That is, unless they’re deliberately trying to undermine my performance, or the movie itself. There are attention-seekers, limelight-hoggers, deceivers and bullies in every office and every family, and the film set is certainly no exception. Generally the director will pick up on this and deal with it himself. If he doesn’t, I find a long stare before I say my next line generally does the trick.
The flip side of trying to ignore bad acting is trying not to get concerned about whether the other fellow in a scene is “out-acting” me. It should never be about trying to make myself appear better than the other guy, because everything must be done for the good of the whole. That’s why I’m not one of those actors who eases up on my performance when I’m “off-camera” feeding lines for someone else’s close-up. Maybe I’m not the one in the spotlight but I still have a contribution to make so that the scene is the best it can be. Whether I’m on-camera or off-camera, whether it is my close-up or I’m just feeding lines, I play my role at the same pitch and with the same energy. A real team player understands that part of their contribution is doing whatever it takes to ensure everyone is giving their best.
And, of course, a generous double-act can be greater than the sum of its parts. I discovered that when I played Peachy, opposite Sean Connery as Danny, in The Man Who Would Be King. We each understood that, for the sake of the picture, we had to bring each other into our close-ups rather than edging each other out. In long dialogue scenes, Sean would turn me full face to the camera for my important line, and I would return the compliment. Sean is one of the most unselfish actors I have ever worked with and we developed a deep mutual trust and admiration. We were always thinking of each other, and the film was all the better for it. However full of stars a team is—a movie team, a football team—if those stars are too full of their own importance to work as a team, they are going to get beaten by a weaker side that has learnt to work together.
Only compete with yourself
Montgomery Clift used to say that the highest tribute you could pay to another actor was to envy his performance. He thought it was healthy for one actor to look at another and think, I wish that had been me. I disagree. This kind of competitive comparison is rarely even possible, and when it is, it is pointless and unhelpful.
I love to go to the theatre and the movies, and I love watching TV. I absolutely love other actors, their skills and performances. I admire them and get great pleasure out of watching what they do. But I have no sense of competition with other actors—my predecessors, my contemporaries or my successors. I love Humphrey Bogart, I love Marlon Brando. They are my heroes, my idols. But I’d never put myself up against them, and it’s of no interest to me whether I’m as good as them or not. There’s just no point in doing that, no possible advantage. I’m as good as I am, which is the best I can do.
My competition is always with myself. From my very first step on stage as a robot for Clubland to my latest movie role, all I ever do is try to be the best I can possibly be, without reference to being better than anyone else. How can I find a role that stretches me further? How can I make this role better than the last role? How can I make this film better than the last film? How can I make this take better than the last take?
What makes my heart sing is not besting another actor but besting myself. The roles of which I am proudest are the ones that have asked the most of me, that have been the furthest away from me, but that I feel I have made the most real. The parts where I feel I have truly managed to make myself disappear and summon up someone else: Frank, the disillusioned alcoholic university professor in Educating Rita; Dr. Larch, the rule-stretching gynaecologist addicted to ether in The Cider House Rules; Thomas Fowler, the foreign correspondent in The Quiet American; Alfred Pennyworth, the wise and patient butler who knows how to handle himself in Chris Nolan’s Batman movies; Ray Say, the seedy, angry and desperate agent in Little Voice; Harry Brown, the pensioner who loses his rag and goes on a rampage in Harry Brown; Fred Ballinger, the fading retired composer in Youth; and, of course, Alfie.
The only time it is useful for me to decide how talented another actor is, is when I’m considering working with him, or when I’m already working with him and trying to learn from him. Because I only want to work with the best and I only want to learn from the best. Other than that, it’s of no interest.
I tell my grandchildren the same thing. There will always be someone faster than you, cleverer than you, better-looking than you, richer than you, luckier than you. So forget competing with other people: it will just make you bitter, self-pitying, unhappy. Do your own thing, and do it as well as you possibly can.
When I was young, I read something urging Olympic athletes to “chase the dream, not the competition.” That line has stayed with me all my professional life. It is sound advice.
PART THREE
The Long Run
11.
Being a Star (or Why I Never Wear Suede Shoes)
Ray Say: “You’re a star.”
LV: ”You’re a nutter.”
Little Voice, 1998
GETTING TO THE TOP—to where you wanted to be—is a bit like climbing up a steep mountain path, reaching the peak, then taking in the view. It’s bloody fantastic. Perhaps it’s even better than you’d been anticipating. But it can also be a bit disorienting. Alongside the overwhelming feelings of achievement and elation, there is sometimes another feeling, peering down over the edge, of slight nausea. Standing at the summit does not always feel quite how you expected it would when you were looking at it from halfway up.
So what can you expect, if you become a star in the movies, or any other universe?
Let’s start with the good bits. One of the most exciting things that happened to me when I became a star was I got to mix with other stars, which meant I got to meet my heroes. Someone said, “Don’t meet your heroes because you’ll be disappointed,” but I disagree. Getting to meet my heroes, and in many cases become friends with them, was, for me, one of the best parts of becoming a star.
It all happened very fast. After the success of Alfie, Shirley MacLaine chose me to play opposite her in Gambit, which was to be shot in Hollywood, the centre of the movie universe. I flew out to Los Angeles and was whisked off in a Rolls-Royce to a luxury suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel on Sunset Boulevard, where I was to stay for the entire three-month shoot. While I was waiting for Shirley, who was delayed for a few days, I hung out in the gorgeous airy lobby spotting stars and, to my great pleasure, being spotted right back. Jane Russell, one of Hollywood’s biggest and sexiest stars of the 1940s and 1950s, invited me to lunch at the Beverly Wilshire. John “call me Duke” Wayne landed his helicopter in the hotel’s gardens before striding into the lobby in full cowboy get-up, telling me I was going to be a star and giving me the advice I opened this book with. “And never wear suede shoes,” he added.
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because,” he said, low and slow, “I was taking a piss the other day and the guy in the next stall recognised me and turned towards me. He said, ‘John Wayne—you’re my favourite actor,’ and pissed all over my suede shoes.”
As if that wasn’t enough, when Shirley arrived back in Hollywood, this powerful and beloved Hollywood figure pulled out all the stops and threw me the most dazzling and glamorous welcome-to-LA party. There I met icons like Gloria Swanson, Frank Sinatra and Liza Minnelli, and soon-to-be best friends, like Sidney Poitier—with whom I went on to make two movies—and the Hollywood super-agent and super-host Irving “Swifty” Lazar, so-named because he once put together three movie deals for Humphrey Bogart in a single day. The following night Shirley took me to dinner in Danny Kaye’s kitchen, where the other guests were the Duke of Edinburgh and Cary Grant, and the night after that it was just a quiet family dinner—except that her quiet family dinners consisted of her mum, her dad and her brother, Warren Beatty.
At another party, thrown for me in New York, I met the legendary Bette Davis. “You remind me of the young Leslie Howar
d,” she told me, in that unmistakable drawl. I was slim and blond at the time (I had been following the Actor’s Diet, or as we called it, starving, for years) and had been told that before, but Bette’s follow-up was entirely original. “Do you know?” she went on. “Leslie screwed every single woman in every movie he ever made—except me.”
“Oh, yes,” I spluttered. “I’d heard that.”
“Well, I wasn’t interested in being just another one of his conquests, and I told him so. But when I look at you, I just wonder what difference it would have made if I had.” This last bit was said a little wistfully.
“Would you like dinner tonight?” I blurted out.
She gave me a long look, then said dismissively, “I wasn’t making a pass at you.”
I hadn’t thought she was. I straightened things out and we had a lovely dinner that night, along with Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn, after which I put Bette in a taxi home.
Soon I was dating women like Natalie Wood and Nancy Sinatra. I was being flown out for my first visit to Las Vegas by that city’s king, Nancy’s father Frank, to hear Frank sing with Count Basie and be introduced to the Rat Pack—Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Joey Bishop and Peter Lawford. At the beginning this was all rather surreal and overwhelming. I remember sitting in Frank’s private plane, just me alone with Frank because all the women were sitting in a separate little group, and being so nervous I could barely speak. Later it became normal for me to socialise with Gregory Peck, Frank Sinatra, Mia Farrow, Billy Wilder, Jack Nicholson. They were simply my friends. But I never lost a sense of wonder and gratitude each time I came across a movie hero.
One star-studded dinner that stands out in my memory for the sheer incredulity it prompted took place not in Hollywood but in glamorous Budapest. I was shooting a movie there and so, it seemed, was everyone else. Elizabeth Taylor threw a birthday party one night and there came a point in the evening when all the other men at my table must have gone to the Gents because I remember looking around me and it was just me, sitting at a table with my wife Shakira, Elizabeth, Raquel Welch and Grace Kelly.
Two of the most star-studded events of my life must have been my sixtieth and eightieth birthday parties, both shared with my “celestial twin” (we were born at the same time on the same day, me in London and him in Chicago), Quincy Jones.
For our sixtieth birthdays in 1993 we took over a club on Beverly Drive and it was wonderful to see so many family and friends from past and present all gathered together—from John Barry and Sidney Furie of my Ipcress File days to Oprah Winfrey and Jack Nicholson. The highlight of the night was rapping with Ice-T. I thought I was actually pretty good.
Our eightieth birthday party had to top that—and it did. How do you top a birthday party in Los Angeles? You head to Las Vegas and the dining room of the MGM Grand. There were two thousand guests; the cabaret included Stevie Wonder singing “Happy Birthday,” Jennifer Hudson, Whoopi Goldberg, Bono and Chaka Khan; my wife, daughters and closest friends were there; and we raised millions of dollars for the Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health, founded by my friend Larry in honour of his father and specialising in looking after people suffering from Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. It was a wonderful, joyful evening, and looking around me as Chaka Khan sang the theme tune from Alfie to me, I thought, That’s what it’s all about.
Stardom also brought me life-changing quantities of money. I don’t have a lot of good advice on money. I’m good at earning it, but I’m terrible at hanging on to it. I suppose what I would say is: spend it on what gives you pleasure. When I made my first real money, on Zulu, I spent it on a pony for my horse-mad eight-year-old daughter Dominique. When I first felt truly wealthy, after Ipcress, I went mad buying things I had never been able to afford. It might sound silly but it turned out that my first priority wasn’t a fancy car or a foreign holiday, but hygiene. When you’re really poor, you’re often dirty as well. I had been used to making shirts last another day, brushing my teeth with salt, doing without shampoo and sleeping in unwashed bedclothes because I had no money for the launderette. So I went mad buying shirts, sheets, towels, socks, toothpaste, shampoo and the world’s biggest collection of aftershave. As the money kept coming in, I bought a house for my mum, two houses for my brother and a flat for my friend Paul. I also eventually managed to persuade Mum to give up her cleaning jobs. My family had never had much money to speak of and it gave me enormous pleasure to be able to make them more comfortable. Now I’ve stopped buying houses and I spend my money on huge family holidays, with all the grandchildren. But no matter how much money I make, I never lose that feeling of panic and dread at the thought of being poor again. I never feel completely secure. I think when you’ve been really poor, that feeling goes deep and never leaves.
The only other piece of money advice I have that’s worth sharing is something David Bowie once told me. I was with him on the day he bought himself a yacht. He took me on board and we had a drink. I met him a couple of years later and asked how he was enjoying it. “There are two great things about a yacht, Michael,” he said. “The day you buy it, and the day you sell it. And the last one’s better than the first. Forget it, Michael, forget yachts.” So I did. If I had that kind of money I wouldn’t have a yacht, I’d have a plane. For me that would be the height of luxury.
Stardom opened other doors too: to the things that money can’t buy. Anywhere that was impossible to get into, suddenly I could. Theatres that saved seats until the last minute for famous people saved them for me. Exclusive clubs offered me membership. Restaurants that were booked up months in advance kept their best tables for me. In New York, it was Elaine’s, the city’s salon where writers, directors and actors gather. In Los Angeles it was Ma Maison, Matsuhisa (the first of Nobu Matsuhisa’s restaurants) and Chasen’s (where I once did the Heimlich manoeuvre on George Burns and saved his life. He must have been ninety then, so he had another ten good years left in him. Never a dull moment in Chasen’s.) In London it was the Aretusa on the King’s Road and the White Elephant Club on Curzon Street in the 1960s, and then my own restaurant, Langan’s Brasserie, and the River Café, Harry’s Bar, Scott’s and Annabel’s.
The unexpected perks were things like this. When I first became a star I had never learnt to drive so I hired a chauffeur to drive me around. But later I moved with my family to Los Angeles, and everybody drives there so I had to take a test. Before I took it, a man behind a desk informed me, in a prepared speech he had probably given many times, “The person who will perform your test is sitting outside in the car. You will speak to him only to say, ‘Good morning.’ There will be no normal conversation. He will give you instructions, you will listen and respond. There will be no personal remarks whatsoever.”
I said, “Yes, Officer, I understand.” I went outside and got into the car.
The guy looked at me and he said, “I loved you in The Man Who Would Be King. You’re going to have to be shit to not pass this test.” So at the age of fifty that was how I got my first driver’s licence.
Alongside all of this fun, glamour and privilege, there are of course some downsides to being a star, in the movies or anywhere else. But if I ever even start to feel sorry for myself about some trapping of stardom I give myself a sharp talking-to. “Michael, would you prefer the alternative?” Yes, being at the top brings its challenges. But if you think it’s lonely or tough up there, either you’ve never been at the bottom, or you’ve forgotten what it was like.
One big downside of stardom is that while you’re meeting your heroes and enjoying your money and all the other trappings—my first dressing room in Hollywood was bigger and more comfortable than anywhere I had lived up to that point in my life—it is easy to enter a bit of a bubble and lose touch with reality, your values and who you are. It’s more for others to say than for me, but I don’t think I ever really got stuck in that bubble. Perhaps that was because success came to me relatively late.
I’m sure the people I kept around me helped too. Although m
y social circle did become quite starry, I also continued to spend a lot of time with my family. And I never was much of one for an entourage. These days, we have security, a housekeeper and a brilliant secretary: that’s about the extent of it. I’ve never had bodyguards, cooks, personal trainers or stylists. If I’m doing press, I won’t be surrounded by PR, agents or assistants. Shakira and I love seeing small groups of friends, and we love spending time with our family, but we don’t like to have lots of staff around and we are really quite self-sufficient.
This doesn’t just go for those of us in the position to have “people,” it goes for any senior manager in any organisation: the more people there are around you, whose job it is to please you, or whose job depends on winding you up and getting you exercised about this or that, or whose sense of importance depends on their relationship with you, the more likely you are to lose touch with reality. Not to mention the more sinister possibility of exploitation and manipulation by people whose livelihoods are built around your success.
I remember one night I introduced Whitney Houston at a charity show in Hollywood. She was with me backstage and before she went on someone who I assumed was a member of her entourage came up to her, put her up against the back of the stage, put her arms either side of her so she was pinned there, then talked right into her face. “You’re going to do this, and do that, you’ve got to, you’ve got to,” on and on and on. I walked on stage and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, Whitney Houston,” and she let Whitney go, and on Whitney walked. And she was fabulous. But I felt for her.
Blowing the Bloody Doors Off Page 13
