The boisterous drinking habits of the four actors are chronicled in the book “Hellraisers,” by Robert Sellers.
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| Robert Sellers |
Robert Sellers’s “Hellraisers” is completely unapologetic about its party-hearty premise. He has slapped together a string of outlandish stories about four of the British Isles’ most stylish drunken actors, and he doesn’t even pretend to have turned those stories into a coherent book. “Hellraisers” wants only to be a rowdy collection of greatest hits, and it lives up to that fun-loving ambition. It reels off riotous tales about Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Peter O’Toole and Oliver Reed without giving a moment’s thought to what those tales might mean.
“Enjoy it; they bloody well did,” Mr. Sellers tells his readers at the book’s start. And then off he goes, digging up the wild, headline-making antics of his book’s four principals. Since each of them behaved like a tabloid reporter’s dream and did his best carousing in public, Mr. Sellers has plenty of fine one-liners to replay and bouts of mad excess to describe. How accurate are these stories? That can’t be a serious question. On the occasion when Mr. Reed is said to have drunk 126 pints of beer in 24 hours, it’s highly unlikely that anyone really bothered to keep the numbers straight.
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| Richard Burton. |
And for this book the truth doesn’t really matter. Even for actors, its four subjects were uncommonly theatrical and loved telling merrily exaggerated stories about themselves. “I did quite enjoy the days when one went for a beer at one’s local in Paris and wake up in Corsica,” Mr. O’Toole once quipped, though he doesn’t seem to have said this or anything else to Mr. Sellers. Ditto for the other three hellraisers, who were not available for comment, having all fallen into sad states of decline and developed the true physiognomies of Dorian Gray before they died of alcohol-induced or alcohol-accelerated problems.
“I felt like singing and began to woo an insurance building,” Mr. O’Toole said on another occasion, with his usual aplomb. (Mr. O’Toole is also a memoirist who has written eloquently about his adventures.) “Stripped, I am monstrous,” Mr. Burton said about his reputation as a ladies’ man. Mr. Harris joked of having formed a support group called Alcoholics Unanimous that worked this way: “If you don’t feel like a drink, you ring another member and he comes over to persuade you.” Mr. Reed, by far the most hellish of the four, had an eagle’s head tattooed on his shoulder. He also had the eagle’s claws tattooed on the part of his body that he most enjoyed exposing without warning. “Would you like to see where it’s perched?” he liked to ask about the bird.
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| Richard Harris |
Anyone horrified by the reckless abandon of “Hellraisers” should know what its ultimate effect turns out to be. This fun-loving celebration of drunkenness proves to be an even more sobering cautionary tale than some of the most serious addiction and recovery memoirs. And the fact that none could entirely stop drinking, even when it became a life-or-death medical necessity, makes it that much sadder. Funny as it is, the book’s boisterous beginning gives way to grimly premature states of illness and dotage, with Mr. Harris as the member of the foursome most aware of his behavior’s high price. “I didn’t even have the joy of remembering my own exploits,” he said, after realizing that alcohol had wiped out much of his memory.
Of course each of these actors carefully cultivated an air of forgetfulness, even in his prime. Upon being told that his first wife had temporarily left him and taken their child, Mr. Harris later remarked: “Did she? I wasn’t fully aware.” Like Mr. Sellers’s other subjects, he perfected a cavalier panache that allowed him to glide through life delivering boozy bon mots, thus eclipsing certain unpleasant realities. (Harris could turn violent, and both of his wives apparently lived in fear of him.) The selective use of memory seemed to go with these actors’ territory, as when Mr. O’Toole once advised Michael Caine to avoid dwelling on bad behavior. “Never ask what you did,” Mr. O’Toole supposedly told his fellow actor. “It’s better not to know.”
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| Peter O'Toole. |
Unfortunately being oblivious became a professional as well as personal necessity for these legendary troublemakers. Each of them wound up taking execrable acting jobs just to stay afloat, especially after a new wave of filmmakers in the 1970s made their Shakespearean mannerisms look badly out of date. Of the four it was Mr. Reed who took the worst B-movie roles, wrecked the most furniture, kept the most dangerous company (during one scarily memorable phase he joined forces with the Who’s wild-man drummer, Keith Moon) and could most naturally play a werewolf without makeup.
But when it came to bleak makeup jokes, nothing here beats a story about Mr. Burton during the filming of “The Klansman,” one of his worst. “If you want to interview a drunk or see a drunk fall in the camellia bushes, come ahead,” that film’s publicist supposedly told the press. And when the film’s makeup artist was complimented on how well he had prepared Mr. Burton for his death scene, the makeup man replied: “I haven’t touched him.”
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| Oliver Reed. |
“Hellraisers” can be read as heedlessly as it was reported and lived. But it winds up being far less lighthearted than it looks at first glance. As the evidence of carousing accumulates, so does the ponderousness. The stories become repetitive. The principals grow too old to live life on one long bender. And on those occasions when they do sober up, a couple of them complain that drunks are annoying bores. Their wives, Mr. Sellers says, could not have agreed more.
HELLRAISERS
The Life and Inebriated Times of Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Peter O’Toole and Oliver Reed
By Robert Sellers
Illustrated. 286 pages.
Thomas Dunne Books.
