The Elephant to Hollywood

by Michael Caine

  I paced around the flat for a bit, desperate for time to pass so I could ring up Maxwell House headquarters the next morning and find out who had shot the commercial. Eventually I could bear it no longer and Paul and I grabbed our coats and headed down to Tramp to find Johnny Gold, who could always be relied on for a sympathetic ear. Johnny pointed out beautiful girl after beautiful girl to me on the dance floor, but it was no good, I was in love. Eventually, emotionally wrung out, I decided to call it a night and just as I was leaving, I ran into Nigel Politzer, a guy I vaguely knew. ‘Going so soon?’ he asked. ‘And alone?’ ‘I’m in love!’ I declared dramatically. ‘And it’s hopeless. I saw this beautiful Brazilian girl on television tonight and I may never see her again.’ Nigel patted my shoulder. ‘Which show?’ he asked. ‘It wasn’t a show,’ I replied mournfully. ‘It was an ad for Maxwell House.’ He burst out laughing. ‘The girl with the maracas?’ he asked. ‘Yes!’ I howled. ‘How did you know?’ ‘Because I work for the company that made the ad,’ he said. ‘Then you can help me!’ I clawed at his jacket. ‘Paul and I are going to Brazil tomorrow to find her. Do you know how we can get in touch with her when we arrive?’ Nigel roared with laughter again. ‘No need, mate! She’s not in Brazil and she’s not Brazilian. Her name is Shakira Baksh, she’s Indian and she lives off the Fulham Road.’

  I spent the rest of the night alternating between bliss and despair. The Fulham Road – only a mile or so from my flat! So near – and, yet, what if she already had a boyfriend? What if she was married? What if – the final irony – she was a lesbian? Nigel had promised to give her a call the next morning and ask her if she would let me have her phone number – what if he forgot? Eventually I dropped off into a fitful sleep only to be shaken awake by Paul at around noon. ‘Nigel’s on the phone,’ he said. I grabbed the receiver. ‘She’s agreed to give you her number,’ said Nigel. He sounded a long way away. Grabbing a pen, I took the number down in a shaking hand.

  It took two vodkas and a cigar before I made the first call, only to be told by a flatmate (female, I noted with relief) that Shakira was in the shower and I should ring back in half an hour. It took another vodka and another cigar before I was ready to make the second call. This time she answered herself. Yes, she knew who I was. Yes, she had seen some of my films (no mention of whether or not she had liked them). But I should be aware that she didn’t make a habit of giving her number to strangers. ‘Of course not!’ I dithered and went on to make some silly point about us not being strangers because I had seen her on TV. I could almost hear her arching her exquisite eyebrow on the other end of the phone. Hastily I attempted to recover my position by asking if I could take her out to dinner. I could, it seemed, but not for ten days. Ten days? I agreed, of course, but those ten days were the slowest of my life and I counted the hours and minutes before I could call her again. When the day came, two vodkas down, I called and suggested that I pick her up at eight the following evening. She wasn’t having any of it. ‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘You give me your address and I’ll pick you up.’ Not unreasonable – but by this stage I would have agreed to just about anything she asked.

  I needed more vodkas to get through the following twenty-four hours, but by the time eight o’clock came around I had eliminated any sign of booze or cigars in the flat and had gargled with so much mouthwash my mouth was on fire. I don’t think I have ever been as nervous as I was that evening, waiting for the doorbell.

  At last it went: a long assertive ring. Trying my best to remain cool, I walked calmly to the door, opened it and fell in love. Shakira was even more beautiful in the flesh than she had been on screen. I couldn’t speak. She held out her hand for me to shake and I took it but then just held it because I never wanted to let it go again. Eventually I came to my senses and ushered her into my flat – and she walked into my flat and into my life, and she has been at the very centre of it ever since. We did, of course, eventually make it out to dinner. And I discovered that she was from a Kashmiri family that had immigrated to Guyana, which was where she was born and that, as Miss Guyana, she had come to England to compete in the Miss World competition. ‘Where did you come?’ I blurted out gauchely. ‘Third,’ she said sternly. I can’t remember exactly what we talked about now, but I will never forget the intensity of our first meeting. We spent the next few weeks constantly in each other’s company, until she had to leave for a modelling job in Mexico and I had to go to Malta to make Pulp, the second film Michael Klinger and I produced together. This would be a good test, we decided. Our affair had become so intense so quickly that I think we were both frightened by the strength of our feelings and a week apart seemed like a good idea. In fact it was a terrible idea; we missed each other desperately and phoning Mexico from Malta in 1972 was an almost impossible task. As soon as Shakira’s shoot was over, she flew to join me in Malta and we have been together ever since.

  What first drew me to Shakira was, of course, her beauty – and she is one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen. But it was not just that – after all, I was in the movie business and I worked with beautiful women every day. She has a far more important quality, which I sensed the moment she walked into my flat: she is a completely good person. I have met very few people in my life with no bad side, but she is one of them – she doesn’t have a nasty bone in her body. Of course, like most women, she has a steel wire running right through her middle should you choose to go that far and find it, but although she is a very strong person she is also incredibly sensitive to everything and everyone. There is absolutely no wickedness or unkindness in her anywhere – as I always say, I have enough of those for the two of us – and on that very first evening with her I could see that straight away.

  When we got back to England, Shakira moved first into my Grosvenor Square flat and then, when the lease expired, we decided to make the Mill House our permanent base. This, I realised, was what had been missing from my life: the chance to make a country home – and a garden – with the woman I loved. When Shakira pointed out what no one else had dared to, that I was drinking at a really quite dangerous level, I made an immediate decision to cut back drastically and from then on – as now – rarely drank anything besides wine with my meal.

  So healthier, happier and certainly thinner and fitter from all the exercise I was getting redoing the garden at Mill House, I felt on top form. Professionally I was facing one of my greatest ever challenges – playing opposite Laurence Olivier in the film version of Anthony Shaffer’s stage play, Sleuth, which involved fourteen long tough weeks on set, but I was going back to the Mill House and to Shakira every evening and so I felt more than equal to the task. Summer slipped into autumn and I thought nothing could alter our idyll together until, one day, I was passing our bedroom and heard Shakira call out to me. ‘What is it?’ I asked, coming over to sit next to her on the bed. I could see she had something important she wanted to tell me. She looked up at me. ‘I’m pregnant,’ she said. ‘But that’s wonderful!’ I could hardly believe it: we were going to have a baby! ‘But I was worried you wouldn’t want a child,’ she said, smiling. ‘You never said anything about wanting one.’ There was something else I had never said anything about either. ‘Will you marry me?’ I asked. ‘It’s not just because I’m pregnant?’ she asked suspiciously. ‘No,’ I said. And it wasn’t. I could not imagine a future without Shakira and as far as I was concerned we were already committed to each other – so much so that, I admit, the fact that we had not actually gone through the formalities had simply passed me by.

  It was not only the formalities that had passed me by. We were so in love that it had not really occurred to me to wonder what my mother’s reaction to the news of our marriage might be. I have always loathed racism whenever I encountered it. My memories of the way the white bosses treated the black workers in South Africa when we were filming Zulu and the appalling prejudice I encountered in Louisiana when we were on location for Hurry Sundown still make me shudder. I’ll never forget the way the Ku Kl
ux Klan, who had dubbed us ‘the nigger picture’ because black and white actors were working together, targeted us: peppering our dressing caravans full of bullet-holes during the night and even blowing up the hotel swimming pool because we had all swum in it together. I had travelled widely and had many friends of different colour; but I did wonder what my mother would think about the fact that I was marrying an Indian woman – or rather, I was marrying a woman who happened to be Indian. In fact she made no comment at all except in passing one weekend when she was staying with us at the Mill House. ‘Where’s Sharika?’ she asked. She never did manage to get her name right. It was eleven o’clock in the morning, and I told her that Shakira was still in bed. ‘They do sleep a lot, Indians, don’t they?’ said Mum and it was her only racial comment ever. In fact Shakira was just tired from being in the early stages of her pregnancy, but I let that pass.

  The only racism we ever encountered in the English countryside occurred a few years later. We were relaxing at the Mill House one evening, when the doorbell rang and Shakira went to answer it. ‘I need to see Mr Caine,’ the man standing outside insisted and handing his hat and coat to Shakira walked straight past her. I came out of the living room to see what all this was about. ‘Mr Caine?’ the man said, holding his hand outstretched. ‘Good to meet you. I wonder . . .’ he turned round and looked at Shakira. ‘Could we have a word in private?’ I took him into my office. ‘How can I help?’ I asked warily. He lowered his voice. ‘Are you aware that the house for sale further down the street is going to be bought by Indians?’ He paused for full effect. ‘Once you get them in you never get them out again!’ ‘It is a problem,’ I agreed, ushering him out. ‘And it’s one I fully understand.’ I steered him past the living room where Shakira was curled up on the sofa watching TV. ‘This is my wife,’ I said. The man’s jaw dropped. ‘Once you get them in,’ I said, ‘you never get them out again.’ The man grabbed his hat and coat and fled and never came back.

  We got married in Las Vegas on 8 January 1973. Dennis Selinger flew out with us to give Shakira away and we were joined there by Jerry Pam, my Hollywood press agent. I had to be in LA anyway for the publicity tour of a picture, so we managed to keep the whole thing a secret. The ceremony took place in the ‘Little Chapel on the Green’ – so named because it was surrounded by a strip of AstroTurf rather than for any resemblance to an English village parish church – and it was a glorious mixture of style and commerce. The basic wedding cost a bargain $75, but there were some optional extras . . . flowers for the bride, buttonholes for the gentlemen, photographs of the vows, an audiotape – we paid (or rather Dennis paid) for the lot. The only hitch occurred just before the actual ceremony when, sitting rather nervously in the waiting room, I glanced up at all the pictures of the happy couples who had passed through the Little Chapel on the Green on their way to wedded bliss. They included more than a few Hollywood reprobates and I knew for a fact that the marriages so triumphantly displayed were all long since finished.

  The ceremony was over very quickly and Shakira and I emerged onto the main strip of Las Vegas as man and wife. A quick dinner, and then it was back to the airport and a plane back to LA. As we strolled back into the Beverly Wilshire, as if nothing had happened, we congratulated ourselves on having got away with the whole thing but somehow word had got out and we found ourselves moved to one of the bridal suites. And not just any one – perhaps to honour Shakira, they had put us in the Indian one. It was beautiful, but in an (in my view) unnecessary nod to tradition, not only was the bed suspended from the ceiling, but each of the bedposts featured a bell, which tinkled gaily every time the bed moved. I didn’t feel inclined to provide the other hotel guests or staff with any evidence of our amorous inclinations and was determined to get the bells off. I struggled for a bit without success and was about to give up when I had a bright idea. Room service obliged. And with the buns from four hamburgers stuffed inside the bells, we passed on silent night.

  My first marriage had been such a disaster and because I’d divorced and had a baby I couldn’t see I had vowed never to get married again – until I met Shakira. And then it wasn’t about getting married: it was about marrying Shakira. To me, the wedding ceremony is the least important thing about getting married. I always worry a bit about massive weddings and whether people have them because they are trying to convince themselves they are doing the right thing – as if they think that spending a huge amount of money will make up for up a lack of confidence in their choice of husband or wife. That said, I gave both my daughters grand weddings when the time came, because it was what they wanted and because they wanted to do it ‘properly’ – and I loved doing it. As for wedding anniversaries, we don’t make a song and dance about ours – in fact I have been known to forget it completely. And when I do remember, it’s most likely to be a bottle of champagne and some flowers. But for me, what’s really important is the way we live every day; because we are so much in love with each other, every day is a celebration of our love and the specific date doesn’t matter. But the fortieth is on its way – and after that, the fiftieth – and that really will be some party, I can tell you!

  While I continued on the publicity tour – a gruelling twenty-two-city schedule – Shakira went to New York to visit her mother, Swabera, known to all of us as Saab, who was now living in Queens. Saab had spent Christmas with us and had got on like a house on fire with everyone, including my mother, but Shakira was still nervous of telling her that not only had we got married, but that she was three months’ pregnant. In the end she took her mother out to lunch and confessed everything. ‘She just smiled, Michael!’ Shakira told me on the phone the next day. ‘She said she’d read all about it in the New York Post a month ago!’

  I couldn’t wait to get home and be with Shakira again and we spent an idyllic spring and early summer at the Mill House getting ready for the baby, due in July. I was determined to play my part in events and prided myself on the way I had thoroughly prepared mentally for what was to come. Even so I was taken aback when I arrived at the clinic with Shakira in early labour to be handed not only a set of scrubs, but also a pair of white rubber waders. Waders? There would be so much blood I might need waders?

  The labour lasted twelve hours. In the end, although I dutifully donned the waders, I stayed up near Shakira’s head, pushing when she did, so enthusiastically that I thought I might give myself a hernia. We heaved together on cue until the obstetrician gave a sudden cry – ‘the head!’ – picked up some scissors which he waved menacingly in the air and then plunged them into Shakira’s nether regions. At this point I was nearly sick – on my waders, this time, rather than my shoes – but then I saw his triumphant expression and the lock of black hair he held up between his fingers. ‘Nearly there!’ he said encouragingly and with a few more heaves, our daughter was born.

  While the baby was taken away to be weighed and measured, I knelt by Shakira’s bed, covering her with kisses. When a nurse brought the baby back again, we held her between us, marvelling at how perfect she was. Eventually I was sent home so that my wife and daughter could rest – but I was on such a high I went straight round to Dennis’s place to tell him the news. One glass of wine led to another, and I was just beginning to relax when the phone rang. Dennis picked it up. ‘It’s for you, Michael,’ he said. My heart started pounding. The only person who knew where I was going was Shakira. I took the receiver. ‘I’m afraid there’s a bit of a problem,’ said Dr Bourne. ‘We’ve had to move the baby to the intensive care unit at King’s College Hospital. I think you should come here right away.’

  I have no recollection of how I got to the hospital, but I will always remember walking into that intensive care unit. There must have been about thirty incubators, each with its own tiny inhabitant. ‘I don’t understand,’ I said to Dr Bourne, trying to keep the fear out of my voice. ‘She wasn’t premature – and she was 6 pounds 12 oz.’ It wasn’t her size, he explained. A sharp-eyed night nurse had been doing her rounds an
d noticed that our daughter was struggling to breathe; she had called Dr Bourne and he saw at once that her lungs had collapsed. She had cried lustily at birth, so there had been no reason to suspect this might happen and there was, he assured me, a seventy per cent chance of survival. Those seem like good enough odds in a bar room brawl, but to a new father standing by an incubator, gazing at all the tubes and wires attached to his tiny daughter’s body and watching the monitor bleep with each beat of her heart, they seemed very frightening indeed.

  Perhaps the worst thing of all was being able to do nothing. The doctors and nurses – who were wonderful – flitted from incubator to incubator, calmly reading gauges, taking temperatures, adjusting drips. I just stood there, helplessly. Eventually a kind nurse showed me how to wash my hands with antiseptic soap and then pointed out a little hole in the side of our baby’s incubator. My hands were too big to fit, but I did manage to slip a finger through and touch the little hand nearest to me. To my astonishment, the baby uncurled her hand and slowly curled it again round my finger. Her grip was so powerful that I felt sure that this was a life force that could not be extinguished. I sat there, holding her hand and listening to the soft steady bleeps of the monitor that told me her heart was still beating, until I was told to go home.

  The following two weeks were two of the longest of my whole life but thankfully our daughter recovered and I was able to take both Shakira and the baby back to the safe haven of the Mill House. We had given our child two names, the Christian one of Natasha and Shakira’s choice, the Moslem one of Halima, which means wisdom. She could, we thought, decide for herself when she was older which religion – if any – she wanted: she would have a name for both. Over the rest of the summer and into the autumn, as Natasha put on weight and passed all her developmental milestones with ease, our worries about her began to recede and Shakira and I started to relax into the pleasures of parenthood. What we had been through had, if anything, strengthened our love for each other even more; now, with our daughter, we were bonded forever as a family.