The Elephant to Hollywood

by Michael Caine

  It was through Dennis that I met another Orphan, the press agent Theo Cowan. Despite his vast number of show business contacts, his glamorous social life and his great sense of humour, Theo always seemed to me to be a lonely man. There were rumours of an unrequited love affair with the great British screen actress of the Forties, Margaret Lockwood. Whether or not this was true, I don’t know, but he always appeared to be holding some torch for an imaginary woman. Theo’s passing was as quiet and measured as his life had been. He had lunch with the rest of us Orphans on the Thursday at Langan’s as usual, on the Friday he had a business lunch and then he went back to his office, made a pillow of his hands on his desk to have a little nap and never woke up. As one of us said at his funeral, ‘They’ve started bowling in our alley,’ and for the first time, our group faced the fact that we were all mortal.

  The music scene in London in the Sixties was famously vibrant and one of the greatest icons of the period was one of our Orphans, Mickie Most, who produced records as varied as The Animals’ ‘House of the Rising Sun’, Donovan’s ‘Mellow Yellow’ and Lulu’s ‘To Sir with Love’. Mickie was the fittest of all of us: he regularly ran ten miles a day, whereas most of the rest of the Orphans probably couldn’t walk ten miles a day. One day at lunch he told us he wasn’t feeling great and had had to cut his daily run down to just five miles. We all laughed at the idea of someone who was running five miles a day thinking he was sick, but Mickie was right: he was sick. In fact he had lung cancer. It was a terrible shock; Mickie had never smoked. What was worse was that his lung cancer was the most virulent kind, totally incurable and had come about because of a lifetime of working in a sound studio, where, unbeknownst to anyone, the sound ‘baffles’ were made of asbestos.

  The last time I saw Mickie, we had lunch, just the two of us, and I asked him what they had actually said to him when they told him the bad news. He smiled. ‘They told me not to send out any dry cleaning,’ he said, and we both laughed. And then I told him the Henny Youngman joke about the patient whose doctor told him he had only six months to live. When he said he didn’t have enough money to pay the bill, the doctor gave him another six months. We were both laughing as we left the restaurant. People must have thought we were having a great time, and the expression ‘dying with laughter’ came to my mind. But as we stood there on the pavement, Mickie said, ‘Unfortunately, I can pay that bill . . .’ We shook hands, walked off in opposite directions, and I never saw my friend alive again.

  When the next spring came round, a camellia bush that Mickie had given me for my garden had died. I just couldn’t pull it out and throw it away and the following year it came back to life and is now thriving. A horticulturalist would probably give you a perfectly reasonable explanation for this, but, as I’ve said, actors are a superstitious lot and I know Mickie is out there in my garden every time I go for a walk. He is also with me when I am in one of my favourite places in the whole world: the French Riviera. Chrissie Most, Mickie’s lovely wife, who is a great friend of ours, told me that Mickie had asked to be cremated and for his ashes to be scattered in the bay of Cannes, in a spot they could see from their villa in the hills above. Every time I look across that bay, I can see Mickie and feel his presence with us again.

  The next Orphan I met was through the director Bryan Forbes. Genius tailor, Doug Hayward, was known by the rest of us Orphans as the ‘Buddha of Mount Street’ and he became our rock and his Mayfair shop became our base. In fact it was because he would only ever give himself an hour off for lunch that we always had to eat in Mayfair. The rest of us travelled all over the world, but the one place we all came to first when we got home was his shop, where we would listen to Doug – who never left London – tell us what had happened while we’d been away, dispense wisdom and tell jokes.

  Doug was always as sharp as a needle, so it was a long while after the silent enemy of Alzheimer’s had made its permanent base in his brain that we noticed there was anything wrong – and it took a lot longer than that for us to accept it as a fact. Alzheimer’s is so slow that you have masses of time to pretend, hope or believe that it’s not happening, but it is unstoppable. Eventually he was diagnosed with the disease and we all started our long farewell as we watched him walk slowly away from us. Over a period of three years, one by one we waited for the time when he wouldn’t know who we were, and one by one our much-loved friend’s brain cut us out of his life, leaving us to watch him make that journey to his eventual lonely but welcome end. Like the others, I waited anxiously for the time when he wouldn’t recognise me and when it came it was quite a gentle blow – although a blow none the less. I had gone up to his apartment above the shop and Doug was watching television as usual. ‘Michael’s here,’ said Audie, his long-standing friend and assistant who knew him better than anyone else. Doug looked up from the TV and mumbled ‘Hello’, before going back to watching a programme he couldn’t understand. I stood there stunned as it sank in that he really was gone from my life forever. I waited until I knew I could speak steadily without crying and then I said in a very clear voice, ‘Goodbye, Doug.’ He didn’t even look up from the TV.

  Doug died in 2008, quite some time after this meeting, but I could never bear to go and see him like that again. I spoke at his wonderful funeral in Mayfair and got the chance to say how much I loved him and to say a last quiet ‘Goodbye, Doug,’ as his coffin was carried past. He was a man we would never see the like of again. Hayward’s, Doug’s business, has survived – I still order suits from them – and I feel Doug’s continuing presence in the shop, which was sold but which Audie still runs with the same staff. But Doug’s death broke our hearts and for a while we didn’t want to visit our Mayfair haunts ever again.

  The Mayfair Orphans are down, but we’re far from out: the group now comprises club owner Johnny Gold, photographer Terry O’Neill, composer Leslie Bricusse, Roger Moore, new recruit Michael Winner, tricologist Philip Kingsley, and me – and we make the most of our times together. We’ve lost Dennis and his wisdom, Theo and his press contacts, Mickie, our link with the world of rock and roll and constant source of free CDs and concert tickets, and Doug, our heart and soul, but we still have Philip, to save us all from going bald, Johnny, our permanent disco and social connection, Terry, our great official photographer, Roger, to lend us some respectability and Leslie who knows all there is to know about food and wine. Michael Winner is only an occasional Orphan as he travels constantly, but we’re glad to have him around when he turns up, battered and bruised, to recount the havoc he’s caused. He’s also the only one of us who is capable of being both nice and nasty, and he’s the only trained lawyer amongst us, so he’s an essential member of the group: if we want anyone or anything done, we send Michael. As for me, I am the joker and the most travelled, so I’m the storyteller. We haven’t done so badly.

  I first met Terry O’Neill when he took my photograph. By the time we met he had already photographed the Queen in her palace at Sandringham and Frank Sinatra in his palace – the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami, where he was surrounded by his version of palace guards – and we became firm friends. Terry frightened the life out of us with a bout of colon cancer a few years ago, but he recovered, thank God, and is working as hard as ever.

  Leslie Bricusse is another Overseas Orphan like Roger Moore. He, too, has a villa on the French Riviera and he, too, is generous with it. Some of the best times of our year are spent there with him and his wife Evie. They have just celebrated their golden wedding anniversary, so there are no worries that we’ll lose out on another favourite holiday villa in any divorce . . . Two-times Oscar winner Leslie is not only the composer of such songs as ‘What Kind of Fool Am I?’ and ‘The Candy Man’, he also wrote (although he didn’t know it at the time), the semi-official anthem of the Mayfair Orphans: ‘My Old Man’s a Dustman’. We’re all Londoners and mostly from humble origins, so it just feels right.

  Leslie is a great wine connoisseur and lover of French food and part-owned the Pickwick, th
e restaurant where I was eating with Terry Stamp the night Harry Saltzman offered me the leading role in The Ipcress File. Leslie had spotted the meeting during the course of the evening and winked at me and gave me the thumbs up. When I told him later what had happened, it was he who suggested we went on to celebrate at a new disco, the Ad Lib, not far away – and it was there that we met two more people who would become a big part of our lives, the Ad Lib’s owner and husband of Jackie Collins, Oscar Lerman (who unfortunately would die before we officially named ourselves the Orphans), and his business partner, the incomparable Johnny Gold, one of the great nightclub hosts of all time. Oscar and Johnny went on to open Tramp, one of the most successful discotheques ever, which became the Orphans’ night shelter for many years – until we started meeting our own grandchildren there.

  And so at last the Sixties, which had been so good to us and such fun, faded. But that decade didn’t die. It lives on in the memories of those of us who were there and especially in the hearts of the Mayfair Orphans who did so much to make it happen. Whether gathered together in our old haunts, sharing holidays together in our favourite places abroad, or just enjoying ourselves sitting round the table in Surrey, for me, home and happiness is all about friends and family.

  19

  A Date at the Palace

  When an actor’s been around as long as I have, there’s a great temptation to choose a picture for the pleasure of working with old friends, but this can be a mistake. As soon as we had settled in Surrey, I was off again and made three movies in quick succession. In the first one, Curtain Call, which was about a camp theatrical couple, my co-star was the incomparable Maggie Smith, with whom I had so enjoyed making California Suite, and it was also going to be directed by Peter Yates, a good friend of mine. What could go wrong? Well, quite a lot, as it happened. I never actually saw the finished movie – and hardly anyone else did either . . .

  I followed this up with something more serious and dramatic. Quills is the story of the Marquis de Sade’s descent into madness while locked up in an asylum. Geoffrey Rush played the Marquis brilliantly with all the stops pulled out; Joaquin Phoenix played the Catholic priest who ran the asylum. Joaquin was a pleasant young man, but somewhat strange. His two brothers were named River and Rain and his two sisters Summer and Liberty. He changed his own name for a while to Leaf (but changed it again before Autumn came . . .). Joaquin was hard to get to know. He was a combination of enigmatic and explosive, which is a difficult one to understand, but he worked incredibly hard – it made me feel lazy just to watch him prepare for a take – and his labours paid off. Kate Winslet, on the other hand, who played the laundry girl, was much more down to earth. Off screen as well as on, she is one of the most brilliant and unpretentious actresses I’ve ever met. I played the man sent by Napoleon to stop de Sade writing his books, which he had continued to do in the asylum, smuggling them out, rather aptly, in the baskets of dirty laundry. It was a great movie to do, and I took it because I wanted to do something prestigious after Curtain Call but it never caught on with the public.

  My next film was Shiner, in which I played a Cockney gangster. Yes – probably a mistake. It wasn’t a bad film – and it was certainly a step up from Curtain Call and Quills – but it seemed as if the public were fed up with gangster films. We shot it in the East End of London. I hadn’t been there for years and it had changed enormously, but I witnessed something there that really shocked me and set the alarm bells ringing – although, at the time, I let it go. We were filming outside a block of derelict apartments that were waiting to be demolished and were, I thought, abandoned. We’d been there a couple of hours when suddenly, out of this terrible slum poured about half a dozen young people, all filthy, all emaciated, all stoned out of their minds, all waving grubby bits of paper. As they walked unsteadily towards us in slow motion I thought of that cemetery scene in Michael Jackson’s Thriller video, where all the bodies come out of the graves. As they gathered round me, I could smell their unwashed bodies and see up close the bloodshot eyes and the tattered skin on their faces. I stood there, signing these dirty scraps of paper and I was stunned at what was happening in my city. I realised what a sheltered and cocooned life I now led: I had no idea that this was the norm – yet local people seemed to be walking by without a second glance.

  Although Shiner was more successful than my previous two movies, it still didn’t cause much of a stir and so I couldn’t have been more pleased when something fantastic came in right out of the blue: Miss Congeniality.

  Sandra Bullock, who was the producer as well as the star of the movie, wanted me to play the sort of Professor Higgins to her tough, dowdy FBI agent, who has to go undercover as a beauty queen. This picture was a joy from start to finish. Just before we began shooting I had won my Oscar for The Cider House Rules and in my acceptance speech I had told Tom Cruise (who was also nominated in this category for his part in Magnolia) that he should be pleased that he hadn’t won as the dressing room trailers given to supporting actors would be much too small and modest for him. It was a joke and Tom and everyone else laughed, but when I got to the set of Miss Congeniality on the first day and was shown to my trailer, it was the biggest and most luxurious accommodation I had ever had on a set. And on the door was pinned a note in Sandra’s handwriting. ‘Welcome to the shoot. This is as big as Tom’s.’ I checked – and it was.

  Miss Congeniality was tremendous fun to make. Sandra was fantastic, both as an actress and as a producer. She was always kind and attentive and pleasant and never imposed any problems that she might have been encountering with the production on the rest of us. I never saw her without a smile – and yet I discovered later that just before this movie, her mother had died of cancer. We never knew; she was a true professional. I was so pleased to see her win the Best Actress Oscar this year for her role in The Blind Side. And she has a great sense of humour. The night before winning the Academy Award, she won the Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Actress in a film called All About Steve. Typical of Sandra – she turned up to accept it with as much good grace as she showed the next evening at the Oscar ceremony. She’s a true star. Candice Bergen, a friend from the past, was also in the movie. We’d last worked together on a terrible film of John Fowles’s book The Magus, which none of us understood, and neither, it seemed did the audience. William Shatner was in the movie, too, probably the funniest and craziest actor I have ever met. The romantic lead was Benjamin Bratt and we became good friends. He was going out with Julia Roberts at the time and Benjamin and I were in a car one day together and he phoned her in Las Vegas where she was making a film. During the course of the conversation he handed the phone over to me and said, ‘Say hello to Julia.’ I did – and there was no reply. So I tried again. Still no reply. I tried a third time and finally I heard a voice at the other end say, ‘I can’t believe I’m talking to Alfie!’ ‘Alfie?’ I said. ‘You’re far too young to have seen Alfie!’ ‘Have you never heard of television, Michael?’ she said. I agreed that I had, indeed, heard of television, told her how brilliant she was in Pretty Woman and passed the phone back to Benjamin. I have never spoken to her since – and neither, I think, has Benjamin.

  The film was shot in Austin, the capital of Texas. Austin is a very rich town with a massive university and a lot of steak houses. The most famous one at that time was Sullivan’s and it was here that the then governor of Texas and his cronies always ate: we saw George W. Bush there every time we went. Everything in Texas is big, including the onion rings. Benjamin and I were at Sullivan’s one lunchtime and just about to start eating, when we saw a woman approaching us with a smile and a camera. It happens all the time when you are well known: not only is your meal interrupted with the photograph, but attention is drawn to your table and so everyone else thinks it’s OK to interrupt you, too. Anyway, as she came over, we both put a brave face on it and prepared to pose, but she completely took the wind out of our outraged sails by saying, ‘Can I take a picture of your onion rings? The folks b
ack home just won’t believe how big they are!’ With a sigh of relief, we both said yes . . .

  Austin is a strange town – and the citizens know it. I have a souvenir mug that says ‘Keep Austin Weird’, and they are doing a pretty good job. Sandra was going out with Bob Schneider around the time we were making the film and she took a group of us to see him play. When he came on, the young female fans at the front lifted up their blouses and flashed their breasts at him. Sandra said that they always did that to him as a greeting. It would have made my day back when I was fourteen, but it seems a pretty odd business to me now.

  The weirdest thing I saw in Austin was from the window of our hotel, which was on the banks of the Colorado river. Shakira and I arrived back at the hotel late one afternoon and the receptionist told us rather mysteriously to go out onto the balcony of our room at precisely six o’clock and look at the bridge over the river on our right. We did exactly as she suggested and saw that there were crowds of other guests standing on their balconies, too, and a host of people standing below, all with cameras ready, waiting for something to happen. Not wanting to miss anything, I rushed back inside to get my camera and got back just in time to witness one of the most extraordinary sights I’ve ever seen. At dead on six o’clock, two million bats flew out from under the bridge in their nightly search for food. There’s no other word for it – weird.

  My next film couldn’t have been more different. Last Orders was a tiny, low-budget British picture and although I only had a small part and the money was modest, I wanted to do it because not only was the great director Fred Schepisi involved, the cast included actors I liked and admired including Helen Mirren, Bob Hoskins and, from way back in the Sixties, David Hemmings and Tom Courtenay. Ray Winstone was playing my son, as well, so this really was the Best of British Talent. I suppose I always knew I’d end up playing my father at some point or other: my character, Jack Dodds, was a battler, just like my dad, a man who’d been born and bred in Bermondsey. But even though I was only on the set for about ten days out of the nine or so weeks of shooting, I found that playing a character like Jack Dodds alongside so many of my contemporaries, and watching Bob and Ray, the next generation of working-class actors like us, if you like, almost felt like watching the life I could have had play out on screen.