During the winter at Broome Hall nothing very much went on in the garden, especially in the market garden. ‘It’s freezing, the ground’s solid, so nothing’s growing,’ Christensen told Ollie when he enquired one morning on the state of play. ‘Fancy a bit of heat then?’ Ollie said. ‘Wanna come out to Barbados?’ Christensen grabbed his passport and off they went. As they arrived at the hotel Ollie took Christensen to one side. ‘The barman at the restaurant knows who you are, you’re staying with me, you pay nothing here.’ And the holiday lasted three weeks. ‘I went out to Barbados with £45 spending money and came back with £55,’ says Christensen.
Paul Friday came along too, and Ollie boasted one night to the locals that he and Friday were top-notch darts players, foolishly as it turned out, because somebody set up a darts match with the island’s champions. Thinking it would be a few drinks and a bit of a laugh, they got a shock to see three hundred people and a local TV crew waiting for them. By a complete fluke they won, ‘Only because they were more pissed than us,’ said Ollie. The next day Christensen and Friday were told to be ‘on their best fucking behaviour’ because they’d all been invited to a barbecue. Ivan, Ollie’s driver on the island, took them to a beautiful villa that was discreetly tucked away and had a guard on the gate who was quite obviously wearing a piece. Christensen started to get a bit worried. ‘Anyway, we were let in and introduced to this middle-aged man, who was very pleasant. We had traditional food, it was a very nice evening. I was on my best behaviour obviously. And driving back with Ivan I asked, “What’s all the big deal about being on your best behaviour?” and Ivan replied, “I wouldn’t want you to insult the Prime Minister.”’
Another day Ollie took the group for a treat to Greensleeves, a very upmarket private estate fronting the beach. Almost immediately Oliver started to misbehave, climbing on to the flat roof of an outbuilding that overlooked the pool, while waiters tried to pull him down by one of his legs. Finally he got on to the diving board and, fully clothed, pretended he was going to jump in. Sitting nearby eyeing him up was an immaculately dressed woman, probably in her late fifties. When he saw her she said, ‘I will if you will.’ That was a red rag to a bull and Oliver leaped into the water. With that the woman stood up and executed a perfect swallow dive. ‘Give that woman a bottle of Dom Pérignon,’ Ollie announced. But the fun and games weren’t over. ‘Because then everyone else started to dive in too,’ remembers Paul Friday. ‘They were jumping off the diving boards. Nearly everyone in the restaurant ended up in the water. One broke his leg, a girl broke her ankle, another broke his arm. It was complete mayhem.’
During their stay HMS Fearless came into port and here Ollie executed one of his great wind-ups. The victim was Paul Friday, who always told Oliver that he could see his wind-ups coming a mile off. With the ship sitting in Coconut Creek, all the officers frequented the local bar and immediately recognized Ollie. Asked if he was on holiday, he replied that he and his men were diving for Sam Lord’s treasure. Now, Sam Lord was the island’s most infamous buccaneer in the early 1800s and lured ships laden with gold on to a reef where he and his men slit their throats and stole their booty, much of which, legend has it, still lies on the seabed. Without any prior warning Ollie introduced Paul Friday to the officers as one of the best divers in the Royal Navy, presently AWOL because Ollie was paying him so much. Invited aboard HMS Fearless and into the officers’ mess, Friday grew ever more anxious putting on the old naval act as he was subjected to numerous questions about this fictitious dive. ‘Then suddenly I’ve got this bloody diving officer coming on to my shoulder asking what sort of gases I’d be using to go down to this depth. And I’m thinking, what have I got myself into? Ollie’s going, “Oh, it’s top-secret, experimental stuff.” The evening went by, we had quite a bit to drink. The next thing, these two heavies come in and I’m grabbed hold of, taken out, and locked up. I’m in this cell all night thinking, I’ve talked myself into this. The next morning the door opens and there’s Ollie and Norse and Ollie says, “Gotcha!” The whole bloody lot of them on that boat knew what was going on apart from me!’
After Barbados Ollie flew alone to Los Angeles, where he booked in at the Beverly Wilshire. There he awaited David, who was flying over to negotiate some business; it also happened to be David’s fortieth birthday. Driven from the airport, David arrived at the Beverly Wilshire, where grand steps led up to the entrance, but there was no front door, nothing at all. ‘I thought, well, obviously the weather’s so good here you don’t need front doors. Only to find out later that Keith Moon had come visiting and driven up the steps and through the doors, smashed them, and his car ended up in the foyer of the hotel.’
On the morning of David’s birthday the two brothers met in the hotel bar. ‘What do you want to do then?’ asked Ollie.
‘I really don’t mind.’
‘I’ll tell you what, we’ll go out for a meal tonight.’
‘That sounds good.’
For the rest of the day they stayed in the bar, slowly making their way through several bottles of liquor, chatting, laughing and telling jokes. At one point David just happened to glance down at the end of the bar and thought he saw Keith Moon walk past an open door. He turned to Ollie. ‘Keith’s just come in.’
Ollie looked blankly at David. ‘No, no, Keith left days ago, he wouldn’t be here.’
Evening descended and remarkably both brothers were still standing, quite compos mentis actually. ‘OK, let’s go out,’ suggested Ollie. ‘I know somewhere to go. Let’s both have showers and meet down here in twenty minutes.’ David was in his room when the phone rang. It was Ollie. ‘Where are you?’
‘Ollie, it’s only been ten minutes. I’m in the middle of having a shower.’
‘For God’s sake, hurry up.’
At the allotted time David showed, only to see a huge banner spread across the bar: ‘Welcome to David’s 40th Birthday Party.’ Ollie had organized a huge surprise party in the main dining room, an opulently furnished space with flock wallpaper, chandeliers, the works. And there was Moonie, grinning from ear to ear. Ringo Starr was another guest. ‘I sat down at a table,’ recalls David, ‘and a very pretty girl was put beside me, so I started talking to her. She was at some university. About halfway through the meal she disappeared. Never mind, I thought. Then suddenly there was a fanfare and these huge doors opened and six chefs pull in this cake, which is almost up to the ceiling, about nine foot tall with layers going up and candles all round it. I was given a sword to cut it but as I approached the lid of the cake exploded and the girl who had been sitting beside me came out stark naked.’ It was Ollie’s idea to have the girl in the cake. He’d always heard about these girls jumping out of cakes, but never seen one.
Moonie, one surmises, had probably seen plenty of naked girls jumping out of cakes, jumping out of all sorts of things probably. But the sight of this particular girl set him off. What happened next David has never forgotten. ‘Keith leaped up the layers of the cake and tried to grab the girl, who made a run for it. At that point Keith started going mad: he got the sword and slashed at one of the chandeliers, which came crashing to the floor. Women were screaming, running out of the room, and goodness knows what. Then Keith got hold of this enormous great tablecloth and pulled the whole thing off and the crockery and soup tureens and everything were smashing on the floor. In doing this he’d cut his hand rather badly and blood was pouring out. The next minute he’s gone, with Ollie chasing after him. So I ended up talking to Ringo and he was telling me about how your nose gets delicate after you’ve been snorting for so long, when suddenly the doors opened and the police came in with truncheons and Ringo went, “Oh dear, here comes trouble.”’
It was at this point that David decided he’d better find Ollie. He was in the kitchen attending to Moonie, who was lying stretched out on the floor, blood everywhere. Ollie was holding his arm up, trying to stem the flow of blood, while balancing a whisky and soda. Then the paramedics arrived and got down on the floor by Keith’s head to ask, ‘Where does it hurt?’ And there’s Ollie spilling his Scotch over Keith, who’s going, ‘Aarrgghh!’ And the paramedics go, ‘Where’s the pain?’ After about ten minutes they realized this was a total fiasco and left. David ended up outside helping put Keith in his car and then watched it drive off. Meanwhile the kitchen door had slammed shut behind him, so he had to walk back in through the foyer. ‘By that time hotel security were in great evidence. I went back into the dining hall and there was Ollie sitting round a mountain of broken chairs, tablecloths covered in red wine, and shattered chandeliers. “That was quite a party, wasn’t it, David?” he said.’ Quite a bill too: Ollie had to pay £10,000 for the damage.
But Ollie and Moonie weren’t finished yet. Their next stunt was kidnapping David Puttnam. The British film producer had just arrived in LA and was stepping out of the Beverly Wilshire on his way to a business meeting when Keith’s Rolls-Royce slammed on its brakes in front of him, a door burst open, and he was grabbed and thrown into the back. The next thing Puttnam knew he was being driven fast along the Pacific Coast Highway. ‘It was mad,’ he later recalled. ‘They were laughing, it was stupid and it was edgy. I knew I could handle Keith [Puttnam had recently worked with Moon], but the two of them together I certainly couldn’t handle.’
In comparison with their antics on Tommy, Ollie and Moonie’s escapades in Los Angeles seemed to have a much darker tone to them, a result no doubt of Keith’s mental state at the time. Not only was he fighting alcoholism, but he was increasingly withdrawing into himself. Ollie was one of only a select few Keith allowed to visit him at his LA pad. They’d spend hours in the evening just sitting and listening to music, often in silence, not talking. Ollie was only too painfully aware of the change in his friend, that things were flat-lining, the clown’s make-up had smeared.
Sometimes the old Keith would resurface. One evening Oliver was attending a film premiere downtown, something he despised, but he had two lovely ladies accompanying him, so things weren’t all that bad. Resplendent in a dinner jacket, he walked out of his hotel to get into a limo, a multitude of flashbulbs exploding around him, when – thwack – something hit him in the face. It was moist and tasted of lemon: it was a custard pie. After removing the mess from his eyes and noticing that his lovely lady friends had suffered collateral damage, he then had a card pressed into his hand by a man. It read: ‘Pie In The Face International – you have been selected by Mr Keith Moon to become a member. Here is your certificate.’ Ollie burst out laughing.
Film director Peter Medak recalls standing outside the Beverly Wilshire when a limousine pulled up, the door opened and somebody on all fours backed out on to the pavement on his hands and knees. ‘And it was Oliver. He’d arrived at the airport at four o’clock that afternoon and 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 hell-raisers. Oliver for no reason would start a fight. If he didn’t like someone’s face or someone said the wrong thing – boom.’
Ollie also bumped into Yvonne Romain and her husband Leslie Bricusse, who had a house in LA and often hosted Sunday lunch parties for Brits working in Hollywood. Ollie, who hadn’t seen Yvonne since their Hammer days, was invited and found himself among a who’s who of British film stars. ‘It was amazing,’ remembers Bricusse. ‘There was Ollie, Roger Moore, Mike Caine, Sean Connery, you name it. Sadly no one took a photograph.’
Bricusse recalls another memorable Sunday. He was just on his way to have lunch with Timothy Dalton at a famous pub on Sunset Boulevard called the Cock and Bull, when Ollie called and asked if he could tag along. Bricusse was only too happy, so called the Cock and Bull and the manageress told him, ‘I’m sorry, Mr Bricusse, but Mr Reed is barred. The last time he was here he threw the barman through the back of the bar and destroyed it. So he’s not allowed in here. I’m sorry.’ Bricusse reassured the manageress that both he and Timothy Dalton would be responsible for Oliver and she finally relented. ‘So we had lunch, it was very nice, and Oliver was very well behaved. I had a four o’clock business meeting, so I left Tim to look after Ollie. When I got home later that day the phone rang, it was the manageress of the Cock and Bull. He did it again, three minutes after I left, knowing the circumstances – and it was the same barman!’
The reason for Ollie’s lengthy presence in LA was that film offers had all but dried up in Britain and he now had no choice but to go where the work was. David had managed to get mega-agency ICM to put one of their best agents on to the job of looking after Ollie. ‘And bless her, she came home with the goodies.’
Ollie’s first Hollywood-based movie was Burnt Offerings. Shot early in 1976, this adequate haunted-house chiller did modestly well at the box office and was from writer-director Dan Curtis, best known for his cult TV series Dark Shadows. Ollie was teamed with Karen Black, a hot actress at the time after roles in The Great Gatsby (1974) and Nashville (1975), and the legendary Bette Davis. His admiration and respect for Miss Davis were unqualified, and on screen it’s a joy watching them bounce off each other and share some choice barbed dialogue. Off set, things were a little different, with Miss Davis declaring Oliver ‘possibly one of the most loathsome human beings I have ever had the misfortune of meeting’. An overreaction for the press perhaps, since at the close of filming she presented him with a signed pen and ink drawing of herself which he proudly displayed in his study. What’s true is that Ollie did send her round the bend a few times. Miss Davis used to have her evening meal sent up to her hotel room on a food trolley. Returning from a drinking session one night, Ollie deployed the trolley as a skateboard, hurtling down the corridor and waking her up. She also complained to the producer about his nightly drinking ritual and said that he would arrive on the set in the morning the worse for wear. ‘That man seems to be perpetually on a hangover,’ she blasted.
Karen Black refers to Oliver as ‘a guy’s guy’ and remembers one morning having to do a scene where his character is attempting to drive away from the house during a torrential rain storm. ‘And these rain machines can drench you in thirty seconds. I don’t think Ollie had slept all night, so there he was in the car completely drenched with the wind machines howling outside and he was shaking, he was visibly shaking. But he kind of used that for the scene: his character was supposed to be distraught. It was very bewitching to watch, it was quite brilliant.’
Often before scenes, Karen remembers, Ollie would ‘get seriously wired-up’, but she also found that sometimes when he fluffed a line he’d very subtly and nervously chastise people for standing in his eyeline. ‘But the truth was, in my perception, he just forgot his lines and he didn’t want to say, sorry, let’s do that again, so he would blame the first person he saw standing there.’ That insecurity again: Oliver was desperate to make a good impression on his first American movie. Karen saw it more as being childish, a trait that jockeyed for space with his chauvinism in her estimation of Ollie. Her description of a chauvinist is a man who can’t tolerate it when a woman takes a point of view and can’t be moved off it, not because she’s stubborn but just because that’s her position. Karen remembers one scene with the two of them swimming in an outdoor pool and Ollie had placed his face on the camera side of hers. On the next take she said she was going to put her face at the forefront of the camera this time. During the shot Ollie did everything he could to prevent her. ‘But I held my position, and he got up right out of the swimming pool and he had to take a very long walk because he was so infuriated. But I must say I liked him, he made me laugh. But I don’t think he paid much attention to me at all. I think if I asked him the colour of my eyes he never would have known.’
That chauvinism reared its head in spectacular fashion during a memorable appearance on Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show. Carson had steered Ollie on to one of his favourite subjects, women, and good ol’ Ollie didn’t hold back, going into misogynist overload and elaborating on his theory that, underneath all the political beliefs and talk of equality, women really wanted to be in the kitchen with their pots and pans. Fellow guest Shelley Winters, a staunch women’s libber, could contain herself no longer and poured her drink over Ollie’s head. It’s a great television moment and Ollie handles it perfectly, not rising to the bait but behaving like the perfect English gentleman. Carson’s face throughout is a picture.
Reporters always knew they could get good copy out of Ollie by asking him to discuss his attitude towards women, because invariably he came across as a male chauvinist pig of the Jurassic era. Of course, most of the time he knew exactly what he was doing by suggesting that a woman’s proper place was on her hands and knees scrubbing the floor. ‘In return I feed them, wine them, make them laugh and give them a punch on the nose and a good kicking when they need it,’ he wrote in his autobiography as if it was some kind of manifesto. Such statements were nearly always intended to get a reaction, and to his mind it was great if at the same time they also pissed off the dreaded women’s libbers, a breed he genuinely despised. ‘I don’t like to sit around listening to these stupid women’s libbers, who are anyway eventually going to be fucked to death by some big marine, and enjoy every moment of it.’ But, as Simon admits, this horseplay wasn’t wholly an act. ‘I think fundamentally this chauvinism was there and then he would use it as a weapon to shock.’ Jacquie agrees. ‘As far as women were concerned he genuinely thought he was superior.’
At Broome Hall Jacquie time and again wished she could join in the fun with the boys more often, but instead she was usually consigned to the kitchen with the other women drinking Blue Nun round the table. ‘It really was quite Victorian when women disappeared while the men went to smoke their cigars in the drawing room.’ Ollie was old-fashioned in other ways, demanding Jacquie give up her dancing career, which she did. ‘His mentality was, you don’t work, you’re here twenty-four hours for me.’ She was also forced to drop some of her friends or he made it awkward for her to see them. ‘My father was quite controlling,’ admits Sarah. ‘He did tend to control the women in his life and he did like to control his children.’
This level of control reached absurd heights during Jacquie’s time with Ollie. On holiday, for example, she wasn’t allowed to wear a bikini: it had to be a one-piece. All this derived no doubt from Ollie’s own insecurity. Often he was guilty of misinterpreting situations, especially when he was drunk. ‘I might be talking to someone,’ says Jacquie. ‘And it could be a friend, a person he knew, and they’d make a joke or something and I’d laugh. Well, that was like a red rag to a bull. He’d go, “Leave her alone” or “Get out!” And the poor guy hadn’t done anything. He was very, very possessive. He had to possess someone completely.’
It’s amusing to discover that Ollie once confronted Carol Lynley, complaining that he’d been referred to as a misogynist in a magazine article. ‘You don’t think I’m a misogynist, do you?’ He seemed genuinely surprised by the notion. This in spite of the fact that he regularly came out with gems like: ‘Clever women make me apprehensive. Women are not thinking vessels. They are vessels for a man’s sex and his children.’ Or this description of his ideal woman: ‘A deaf and dumb nymphomaniac whose father owns a chain of off-licences.’ The BBC was once bombarded with angry phone calls from housewives after he took part in the Radio 4 chat show Start the Week and suggested a woman should behave like a nun by day in the kitchen and a whore at night in bed.
Such trivializing of women appears at odds with the impeccable manners he always displayed when in their presence. ‘I may be a bastard but I’m a polite bastard,’ he once said. If a woman came into the room he always stood up, always, and that was with him right the way throughout his life. ‘His manners, when he was deciding to act in that way, were outrageously correct,’ says David. ‘He would exaggeratedly get up, he would make an absolute feature of getting up.’ It was the same if a woman left or returned to a table at a restaurant. ‘And if it was a table of twenty people he was standing up every five minutes, a bit like a yo-yo,’ jokes Mark. Sometimes he would open a door and a woman would walk through and he’d say, ‘I beg your pardon,’ and she’d say, ‘I didn’t say anything,’ and he’d reply, ‘I’m so sorry, I thought you said, “Thank you.”’
These gentlemanly characteristics and good manners, harking back to a bygone age, added immeasurably to Oliver’s personal charm and were part of what Mark believes made him so endearing to the opposite sex. ‘Women like a naughty boy, but Ollie had that very smooth, gentlemanly veneer that had a naughtiness underneath it which crackles, which is exciting, which is attractive.’
It’s undeniable that Ollie was far more comfortable in the company of men than of women, but he was capable of both affection and great love for a woman. ‘He certainly loved me,’ says Jacquie. ‘Women as a whole, though, I don’t think he liked them as a species. But, in a funny sort of way, he needed a companion of the female kind, both physically and emotionally.’ Carol Lynley believes it runs much deeper and that, rather than a general dislike of women, he felt anger towards his mother. Certainly Oliver blamed Marcia for the break-up of her marriage to his father. ‘And he held a score against her all his life,’ says David. The fact that she was never around much during Oliver’s childhood may also have contributed to his insecurity and to his lack of trust of women. Carol Lynley remembers only a few instances when Oliver brought up his mother in conversation, and when he did the anger was tangible. ‘I got the impression he didn’t seem to like her very much. So I don’t think Ollie disliked women, I think he was still angry at his mother and it came out like that.’