In the autumn of 1975, when Oliver agreed to appear in the comedy western The Great Scout & Cathouse Thursday, he faced the challenge of sharing the screen with a man whose hell-raising and boozing matched his own: Lee Marvin.
‘You know, Oliver, that Mr Marvin enjoys a drink.’ The voice belonged to the film’s English producer, Jules Buck, who was in the limo with Ollie that was taking him to Los Angeles airport to catch his flight to Mexico. ‘Could I ask you as a great favour to calm it down, because Lee’s terribly difficult?’
‘Of course. I quite understand,’ said Ollie, stifling a burp. ‘You can count on me to do all in my power to keep Mr Marvin away from that disgusting liquor.’
‘Oh, and may we ask you to do the same?’ said Buck.
Ollie puffed himself up with fake indignation. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, er, I understand that you have a certain reputation for, well, how can I put this, you know, for having a few drinks at night and, you know, getting into fights.’
Ollie’s face was one of alarm and bewilderment. ‘What! How dare you! Stop the car! Let me out – I’m going back to England.’
A volley of profuse apologies followed. Buck hadn’t really meant what he said, oh no, and yes, of course he trusted him completely, oh yes. Ollie must have revelled in watching his producer squirm in his seat. It was only later, talking to Marvin, that Ollie heard that Buck had told him exactly the same thing.
The car pulled up outside the airport hotel and Ollie walked inside. Marvin hadn’t arrived yet, or so he thought, then someone pointed to an object asleep outside on a bench which stirred when prodded by an assistant. Wearing a baggy pair of jeans, mangy shirt and shabby sports jacket, Marvin strolled into the Departures lounge, looking like a crumbled wad of ten-dollar bills. And there was Ollie, dressed in a smart Dougie Hayward suit. ‘How do you do? Pleased to meet you, I’m sure,’ he said, in his best Brideshead Revisited voice. Marvin was genuinely taken aback. ‘I was expecting to meet up with this actor who was supposed to be Britain’s hell-raiser and what do I see but this tailor’s dummy in a pinstripe suit looking more like a fucking banker.’
During the flight Ollie and Lee were as good as their word and declined offers of beer and spirits, instead drinking orange juice. Things changed when they hit Durango. High up in the Sierra Madre mountains, the city of Victoria de Durango had long been acknowledged as a perfect location for making westerns, despite its remoteness. Back in the seventies there was just one flight a day to Los Angeles; that was the only means of getting there and the only communication with the outside world. ‘It really was a hick town,’ recalls David Ball, the film’s accountant. ‘There was no tarmac on the street and there were potholes that you could lose a car in. It really was a funny old place and very much bandit country. Our member of the secret police allocated to us by the Mexican government, who we made our transportation captain, gave me a gun on my first day out there. “What am I going to do with this? I’m from England,” I said. “You are best to have this, señor,” he replied. “Because down here banditos.”’
Ollie considered Marvin ‘Mr America’ and claimed to have ‘crossed the Atlantic to challenge him for his crown’. It didn’t take them long to decide to have a drink one evening, once the producer was safely tucked up in bed. ‘Well, what are we going to have?’ asked Ollie.
‘We’re in Mexico, we’ll drink fucking tequila,’ Marvin replied.
‘Let’s not waste time, then,’ said Ollie as he poured himself half a pint of the stuff, took a handful of salt and a lemon, smeared the glass with it, and drank it down in one.
Marvin watched this, said, ‘If you’re just going to fuck around, I’m not playing,’ and went to bed.
When the drinking contest proper was finally arranged, co-star Strother Martin was elected referee. ‘Marvin was the champ and had the privilege of calling the shots,’ said Ollie. It was to be vodka on the rocks, and they were knocked back, line after line, until Ollie emerged victorious after a reported ten hours. ‘He was as proud as punch about that,’ remembers Simon. ‘And he rang me about three in the fucking morning, slurring, “I want to tell you that Lee Marvin’s given me his drinking cloak, and he’s now under the table. He’s under the table as I’m talking to you now, and I’ve got his cloak.” So they’d obviously had a monumental session. Getting Lee Marvin’s drinking cloak was almost like getting an Oscar for Ollie.’
Respectful of his drinking prowess, Ollie was also a fan of Marvin the actor and had seen all his films. He was the prime reason for taking on what turned out to be a disappointing film in which, for some reason, Ollie was playing a whisky-soaked, gonorrhoea-ridden Indian. It’s a marvellously inventive and funny performance but you can’t help thinking while watching it that Ollie was miscast. The plot has him and Marvin’s grizzled frontiersman out to reclaim a lost gold mine from villainous Robert Culp.
David remembers just how thrilled his brother was about working with Marvin but couldn’t help feeling at the time that producer Jules Buck was ‘very, very mad’ to team the two of them together in the same movie. Incredibly Durango survived – look it up on Google Earth, it’s still there – but it was touch and go for a while. The crew were housed in a hotel called the Campo Mexico, a series of chalets on the northern edge of the city. Ollie and Marvin, though, were allotted houses, but most evenings Ollie ventured to the Campo to drink with the crew. ‘And Ollie’s drink was six bottles of Domecq, Mexican white wine,’ recalls David Ball, who along with Ollie was one of the few Brits on a crew largely made up of locals and Americans. Ball is a chief witness to the shenanigans and wildness that went on in Durango with Ollie. ‘As people came into the bar he’d invite them over, so the table would just get bigger and bigger, and Ollie would order six bottles of Domecq and, irrespective of what you drank, if you were sitting with Ollie you drank Domecq white wine. And they couldn’t chill it fast enough.’
One night Ball’s girlfriend arrived from London and they were part of Ollie’s table, cracking jokes and having a laugh. Six bottles of Domecq, please. Then suddenly Ollie turned to Ball and said, ‘Goodnight, Dave.’
‘Oh, goodnight, Ol. You going? See you tomorrow.’
‘No, I meant you. Off you go.’
Ball grew anxious. ‘Listen, Ol, we’re all having a drink here, we’re all getting a bit lathered. If I’ve said something that may have upset you, it was certainly not intentional, so please forgive me.’
‘Oh no, no, no, no, you’re all right, mate. The thing is this, I’m going to smash this fucking place up in ten minutes and I wouldn’t like your good lady to get hurt. So better go.’
‘Good night, Ol,’ said Ball, and he and his partner left. ‘And he did: he fucking threw a table through a plate-glass window. And they had to board it up.’
The following evening Ball was sitting there with his girlfriend and in walked Oliver. Pleasantries were exchanged. And then this little waiter came up to him. His hands were shaking and he was holding a small piece of paper. ‘What’s this?’ asked Ollie. ‘It’s probably the invoice for the damage, Ollie, you did last night,’ said Ball. Ollie looked at the bill – it was something like a couple of hundred dollars – pulled out some money, gave the waiter an extra $50, and ordered six bottles of Domecq. ‘That was class,’ says Ball. ‘Pure class.’
Ball first met Ollie at Los Angeles airport, but it was Reg he got to know first, both being cockneys. Ball saw first-hand exactly how Reg operated in the evenings with Ollie, how he kept him out of trouble and also indulged his excesses. If Ollie wanted to smash a place up, Reg wouldn’t stop him. ‘If that’s what you want to do, you want to let off steam, fine,’ he’d say. And then when Ollie was done, Reg was on hand if there were any repercussions. ‘Reg knew that Ollie was a leery git sometimes when he went out on the booze. Reg was the safety barrier.’ It was needed sometimes, because in bars or clubs there would be a bit of a fracas to start with but then things quietened down and they’d be left pretty much alone. ‘The word went out very quickly,’ says Ball. ‘Ollie and Reg roll into town, they put their stamp down and that’s it, you don’t fuck with them, you really don’t fuck with them. I mean, Ollie was strong, but Reg was something else. But you’d always find that, if they did cause a bit of damage, there would be a couple of hundred bucks over the bar to sort it before they left.’
Ball was also privy to the playfulness that existed between the two men. One day on the set Reg bought Ollie a piglet and left it in the bathroom of his location trailer with a pink bow tied around its neck. Ollie kept it as a pet in his rented house, even teaching it how to play hide and seek. ‘At three o’clock in the morning you could hear Ollie and this little piglet running all around the house together,’ remembers Ball.
One afternoon news reached the crew of a terrible accident. A production driver had to collect someone at the airport and, passing through a village, inadvertently ran over a little boy and killed him. Ball was asked to get a thousand dollars in an envelope, which he did, and give it to the associate producer. ‘What’s it for?’
‘This has got to go to the chief of police to hush it up.’
‘But it was an accident,’ said Ball.
‘Yeah, but this is how it works down here.’
The next day at lunch Ollie announced they were holding a collection for the dead boy and threw a couple of hundred bucks on the table. ‘Right, Lee,’ he said. ‘You give me two hundred, come on you’ve got it, give me the fucking money. Come on you, Strother, give me two hundred. Robert, come on, come on, everybody.’ By the end Ollie had a bundle of cash and as a result the Americans on the crew, instead of giving a dollar or two dollars, were handing over tens and twenties. Ball reckons the dead boy’s family received something like the equivalent of twice their annual income. ‘And Ollie was the one who kicked it off. He was the one that forced people to dig deep into their pockets. That’s how big-hearted he was. Because if you animated Ollie to do something for you he would do it 101 per cent. That’s what he was, Mr 101 Per Cent.’
Amid all this a film did actually get made and the chemistry between Ollie and Marvin is terrific, even if Lee was pretty much pickled most of the time, according to Ball. ‘His wife Pamela had to physically restrict the amount he could drink because he only needed to sniff the bottle and he was gone, more or less.’ This isn’t to imply that Marvin had reached a point in his life and career where he was a walking coma patient, but Ball does remember Ollie sometimes goading the veteran star to get a performance out of him. ‘He’d push him, he’d say, “Come on, Marvin for fuck’s sake, can’t you do better than that!” Those were great days. You looked forward to going on the set because you didn’t know what Ollie was going to do. He did something new every day. Wonderful, wonderful man. And probably the most professional actor I’ve worked with in forty years in the business and I’m putting him up against people like Burt Lancaster and Rod Steiger. He would always, always get blind drunk with Reg but in the morning would be on the set at six and do the scene in take one while Marvin was still learning his words. They don’t make ’em like that any more.’