Glamorous as this house was, there are many far more luxurious in and around Beverly Hills. Our friends Marvin and Barbara Davis had one that seemed to define the term ‘Hollywood mansion’: the driveway didn’t just go in and out, it was a whole dual carriageway . . . We were in the middle of dinner there one night when a slightly embarrassed butler brought in the telephone and whispered in Marvin’s ear. Marvin shrugged and took the phone. ‘Yeah?’ Pause. ‘Sixty.’ Another pause. ‘I told you: sixty.’ Further pause. ‘That’s it. Yeah. Bye.’ He gave the phone back to the butler and someone – not me – had the courage to ask him who was on the other end. ‘Michael Jackson,’ said Marvin. ‘He keeps ringing me wanting to buy this house for forty-five million dollars and I keep telling him it’s sixty.’ There didn’t seem much to add to this, so we went back to our dinner.
Marvin was a real wheeler-dealer and a bit of a rascal and I adored him (I’ve got a soft spot for rascals, being a bit of one myself). His father, a Polish Jew, was a boxer known as Fighting Joe Davis and he’d landed up in London before signing up to the British merchant navy and then jumping ship in America. Marvin made all his money in Texan oil and ended up buying Fox and selling it to Rupert Murdoch and buying the Beverly Hills Hotel and selling it to the Sultan of Brunei. Mind you, when he died, it turned out he wasn’t quite as rich as we all thought, but while he was alive it was luxury all the way. He was very interested in art and the art market and I recall one evening round there when David Hockney came to dinner. Marvin spent a long time trying to get David to tell him how much his paintings were to buy and how much they might be worth in the future. David didn’t have the faintest idea – it was fascinating to watch art meeting commerce and both finding the other completely incomprehensible.
If Marvin had been unable to ascertain the value of a David Hockney from the man himself, he was on surer ground with his Renoirs and Picassos – the house was full of them. He showed me round once and there in the middle of all this incredible art was a still of Sly Stallone and Dolly Parton in Rhinestone, the 1984 movie Marvin backed and that was released with, shall we say, indifferent results. When I pointed out the incongruity of this photograph hanging side by side with some of the world’s greatest paintings he pretended to look surprised. ‘But that’s the most expensive picture in the house, Michael,’ he said. ‘It cost me forty million dollars!’
Marvin had everything and knew everybody. You could turn up to dinner there and find yourself – as we once did – at a political fund-raiser for Bill Clinton being sung to by Barbra Streisand, or, on another occasion, sitting next to Ronald Reagan. For some reason President Reagan seemed to think I was a friend of his and he greeted me with a hug and asked me how my sons were. And he did that from then on whenever we met. He never actually used my name and as I don’t have any sons I never actually found out who he thought I was – and after a bit it would have been too awkward to put it right. He was a funny guy and had a great way with words and a knack of getting to the nub of things that really appealed to me. He once told me that California was not a place to live but a way of life and I think he got that absolutely right. Another time he said to me that he didn’t mind at all no longer being president. ‘You know . . .’ – and I waited for him to say a name, but he adroitly avoided it – ‘I’m very happy living in a private home after eleven years in a public house.’ I wonder if he realised how funny that was to a Brit.
Ex-presidents, presidents-in-waiting – there was nothing you could do socially for Marvin, nothing you could give him that he couldn’t buy, but I did once do something for him that no one else could have done and that even Marvin, with all that money, couldn’t have done for himself. Shakira and I were friendly with Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson while they were married and introduced Marvin to them. Sarah really liked him and when we asked if Marvin and Barbara could join a dinner party she was organising at Buckingham Palace, she kindly agreed. It was something Marvin never quite got over – I guess he had finally found a mansion he really couldn’t afford.
7
No Holly, No Woods
Back when I arrived for the first time, it didn’t take me long to work out that a lot of what I had thought about Hollywood was wrong. Looking back, I was a wide-eyed innocent and I spent months thinking to myself, ‘I guess Hollywood just isn’t really like that,’ every time I made a new discovery about the reality of the place. Even my grasp of the geography and history was off, never mind the power politics. For a start, I’d assumed Hollywood was the biggest centre of film-making in the world, but I soon discovered that very few films are actually made there . . .
The founder of the original Hollywood was a man named Hobart Johnstone Whitley. He and his business partners were land developers and built more than one hundred small towns all over the western United States. In 1886 they bought several hundred acres at the foot of the Cahuenga pass and decided to build a new town there. It was Whitley who came up with the name. The hillside above was covered with toyon, a plant also known as Californian Holly, because it’s covered in red berries in the winter. And that was that for a bit. It wasn’t until 1910 that the movies came to the town, with D. W. Griffith who was looking for a location for a picture called In Old California. Although they were able to shoot under electric light by that time, they found the bright Californian sunshine was perfect for the primitive film stock. Griffith and his crew went back east to New York and New Jersey, where most of the infant film industry had settled, and spread the word about the sunshine and light they had found in Hollywood.
The first movie studio built in Hollywood was called the Nestor Studio and it was on the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Gower Street. It was opened by David and William Horsley, two brothers from Bayonne, New Jersey. In 1913, Cecil B. DeMille and Jess Lasky bought a barn on the corner of Selma and Vine Street and turned it into a studio and in 1917 Charlie Chaplin opened his studio on the corner of Sunset and La Brea. After that, the rest of the movie industry came swarming in from the east and the myth of Hollywood was born.
Although the studios started there, most of them have since moved out and these days only three are left: Paramount, Chaplin and Goldwyn. Paramount, founded by Adolph Zukor in 1912, is the oldest working studio in America – and it certainly was Paramount for me. This studio financed Zulu, my first major film, and even though it didn’t get a US release to begin with, Paramount followed it up with Alfie, my breakout film, which they gave a major release in America where it got me my first Academy Award nomination. And my next Paramount film became The Italian Job. So – Zulu, Alfie and The Italian Job, three of the biggest films in my life: I have a lot to thank Paramount for. In fact I had a chance to thank Adolph Zukor personally when I was a guest at his hundredth birthday party in 1974. He was in a wheelchair, looking very frail, and I went up to him, shook his hand, wished him a Happy Birthday and said a big ‘thank you’. He looked at me blankly for a moment and said, ‘For what?’ He clearly had no idea who on earth I was. Bob Hope was the compère of the event and in a toast to this tiny old man all bundled up in his chair, he said, ‘If Adolph had known he was going to live to be a hundred, he would have taken better care of himself!’ And indeed it seemed touch and go as to whether the birthday boy would last the evening. I asked Bob what the protocol was in the event of sudden death. ‘The studio has thought of everything,’ he told me solemnly. ‘A hundred magicians stand ready in the kitchens, one for each table. Should Mr Zukor be unexpectedly taken from us before the festivities are over, at a pre-arranged signal from me, they will run in, whisk the white tablecloths off and reveal the black ones that have been laid beneath as a precaution.’ He kept a straight face longer than I did.
The Chaplin studio, is, to me, a sign that he was a little homesick for England. It sits on the corner of La Brea and Sunset Boulevard and is built to look like a street in an English village, complete with manor house and village green. It takes authenticity to the extreme: all the buildings have chimneys, which
don’t get a lot of use in sunny Hollywood. I suppose it’s not surprising that Chaplin should want to recreate his version of England as a rural idyll: he grew up very close to where I did, in the Elephant, and no one would have wanted to recreate those slums as they were then. Once, years ago, I bumped into Charlie Chaplin walking round the area quite anonymously, unnoticed by the crowds. Like me, he had come to pay a visit and he seemed to feel quite nostalgic about it and sad about the way it had been destroyed – first by the Luftwaffe and then by the developers. He didn’t have a clue who I was, but we talked for a little while and he pointed out the ruins of the South London music hall he had appeared at in his last show before he went to America. It was only about 300 yards from the prefab I had grown up in. I once asked my mother where she went for her honeymoon. She laughed drily and said, ‘The South London theatre to see Charlie Chaplin in Humming Birds with Stan Laurel.’ Small world… When I met him, Chaplin was beautifully and expensively dressed, but even in his overcoat and hat – a trilby, not a bowler – I couldn’t help seeing the echo of the Little Tramp as he walked away.
My other connection with the Chaplin studio is that not only did we shoot the interiors of Too Late the Hero here, but it then became the headquarters of the Jim Henson Company with whom I made The Muppet Christmas Carol in 1991.
Samuel Goldwyn’s studio is the third and last studio still actually in Hollywood itself. It was originally built on land owned by Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks on the corner of Formosa and Santa Monica Boulevard known as ‘The Lot’, until it was renamed when they formed United Artists with Charlie Chaplin and D. W. Griffith. Goldwyn eventually took it over and named it after himself, after a lengthy legal battle with Mary Pickford, who owned the lease and wanted to name it after herself – an early Hollywood story but one that strikes a chord . . . Now the studio is called The Lot once more and is still used for independent film-making – I made the Austin Powers Goldmember movie there myself, with Mike Myers.
Next door to one of the most prime areas of real estate in the world, Holmby Hills, is the city that Cleopatra built. Century City was once the back lot of Twentieth Century Fox, which now sulks in a small corner of its formerly great property. Fox had a string of movie disasters in the late fifties and early sixties, most notably Cleopatra, the biopic starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton notorious for costing $44 million rather then the original $2 million budgeted, and in 1961 they were forced to sell their 180-acre back lot to the Alcoa company who turned it into the Century City you see there today. To be a city in Britain, you have to have a cathedral, but this is Hollywood and it has its own cathedrals: skyscrapers full of the archbishops, bishops and priests of our age – the accountants and lawyers (including my own) who guide our prayers.
All show business ends up as farce and Century City and Cleopatra are no exception. Many years later I was on a yacht in Monte Carlo harbour with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton and after dinner we all sat down and watched Carry On, Cleo, one of the lowest budget films ever made. They had brought it with them all the way from London – and in those days it wasn’t a matter of tucking a DVD into your handbag or briefcase, films were all on reels, so they had gone to some real effort to get it there. We all roared with laughter at the silly jokes – there was one in particular I remember Elizabeth and Richard cracking up over. The two Caesars are arguing about whose gladiator is better, and one of them says, ‘My gladiator is the greatest,’ and the other one counters with, ‘My gladiator is invincible,’ and the first one comes back with, ‘Well, my gladiator is impregnable!’ And the gladiator is standing there – he’s a raddled old Cockney of about sixty – and he says, ‘It’s not my fault, guv – my wife doesn’t want any kids!’ I tell you, they were killing themselves.
Although they started in Hollywood, Universal Pictures moved out to a 250-acre lot in the San Fernando Valley in 1914. They were still there in 1966 when they gave my career two massive boosts. The first was when they bought and released The Ipcress File in America – the first time any of my movies had a general release there. No one told me they had done it. I was shopping in Bloomingdale’s in New York during my publicity tour for Alfie, and I came out on the Third Avenue exit and there on the other side of the street was my name up in lights – it was a fantastic moment! It was Universal, too, that brought me to America to work with Shirley Maclaine on Gambit. It’s another studio to which I owe a debt of gratitude.
Warner Brothers also started in Hollywood, on Sunset Boulevard in 1923, and then followed Universal out to the San Fernando Valley in 1928 after their first great success, the first ‘talkie’, The Jazz Singer, with Al Jolson. They have had a great eighty-year history there, and although I have contributed to a few of the blips along the way, including The Swarm and Beyond the Poseidon Adventure, I’m pleased to have made it up for them eventually with Batman Begins, The Prestige, The Dark Knight and Inception.
The third of the great studios in the San Fernando Valley is Disney. Walt Disney opened a small studio there in 1923 and it went on to become the biggest entertainment company in the world. Long ago, in what seems like another life, I actually met Walt Disney. I was working as a tea boy for the producer Jay Lewis, who was making Morning Departure with John Mills. I’d never been to a film studio before and one day he took me with him to Pinewood. While we were there we ran into Walt Disney. I stood there at Jay Lewis’s elbow trying to merge with the wallpaper while they chatted and then he suddenly remembered I was there and told me to get Mr Disney a coffee. ‘Milk and sugar?’ was all I could manage to squeak to the great man – but I’ve never forgotten it. As a little boy I was a huge fan of Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Pluto and it gives me such pleasure now to watch the cartoons with the next generation of our family, my two-year-old grandson, Taylor. When I’ve been working in my study on this book, he’ll come in, march over to me, climb on my lap and say, ‘Mickey Mouse!’ until I give in. So, happily distracted, I enjoy it all over again.
As well as the enormous complexes owned by Universal, Warner Brothers and Disney, the San Fernando Valley is also home to NBC, the Getty Museum and the Hollywood Bowl. In spite of these high-prestige institutions, very few celebrities actually live in what’s known as ‘The Valley’, although of course most of them spend a lot of their time at the studios there. Bob Hope was one of the exceptions to this rule, and he had an enormous mansion and estate there and even an airport named after him. There are two reasons for avoiding the Valley: first it is insanely hot for most of the year, and second it is the porn movie capital of America. If you ever see an American porn film in which the participants are sweating before they even start on the action, you’ll know it was probably shot in the Valley. In fact the Valley can be a great place to live, although people can be quite snobbish about it as an address. I once heard a Valley parent ask, ‘At what age do you tell your children they live in the Valley?’ All I can say is: they should have tried living in the Elephant in my day . . .
The MGM studios were never in Hollywood at all. Instead they are seven miles away in Culver City, on the way to the airport. They were started in 1924 when a big cinema owner named Marcus Loew bought two production companies, the Metro Picture Corporation and Goldwyn Pictures. When these two were joined by Mayer Pictures, owned by Louis B. Mayer, the conglomerate was titled, with great imagination, Metro Goldwyn Mayer. For many years, under the leadership of Louis B. Mayer, it was the most successful movie company in the world.
MGM once did a movie with which I had the very slightest of connections. My friend Julie Christie had got a screen test for the lead role in Dr Zhivago, which was being directed by the great David Lean. I offered to support Julie by playing the ‘back of the head’ part opposite her in the screen test so she could play for the camera. David Lean liked the back of my head so much that he asked me if he could use it for all the screen tests, to which I agreed. I was just doing it as a favour, but it was obviously going quite well because one day David suggested
that he actually tested me for the main part. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘if we shoot it this way, and maybe comb your hair like this . . .’ and we did, but when we saw the tests we both knew straight away I wasn’t right. ‘So what do you want?’ I asked David. He thought a bit and then he said, ‘What I want is a man who’s taken a long hard look at life and has decided there’s absolutely nothing to be done.’ It came to me in a flash. I had just seen Omar Sharif in Lawrence of Arabia and I said, ‘Omar Sharif!’ And David said, ‘Really?’ He thought some more and then he said, ‘You know, you could be right – I’m going to test him.’ And he did – and Omar got the part – although I’m not sure I’ve ever told him how it came about. So there you are – if I hadn’t failed the bloody screen test, like so many other things, I’d have been Dr Zhivago . . .
Next door to MGM there is another small studio, built by Thomas Ince, one of the first great silent film producers. The front door of the office block was very posh, designed to look like the front door of George Washington’s mansion, Mount Vernon. David O. Selznick, who was already a successful producer, bought it in 1935 for his own independent productions. One of these was Gone with the Wind – and the front door of the studio was used as the front door of Scarlett O’Hara’s mansion, Tara. David O. Selznick was a great and also very frugal producer. When he needed to film the burning of Atlanta for Gone with the Wind, he did it here on the back lot and burned all the old sets from King Kong, The Last of the Mohicans and Little Lord Fauntleroy. Not only did he get free firewood, he created the space to build Tara itself out of plywood and papier mâché. The set was eventually dismantled and is now for sale in 3 x 1 inch rectangles. As Selznick said himself at the time, ‘Like Hollywood, it was all a facade.’
The Elephant to Hollywood Page 11
