Apart from stepping in the dog shit on day one of the filming, I found Alfie a surprisingly straightforward movie to make. I was growing in confidence with every new role and I found Lewis Gilbert – who came from a similar background to me – great to work with. Unlike some directors, he actually worked with his cast and took their opinions into account, even asking me who we might cast as the middle-aged married woman Alfie seduces. I immediately thought of Vivien Merchant, with whom I’d appeared in Harold Pinter’s The Room at the Royal Court. She was a brilliant stage actress, but she’d never appeared in a film before and Lewis wanted her to do a screen test, which she refused to do. It looked as if that was that, but Lewis took a chance on my judgement and we cast her anyway. She turned out to be a huge success and was eventually nominated for an Oscar. Lewis and I also came up with a way to have Alfie address the audience without making it seem as if he was delivering a long declamatory speech: I spoke instead as if I was talking just to one person, so the audience felt as if they were an intimate friend of the character.
In spite of all Lewis’s encouragement, however, and my gut feeling that things were going well, I still refused to see any of the rushes. I could now well afford a new pair of shoes, but I still didn’t want to be sick all over them. It’s not about being competitive with other actors; my competition has always been me. My only question is: can I be better than I was the last time? I’m not just self-critical, I’m a nightmare! And with rushes, I’d learnt from my experience with Zulu that if you see them you’ll just screw up the next day’s shooting worrying about yesterday’s. It’s a lesson in life – don’t look back, you’ll trip over.
‘Why not just wait outside?’ Lewis said to me kindly one day when he was about to go into the screening room with the latest reels. Feeling decidedly queasy, I hung about nervously – and was immensely relieved to hear gales of laughter coming from inside. Maybe, just maybe, this was going to be a hit.
Lewis certainly thought so. We had lunch in that twilight zone in between finishing filming and awaiting news of a release date, and he said to me, ‘You know you’re really very good in this. I think you could be nominated for an Oscar.’ I just sat there dumbly, gaping at him. I’d never imagined that Alfie would have any traction in America whatsoever. Alfie himself spoke in such a heavy Cockney accent that Shelley Winters, my co-star, told me that she hadn’t understood a single thing I’d said to her during the course of the movie and had resorted to just watching my lips to know when to come in on cue. I’d had to lip-synch a clearer version of my lines onto the original take, in case we did get an American release (if you ever see the American version of the film you’ll think I can’t do a Cockney accent, but you will get to hear the closing titles sound track ‘What’s it all about, Alfie?’ because Burt Bacharach only wrote it after he saw an American preview), but I hadn’t really thought it was likely to happen. Just shows how much I knew . . . And Lewis was right. I did get nominated for an Academy Award by the people in my boyhood dreamland, Hollywood. I didn’t go to the ceremony and in the end it was just as well. The Oscar was won by my favourite stage actor (and friend) Paul Scofield in the movie version of my favourite stage play, A Man for All Seasons. I asked his wife later where he was when he heard the news. ‘On the roof of our barn,’ she said, ‘mending it.’ ‘What did he say?’ I persisted. ‘Oh – you know, “Isn’t that nice, dear?”’ I have been nominated many times for an Oscar and won it twice, and whenever I see the tears and tantrums at today’s ceremony, I always think of Paul and smile.
But all this was in the future. I had filmed Ipcress and Alfie back to back, and was first waiting for the release of The Ipcress File and the verdict of the critics. It didn’t look too promising. Harry Salzman and I sneaked out of the low-key premiere to gauge the reaction of the audience and the first man we spoke to told us he thought it was the biggest load of crap he’d ever seen. I was immediately plunged into the depths of gloom and went off and got very drunk. I woke up the next morning with a stinking hangover and, feeling very sick, went off to get the papers.
The first review I read confirmed my worst fears: it was awful. But the next one was good, the one after that was even better and after that the good notices began to pile up so consistently that even I could see that I had made it. I began to cry – not just quietly, but great heaving sobs I couldn’t control. After all this time, after all the knock-backs, the rejections, the struggle – I really was a success. Without quite realising what I was doing, I scrunched up the papers and started throwing them out of the window, howling as I did so. ‘Oi!’ a voice from the street below shouted. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ An old charlady was standing there looking up at me, hands on hips. ‘Come down here and pick these up!’ she shrieked and, then, seeing my tear-stained face staring down at her, ‘You don’t need to cry,’ she said more kindly. ‘It’s time you grew up.’
I took a deep breath and looked around me. She was right: I did need to grow up. I was thirty-two. I had been so focused on work that I hadn’t had a chance to sit back and take stock. I went down to the street and picked up all the paper and vowed that from now on I’d take things a little more calmly.
I couldn’t have got away with sneaking out of the premiere of Alfie as I had at The Ipcress File. This was the real deal. It was held a year later in March 1966 at the Plaza in Piccadilly and was a massive event. It seemed as if anyone who was anyone in the Sixties was there – from all of the Rolling Stones and the Fab Four Beatles to Barbra Streisand and Tippi Hedren, who fainted during the abortion scene and had to be carried out. This time I did take my mum. When I look back, I can see that she hadn’t wanted to go to the Zulu premiere because she was terrified she might make a mistake and screw up my career at such a delicate stage – that was the way she thought. I think it was probably a class thing and she was intimidated by the thought of all those people in evening dress. She was completely devoted to what I was doing – mind you, she wasn’t quite sure what it was – but she trusted me. She hadn’t wanted to go to the premiere, but she still wanted to witness it.
Things were different at the premiere for Alfie. The party afterwards was in a pub called The Cockney Pride and Mum almost had to be forcibly removed at two in the morning. It was a great night, but best of all was sharing it with the person who had done so much to make it all possible. But my mum was not going to let any of my success go to her head. She still worked as a charlady, getting up at six in the morning to clean people’s houses and no matter how often I told her that I had enough money for her never to work again, she stubbornly refused to give it up. I didn’t know what to do but eventually, I hit on the right solution. ‘Mum,’ I said, ‘what do you think the press would say if they knew you were still scrubbing floors when I was earning all this money? They’d crucify me!’ She saw the sense in that at once. As I said, there was nothing she wouldn’t do for her boys.
In the end, after a very tough start, Mum had a very happy life – although I’m not sure she ever quite understood what I did and she certainly never understood how much I earned. She asked me a few years later, ‘How much do you earn for a film?’ And I said, ‘A million pounds.’ ‘Oh,’ she said and she was quiet for a bit and then she said, ‘How much is that?’ She had no way of computing that sort of money, so I said, ‘It means you don’t have to do anything, Mum, work for anything, or want for anything ever, ever, ever again. So no taking crafty cleaning jobs to be with your mates or I’ll get into trouble with the papers.’ She never let me see how important my success was to her, or how proud she was of what I’d achieved. In fact she hardly mentioned it at all – unless it was to take the piss out of me. But when she died in 1989 her friends and members of our family all told me that she’d spoken of me with tremendous pride. She was just very careful not to let me get too big for my boots.
Meanwhile, there was something she was keeping from me. She’d lost touch with my brother Stanley and she was very upset about it. None of his friends
seemed to know where he’d gone and I began to get worried too as all my efforts to trace him failed. I’d almost given up when one day I was in Heal’s, the classy furniture store, ordering a new sofa and I asked to see one they had out the back. Two blokes in overalls heaved it in to the showroom for me and as they manoeuvred it into place, one of them turned in my direction and I saw it was Stanley. I was really shocked to see him looking so shabby and felt terrible that he was working so hard to keep his head above water while I was ordering sofas without a second thought. In the end, it worked out brilliantly. I took care of things for Stanley and as I was about to go away to the Cannes film festival where they were showing The Ipcress File, he moved into my flat to take care of things for me.
It was in Cannes that I finally realised what my life had become. Harry Salzman put me up in a very grand suite at the Carlton Hotel and I revelled in the luxury of it, but as soon as Ipcress was shown I realised that my days of freedom were over. I couldn’t leave the hotel without being mobbed by the press. Sean Connery was also in town and he hated it so much – he couldn’t even get to the hotel dining room in peace – that he left the same day. I wasn’t in quite that league yet, so I stuck it out and went to the reception given by the British Consul. The Beatles were also in the line-up and I was next to John Lennon. After the fiftieth person had shaken our hands and asked who we were and what we did, John and I changed our names – his to Joe Lemon and mine back to Maurice Micklewhite. It didn’t seem to make much difference, but it cheered us up. John and I made a nice little drinking team for the couple of days we were in Cannes and toured the parties together. He was a tough, no-nonsense man and completely indifferent to the glamour of our surroundings. At one party, we found ourselves both needing a pee and all the lavatories occupied. We roamed round some great palace of a house and eventually I found an en suite bathroom upstairs and rushed in. When I’d finished, I came out to find John rather unsteadily peeing out of the bedroom window. ‘John, you’ve got it on the bloody curtains!’ I said. ‘Who cares?’ said John in that unmistakeable voice. ‘They’re rich – fuck ’em!’
If Cannes seemed like impossible glamour, then New York, where I was off to next, was in another league.
6
To Hollywood
Alfie had opened in the US and had been such a hit (those long hours getting the lip-synching right had obviously paid off) that it went on general release, which was a rare event for a British-made picture. So the plan was that I too would go on general release along with it and do my first ever American publicity tour from New York. When I got there, I discovered that The Ipcress File had been bought by Universal and was also on general release, and I was overwhelmed by the response I got. A year ago I had been a complete unknown, here I was with two hit movies playing to packed houses across the States and I was hailed everywhere as a star. In fact I was the one who was starstruck – at parties given for me and in restaurants, night after night, I found myself next to one movie legend after another. At the 21 Club I sat next to Kirk Douglas and Maureen O’Hara; at Elaine’s (soon to become a fixture of my New York life) I knocked over Woody Allen’s wine glass and trod on Ursula Andress’s foot; and at the Russian Tea Room I sat in between Helen Hayes and Walter Matthau. If anyone had told that little boy sitting in that dark, smoky cinema in the Elephant all those years ago that this was where he’d end up, he’d have thought they were mad.
But perhaps the most memorable encounter of all during that whirlwind tour was with the legendary Bette Davis. People had been so generous to me during my trip that I asked Paramount if they would let me host a cocktail party the night before I left to say thank you. My new friends, the wonderful theatrical couple Jessica Tandy (who went on to win an Oscar at the age of eighty-two for Driving Miss Daisy) and Hume Cronyn, asked if they could bring Bette Davis along. I could hardly believe what I was hearing and when the evening came, I couldn’t wait to introduce myself to her. ‘You know,’ she said, in that unmistakeable drawl, ‘you remind me of the young Leslie Howard.’ I’d heard this before but this was from Bette Davis! She went on, ‘Did you know that Leslie screwed every single woman in every movie he made – except me?’ I had heard this, I said. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I was not going to be just one on a list of conquests – but when I look at you I was just wondering what difference it would have ever made if I had.’ She sounded almost wistful. I blurted out, ‘Will you have dinner with me tonight?’ She looked at me for a minute. ‘I was not making a pass at you,’ she said, rather severely. ‘No, no,’ I said hastily. And I didn’t think she was. But she was trying to tell me that she had been there and that sometimes you can have regrets. ‘We could have dinner together with Jessica and Hume,’ I went on, ‘just the four of us.’ She smiled and relaxed. ‘That would be nice,’ she said, ‘as long as I can go home in a taxi on my own.’
I wasn’t back in England long before I got the call from my agent that would truly change my life. Shirley Maclaine had seen me in The Ipcress File, Dennis said, and as her contract stipulated that she could choose her own leading man, she had chosen me for her next film, Gambit. She was the star and she had chosen me. Of course the fact that I was a relative unknown and therefore cheap was a bonus for the production, but nonetheless she had picked me out and wanted to take the chance. They sent the script and I thought it was great, but that was completely beside the point. This was Hollywood – and I would have done anything to make a movie there. I had made it at last.
So off I went to the land of my youthful dreams. My expectations were so high I thought the reality would be a disappointment. I was wrong – it was better than the wildest of those dreams. I arrived at LA airport and was whisked off in a Rolls Royce to a luxury suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Then there was a bit of a hiatus, a glamour blip for a few days as Shirley was delayed and so I sat there in the hotel in splendid isolation awaiting her stamp of approval and the welcome party she had planned for me. To pass the time, I took to star-spotting in the hotel lobby. I didn’t know it, but both Alfie and The Ipcress File were doing the rounds of the luxury home cinema circuit in Beverly Hills and going down very well – and my face was beginning to become known around town. The first famous person to recognise me was Jane Russell, the gorgeously sexy star of Howard Hughes’s The Outlaw. She was passing through the lobby and came over to have a chat and invited me to lunch. Lunch with Jane Russell – it might seem the very essence of glamour, but by this stage Jane was une femme d’un certain age to put it politely (she was getting on a bit) and the lunch was hosted by the Christian Scientist church of which Jane was a member. Not my most stunning Hollywood moment.
The next lobby encounter, however, made up for it. As I was sitting there I heard the sound of a helicopter landing in the gardens opposite the hotel, which, a porter told me, was strictly illegal. We stood at the door to see who had dared break the law so flagrantly and out of the swirling cloud that had been whirled up came the figure of John Wayne. He strode into the lobby and up to the desk, wearing a full cowboy costume and hat. He was covered in dust. I just stood there, mouth open, while he waited to be handed his room key. Suddenly he turned round, saw me looking at him, pointed at me and said, ‘What’s your name?’ I could barely get the words out, partly from nerves and partly because I’d hardly spoken to anyone in days. ‘Michael Caine,’ I croaked. ‘Are you in that movie Alfie?’ ‘Yes,’ I said again, still hoarse. ‘You’re gonna be a star, kid,’ he said, ‘and if you want to stay one, remember to talk low, talk slow and don’t say too much.’ ‘Thank you, Mr Wayne,’ I said. He put his hand out and I shook it. ‘Call me Duke,’ he said and putting his hand on my shoulder he guided me round the lobby with him. ‘And never wear suede shoes,’ he said confidentially. This threw me. ‘Why not?’ I asked. ‘Because I was taking a piss the other day and the guy in the next stall recognised me and turned towards me and said, “John Wayne – you’re my favourite actor!” and pissed all over my suede shoes.’ And with that he was gone. I was
to meet the legend many more times in Hollywood and he was always full of advice. I was even with him when he was dying of cancer in 1972. Shakira was in the UCLA Medical Center and when I visited her I found John Wayne in the next room. I don’t remember what we talked about – old times, I guess, people we knew – but I remember his bravery as he faced up to the terminal illness he’d been fighting for so long. ‘It’s got me this time, Mike,’ he said to me. When Shakira was well enough to go home I went in to see him for the last time. ‘I won’t be getting out of here,’ he said as I got up to go and then, seeing I was close to tears, ‘Get the hell out of here and go and have a good time!’ I left before he could see me cry.
When Shirley arrived, my real Hollywood life started. I couldn’t believe my luck in having this powerful, gorgeous woman on my side. I had wondered what she and Ronald Neame, the director, saw in me that made them think I was right for Gambit, and I think it was the sort of nefarious charm I projected with Alfie. Alfie’s a bit of a villain, but he’s charming with it. I’ve still got the poster for Gambit and the blurb says, ‘Alfie’s on the go again’ and that’s just right for my character in Gambit. Whatever it was, once Shirley had decided I was the one, she backed me all the way and I became her protégé – although to this day she claims she made a mistake. She’s a great mickey-taker and whenever I see her now she always says, ‘Are you still doing it? When are you going to give it up? How many movies are you going to make this year?’ It’s all a tease because she knows and I know that my life in Hollywood all began with the incredible welcome party she threw for me. The first person to arrive was Gloria Swanson – who looked just like Gloria Swanson, only smaller. The next person to arrive was Frank Sinatra. I simply couldn’t believe it – Frank Sinatra! Then came Liza Minnelli, and then star after star. Of course they all walked straight past me and went to say hello to Shirley, but I didn’t mind. She was very generous and brought them all over to meet me. Almost everyone had seen Alfie by now and they were very complimentary and after a while I started to feel I really had arrived.
The Elephant to Hollywood Page 9