Oliver’s National Service had drawn to an end and although he didn’t think he made a particularly successful soldier he nevertheless took pride in the fact that he’d served with the RAMC. ‘He loved the Royal Army Medical Corp,’ says Mark. ‘He used to talk about how they were the most decorated regiment in the British army.’ For the rest of his life Ollie was in love with all things military. His widow Josephine says he was constantly quoting his old army number and during the Falklands war tried his best to volunteer. ‘I think he phoned up and they were very kind and polite and said that perhaps he was a little old. But he was very supportive of all the armed forces.’
In 1977, when the fire service went on strike and the army’s ‘Green Goddess’ fire engines took over, Mark was awoken at one o’clock in the morning by a grinning Ollie. ‘Come on, we’re going to have a drink with the bucko boys.’ Mark, who was about sixteen at the time, remembers helping his father fill the car boot with Thermos flasks of booze and bottles of whisky and driving to his local fire station in Dorking. Pulling up at the gate, they were informed by the pickets that the soldiers were at a barracks in Redhill. Ollie didn’t know how to get to Redhill, so drove to the nearest police station, where a helpful desk sergeant told him, ‘Right, Mr Reed, you go this way, over that roundabout.’ After a five-mile trek they were in Redhill but still clueless as to the whereabouts of the barracks, when Ollie spotted a police car and flashed his lights. It stopped and a copper got out. ‘Oh yes, Mr Reed, we heard you were coming. I can take you as far as the barracks gate.’ Off they went again, with a police escort, and finally arrived around two o’clock in the morning. ‘We rang the bell,’ says Mark, ‘and these officers came down and helped us take in all these boxes of booze. We had a quick drink with the soldiers and then drove home again. You couldn’t do something like that now. Times have changed.’
On another occasion Ollie was holidaying in Barbados when HMS Fearless came into port. The officers were using Ollie’s hotel bar as their mess and when they arrived in their nicely pressed shore-going kit, of course his eyes lit up. ‘Ah, gentlemen, would you care for a drink?’ It became an amazing piss-up that turned into a game of Follow My Leader, with the navy guys trotting behind Ollie as he marched twice round the outdoor swimming pool, then on to the diving board and into the water. The next morning Ollie was sitting by the pool nursing a not inconsiderable hangover when he heard the low pulsating noise of rotor blades. A helicopter was hovering over the resort and lowering down a naval commander clutching a bottle of rum and a teddy bear as a thank you to Ollie from his fellow officers.
Back from Hong Kong and living with Granny Dardin, Ollie soon turned his thoughts to what he wanted to achieve in life. He’d no intention of returning to his old job at the hospital, but with no qualifications or training of any kind he was limited as to what he could do. The only thing he had going for him was £100 in savings and a new personal wardrobe. ‘Out in Hong Kong you could get suits made very cheaply,’ says David. ‘So whilst he was there he got quite a big wardrobe and he came back with a trilby hat, a camel-hair coat and various good-looking suits.’ Perhaps, thought Ollie, his newly acquired dapper style might entice a rich woman to marry him and keep him until his dotage. More realistically, he decided to try his hand at male modelling and joined a photographic agency. ‘Oliver was extraordinarily good-looking when he was young,’ says David. ‘There was a mystery and a roughness and a sort of animal element to him. It was an animal attraction, his eyes were phenomenal, and gradually the film business realized it.’
Ollie had also acquired a girlfriend and this prompted a move out of Granny Dardin’s into a room in Redcliffe Square, close to Brompton Cemetery. When that relationship didn’t work out he was soon determined to find more obliging women and his partner in crime was an Irishman who lived upstairs. Jack Burke owned a Jaguar car won in a poker game and nicknamed ‘the passion wagon’, and he and Ollie tore up and down the streets of west London in an effort to impress the girls. In truth, Ollie found female company largely easy to come by. At a house party populated by young teachers he scored with a Miss Hook, who insisted she was a virgin despite a repertoire of seasoned bedroom techniques. When, post coitus, Oliver threw doubt on her claim, Miss Hook lived up to her name by walloping him round the head.
Money ran out to buy petrol for the Jaguar and Ollie and Jack were forced to find themselves a job. Burke was a member of the film extras’ union and held fanciful notions of maybe becoming an actor. To Ollie, it didn’t seem like such a bad ambition: after all, he’d enjoyed Shakespeare at Ewell Castle and had all that theatrical heritage, although at school it was David who did all the optional drama classes, not Ollie. ‘However, I do remember before National Service he joined an amateur dramatic group in Wimbledon. That was the first indication of going down that road.’
Like thousands of would-be actors Oliver wrote to theatrical repertory companies asking for work; he was turned down flat for lack of experience. ‘That being the case, I decided to invent a career.’ Overnight his CV took on the appearance of a seasoned pro’s, with appearances in everything from Othello to the most avant-garde plays in places like Wagamoomoo in Australia. ‘What I did not realize was that the people to whom I addressed my shining history knew full well that the theatres where I’d given my breathtaking performances did not exist.’ Drawing another blank, Ollie decided to turn for advice to Uncle Carol, for whom he had enormous fondness and respect, even if trips to see him had been all too rare. ‘You see,’ says David, ‘my father and Carol fell out big time and didn’t talk for many a year. Carol started his career in the theatre and Peter saw him holding a spear on stage and made the remark, “What the bloody hell are you doing holding a spear!” And, rather like Ollie taking objection to things Peter told him, Carol was the same and reacted quite badly. Of course, Carol went on to a successful career but it took many, many years to get over that feud.’
By that stage Carol Reed had a string of highly respected films to his name as a director, including The Way Ahead (1944), a superb war drama and fitting tribute to the bravery of the ordinary soldier, Odd Man Out (1947), which featured James Mason as an IRA member on the run, and his masterpiece The Third Man (1949), often cited as the best British film ever made. He was also by then a ‘sir’, having the honour of being only the second British film director, after Alexander Korda, to be knighted.
Ollie had seen Sir Carol shortly before going off on National Service, visiting the set of his glossy circus romp Trapeze and having his photograph taken inside the circus ring with Burt Lancaster and Gina Lollobrigida. But as he walked down the King’s Road in Chelsea towards Carol’s opulent house at number 213, today a Grade II listed building, he was overcome by nerves. ‘Not of the man, who was full of sweetness and charm, but of the powerful film director who just happened to be my father’s brother.’ Maybe Ollie was fearful that his visit would be misinterpreted. ‘He didn’t want to be seen taking advantage of the relationship,’ says David. It was advice and guidance he wanted, no more.
Invited into the drawing room, Ollie sat down awkwardly and as he explained his wish to become an actor Sir Carol listened politely and intently. The stage, Ollie said, did not really hold any interest for him, he wanted to work in films. That may be so, said Uncle Carol, but he still needed some kind of formal training. RADA was suggested. Ollie shook his head: he believed all drama teachers either couldn’t hack it in the real world or just weren’t good enough to act. ‘I also think he just wanted to get going and start earning,’ says Simon. ‘It was a case of, let’s get some money. That’s it really. I want money, I want it quickly. He saw acting as a pay cheque. Also RADA was a bit establishment.’
The next best thing, suggested Carol, was to meet the right people. ‘Put yourself about a bit at the Ritz grill.’ Oliver hadn’t the faintest clue where the Ritz grill was, let alone the money to pay for lunch there; he currently existed on a diet of spaghetti and tomato soup and hadn’t even got a shilling to put in the gas meter. He began to get the feeling that dear uncle Carol ‘was drifting about in an Edwardian summer’. His next suggestion got Oliver thinking that he might very well have cracked: ‘Seek out the people that can help you, Oliver, pitch a tent outside their front doors and every morning when they leave to go to the studio, step out of your tent and say, “Excuse me, I’m Oliver Reed, I would like you to give me a job.”’
Carol did offer one piece of advice that Oliver would always be grateful for. If he wasn’t going to bother with drama school, then he should spend as much of his spare time at the cinema, watching and observing. Henceforth Oliver’s local Odeon became his university ‘and my only training school’. The pub, too, was another great source of learning that served him well for his entire career. All human life was on display, the flotsam and jetsam of society, the working class, and the aristocracy mingling in the saloon and public bars, like a human zoo. ‘Oliver told me once that this was the way he learned how to do a part,’ reveals Bernie Coleman, owner of the Dog and Fox pub in Wimbledon. ‘He loved observing people. If he came in early he’d sit by himself with a pint and just watch and listen to people.’
Ollie was remarkably perceptive and his knack for observing human nature never deserted him throughout his whole life. ‘He picked up on things around him that you just wouldn’t notice,’ says Mark. ‘They’d pass you by. But not him. Just little details that he would see and no one else. He prided himself in it.’ As Ollie once said: ‘Everyday life is my favourite theatre. People are my favourite actors.’
With Jack Burke’s help Oliver managed to get into the film extras’ union and his first job was in Hello London, a musical-cum-travelogue so obscure that it has virtually disappeared. Its star was Sonja Henie, three times Olympic figure-skating champion, but when she arrived in London in early 1958, after years of touring ice revues across the United States, she was very much a faded personality and Oliver couldn’t help but feel disappointed. ‘Her legs were muscle-bound and unattractive and didn’t give me the urge to give her one.’
Ollie had been hired by the film’s director Sidney Smith because of his ‘hungry face’, and is one of a haggle of journalists greeting Sonja as she steps down from her flight smiling inanely as if rigor mortis had set in midway across the Atlantic. Unimpressed with the costume the film production company had offered, Oliver phoned his dad and asked if he’d lend him his reporter’s mac. It was the first time in something like three years that he’d contacted his father. It would be another two years before they progressed from speaking on the phone to actually sharing the same oxygen in a room.
The rest of 1958 was taken up with sporadic bits of extra work. Ollie featured in crowd scenes in Norman Wisdom’s The Square Peg, an agreeable slice of army antics. It’s the one where Norman finds he’s a dead ringer for a Nazi general and swaps roles, flirts with a pre-Avengers Honor Blackman, causes chaos on a parade ground, says ‘Mr Grimsdale’ a lot, and pours champagne down Hattie Jacques’s cleavage. Life is a Circus, directed by Val Guest, featured the Crazy Gang, the pie-and-mash equivalent of the Marx Brothers, whose mix of nerve-shredding cockney songs and insipid zaniness today looks about as funny as a dead parent. This was their last film and saw them trying to save a circus from closing down. Ollie is barely visible in the background as a punter in a few of the crowd scenes. Then there was a couple of days’ work sunning himself as a passenger on a cruise ship on Pinewood Studios’ back lot in The Captain’s Table, a sort of sub-Carry On comedy. These jobs never paid very much, so Ollie was generally destitute, bedding down with friends or casual lovers.
Waking up one morning, he was perturbed to discover nasty red blotches across his chest, followed by blinding headaches and a 100-plus temperature. Thinking it to be nothing more than the onset of influenza, he still called in at his local GP and was alarmed when the doctor reached for the phone to order an ambulance. At the hospital it was confirmed that Oliver had bacterial meningitis, a life-threatening ailment known to strike with incredible speed, so without delay Oliver was pumped full of antibiotics and ordered to rest.
With nowhere to go, Oliver convalesced with his mother, now remarried and living in Cheshire. Oliver had yet to meet his stepfather, Bill Sulis, but had heard stories of his wild antics in the RAF, from which he was dismissed for damaging a plane while flying upside down. Such devilry immediately endeared him to Oliver and at first the appreciation appeared to be mutual. Thanks to a family fortune derived from the manufacture of rope, Bill and Marcia lived in relative splendour in a mansion set in its own grounds. Bill was determined to show off Marcia’s son to the country set at various parties and hunt balls, but Ollie’s prized collection of Hong Kong suits was now history save for one, and that had seen better days. ‘I now regretted scrubbing it with Daz on the side of the bath to remove all the beer stains and the dried puke.’ Aghast at the thought of his stepson meeting local dignitaries in anything other than flash attire, Bill loaned him a few of his dinner jackets. These, alas, did not last long: one went west after Oliver chased a farmer’s daughter across a ploughed field, while another shrank to infant size when Ollie crawled home drunk one night in a rain storm. ‘When my stepfather had run out of suits I went back to London.’
Marcia had arranged for her son to stay at a mews flat near Notting Hill Gate tube station that belonged to an aunt who lived in Egypt. With a secure roof over his head, Ollie began to look for work again, but this time he faced competition from a most unlikely source: his own brother. Out of the army, David had also set his sights on a career as an actor and together they made the daily rounds of casting offices and advertising agencies. It was a depressing time: Oliver had spent what was left of his army savings on a photographic portfolio but nobody was interested in hiring him. ‘You’re too Continental-looking,’ many complained. Years later and an international star, Ollie loved going up to those same agents and producers whenever their paths crossed and saying, ‘Hey, remember me? I’m Oliver Reed. You used to tell me to piss off!’
David saw a lot of his brother during this period. Their operations base was a coffee bar in Earls Court run by a man called Tiny, who of course was an enormous fellow. ‘We used to meet down in the cellar and for us everything gravitated from there. We’d meet on a Friday evening and Ollie and I would buy a bottle of Merrydown cider and two straws and drink that until it gave us a buzz and then we’d say, right, where’s tonight’s party?’
The Ollie that David encountered after National Service was very different from the one he last saw at Ewell Castle, if only in appearance. ‘He went into an odd period of dressing very, very strangely, of going around in an open-top shirt tied in a knot above his bare waist, with a big chain around his neck with a skull on it. I suppose it was part of that period where youth were beginning to express themselves as a revolt against the stodginess of the adult world. It was the days of rock and roll, mods and rockers, and beatniks. It was the start of creating one’s own culture, youth culture. The social barriers were starting to be broken down, girls and boys were getting their emancipation from the protection or governance of their parents and so earning enough to have their bedsits. We were self-supporting. It was a very important period, but it’s only when you look back on it all; you didn’t realize it at the time.’
Craftily David was able to make practical use of his brother’s rather menacing look. At the time David hung out around Wimbledon with a chap called Mike. ‘We were both rather po-faced, we’d been young subalterns in the army, so we used to go to clubs in London and pretend Ollie was our bodyguard. So there would be Mike and I dressed terribly correctly and we used to make a thing of sending Ollie across to a girl to say, my boss wants to dance with you.’ A few months later when David met his future wife Muriel (Mickie to her friends) he arranged a get-together with his brother at a coffee bar. In Ollie walked, in tight-fitting jeans, the open-neck shirt, and that skull on a chain. ‘I was shocked out of my brain by him,’ admits Muriel.
All that time leafing through the actors’ newspaper The Stage looking for work finally paid off when Ollie noticed a story about producers casting for a new seven-part BBC historical drama serial called The Golden Spur. Arriving late, he found himself at the back of a very long queue of other hopefuls. Handed a scrap of paper with some dialogue on it, he used the time to learn it by heart, something that no one else appeared to be bothering to do. When it was his turn he rattled the speech off effortlessly, a display of professionalism that perhaps swayed the panel to give him the small role of Richard of Gloucester. It was a remarkable feat, given that Oliver had no real acting experience.
When his sole episode aired in the summer of 1959 Oliver’s brooding image attracted the attention of an agent, Pat Larthe. ‘You were brilliant, darling,’ she said down the phone. Moderately well known in the business for supplying top models for television and magazine assignments, Pat only handled a limited number of actors, including the young Michael Caine, who joined her books at roughly the same time as Oliver. Thrilled to have an agent at last, Ollie saw this as proof that he was heading in the right direction and his days of poverty were over. The only downside to the arrangement was the 10 per cent of his earnings that Pat would claim for the next ten years. ‘And she held me to that,’ Ollie later complained. ‘Even after I left her and went to another agent.’
Pat went to work immediately on Oliver, sending him to Pinewood for a day’s work as an extra on The League of Gentlemen. Now considered a minor British classic, it stars Jack Hawkins as a former army officer, bitter at his early retirement, who recruits a group of disgraced colleagues to perform a bank robbery with military precision. They hire a room at a theatre club for one of their clandestine meetings and a couple of obviously gay chorus boys barge in. When one of the young actors couldn’t quite manage to access his feminine side and needed to be hurriedly replaced, Ollie sensed his chance. ‘I can do that!’ Director Basil Dearden quickly gave him the once-over and told him to give it a go. ‘And that was Oliver’s very first speaking role in a film,’ says David. And Ollie made the best of this opportunity, managing the almost impossible feat of out-camping Kenneth Williams with his mincing entrance, hands on hips, and a voice resembling Edith Evans overdosing on helium.
Next was The Angry Silence, a highly praised film featuring one of Richard Attenborough’s finest performances as a factory worker who refuses to support an unjustified wildcat strike and is ostracized and victimized by his colleagues. Ollie can be seen in several scenes set in the factory, mingling with a group of other young thuggish workers. His glowering looks are unmistakable and he handles his few lines of dialogue with a sort of naive brutishness.
Playing Attenborough’s character’s best friend in the film was Michael Craig, on whose original storyline the picture was based. Craig, something of a screen heart-throb in the early sixties, vividly remembers Ollie being on the film since during shooting he stayed with Craig and his first wife in their house in London and behaved impeccably. ‘He was very young at the time and just out of the army, where he’d been an officer and a gent, which he still was. Oliver was very polite and good to work with. I suppose I thought he might do well as a screen actor, he was good-looking, very macho, and with presence. We ran into each other over the following years and he was always friendly until after he had the fight in the club when someone shoved a glass in his face and left him badly scarred. He became quite different after that and I don’t think we ever met again.’