Articles/Interviews

OLIVER REED TELLS WILL TUSHER

He doesn't choose the safest audiences for his most outrageous confessions. You have to give Oliver Reed that. You don't have to listen to his friends or read his clippings to validate his taste for combat.

Oliver has a compelling taste for swordsplay, real and verbal. You can't escape the uneasy feeling that one or the other, or both, could in some bizarre way prove the death of him on day.

Yes, Oliver lives dangerously. And it is questionable that he would find life bearable under any other terms.

We were sitting in the sunwashed Garden Room of the old Claremont Hotel. It was mid-afternoon in Oakland, California, and the dining room echoed to the residual dish clatter of the waning lunch hour. A few minutes earlier, we had been joined by a pretty, animated young British woman, who, it became immediately clear, took an undisguised fancy to keeping a protective eye on Oliver.

Jacqueline Darrell has been his lady for eight years. As is her right and preference, she goes everywhere with him. That is, everywhere permitted by circumstances that include the presence of their winsome six-year-old daughter, Sarah, who also was along. They no longer travelled with a nanny who would babysit for Sarah around the clock, so Jacqueline's freedom - and availability to be with Ollie at all times - was drastically restricted.

I had made the suggestion that despite Oliver's twinkling guilty pleadings to be an inveterate ladies' man, he was, at heart, a closet monogamist. Eight years with the same lady, albeit without the compulsion of a wedding licence, would certainly seem to argue for that proposition.

After a long, stunned silence - a state to which he is not frequently or readily reduced - Ollie acknowledged the allegation obliquely. Jackie, who can into Oliver's life when she was a dancer in Oliver!, attentively monitored Oliver's reply, a fact that did not restrain him from the audacity of speaking of his ladies in the plural.

"I like my ladies to behave like a nun in the streets," he said favouring Jackie with a boyishly warning glance, "to be an angel to my friends and a whore in be. And if I expect that of my ladies, I will always live in the closet."

It is not always possible to tell when Oliver is indulging in half put-on and when he is being literal. The two worlds keep merging, fantasy mixed with reality in his verbal blender - just as they do in the Don Quixote existence in which he ceaselessly titls at sham and irritation, real and imaginary.

He signalled the waitress for another wine, then excused himself to rebuke the maitre d' for permitting his guests to be served bloody Marys that were scarcely bloody enough. The wanderings did not derail his train of thought.

"I love to stand in the cupboard, watching, actually," he mused, recalling the paucity of feminine companionship when he did a turn in the British Army in the mid-Fifties. "We could never afford to buy a hooker for each of us, so we used to all donate a certain amount of money, and one of us would the get the hooker. We used to toss a coin to see which lucky fellow would get the hooker. Then the rest of us would hide in the closet. So the fellow who was fortunate enough to get the lady knew we were in the cupboard, and the cupboard used to rock onto the floor."

Oliver's mischievous hazel eyes sparkled with relived delight as he recounted the story. Even Jackie seemed to fin it amusing. It was a warm, lazy afternoon in Oakland, and everyone in the Garden Room was dressed casually - T-shirts, Hawaiian shirts, blouses. Informality was the uniform of the day... with the exception of Oliver Reed, who obstinately wore a handsome, vested tweed suit with a carnation in his lapel.

The vested suit and the carnation are his trademarks. He wears them almost always - although, to be sure, they make uncommonly frequent trips to the cleaners because of his predilection, at moments of whimsy or depression, to lift a glass of water as high as his arm can reach and pour its contents over his head. Seemingly it helps when a shower is not too handy.

I met Oliver when he was making his first film in America - Burnt Offerings, co-starring Bette Davis and Karen Black. The recognition on foreign shores brings delight to Oliver, who loves the aura of aristocracy that comes from what he does on the screen as much as he loves what he does off the screen. For that, not women, he cautions, really is his consuming passion, his most constant love.

"I will move wherever the film industry is," Oliver says quite earnestly, "if I'm bludgeoned out of a particular situation, hopefully I will find another where I'm allowed to act or to be involved in the movie industry, because that happens to be my great love. I prefer the movie industry to most women." He caught a sharp glance from Jacqueline.

"Most women," he re-emphasised. "There's one that's very special to me."

Ollie is a man who can accommodate a variety of love affairs simultaneously - a compulsive passion for pranksterism, love of ladies, love of the sauce, love of brawling, love verbal jousting, even love of country and countryside.

As far as his love of jokes goes, there is, for just one of many illustrations, the time Oliver went into a restaurant, ordered a sundae from a waitress who kept him under suspicious surveillance ... and then he dumped the ice cream right on his head.

"I'm only full of un," he says almost contritely. "Whatever I do, I'm sorry if I upset you. I only do it to watch people's faces. I did it to watch her face. As you can imagine, a waitress doesn't see that too often. I just liked to look at her face - and her face was amazing."

But the sundae-dumping episode, as it turned out, was only the beginning of a not untypical Oliver Reed night on the town. It is not likely that the tale could be recycled in narrative more revealing of mood and incident than his own. It is no idle boast when Oliver suggests that he has sensitivities to the feelings of others, even to the impact of his shenanigans on the forgiving friends and protectors with whom he travels. On this particular evening, he was being chauffeured by a friend, who drove him around town at the wheel of a vintage Rolls-Bentley by which he put much store.

"I thought it would be discourteous of me to sit in his motor car and drip ice cream," Oliver says, not unreasonably. "So I jumped into the bay (fully clothed) and I washed the ice cream off. Now I'm soaking wet and it's saline water, and he's worried about his leather. He didn't say anything. He was too polite, I could tell."

So when the car stopped for a red light, Oliver thoughtfully jumped out and made tracks for a store in which he thought he'd spied some Haitian art. He thought it would be a good thing to buy what he perceived to be an attractive Haitian painting, and he remembered to get some money from Jacqueline, who wouldn't have missed this - or any other - escapade of Oliver's for anything. What he didn't seem to remember was that he still had a flagon of wine in his hand, one shoe missing, and that he was still soaking and dripping wet!

When he announced his intention to purchase the Haitian painting, the storekeeper icily informed him that it was not, in point of fact, a Haitian painting. Oliver was not that easily put off. He insisted he knew a Haitian painting when he saw one, and the clerk said he'd be happy to sell a Haitian painting if he had one. "We only sell prints, sir", the man said. "That is a print, and it is not a Haitian print."

As this point, Ollie realised that he had become the centre of attention, and not because people recognised him as the star of films.

"I saw people look around at me," he grins impishly. "I had only one shoe on. I was soaking wet, and I had the win in my hand. They thought I was a wino. I said, 'Listen, I've got the bread.' Then people began to whisper. The he ignored me and walked away from me completely."

Oliver couldn't imagine for the life of him why people kept staring at him. He gave acquiring the Haitian painting as a lost cause and went outside where he had left the Rolls-Bentley waiting.

"Of course, the traffic was piled up," he vouchsafes, "and the car got embarrassed and drove away, so nobody knew who I was."

"I stopped some people in the street, still with the flagon of wine, soaking wet and with a handful of dollars and one shoe. I said 'Excuse me. Have you seen a black Rolls-Bentley driving up and down the road here at all?' They would all ignore me and walk completely away, and not talk to me.

"Then two young hippie kids came on, drinking from bottles. I said 'Excuse me. Nobody wants to talk to me'. They laughed. I said 'Have you seen a black Rolls-Bentley anywhere?' And they said 'Yes, it's just gone around the block. There it is.' Then it came up. I got into the car and went (indicating a lusty cheer) to the fellow in the art shop, and that was it."

With Oliver Reed it is constantly like that. He was born to swim upstream against choppy water, and he's always making waves - always with a smile and a twinkle in those all-knowing eyes. He is the archetype of what a movie star once was supposed to be, and, perhaps, never really was. But he's determined to give it an honest shot - even if he self-destructs.

He knows where it's at and he knows where he's at. Perhaps that is why he has so little patience for those who constantly complain that stars are paid extravagantly beyond their worth. "Let's face it," Oliver implores. "We are dream makers. The writers get an enormous amount of money. The people that own the cinema get enormous amounts of money. Why, simply because the actor spends his money and is in the public eye, should he be singled out as the one who's being paid exorbitantly?"

He looks at you like a wounded springer spaniel. "If we cannot live like stars - and that's what the public wants and what they want to go and see - what sense does it make? So many big actors have gone broke keeping up their public images, living in expensive hotels, driving around in expensive cars, dressing expensively, drinking expensively. That's what the public wants to see. That's the majesty of cinema!"

And Oliver Reed, glory to his vanishing breed, is eagerly willing to go indulging all these colourful excesses and to let the public see him for the marvellous overgrown boy he is determined to be. He is not of the common cut.