The Elephant to Hollywood

by Michael Caine

  As soon as I’d fully recovered I rang Alwyn again to find out if the job was still open but while I’d been in hospital the company had folded. I never saw Alwyn or Edgar again – although years later, when I was in Beverly Hills, I got a letter from a social worker in Hammersmith, London. He said he had an old man called Alwyn D. Fox lying destitute in one of his wards. Mr Fox, he said, was claiming he had discovered Michael Caine. In all likelihood it was fantasy, but if there was any truth in it, would I mind writing Mr Fox a letter and perhaps sending a small amount of money to make his last few weeks a bit easier? I wrote at once to confirm Alwyn’s story and enclosed a cheque for five thousand dollars. Two weeks later I had another letter from the social worker, returning the cheque. Alwyn had been delighted to get my letter, he wrote, and had spent the day he received it showing it to everyone on the ward. He had died later that night.

  No Alwyn Fox meant no job for me, so I headed back to Solosy’s to pick up another copy of The Stage. My time at Horsham meant that I had left the Assistant Stage Manager category behind and could now (with a certain amount of artistic licence) call myself an ‘experienced juvenile’. Unfortunately, my artistic licence extended a bit too far and I added the part of ‘George’ from George and Margaret, a popular play that would have been the next production at Horsham, to my list of parts. When I got to one audition, in a theatre in the east-coast town of Lowestoft, I was taken aback to find that the seventy-year-old director seemed a bit hostile. ‘It says here, you played George in George and Margaret,’ he said. Something was clearly not right. ‘Well, I did,’ I retorted, determined to stick to the story. ‘Well, you’re a bloody liar!’ he roared. ‘You’ve never even seen the play – or you’d know that the cast spends two hours waiting for George and Margaret to turn up and they never do!’

  In spite of this – perhaps he liked the way I’d acted so indignant – I got the job. I learnt a great deal from this wily old man. Three pieces of advice in particular have always stuck in my mind. In one play I did in Lowestoft I was cast as a drunkard and at the first rehearsal I came rolling onto the stage and staggered about. The director held up his hand to stop proceedings. ‘What do you think you are doing?’ he demanded. Feeling rather aggrieved, I said, ‘I’m playing a drunk.’ ‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘You are playing a drunk – I am paying you to be a drunk. A drunk is a man who is trying to act sober; you are a man who is trying to act drunk. It’s the wrong way round.’ Spot on. Another time I was on stage, but not speaking. The director held up his hand and said, again, ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ ‘Nothing!’ I replied. ‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘You may not have any lines, you are on stage and you are listening to what’s being said and in fact you have wonderful things to say, but you have just decided not to say them. You are every bit as much part of the action as the people who are speaking. Half of acting is listening – and the other half is reacting to what’s been said.’ Spot on. I also remember a scene in which I had to cry. I thought it was going very well, but again the director stopped me with the line I was hearing rather too frequently for my liking. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ he shouted. ‘Crying,’ I said, rather offended that he appeared unmoved by my performance. ‘No, you’re not!’ he said. ‘You’re an actor trying to cry. A real man is someone who is trying desperately not to cry.’ Spot on, again.

  I was keen enough to abide by the rules of theatre when it came to acting but I was determined not to let my lowly status as juvenile lead interfere with my love life. I had fallen in love with an impossible dream – Lowestoft’s leading lady, Patricia Haines. Pat was absolutely gorgeous, two years older than me, light years away in sophistication and a brilliant actress who didn’t have to add any extra parts to her CV. However, although she was always polite, she didn’t seem to have really noticed me at all, in fact she didn’t seem to have noticed that the company even had a new juvenile lead, no matter how often I hung around casting meaningful glances in her direction.

  Things went on this way for a couple of weeks and then, one night after the show, one of the actors gave a party. As usual, Pat was the centre of attention. As usual, she acknowledged me with a brief smile and then ignored me. Realising my love for her was forever doomed to be unrequited, I settled down to concentrate on getting thoroughly plastered. I sat there alone all night, mired in misery, until the party began to fold. Just as I was contemplating an unsteady return to my lonely digs, I heard a voice from behind me. ‘Are you shy?’ I jerked round to see Pat standing there, all five feet nine of her (plus her three-inch heels). ‘Shy?’ I lurched to my feet, spilling my drink down my trousers. ‘Me? What makes you say that?’ She was a blunt Northern lass. ‘Because I can see you fancy me and you’ve not even tried to make a pass.’ A pass? Was she mad? Me, make a pass at Pat Haines? I wobbled there for a moment, intoxicated not just with cheap beer but by her closeness and the smell of her perfume, and then I took the plunge. What did I have to lose, after all? With all the confidence I could muster from all the Bogart films I had ever seen, I looked her straight in the eyes. ‘I’m in love with you,’ I said. There was absolute silence for a minute. The blood was pumping through my head so strongly I had to lean forward to catch her reply. ‘I know,’ she said with a smile. ‘And I’m in love with you, too.’ This time I knew just what to do. I leant forward and kissed her.

  Pat and I were married a few weeks later in Lowestoft. Pat’s parents, Claire and Reg, came down from Sheffield and although they made the best of things, it was clear that they thought the marriage wouldn’t last.

  And of course they were right. We left Lowestoft for London but it was a very hard first few months. We were renting a small flat in Brixton from my Aunt Ellen, the first person in our family to own their own house, and it was just as well she let us have it cheap, because neither of us was making it big. After a very dry period in which I only got a few walk-on parts in television, I gave up looking for acting work and took a series of dead-end jobs to support Pat while she pushed on with her career. It was soul-destroying – and it was about to get even more difficult, because Pat became pregnant. Our beautiful daughter Dominique was born to a father who simply wasn’t ready for her and couldn’t support her and under the strain our marriage broke down and I walked out. Pat took Dominique back to her family in Sheffield and Claire and Reg took on the job of bringing her up. I was in despair: I had no money, I was out of work and I had abandoned my wife and child. At twenty-three, I felt I had failed my family and myself and I was almost suicidal with worry.

  I moved back to the prefab. Things were bad at home, too. Dad had rheumatism of the spine and could no longer work so I got a job in a steelyard to bring in some money. It was mercilessly hard physical labour – the hardest I’d ever done – and bitterly cold. Meanwhile, Dad’s back pain was worsening and the doctor told me (but not him) that in fact he had liver cancer and would only live another few weeks. I watched as this strong, vital man faded away in front of my eyes until the day I carried him out of the house to the ambulance waiting to take him to St Thomas’ Hospital to die.

  I will never forget those last two days of my father’s life. He was in agony. I begged the doctor to give him an overdose of painkillers. At first he refused but when I pointed out that death could hardly be worse than the living hell Dad was going through, he looked at me for a moment and then said, ‘Why don’t you go now? Come back at eleven o’clock tonight.’ When I returned that night, Dad was much calmer and I sat with him holding his hand. I squeezed it now and again, and now and again he would squeeze back. We sat there like that for two hours, and just as Big Ben, which I could see from the window, struck one o’clock, Dad opened his eyes. ‘Good luck, son’ he said, quite clearly, and then he died.

  When they turned out my father’s pockets at the hospital, all they found was three shillings and eightpence. Three shillings and eightpence was all he had after fifty-six years of hard manual labour. As I walked out of that ward I determined that I would make so
mething of myself – and that my family would never be poor again.

  Everybody gets a break now and again and it sometimes doesn’t come the way you might expect. Who would have thought that it was my experiences as a soldier in Korea that would lead to my first exposure to the movie business?

  My mum had had a small insurance policy – twenty-five pounds – on my father’s life and seeing what a terrible state I was in, she cashed it in and told me to go away and sort myself out. It was typically generous of my mum – who had so little money herself – and because I had fallen in love with the idea of Paris after reading a memoir called Springtime In Paris by the American writer Elliot Paul, Paris was where I chose to go. My return fare from London, Victoria, was seven pounds and with what I had left I managed to afford – at least to start with – a crummy hotel in the Rue de la Huchette, which was where Elliot Paul had stayed. Not having any money, I had to walk everywhere, but I was just out of the army and still very fit and in any case Paris is the best city to walk around in the whole world. For a couple of months I walked all over it, sat at cafés on the pavements just watching people go by and vowing that one day I would come back and do the whole place in style. My money soon ran out, but I survived on little bits of luck. I learnt to cook French fries on the pavement on the Boulevard Clichy, Paris’s main street of vice at the time. The man who taught me sold hot dogs and I sold my ‘frites for a franc’ next to him. After I could no longer afford the hotel, I slept at the old air terminal in the centre of Paris. I had my bag with me and a discarded air ticket I had found so I looked like a passenger who had missed a flight. Breakfast was free, supplied by a sympathetic American student who ran the early morning shift in the terminal café, and he also kept my bag for me during the days so I could walk about unencumbered. I know you are supposed to fall in love in Paris – it is one of the most romantic cities in the world after all – but there didn’t seem to be much enthusiasm for a sad, broke, unemployed young Englishman among the women I met. I may not have fallen in love with a woman, but I did fall in love with Paris herself and my time there sparked in me a life-long love of the city.

  It also did the trick. I stayed there for several weeks until I felt able to go home, and when I did get back to the Elephant, it was to be greeted by my mother with a kiss, a cuddle and a tear and the news that I’d got a job. I started to cry myself because there was a telegram waiting from my agent offering me a small part, plus the role of technical advisor, on a film called A Hill in Korea. The film was being shot on location in Portugal and in the Shepperton film studios and they would pay me £100 a week for eight weeks. This was untold riches! But there was a problem: the film was a month and a half away, Pat needed money to support herself and the baby and there was no chance of me getting a job for just six weeks. Once again Mum came to the rescue and took all her savings – £400 – out of the post office. ‘You can pay me back later,’ she said. As ever, there was nothing she wouldn’t do for Stanley or me.

  Once I’d got past my dodgy debut performance I had never had any trouble remembering two hours of dialogue on stage. In A Hill in Korea I managed to forget just eight lines – and I only had to deliver them at the rate of one a week. Filming a take is completely unlike acting in the theatre; most of the time is spent co-ordinating the filming equipment, for a start. By the time the director, Julian Aymes, shouted, ‘Action’ I was a complete bundle of nerves and it didn’t help to overhear one of the cameramen muttering, ‘It’s only one fucking line!’

  If my film debut wasn’t going as well as I’d hoped, I felt on much surer ground as a technical advisor. After all, I was the only person on the set who’d set foot in bloody Korea. But no one seemed to want to know. No one understood what we’d been doing there – in fact it often seemed as if no one knew we had even been there. Whenever I’ve mentioned it to American friends, they are completely taken aback. ‘The British were in Korea?’ And it wasn’t just us Brits. I was in a division that also included Australians, New Zealanders and South Africans, not that anyone seemed to care. I’ve got a lot of sympathy for soldiers. I know what it feels like to be sent off to fight an unpopular war that no one at home really understands or cares about and then to come back and meet a complete lack of understanding – or, worse, indifference – to what you’ve been through.

  I’m very anti-war. I see these young men going off to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan and I know what’s coming to them. I can’t watch the news of army casualties; I have to turn the TV off when it comes on because it’s just too sad. Like many of them, I was only nineteen when I was sent off to Korea with the Royal Fusiliers and probably like many of those going off to Afghanistan, I’d never heard of the place. My basic national service training had consisted of learning to shoot a 303 Lee Enfield rifle (obsolete by the end of the Second World War), and how to fire a Sten gun. This machine gun had a major design fault: it either jammed after the first three rounds or kept blasting even with your finger off the trigger. That happened to one of my mates at the firing range and the idiot turned around to ask the sergeant what to do, still holding his gun, spraying bullets in all directions. You’ve never seen a bunch of squaddies hit the floor so fast.

  But no training could have prepared me for the real thing, for my first time on guard duty in a trench, for the absolute darkness of the Korean night, for the first time the flares go up – and above all for the first time I saw hordes of the enemy charging towards me. In fact I felt far more hostility towards the rats that infested our bunker than I did for the Chinese soldiers we were supposed to be fighting. I will never forget standing on night duty daydreaming, as usual, that I was acting a major part in a heroic war film, when I was interrupted by the blast of a trumpet. ‘What the fuck is that?’ I shouted at my mate Harry. Before he could reply with the obvious, the entire valley erupted with the sound of not just one but hundreds of trumpets, the searchlights sprang into life and there, in front of us, a terrifying tableau was illuminated: thousands of Chinese advancing towards our positions led by a troop of demonic trumpet players. The artillery opened up, but still they came on, marching towards our machine guns and certain death. The protective minefields we sheltered behind suddenly seemed irrelevant: the first wave of Chinese committed suicide by hurling themselves onto our barbed wire so their bodies could be used as a bridge for the troops following. Eventually they were beaten off, but they were insanely brave.

  It seems to me that the people who send you to war are too old to go themselves – or know better. The sergeants who trained us told stories of incredible bravery during the Second World War but by the time we’d actually got to Korea they had all mysteriously disappeared and suddenly it was some of us young guys who were made sergeants. Not me – I was lucky to make private. But then, I think that going to war ages you. When we were marching out of the line, having been there for a year, we were nearly twenty. On the way back we passed the regiment that was taking over from us. They were nineteen-year-olds, as we had been when we went in and I looked at them, and I looked at us, and we looked ten years older than they did. They looked like young boys; we looked like young men.

  The closest I got to death – and the incident that still haunts my dreams from time to time – was a night-time observation patrol in no-man’s-land. Three of us – my platoon commander Robert Mills (who later became an actor, too), a wireless operator and me – were sent down the valley, faces blackened with mud and covered in mosquito repellent, to the very edge of the Chinese lines. Madness. It could have got even madder. As we squatted in a rice paddy, insects eating us alive, Bobbie Mills, who was the son of a general, had an idea. ‘I know,’ he said, ‘we’ll grab ourselves a Chinese prisoner! I’ll give you a fiver each.’ I stared at him. He’d spotted my mercenary streak, but he had seriously misjudged my interest in a futile gesture. ‘Are you off your fucking head?’ I hissed. He looked hurt. ‘Does that mean you won’t come with me?’ ‘Too fucking right,’ the wireless operator and I said together. ‘I
n that case,’ he said as if he was depriving us of a great treat, ‘we’ll just have to go back.’ We were halfway up the hill again, moving cautiously, when we suddenly caught the whiff of garlic – the Chinese ate garlic like chewing gum – and realised we were being followed. Just in time, we threw ourselves on to the ground as a troop of Chinese soldiers emerged from the long grass and began searching for us. I lay there, absolutely terrified, my hand on the trigger of my gun, with the enemy circling so close we could hear them talking. I was conscious of a growing fury – I was going to die before I’d even had a chance to live, before I’d had a chance to do all the things I wanted to do, before I’d had a chance to realise even one of my dreams. I decided I had nothing further to lose; if I was going to die, then I was taking a lot of Chinese with me. I was not alone: the three of us were gripped with a new sense of purpose. We would not run back to our own lines, Bobbie Mills said, we would charge the enemy, all guns blazing, and take them by surprise. This time, we were all agreed. ‘I need a piss,’ said the wireless operator. We were all agreed on that, too, and knelt there in the undergrowth and all peed together. Then we got to our feet and hurled ourselves into the night. The Chinese began firing in all directions, but they had no idea where we were coming from and we just kept running towards the enemy lines until it felt safe to change direction and head back to our own. Somehow we got back in one piece – but it was a close-run thing.

  I don’t wake up in the night in a sweat reliving this incident, but it does come back to me at moments of difficulty, particularly when someone is looking to attack me or do me down. And I just think – as I did on that Korean hillside – you cannot frighten me, or do anything to me, and if you try I’ll take as much or as many of you with me as I can, even if I lose in the process. If you leave me alone, I’m great – but just don’t start . . .