Blowing the Bloody Doors Off

by Michael Caine

  Copyright © 2018 by Michael Caine

  Jacket design by Amanda Kain

  Front-of-jacket photograph © Nigel Parry/CPi

  Back-of-jacket photograph © AF archive / Alamy Stock Photo

  Jacket copyright © 2018 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  Originally published in Great Britain in 2018 by Hodder & Stoughton

  A Hachette UK company

  First U.S. Edition: October 2018

  Hachette Books is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Hachette Books name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  ISBNs: 978-0-316-45119-2 (hardcover), 978-0-316-45187-1 (large print), 978-0-316-45116-1 (ebook)

  E3-20180924-DA-NF

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  PART ONE

  1. It Doesn’t Matter Where You Start

  2. Auditioning for Life

  3. Using the Difficulty

  4. Doing the Right Things

  PART TWO

  5. Getting There Is Just the Start

  6. The Rehearsal Is the Work

  7. Less Is More

  8. Having Serious Fun

  9. Taking Direction

  10. The Big Picture

  PART THREE

  11. Being a Star (or Why I Never Wear Suede Shoes)

  12. Rise and Fall

  13. Being Decent

  14. Don’t Look Back (with a Few Exceptions)

  15. Getting Old and Staying Young

  16. A Life in Balance

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Michael Caine

  Image Credits

  Newsletter

  For Shakira, Niki, Natasha, Taylor, Allegra and Miles—and for you.

  Introduction

  THE FIRST TIME I was in the United States, when I had just made Alfie, I was sitting on my own in the lobby of the Beverly Hills Hotel and heard the sound of a helicopter landing in the gardens opposite. This, the porter told me, was strictly illegal. He and I stood at the door to see who was so flagrantly flouting the law—presumably the President, of the United States or at least of the Beverly Hills Hotel. Across Sunset Boulevard, out of a swirling sun-flecked cloud of dust, six foot four and in full cowboy get-up, strode the unmistakable figure of John Wayne. As I stood there with my mouth open he caught my eye and altered his course to come over to me. “What’s your name, kid?” he asked.

  “Michael Caine,” I managed to croak.

  “That’s right,” he agreed, with a tilt of his head. “You were in that movie Alfie.”

  “Yes,” I said. I wasn’t really keeping up my end of the conversation.

  “You’re gonna be a star, kid,” he drawled, draping his arm around my shoulders. “But if you want to stay one, remember this: talk low, talk slow, and don’t say too much.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Wayne,” I said.

  “Call me Duke.” He gave me a chuck on the arm, turned around and swaggered off.

  It was a mind-blowing Hollywood moment for an ambitious young actor on his first visit to the city of dreams. And it was great advice for anyone who was going to be acting in Westerns and delivering all his dialogue from a horse. Talk low and slow so you don’t scare the horses, and say as little as possible before the horse runs away. But it was not such great advice for someone like me, an actor who was going to play all kinds of characters with tons of dialogue, and mostly, thankfully, with my feet planted firmly on the ground.

  I am often asked what advice I have for actors starting out in this business. And for many years my answer was “Never listen to old actors like me.” That was because, until John Wayne offered me his words of wisdom, I always used to ask older actors what I should do, and the only thing they ever told me was to give up.

  But as I’ve got older, I’ve been reflecting on my life, as older people often do. And I’ve realised that, over my sixty years in the movie business and my eighty-five years of life, I have been given a lot of useful advice—by Marlene Dietrich, Tony Curtis and Laurence Olivier among many others—and I have learnt a lot of useful lessons, from my many glittering successes and my many disastrous failures. I started to think I could do a bit better than “never listen to advice.” In fact, my advice would be, don’t listen to that advice.

  This book is the result of that reflection. I wanted to look back on my life from the Elephant and Castle to Hollywood, and from man-about-town Alfie to Batman’s butler Alfred, with all its successes and all its failures, all its fun and all its misery and struggle, its comedy, its drama, its romance and its tragedy, and find, among it all, the lessons I’ve learnt and want to share, not just for aspiring movie actors but for everyone.

  A few of my “lessons” are quite specific to movie acting. But I hope that most of them will speak, somehow, to most of you. You won’t all have to audition for parts but in some ways life is always an audition: everyone has moments when they have to put themselves out there for what they want. You won’t all have to learn lines but everyone sometimes has to make sure they’re properly prepared. We all have to deal with difficult people and we all have to learn how to balance our professional and personal lives.

  What you need to be a star in the movies is not that different from what you need to be a star in any other universe (it just takes a little more luck).

  And if you don’t give a monkey’s about this old man’s so-called wisdom? Well, I hope you’ll still be entertained. Along the way I tell stories from my life, some old, some new, many star-studded and all entertaining, I hope, that help to tell the bigger story of how I got from where I started to where I ended up, and the mistakes I made, and the fun I had, and what I learnt along the way.

  What worked for John Wayne was never going to work for me. So I don’t assume that what worked for me will necessarily work for you. The world I came up in was very different from today’s, and my battles as a young white working-class male movie actor in the 1950s and 1960s will not be the same as yours.

  And I know that my life has been blessed with more than its fair share of good luck and good timing. As a young working-class lad in the 1960s I was in the right place at the right time. I know that. Thousands of actors out there were as good as and better than me, but didn’t get the breaks. I know that too. And I know that while suddenly in the 1960s parts were being written and worlds were opening up for working-class lads like me, those breakthroughs were decades away for women and people of colour. It has taken me many decades to understand the battles—not just for the roles but for dignity and basic decency—that women have been fighting in the movies and many other industries for years, and I’m still learning.

  I have been extraordinarily lucky in my personal life too, meeting my wife Shakira and having the most wonderful life with her for forty-seven years. I have been
blessed with two incredible daughters, three precious grandchildren and a group of close, supportive friends.

  No one can succeed in the movies or anywhere else without luck. But I haven’t just been lucky. I’ve been unlucky plenty of times too. And I’ve never rested on my laurels. I’ve worked hard, learnt my craft, grabbed my opportunities and just kept on bloody going when others gave up.

  Nobody has the one secret formula for success. No one can promise you riches and fame—and actually I wouldn’t recommend wishing for them. A lot of actors know as much about the business as I do, and more. But if you would like a look at how one very lucky man got there, overcoming the bad luck and wringing everything he could out of the good, making tons of mistakes but trying to learn from them, doing what he loved and having a lot of fun along the way, let’s get going!

  PART ONE

  Starting Out

  1.

  It Doesn’t Matter Where You Start

  “…you don’t even see the riches you’re treadin’ on with your own feet”

  Walter Huston to Humphrey Bogart in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, 1948

  WHEN I LOOK AROUND me now, and look back to where I’ve come from, and then, just to be sure, check out the view again, I still sometimes think: What? Me? No. You’re having me on. It still sometimes seems like an impossible dream. Lesson number one: I am living proof that, whatever your start in life, you can make it. Emphasis on “can”—not “will.” No promises.

  I was born about a million years ago in 1933, in the middle of the worst depression this country has ever known and six years before it was brought to an end by an even bigger catastrophe, the Second World War. My mother was a charlady who, though I didn’t learn this until after her death, already had one son, who she was loving and caring for in secret. My father was an intelligent but completely uneducated—or undereducated, which was typical of the working class at that time—fish porter at Billingsgate market. We lived in a cramped two-room flat in a converted Victorian house in Camberwell, then one of the poorest parts of grimy, smoggy London: three flights up from the street and five flights up from the one toilet in the garden. I suffered from rickets, a disease of poverty that causes weak bones, and I tottered up and down those stairs in surgical boots.

  Three years after me came another son, Stanley, and another three years after Stanley came the Second World War. As the Blitz flattened London, my brother and I, aged three and six, were evacuated, and found ourselves at the tender mercies of separate and rather disappointing new families. Mine fed me one tin of pilchards on toast a day and kept me locked in a cupboard under the stairs when they went away for the weekends. My mother barged in and rescued me, covered with sores, as soon as the Germans stopped bombing the railway lines, but not before I’d developed lifelong claustrophobia and an absolute detestation of any cruelty to children.

  I left school at sixteen with a small handful of exam passes, found and got sacked from a handful of menial office jobs, and at eighteen I got called up for National Service, where I first did my level best to help with the Allied occupation of a defeated post-war Germany and then headed off to be shot at by Communists in Korea.

  Britain then was one of the most class-ridden nations in the world, and I was, I was daily informed, at the bottom of the heap. Of course there were millions of people all over the world living lives much worse than mine, but I didn’t know about that. I just knew that I was poor and working-class.

  In many ways it was not a great start—for anything, let alone movie stardom. But to its star—Maurice Joseph Micklewhite, as (poor sod) I was known back then—my childhood never felt like a sob story. It was what I knew, I was loved, my mother and father were great parents and even the worst of times seemed to bring me something good.

  The Second World War was one of the most horrific, tragic events of the twentieth century. But for me, it was one of the greatest things that ever happened. For this scrawny six-year-old slum-dweller, it meant evacuation and escape from the Blitz—with my brother and mother the second time around. We were transported from smoke-choked London to the bliss of the Norfolk countryside where I could run around in the fresh air, nick apples and have a massive bleeding carthorse called Lottie as a pet. Like everyone else I was forced to eat organic food for five years: there were no chemicals to put on the land or in food, because they were all being used in explosives and ammunition. There was very little sugar, no sweets, no fizzy drinks, but free orange juice, cod liver oil, malt extract and vitamins. For most people rationing was terrible but for people like me the wartime diet was a great improvement. My rickets was cured and I shot up like a weed.

  Because of the war I got the opportunity to take the so-called eleven-plus exam to get me a place at a good grammar school: very unusual at that time for a boy from my background. My father survived Dunkirk, El Alamein and the liberation of Rome—I still have the card he sent me for my sixth birthday from Dunkirk, and the rosary the Pope gave him in thanks in 1944—and came back to us, tireder, sadder, but a daily reminder of how lucky we were: the telegram we had dreaded every day for the six years of the war had never arrived. And when I came back to London after the war, twelve years old, still lanky but now six foot tall—already four inches taller than my father—we were rehoused in a prefab in the Elephant and Castle. It had electric light, hot water, a proper bath, a refrigerator and, best of all, an inside toilet. These were all firsts for us and it felt like luxury.

  I learnt early on that everything, no matter how tragic, can have its good side for you personally. I learnt to find the good in terrible situations. Looking back I would add another lesson that I couldn’t possibly have known at the time (I wish I had): if I can make it, there’s hope for us all. No matter where you start in life, you can get up and out.

  Learn what you can from what you get

  None of us chooses our childhood. We don’t choose our families, or our circumstances, or the era we are born into. But no matter where we find ourselves, there is always something we can learn. And now, more than ever, I realise what great lessons I learnt from the good bits and the crappy bits of my early life.

  My father taught me that I wanted more out of life than I was supposed to get. My mother taught me the things I needed to be able to go out and get it. Together, they provided me with a wonderful launch pad—and a wonderful grounding.

  My father was a brilliant, intelligent and funny man, a hero to my brother and me. He could make a wireless from scratch out of small parts. But like many of his generation he wasn’t very good at reading and writing, and because he was uneducated he was unsuited for anything but manual labour. My father was not a chirpy Cockney sparrow. He was, in truth, never truly happy. He deeply resented his situation yet felt hopeless to change it. I used to look at him and think: Blimey, with an education, what could this man have done? And then: Blimey, I need to get an education or I’ll end up like him, getting up at four every morning to spend the day carting freezing cold fish about, then blowing all my wages on the horses. When my father died in St. Thomas’s hospital at the age of fifty-six, I was with him. He had three shillings and eightpence in his pockets, and that was all he had to show for a lifetime of working like a beast of burden. As I walked out of the hospital ward I swore I would make something of myself, and my family would never be poor again.

  My mother set me on my path to success by giving me my first acting role. At the age of three I had a regular gig in a two-hander, opening our front door to a varied cast of unsuspecting co-stars—the local debt collectors. I had only one line to deliver: “Mummy’s out.” Slam door, exit up the three flights of stairs back to our tiny flat.

  It’s a nice story and it’s true. But what my mother gave me went a lot deeper than that.

  My mother made me the man I am.

  When my father went off to war, I was six and my brother Stanley was three. My mother didn’t cry as my father got on the army truck and it drove off out of sight. She turned and looked at us a
nd said, “Your father’s gone. Now you two have to look after me.”

  “Right, Mum,” we both said. “Of course we will. Don’t you worry.”

  Of course it wasn’t true. We couldn’t possibly look after her, and she didn’t need us to: she was tough as old boots and could look after herself. Which was lucky because my father didn’t come back for four years. But that solemn moment gave me an incredible sense of responsibility that stayed with me all my life. I have always wanted to take care of the people around me and always felt a terrible sense of guilt when I haven’t been able to.

  At the same time, Mum taught me how to relax, have fun, laugh and not take myself too seriously. She had a hard life but, unlike my father, she was not weighed down with bitterness or self-pity. She loved to laugh and she smiled her way through the humiliations of the grinding poverty that comes with being married to a gambler, six years of war waiting for the telegram boy in his silly hat and the lifelong strain of caring in secret for her beloved first child, David.

  And, later, when stardom came, boy, did my mother keep me grounded.

  When I had grown up (a bit) and settled down (a bit), my wife Shakira and I used to have my mother over to our house in Windsor every week for Sunday lunch. Sometimes it would be just the family and other times we would have friends there too—by this time, often very successful movie-business friends. This Sunday must have been just after I’d finished making The Man Who Would Be King, a 1970s escapist buddy caper set in a remote made-up land near India. The great director John Huston and the producer John Foreman, who, together with my co-star Sean Connery, had made working on that movie such a joy, were tucking into their roast dinner and my mother was earnestly engaging John Foreman on the topic of the price of milk. It was on her mind at the time, because it had just gone up by twopence, and John was agreeing with her that this was terrible. My mother always remained herself and always treated everyone the same.