Eartha and Patrick
Warburton: Eartha and I had actually worked together before that. We did some horrible movies in South Africa back in 1985 [Dragonard and Master of Dragonard Hill]. Oliver Reed was the villain. Eartha Kitt ran the bordello. I’m the one white slave. Now, I was 22 years old. I rowed crew in college, so I was still in pretty damn good shape. And it’s one of these exploitation-type films. So once they got me up on the blocks, of course, the women have their husbands there, and they’re twirling their parasols, like, “Darling, I want that one.” To reiterate, these are the worst movies ever made. My wish is that nobody would ever see them ever again — because as bad as these movies are, I truly was the worst thing in them. Oliver Reed, who sometimes would start with a little bit of whiskey at 10 in the morning, is really the only watchable thing in them. He was relegated to doing crappy movies like ours because they couldn’t insure a major production with him at the time. Finally, he garnered some trust and they hired him on Gladiator… and he died, making Gladiator, drunk in a bar on the island of Malta. I think he was arm wrestling a rugby teamOn the night of his death, Oliver Reed was indeed goaded into a drinking match against a group of not rugby players, but Royal Navy sailors. (For what it’s worth, he won the arm-wrestling match.) . I might have one of these details wrong. It cost them millions of dollars in post.
But what’s really funny is after we’d done those films, Eartha was performing at the Roosevelt Hotel. I went to see her perform. She invites me up to her room and excuses her butler, and we’re just sitting there. I am on one end of the couch, and Eartha is on the other end. And she’s petting this furry creature, this animal — I can’t tell if it’s a dog or a cat. I’m a 22-year-old kid on the other end of the couch with Eartha Kitt. We were worlds apart. I look at Kronk and Yzma. Oh, my God, art has just copied reality here. I just thought back to me and Eartha, 15 years before.
This story tickled me so much. The whole piece is definitely worth a read, but this little gem in the middle was my favorite part.