There really wasn’t anything else to do but get drunk every night; that’s Geraldine Chaplin’s recollection. They were in some far-flung place in Denmark and at night she’d accompany Ollie and Reg as they searched for any bar to get sloshed in. Never once did she feel in any danger, that the evening might get out of hand, as both men looked after her as if she was their kid sister. ‘Ollie would always protect me. He was a real gentleman, beautiful manners, beautifully brought up. And the drunker he got the better manners he had, I found.’ Ollie misbehaved, of course, walking over to tables and demanding people stand up to join him in a chorus of ‘God Save the Queen’, which rather mystified these simple Danish folk, but there was no menace about it.
Geraldine is a member of an exclusive club because Ollie rarely invited women to join him on his drinking binges. And it was hard liquor, too, which Geraldine matched. ‘I drank what Ollie did, what everyone was drinking, and Reg too. Reggie drank an awful lot. Reg was very protective of Ollie. They always had a good time together and Ollie would make fun of Reg and Reg would take it like an adoring dog.’ What was most refreshing for Geraldine was how utterly non-showbiz Ollie was. He didn’t seem like an actor at all, and never talked shop. Although if somebody came up and wanted to talk to him about movies, then he was happy to do that. ‘One night someone congratulated him on his performance in Women in Love and afterwards he turned to me and said, “Well, they’ve all seen it now, there’s nothing to hide, they all know what it looks like.”’
The barrenness of the location suited the film they were making, Zero Population Growth, a rather ponderous and grim science fiction tale about a future earth where population control is mandatory and children are replaced by android dolls. Directed by Michael Campus, it was an odd choice, one of many Oliver was to make. He was now entering a phase where he was to take films largely on instinct or to pay the bills for Broome Hall, especially when the energy crisis of the early seventies kicked in and the price of oil hit the roof. ‘In heating terms alone Broome Hall could not have been too dissimilar to the cost of running a ship of war,’ says David. In Zero Population Growth Ollie and Geraldine play a couple who defy the law by having a child and are forced to go into hiding. There wasn’t much rehearsal beforehand for the two actors to familiarize themselves with each other and the first thing Ollie said to Geraldine when they met at the hotel bar was, ‘Look, we’re playing man and wife, so we have to get used to touching each other – so let’s dance.’ And that’s what he did. ‘He proceeded to grab me and dance in this absolutely bear-like grip and felt me up and down. It was actually very funny.’
In truth, there didn’t seem to be very much direction going on at all, at least in the sense of helping the actors shape their performances. In the end Geraldine turned to Oliver. ‘He was very generous. Some actors do it all for themselves, but Ollie was so helpful on the set with your performance. He’d take me aside and say, don’t do this, do that, try this, much more help than the director. I don’t think Ollie clashed with the director but he knew that he was crap basically. That’s why he helped me a lot. But he didn’t take it out with the director. I never saw him being rude to anyone, unless they didn’t stand up and sing “God Save the Queen”.’
Some shooting took place in Copenhagen and Carol Lynley flew there to stay with Ollie for a while. One night they were invited to a very grand house for dinner, along with Geraldine and her partner, the Spanish film director Carlos Saura. Usually Carol had nothing to worry about when going out with Oliver. ‘He was good company and most of the time he was very quiet. Once in a while he would misbehave and get banned from certain establishments. I remember when he was in New York at this hotel, I think it was the Sheraton, I had to go with him into the dining room because he’d been banned and they wouldn’t let him in without somebody to take care of him.’ But generally Ollie would be on his best behaviour with Carol. Indeed, the only time she can remember ever really losing it with him was at this dinner in Copenhagen. ‘Halfway through the meal for some reason, I guess he’d been drinking, Ollie got up and stood on the table, dropped his trousers, and tied the napkin around his prick. I was so furious. We were thoroughly thrown out of the house; I don’t even remember getting to the car it was so quick. And as soon as we got back to the hotel I was just furious at him. But he would do things like that from time to time. I’m still angry at him for doing that.’
As 1971 drew to a close Oliver was in south London shooting the Get Carter-inspired thriller Sitting Target with Ian McShane and Jill St John. He liked the hard-edged contemporary subject and his role of Harry Lomart, a violent criminal who breaks out of a top-security jail to kill his unfaithful wife. Ollie always attempted to play these kinds of villains – who in lesser hands had a propensity to come across as one-dimensional – as proper rounded human beings, not totally evil. ‘They wouldn’t be believable if they were only one colour, with no light or shade.’ Lomart was no different, and like most men of his ilk, there was a sad, pathetic side to his nature. ‘Evil is not, in my view, an abstraction; it is compounded of some very human flaws.’ The result is one of Oliver’s most brutal and mesmerizing performances.
Director Douglas Hickox came away from the experience full of admiration for Oliver as an actor and for his generosity of spirit. Late one afternoon three young actresses arrived on the set to test for a small role. Although he’d finished his work for the day, Ollie stayed on for two hours to read the lines for them off camera. ‘How many other stars would do that?’ Hickox asked. ‘They would normally just have the director or somebody else do it.’
Carol Lynley remembers being on the London location of Sitting Target. Often she would visit Ollie’s film sets, something he never reciprocated. ‘He was much too egotistical for that. So I would sometimes go and see him when he was working. Mainly it was just keeping him company, he liked to have company.’ Nor was Ollie at all supportive of Carol’s career as an actress, and she never discussed with him what roles to take or heard a comment or opinion from him about any of her performances. ‘I don’t think he really thought about it one way or the other. He was very centred on himself, as most actors are. The only thing that he ever asked me about was, did I really sing the song in The Poseidon Adventure? Other than that, he was never particularly interested in what I was doing or who I was filming with.’
Since their meeting back in 1966 Carol had watched Oliver progress from a reasonably well-known actor to an international star. He’d never been at all showbizzy, one of the reasons why she liked him so much, but now Carol couldn’t help but be impressed by the way Ollie had not allowed fame to change him. ‘He was a very moderate person, he never had a big head, never really ordered people about. He made movies and hung out with movie stars on the set, but most of his friends that I met were just regular people. He didn’t change at all, except that his clothes got better.’ And it would remain so for the rest of his life: the glitz and the glamour of the business, the premieres, the limos, and all that bullshit just wasn’t him. ‘He didn’t need the fame in order to make him complete,’ says Mark. He was about as far from being a luvvie as it was possible to get. ‘Ollie wasn’t a star in the sense that he frequented glitzy parties,’ reports David. ‘None of that, he didn’t go near them. He was a film star only in the sense that people knew who he was and he was rich. He loved to go into a pub and say, right, everyone a drink, because he wanted everyone to have a good time. But he didn’t play the film star. I can’t remember him doing that at all. But he would act the part if called upon. If it was a professional thing, then he knew how to make an entrance.’
There was, however, one significant change that Carol noticed about Oliver: his drinking had increased. On the set of The Shuttered Room Carol hardly noticed him hitting the bottle but over the past few years it had become more and more of an issue. One evening she brought the subject up. ‘Why don’t you just drink wine?’ she asked. ‘It’s better for you than hard alcohol.’
‘I can’t,’ he said.
‘Sure you can. I’m not saying, don’t drink. I’m just saying, have a bottle of wine. Have two. Just don’t have a bottle of Scotch.’
‘No, I can’t.’
‘Well, why not?’
‘Because I can’t feel anything unless it’s hard alcohol. I can’t feel anything on wine.’
Carol never raised the subject again. Often they’d go to pubs and although Carol rarely drank much herself, Ollie always made sure that she had a shandy. ‘Once he saw me take a drink of hard liquor, a vodka and tonic, and he was horrified, absolutely horrified. “Only order a shandy,” he said. Looking back, you just wish that he had been able to control his drinking, because that did accelerate. He did try but he never really tried for long enough.’
Simon was another who saw a quite definite shift in Ollie’s drinking from the early to mid-seventies and onwards. ‘That’s when I think the drinking became less fun. He was still after the Happening. It was probably just more difficult to find and it needed more drink, whereas in the early days he only needed a couple of drinks and the Happening would arrive.’
The amount of booze Ollie was buying was startling. David recalls their accountant saying at the end of one year, ‘God, how do you spend this much on drink? This would keep any normal family in luxury.’ Jacquie recalls Ollie going on a binge that lasted something like three days, ‘then even he had to give in and he collapsed on the front lawn and violently threw up – and grass never grew on that patch in my time at Broome Hall.’
Ollie was also a well-known face around the hostelries of Dorking. He’d drink there rather than Horsham, a town about the same distance from Broome Hall, mostly because the police round Horsham, Sussex police rather than Surrey, were a bit heftier when it came to drink-driving. ‘They were more on it,’ claims Mark. There was the Dorking run, for example, where Ollie and his pals would ask for a quadruple gin and tonic and down it before the barman came back with the change, then dart off to the next pub. The White Hart was where Ollie did most of his drinking in town, though sometimes he ventured to the White Horse Hotel, until he got barred for setting the chimney alight. Seated next to a large, roaring open fire, Ollie kept lugging on log after log until it was a blazing inferno and the fire brigade had to be called. He was told by the management his presence was no longer desired.
He even took Mark to the pub aged twelve and got him pissed. He started the lad on half a shandy. It tasted like shampoo but Mark asked for another one, this time with a small lemonade top. Yuk, still tasted like shampoo. Right, Ollie thought, let’s give the little bugger some beer. He drank six pints of their best bitter. ‘I remember him driving me back home, and he kept looking at me because he couldn’t work out how I was fine – I was shit-faced. Back home I was puking in the bathroom and he was fussing around me giving me a blanket and I just wanted to be left alone to die.’
Jacquie never spoke to or lectured Oliver about his drinking. ‘It wouldn’t have entered my mind. I would have had a thick ear. In passing I might say, you’re not bloody pissed again.’ Often she’d join in. ‘One just went with the flow and tried to keep up.’ Ollie liked to have people around him when he drank, and he’d never crack open a bottle on his own. Nobody from his immediate family ever recalled seeing him do that. ‘He never, ever drank alone,’ confirms Jacquie. ‘He always had to have a drinking buddy, even if he had to pick one up on the way to the pub.’ Or drag poor old Bill Dobson out of bed or go round to David’s. ‘He used to wake us up, sometimes three or four in the morning,’ remembers David’s wife Muriel. ‘He’d break a window if we didn’t let him in.’ What was it that he was after? He feared being alone, that’s for sure, so was it purely for the company, somebody to talk to? Or, as David believes, wasn’t the reason all too obvious? ‘Most people who drink don’t do it by themselves. They always do it in the company of others because it gives them the feeling that they’re not the only one. It gets rid of the guilt feeling.’
All this raises the obvious question, was Oliver Reed an alcoholic? Of course, it depends how one defines alcoholism. To Mark it’s someone who wakes up in the morning and the first thing they think of is getting a drink down them; certainly that was not Oliver. ‘He loved it, had great fun with it, enjoyed the buzz of it, but it had to have a reason. So if there was a good enough excuse, like he had people around and they were up for having a drink, then off it would go.’
Like her mother, Sarah grew up never trying to stop Ollie drinking, and along with Mark is convinced her father was not an alcoholic. ‘Which some people find quite weird, but you never found empty bottles lying around. He could turn it on and off, that was the extraordinary thing, his willpower. I’ve never met anybody with such willpower as my father. He wouldn’t drink for days or months if he had to.’ What he’d do, then, was binge-drink, go off on benders, sometimes five days at a time, and then return to the land of sobriety. After these benders Ollie checked himself into what he called ‘the clinic’. He’d not leave his bedroom for sometimes upwards of three days, just lying in bed alone watching television and feasting on chocolate, ice cream, sardines on toast, and bottles of Lucozade. Eventually he would venture out, potter around the garden, and walk the dogs. It resulted in a very strange childhood for Sarah because there seemed to be no happy medium. If he wasn’t absent through filming Ollie was in drunk mode or being solitary and quiet. ‘I was too young to understand or question it, but I knew there was quiet time and there was crazy time, and not a lot in between. That was pretty much the pattern of his life. There were times I was disturbed, probably not by how much he drank, but by how it made him; if he was being unpleasant or embarrassing, then I’d wish he drank less, but I don’t think I ever questioned it.’
When he was drinking, it was a case of riding the wave with him. Sarah remembers one morning she and Mark came down for breakfast and Ollie had prepared apple juice; except it wasn’t: it was Calvados and apple juice. ‘So he was clearly pissed from the night before and that would just be it, you’d keep going. So, ten o’clock the next morning, Calvados, and you were on a roll.’ Other times it was best just to get out of his way. Those who lived with Ollie developed this inbuilt radar: they could walk into a room and sense where the energy level was. ‘I think both Mark and myself got that from a young age. We could walk in and go, OK, it’s a good one, it’s a bad one, it’s a fun one. Like most drinkers, there’s a good drunk and a nasty drunk, and he could be a nasty drunk, and in those cases we would literally go and hide.’
According to Michael Winner, ‘There was no greater pendulum swing in any human being that I’ve ever met than Oliver Reed sober to Oliver Reed drunk.’ The transformation when it happened was extraordinary. It was truly Jekyll turning into Hyde. What triggered it? It was like a Plimsoll line, that one drink, that one vodka and tonic too much and then there was this monster. ‘Ollie wasn’t an alcoholic,’ believes Murray Melvin. ‘But there was a need, because without it he was lovely. But that one drink and he had to hit somebody. He just had to hit somebody. He really was Jekyll and Hyde. You could almost see the change in him – ohh, that’s the one – and you knew to get out or, like a typhoon, you put the shutters down and hoped it blew over and your house was still standing at the end of it.’
Family and close friends could always tell when the switch had gone and Ollie was turning nasty. In fact they coined a phrase: Mr Nice and Mr Nasty. They might be at a restaurant with him and suddenly sense the shift in atmosphere. ‘Then Mickie and I would just say bye-bye and go,’ says David. ‘Because we knew within ten minutes the other character would come out. Oh dear, here comes Mr Nasty. You actually saw the change, it was physical.’ As Muriel says, ‘He was like Jekyll and Hyde, it was black and white with Ollie, there was no grey.’
In the morning, as with most drinkers, remorse and guilt would set in and he’d go to a florist and buy lots of bouquets and go round depositing them at houses, apologizing with that wonderful excuse ‘I’m sorry, I don’t remember’. ‘There were times when he wasn’t lovely and he could be troubled and awkward and stroppy,’ admits Mark. ‘My grandfather Peter used to come down and visit us and always made sure the car was aimed in the right direction and that he knew where his car keys were should he want to make his exit, because it wasn’t fun any more.’
It had become the habit, annually, to pack Oliver off to the Caribbean to get a bit of rest and recuperation. ‘I forget why I first did it,’ says David, and he doesn’t know whose idea it was. ‘But one winter, in between maybe girlfriends or wives, I sent him on holiday to Barbados. I put him on a plane and off he went.’
As he walked out of the airport looking for a cab, Ollie’s eyes fell on one particular taxi driver. His name was Ivan. ‘Right, Ivan, you are my driver whilst I’m here. You work for no one else. You work for me.’ That was the first year. The second year David got a phone call from Ollie saying, ‘Dave, I’m going to set up a taxi rank for Ivan.’ So they bought him some cars. ‘Ollie simply loved the man,’ says David. ‘He nicknamed him Dadi. And Dadi was mad on cricket, so one year Ollie flew him over for the Test Match at Lords.’
Ollie fell in love with Barbados. ‘It was the friendliness,’ says Sarah. ‘The culture, the rum shops. Just that raw humanity of people, kids playing in the street with a cricket bat.’ There was a place called Coconut Creek where he liked to stay and whenever David arrived for a visit the two brothers would swim across a cove to get a drink at a rather splendid hotel. But the water was over a coral reef that was razor-sharp. ‘It was one of Ollie’s party tricks to swim over this coral reef which, if you dropped down just a little bit, could slice you open,’ says David, who has never forgotten those holidays. Coconut Creek was so charming and unspoilt, with its bars on the beach with little straw roofs and houses on stilts to keep the rats out. He went back a few years after Ollie died. ‘Now it’s all concrete, full of hotels.’
Jacquie went there a few times too, and they rented a house on Gibbs Beach on the west coast. Nothing posh, it was more like a wooden shack with wood partitions dividing the rooms. Outside the door there was almost nothing for as far as you could see. ‘We used to walk for miles along that beach. That’s why he liked Barbados so much, he felt unthreatened there, relaxed.’
In spite of the island’s isolation, Ollie still cultivated a gang of friends he could have fun with. On The Hunting Party he had got friendly with a small-time American actor called Ritchie Adams, who’d often stay at Broome Hall while he was looking for work in London. Ritchie had just got hitched to a octogenarian millionairess and they were enjoying a honeymoon cruise. The ship came into Bridgetown, the bustling capital city of Barbados, and Ritchie heard Ollie was around, so left his new bride to have a quick drink. Predictably Ollie and his pals got Ritchie absolutely hammered and dumped him in a wheelbarrow to sleep it off. When he woke up the next morning the ship had sailed on to its next port of call. Panic-stricken, Ritchie got Ollie to drive him to the airport in order to catch it up, but Ollie deliberately bundled him on to a flight that went to the wrong island.
Ollie was sunning himself on the beach when a package arrived at his hotel. It was a script for a film called The Triple Echo. The role on offer was only a supporting character but the story was sufficiently intriguing and it also promised the chance of a rematch with Glenda Jackson. Set during the Second World War and based on the H. E. Bates novel, the film has Glenda playing a woman living alone who meets and falls in love with a young army deserter. Determined that he shouldn’t be found by the military authorities, she resorts to disguising the lad as her sister, a subterfuge that leads to tragedy when Ollie’s bullish sergeant major enters the scene.
As he neared the end of the script something brought Ollie up sharp. ‘It said I had to kiss a bloke while feeling his bollocks.’ It didn’t matter that his character had been deceived by the dragged-up deserter, it still meant wrapping his lips round a fella’s whistle. Ollie sent a rather urgent cable to the makers: ‘Unless the kiss is out I’m not doing the movie.’ A cable came back saying: ‘Kiss out. Come in.’
Ollie duly turned up for shooting at a remote farmhouse near Salisbury, and, acknowledging the film’s modest budget of £200,000, accepted a low fee. Glenda did likewise. It was the only thing the pair had in common, for their relationship, distant in the extreme, had not changed one iota since Women in Love. All of which left a young director called Michael Apted feeling very apprehensive, especially after meeting Ollie at a costume fitting. ‘He was very nice but clearly going to be a handful, very boisterous, lots of laughing and larking about, and I was nervous as shit about the whole thing.’
It wasn’t just the clash of personalities between Ollie and Glenda: the two actors had diametrically opposed ways of working, and Apted was often caught in the middle. ‘Coming from the theatre Glenda wanted to rehearse everything and have everything laid down, and then within two or three takes it was done, done beautifully. Oliver, on the other hand, would come in of a morning and not know what scene we were doing, let alone what it was about or what he said. So for me, on my first movie, this was terrifying. My first instinct was to think, well, this guy’s just a lazy slob, and some of that might have been true, but he brought incredible life and energy to the thing because he kind of discovered it on the spot, he was able to make use of the location or the set or whatever, he figured it out as we were going along.’ Glenda could see what was happening and gave Oliver space to do it. In other words, she compromised. ‘And if she hadn’t done that I don’t know where we would have been,’ says Apted.
Later to forge a considerable reputation as a director in Hollywood, Apted came from a career in television and so Ollie was the first pure film actor whom he’d ever worked with. ‘And although he was rather extreme he taught me huge amounts about how to prepare as a film actor, how to focus on the moment and be in the moment. That was a huge lesson and I never forgot it. A lot of people that I later worked with were from my school of thought, they liked to prepare things, as Glenda did, but then other people, from John Belushi to Tommy Lee Jones, they had a way of working that was very reminiscent of what I learned from Oliver. So he was profoundly important to me, probably as important as any actor I ever worked with.’
Ollie also left a huge impression on Brian Deacon, the young and inexperienced actor who played the deserter. Often during a scene Ollie would suddenly start improvising and there wasn’t a great deal you could do about it except try to keep up. ‘I was just out of drama school and weighed less than ten stone, so I don’t think this man with a forty-six-inch chest felt particularly threatened by me.’ Deacon found Oliver charming and well-mannered, but clearly identified a side to his nature, a dark side, that was fixated on experiencing violence for the sake of it, knowing he had people like Reg around to pull him out of situations if they got out of control. ‘Ollie was always looking to fight people. In our hotel one night there was a wedding reception – they must have been Scottish because there was an awful lot of guys wearing kilts – and Ollie got really excited about seeing if he could conjure up some guys from the crew because he said, “We’re gonna do the Scots.” He was going to go into this wedding reception and just pick a fight with any guy in a kilt. And he was relishing the idea and we had to say, “Don’t be ridiculous, Oliver, it’s somebody’s wedding. You can’t just barge in there.” That was the less attractive part of his character.’
It was a trait that had begun to emerge in Oliver’s teenage years and never really left him, these sudden explosions of pissed aggression. He’d flatten his nose down like a boxer and puff himself up like a peacock. Sarah remembers being in Dublin once with him in the early eighties and they were at the theatre. ‘And for some reason the guy in front of him really annoyed him – he was German, I think that was his problem – and all of a sudden Oliver leaped over the seats and grabbed him and it was like, right, that’s the end of that evening. And we literally left after that.’
One of Ollie’s favourite haunts of the late seventies and early eighties was Stringfellows nightclub in London’s Covent Garden, where he enjoyed a game he christened ‘Headbutting’. Each player was required to smash his head against his opponent until one or other of them collapsed or surrendered. A regular victim was The Who’s bass player, John Entwistle, who after being knocked out three times pleaded with the club’s owner, Peter Stringfellow, to either ban the game or bar Ollie.
Murray Melvin recalls returning with Oliver from a publicity launch somewhere and having a pleasant lunch at the airport while waiting for their flight. ‘And there was a chap who was a bit of a wide boy, a bit of a chancer, sitting opposite Ollie. And I don’t know what it was he said, I don’t know whether he referred to Josephine, but suddenly Ollie was up, grabbing the table, trying to get at this guy. And somebody said to this chap, “Go, just get out.” And we restrained Ollie and this chap just disappeared and we calmed Ollie down.’
Jacquie learned to live with these outbursts. One time Ollie had to go to London for specialist treatment on a bad back. ‘And because he was such a huge man, they had to have him sedated for three days before they could do anything.’ Afterwards Jacquie drove him back to Broome Hall. ‘I was terrified of driving Oliver, you can imagine, him shouting and screaming. And I was on this dual carriageway and he said to me, “Go on, overtake.” There was someone in front of me. “OVERTAKE!” he yelled. I said, “I can’t, I’m on the barrier.” He grabbed and pulled the steering wheel and of course we crashed into the barrier. “That’s it,” I said. “I’m getting out. I’m not driving.” And so even though he was still reeling from all the sedation and should not really have driven, Ollie drove them home.
Strangely, when he was drinking, Jacquie never felt things would get out of control because he’d have friends over and he’d either crash out or go off somewhere else, ‘So I never felt threatened.’ Carol Lynley is adamant that she never saw Ollie act violently towards anyone, drunk or sober. ‘Nor would I have been around if he was violent. I would have been out of there so quick.’
Tales of Oliver’s drinking had, of course, reached the ears of everyone working on The Triple Echo, Deacon included, of nights out on the town around the pubs of Salisbury. ‘One night ended up with some of the women working on the movie having their bras removed, burned in an ice bucket, and nailed to the wooden bar.’ As for Apted, he has no recollection of Ollie ever arriving on the set under the influence. ‘I may be wrong, but I don’t even remember him showing up late. He was pretty professional about the whole thing.’ Glenda does, however, remember one incident when perhaps the exertions of the night before had taken their toll. ‘We were shooting a scene and when the director called cut Oliver literally fell flat on his face, he was flat out on the floor. But you wouldn’t have known it from seeing the shot. He’d delivered his lines and played the scene perfectly.’
After a particularly strenuous day’s shoot Deacon walked into the hotel bar and saw Apted, Reg, cameraman John Coquillon and Ollie. ‘I went, whoops, and turned on my heels, but before I could get out I was hauled back in by Ollie.’
‘What do you want?’ he said, throwing his arms round the young actor.
‘I’ll have a half pint of Guinness, please.’
Ollie turned to the barman. ‘Right, half a pint of Guinness and then we’ll have five triple whiskies, please.’
‘Oh, I can’t drink that,’ said Deacon.
‘Come on, get it down you.’
It was a command intended for everyone to heed. ‘And it was so intimidating we all drank them,’ says Deacon. The drinking continued at a fearsome pace until Oliver insisted on taking everyone out for an Indian. Reg was driving the Roller and they all got in. At the restaurant Ollie ordered the meal and several bottles of wine. ‘He sent the wine glasses back, asking for half-pint tumblers, and was just tipping it straight in: “Get it down your neck,”’ remembers Deacon. ‘And we were completely smashed.’
Back at the hotel, Deacon got out of the car and walked straight into some glass doors. ‘I’m picked off the floor and hauled up to Ollie’s room because now we’re going to smoke some joints.’ Suddenly Ollie realized Apted and Coquillon had gone AWOL and went storming around the hotel looking for them. Deacon turned to Reg. ‘I’m going. I’m outta here.’
‘Ollie will be really pissed off when he comes back and doesn’t find you here.’
‘Reg, I’ve got to go.’
Deacon just about managed to drag himself back to his room and collapsed on the bed. The next thing he knew his alarm was going off; it was five o’clock in the morning. ‘I got into the bathroom and within about thirty seconds I was like a baby, it was projectile vomiting, made a complete mess of the place. I got in the shower and tried to get cleaned up and shaved my face and made a real mess of it, cut my chin, hopeless.’
Arriving at the location, a couple of the crew took to marching Deacon around a car park in an effort to straighten him out. Half an hour later a car came screeching to a halt outside the make-up caravan. ‘Michael Apted got out,’ says Deacon. ‘And literally crawled inside, on all fours. I don’t think he’d been to bed at all.’
Glenda was furious when she found out, grabbing hold of Deacon. ‘You stupid, stupid boy.’
‘What?’
‘Do you think it makes you more of a man going out and getting drunk with Ollie? Is that what a man is?’
‘Glenda, I had no choice. I was hauled . . .’
‘Of course you had a choice!’ And so it went on. She really tore into Deacon, who was left scratching his head about why he’d been singled out when both Apted and Coquillon could barely stand up. And there was Ollie, as bright as a button and walking about with a huge Cheshire-cat grin on his face. He’d certainly left his mark, which of course had been the whole point of the exercise. ‘That was in a sense my rite of passage with him,’ believes Apted.
Despite The Triple Echo failing to find an audience, Ollie remained enormously proud of it. Making his entrance in a tank churning up farm fields, he is the epitome of the macho army lout, and plays the role with just the right degree of humour, testosterone and menace. ‘I think The Triple Echo is a very under-recognized film and I think Oliver is particularly good in it,’ says Glenda. ‘I thought that he brought a lot of personal touches to his character, which were his own. I thought it was immensely layered.’
The film’s most memorable scene is the deserter’s near rape at the hands of the sergeant major during an army dance, shot in a real barracks. Both actors weren’t relishing shooting it, least of all Ollie, who, Deacon was told, had a bottle of vodka stashed away and had already downed half of it. Getting the snog removed had been a small victory, but Ollie was still required to throw Deacon hard up against a wall and get quite friendly: ‘Come on, girl, don’t you mess about, give us a little feel, eh.’ It was an incredibly brave scene to try, especially for an actor with a highly macho public image. ‘But that’s what was so appealing about Oliver,’ claims Apted. ‘He went for it 100 per cent. Despite all the bluster and the larking about, he did take the work seriously, he took the story seriously and in those scenes when he realizes he’s been duped he was truly terrifying. I really thought he was an incredibly interesting actor. And he clearly loved what he was doing. This was a small little film, he was probably making hardly any money, but he really got with it.’
It was at a press conference for The Triple Echo that Ollie’s most infamous party trick, that of taking out his dick in public, or as he cosily described it, ‘My snake of desire. My wand of lust. My mighty mallet’, first drew attention. It was something he was still doing as late as 1996, by which time he was referring to it as ‘a national institution’.
The questioning had turned to Burt Reynolds’s recent decision to pose naked in Cosmopolitan magazine. Ollie revealed he’d turned down a similar opportunity and when asked why replied that it was because his dick was too big to fit on the page. ‘Prove it,’ demanded an elderly female journalist on the front row. Without hesitation Ollie dropped his pants and flashed the end of his knob. ‘Why have you stopped?’ the woman demanded to know. ‘Madam. If I’d pulled it out in its entirety, I’d have knocked your hat off.’