That first evacuation did not last long. Stanley and I were the last two children left in the village hall at Wargrave in Berkshire and had to be rescued by a very kind woman who whisked us off to a huge house in a Rolls Royce. There we were showered with kindness and given unlimited cake and lemonade – it all seemed too good to be true. It was. The next day a busybody official came round and said we were too far from the school and we would have to be sent elsewhere and split up.
Stanley was sent to live with a district nurse and I was taken in by a couple who were just plain cruel. My mother couldn’t come to visit straight away because the Germans were bombing the railway lines. When she eventually managed to get down she found me covered in sores and starving. There was an allowance to cover the costs of taking in evacuees and my hosts were out to keep as much of it as possible; I’d been living on a tin of pilchards once a day. Even worse, they used to go away for the weekend and leave me locked in the cupboard under the stairs. I’ve never forgotten sitting hunched in the dark, crying for my mum and not knowing if anyone would ever come to get me out; time had ceased to have any meaning. That experience was so traumatic that it has left me with a lifelong fear of small, enclosed spaces and a burning hatred of any cruelty to children; all my charity work is aimed at children’s charities, particularly the NSPCC. Anyway, back then I decided I’d rather risk the bombing than be locked up in a cupboard again. Happily, my mother agreed and took Stanley and me straight back to London, determined not to be parted from us again.
By now the Blitz on London was happening in earnest and it seemed to me that Adolf Hitler had found out our address. The bombs got closer and closer and when London was set alight by blanket incendiary bombing during the Battle of Britain, my mother had had enough. My father was called up to serve in the Royal Artillery and she took us to North Runcton in Norfolk, on the east coast of England.
Sometimes I think the Second World War was the best thing that ever happened to me. Norfolk was a paradise for a scrawny little street urchin like me, coming from all the smog and fog and filth of London. I was a little runt when I went there and by the time I was fourteen I had shot up to six foot, like a sunflower growing up a wall. Or a weed. Wartime rationing meant no sugar, no sweets, no cakes – no artificial anything – but we had good food, supplemented with wild rabbits and moorhens’ eggs. Everything was organic because all the chemical fertilisers were needed for explosives, so I was given this unexpectedly healthy start in life. We lived with another ten families crammed together in an old farmhouse, with fresh air, good food and, best of all, the chance to roam free in the countryside. I went round with a gang of other evacuees; the village mothers wouldn’t let their kids play with us because we were so rough and our language was a bit suspect, to say the least. Now I look back on it, we must have been a bit of a bloody nuisance – we raided the orchards, stole milk off doorsteps and got into fights with the local boys – but my experiences there changed my life. I appreciated the country because I went there and I appreciated London because I’d left it behind.
After six months in Norfolk, my father came home for a fortnight’s leave. We wanted to hear Lone Ranger-type stories of fighting the Germans, but he was simply exhausted. He’d just come, he said, from a place in France called Dunkirk. It didn’t mean anything to us at the time, but when I look back now I wonder at what sort of hell he went through there. When his leave was up he was sent to North Africa with the Eighth Army to fight Rommel. We didn’t see him again for four years.
By now the war had reached even sleepy Norfolk. With the entry of America, we found ourselves living in the middle of seven huge US Air Force Bomber bases and witnessing the war in the air at first hand. As we watched from the ground we could see German planes attacking our own fighters – and we could see the deadly results as plane after plane spiralled out of the sky and crashed in the fields around us. I had never connected the fighting I saw in the movies with real life; now, when we reached the downed planes, often ahead of the police or Home Guard, I saw dead bodies for the first time.
Hitler may not have invaded us, but the Americans certainly did. The towns and villages of Norfolk were overrun by gum-chewing, laid-back, good-humoured American airmen who seemed to think everything was a joke and amazed the locals with their generosity and sense of fun. Everything I knew about America I had learnt from my weekly cinema visits and these brave young men were the first real Americans I’d met. It was the beginning for me of a love affair with America and all things American that has lasted the whole of my life.
I wasn’t only getting an education through the cinema. I’d been very lucky in my elementary school teacher: a butch, chain-smoking, whisky-drinking, completely inspirational woman called Miss Linton. Looking back, I can see that she was probably a lesbian and that I perhaps represented the son she’d never have. She saw something in me, encouraged me to read widely, taught me maths through the unusual medium of poker, and one memorable day came flying across the village green in her academic gown to our house to give me the news that I’d passed the London scholarship exam to grammar school. I was the first child from the village school ever to do so. By now my mother had got a job as a cook and we had moved into the servants’ quarters of a big house called The Grange, on the edge of the village. After the Elephant and Castle it was unimaginable luxury – electric light, fully equipped kitchen, endless good food (we got the leftovers) and hot and cold running water. There was even a huge piano in the family drawing room, shaped like a harp on its side – nothing like the upright boxes I’d seen in the saloon bars in the London pubs.
The house was owned by a family called English whose money came from a timber firm – Gabriel, Wade and English. I’d always remembered the name, and years later Shakira and I decided to take a trip down the Thames on a sunny evening and we went past an old warehouse and I was surprised to see that name painted on the side. I think I’d somehow thought it wasn’t a real firm. Mr English was very kind to me and offered to pay for me to go to school and university, if I didn’t pass the scholarship. I was a funny little boy, quite lonely, but people would catch on to me somehow and Mr English used to take me through to the main house and give me tea in the drawing room. One day, I thought, I’m going to have all this – and the house I live in now in Surrey is really his home: I have replicated his life. It’s even extended to food. Because we used to eat the leftovers from the Englishes’ dinners, I got used to eating game – pheasant and partridge – as a young boy and that’s had a lifelong effect on me. I eat like a country squire these days – albeit a country squire who’s been to France a lot!
As you get older, you find yourself doing many things for what you are aware will probably be the last time. A couple of years ago I went back to North Runcton with my daughter Natasha. I had been invited to unveil a blue plaque on the village school where I had acted in public for the first time. We were given a great welcome and shown round the impressively modernised buildings, and then we drove to The Grange where the current owner let me in through the front door for the first time. The house, like the school, had changed – the quarters where we had lived were now a double garage – but the two bay windows in the drawing room looking out over the fields were just as they were when Mr English used to have me in for afternoon tea. As I stood there, I realised that one major part of me had been shaped in this room, while another had been shaped by the school we had just visited. And as we drove away from North Runcton, I was conscious of saying goodbye to my childhood and, although they were long dead, once again to the people there who had been such an important part of it.
So, thanks to Miss Linton – and if I’d failed, it would have been thanks to Mr English – I got to go to grammar school. The London school that had been evacuated nearest to us was a mainly Jewish school called Hackney Downs Grocers. I’d never met a Jewish person before but my mother informed me that my father’s bookmaker was Jewish and so was Tubby Isaacs, the man who used to sell Dad his jellied e
els. Both these men were fat. Mum also said that Jews were clever because they ate a lot of fish (I hated the stuff my father used to bring home from the market before the war) and that most Jews had money, which made sense to me since Dad lost most of his at the bookies and spent what was left on jellied eels. So I was a bit surprised to get to my new school and find that although they were clever, the boys were not fat and they weren’t rich – in fact they were just like me. We even shared a name. The name Maurice was a bit unusual round the Elephant but at Grocers everyone seemed to be called Maurice. In fact a lot of them had Morris as a surname, too. Very confusing. The only thing that set them apart from the kids I’d been to school with before was that they worked hard. They got this attitude from their parents. My best friend Morris’s (I’m not making his name up) parents were obsessed with the importance of his education and, yes, they ate fish at practically every meal.
We got back to London in 1946 and it was a miserable time. Many of the familiar streets of my childhood had literally disappeared and the landscape was littered with the rubble of collapsed buildings. When my father was demobbed, having fought right through the war from El Alamein to the liberation of Rome, the council rehoused us in a pre-fabricated house. Years later, when I was in the movie Battle of Britain, I had lunch with General Adolf Galland, the former head of the Luftwaffe, who was acting as technical advisor. I didn’t know whether to hit him or thank him for his successful slum clearance programme, but it wouldn’t have mattered: he didn’t seem to have realised that the Germans had lost.
The prefabs, as they were known, were intended to be temporary homes while London was rebuilt, but we ended up living there for eighteen years and for us, after a cramped flat with an outside toilet, it was luxury. Outside, though, there was a constant smell of burning rubbish in the air as the authorities cleared the bomb sites, compounded by the thick smog produced by the coal fires. The shops were empty, everyone was queuing for the few goods that were available – and my only escapes were the cinema and the public library. For young working-class boys like me, America was really exciting. British war films were always about officers; American films were about enlisted men. British authors wrote about officers; in the library I discovered Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and James Jones’ From Here to Eternity. Here at last were stories about the experiences of soldiers I could identify with.
I may have been a keen member of the public library, but I was not enjoying school. I’d had to move from Hackney Downs Grocers to a school nearer to us and it did not go well, either for the staff at Wilson’s Grammar School or for me. The only subject I was remotely interested in was French – and that was only because of Mam’zelle, whose short skirts offered a flash of thigh when she perched on the front of her desk – and I began to devote more and more of my creative energy to playing truant. Mum used to give me money for lunch each day and whenever I could I would spend half of it on a bar of chocolate to keep starvation at bay and the rest on a ticket to the Tower cinema in Peckham.
Where Wilson’s was failing in its attempts to educate me, the Tower cinema was doing a lot better – and not just in the world of film. One day I turned up at the box office as usual with my chocolate bar and while I was buying my ticket, the girl behind the glass leant forward and whispered, ‘Give us your chocolate and I’ll show you me tits.’ My jaw dropped. I sneaked a look at her torso. She was no oil painting, but when you’re fourteen, most girls have a certain allure. ‘OK,’ I said hoarsely and pushed the bar across the counter before she could change her mind. She glanced around. The foyer was empty. ‘Here you are, then, Romeo,’ she said and slowly lifted one side of her jumper to reveal a slightly grubby bra. With one finger, she pulled up the left cup until first a nipple popped out and then a whole white breast. It was enormous! It quivered before my staring eyes for at most two seconds before she bundled it back inside her bra, pulled down her sweater, grabbed the chocolate bar and slammed the box office window closed. As I walked the long lonely walk down the darkened corridor to the screen, a sense of injustice began to grow. She’d said ‘tits’ plural! I’d only seen one. And now I was left with no chocolate. It didn’t seem fair to me and I vowed that I’d never pay for sex again. And I never have. Love, yes – at various points – but that’s a different matter.
They say the average teenage boy thinks about sex every fifteen seconds. That wouldn’t have got anywhere near it for me. But of course help was always at hand, so to speak. More constructive help was available at a youth club called Clubland in the Walworth Road, which offered a gym and sport to keep our minds pure and our bodies exhausted. Cold showers were also on the agenda, but I cottoned on to the real purpose of these very quickly. I did join the basketball team since I was already six foot tall but I was a lost cause: the only thing I was really interested in chasing was girls.
I was obsessed with a girl called Amy Hood and one day as I was going up the stairs to the gym, I spotted her through a door, along with all the other best-looking girls in the club. I was standing there with my nose pressed to the glass when the door opened unexpectedly and I fell into the room. I blushed and the girls all tittered but the teacher came over and grabbed me by the collar. ‘Come in!’ she said, hauling me over to the group. ‘You’re the first boy we’ve had all year.’ My lucky day; my twin obsessions – girls and acting! I had stumbled into the drama class.
I’ve never liked critics and it may well go back to my very first review in the Clubland magazine. I was playing a robot in R.U.R., an obscurely intellectual play by Karel Capek. I didn’t have a clue what it was about. I didn’t even understand the one line I had. Even so, I understood fully the sarcasm behind the young critic’s assessment of my performance. ‘Maurice Micklewhite played the Robot, who spoke in a dull, mechanical, monotonous voice, to perfection.’ Bastard.
Bad notice or not, I was on my way – or so I thought. From then on until I was called up for my national service, I was always in a play. I was also taken under the wing of a man called Alec Reed, a movie fanatic, who used to show his collection of sixteen millimetre silent films at Clubland every Sunday evening. Not only did Alec teach me everything he knew about the history of film, he also introduced me to the technical side of movie-making. Every summer the whole club would go on holiday to the island of Guernsey, off the south coast of England, and Alec would make a documentary of the trip. It was a proud moment for me when my name came up on the credits for the first time – ‘Maurice Micklewhite, Director’. Once again, the audience laughed. Bastards. But I realised they were right. When I made it to the big screen it would have to be under a different name.
Even I had to admit, though, that my name was the least of my problems. I was a tall, gangly, skinny, awkward boy with blond hair, a big nose, pimples and a Cockney accent. All the movie stars of the day – Robert Taylor, Cary Grant and Tyrone Power, for instance – were dark-haired, smooth, sophisticated and very handsome. Even the ugly ones, like my hero Humphrey Bogart, were dark-haired, smooth, sophisticated and very handsome. It’s easier now, of course, but back then people who looked like me would only ever have been cast as the hero’s best friend. I remember even Steve McQueen telling me once that if he’d been an actor in the thirties he would have been the best friend.
So how did I make it in the end as a movie actor? There’s a good ten years of hard graft in the theatre and TV there, of course, before I got to Alfie, but even apart from the acting, you have to have the right face. Take a look in the mirror. Can you see the white on the top of the iris of your eye in relaxed position? Can you see your nostrils looking at your face straight on? Can you see the gums above your top teeth when you smile? Is your forehead longer than the space between the bottom of your nose and the bottom of your chin? If you are a man, do you have a very small head? If you are a woman, do you have a very big head? If you have any of these facial characteristics, you won’t get the romantic leading roles. If, however, you have all of the above, you could probably mak
e a fortune in horror films.
All those years I spent acting at Clubland and later in the professional theatre turned out not to be a lot of help, ultimately. The art of cinema acting is the exact opposite of stage acting. In the theatre you have to be as big and broad and loud as possible, even in the quiet scenes, which is a trick that only the best actors can pull off. Film acting, on the other hand, is about standing six feet from a camera in blazing light and not letting the tiniest bit of acting show. If you are doing it right you make it look very easy, but it takes a great deal of hard work to accomplish. It’s a bit like watching Fred Astaire dancing and thinking, I could do that – and you couldn’t in a million years.
Of course there are some useful tips I’ve picked up along the way . . . In a close up, choose just one eye of the actor you’re playing opposite, don’t skip between the eyes or you will just look shifty; choose the eye that brings your face closest to the camera; don’t blink if you are playing a strong or menacing character (and remember your eye drops!); if you are playing a weak or ineffectual character, blink as much as you like – just look at Hugh Grant; and if you have to pause after another actor’s line, always start your line and then pause – and you can hold that pause as long as you like. Last of all – full frontal nudity. Don’t do it. Acting is all about control and the minute you are naked you have lost control of what the audience is looking at. But if you absolutely insist on disregarding my advice on that last point, let me offer one final tip: don’t move. When legendary ballet dancer Robert Helpmann was asked, as the notorious naked revue show Oh! Calcutta debuted in London, if he would ever do a naked ballet, he said, ‘Certainly not.’ When asked why, he replied, ‘Because everything doesn’t stop when the music does.’ Wise man.
The Elephant to Hollywood Page 3
