The Light's on at Signpost (11 page)

I
WORKED ON FIVE FILMS
with Oliver Reed, but I didn’t get to know him well. We weren’t just of different generations, but of different worlds, and had little in common beyond our work. Yet with the possible exceptions of George C. Scott and Edward Fox, he was the most rewarding actor I ever wrote for, and one of the best. He is remembered chiefly as what is called, usually with admiration, a hell-raiser—though why anyone should admire a loud-mouthed, violent, drunken nuisance (which is all a hell-raiser is) I can’t imagine. Oliver may have been all of that; I have seen him make an immortal ass of himself on television, and had well-documented accounts of his excesses from mutual acquaintances, but of his legendary aggression I had no personal experience. Eccentric behaviour, yes, but violence, no. And he could be, and often was, a perfect gentleman.

I can’t recall my first sight of him on film, but I know he struck me as one of the ugliest men I’d ever seen, and when he was cast as Athos, with top billing in that astoundingly starry Musketeer cast, I was disappointed, especially as Heston had been mentioned for the part, before his inspired casting as Richelieu. My disappointment turned to alarm when I heard that during shooting in Spain Oliver had been arrested after a hotel brawl and dragged to the slammer by five policemen, roaring: “Leave me alone! I’m Athos of
The Three Musketeers
! I don’t want any problems!” He escaped prosecution, but it was a worrying beginning.

However, doubt and disappointment didn’t last five seconds after I had heard his first lines when the showing of the rough-cut took place at Twickenham. He had to say, with facetious sarcasm, that the gash on his arm was not a wound, but small-pox, and when the sycophantic surgeon agreed, to retort: “Don’t pretend you would know one from the other, or that it would make any difference to your treatment if you did.”

Not the easiest line for an actor to manage, as I’d known when I wrote it; Oliver rasped it out at speed with splendid throwaway contempt, and I felt that surge of delight that comes when you hear your words spoken far better than you thought they could be. (Good actors can send a writer out of the cinema convinced that he’s a genius.)

I knew then that Lester had found the perfect Athos, and when I met Reed for the first time I thanked him for the way he’d handled those opening lines. Roy Kinnear, typically, couldn’t resist adding: “He means the rest of your lines weren’t so hot,” but Oliver just smiled and said: “Thanks for the opportunity.”

I did my best to give him the opportunity again in later films because it was such a pleasure to hear and watch him at work. He could always be relied on to give lines full value (and often more than they were worth), and he was blessed with that rare quality that is beyond mere acting: style. He had it by the bucket; Flynn and Fairbanks never swept a cloak or threw out a challenge with greater panache. On the Parkinson show he got his interviewer to deliver a “Musketeer line”, and very well Parkinson did it; he had the best exemplar in the business.

When you know whom you’re writing for, you obviously try to play to his strength. Olly had remarkable breath control, and frequently I deliberately gave him quite long passages rising to a crescendo, because he did them so well. He didn’t always care for this; on one occasion, faced with a tirade, he complained to Dick Fleischer about “George adjective Fraser’s adjective dialogue” being “too adjective much.”

“Then don’t say it,” said cunning Fleischer, knowing that such a remark is about the most deflating thing an actor can hear, especially an actor without formal training. Oliver snarled—and once in front of the camera, said the speech perfectly.

He had the most menacing whisper in the business, and, unlike many whispers, it was always audible; he would vary it with sudden, unexpected roars, and took a special delight in pejoratives and insults which he could spit out—I recall him on location in Spain, bellowing with laughter as he rehearsed, with immense gusto, a line which he had to fling at Bob Todd (he of Benny Hill fame): “Take your damned summons and soak it in wine and choke on it, you time-serving pimp!” He brought the same energy to his action sequences, and I often felt a pang for the extras and stuntmen who got in his way when he was really motoring. He met his match on
Royal Flash
, in which he had to trade punches with Henry Cooper, who was playing John Gully, a champion of the Napoleonic era,
*
to Oliver’s Bismarck. I wasn’t present, but I understand that Oliver got ambitious until Cooper gave him what is technically known as “a sweetener”, to calm him down.

That movie was the only film made from one of my Flashman books. Dick Lester directed my script, with Malcolm McDowell in the lead, Britt Ekland as the heroine, and Alan Bates as Oliver’s assistant villain—the first time they had appeared together, I believe, since their notorious nude fight in Ken Russell’s
Women in Love
. The supporting case included Alastair Sim in his penultimate film, and a number of minor players who have since become very big names, among them David Jason and, in a lovely two-minute cameo as a London policeman, Bob Hoskins.

It wasn’t a box-office success, but Oliver was one of the best things in it, and was, as I discovered later, unusually proud of his performance—when we met again in Budapest he hailed me with a cry of “Not a bad Bismarck, was I?” and I still have a card bearing his sketch of a rapier and plumed hat labelled “Ath” and a top hat and moustache captioned “Bis”, signed “Olly Reed”. He sent it to me in Hollywood when he was working on
Sting II
and I on
Octopussy
, and it’s a remarkably neat piece of work, considering that he did it, according to the messenger who brought it to me, in an advanced state of inebriation.

As I have already recounted, Hungary, where much of
Prince
and Pauper
was shot, saw Oliver at his spectacular worst, brawling, boozing, being ejected from hotels and threatened with deportation, and wading the Danube by night. I have to say that it also saw him at his best, patient and cheerful during long and difficult days on set, a model diner in the hotel restaurant, at his most charming when I introduced him to Kathy, and showing no more than mild suspicion as he sat in the corner of the bar watching Fleischer and me conferring—the sight of writer and director together seems to unsettle actors, who probably think no good can come of it.

He was also on his best behaviour at the big party in Budapest, moderately elevated as the evening wore on, but not unpleasantly so, merely inviting passers-by to feel his biceps, airing what sounded like fluent French to a female hotel guest, reminding me again what a splendidly square-headed Bismarck he had been, that he was thirty-eight and fighting fit, and suddenly waxing confidential with dark hints that
they
(the press, the public, the gremlins?) seemed to think that he was over the hill and would be lucky to get the part of bloody Santa Claus next Christmas outside bloody Harrods.

“Just you wait—let ’em go to bloody Harrods next Christmas, get hold of bleeding Santa and whip off his beard, and what’ll they find?” Explosive shout of laughter. “Bloody Steve McQueen!”

I gathered then that there was no love lost between him and McQueen, and this was confirmed by McQueen when I worked with him some months later on
Taipan
. There was a part which I thought Oliver would be right for, but Steve frowned and wrinkled
his nose. “Ferdinand the Bull,” he said. “You know why they call him that? Because he’s always being put on his ass.” Pause. “Matter of fact, I almost put him on his ass once myself.”

The idea of McQueen, who was fairly slight in build and of no more than middle height, putting that hulking mass of muscle
*
on any part of its anatomy, was not worthy of comment, so I didn’t. I have since been told that the reason for their mutual dislike was that Oliver had thrown up over Steve during a meeting in London, which might account for it, but I suspect that even if Oliver’s internal economy had been under control they would still have been poles apart, the quiet, plain-spoken, pretty egotistical American, and the ebullient, beautifully accented Englishman. Thinking of them together, I have no difficulty understanding the events of 1776.

I had left Budapest before Oliver’s final fall from grace, when he arrived on the set in a highly alcoholic condition, falling down and rolling on the floor. Fleischer was adamant that he would never work with him again, but knowing Dick I rather think he would have relented if the occasion had ever arisen.

Olly was not the only actor on
Prince and Pauper
with a drink problem. George C. Scott’s appetite for the sauce was well known, and when he was cast as the Ruffler I received a hurried instruction to rewrite one of his scenes—this, I discovered later, was to ensure that he and Oliver would not be called on to perform together; some risks are just too great to run.

Ten years passed before I saw Oliver again—in the flesh, anyway. I watched him falling off couches and performing an ape-like dance on TV chat shows, and felt anger at the creeps who plainly had invited him to appear in the hope that he would make an idiot of himself. And then
The Return of the Musketeers
brought us together again, and on the Spanish locations he was back in his old uproariously good-natured form, bellowing with laughter as he was yanked up to dizzy heights and down again on a mobile platform, enacting a brawl in which he hurled stuntmen about with rare abandon, and giving his lines all the force and energy of old. Off the set he was quieter and more placid than I had known him; perhaps a happy marriage and middle age were having their effect.

We had dinner one night at Pierre Spengler’s house, with Billy Connolly and Pamela Stephenson (and their new baby in a cot hard by), and afterwards Oliver and I talked away in a corner—about Max Beerbohm’s
Zuleika Dobson
, of which apparently he owned the rights (and supposed gloomily that I would be too expensive to write him a screenplay; I assured him that for friends I gave a discount), and Alf Gover’s cricket school, which he had attended, and what might have been if Jack Cardiff had succeeded in getting Farnol’s
Jade of Destiny
off the ground, and what was it like living on the Isle of Man—he was then on Guernsey, and feeling restless—and much else that I’ve forgotten; he was on his best behaviour again, entirely on the wagon, he assured me.

He declined a cigarette, saying he didn’t smoke, and when I reminded him that he’d smoked between takes while seated in the stocks at Sopron, he said: “Sure it wasn’t a joint?” That I couldn’t tell him, but somehow our talk veered from the fatal potential of tobacco to the subject of death, on which we had a spirited argument, he taking exception to my fatalistic attitude. “Rage, rage against the fading of the light” was Olly’s style—but then, it would be, wouldn’t it?

Our conversation came back to me when I heard the news of his sudden death in Malta; it reached me in hospital, where I was recovering from a heart attack of my own. At such times one naturally conjures up memories: I saw him again, sweeping his Musketeer cloak round his shoulders and telling Frank Finlay to “kill the fellow and come after us”; sitting, sad and heavy, with Michael York, intoning in that beautiful voice “There was a man
once…”; pronouncing sentence of death on Faye Dunaway with a sudden catch in his throat; bellowing a welcome with that gleaming grin through his beard when we met again in Spain—and our final meeting, at the
Return of the Musketeers
premiere, when he told me he was making
Treasure Island
with Charlton Heston: “I’m playing Billy Bones, playing him as a Jock, what d’you think?” I said I was sure Stevenson would have had no objection.

And for some reason his last words to me after the premiere have stuck in my memory: “Right, George, you know where the sausage rolls are?” before the photographers hauled him away to pose, bearded and beaming and slightly dishevelled.

I was lucky to get the chance to write parts for him; very lucky indeed. He was a remarkable screen presence, and among those for whom I’ve been privileged to write, he ranks with any, Heston, Harrison, Scott, Lee, Brando, and the rest.

Last thought: if he had been born twenty years earlier, what a war he might have had, for he was the very marrow of those mad, outrageous, insubordinate subalterns one encountered now and then in the forties, wild men frequently in trouble, admired almost to worship by their platoons who thought them hell of a fellows, bull-at-a-gate reckless in the hour of battle, tolerated by an Army that knew when it was well off and when to turn a blind eye, and all too often ending up as names carved in marble. I think Oliver might have been such a one; in his own words, he was true blue.

T
HERE MAY HAVE BEEN
worse governments in our history than New Labour, but offhand I can’t think of one. Ethelred the Unready was less of a ditherer, Henry VI was useless but never actually had much chance to govern, Tumbledown Dick Cromwell at least made way for the Restoration, and James II had the sense to know when he wasn’t wanted. Which leaves us with Lord North, Clement Attlee, and Heath’s railroaders of the early seventies who not only brought about the European fiasco, but clashed disastrously with the miners, reduced us to a three-day week, and gave me the humbling experience of flying out from a power-cut London where people were reduced to pinching candle-ends in darkened restaurants, and arriving in a Moscow ablaze with light. It takes a real talent for disaster to go one worse than Communist Russia.

But bad as these were, they didn’t have the all-embracing, widespread incompetence, fuelled by conceit and ignorance, of New Labour, who rocketed to power on the strength of an Andy Pandy grin, a Tory administration which had long outstayed its welcome, and a gullible electorate who weren’t all old enough to know how awful Labour government invariably is. To be fair, New Labour has managed the economy well, thanks to Gordon Brown, a novelty among Labour Chancellors in that he knew what he was doing, and in mitigation it has to be said that the Blair Government has not been notably lucky.

Even so, one searches our annals in vain for a record of bungling, dogma-driven amateurism to match that of the unhappy crew who in a mere five years achieved the atrocious mess of Kosovo, the mishandling of Scottish and Welsh devolution, the shameful episode of Pinochet, the hypocrisy displayed over Clause 28, the fox-hunting farce, the sleaze which (unlike the Tories’ back-bench scandals) was at the heart of government, the failure (shared by their predecessors) to stand up to Brussels, the mendacity of describing a surrender to terrorism as a “peace process”, the misguided and unnecessary intervention in Afghanistan, the weak reliance on unelected advisers, and the general impression given of middle-aged boys hopelessly out of their depth in a man’s job…it’s quite a catalogue. But all pales into comparative insignificance beside the irreparable wrecking of the Constitution.

No doubt there was a case, if something better could be devised, for reforming the Lords, but there was no excuse for New Labour’s undisciplined rush to abolish the only legislative body in the world that could truly be called independent—unbound by party discipline, free to ignore the whips, fearful of no leader’s displeasure, or of deselection. None of which, of course, endeared it to a premier impatient of the restraints of Parliament, who has shown disturbing dictatorial tendencies.
*
He undid at a stroke a Constitution it had taken a thousand years to build, through civil war, revolution, and national peril, breaking it like a petulant child with a toy he doesn’t like.

A sensible reformer would have gone about it warily, taking into account, among other things, that the House of Lords embodied probably a greater variety of expertise, knowledge, experience, and talent than any other political assembly on earth. Name a calling, a profession, a qualification academic or practical, and you would likely find it in the old Lords, simply because it was composed not of politicians fit only for politics, but of people who lived and worked in the real world. Privileged indeed, aristocratic relics in some cases, but infinitely preferable to a House packed with cronies and placemen, or an elected assembly of party hacks who couldn’t get into the Commons or the European Parliament. For the time being at least the Lords should have been left alone; it might have been frustrating for a Labour government to have an upper house right of centre, but better that than the destruction of an admitted anachronism which was, paradoxically, a true bulwark of democracy. It was a long time since the Lords had been the Tory Party asleep; its restraints on the Commons more often than not had the approval of the country, however much they might infuriate the Left.

But if the reforming (or rather, the deforming) of the Lords was New Labour’s most wicked act of mischief in its first term, it at least did not make me ashamed to be British—something I wouldn’t have thought possible. New Labour managed it, dishonouring my country and its people by behaving like savages and trying to pretend that they were doing something noble.

I’m talking about Kosovo, a war crime by any standards, for which, in a civilised world, the Labour leaders would have been arraigned and convicted, a brutal slaughter for which the pathetic excuse was that it was necessary because “we could not walk away from a humanitarian catastrophe”—the ethnic cleansing by Milosovic. So they created another humanitarian catastrophe every bit as ghastly, blowing up children with cluster bombs, hammering civilian convoys, blitzing Belgrade (and the Chinese Embassy), acting illegally in defiance of the UN while telling the world that their beastly campaign was just and necessary—and successful, when in
fact it failed miserably, with our bombers hitting just 2 per cent of their targets.

And these are the people who demanded the trial of Milosovic
*
while posing as saviours. To paraphrase Fluellen, I was not angry till that moment.

It can be argued that a cabinet whose training for office consisted mostly of union politics and student agitation, could have no real conception of the horror they were inflicting. But that won’t wash. True, they had no experience of war, and lacked the imagination to put themselves in their victims’ shoes (supposing they gave them a thought), but inexperience and ignorance are no excuse in today’s well-informed, graphically reported world. They knew very well what they were doing, and did it regardless.

No old soldier likes to use the word cowardice, but that was one of the most distasteful aspects of the Kosovo bombing. We know that had there been the least possibility of Serb retaliation the heroes of the White House and Westminster would never have dared military action—the genuine and justified fear they showed of engaging the Serbs on the ground told us all we needed to know about the repulsive poltroon of Pennsylvania Avenue, for whom the campaign was a heaven-sent distraction from the scandals of his presidency, and the worth of our own government spokesmen’s mock-Churchillian posturing. (There’s a thought to brighten your nightmares: suppose New Labour had been in office in 1940…)

For some reason which escapes me, there seems to be a feeling now that we have a moral duty to interfere in foreign disputes, and tell other countries how they should govern themselves, especially if so-called democracy is thought to be in danger. This has led us into costly misadventures in Yugoslavia and Afghanistan—where we had absolutely no right to be, sticking our nose into other people’s quarrels—and in Sierra Leone. But not, curiously, in Zimbabwe, where our people were actually being attacked and dispossessed by a most unsavoury tyrant. But then, one perhaps shouldn’t expect New Labour to worry about ethnic Britons in Zimbabwe, whom they probably regard as the despised remnant of a colonial era, and therefore unworthy of concern.

As to our “moral duty” elsewhere, isn’t it ironic that today’s liberals, who throw up their hands in horror at our interferences overseas in previous centuries, seem to approve of them in a modern context—no matter how unjustified, and no matter that they produce atrocities like the cluster bombs of Kosovo?

If anything, the Pinochet affair was even more dishonourable than Kosovo, being a mixture of treachery and sheer bad manners. His arrest and detention were said to be justified by his crimes against humanity and the demand for extradition from a Spanish lawyer, but both in fact were irrelevant, and would not even have been considered if he had been a Mao or a Castro or even a Stalin with full Left-wing credentials, instead of a monster of the hated Right.

The real issue was British honour, and New Labour’s failure to observe a code respected by the lowliest savage. Admit someone to your home, let him eat your metaphorical salt, and you are bound to treat him as a guest and see him safe. It doesn’t matter if he’s Hitler (or Stalin); if you found his crimes gut-churning (to use the felicitous expression of Mr Mandelson), you should have refused to admit him. To let him come in good faith and then seize him is simply despicable.

In the event, as nasty a betrayal as we have seen since Quisling’s day turned out to be a monumental piece of bungling. For after months in which odium was heaped on the government, curious kangaroo procedures took place, Pinochet’s health and Chile’s political
situation both deteriorated, vast amounts of time and money and credit were wasted—after all that, they had to let him go, having achieved nothing.

No, I’m wrong, they had achieved something. They had ensured that a saying once proverbial and honoured in Latin America would vanish thenceforth, or be used only in sarcastic contempt: “Word of an Englishman”.

I’ve confined myself to New Labour’s three worst offences because the others—the sleaze, the spin, the devolution fiasco, the foot-and-mouth debacle, the disgrace of having to send NHS patients abroad for treatment, the truckling to Brussels, the hypocrisy of waging war on Muslim terrorists while surrendering to Irish ones and even welcoming tham at No. 10 and Westminster—aren’t worth the waste of further words. The Pinochet affair was disgusting, the Kosovo atrocity enraging, and the assault on the Constitution appalling, but looking over this chapter my chief feeling is one of depressed regret. What a sorry tale to have to tell about a British government.

And the most galling sorrow, to me and millions like me (not only my fellow-dinosaurs but more young folk than New Labour suspects) who love our country and its past and all that it has done for the world with a fervour and pride this government can never feel or understand, who hope and fear for its future, is that we can only stand helpless while unworthy nonentities spoil what generations of good and great men and women built and defended and died for. It’s hard to see the things you gave your life to broken, as Kipling said, and know that not all the tools in the world, worn-out or new, can build them up again.

What a bitter irony that Britain, which fought so many giants and sent them packing, should be brought low by pygmies.

Well, we must bristle our courage up, hope for better days for our children and grandchildren, and never lose sight of the glorious certainty that New Labour, too, shall pass away.