Articles/Interviews

Hate him or love him, you can't be indifferent.
By Jeannie Sakol

He's a Gothic hero in the living, lusting flesh. The throbbing dust cover of one of those asbestos novels where the wind is permanently set on "howl" and the tormented Mahster simmers and scowls a lot to the sexual Angst of all the women within radar reach of his wild, insistent eyes.

Oliver Reed in the living, lusting flesh, actually makes the fiction Gothics seem pale by comparison. He smoulders, a mobile furnace with a low, fierce heat that threatens to explode at any moment. As Gothic heroes will, he seems constantly involved in a conflict between the ferocious animal drives of a physically powerful body and the mind hungers of a unique and probing intellect.

When I first set eyes on him (in the living, lusting flesh), he doesn't see me at all. His brother, Simon, has brought me to the pastoral wilds of Surrey where, down an unmarked side road, we have entered the gates of Broome Hall. Turrets, chimneys, craggy stonework, twisted ironwork abound. The clock in the tower has stopped. Roses run frantic on overgrown bushes. A feeling of voluptuous promise prevails. Is that a wan, frightened face at an upper window? Is that a chord of church music on a distant organ? The nervous laughter turns out to be me. The atmosphere is ripe with sexuality, the clock tower, the forest of chimneys, the very fenceposts a riot of phallic celebration.

Smugglers once lived at Broome Hall and it had been used as a monastery before Oliver bought it last winter. There are fifty-four bedrooms, a Victorian letter box stamped VR, and ominous white X marks on dozens of upstairs windows, mindful of Plague times when the houses of victims were so designated. Here, X marks the spots where new windows are needed.

I am behind the house, staring across miles of terraced fields and the landscaped meadows of the North Downs. In the near distance is Oliver Reed, his back to me, standing massive and still beneath the outstretched arms of a giant oak. He is watching his son Mark on a horse, taking a jumping lesson in the paddock beyond. At our approach, he turns, a smile of paternal joy on his face. The son of his first, former, and at the time of writing, only marriage, Mark is eleven, fair and all togged out in riding gear and hard hat to deal with his father's hunter, Dougal, who is also eleven.

"He's up to four feet," Oliver announces.

To confront Oliver Reed in the middle of an overgrown field is very disconcerting for a city girl. The physical impact of the man is profound. From the distance, he was still an abstraction. Then, he moves closer until suddenly he is a few inches away, looming, massive, a dark shadow between me and the sun, well over six feet tall, fourteen solid packed, rock hard stone. His hair is thick arid raked by the wind. It is black, flecked with grey and earlobe length. This day, he sports a sinister Fu Manchu moustache that caresses the corners of his mouth and forms brackets for his chin, partly hiding the infamous three-inch scar he got in a brawl eight years ago. There are tiny, furry hairs on top of his nose. His chest and arms are bursting the seams of a white sweat shirt with a dragon over his heart. Faded blue jeans cling like a relief map. Where the denim has worn thin on his powerful thighs, there are thick canvas patches. Why the patches?

"Because," the eyes playful, "there are holes."

He bought the jeans secondhand in San Francisco. "Sailors off ships sell them. You buy them already broken in. I like jeans to look worn. The more frayed spots, the more patches. These are beginning to look like Joseph's cloak."

The sun is bright, forcing me to squint even with sunglasses. Not Oliver. His slate blues don't flinch. They fix me coolly, assess rather than undress, knowing too well what's underneath the neo-trendy duds to do the old mental peel-off. The Master of Broome Hall acknowledges me with a curt nod, then brushes past to lead the way back to the compound of buildings, a few stones of which date back to the fourteenth century.

In the rose garden plays an exquisite little girl of three, silk black hair hanging straight, pale skin, porcelain features. She is Sarah. Her mother, Jacqui, the grown version of her daughter but with russet hair, swoops the child away at our approach. Jacqui is a former ballet dancer with the Royal Ballet. She has lived with Oliver for four years.

"I want to get them all pregnant at once," Oliver says with quiet menace. He is pointing towards his stables. "There are nine brood mares and one stallion. I think he can do it."

Inside the stables is his current favourite, a rich brown filly, Nutkin. Sleek and spirited, she is not yet broken. "I'm going to have her covered by a German horse. She won't know it when it happens but she'll produce something bigger than herself. As soon as we've got her broken," he says, lovingly, his voice insinuating, rich, a little like James Mason in The Seventh Veil. Nutkin is sensitive to the touch, he says "a wild one".

The wild streak appeals to Oliver. He doesn't like being saddled or fenced in, either. A creature of impulse, he once jumped off Putney Bridge with his clothes on. Last January, at his rugger club's party, he danced a Zulu dance with his clothes off. "One girl asked for my autograph." In the dead of last winter when he took over Broome Hall, .he noted the islands in his seven-acre private lake, again stripped off and swam through ice to "claim" the largest one.

On a romantic impulse in the West Indies, "not too long ago", he met a girl and said to her, "Will you travel with me? Because I have a great need to fall in love and travel the world. I'm asking you this now-the day we've met-because that's how I feel. I want to travel the world with you even though all we may do is take a tuppenny bus ride down the road." He recalls ruefully that he bought the two air tickets for Tokyo for the following day. Things didn't work out. They didn't go. Did he regret the impulse?

"The only impulse I've ever regretted is divorce. Divorce is always bad. You change the locks. It's wrong."

His 1960 marriage to Irish model Katie Byrne wound up in court ten years later. "I was twenty-one when I got married, a child groom. I've always been married. I was married to my top sergeant in the army. For me, marriage is an antiquated system. For women, it's a way to assure support of her babies, I suppose. But I will always support my young."

Despite the split, his love for Ireland flourishes and when life gets dicy, he flees to a farmhouse on the west coast. The subject of alimony remains a sore point. "What makes a woman feel she's worth that much money when all she's contributed is half a failed relationship? No man who is satisfied at home is going to go off!" He sneers at the idea of marriage as a partnership. "It is not a partnership-it's a relationship. A partnership is sharing all the assets. Ridiculous. The law should have a formula for working out how much a woman needs to get started again. There should be a flat settlement, the money invested safely. The trouble is the lawyers .... "

Does he think that women should ever pay alimony to men? "NO!"

He shows me his planned kitchen garden. "Natural things here. Onions. Herbs." He points to a pile of fresh horse manure. "Plenty of that around. Cover the garden with it." Is he into health foods?

"I don't eat a lot of meat. I get my protein through beer." He pauses. "Assuming, of course, that beer contains protein."

At the main entrance to the house is a newly grassed circle planted with trees Oliver chose himself. A maple, a cedar and a mountain ash. A crusted stone font stands beside the front door. "I'm not a Catholic, but one night I filled up the font with good red wine. The next morning, it was empty! Gave me a nasty turn. Scared me, you know. Then" - faintly embarrassed laugh - "we discovered there was a slow leak in the font."

We slip into the leather cocoon of his car. He takes several tins of spray stuff out of the door pocket and convulsively sprays us, the car, his mouth and the air with a corsage of floral mists. "I got breathalised last year. Breaking the speed limit. This way, they won't be able to smell a thing. Now, I'll be had up for being a fruit." We drive to a local pub, the Cricketers Arms, dating back to the fifteenth century.

"Textures," he muses, savouring a mouthful of cheese flan before drowning it in a gulp of bitter. "If I had to choose between being blind or deaf, I'd rather be blind. I like to talk. I like to hear. I like to touch. I'm thirty-five next 13th February; I know what a' woman looks like. Textures and smells are the most important things. She feels like a blancmange tastes. These sheets taste like marigolds. Old walls smell of desire. One good rule: anything that smells good will feel good. Fresh sweat - very exciting. Cold, clear water - ahhhh! But if something smells false, chemical, watch out. As for instance," he assumes a professorial look, "if I happen to be kissing a woman's breasts and I am suddenly aware of chemical armpits, the acridity of deodorant, I am put off."

Breasts are his second favourite part of the female anatomy. What is first? "The eyes. Not the shape but the expression. Eyes and what they say are a constant surprise. Breasts have expression, too, not as much as eyes perhaps, though I have never suckled an eyeball." He admits to a youthful preference for ample proportions. Now, in maturity, "I merely prefer them to look like breasts."

He does not, surprisingly, like girls to go braless. "When I'm with a woman, the way she looks belongs to me-not to everyone else. I want those nipples to point only at me." He asked one girl he was taking to dinner to kindly put on a bra. She didn't own one, it turned out. They stayed at home.

"Birds who try to create sexual tensions in public are not really sexy. Painting black lines around their mouths, their knockers hanging out-it's too self-conscious. The most alluring bird is the one who is not aware of it."

As sexual values and identities change, Oliver Reed remains a self-styled male chauvinist, convinced of one fundamental truth. "There is one thing a woman will never forgive herself or her creator or her lover for and that is that woman is the one who is entered into. Until she is totally joyful about this intrusion, she can never be happy. It is ironic that the very 'word that expresses the best of sexuality is the word most commonly used for rejection."

Women should take the sexual initiative if they want to, he feels. "But they are still inhibited. Women enjoy oral sex but they don't say so." The woman over thirty should take young lovers. "It's her pleasure and her duty. The older woman knows her onions. In my experience of making love to young birds, their young lovers haven't taught them very much because no older woman taught them."

Does intellectuality turn him on? He shudders. "Clever women make me apprehensive. Women are not thinking vessels. They are vessels for a man's sex and his children. Never has it been written than a woman has the right to mouth things to make her equal. Women's Liberation is intellectual thuggery by a gaggle of smart alecs. The great thing about women is their air of mystery. It's not just their boobs and all that. Women's Lib does women a great disservice. The worst of it is that forceful women are creating men in their own image, men who use hair lacquer and hair dryers, men with waspy waists and skinny legs. No wonder the birds are unhappy."

For the woman looking for a real, earthy masculine man, Oliver Reed advises, "Stay out of coffee bars and boutiques. Go out to the countryside where the old-fashioned man is. He won't have a trendy hairdo or a satin shirt but he'll be a man who will make love to you and love you and provide you with meat and eggs and sweet smelling air. He may be an educational cretin but what matter? I am suspicious of intelligent women! Keep 'em down!"

Lesbianism intrigues him. "The idea of two girls together is very exciting to a man. The porny magazines know this. The more women learn about eroticism, the more they will turn to each other. I predict that in three hundred years, babies will be born in laboratories without any of the mess, and men and women will find sexual gratification only with their own gender. Except for sex, most men are happiest with other men."

Among his extra-sexual pursuits is Chinese arm wrestling, a synthesis of muscle and willpower at which he excels. Riding a horse and boozing with male companions dominates his free time. Old clothes are best. Occasionally, he will turn up in London wearing his "church suit", a dark pinstripe, which feels to him like a suit of armour. "A man can only function in old clothes. Women are always trying to get rid of an old jacket. A man only feels comfortable in certain trousers. The creases are in the right places." Why do the birds go for the lads in the trendy trousers, he demands. "No pockets - no place to keep the money - so who winds up paying - the bird!"

A key to his character may lie in his favourite writers and heroes. Hemingway, Steinbeck and Jack London predominate as interpreters of The Way Things Are. Yet, the fictional heroes with whom he best identifies are Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights and Mr Rochester in Jane Eyre, very much the Gothic genesis of his life style. Bill Sykes (in Oliver) he dismisses as a pantomime character. In history, Walter Raleigh intrigues him most. "He died dramatically, bravely and - I understand he was a good lay."

Unlike almost any actor you can name, Oliver Reed has no wish to play Hamlet. Nor does he regret having passed the age to play Romeo. "In fact, I'm not madly stuck on Shakespeare or the theatre." He doesn't even go to the theatre. The last time he attended a live production was twenty-two years ago when he saw Guys and Dolls in the West End. He liked it but has never been back.

"Most actors want to hear people clapping. I don't need applause."

Despite looking like an aristocrat's bastard masquerading as a builder's labourer, Oliver grew up as one of three legitimate sons of respected sportswriter Peter Reed in what he describes as middle class surroundings. His uncle is Sir Carol Reed, director of some of Britain's greatest and most successful films, including The Third Man and Oliver which only coincidentally starred his nephew as Sykes. As a boy, he attended thirteen schools until, at seventeen, he left both schooling and home to seek his fortune. He worked as a hotel porter, Soho strip-club bouncer, a hospital orderly and amateur boxer. He won his first fight, lost his second and quit the ring "because I didn't like getting hit".

That's when the army got him. He did his two years' national service with the Royal Army Medical Corps in Malaya and Hong Kong where he performed another of his impulse swims, diving into the harbour and swimming to Hong Kong Island "forwards and backwards".

On his demob, he decided to become a salesman. "But my father said I wouldn't be able to sell a packet of crisps." He toyed with becoming a surgeon. "But I couldn't spell." A need to earn some money led to his being a film extra. By the late Fifties, he had moved into speaking roles in such films as The Angry Silence, The League of Gentlemen and The Two Faces of Dr Jekyll, playing what his official bio describes as "characters of a somewhat dubious nature". Commercial success began to snowball in the early Sixties when young director Michael Winner starred him in The System, I'll Never Forget What's 'is Name and The Jokers which was a huge personal success for him in America. The brutal, brooding hulk of volcanic masculinity was beginning to intrude on the dreamland of women both sides of the Atlantic.

But it was Ken Russell's instinct which converted Oliver Reed from just another pretty face into a major acting talent. First with Debussy for the BBC documentary that was also shown in America. Then with Gerald Crich in Women in Love and Father Grandier in The Devils. The power and passion were now disciplined and distilled in performances of raw emotion and intellectual depth. Gerald's crippling need for love, Grandier's obstinate contempt for cant, are gemlike portrayals of the universal male animal at bay.

Of the full frontal nude scene with Alan Bates, Oliver says, "I was the first. I won't appear naked again. One million women saw me totally naked. I'll settle for that."

As Father Grandier he kept his clothes on while the nuns, led by Vanessa Redgrave, tore theirs off, starting a political and religious hassle which resulted in the priest's incineration, the final charred moments of which I could not bear to watch.

Coming up are an as yet untitled film made in Bulgaria with Claudia Cardinale, and Triple Echo also starring his old movie room-mate Glenda Jackson, a suspenseful H. E. Bates story in which he plays a crude army sergeant who stalks a deserter and the woman hiding him.

Talking about films, he recalled that the first he ever saw as a child was Dumbo. Later, his most frightening experience was seeing Unconquered in which a woman appears holding her baby who has been scalped by Indians. His biggest thrill professionally came many years later when he stood in Leicester Square and saw his name outside three separate cinemas at the same time.

Yet, he confesses, in retrospect this last wasn't half the thrill of the first time he made love to a girl. He was seventeen, a late starter. "I had it all set up. The record player. The booze. The poetry. I recited Tennyson's Morte d'Arthur to her. My school prefect made me learn it and I didn't want it to go to waste. But no more details - the people involved are still alive."

Women delude themselves that they are the romantics, says Oliver. "It's men who really are. The women keep shooting us down." On two separate occasions, he chartered' a sailing boat and invited a cherished girl to join him. "Come with me, my darling," he sends himself up in a joky Ronald Coleman voice. "And we shall sail the Seven Seas, the Windwards, the Grenadines, just sun and sea and the two of us." Twice he thusly set sail. Both times, the girls got seasick.

A recent romantic impulse was thwarted by British Rail. Acting on a sudden need to have breakfast on the dining car train to Cornwall, he gathered up Jacqui, Mark, Sarah and a few friends and rushed to the nearest station. The train was ready to pull out as the party ran through the barrier. They were about to jump aboard when Oliver peered through the window of the dining car expecting to see heavy white linen, flowers in silver jugs, smiling waiters and bright cutlery and china. "Instead, I saw plastic and bench seats. We let the train leave without us."

On the subject of religion, Oliver is oddly moving: "Am I a religious man? Yes, I think so. I am an agnostic but none the less a deeply religious man. A religious man is one who worships. I don't believe in Jesus Christ or the Virgin Mary or Jehovah or Buddha. I have instead an abiding belief in one's own kind. I don't believe we should worship the golden calf or the golden tabernacle. It is merely convenient to worship God, an act of convenience. We're tribes and we're still after each other's wives. The problem is how to solve this problem. In the old days, they looked for the strong man in the tribes. Like Moses. They sent Moses up the mountain. He scribbled a few rules on a rock while the rest of them sat around smoking pot.

"I'm not a grass Christian. Look at that tree." I look at that tree. "I don't believe it's due to God. I can do that. I can't believe the atrocities in Africa and Ireland are due to God, either. Mutilations. Children trained as killers. I believe in man's spiritual and sexual dignity. I am not concerned with Christ. Humanity must have faith in itself. We mustn't allow us to destroy us."

And what of woman's sexual dignity? "I treat every woman like a lady," he says. I expect to see a smirk on his face when he says this, but no, he means it. "I always open doors for women. I stand up when they enter a room. I may be a bastard but I'm a polite bastard. Physically, a man can take a woman by force because he is stronger. But what's the point of that? Sometimes I may take a girl out ten, twelve times, just wining and dining her, assuming nothing. After the twelfth time, she's so baffled, she's the one who asks to go to bed."

Surprise, he feels, is a basic to romance. For men, his advice is, "The first time you make love to a woman, do it in the conventional way. Get on top. Then, the next time, when she thinks that's all you can do, change things around a bit. Surprise her."

It's very easy to make a woman happy, he says. "She needs to be wanted and wants to be needed." And, if his life sounds a piece of cake with tons of icing on top, he adds, "I never thought I was really needed. Lately, I have learned that I am needed. The trick is to allow yourself to need and be needed."

Roughneck he may look, barfighter he may be, poet stud of films he is. A modern Gothic, brutish, surly, a magic maker of waves within waves. Like the Heathcliff and Rochester he admires, he is a wounded hero, needful of a heroine's true love. Perhaps, at Broome Hall, he will find it.