Articles/Interviews

In the mid-seventies, racehorse trainer Gay Kindersley met and fell in love with Philippa Harper. However, he soon came to realize that he had a rival for her affections...

They had a funny, happy day and he asked her to have dinner with him. As Peggy had already arranged a supper party that evening, Philippa explained that she really couldn't let her mother down but, seeing his crestfallen expression, said that he could come too if he liked. After dinner, when the guests had left and Peggy had gone to bed, they sat alone at the drawing-room fire making tentative plans for another meeting, sleepily content in each other's company. This peaceful idyll was interrupted noisily as the door crashed open and, wearing only a bath-robe, in strode the bulky figure of actor Oliver Reed. He was not pleased with the scene that now presented itself.

For some time Reed, who lived in considerable style only a few hundred yards from the Harper cottage, had been conducting an affair with Philippa. Since her return to England she had found it difficult to define for herself a continuing role in his life in any way that gave her satisfaction. Accordingly she had decided to end the relationship. Reed, unwilling to let go, had watched the evening's party breaking up and, when he thought the coast was clear, had arrived with the intention of patching things up. Once introduced, the two men sat on either side of the room, mentally circling one another like cautious prizefighters. Philippa sat between them, wondering how she could sensibly put an end to the evening as the stilted small-talk began to dry up. Her Alsatian puppy Athos, a present from Reed to celebrate his success in The Three Musketeers (he had taken Philippa to the premiere in Paris) lay snoring gently on the hearth. Abruptly the actor, tiring of impressing on the interloper that he had a prior claim to their hostess, rose, woke the dog and began to put him through a series of pointless obedience exercises. The puppy, still half-asleep, was unreceptive. Half-heartedly, and probably only for dramatic effect, Reed kicked it. Philippa, outraged, saw her chance. 'Out, you,' she ordered, propelling the protesting actor through the door. She turned to Gay. 'Stay if you want to, but I'm going to bed.'

Despite Reed's unsolicited but constant advice that Philippa was making a grave mistake and his plaintive cries that he couldn't understand what she saw in Kindersley, the affair rapidly accelerated.

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The number of guests at the church blessing which followed the civil ceremony was hardly greater than the select few who had attended the muted celebrations at Caxton Hall twenty years before. Philip and Valsie were not able to come but this time they had at least been invited. Oonagh had arrived from La Tourelle and she and Peggy seemed equally content at the turn of events. In the church Marco Marshall, the best man, found himself reflecting on the number of times during the last two decades and more that he and his wife had provided spurious alibis as Gay pursued the Flying Fornicator and the many other passing fancies that had been his meat and drink. He wondered whether this new Mrs Kindersley would try to change her husband's compulsion for the chase and concluded that, even if she did, it was probably beyond the powers of any mortal being to put a stop to it. His reveries were brought abruptly to an end as Oliver Reed marched in, accompanied by a number of the minders and drinking companions he always described as his 'gardeners'. Reed, an often well-mannered man where women were concerned (he never swore in their presence), had found it difficult to come to terms with the notion that he had lost Philippa to a married, balding, older man with little - he thought - to commend him except perhaps a passably decent record as a jockey. The actor did his best to behave at the subsequent reception but inevitably the drink caused him to lose his always precarious self-control. As he prepared to leave, he leaned across the table, his head thrust between the bride and groom, his face contorted. 'I hope you both rot in hell,' he said.

From the time he had first met Gay, Reed's close but uneasy friendship with the Kindersleys was shot through with a strong undercurrent of conflict with the man he regarded as having stolen Philippa from him. Although he was to become a godfather to their younger son Oliver, the unaccustomed loss of a battle for a woman rankled obsessively. Years later, after becoming markedly overrefreshed at Newbury Races, he turned up naked outside Mabberleys on a cold November night. It was Philippa's birthday and he had experienced a little trouble finding the right house, startling a number of stable lads (male and female) in the neighbouring yard as he asked directions. When he finally found the right front door ('As it's your birthday, I've come in my birthday suit') the dramatic effect he desired was first deflated by young Rory Kindersley calling to his mother in a most matter-of-fact voice to say there was a funny man on the door-step without any clothes, and then by Philippa (not even bothering to investigate) responding from the kitchen, 'Oh, it must be you, Oliver. Aren't you cold? Why don't you put a coat on?' The point of the exercise was even further buried when Reed discovered that Gay was away and not able to take the hoped-for exception to his presence. At another time he picked a quarrel by accusing Gay of putting a hand up his girl-friend's skirt in the back of a car (this time he may well have been on firmer ground!) and made Philippa, who was driving, stop so that they could have a fight in the road. Both would-be pugilists were so drunk that they could hardly identify their targets, let alone land a blow, and the women were able to calm Reed down. In vino, the imagined veritas of the actor's humiliation at the hands of an older man always asserted itself.