Oliver Reed: The Daily Mail Calls Him “The Vilest Man in Showbiz,”

Oliver Reed: The Daily Mail Calls Him "The Vilest Man in Showbiz," Before Drowning its Judgment in a Psychobabble Bath

Posted by Nicholas Stix

 

A tip 'o the hate to Kathy Shaidle at Five Feet of Fury.

 

 

The vilest man in showbiz: Oliver Reed is portrayed as a lovable rogue, but a new book reveals he was a sadistic drunk who delighted in humiliating his own children

By Tony Rennell

PUBLISHED: 16:00 EST, 5 July 2013 | UPDATED: 05:36 EST, 6 July 2013

Mail Online

The boyishly handsome actor David Hemmings was up for a giggle on the set of his first major film in 1963, and his fellow star, the macho Oliver Reed, dared him to hang upside down outside the second-floor window of the hotel they were staying in, promising he'd hold on to him and not let him fall. The 21-year-old Hemmings stupidly agreed.

As he hung there, staring down on a vicious set of spiked railings 60ft below, he heard the dark and dangerous Reed growl threateningly from above, 'How do you like this, boy?' followed by a mocking: 'Wanna come up, boy?'

The terrified Hemmings asked to be hauled back in — and was. But for the rest of his life he admitted to being wary of Reed.

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Ladies man: But Oliver Reed, seen here posing with actress Madeline Smith, nursed a deep dislike of women

Hemmings recalled: 'He could drink 20 pints of lager with a crème de menthe chaser and still run a mile for a wager. He was frightening and deeply unpredictable.'

This kind of reckless behaviour was typical of Reed throughout his life of excess and debauchery. He saw nothing wrong in climbing onto the table in a restaurant, dropping his trousers and tying a napkin round his manhood — his 'mighty mallet', as he liked to call it.

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Such antics would be shrugged off by some as just larking about, fifth-form high jinks gone bad. Ollie the prankster, the funster, the bruiser who was kindness itself deep down inside.

Except there was something much more sinister behind the persistent male posturing, the constant need to prove himself the leader of the pack.

Actress Jane Merrow, also on that same film set in Torquay back in 1963, saw it. 'He would get into drinking competitions with people he knew couldn't drink or shouldn't drink. There was cruelty in that, but he just thought it was funny.'

 

Hellraiser: But Oliver Reed was regarded by many as a bully who had a tendency to pick on people smaller than him

 

Hemmings, too, picked up on this unpleasant characteristic. 'I concluded that Oliver, for all his charismatic, cavalier hell-raising, was inclined to bully anyone smaller than himself — like me.'

Reed had always been that way. At school, bigger and tougher than all the other boys his age, he was known as Bully Boy Reed.

When, aged 18, he began his National Service, he revelled in the barked orders, the personal insults, the physical toil.

Promoted to corporal and given his own squad of men to scream at, 'I became as big a bastard as anybody who had the job of making life miserable for a body of men,' he recalled, without a hint of regret. His men came to despise him utterly, to which he responded: 'F*** 'em!'

The truth is, far from being a genial rogue whose drunken antics only caused harm to himself, a major new biography reveals him to be a monstrously cruel and selfish bully who, throughout his life, played on other people's weaknesses, even children.

Mark Lester — the child actor who starred opposite him in Oliver! — recalls how at the end-of-filming party, Reed spiked his Cokes with vodka and got the eight-year-old completely drunk. 'I got home and my mother put me in a cold bath with all my clothes on. I was violently ill.'

 

Extrovert: Reed publicising his autobiography with children Mark and Sarah, who grew used to his wild mood swings

 

Reed never held back, even inflicting this sort of behaviour on his own children. They hated it. What son really wants to see his drunken father unscrew a light bulb in a restaurant and ostentatiously eat it because he didn't like the food he'd been served? Or shock people by putting cigarettes out on his tongue?

What father takes his 12-year-old son to the pub and lets him drink six pints of bitter? 'When we got home I was puking in the bathroom and he was fussing around me giving me a blanket and I just wanted to be left alone to die,' recalls Mark Reed.

What father gets his eight-year-old daughter drunk on what he called 'traffic lights', lined-up glasses of red cherry brandy, amber apricot brandy and green crème de menthe? She woke up with her first hangover.

But Sarah Reed was used to such behaviour. When she was little, Sarah often went down to breakfast at home and had to step over the bodies of her father's sozzled friends sleeping off the effects of the boozy bash the night before.

 

Chauvinist: Reed once claimed women's roles are: 'To be cooks, scrub floors and be receivers of men's sex'

 

'People would come and get drunk, keel over and be sick,' she recalls. 'It was normal.'

Mark — Reed's son with his first wife, Katie Byrne, a feisty Irish redhead — grew up amid marital mayhem. The rows over his father's antics or some girl he'd been seen with were colossal.

When they divorced and Katie claimed 50 per cent of everything, he responded in typical aggressive style by sawing tables and chairs in half.

But it wasn't his parents' fighting that most troubled Mark. What most distressed him was the humiliating way his father treated him. He had to be top at everything, and if he wasn't he'd face his father's wrath.

David Reed (Oliver's older brother) remembers the time Oliver bought Mark a horse, put him on it and told him to tackle some fences.

'When the boy failed to get this horse to jump, Ollie screamed at him: "You bloody slug."' At other times he would scream at his son: "You're not the boy I wanted!" '

Whether unconsciously or not, his words were an echo of his own father's disappointment in him when he was a child — an academic failure whose physical prowess and sporting achievement his father greeted with contempt.

As we shall see, this bitterly hurtful rejection was the key to his own bullying, bombastic behaviour — especially towards his own children.

What caused the collapse of Reed's marriage to Katie Byrne was his affair with dancer Jacquie Daryl, with whom he then lived for the next ten years, though they never married.

Sarah was their daughter, and she did her growing up at Broome Hall, Reed's massive Victorian pile in 65 acres of Surrey.

For much of Sarah's early life, her father was pretty much a stranger. He'd come back after months away filming and 'suddenly this huge great bear of a man with bristles would be cuddling me and over-powering me and I didn't know him. He scared me.'

Sarah was ten when her mother and Reed split up. The atmosphere at home had been volatile and violent for a while.

'I heard accounts of Ollie pulling her along a passageway at home by her hair,' says his brother David. Sarah remembers her mother getting 'the odd black eye'.

One day they returned from the pub, and Jacquie was despatched, as usual, to the kitchen to cook dinner for Reed and his mates.

'I had a great big bowl of hot pasta sauce to serve and he just tipped it all over me. I didn't react. I didn't even go and clean myself up. I just sat there covered in pasta sauce.'

But it was the last straw for her. A few days later, she put her daughter in the car and drove off, never to return.

 

Last role: Reed portrays Proximo in a scene from the film 'Gladiator,' in which he starred alongside Russell Crowe. He died while making the film

 

Afterwards, Sarah continued to see her father, though her visits only highlighted the gulf between them. There seemed to be no happy medium about life with him.

Those who lived with Reed developed an in-built radar for walking into a room and sensing his mood.

'Both Mark and I got that from a young age. He could be a nasty drunk, and in those cases we would go and hide.'

What also cursed Reed's relationship with his daughter was his belittling attitude to women. 'Women are not thinking vessels,' he once declared. 'They are vessels for a man's sex.'

And with typical chauvinistic braggadocio, he described his ideal woman as 'a deaf and dumb nymphomaniac whose father owns a chain of off-licences.'

In his daughter's case, the misogyny revealed itself in the advice he gave her as she set off to school each day. Be as naughty as you can, he told her. 'It wasn't "work really hard today, darling",' Sarah recalls, 'but "be naughty and if you get expelled that's fine".'

This apparently liberating attitude was prompted by his belief that education didn't matter much for a girl.

'My father was quite sexist. He'd say: "You're just going to get married, have babies, and sit on a cushion and sew a fine seam." It was said tongue-in-cheek, but it was what he expected.'

 

Reed as Bill Sikes in the film 'Oliver' - he spiked his eight-year-old co star's cokes with vodka at the end-of-filming party

 

As Sarah got older, drink helped ease the strains in their relationship. 'We had fun times when I was old enough to get drunk with him. The awkwardness went and we could actually have a real giggle.'
But the sadness of a fractured father-daughter relationship haunted her.

And she never came to terms with the way he liked to humiliate people and make them squirm. He even did it to her.

She was in her late teens when he took her out to dinner at a very grand restaurant in London. 'Right,' he said before they set off, 'you've got to pretend that you're my lady of the night' — an odd role to give to your own daughter and not in the least amusing.

Arriving at the restaurant, he went up to the doorman. 'Good evening,' he said, and then, pointing to a decidedly awkward Sarah: 'This is, er . . . my niece.' Nudge, nudge. Followed by: 'Er . . . actually no, she's a lady of the night.'

Never mind the unfortunate doorman's discomfort, poor Sarah stood there in utter embarrassment, wishing the ground would swallow her up. When leery and lewd Oliver Reed was in action, it was the way most people felt.

But what most people didn't know was that the seeds of his behaviour were sown in his childhood, by a father he despised for being a coward, and a drama queen of a mother who virtually abandoned him for a series of lovers.

His father, Peter Reed, was a gentle and refined man, as befitted the grandson — albeit illegitimate — of the great Victorian actor-manager Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree.

But when war broke out in 1939, this upright and utterly middle-class citizen living in sedate, suburban Wimbledon took an unusual decision. He found the thought of killing barbaric and registered as a conscientious objector.

Marcia, his wife, was so appalled that she ended the marriage. What she saw was not someone making a principled stand but a coward she could not love.

And that was the verdict, too, of their son, Oliver, when, years later, he became aware of his father's refusal to fight. To the day he died, Reed loathed the quiet man who raised him and did everything he could to be as different from him as possible.

The super-macho image he projected was a direct reaction to his shame and disgust at what he saw as his father's lack of manly virtues.

Not that his mother was any better a role model for young Ollie. Walking out on her husband, she dallied with airmen — and Ollie came to loathe her too, for splitting up the family and making his childhood hell with her indifference to him. 'He held a score against her all his life,' says his older brother David.

 

Reed during his infamous interview with Des O'Connor in which he appeared drunk and boorish

THAT infamous interview with Des O'Connor

 

 

She was absent during much of Ollie's childhood and that was the root of the contempt he had for women. At some point in 1940 — with Peter's refusal to enlist the breaking point — she left the family home, taking Oliver with her.

Peter, left behind with David, had no idea where she had gone.
In fact she had set up home in a thatched cottage belonging to her latest lover, a senior officer at an RAF station in Buckinghamshire.

Here she held dazzling soirées, playing hostess to her lover's friends from Bomber Command, effortlessly turning on the charm and greeting everyone with kisses and smiles. But not her sons.

Oliver remembered her as a woman from whom 'there were never any hugs and kisses'.
Marcia moved on, tiring of her RAF lover and rejecting his offer of marriage.

She went back to Wimbledon, not to Peter, though, but to her own parents and it was here that Oliver came under the influence of his maternal grandfather, Lancelot Andrews.

A flamboyant character (especially after a few drinks), he would parade around the garden waving a Union flag and singing Rule Britannia — as a drunken Reed himself would do years later.

But the boy had only a short time with the grandfather he admired. In the summer of 1944, the old man was killed when a flying bomb struck Wimbledon.

As if that wasn't bad enough, within a few weeks Oliver and his brother David were shipped off to boarding school.

Six-year-old Ollie was left howling with misery, feeling crushed, lonely and deserted. He hated the boarding school, its smelly, soulless dormitories and ridiculous school uniform.

But they weren't there for long. Peter couldn't pay the fees, they were kicked out after a few months and he took them to live with him and his new wife, Kay, in a rented farmhouse in Kent.

 

Reed once took his 12-year-old son to the pub and let him drink six pints of bitter

 

It was overrun with brambles and nettles but the boys adored it because for much of the time they had it to themselves.

Peter had a job in London, where he and Kay lived during the week. They would drive to the country to weekend with the boys and then depart again on Sunday evening, leaving Ollie and David to run riot.

'We had au pair girls looking after us,' recalls David, 'but largely we were left alone.' This unorthodox situation lasted until a new boarding school was found for them.

Here Oliver struggled. His reading and writing were awful, his school reports invariably damning — 'doesn't try, can't cope, very confused' — and his growing frustration led to flashes of temper.

His root problem was dyslexia, unrecognised at the time, but a pattern was set. For the rest of his life he felt academically inferior.

'He was nobody's fool,' says David, 'but he always felt intellectually he wasn't the equal of others, so rather than expose himself to being discovered he would shout.'

A mother's love might have helped him through these and other difficulties, but her absence was thunderous. 'A very self-centred, selfish woman,' is one family member's summing-up of Marcia.

'She didn't have any motherly instincts. All she could think about was herself. She was beautiful, she loved men, had an enormous amount of affairs, and the boys got in her way.' With no chance of passing the exams for the sort of top public school his father wanted for him, Oliver next found himself in a 'a school for dunces', as he called it, in Surrey.

 

Reed alongside Lysette Anthony in the 1989 film 'A Ghost In Monte Carlo'

 

Here he learned an important lesson: life was cruel and the strongest succeeded while the weak got abused and ignored. He chose to be a bully.

Every day he challenged other boys to arm-wrestling competitions. 'You didn't cross him,' a classmate recalled. Academically he struggled, but while Ollie still required fingers to add up, he had few equals on the sports field, which led to him being made captain of athletics.

For sports day in his final year, he entered himself for every single event. Such bravado was not welcomed by his father. Peter never understood his son's obsession with proving himself physically.

All he saw was aggression, and it turned his stomach. He refused to attend the event.

Oliver duly won every event but, travelling home afterwards with all the silver cups he'd won in a rucksack, he was stopped by two policemen, who didn't believe his explanation. His father had to go to the police station to get him out.

When they eventually arrived home, Ollie was expecting some kind of praise, but instead his father berated him that he'd only won the prizes because of his size and strength.

'If you want to be an ape, Oliver, by all means continue running round the field. But don't bring your cups back here to impress me.'

'What are you trying to prove, boy?' he demanded to know — a question that would occur to many people over the coming decades as they observed the adult Oliver's obnoxious behaviour.

Even when Reed made his break into acting and began to make a name for himself, his father remained indifferent to him.

Just as he reacted with disgust to his son's sports trophies, so he couldn't bring himself to celebrate Oliver's achievements as an actor and never once complimented him on a film or a performance.
The son never could win his father's admiration.

And vice-versa. For Reed, the psychological wound of his father's perceived cowardice just would not heal. He was increasingly obsessed by it. 'To Ollie, it was cowardice,' says David, and he was never able to forgive him for it.

 

Reed the notorious drinker pictured with Keith Moon drummer with The Who

 

'He was always going on about his father being a conscientious objector,' recalls Oliver's widow, Josephine. 'He kept saying how awful it had been as a child to be the son of one.' Friends recall seeing the adult Ollie goading his father, spitting the words 'You bloody conscientious objector,' into his face.

Throughout his life Oliver compensated for this supposed stain on the family honour by indulging in displays of rabid patriotism. His life was also punctuated by ridiculous tests of strength, such as grabbing the back of a chair and holding his body parallel to the ground by the arms, a phenomenal physical feat.

The whole point behind his excessive behaviour was to prove some kind of warped notion of masculinity.

For the same reason, he could never back down from a fight. It was as if he had constantly to prove he was a man — and somehow right the wrong he believed his pathetic, pacifist father had done to him.

He kept trying to do that until the drink-filled day he died. Just hours before he collapsed from a heart attack in a pub in Malta in 1999, aged 61, he had been arm-wrestling sailors less than a third his age — pushing himself to the limit, wrestling his demons to the bitter end.