become the target for every nutter in the land.’ The pair struck up a touching friendship on set, with O’Toole mischievously calling her ‘Midget’.
Although most of his recent work had been in America, O’Toole still made a habit of visiting Ireland. On one trip he was accompanied by a journalist who noted O’Toole’s behaviour and observations on the cabin crew with some amusement. Sitting on the plane, and unaware of a priest close by, O’Toole broke into a broad smile as the stewardess, a quite robust little blonde in a tight fitting tweed uniform, walked by. ‘Oh, look at that arse!’ he roared, his face aglow. ‘That ass is covered with tweed made in Connemara, where I was born. Nicest asses in the world, Ireland. Irish women are still carrying water on their heads and carrying their husbands home from pubs, and such things are the greatest posture builders in the world.’
As for Ireland itself, O’Toole, just like his father, had no intention of ever going back there for good. ‘God, you can love it! But you can’t live in it. Oh, the Irish know despair, by God they do. They are Dostoyevskian about it. Forgive me, Father, I have fucked Mrs Rafferty. Ten Hail Marys son. But Father, I didn’t enjoy fucking Mrs Rafferty. Good, son, good.’
In 1985 Oliver Reed married for the second time, his bride named Josephine Burge. They’d met when she was just a 17-year-old schoolgirl in a Sussex pub from which, predictably, he was later banned for boisterous behaviour. He’d seen her there a few times with her gang of mates, even saying to the barman, ‘See the skinny one. I’m going to marry her.’ One day he plucked up the courage to introduce himself. Taking the ring-pull tab off the top of a can of beer Reed went over and put it on her finger. She wore it for the whole of her summer holidays, although when she came back to the pub Reed had trouble remembering her name. The press made much play of the fact that Josephine was 25 years his junior, three years younger than Reed’s own son, Mark. Even his friends and family were shocked by it all.
Reed not so much planned the wedding as he planned the stag night and the reception. He wanted to hire a coach to take his mates and himself roaring round the countryside showing porn films and football matches. ‘That way we can’t be thrown out of any pub.’ In the end Reed and his gang took over a boozer in Surrey and drank for three days solid: beer, cider, half pint mugs of gin and vodka and gunk. Reed, naked but for a kilt, presided over the booze orgy and friends arrived in shifts to replace revellers who had fallen by the wayside. Local villagers kept their fingers crossed that sleep deprivation might render Reed harmless. ‘He’s in there with a real rough lot,’ said one quaking neighbour. ‘They could take the village apart.’ But come the third day the boozers were still going strong, pausing only for a cuppa: two teabags in a litre of scotch heated in a kettle, of which everyone had to partake. Periodically food in the form of sandwiches was sent in from a nearby hotel. The manager placed the tray outside the door. ‘I dare not enter because Ollie sees me as representing authority. If he got half a chance he would grab me and I’d never be seen again.’
As the press watched from the relative safe distance of the car park small groups of Reed’s handpicked boozing chums who could no longer stand the pace staggered out into the harsh daylight. ‘I can’t keep up with the man,’ said one. ‘I don’t know where he’s putting it.’ By the end of it all there was but one drinker left in the pub, Reed himself.
By comparison the wedding itself was a relatively calm affair. ‘I have talked to the police,’ the registrar in charge told the press, ‘and assured them that it will be a quiet and quick ceremony.’
After downing a reported 104 pints during the two-day reception Reed announced to Josephine and the world his plan to be a new man; his hellraising days were over, he vowed. Alas, just two weeks later he was embroiled in a bar room brawl. ‘Once a pirate,’ he excused, ‘always a pirate.’ Besides he’d only recently come off a wager to stay off booze: ‘My life against twelve and a half pence was the stake.’ It was an experience he didn’t particularly care for. ‘I like the effect drink has on me. What’s the point of staying sober?’
Not long after their marriage Reed and Josephine moved to Guernsey. Many pondered that the reason was because Ollie had been banned from every pub where he lived, most notably the Bull’s Head where he climbed the chimney naked, shouting ‘Ho! Ho! Ho! I’m Santa Claus!’ One regular drinker at his old local did lament his departure. ‘We just hope that for the sake and sensibilities of the good people of Guernsey that Mr Reed refrains from a regrettable habit of his insisting on showing complete strangers his tattoo.’
That was the least of the islanders’ concerns. Over the years Reed had visited Guernsey often and havoc, as usual, hadn’t been far behind. One hotel even took the precaution of installing bars on the windows of his first floor room. Why? The room overlooked the outdoor swimming pool and one evening Reed charged across his bedroom and dived headfirst through the open window, sailing over the terrace patio and into the water. To prove his feat was no mere fluke, he did it again.
Then there was the occasion he was challenged to a drinking contest by a bunch of sailors and just couldn’t refuse. ‘But we were having quadruple measures of chugalug, one after another, and I am afraid they sank me.’ Reeling from the effects of too much rum Reed put his fist through a hotel window and was arrested in his underpants, covered with dirt and blood, after squaring up to the police. ‘Come on,’ he bellowed. ‘Come on, have a go if you dare.’ Finally he collapsed and was arrested and dragged comatose to the police station. In court he later admitted the charge of damage and ‘acting in a disorderly manner while drunk’. He was fined £100. Released, Reed apologized on bended knees to Josephine and promised reporters to give rum a very wide berth indeed from now on. Josephine, on the other hand, seemed remarkably relaxed about things. ‘He’s much more fun when he’s drunk. He can be rather boring when he’s sober.’ Josephine recounted the occasion when she woke up at home one evening to find Reed sitting on the bed, wearing a policeman’s helmet and swapping jokes with a strange man. ‘I just went back to sleep.’
True he was invariably fun, but a drunk Reed on a film set could be an accident waiting to happen. One time, wardrobe had come to collect Reed who was lunching at his hotel and on his sixth bottle of Dom Perignon. Somehow recognizing them, Reed immediately demanded that they sit and drink with him. His call time was 11 o’clock. Before the wardrobe assistants could coax him off his barstool, Reed downed one more bottle of champagne (in 15 minutes) and declared that he was ready to act. He was unable to stand, so the assistants dragged him by the arms out of the bar, Reed ranting and raving all the while, and deposited him in a car to speed him to the location.
Gently laying him down on the grass, wardrobe proceeded to take off Reed’s trousers and boots. On seeing his co-star Reed suddenly whipped out his cock and started pretending that it was a gun. ‘Bang, bang,’ he hollered. ‘How do you like my chopper?’ The actor tried not to take any notice. ‘It looks better when it’s at attention.’ Fortunately, Ollie didn’t feel the need to prove that.
Reed was then handed a prop pistol for his scene. He was on a hill surrounded by enemy troops and two helicopters hovered overhead. Realizing he was defeated, Reed had to dramatically toss his gun aside. The cameras rolled, everything proceeded smoothly, until a scowling Reed hurled his pistol at an extra, pulled out his cock and screamed, ‘Bang, bang, bang.’ The director could scarcely believe it. ‘CUT!’ Reed just stood there laughing, then stumbled up to another actor and said, ‘I know that I’m supposed to just drop the gun, but I think that my only way to survive is to pretend I’m crazy so they won’t shoot me!’ He laughed more, choked, and then threw up. The eventual shot in the film had to be accomplished using his stunt double.
Reed also still had a habit of dropping his trousers in public to reveal his ‘mighty mallet’. One day in the pub with friend Stephen Ford, Ollie brought up the subject of his cock. ‘You talking about that silly little thing again,’ Ford said in exasperation. ‘I bet you right now that I’ve got a bigger cock than you,’ Ollie said. Not having that, Ford said, ‘Oh all right, fine. What are you going to do about it?’ Reed stood up. ‘Right, come through.’ Reed pressganged Ford into a small back room which had a large mirror on a wall. ‘Right, trousers down,’ ordered Reed, who realized he had lost immediately. Still pulling up his trousers Reed went back into the bar. ‘Silence everybody, stop. Stop!’ A hush fell over the whole establishment. ‘I wish to announce that Stephen Ford has got a bigger cock than I have.’
Out of all Richard Harris’s brothers Dermot – his business manager – was the one he felt closest to. Dermot had a huge capacity for drinking day and night. It was the booze that wrecked his marriage to actress Cassandra Harris, who would later marry Pierce Brosnan. People who knew the two brothers and saw them together could see that they were nothing but a bad influence on each other.
Touring Camelot in Chicago, Harris was waiting in the wings for his opening cue when Dermot said, ‘Dick, I don’t feel too good. I think I’ll go and lie down.’ As he walked onto the stage Harris heard himself saying, ‘Look after yourself.’ When he came off again after the curtain call Dermot was dead. He was only 48. Coming so soon after the loss of Burton, Dermot’s death profoundly affected Harris. Some say it changed him. Others were more of the opinion that once a rogue, always a rogue, but at least one that bordered on the loveable. A female journalist told of the time she interviewed Harris at his hotel suite and the star kept telling her, ‘You haven’t seen the whole suite until you’ve seen the bedroom.’
Harris was capable of the most obscene behaviour, but a lot of it was tinged with humour and playfulness. ‘I’ve always said the reason I don’t feel my age is because I’ve preserved the child in myself. The child has never grown up.’ Harris was the Peter Pan of hellraising. At home in the Bahamas neighbours took to dropping by uninvited. To deter them Harris conceived an impish plot. One afternoon a family living close by turned up. Walking inside they found Harris with two mates sitting naked watching porno movies and masturbating. ‘Oh, hello there,’ said Harris. ‘Come on in.’ The poor family fled in terror. It was all an act, of course. Harris had deliberately bought the worst hardcore movie he could find in New York and when he saw anyone coming up his drive shouted to his mates, ‘Action station boys,’ and they all stripped off. The incident went round the island like all good gossip does and afterwards Harris was left pretty much in peace; the way he wanted it.
In the 80s Harris had moved lock, stock and barrel to the Bahamas but his career was down the pan. By the close of the decade he was reduced to making TV movies, bad ones to boot. His poor choice of material was epitomised by his insistence on playing the detective Maigret (a role Burton had been considering prior to his death) in a TV series in 1988. It was crap indeed and the critics weren’t kind. The Daily Mirror poured scorn on Harris’s Irish brogue. After destroying Maigret, they said, why not go the whole distance: ‘How about Sherlock O’Holmes, Paddy Mason, Hercule Guinness?’
The years of boozing, the enemies and grudges left in his hellraising wake had all come back to haunt Harris. The casting opportunities had dried up. Unlike his contemporaries, Caine and Connery, Harris had fundamentally failed to make the critical metamorphosis into late middle-age film roles. By 1989 he was fast approaching his sixties, and Christ did he look it. ‘A critic once described my face as five miles of bad Irish country road,’ Harris said, almost with pride. ‘Every wrinkle tells a tale.’ For the rest of his life Harris enjoyed shambling around looking like an unmade bed, sleeping in his clothes and then not changing them the next day. Indeed he’d wear the same outfit for days on end; he didn’t give a shit, proudly boasting of the fact that he’d never owned a hairbrush in his life.
At least he wasn’t drinking, and for the first time in his life he was rather glad of the fact. ‘I’ve woken up with women whose names I don’t remember. I’ve punched coppers. It all used to be so smashing. The wonderful sensation of a fist going into somebody’s face. But now my body just hurts. If one of my three sons so much as grips my arm I say, “Ouch”. I live in constant agony, drinking Perrier water while the guys are knocking back the vodkas. But if I touch the stuff my day isn’t worth living. Oh yes, it’s been a great 30 years, but we’ve all paid the price in our different ways.’
Peter O’Toole had done many things in his life; child snatching certainly wasn’t one of them. But that’s exactly what he was accused of doing in 1984. When O’Toole met Karen Somerville, an American model, in 1981 she was 15 years his junior. It was his first meaningful relationship since his divorce from Siân and in 1983 at the age of 50 he became a father again, of a long wished for son, aptly named Lorcan, Gaelic for Lawrence. But when Lorcan was just ten months old the couple split and a bitter tug of love over the child ensued. Karen was awarded custody and moved back to the States with Lorcan; O’Toole was given visiting rights only. On one of these trips over to see his son O’Toole, who had vowed never to let Lorcan go, bolted with the child, turning up in Bermuda of all places, en route to London. During the eight hour stopover Karen phoned friends to organize a lawyer to prevent O’Toole taking the child off the island. Police and officials arrived at O’Toole’s hotel just as he was preparing to leave for the airport and he was forced to hand Lorcan over to the authorities.
O’Toole always denied that he was attempting to snatch his son and take him back to England. All Karen said on the subject and of her former partner was, ‘Let’s just say that he is not a predictable man.’ With that in mind, perhaps, Karen employed security guards to watch over her son should there be another ‘kidnap’ attempt. Back in England O’Toole was heartbroken; the son he had always craved was thousands of miles away, more out of reach than ever. Now living a solitary existence in his cottage in Connemara and in his London home, O’Toole told reporters that any woman contemplating marrying him ought to be led gently to a place of safety. But he fully intended to carry on fighting for custody of his son; and the big show down was yet to come.
As for Harris, the mid-to late-80s was a barren period for O’Toole, with cameo appearances in stupefyingly awful blockbusters like Supergirl (1984) or sterile comedies nobody wanted to see such as Club Paradise (1986) and High Spirits (1988). There was one notable exception, The Last Emperor (1987), a magisterial film about Pu Yi, China’s final ruler. O’Toole’s role, as the young man’s English tutor, was relatively small but made a huge impact. The film itself was history making, being the first feature granted permission by the Chinese government to shoot inside the fabled Forbidden City. Security was so tight that when O’Toole forgot his pass one day he was denied entrance to the set.
But the real drama for O’Toole was happening in real life. For almost four years he and Karen Somerville had been locked in an increasingly hostile legal battle over the custody of Lorcan. After the Bermuda incident O’Toole must have thought he’d blown any chance of ever being granted custody but in 1985 he was once again allowed access to his child and the boy was routinely shuttled back and forth across the Atlantic. But the utter desperation O’Toole felt to keep hold of the son he had always yearned for clouded his judgement once again and he refused to release Lorcan after bringing him to London for a holiday. Karen immediately proclaimed that Lorcan had been stolen from her and got the courts to order O’Toole to return the boy. He refused. Tough New York lawyers threatened O’Toole with a daily fine of $1,000 from his earnings on The Last Emperor if he failed to hand over Lorcan to his mother. Karen then upped the stakes, getting her lawyers to ask a US federal judge to issue an arrest warrant and a ruling that O’Toole was in contempt of court, which meant he could be arrested the moment he entered the United States.
In May 1988 O’Toole and Karen faced each other in London’s High Court; the two former lovers were unable even to look each other in the eye. It was an appearance before the world’s press that O’Toole could well have lived without, he looked frail and nervous, a man on the brink of being torn in half. The judgement, when it came, hit O’Toole in the pit of his stomach like poison; the son he adored had to return with his mother to America. Visibly shaken and in tears O’Toole’s all or nothing gamble in refusing to hand over Lorcan after the allotted 16-day custody period had failed. He returned with the boy to his Hampstead home and together they packed Lorcan’s small suitcase and for a while played in the garden, father and son together perhaps for the last time.
Facing the possibility of never seeing his son again O’Toole appealed the decision to return him to his mother. In August in an American court O’Toole dramatically won back joint custody of Lorcan. The judge ordered that the boy stay with his father and carry out his schooling in London and live with his mother during the holidays. O’Toole had won his greatest battle. For this most private of men, who only consented to interviews out of necessity and had always shunned the glitzy media spotlight, to have to live out this personal trauma in the glare of publicity was an agonizing ordeal. But the reward was sweet and the years of Lorcan’s childhood that O’Toole was now able to share brought out the very best in him.
Oliver Reed had been settling in very nicely thank you in Guernsey. As a moving in gift he’d bought Josephine a beautiful antique gold necklace but one boozy evening she’d tied it round their pet dog’s neck as a joke. Incensed, Reed took the necklace and buried it in the garden to teach her a lesson. Trouble was that when after a few days he came back to retrieve it he couldn’t for the life of him remember exactly which bit of the garden he’d buried it in. The gardener was ordered to dig up most of the lawn and flowerbeds and metal detectors were employed in the hunt. But it was never found.
At his new home Reed converted the large loft into a replica pub. Friends would join him there and they’d drink often till three or four in the morning. Ollie would then sometimes stagger into his study to write poetry, phoning his poor put upon brother Simon to regale him with his latest offering down the phone line. When these recitals became too much for any human being to bear Simon took to leaving his answer phone switched on all night. Asked later for his verdict on brother Ollie’s poetry Simon said, ‘It was like someone who had taken LSD every night of their lives.’
Reed very quickly established his drinking credentials in the many pubs on the island. ‘He is usually OK until about 2 o’clock,’ said one landlady, ‘but then things tend to get out of hand. His drinking reputation is legendary on this island.’ He also enjoyed welcoming visiting journalists to his new world, taking them on tours of the island, usually starting and finishing in a pub. On one occasion Reed was driving a reporter along the coastal road when he suddenly stopped the car and asked his passenger to step out and just smell the beautiful clean fresh air. The journalist did so and in mid-sniff heard the door slam behind him, the car engine rev up. Reed sped off. The poor man was in the middle of nowhere, no house and no person within four miles. When the weary reporter got back to his hotel hours later Reed was waiting for him in the lobby, drink in hand.
After years of nothing parts and being famous only for periodically appearing in the tabloids in various stages of being pissed, Oliver Reed returned to the big time again with Castaway (1986), a film based on the real-life story of a business man who places an ad in a paper for a girl to come and live with him on a tropical island. True to form, though, at the glitzy opening night of the film a sozzled Reed shouted out in dismay during the performance when he realized that some of his favourite scenes had been cut out of the movie.
Cast as the girl, and spending the majority of the movie completely starkers, was Amanda Donohoe. In her first real movie role, she was to some extent thrown in at the deep end, having to handle Ollie. ‘I don’t think that anybody understood the state that Oliver was in when he came to do Castaway. Although everybody understood that he drank, nobody knew quite how much. There was this dichotomy; there was this incredibly sweet, charming, sensitive man … and the next minute he’d be calling you a bitch. You really didn’t know where you were with him. This was at a point in his career where he had been unemployable. I think he really tried to be very good … he tried and tried and tried … but I just don’t think he could resist somehow.’
To promote Castaway Reed did more press than he’d managed in years. A reporter was invited to meet him one morning at a genteel hotel in Dorking. Waiting in reception the journalist saw Reed arrive, recovering from a massive bender the night before. ‘That’s why I’m drinking champagne,’ he announced. ‘It’s a good pick me up. But I think now,’ consulting his watch which read 10.45 am, ‘I’ll switch to gin and tonic.’ The interview began with the reporter wondering why Dorking, not exactly the kind of place frequented by film stars or hellraisers. ‘I am Dorking,’ Reed explained, pounding the table with his fists, rattling the coffee cups. ‘And Dorking is me.’
By far Reed’s most notorious public appearance at this time, perhaps of his career, occurred when he agreed to do Michael Aspel’s TV chat show. Aspel knew Reed was always a good booking, but on this particular occasion he’d had word from the researcher travelling with him: ‘We’ve stopped again!’ and that the star was drinking large quantities of booze. Still, nothing quite prepared Aspel for the apparition that lurched onto the set. He came on looking like the uncle from hell at a boozy Christmas party with his shirt half hanging off and clutching a jug of what one hoped was just orange juice. He then proceeded to forget the plot of the film he was meant to be promoting and hijacked the band to play the 60s hit ‘Wild One’, belting out the lyrics like a Neanderthal Elvis. It was a performance that few who watched it would ever forget. ‘I was delighted,’ Aspel later confessed. ‘People said “Aspel was furious” – I was thrilled! You don’t expect Reed to come on and behave like a bank manager; if he did it would be disappointing. But we knew he was sloshed because he’d taken 15 stops … and a couple of pints of gin and tonic. So when he lurched on I thought “This is great!”’
Was Reed out of his head or was it another case of giving the punters what they wanted? ‘I don’t think it will take that long to rebuild the studio,’ said Aspel. It certainly left an impression on fellow guest, writer Clive James – ‘It was one of the most exciting evenings since World War II, when I was much further from the front line’ – and on the viewers, 600 of whom jammed the station’s switchboard to complain, The Sun newspaper called them all spoilsports. ‘In our view,’ they said, ‘Ollie Reed drunk is better than Wogan sober any day.’ That didn’t stop TV bosses announcing their intention to ban Reed, who’d left for home after the Aspel show perfectly delighted with his performance, from ever appearing on their chat shows again. ‘On television Oliver was a menace,’ says Michael Winner. ‘They once said to me, “We’re going to do Oliver Reed’s This is Your Life live.” I said, “Obviously you have a better job to go to and wish to leave Granada television in a hail of ignominy.” They said, “No, no, all his family say that Michael, you are the only person he respects, so we’re going to tell him that he’s coming as a guest on your This is Your Life.” Sadly this never worked out because there was an electricians’ strike and the thing was cancelled. On television Oliver was quite difficult. They often called me to sit next to him, because they thought if I was there he would be sober and well behaved, which was only marginally true.’
After other public misdemeanours – on the Des O’Connor chat show Ollie was only just restrained from producing his cock live on camera – his brother and two sons wrote jointly to inform him how unacceptable and embarrassing his behaviour had become. Reed never replied. To him he was merely giving the public what they wanted. ‘Sometimes I go over the top,’ he said, stating the obvious, ‘but I don’t punch people any more. I’m too old for that now.’
But deep inside Reed must have known that he was cutting his own throat with such antics, however glorious they were. After Castaway, a critical and financial success, in which he’d given his best performance for years, producers should have been banging on his door with scripts, but his antics scared them all off; people were just afraid to employ him and what should have been a revival ended up another barren wasteland.
In 1987 doctors warned Reed to give up the booze or he’d be dead within two years. His alcoholic intake and rich food diet were leading to possible kidney damage, coronary disease and ultimately heart failure. But did he care? – not really, announcing that he’d rather die than stop boozing. ‘Richard Burton was hitting the bottle with John Hurt the night before his death. He knew it was going to kill him, but he did not stop.’ Reed didn’t like what giving up booze had done to his other surviving acting chums. ‘Now Richard Harris and Peter O’Toole have stopped drinking they don’t look nearly as robust as they used to. I certainly prefer them in their stamping days.’
Reed hated the thought of a long, lingering death, of vital organs slowly popping off. Thoughts of suicide came into his mind. Drinking himself to death was the preferable option, though it would take far too long. There had to be a quicker solution. In the end Reed made his son Mark swear to perform ‘his sacred duty and put a shot gun in my mouth and pull the trigger’.
Who knows just how seriously Ollie contemplated suicide; in any case he had no intention of heeding the health warnings and carried on boozing. By now a life on the piss had taken its toll on his appearance: he was potbellied, grey-haired, lined and stooping like an old man; at times he looked like Father Christmas leaving an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. It was a long way away from the brooding sex symbol of the early 70s. His face was now ‘a sad reflection of a dissolute life’, as one journalist put it. ‘A Hogarthian example of debauchery’s perils.’ When in 1989 he played Athos once again, in The Return of the Musketeers, Reed looked positively prehistoric compared with his co-stars from the original movie. But the hellraiser was still there. Filming in Aylesbury, Reed went to a local pub and after numerous pints boasted to the locals of the tattoo on his cock. He was finally persuaded to place his manhood on a barstool for public examination.
For Reed, however, the onset of old age presented no great fears. ‘I’m looking forward actually to getting old and playing the sage. I want to be wheeled around in a wheelchair, carrying a whip, pushed around by a Negro in a white uniform, whipping people if they get in my way.’
That same year Reed was thrown out of a celebrity bash for attacking fellow hard man Patrick Mower. Trouble flared when Ollie stood up and yelled interruptions during some of the speeches. When Mower intervened to calm him down Reed tried to head butt the TV star. Reed later denied head butting Mower, insisting he had ‘leant across the table to give him a kiss’. Seated close by watching all this were ex-boxer and stunt man Nosher Powell and wrestler Jackie Pallo who got up and forced Reed back into his chair. Things were quiet for a while until Reed began goading Mower about his young blonde companion. Again Nosher Powell was on hand. Grabbed from behind Reed was manhandled to the door and thrown out into the street. As one guest told the papers, ‘Oliver was smashed out of his brains tonight.’