Interview - Robert Sellers: The hedonists, the hellraisers and anti-heroes

"NOT since Attila the Hun swept across Europe leaving 500 years of total blackness has there been a man like Lee Marvin."

So said Joshua Logan after directing the star in Paint Your Wagon back in the late sixties.

Marvin was one of the great Hollywood mavericks, and one of its most fearsome barflys. He also happens to be one of the 90-odd film stars, musicians, writers, politicians, artists, sports stars and bacchanalian spirits to have made it into Robert Sellers' new book – An A-Z of Hellraisers: A Comprehensive Compendium of Outrageous Insobriety.

It is the third instalment in his "hellraiser" series which previously chronicled the hard-drinking exploits of Richard Burton, Oliver Reed, Richard Harris and Peter O'Toole, and Hollywood mischief-makers like Dennis Hopper and Jack Nicholson.

"Having written the other hellraisers books, it seemed to make sense to do this," explains the Leeds-born author.

As the title suggests, the book is pretty much a definitive guide to famous hellraisers featuring everyone from Alexander the Great and Ernest Hemingway, to Ozzy Osbourne and George Best.

If some of these people turned up at your house for a party, the chances are you wouldn't have a house left by the following morning.

To make the cut, Sellers says they had to be famous and prodigious drinkers with a propensity for outrageous revelry.

"Someone like Lee Marvin deserves a book all to himself, but I've included everyone I could think of," says Sellers.

"You don't have to smash up restaurants to be a hellraiser. Dorothy Parker was a hellraiser in a different way because she was drinking like a man in the '20s which wasn't the done thing, so she was breaking taboos."

Others, though, lived up to their reputation for being mad, bad and dangerous to know. The Who's drummer Keith Moon once swallowed a horse tranquilliser that knocked him out for two days, which at least meant hotel rooms were safe for 48 hours.

Richard Burton was another force of nature, as actor Robert Hardy can testify to: "Put half a dozen hellraisers in a room with him and he would be their chief in 10 minutes."

Hollywood legends could be just as bad. John Wayne would apparently arrive on set so drunk he had to be wired to his horse, while Ava Gardner's antics led to her being banned from every bar and restaurant in Madrid. However, some of Sellers' choices are more controversial.

"I was speaking to a military historian who raised his eyebrows when

I told him that Winston Churchill was in the book. But Churchill was a colossal drinker, he had an incredible constitution and at the same time could stay compos mentis.

"He could hold a war cabinet meeting at 2am having polished off a bottle of champagne, Pol Roger was his favourite."

In Sellers' view, hellraisers are different from your average drunks. "They're hedonistic, and therefore much more dangerous. They're anti-heroes really, they're the opposite of a role model."

This devil-may-care attitude was typified by the writer and journalist Jeffrey Bernard who once wrote into a newspaper saying, "I have been commissioned to write an autobiography and I would be grateful to any of your readers who could tell me what I was doing between 1960 and 1974."

Some of the tales Sellers recounts are so outrageous they're scarcely believable. But while humour and gallons of booze course through the pages of this book, there is a dark side to these stories of excess.

"There are some very funny stories here but there's also an element of darkness," admits Sellers.

"There's a price to pay in the end and many of them paid it. A lot of them do have horrible deaths and their lives were often pretty depressing. But if you're drinking yourself to death, it's always going to end badly."

It's a salient point that is accentuated by the fact that only a handful are still alive. So why are we attracted to such volatile characters?

"There's an element of wishing we could get away with that kind of behaviour sometimes. But there's also a ghoulish pleasure in seeing them get their comeuppance."

There is, of course, a danger of glorifying such wild behaviour, but Sellers defends some of their antics. "It's bad behaviour but there's something grand, almost theatrical, about it.

"Ozzy Osbourne didn't just urinate against a wall, he urinated on the Alamo dressed in his wife's clothes and was arrested by Texas rangers at gunpoint."

But are such antics still acceptable in today's society? "The most recent people in the book are Nikki Sixx and Russell Crowe. But I think people have grown bored with this kind of behaviour."

We live in a more sanitised, some might say prosaic, world these days that is less tolerant of inebriated miscreants, no matter who they are.

Many people will say "it's about time", but it's worth asking yourself who you would rather meet – Tom Cruise or Richard Burton; Dan Brown or Ernest Hemingway; Ava Gardner or Gwyneth Paltrow? I know who I'd choose.

An A-Z of Hellraisers, published by Preface, is out now, priced 20.

In their own words

Errol Flynn: I like my whisky old and my women young.

Shane McGowan: I was given six weeks to live, about 25 years ago.

John Barrymore: You can't drown yourself in drink. I've tried, you float.

Dean Martin: I'd hate to be a teetotaller. Imagine getting up in a morning and knowing that's as good as you're going to feel all day.

Brendan Behan: I am a drinker with a writing problem.