Joe's View

Equal parts funny and appalling, the new Robert Sellers book “Hellraisers” (St. Martin’s Press) takes us back to the glory days of stage and screen stars Peter O’Toole, Richard Burton, Richard Harris and Oliver Reed.

The men represent an earlier era of British theater and film when stars bragged about their drinking and womanizing exploits.

The four men profiled by Sellers agreed later in life that they probably wasted a lot of time and energy in their offstage adventures — and, sadly, forgot big chunks of their own personal histories in a boozy fog — but they were products of a macho show biz culture in which Errol Flynn and John Barrymore had set a high bar for carousing.

Sellers is perhaps a bit too light-hearted in recalling some truly appalling behavior by the four men, but he makes it clear that what they did was not that unsual in “The Plastered Fifties” and “The Soused Sixties” — two of the chapter titles in the book.

“Hellraisers” shows how the actors got themselves into a vicious cycle in which their often dismal films pushed them to drink more which made them unreliable and often unemployable for long stretches of time.

Burton told an interviewer that his early theater days of nightly shows with drinks and dinner afterwards put in motion an alcohol habit that only got bigger with the passage of time.

“Burton’s intake was prodigious,” Sellers writes. “At the height of his boozing in the mid-70s he was knocking back three to four bottles of hard liquor in a day.”

The actor claimed he couldn’t remember making “The Klansman” (1974) — a mercy considering the film is often cited as one of the worst studio pictures of the 1970s.

When they were young, the drinking and carousing seemed to be part and parcel with their brilliant and daring work — O’Toole in “Lawrence of Arabia” (1962), Harris in “This Sporting Life” (1963), Reed in “Women in Love” (1969) and Burton in a number of great stage and film roles in the early 1960s.

Harris called the lifestyle “a fine madness, a lyrical madness…we lived our life with that madness and it was transmitted into our work…We weren’t afraid to be different. So we were always dangerous. Dangerous to meet in the street, in a restaurant, and dangerous to see on stage or in a film.”

O’Toole and Harris were lucky enough to clean up their acts and go on to fine work in their 60s and 70s (indeed, Harris made a fortune later in his life by purchasing the stage rights to “Camelot” and earning millions on a multi-year tour).

Burton was only 58 when he died and who knows what he might have done with another 10 or 20 years or work. Maybe win the Oscar that always eluded him?  

Reed’s story is the saddest of the four, dying at 61, with his few memorable film roles — “Oliver!” in 1968, “Women in Love” the following year — long behind him.