Articles/Interviews

OLIVER REED

I discovered Oliver Reed was in Beverly Hills after a friend arranged for a pie to be thrown in Oliver's face. So I phoned Oliver at his hotel, he invited me to dinner - and we did this interview in the bar beforehand. Oliver Reed has always seemed rough, tough and unendingly butch - so I was surprised to find him formal, frostily polite - rather like the head boy of a superior public school.

 

A woman is good in bed if she accepts the fact that she is going to be fucked. She is the receiver, the vessel, and provided that a woman understands that she is going to be penetrated, that she will always be fucked, then a man can have a proper sexual relationship with her.

I am very Victorian in my habits. I have never ever in my life been interested in anything small - in intellect, ideology, sociology, politics, in motor cars, hotel bills, in drinking habits, and certainly not my ladies. My ladies should be luscious. My ladies should be voluptuous. I like large asses. I prefer large vessels, but not empty vessels. The fashion for thin ladies is only recent. The Pre-Raphaelite, full-hipped ladies of Holman-Hunt were my kind of woman. Those used to be the fashionable style of woman, not the wishy-washy, complacent, high-titted society ladies.

Complacency makes a woman bad in bed. I can't tell if a woman is good just by looking at her. But one of the first signs of the woman who might be good is that she has made an effort for the man, that before seeing him she brushes her hair, puts all that shiny stuff on her lips, wears a fresh frock, cover herself with scent, then rushes out to meet him, and pretends that she is a lady.

Age makes a woman good in bed. A boy of seventeen wants to go to bed with a woman of twenty-seven to feel that an older woman is teaching him to make love. A man in his thirties and forties needs the complacency of knowing he can cope with a forty-year-old woman, but at the same time still retains the arrogance of a man who loves to tell himself he has copulated with a woman of under twenty-five.

Romance matters: those mornings with toast and marmalade in bed, when the woman gets back to bed with you and reads the papers. And there are toast crumbs in the bed, and she is very warm, breathing on your shoulder. So you smile and you wake up twenty minutes before the pubs open and she puts on some Mulligatawny soup in the kitchen, and you fall into the bath naked and she falls out of the kitchen naked. Then she puts on a clean frock and you go and play darts in a pub that is full of smoke and you know that you have just left toast crumbs in your bed. That is romance. The romance of going out to an Indian meal, then the movies, and after that, making love for the rest of Sunday. I think that is romance that has to be perpetuated through Monday and Tuesday, and I am no literate enough to understand what happens beyond Wednesday.

I don't think a woman would ever refuse something I wanted in bed. But I think that a woman is possibly less good if she asks for what she wants in bed. A woman always wants to be dominated in bed, but is afraid to admit it. So she says, 'I want more' and shuffles around the bed, because she has read lots of cheap literature which says that a man is going to ejaculate eight times during the evening if he is James Bond, and no fewer than four times if he is of lesser note. Whereas in reality it will probably, in general, happen once; he will then fall asleep, and later it will happen again twice. A woman should never ever be demanding in bed.

A woman has to understand that in a man's sexual head she is the one who is going to be dominated and abused. A woman should be abused, and the woman who is happily abused is a successful lady in bed. I think the woman who is good in bed has to be quite a good slave. She also has to be a willing slave. A willing slave is always warm and humble and submissive and happy to be a slave - and being that is what makes a woman good in bed.