Articles/Interviews

So has everyone's favourite hell-raiser been brought to heel in middle-age by a slip of a 17-year-old schoolgirl? The male chauvinist of all time, who once said... "a woman should behave like, an angel to my friends, a nun in the street and a whore in bed"... seems to have found the love of his life. Alan Markfield met him in New York

Oliver Reed did not look at all like the "scruffy, unshaven, drunken gorilla" he depicts in his best-selling autobiography. He was wearing a smart grey, double-breasted, pin-stripe suit with a flower in the buttonhole. Nor was he out for trouble, which he has found so successfully in the past, plus the headlines that go with it.

The lived-in face, still scarred from an unfortunate encounter with a broken glass in an early nightclub brawl, was all smiles as he put an arm around my shoulders and steered me to a nearby table in the exclusive Park Avenue restaurant.

"Meet Josephine Burge," he said proudly. "She's the one who has tamed me, she's the one who has put to rest once and for all the demon hell-raiser, Ollie Reed."

Josephine is the schoolgirl from Rudgwick, near Horsham, Sussex, who, at the age of 16, was discovered earlier this year sunning herself on a Barbados holiday with the 43-year-old divorced actor, who has a son three years older than she is.

One of the few people who had anything kind to say about the situation was, not unpredictably, Josephine's widowed mother, Mrs. Anne Burge. "Oliver has been a very good friend of the family for a year now," she explained. "I have known him personally for at least six months and he has often been here for dinner."

"He is not a bit like his wild public image when he is in my house. I'm sorry people have picked up tittle-tattle and turned the friendship into something sordid, which it is not. There is no one I should be happier to trust our dear little girl Josephine with than our family friend, Oliver Reed."

But otherwise, the comment was almost universally hostile. Of Mrs. Burge's view that her daughter was lucky to have the opportunity of a winter Caribbean holiday with an actor 26 years her senior, one woman newspaper columnist commented: "Any mother daft enough to let her child go 4,193 miles away with a middle-aged movie star, while allowing her daughter's headmaster to think the child was off school with 'flu is foolish enough to believe anything."

Oliver's ex-wife, Irish model Kate Byrne, described the relationship as "madness" and went on: "He must be having a brainstorm if it's true. He had fads on cars and different ways of getting drunk - but not young girls." Their son, Mark, then 19, said: "I think this is a flash in the pan that became too serious. I don't think he will marry Josephine. I hope not. I don't fancy a stepmother three years younger than I am."

And the headmaster of the Billingshurst, Sussex, comprehensive where Josephine was studying for A-levels in history, sociology and English said: "I should naturally like to see her back at school. It is, naturally enough, a case of concern for her moral welfare." He added that her future at the school would "depend on her attitude."

Oliver himself said virtually nothing beyond: "We are really enjoying ourselves. People seem to be implying that 1 am doing something wrong, but I don't think I am." It was only on that spring day - Josephine's 17th birthday - when the three of us lunched in New York that he talked freely for the first time about what he calls "my old-fashioned love story" and his attempts to protect Josephine from the smears that would inevitably accompany the linking of their names.

The story begins just over a year ago in a Surrey pub near Oliver's home at Rowhook, which is itself just a few miles from Josephine's home at Rudgwick. His custom-built Panther De Ville was parked outside and he was doing handstands in the bar, a trick which he has found to be a useful way of drumming up new acquaintances.

Josephine, who had a schoolgirl crush on him, often dropped in with her brothers when she saw the car parked outside. Oliver had never spoken to her or even noticed her. "But on this occasion he did," she said. "I was just laughing at his being so silly. He heard me, saw me - and our eyes caught."

It was another three months before they actually spoke. Oliver, sipping his fourth triple-strength vodka-and-tonic, took up the tale: "She was in again with her two brothers, drinking pineapple juice because she was too young for alcohol. I went up to her and we started chatting. I don't think I'd have had the courage to approach her if there hadn't been a certain gleam - call it a twinkle - in her eye."

"But her brothers kept a careful watch over us at first. Even when I took Josephine out to dinner, her brothers came as well. Ours is an old-fashioned romance that started in an old-fashioned way. Whenever we went out at first we were always chaperoned."

The relationship flourished, the chaperones were dispensed with and Josephine started travelling the world with him. That was when the problems started. "I've gone to incredible lengths to keep Josephine's presence a secret," he went on. ''I've hidden her in trunks and refrigerators, cars and hotel-room loos, just to conceal her from reporters."

"I grew up in the age of the paparazzi. I'm used to having reporters and photographers examining every aspect of my life. But it is all terribly new for Josephine. It is tougher on her. When we came back from Barbados, she was deeply hurt by the sometimes vicious attacks."

"I felt after Barbados that I had to be very protective. I didn't say a thing or I denied everything. But then I became tired of lying and hiding and slinking around. I explained the situation to Josephine's family, and they understood. I also discussed it with Josephine. She says she wants to be with me."

"So there's nothing to hide any longer - and I'm coming out into the open and declaring my love for this incredible innocent, this child-woman."

Oliver paused in his story to confess rather sheepishly that, despite the depth of his love, he had managed to forget it was his child-woman's 17th birthday. "I had to run out this morning and buy her a card, which I inscribed: 'To my beloved Josephine'," he explained, "and haven't a gift for her yet."

Josephine smiled and took his hand. "We'll be together, that's enough," she said.

Josephine's appearance on the scene, he agreed, had had a mixed reception from his two children - Mark, now 20, and Sarah, the year-old daughter born of his long affair with Jacqie Daryl, a South African ex-ballet dancer he met when she was a member of the chorus line of the musical Oliver, in which he played the role of Bill Sykes.

"Sarah adores Josephine," he said ordering another triple vodka-and tonic, "but my son really hates the situation. He hates my romancing someone so young and he doesn't care much for Josephine. He asks: 'Why do I have to call someone mother who is younger than I am?"

"But," he continued, repeating what he said in Barbados. "I personally don't think age is a problem. I once had the good fortune to work with Geraldine Chaplin. She loved both her parents, Charlie Chaplin and his wife Oona, deeply, and they were easily 30 years apart in age. If Josephine and I ever have children - and I hope we do - I'd like to think our children would love us as much as Geraldine loved her parents."

Does talk of children mean that he has plans to marry his child-woman? That's a subject he's coy about. "Josephine is the person I want to grow old with, my happily-ever-after girl," he said, nervously fingering the flower in his lapel. "Isn't that enough for now ?"

He is clearer about the qualities he admires in her: "She has this wonderful, beautiful, pure clarity of vision that keeps everything in perspective for me. I thought I knew it all and had done it all. But Josephine has this extremely unusual gift of suggesting that I'm slipping up without making it seem she's bludgeoning me."

But, given his track record, it will be a remarkable achievement if a girl of 17, who was at school only a year ago, can succeed where a wife and long-term girlfriend failed, and really cure his hell-raising, once and for all.

Apart from acting, Oliver has been a fairground boxer, strip club bouncer, hospital porter and RAMC corporal, these varied careers following his departure, in varying degrees of rapidity, from a dozen private schools which had failed in their efforts to educate him (to be fair, he was suffering from undiagnosed dyslexia).

He has been barred from clubs, pubs, actresses' dressing-rooms and various hotels, including the luxurious Beverly Wilshire in Los Angeles where, at a lavish birthday party for his brother David, the appearance of a nude woman out of the giant cake sparked off a mini-riot which left him with an �8,000 bill for damages.

On a TV show in the United States, actress Shelley Winters poured a jug of whisky over his head after a sexual insult which had to be bleeped out in order not to outrage viewers... he took his trousers off in front of the cameras while appearing on the British TV show Saturday Night At The Mill... and the BBC was bombarded with angry phone calls from housewives, complaining about both his views on women and his language, after he took part in the Radio 4 chat show Start The Week

They included the sentiments: "I think ideally a woman should behave like an angel to my friends, a nun in the street and a whore in the bedroom," and: "I like women to be on their knees in the kitchen scrubbing the floor." In his autobiography Reed All About Me, he elaborates on this theme and explains that he is not, despite surface appearances, a male chauvinist pig: it's just that he likes these "magic creatures" called women "in their place"...

You could just tolerate the idea of that sort of a man as a son-in-law, if he hadn't gone on to write: "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..."

Is this the sort of man Josephine has chosen, at the age of 17, to spend her life with?

Then there is Oliver Reed, extravagant party thrower, in private as well as public. At Broome Hall, the 50-bedroomed Surrey mansion he sold a couple of years ago because it was forcing him to be a 305 days-a-year tax exile to pay the �l,000-a-week upkeep, he once gave a party for 30 members of Rosslyn Park rugby club.

Between Saturday evening and Sunday lunchtime, the revellers drank 50 gallons of beer, 32 bottles of Scotch, 17 bottles of gin, four crates of wine and 180 bottles of Newcastle Brown ale. They also covered the kitchen floor with broken eggs to play "ice hockey." "It could have been worse," commented his lady of the time, Jacqie Daryl, indulgently. "I suppose a lot of them were in training and off the drink."

But that was before she was worn down by what she described as Oliver's "spontaneous" behaviour, packed her bags and left.

As our lunch on Park Avenue drew towards its close, Oliver ordered a sixth triple vodka-and-tonic and admitted that he was not abandoning his outrageous, brawling, hard-drinking, tearaway pose entirely because of Josephine, but because it was to some extent a cultivated reputation to further his career.

"Now I'm finding myself at a crossroads," he explained. "I'm no longer the musketeer, the swashbuckler; I'm a strong character, no longer the crazy daredevil, f have to be more dignified, so I'm no longer interested in hell-raising. This is a new me, Ollie Reed, nice guy."

But, as men with reputations as the fastest guns in the West used to find, a reputation is not something to be shrugged off easily and there is usually somebody somewhere looking for a fight with you. It is a challenge he finds difficult to resist: "I'm terrified of violence. But the one thing that terrifies me more than violence is my fear of it"

It is not his only psychological hang-up. He has a morbid fear of lingering illness and, should he contract one, has a pact that his son Mark will perform "his sacred duty" - and shoot him.

"I'm deadly serious," he said. "I've even taught Mark how to do it. I cannot bear the thought of slowly wasting away in a bed one day. So I told him: 'If I ever fall ill, you are to take a shotgun, put it in my mouth and pull the trigger.' I've sworn him to do this and instructed him in the ways of a gun."

Old habits and old hang-ups die hard - and furthermore, despite Oliver's confident assertion that "age difference is not important", he admits obliquely in conversation that, in Josephine's case, it has added an additional complication to their relationship. It is not so much the age difference as her youth, and, beneath the outward show of bravado, he has not remained entirely untouched by criticism of their romance.

"At home in Britain people say I have ripped her away from school," he said. "But, while it is true that she no longer actually goes to school, she is continuing her studies. She has her books with her, she has tutors, she studies wherever we go. I may be a lecherous old man, but I'm not cruel."

You also encounter the odd moment of self-doubt about his actions, particularly when he thinks about how he would feel if something similar happened to his own daughter Sarah: "I look at her and think: is someone going to take you away from me like 1 did when I romanced Josephine? That's why I give my daughter absolutely everything she wants. She's not going to be impressed with any suitor who can give her cars or fine things."

But in the meantime, he is living his life the way he wants, seeing the world with his child-woman at his side. In the month before we lunched, there had been a holiday in New York, another in Dallas. Now they were back in New York while Oliver promoted his latest picture, the �20 million epic The Lion Of The Desert. A few days later, they were due to leave for the Iraqi desert where Oliver was to spend three months working on a new film. Then, his schedule permitting, it would be back to the farmhouse at Rowhook, currently being cared for by his son, Mark. Now that he has disposed of his Victorian "white elephant", Broome Hall, with its 50 rooms and 60 acres of grounds, he is no longer forced to restrict his visits home to 60 days a year for tax reasons.

"I just couldn't be a tax exile," he said. "I could pay a lot less in taxes if I moved, but I must live in Britain. It's my culture, my home, my heritage. A lot of people have said the same thing and then left, people like Michael Caine. Not me, though I'm staying."

Oliver got up to go and held out one of what he once described as "baker's hands". "I'm not ashamed of love," he said proudly. "I'm not hiding around any more. I'm lucky to have a girl like Josephine."

But, without wishing to be pessimistic, how long this euphoria will last - or even if it will last at all - must be a matter of conjecture. Will he grow tired of having to be father as well as lover, helping her with her homework?... Will the hell-raising and wild parties start again?... Will he, as he has done so often in the past, find another meadow where the grass, at least temporarily, looks greener and expect a teenager to accept his philosophy - that "these things are different for a man"?

And what of Josephine? She has hitched her wagon to a star whose view of a domestic relationship is: "I believe that women should do as they're told, within reason, of course. If I say: "I'm going out,' I don't expect them to say: 'No, you can't.' I do what I want. For conversation, I go to my local and talk to a lot of drunks. I believe the greatest philosophies come out of the mouths of a few disillusioned men."

Barbados, Dallas, New York and Iraq are one thing. Sitting in front of a TV set in a Rowhook farmhouse while the man in your life is out discussing philosophy with a few disillusioned drunks is likely to prove another. Time alone will tell. For the moment only one thing seems quite certain. Josephine may never take her A-levels in sociology, history and English - but she should certainly graduate with first-class honours from the university of life.