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When I began reading the Oliver Reed biography What Fresh Lunacy is This? last night I didn't even realize that today is his birthday (thanks Mac) -- Kismet! Serendipity! Me & Ollie, meant to be. Anyway I posted this passage that I read last night onto Instagram but I'll transcribe it, cuz it's fun:
"Already exposed to alcohol and a drinking culture, he was still at an impressionable age when sex entered his life. Barely five, he had just pulled down the knickers of an obliging local lass in a game of doctors and nurses when her mother walked into the room. That little girl, whose mother part-owned the Red Lion [a local pub], grew up to be Samantha Eggar, who went on to enjoy a successful acting career in films including The Collector and Doctor Dolittle. In his autobiography, published in 1979, Oliver claimed that Samantha was 'my first love.' Today Samantha fondly remembers Oliver as her earliest playmate. 'Then years later Oliver and I worked together in two films and he was worth every cent of his notorious but endearing self.'"
I really want to read Olly's autobiography - it's called Reed All About Me - but it's out-of-print and super expensive, so for now I'll read this affordable, and apparently approved-by-Olly, biography. So far it's proved terribly entertaining and I think I'm only twenty pages in, but then that should surprise no one - if anybody lived a life worth reading about it's this - notorious, but endearing - drunk.
Speaking of notorious but endearing drunks, I went to a double-feature of Charles Laughton films at Film Forum last night... funny thing is I'm not even talking about Charles Laughton when I speak of "notorious but endearing drunks," ha! They're everywhere! No, one of the films was called Devil and the Deep and it starred Laughton, Gary Cooper...
... and Miss Tallulah Bankhead, and Tallulah is the "notorious but endearing drunk" of which I specifically speak now. Tallulah's autobiography called, aptly enough, Tallulah: My Autobiography, is also out-of-print but it goes for far less on Amazon, and as soon as I got home last night I ordered up a copy of that. Anybody read it? I have no doubt that she's somebody with a voice and some stories worth listening to. Hell if it's just two hundred pages talking about Gary Cooper in that turtleneck I'll be good.
But it's no doubt even more than that - the best thing on her unerringly amusing Wiki page is the bit about this movie:
"Her 1932 movie Devil and the Deep is notable for the presence of three major co-stars, with Bankhead receiving top billing over Gary Cooper, Charles Laughton and Cary Grant; it is the only film with Cooper and Grant as the film's leading men. She later said, "Dahling, the main reason I accepted [the part] was to fuck that divine Gary Cooper!".
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