I know what I could have become if it hadn’t been for Shakira because in my time in the theatre, the movies and the restaurant business I have come across my fair share of towering alcoholics, and seen my fair share of careers ruined and lives shortened by alcohol. I saw Richard Burton’s Hamlet in 1964 and many years later when I met him on the set of Zee and Company, where I was working with his then-wife Elizabeth Taylor, I told him it had been wonderful, but the fastest Hamlet I had ever seen. He looked at me and said, “The pubs shut at ten thirty.” Richard was always very pleasant to me when he was sober, which was almost never. At the end-of-picture party for Zee and Company I said happy Christmas to him and Elizabeth as I left. “Why don’t you go fuck yourself,” he growled back.
A few years later Richard and his new wife Suzy, Sean Connery and his wife Micheline, and Shakira and I were having dinner together in Hollywood somewhere. Suzy told us that Richard had been on the wagon for some time, and I believed it. For the first two courses Richard never said a word, rude or otherwise. Then he went to the toilet and came back obviously very refreshed and started talking at high speed, very enthusiastically, about everybody. I never saw Richard again. Despite all that he achieved he did not fulfil his enormous professional promise and he died in 1984 before he reached the age of sixty.
Peter Langan was a brilliant chef and restaurateur. He made the best spinach soufflé, seafood salad and crème brûlée I’ve ever tasted, and he taught me that a restaurant should be a piece of theatre. It was not somewhere to come before the show or after the show, it was the show. The walls were the set and needed to be beautifully dressed with expensive-looking artwork—in our case by Peter’s friends David Hockney and Patrick Procktor. The tables should be well spaced but the bar should be at the front and crowded, balancing comfort with a sense of excitement and desirability. The customers were both the audience and the stars of the show: everyone had to be able to see everyone else at all times. But Peter was an alcoholic of quite magnificent proportions—he would occasionally get so drunk he insulted the customers. Once he got under a table and bit a woman’s leg, and he often ended up sleeping either in the restaurant at a table or rough on the streets. After a few months of working with him I realised I needed a chef who was not only brilliant but also sober, which was how Richard Shepherd became the chef and third partner at Langan’s. Peter’s restaurant was a great success but ten years after he opened it, at the tragically young age of forty-seven, he was dead.
Perhaps the supreme example was an actor called Wilfred Lawson who played Alfred Doolittle in the film version of Pygmalion with Leslie Howard and Wendy Hiller. You may never have heard of him but every British actor of my generation had. He was a true actor’s actor, and should have enjoyed a long, sparkling career. I saw Wilfred once in a Shakespeare matinee—I think it was Richard III at the Savoy Theatre—with another prodigious drunk, Trevor Howard. They were clearly inebriated and someone in the audience yelled, “You’re drunk.” Trevor just shouted back, “If you think we’re drunk, wait until you see the Duke of Norfolk.” I’d love to know who could possibly have been out-drinking those two but sadly I just cannot remember. I worked with Wilfred Lawson on The Wrong Box in 1966, a Victorian comedy directed by my great friend Bryan Forbes and with a wonderful best-of-British cast including, among so many others, John Mills, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. Whenever I did a scene with Wilfred, who was in his sixties by then, Bryan shot from above the waist so that I could hold his hand and guide him steadily to his marks on the floor. Shortly after that I remember coming across Wilfred in the Arts Club in London. He was sitting at the bar learning his lines for a West End play. I asked him when he opened. “Eight o’clock tonight,” he said.
I always maintain that it was drugs that brought the 1960s to an end. All that creative energy turned into a lot of sitting around, spaced out. I only did drugs of any kind once, or they could have been the end of me too. A friend gave me some marijuana and I laughed for about five hours and nearly gave myself a hernia. I was trying to get a cab home from Grosvenor Square to Notting Hill at about one in the morning and was standing on the corner laughing like a lunatic. Nothing would stop for me and I ended up walking all the way home. When I got back I vowed that was my first and last time, and it was. It wasn’t just the hernia or the walking for miles. I knew that marijuana affected memory and I had lines to learn.
Of course everything is much more efficient now. These days, shiningly talented young men and women who would once have taken decades to slowly poison themselves with alcohol can get themselves addicted to drugs that will kill them in a matter of months. I well remember Hollywood parties where I had to be stopped from putting sugar in my coffee: “Don’t do that, Michael. It’s cocaine.” Or where I nearly peed myself trying to find a bathroom that wasn’t otherwise occupied. If I hadn’t realised the dangers already, they were brought brutally home to me with the death from an accidental drugs overdose of that effervescent talent Heath Ledger at the age of twenty-eight. Just months earlier we had been shooting together on the second of Chris Nolan’s Batman movies, The Dark Knight. I had been concerned that no one would be able to follow Jack Nicholson’s performance as the Joker in Tim Burton’s Batman movie, but Heath, charming, gentle and thoughtful off-camera, had blown us all away with his utterly original, deeply disturbing, yet nuanced and witty interpretation of the role, for which he received a well-deserved posthumous Oscar. What a loss. What a waste.
Alcohol could have killed my career as it killed so many others. Eighty cigarettes a day, which was what I was smoking in the 1960s, weren’t going to kill my career—or not directly. But try having a career when you’re dead. I gave up drinking in a matter of months, thanks to Shakira. It took almost thirty years for me to give up smoking, thanks to a motley and unlikely crew made up of Tony Curtis, Yul Brynner and Hurricane Higgins.
In 1971, not long before I first met Shakira, I was at a posh party in Mayfair, standing by a fire chatting to someone and smoking my usual Gitanes cigarettes, lighting my next fag from the dog end of the last. I felt a hand go inside my jacket pocket, take out my cigarette packet and throw it onto the fire. I swivelled around, about to protest, and there behind me was Tony Curtis. I had never met him before but he was extremely famous, not least for his brilliant turn in Some Like It Hot. I said, “What did you do that for?” and Tony said, “You’re going to die, Michael, if you keep doing that, you idiot.” He proceeded to give me a very clinically detailed and convincing argument about the risks of smoking. Then he walked away, having (one-third) saved my life in about a minute and a half. I never smoked cigarettes again.
I did, though, take up cigars, thinking they were safer. Then one night many years later I was at a dinner party at Gregory Peck’s house in Los Angeles and found myself, after the ladies had retired to the living room, sitting next to Yul Brynner, smoking my cigar. (Dinner parties in LA were often rather formal affairs.) I offered one to Yul, who declined. “No thanks,” he said quietly. “I have lung cancer. I’ll be dead in two months.”
I immediately started to smash my cigar out in an ashtray. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll put it out.”
“Don’t bother on my account,” said Yul, putting his hand on my arm. “It’s too late for me.” That night, he looked healthy and powerful but, sure enough, within a few months he was dead. I gave up cigars for a year or so after that, then went back to them, telling myself that Yul had smoked cigarettes and I was smoking cigars—so much less harmful. That was two-thirds of my life saved.
Finally, in 2003, just before my seventieth birthday I was watching TV, cigar in hand (on my own in my office because the rest of the family couldn’t stand the smell). On came the snooker player Hurricane Higgins, speaking through a voice-box and looking absolutely terrible, making an anti-smoking commercial. He had throat cancer. I put my cigar down in the ashtray and have not smoked since. Thank you, Tony, thank you, Yul, thank you, Hurricane. And may your souls rest in peac
e.
Don’t be frightened of failure. I have found failure to be a great teacher, whose lesson is “Don’t do that again.” I took that advice many times, and I failed again many times, but always for a different reason. And failure can happen to anyone. I like to say that I have made flops with some of my best friends and some of the most talented people in the business. Norman Jewison, director of Fiddler on the Roof, In the Heat of the Night and Moonstruck, directed me in The Statement, set in beautiful Aix-en-Provence but not beautiful in any other way. Oliver Stone, genius director of JFK and Platoon, directed me in The Hand, a horror picture in which the star of the show is my severed hand. Nora Ephron, writer of When Harry Met Sally and writer-director of Sleepless in Seattle, directed me in Bewitched, which, somehow, just didn’t work. And Irwin Allen, the extremely talented producer of The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno, was the first-time director of The Swarm. I was in Ashanti with Peter Ustinov and Omar Sharif, in Curtain Call with Maggie Smith, The Jigsaw Man with Laurence Olivier and Bewitched with Nicole Kidman. There were no recriminations. In fact, whenever I see Oliver Stone he likes to say to me, “Michael, the best movie you ever made was The Hand.” I got enormous pleasure from working with every one of them and, spending time with every one of them, I had moments I wouldn’t exchange for anything in the world—and we’re all still friends.
The only way to be sure you never fail is never to do anything at all. And the only way to really, truly fail is not to learn from your failures. Any time you learn from a failure, it’s a success.
13.
Being Decent
“I know I am behaving badly, but I have every intention of behaving badly. As a matter of fact, this is exactly the kind of situation where one should behave badly.”
The Quiet American, 2002
BEING A DECENT HUMAN being is difficult for everyone from time to time but it seems there are particular challenges for those who become stars in their worlds. In some ways, being decent becomes harder, just at the point when your behaviour becomes more noticeable and more important. Harder, because once you enter that bubble of stardom you can lose touch with reality and become demanding, egotistical and unreasonable almost as a way of life. More noticeable, because everyone is watching, all the time. We love to know what famous people are “really” like. Did you lose your rag in an airport queue? Or did you take time out of your day to smile at a little boy, sign an autograph and tell him to be good for his mum? Either way, whoever witnesses it will extrapolate an entire personality for you, and tell all their friends. More important, because the more successful you become, the more your behaviour sets the tone for everyone around you.
Stay grounded
Some huge stars completely lose touch with the real world. Frank Sinatra, for example, was an extremely generous member of the secret philanthropists’ club of Hollywood—a circle of big stars who took care of less successful actors as they grew older or fell on hard times—and became a great friend of mine. But he was a law unto himself and everything was on his terms. For example, Frank had a Twenty Minute Rule. He would not travel for dinner more than twenty minutes’ drive from his house in Beverly Hills. If he had been invited to dinner and had been in the car for twenty minutes he would command his driver to turn around. “I’m twenty minutes,” he would call out. “It’s too far. We’re going home.” Mind you, he was also known to fly to Paris for dinner when he was staying in London. And he would always have people fussing around him.
I remember once one of his guys whispered to me conspiratorially, “Frank’s in a great mood today.”
I said, at normal volume, “What about me? What about my mood?”
And the guy looked at me like I was crazy. “Who cares? No one cares how you feel.”
I have known stars who have demanded private planes, drugs, full interior design for their trailers. It goes on.
I was lucky. I always had my family to keep me grounded. There’s nothing like your mum saying she’s had enough of LA and wants to go home to London to catch up on her favourite soap, or your wife saying, “You want a cup of tea? Sure, the kettle’s over there,” to remind you that no matter how much adulation and validation you’re getting in your professional world, at home you’re just plain old you. Not a star, not a god and quite possibly not the person who has had the hardest day.
The other people who have always kept me grounded are taxi drivers. In fact, I sometimes think Shakira keeps a few cab drivers on retainer just to stop me getting too big-headed. The other day, I got into a cab to go out for dinner and the driver, who must have been about fifty, looked in his mirror and said, “My grandfather loved you. He saw all your films.” There was a little pause. “He’s dead now.”
“Oh,” I said. “Have you seen any?”
“I don’t think so.”
On the way back I got into a different cab. I saw the driver clock me in his mirror. “Hey, I know you,” he said. I nodded encouragement. I was hoping for something about how brilliant I’d been in Batman. Instead: “Didn’t you used to be Michael Caine?”
Alec Guinness, that great British theatre and film actor, perhaps best-known for his role as Obi-Wan Kenobi in the original Star Wars movies, but also acclaimed for his work with the greatest director of his era, David Lean, in films like Great Expectations, Oliver Twist and The Bridge on the River Kwai, told me he had similar luck with cabbies. He once got into the back of a cab and the driver said, “I know you.” Alec opened his mouth to confirm that he was indeed Alex Guinness and the driver said, “No, don’t tell me. I’ll get it. Before you get out, I’ll get your name.” As Alec was paying the fare, the driver said with a flourish, “I’ve got it. Telly Savalas.”
So Alec says, “No, that’s not it.”
“I bet you wish you was, though,” says the cabbie. Alec nodded, with a rueful Obi-Wan smile, and walked off into the night.
Pay it forward/create an atmosphere
I still remember, viscerally, how nerve-racking it was being an extra or bit-part actor and I still remember the encounters with my idols that made me feel like a million dollars. Some, like Frank Sinatra, Sidney Poitier and Gregory Peck, eventually became close friends. Others took me under their wing and let me learn from them for the duration of a shoot: Noël Coward, for example, who did a hilarious turn as a gangster boss in The Italian Job, was a gloriously unstuffy, unfussy master of comic timing, who very sweetly used to take me for dinner at the Savoy Grill every Wednesday evening when we were shooting. Noël had come from unpromising beginnings south of the river, worked hard, cultivated an image and completely invented himself: he was an inspiration to me and I couldn’t believe I had the chance to get to know him a little. He was also warm, witty and a wonderful dinner companion. I remember one evening we got on to the subject of Vanessa Redgrave, who was in the news at the time because she was leading protests against the Vietnam War. “She will keep on demonstrating,” said Noël. “But, then, she’s a very tall girl and I suppose she’s pleased to sit down.” Then others, like Sophia Loren and William Holden, spoke to me when I had an uncredited bit part in their 1958 movie The Key, and Vivien Leigh, one of my all-time favourite actors, simply exchanged a few kind and encouraging words with me.
I only met Vivien once, in 1966, on a memorable London evening when John Gielgud came over and introduced himself to me and told me that he and his dinner companion—a tiny woman in dark glasses—had just seen Alfie and loved it. The tiny woman whipped off her glasses and there, in the living, breathing flesh, was Vivien Leigh. I was about to begin shooting Hurry Sundown, for which I was going to need a Southern American accent, so I took a deep breath and seized the moment to get an acting lesson from one of my biggest acting idols. “How did you do your accent for Gone with the Wind?” I asked.
“Oh,” smiled Vivien, “it’s easy.” She was being really sweet to an annoying young actor and gave no sense that she had been asked this question hundreds of times before. “I just said ‘four-door
Ford’ over and over.” Only she pronounced it “foah-doah Fohd.” So if you think I sounded like Scarlett O’Hara in that movie, that’s the reason why.
I remember, too, some of the thoughtful little acts that made a big difference to a nervous young actor. When I was preparing to act opposite Laurence Olivier in Sleuth, there was one small, rather English matter that was bothering me. Formally, Laurence Olivier was Lord Olivier. So what should I call him? Was I going to have to address the only other actor on set as “Lord Olivier” or, even more medieval, “my lord”? Larry had the imagination and grace to anticipate my concern and he wrote to me before shooting began. “You may be wondering how to address me when we meet,” he wrote. “From the moment we shake hands I will be Larry forever more.” Phew. One less thing to worry about.
Of course, I also still remember the other kinds of encounters with big movie stars that left me feeling despondent, furious or a bag of nerves.
When I was a bit-part actor, John Mills had me fired from a movie set for being too tall. I turned up to do my first scene with him, and he said he was sorry but he couldn’t act while looking up. He did at least insist I got my full fee, and we later became friends and even acted together in The Wrong Box a few years later: apparently John was prepared to look up once my star had risen a little higher.
Around the same time, Oliver Reed and I got small two-day parts in a Norman Wisdom film called The Bulldog Breed. I was an uncredited sailor and Oliver was an uncredited Teddy Boy. Apart from our dialogue with him, Norman never spoke to either of us and, in fact, he ordered the assistants to keep the pair of us away from him. What a conceited, nasty man: not funny at all.
Blowing the Bloody Doors Off Page 16
