The Elephant to Hollywood

by Michael Caine

  You couldn’t have had a greater contrast with that cameo role than the small part I took for the fun of it in the third Austin Powers movie, Goldmember. Again I was playing the father (well, by now I was getting used to it . . .), but this time it was the father of Mike Myers’ Austin Powers himself. Nigel Powers, the rakish super spy, gave me every chance I could ever have wanted to send up the whole business of the Sixties man about town, and I adored it. It was an honour to be invited to play a bit part which was really a tongue-in-cheek send-up of my own on-screen image.

  I loved Goldmember from start to finish. Mike Myers is crazy – but crazy like a fox, because he is a comic genius. For a start, he loves what he does – and he makes sure everyone else has fun, too. At the end of every take, for instance, he played loud rock-and-roll through the speakers and everyone started dancing, which took me completely by surprise the first time it happened, but I soon got into it. And Mike, like me, hates getting up in the morning, so every day we got a later and later start until by the time the movie finished we were working from noon until midnight. The lines were crazy, too – one of my own favourites was, ‘There are only two things I hate in the world: people who are intolerant of other people’s cultures, and the Dutch,’ while Mike got to say, when explaining to someone why he had a stiff neck, ‘I took a Viagra and it stuck in my throat!’ No one was going to get an Oscar for this movie, but it was a huge box office success and a great laugh.

  One of the revelations for me in Goldmember was the performance of Beyoncé Knowles. At the time of the film she was still in Destiny’s Child and she was only nineteen. She was quiet, observant, absolutely determined to get her first acting role right and completely professional, with a sensitive regard for the feelings of everyone else on the set. She was famous then, but now of course Beyoncé is one of the top female recording artists in the world, although she once confided to me that she would love to win an Academy Award one day. I am convinced she will . . .

  My working life had felt like a succession of wild changes of tone for a while, but if there could be a greater contrast between my screen role in Goldmember and the ceremony I was about to take part in, I can’t think what it might be. I had been given a CBE in 1993, and although I was grateful to receive such a beautiful medal, I don’t remember anything about the occasion whatsoever. But I can remember everything about receiving a knighthood in the year 2000, in great detail. For a start it was one of the proudest moments of my life. It is not like winning an Oscar – that is for a single piece of work – it is an award for a lifetime’s achievement. It means a great deal to me and to my family – but to us alone. I don’t expect other people to recognise it or to call me ‘Sir Michael’. The knighthood is for me and for us and what anybody else thinks or says about it is of absolutely no concern to me whatsoever.

  You are informed that you have been awarded a knighthood months before the honours list is announced and you are sent some sort of form to fill in if you want to turn it down – which some people do. I never understand people who make a big fuss about turning it down. If not being a knight is so important to them, why do they have to shout about refusing it? I think they should just fill in the form and shut up!

  My only problem with the whole knighthood business was having to find a morning suit, but fortunately Doug Hayward stepped into the breach again – just as he had done back at the premiere of Zulu all those years ago – and lent me his. We were, remarkably, still the same size. Accompanied by Shakira, Dominique and Natasha – all looking incredibly glamorous – I drove to Buckingham Palace. When we got out of the car, we were immediately greeted by an army officer who must have been about six foot five, standing ramrod straight (something I never achieved in my army days) and with a big stick under his arm. He was our own personal usher for the occasion and he led us down the long corridors of the palace at a cracking pace, to the ballroom where the investitures were taking place. As we whipped along, I noticed that various doors were half opening along the way as people popped their heads out to watch us go. ‘Good luck!’ some of them whispered as they recognised me, before shutting the doors hastily as our usher glared at them. It was a welcome human touch in such formal and intimidating surroundings. The whole thing was high-tech, too – we were on digital camera for every moment of the ceremony and were told that we could have a photograph of any moment I chose while we were at the palace. Who says the Royal Family is out of touch? I chose, of course – like everyone else, I gather – the moments when the Queen touched my shoulder with the sword and when the family gathered outside the front of the palace.

  Once Shakira and my daughters were shown to their seats in the ballroom, I was taken to a back room to practise. There was a wooden apparatus with a cushion for kneeling on. ‘The right knee only!’ my usher instructed me firmly. ‘I know how to kneel,’ I said. ‘It’s not the kneeling we’re worried about,’ he replied. ‘It’s the getting up again!’ He pointed out a rail on one side of the cushion. ‘This,’ said the usher – he really did know everything – ‘is for the older recipients who might have trouble getting to their feet again.’ He then gave me detailed instructions on the protocol. It seemed enormously complicated and I realised that – unlike the movies – I’d have to get it right first time: there wouldn’t be a chance for another take. ‘When your name is called,’ he said, ‘you will walk straight in and turn right on the line directly in front of Her Majesty. You will not at any time speak unless you are spoken to. You will kneel on your right knee until the queen has knighted you with her sword. You will then stand and again not speak unless spoken to by Her Majesty. She will then stretch out her hand and shake yours and at that point you are done – not another gesture or word – and you will immediately turn right and walk smartly out of the room. Do you understand, sir?’ I was reeling by this time, but I told him I did and stood there on my own waiting for my turn. When it came, I did everything I had been told to do and in the correct order (I could sense my usher anxiously watching me from the wings) and stood in front of Her Majesty. ‘I have a feeling that you have been doing what you do for a very long time,’ she said. I stifled the temptation to say, ‘And so have you, Ma’am,’ and just said, ‘Yes, Ma’am,’ went down on one knee and was knighted. I got to my feet, and she put out her hand without another word. I noticed that in her handshake there is a very slight push towards you in case you have forgotten it is over. It’s all clever stuff. I turned right as I had been instructed and was met by my usher who seemed very pleased with my performance – as for me, I was walking on air. I was a knight! Just like all those men I had read about in comics and books when I was a kid. I couldn’t believe it and I went to join my family for the rest of the ceremony in a daze. I thought of my mother and of my father and of all the generations of their families stretching back behind me over the centuries and I felt that it was for them as well as for myself and Shakira and the girls that I was there.

  I watched the Queen as she continued the ceremony, awarding medals and honours of gradually diminishing importance. She was, of course, indefatigable, but she was also incredibly kind. She had had a brief word with the four of us who were knighted that day, but as the grandeur of the honour lessened, she spent more and more time talking to the recipients and putting them at their ease. It was a lovely touch.

  A couple of years later I was walking down Piccadilly one day when I bumped into Charlie Watts, of the Rolling Stones. We hadn’t seen each other for years and were busy chatting when my phone suddenly went and I took the call. ‘Who was that?’ Charlie asked when I’d finished. ‘Roger Moore,’ I said. ‘He’s on the way to Buckingham Palace to be knighted and he’s worried about the kneeling bit because he’s got a bad knee and he thinks he might get stuck down there and have to ask the Queen to help him up.’ Charlie looked a bit sceptical, but I explained what I had told Roger. ‘There’s a contraption there to practise,’ I said, ‘and a rail a bit like one of those handgrips you get in disabled showers to help yo
u up if you get stuck.’ I could see Charlie didn’t really believe a word I was saying!

  20

  The Quiet American

  Just as I was getting comfortable with my leading actor status, along came a film that had, as they say in skating, real ‘degrees of difficulty’ – and I couldn’t turn it down. It wasn’t just that playing the anti-hero Thomas Fowler in The Quiet American was a challenge that would make greater demands on me than I had faced in some time, it was also – I hoped – a chance to make a film of a Graham Greene novel that the author, who is one of my favourites, would have been proud of.

  I was at a table in the Connaught Hotel in London one Sunday evening many years ago, having dinner. We were making a film nearby and I had rushed over between takes – as the only person on the set wearing collar and tie (it was my costume, actually, not my own clothes) and therefore allowed into the place, I was eating alone. Suddenly a shadow fell across my table. I looked up and thought, ‘Oh, shit!’ It was Graham Greene and I was aware that my recent film of his book The Honorary Consul was not very good. Sitting there, looking up at him and feeling guilty anyway, he seemed very tall and threatening, but as I stood up to greet him I realised he was only my height. We introduced ourselves and shook hands, and then he said, ‘I didn’t like the film, Michael, but I did like your performance.’ He was notorious for hating the films of his books, but I think he was probably right about the film – and I was flattered by his assessment of my part in it.

  The film – which was eventually and mysteriously released in America in 1983 as Beyond the Limit – also starred Richard Gere and, the first time I had worked with him, Bob Hoskins. Bob was very much ‘what you see is what you get’ from the first moment I met him, and we have gone on to make several pictures together since. Richard Gere, on the other hand, is a much more intense actor, although some of the intensity of his concentration during the making of that film may have been down to the appalling dysentery he suffered on location in Mexico. I wasn’t surprised when I walked past the café at which he and his girlfriend had eaten – I hadn’t seen a plague of rats like it since Korea. However careful you were, it was impossible to escape the bug and eventually the entire cast and crew all fell ill – all except me. I had devised the perfect preventative: before every meal I downed a straight vodka and followed it up with wine and finally a brandy (this was in my younger days, you understand). I figured that no germ could survive an onslaught like that; the problem was that it nearly finished me off, too . . .

  No matter how much I drank off the set, I was always meticulously careful about never being drunk on set; I have too much professional pride for that. I was playing a drunk, too, and that, of course, requires complete sobriety. My character, the Consul, was not only a drunk, but also addicted to aspirins and I was given handfuls of dummy pills to chew. I had to chew away in the first scene, but unfortunately there had been some mix-up and I really was handed a fistful of aspirins. They had an extraordinary effect: I began to feel very odd, started swaying far more than the Consul was supposed to and eventually collapsed and had to be carried off the set. I recovered back at the hotel and was fine for the rest of the shoot. In fact I was the only member of the team who didn’t succumb to dysentery, so maybe my bizarre diet of aspirins and heavy duty evening drinking stripped my system bare of any rogue germs – I wouldn’t recommend it, though . . .

  I felt that justice had not been done to the genius of Graham Greene by The Honorary Consul and so in 2001 I leapt at the chance to put things right with The Quiet American, which charts the start of American involvement in the Vietnam war. I had waited a long time for this sort of role and I was looking forward not only to a story of this quality, but also to filming in Saigon, or Ho Chi Minh City, as it was named after the war.

  It was not exactly how I had imagined it. Shakira and I arrived at the hotel at Sunday lunchtime and we were starving. I asked if we could eat in the restaurant, which I could see from the lobby was doing a roaring trade. The manager was apologetic and told us that there would be a half-hour wait. ‘It’s always packed for Sunday lunch,’ he said. ‘What are you serving?’ I asked. ‘Go and see,’ he said with a smile. ‘You won’t believe it!’ We did – and we didn’t. Apart from a very few Europeans, the tables were stuffed with Vietnamese families all tucking into roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. ‘Incredible, isn’t it?’ the manager said from behind us. ‘We started it because we get a lot of British visitors and it’s just caught on.’

  After we had unpacked and sampled the delights of a Vietnamese roast dinner (not bad at all), we went for a walk. Our impressions of what the streets would look like were all taken from films – mostly French – and featured horse-drawn taxis, vintage cars and locals on thousands of bicycles. Needless to say, we’d got that one wrong. Ho Chi Minh City has three million motor scooters and not one single traffic regulation or signal that anyone takes any notice of. I later asked a Vietnamese if he had any tips on how to cross a road. ‘A good start,’ he said, ‘is to be a Buddhist.’ Well, I had already failed that one. ‘Anything else?’ I persisted. ‘Just step off the pavement,’ he advised, ‘and don’t catch anyone’s eye. If you catch their eye it puts them off and they’ll hit you.’ He seemed to think this was an entirely reasonable explanation. Shakira and I never risked following his advice, but we did come up with a method of our own. We looked for groups of Buddhists, inserted ourselves into the very centre of them and crossed when they did. If we were going to be mown down, we would at least be in the right company.

  Once we had mastered the art of crossing the road, I noticed that all the young women riding scooters wore full-length evening gloves that reached right up to their armpits: it was a truly bizarre sight. I asked our Vietnamese friend why this was and he told me that middle-class girls did not want sunburnt arms because only peasant women had sunburnt arms. Class distinction on scooters – that was a new one on me! If we made it safely to the other side unscathed by the scooters, we were ambushed by the small boys who swarmed the streets carrying trays of stuff to sell. Apart from the usual postcards and cigarettes, they also all carried the same three random and at first sight rather puzzling products: David Beckham Number 8 football shirts, pirate DVDs of Miss Congeniality, which hadn’t even come out in America at this point, and paperback copies of The Quiet American.

  I was intrigued by all three of these items – not least by how the hell they had managed to smuggle out a black market copy of Miss Congeniality so quickly – but it was the presence of the Graham Greene novels I found the most interesting. It turned out that the book had almost iconic status in Ho Chi Minh City. People would point out the window of the room where Greene wrote it in the French colonial Majestic Hotel and just walking around, it was possible to sense the decadence, imagine the brothels and almost smell the drugs that had pervaded the city – and Greene’s novel – then. Although the Communist government had cleared out most of the signs of bourgeois decadence, there was one visible reminder of the Saigon Greene writes about so evocatively: portly, elderly European men could be seen everywhere with beautiful young Vietnamese girls on their arms. A couple of the reviews of our film implied that I was too old for the role of Fowler, but obviously they had never been to Vietnam. I, too, had been a bit worried about taking it on because of the age difference between my character and my young mistress and when we did the screen test, I asked make-up to make the actress Do Thi Hai Yen who was to play Phuong look as old and tarty as they could. It was an impossible task as she was stunningly beautiful – and I needn’t have bothered: such was the desperation of many young Vietnamese women to leave the country that they would go out with any foreigner, even one as old and creaky as me.

  Everywhere I went in Vietnam it was still possible to find someone who knew something about The Quiet American or about Graham Greene himself. One old American reporter – a Graham Greene character if ever there was one – told me that the reason Greene had written the book in the first place wa
s because he had come across a story of two American women who had been killed in the North and their bodies shipped back without a mention. Greene went to Hanoi to investigate. The reporter didn’t know what he had found – but he did know that Greene started writing The Quiet American on his journey back to Saigon.

  We received fantastic co-operation and help from the Vietnamese authorities during filming. At a key point in the movie, which is based on a real incident, there is a huge bomb explosion and the city council allowed us to close streets all around the city centre so we could recreate this. I think they did it because the book and Greene himself were seen as anti-American – although the Communists were blamed for the explosion at the time, Greene suspected that the bomb had been planted by the Americans and he is likely to have been right. The Americans ignored his advice (which made him very unpopular at the time), which was to keep clear of a war the French were already losing – although I think they would take a different view in hindsight. I had served in Korea alongside Americans and at the time, I fully expected the British to go into Vietnam with them. I was very surprised when we didn’t. It was only when I was in Saigon for this film, and realised that Greene was in British Intelligence in Sierra Leone during the Second World War, that I put two and two together: maybe he advised the British government against it. Perhaps he really was ‘Our Man’ in Saigon.