12.
Rise and Fall
“Why do we fall, sir? So we can learn to pick ourselves up.”
Batman Begins, 2005
OF COURSE, AS I kept climbing, I kept falling. If you think that becoming a star, in the movies or any other universe, means you’re never going to fail again—never make poor choices, never fall out of favour, never be involved with something that looks brilliant on paper, then disappoints for no reason anyone can quite put their finger on—then you could not be more wrong.
Those chairs on set with your name on the back are designed to fold up and the names to peel off the backs quite easily. Success is a fleeting moment. It’s quicksilver in your hands: beautiful, wonderful, unpredictable and impossible to keep hold of. It’s a helium balloon that briefly takes everyone’s attention but will always either end up popping spectacularly, or sagging slowly in a corner. It’s a child’s rainbow soap bubble that gets bigger and bigger, then simply disappears. The path from stardom to disappointment and failure is a well-worn one. I know it well. Even after I’d hit the big-time, my career went through endless ups and downs. When I was up, I was a star with all that went with it. When I was down, a lot of that disappeared.
As the wise Alfred Pennyworth from the Batman movies understood so well, to endure and survive, in any walk of life, it is not enough to succeed—to climb to the top. You also need to know, and to learn, how to pick yourself up after you fall. On the many occasions that I fell mid-career, I returned to the lessons I had learnt in the early, brutal years of my career: I learnt from what I could get; I used the difficulty; I looked for blessings in disguise. When I was going through hell, I kept going. I said yes a lot and I gave 100 per cent commitment to everything I did. I also learnt some new lessons. It never became any easier but I would go so far as to say I became something of an expert in failure. A success at failing.
You define your own failures
To quite a large extent, it is up to you to decide what your own personal success looks like, and your own personal failure. There are people who believe they’re making it every day, no matter the reviews or the box office; and there are people who never feel they’re making it, no matter how high they rise, or how many little golden men they take home. There are people who are able to say, “That was a disaster,” without saying, “I am therefore a failure.” And there are people who cannot.
I was eating dinner one evening in Langan’s Brasserie, the London restaurant I had opened with Peter Langan in the 1970s, when I was shown a perfect example of how the “never satisfied” people think. There I was at a corner table and a man came by me on the way to the Gents. He was probably a bit pissed. He clocked me, and came over. “I thought you said this place was supposed to be full of film stars?”
I said, “Well, what am I?”
“You own the bloody place,” he said. “You’re bound to be here.”
It was a fair point. I nodded towards the table opposite and said, “Who’s that sitting there?”
“Dunno.”
“That’s Tom Cruise.” Then I nodded towards the stairs. “And who’s that going up the stairs?”
“Dunno.”
“That’s Clint Eastwood.”
On the way back from the Gents he stopped at my table again. “Well, there was no one famous in the bogs.”
That customer had managed to take success and somehow redefine it as failure. I, on the other hand, having learnt from an early age to find the good in even the direst of situations, was generally able to redefine a failure and turn it into some sort of success. A critical flop like Blame It on Rio wasn’t a failure: it made a lot of money at the box office. Shiner wasn’t a failure either. It was too brutal for audiences and did not do well at the box office but it got good reviews for the acting. Bullseye was disastrous both critically and commercially, but it wasn’t a failure. I had a great time making it with Michael Winner and Roger Moore. Recently I made a movie that was released straight to DVD, but it was shot in Savannah, Georgia, where our great friend Danny Zarem had been brought up. Shakira and I had been wanting to visit for years.
I even found a way to reconcile myself to Jaws: The Revenge. I have never actually watched the movie but I have it on good authority that it was really terrible. I had quite a small part in it, and only worked on it for two weeks, but I was the best-known actor in it so I took a lot of the heat when it was panned by the critics. Not only that but, as you know, my shooting schedule clashed with the Oscars ceremony so I missed picking up my Academy Award for Hannah and Her Sisters. What a disaster! What a failure! Except it wasn’t, for me. With the money I made on that terrible movie, I bought a more luxurious house for my mother. As I used to say to journalists when they wanted to mock me for this debacle, “I’ve never seen the movie, but I have seen the house it paid for, and it’s fabulous.”
I would say that every movie I ever made, whatever its box office, whatever the critics thought, whatever the impact on my professional reputation, in some way enriched my life.
Reinvent yourself
If all else fails, change direction. Reinvent “success.” Reinvent yourself.
At a point in my career when the movie scripts stopped coming, I went back to TV. Unlike today, with the power of Netflix and Amazon, that was seen as a sign of failure. For me, though, the failure would have been not working at all. I made Jack the Ripper in 1988, for which I won a Golden Globe, and Jekyll and Hyde in 1990, for which I won both Golden Globe and Emmy nominations. Not a bad way to fail.
At another point, the scripts not only dried up, they started looking hurtfully different. One of the lowest moments of my career—or so it seemed at the time—was that day I was sent the script in which, the producers had to spell out to me, I was to read the father, not the lover. My first reaction to the revelation that I was too old to play the romantic lead (I was about sixty) was that my acting career was over and I was going to have to radically reinvent “success.” I moved to Miami, sent back the few scripts I received, opened a restaurant and settled down to write my autobiography. I told myself and others that I had retired and that I was happy. I was happy. It wasn’t difficult to find good things about this situation: it was 80 degrees Fahrenheit in the winter in Miami, my restaurant, South Beach Brasserie, was thriving, my publishers assured me my book would sell and I no longer had to get to six thirty a.m. makeup calls. I’m usually a hard worker and here was an incredible chance to be lazy.
But I was even happier when Jack Nicholson, a wonderful actor, who was also in Miami at the time, persuaded me that the reinvention did not have to be so extreme. Why not simply reinvent myself as a movie actor, as opposed to a movie star? A character actor, rather than a leading actor? (What’s the difference? Well, essentially it’s this. When movie stars get a script they want to do, they change it to suit them. When leading movie actors get a script they want to do, they change themselves to suit the script.) Jack brought me a script for a movie called Blood and Wine and talked me into coming out of my so-called retirement and going back to work. I did, and the truth was revealed to me—or I allowed myself to see it: however happy I kidded myself I was, I was never going to be happier than when I was acting. Especially with such a great, fun-loving co-star as Jack. Jack is a tremendous actor who, even more than I do, relishes the relaxation. His attitude to work was summed up for me one day when we were hurrying to get a shot before the sun went down. I broke into a light jog to get back to the set. “Don’t run, Michael,” Jack said to my back laconically. “They’ll know it’s us who’s late.” I fell back in line and on we strolled.
That was in 1996. I followed up with Midnight in Saint Petersburg, another Harry Palmer movie, another flop for me. But then in 1998 I played the sleazy agent Ray Say in Little Voice, a semi-musical starring the brilliant actress and singing impressionist Jane Horrocks, alongside Brenda Blethyn, Ewan McGregor and Jim Broadbent, which was a great success in the UK, if not in the States. And in 1999 I played Dr. Wil
bur Larch in The Cider House Rules, which starred Charlize Theron, Tobey Maguire and Paul Rudd, and for which I won my second Academy Award. I was off and running again. I was using the difficulty, using my change in status to play a wider range of more interesting, more challenging parts than I had done in my movie-star days. I retired more than twenty years ago, and since then I have made more than forty new movies with a whole new generation of directors, producers and movie stars. I may no longer get the girl, but I’m still getting the parts. Bliss.
Succeeding enough is enough
Even since my “retirement” I’ve made plenty of flops, often with stunning casts and terrific directors. You just never know how these things will go. But I didn’t sit around waiting for the great director to give me the perfect script. I kept working. I didn’t want it to take five years for my next picture to come along, and then when I got there on Monday morning and someone said “Action,” I hadn’t acted for five years.
Over and over I repeated the pattern. I made a couple of disappointments but I kept the faith with myself and was always ultimately rewarded, just in time to save myself. The Magus, which came out in 1968, was a dire film but I followed it up with The Italian Job. Saved. A decade later, The Swarm, Ashanti and Beyond the Poseidon Adventure were all awful—great on paper, with terrific casts, but awful in reality, yet sprinkled, like magic stardust, in between were California Suite with Maggie Smith, who won an Oscar for that performance, and Dressed to Kill, in which I played a transvestite killer psychiatrist. Thank you, Brian De Palma, for saving my knicker-covered butt. In the early 1980s The Island and The Hand were both mediocrities but I followed them up with three successes: Escape to Victory, Deathtrap and Educating Rita. In the mid-1980s, I snatched victory from the jaws of defeat when Blame It on Rio and The Holcroft Convention were followed by Hannah and Her Sisters, and Jaws: The Revenge by Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. In the 1990s, after On Deadly Ground and Bullet to Beijing nearly proved to be the deadly final bullet for my career, Jack Nicholson turned up with Blood and Wine.
And, most miraculous of all, in the 2000s, when I’d made a series of unremarkable movies—The Actors, Secondhand Lions, The Statement, some so forgettable that I can’t remember them myself—a young man turned up on my doorstep one sleepy Sunday morning, unannounced, and script in hand. “Hello, Michael,” he said, waving a script in my face. “Sorry to disturb you on a Sunday but I’d like you to read this.”
“Oh, hello,” I said. “What’s your name?”
“Christopher Nolan.”
We had never met, but I knew the name. I had seen Memento, a fascinating film that Chris had made a few years previously, and loved it. It was the only movie I had ever seen that started at the end and finished at the beginning. “Come in, Christopher,” I said, excited that this wonderful young director had brought me a script for what I assumed would be a similar picture: something low-budget and big-potential. I took off my gardening gloves, Shakira made coffee and we sat there, stunned, as Chris explained the script and why he wanted me in the movie. This was not going to be a small arty intellectual piece. Chris was making a series of huge Hollywood blockbusters: a trilogy of Batman movies. “Who do you want me to play in it?” I asked. In my head I had already imagined and then quickly written off Batman, but I thought perhaps I could be a great villain.
“The butler,” said Chris.
I hid my disappointment and smiled. “The butler? What do I say? ‘Dinner is served’?”
Chris smiled back. “He’s not that kind of butler,” he said. “Batman is an orphan and the butler is a father to him. It’s a very important role.”
“OK. Well, leave me the script and I’ll read it and send it back to you tomorrow.”
“No,” said Chris, in what I would come to recognise as his hallmark quiet-but-authoritative manner. “I want you to read it now. I’ll wait until you’re done and you can tell me yes or no.”
“Oh, OK,” I said. Obediently I went to my office and read it. And loved it: Alfred Pennyworth, the butler, was a beautifully written role and the whole thing was just fabulous. When I came back, Chris and Shakira were sitting and chatting over more coffee. I said yes, it was handshakes all round and Chris left, taking the script with him.
Thank goodness I’d kept going. Thank goodness I’d trained myself to say yes. There I was, at the age of seventy-one, cast in one of the greatest movie trilogies ever made and about to kick off ten years of movie-making heaven.
Have a survival kit
Success or failure, we all need our own personal survival kit to see us through. For me, it’s feeding the ducks with my three grandchildren. Making chill-out music compilations (I own hundreds of chill-out CDs and I’ve even made one of my own, Cained). The London restaurant scene. Gardening. Cooking. Shakira. My family. Christmas. Making movies is an intense business and I always give it my complete commitment but I never have, and never will, let it become the only source of my happiness or the only way I define my success.
Although I lived in LA for so many years I never held much truck with psychoanalysis. I didn’t want to pay good money for someone to tell me what I already knew: I was an actor, so I must by definition be mad. I never consulted astrologers or psychics or fortune-tellers or did any of that. Instead, my best therapy has always been working with my hands, on my own, in peace, designing and growing things in the garden. Maybe it takes me back to the Norfolk farm I was evacuated to during the war.
I have always taken great pleasure in food and in the flowering of the London restaurant scene in the late 1950s, 1960s and every decade since. Until the 1950s, food in England was dull and monotonous, especially for the working class. For us, there was fish and chips, eel and pie and Lyons Corner Houses. There were some good restaurants but they kept the likes of me out with their prices, their stiff suit-and-tie dress codes. I didn’t own a suit and tie, and when I asked my dad to buy me one he told me to get a paper round (which I did. And I got a suit. But I still couldn’t afford to eat at a posh restaurant). And all the pubs, cafés and public transport closed at ten thirty to ensure the working classes would get up to go to work in the mornings.
I remember trying my first “American hamburger” in Charles Forte’s milk bar next to the Empire, Leicester Square. What a joy. Then came the coffee bars, including the 2i’s on Old Compton Street, serving coffee and sandwiches and, in the basement for an extra half a crown, rock ’n’ roll. I saw Cliff Richard and Tommy Steele for the first time down there. Then came Italian, French, Indian and Chinese restaurants. Eventually in 1976 I opened my own, Langan’s Brasserie, based on the brasseries, like La Coupole, that I had seen in Paris as a penniless young man. I had been talking for years about wanting to do it because, despite the flowering of the restaurant scene, there was still nothing like La Coupole in London. There was no dress code, and only one rule for staff behaviour: if I ever saw a waiter looking at their watch in front of a customer, they would be fired immediately.
Later—against the advice of a friend who told me never to trust anyone with names from three different countries—I went into business with a talented young chef called Marco Pierre White, who won three Michelin stars at our restaurant in Knightsbridge, the Marco Pierre White (what else?). I thought movie stars were temperamental but they had nothing on chefs, and one of the invisible costs of doing business with talent like Marco was the installation of extra doors between the kitchen and the restaurant to prevent the customers being exposed to the language that was going into their delicious food. Today London, which was a food desert in the 1950s, has become a gourmet’s paradise, with Michelin-starred chefs popping up all over the place and good affordable food from across the world being served up every day. I am proud of my city’s culinary revolution and of having been a small part of the change.
I know that golf features in a lot of people’s survival kit but there are a couple of reasons it was never going to work for me. The first is Sidney Poitier, who is the kindest, gentlest person
you are ever likely to meet. He tried to teach me golf once and I was so bad that he nearly lost his temper. The second is Sean Connery. Sean is not the kindest, gentlest person in the world. In fact, he can be very competitive and impatient. And when he tried to teach me golf he became so incensed that he grabbed my club and broke it in two. For the sake of my friendships with these two—oh, yes, I should add friendship to the list of what’s in my survival kit—the golf had to go.
But that’s fine. It doesn’t have to be golf, or gardening, or chill-out. It’s whatever can transport you to another place or give you an outlet for a few hours when the going gets tough. When I couldn’t redefine failure away, or reinvent my way out of failure, or when I simply had a bad day at the office, my family and friends, and my enthusiasms beyond my career, helped me to keep things in perspective.
What doesn’t help
I also worked out, through experience, and with a little help from a rather odd group of friends, strangers and loved ones, what was not going to help me survive the difficult times.
There was a point in my career when I used alcohol to manage stress, and perhaps also—despite all the glitz and the glamour—to manage a feeling that something was missing from my life. I used to tell myself that I needed it: the stress would get me before the alcohol would. I was never bombed on set, but I thought that a small vodka for breakfast was nothing to worry about, and by the early 1970s I was drinking two bottles of the stuff a day. By an immense stroke of good fortune, Shakira arrived in my life just in time. The empty feeling vanished and she got on my case. Then, to top it all, she got pregnant and I was given a second go at fatherhood, and soon I’d got myself straightened out. I gave up alcohol entirely for a year and now I never drink during the day, and with dinner it’s just wine. Shakira, literally, saved my life.
Blowing the Bloody Doors Off Page 15
