Michael Caine - The Elephant to Hollywood

The Elephant to Hollywood

Michael Caine

www.hodder.co.uk

First published in Great Britain in 2010 by Hodder & Stoughton

An Hachette UK company

Copyright Michael Caine Business 2010

The right of Sir Michael Caine to be identified as the Author of the Work has been

asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,

or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher,

nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is

published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

Epub ISBN 9781848945883

Book ISBN 9781444700015

Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

338 Euston Road

London NW1 3BH

www.hodder.co.uk

To my family: Shakira, Nikki, Natasha, Michael, the father of my three grandchildren, Taylor, Miles and Allegra, and to two of our closest and dearest friends, Emile Riley and Danny Zarem

Contents

Acknowledgements

These are the people without whom I wouldnt be where I am, writing a book about myself...

With everlasting thanks to Toni Howard, Sue Mengers, Jerry Pam and Dennis Selinger, who were not only my agents but were and are four of my closest friends. And in the UK, thanks to Duncan Heath, Kate Buckley and Paul Stevens.

With thanks, too, to all my wonderful friends at Hodder & Stoughton: Kate Parkin, Rowena Webb, Karen Geary and Juliet Brightmore. Without them this book would not have been written (or might have been 1000 pages long...)

Prologue

Well, its a long way from Londons Elephant and Castle to Hollywood. And the shortest distance between two points is not always a straight line, as my story is going to prove. But then Ive never been known for doing things the easy way. I wouldnt have minded easy but things just never worked out like that. In fact although I couldnt have known it at the time they worked out a whole lot better.

Eighteen years ago I thought that my career as an actor was over so I wrote my autobiography Whats It All About? to round off my professional life; and that, as far as I was concerned, was that. Fortunately, and not for the first time, I was wrong. Very wrong. The best was yet to come, which, when I look back at my life the crazy 1960s, the stardom, the glitz and glamour of Hollywood is really saying something. The last eighteen years have been different different style, different places and a different idea of happiness but different has not only been good, its been better than I could ever have imagined.

So this is the story of a man who thought it was all over, and found out it wasnt. Its the story of the last eighteen years, but its also the story of where I came from and where Im going. I know many people have read my first book, but you dont get to my age without looking back and God knows Ive been to plenty of memorial services so Im not going to apologise for telling some of the old tales. But there are plenty of new stories, too, because Ive had the good fortune to work with a whole new generation of movie stars. And that puts me in a uniquely privileged position. There arent many actors whose career has spanned nearly fifty years of movie-making from Zulu to The Dark Knight and there arent many actors who have had Happy Birthday sung huskily and Marilyn-like into their ear by both Carly Simon and Scarlett Johansson, twenty years apart.

Everyone gets lucky now and then, and Ive had some lucky breaks. Ive been lucky, too, with friends and agents and supporters who have all looked out for me. But if theres one person I feel I owe for the way the last eighteen years have gone, its Jack Nicholson. In fact if it werent for him, I wouldnt be writing this book now. I have Jack to thank for the resurrection of my movie career. I know hes not everyones idea of a fairy godmother but he did it for me. Ill explain how, later but it could all have been so very different...

This is not a serious tome by a pompous old actor above all, Im an entertainer, so please feel free to laugh. I want to share the joy and the fun and the good fortune I have had with friends, to tell you about the things Ive done and the places Ive been and about how when I got there it was never the way I thought it would be. In many ways this is an innocents venture into the unknown, so Im pleased you want to come along for the ride. To you and me bon voyage.

The Twilight Zone

When I finished my first autobiography Whats It All About? 1992 seemed like a good place to stop. I had a great film career, a worldwide bestseller, some restaurants, a beautiful house and most importantly of all, a loving family. Christmas and New Years Eve 1991 had been spent in Aspen, Colorado, as guests of Marvin and Barbara Davis, the Texan oil billionaires and socialites. We stayed at the Little Nell Inn (which Marvin happened to own) and we were surrounded by friends including Lenny and Wendy Goldberg, Sean Connery and his wife Michelene and Sidney and Joanna Poitier.

It was a fabulous group to spend a holiday with. I dont ski but I have really worked hard at developing my aprs ski skills and that is what Aspen is all about. As we sat around, enjoying the sunshine, gossiping about old times and eating fabulous food with this great group of people, I felt pretty happy with my lot. Everyone there had been part of my life since I first got to Hollywood although in fact Id met Sean in London back in the late fifties at what was then called a bottle party. If someone was giving a party in those days and couldnt quite afford it, the invitation would be to bring a bottle and a bird. I was so broke that I couldnt afford to bring a bottle, so I brought two birds. And they were both very beautiful girls. I walked into this party and there was Sean, who seemed enormous compared with the rest of us weedy actor types, and he saw me with those two girls and I became his instant new best friend. That period, back in the 1950s, was a tough time for me perhaps the toughest Ive ever known and I was living hand to mouth through much of it, owing small sums of money to people all over London and often having to cross the road to avoid creditors. Of course, what I couldnt have foreseen was that not so many years later, Shirley Maclaine would choose me to play opposite her in Gambit and give me a welcome to LA party, and in would walk Sidney Poitier. And that Sidney would become my instant new best friend.

Aspen with old friends was followed by a period back in Hollywood. I felt on top of the world. Things could only get better. I was completely oblivious to the downturn in store for me. My wife Shakira and I had bought a small house with a fantastic view, not on a Beverly Hill but in the more modest district of Trousdale. It was a holiday home, really our main base was back in England but we wanted to be close to our dear friend Swifty Lazar whose wife, Mary, was very sick.

Apart from Marys illness, there were no signs of impending doom. Nothing seemed to have changed. Our old friends were all in town. As with our New Year at Aspen, the dinner we had one night at Chasens restaurant in Hollywood with Frank and Barbara Sinatra, Greg and Veronique Peck and George and Jolene Schlatter, seemed to reflect all that was good in our lives. It was a great Hollywood evening, full of in-jokes including a prime one from George that seemed to sum up perfectly the relationship between actors and their agents. George is one of the great TV producers, the man who discovered Goldie Hawn in his fantastic show Rowan and Martins Laugh-In , and every bit as funny as the shows hes produced. Ive been lucky my agents have always been close friends but the relationship between stars and agents is usually quite distant socially. The joke goes, an actor gets a telephone call to say that his house has been burnt down and his wife raped. The actor rushes home and a police officer meets him outside and tells him that it is his agent who has come to the house, burnt it down and raped his wife. The actors jaw drops and he turns to the policeman and says, completely astonished, My agent came to my house ?

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