Of all the movie stars and producers and celebrities passing before my dazed eyes, there was one man in particular who was destined to play an especially important role in my new life. And he was the smallest man in the room: at just over five foot tall, I could easily have missed him. But his size was the only small thing about Irving Lazar. He was one of the greatest agents of all time – his clients included Noël Coward, Gene Kelly, Ernest Hemingway, Cary Grant and my idol, Humphrey Bogart. In fact it was Bogey who gave him his well-known nickname of ‘Swifty’, because he once got him three movie deals in one day. Swifty – no one ever called him ‘Swifty’ to his face, he was always ‘Irving’, except when he answered the phone which he would do with a very clipped ‘Lazar here’ – was the first person to get a million dollars for a script (for My Fair Lady) and the first person to get a million dollars for an artist (Elizabeth Taylor for Cleopatra). And it was he who would persuade me, years later, to write my first autobiography. So I’ve got a lot to thank Swifty – sorry, Irving – for.
Later, when I got to know Hollywood better, I realised that Shirley had indeed pulled in the A list that night. It was a dazzling event and among the whole host of people I met were many who would go on to become some of my closest friends, including Swifty and Sidney Poitier. ‘Who is this party really for?’ I asked Shirley about halfway through. She smiled her wonderful smile and said, ‘You, Michael, only you!’ but only she could have pulled it off in that town: she was so loved.
The night after the party, I was invited to a quiet Chinese dinner in Danny Kaye’s kitchen. It really was a kitchen, and Danny Kaye really did do the cooking himself, with the help of a Chinese chef. I didn’t know it then, but these were famous evenings and I would end up going to many of them, but that night was my first time and it was a memorable one. We went into the kitchen and Shirley introduced me to the other guests: two English naval officers and a bald American who was wearing dark glasses, which was odd inside a house and at night, to say the least. I was completely mystified – and then in walked the Duke of Edinburgh (hands behind his back, just like Gonville Bromhead) and it became obvious that they were his security. And then, as if the guest list didn’t feature enough surprises, in walked Cary Grant. I was overwhelmed and sat almost silent throughout the meal, only speaking when I was spoken to. ‘Old Ipcress’ was how the Duke referred to me then and many times since. I had actually met Cary Grant in Bristol while he was visiting his mother and I was on location, but I was too shy to remind him of this or to talk much to him. Many years later when we moved to Beverly Hills we would become good friends, but on this evening he was still one of my idols and I was very much in awe.
Feeling a little more in command of myself by the end of the evening, I escorted Shirley home. As we approached her house I saw clouds of smoke pouring out from it. I pulled the driver up. ‘Shirley,’ I said, ‘I’m very sorry, but I think your house might be on fire.’ ‘Oh, Michael,’ she said. ‘That’s just the steam from the swimming pool.’ Welcome to Hollywood, I thought.
Dinner in Danny Kaye’s kitchen with Prince Philip and Cary Grant seemed a strange idea of a quiet relaxing night off, but when Shirley invited me to dinner with her family the following evening I felt sure that this really wouldn’t present any surprises. I couldn’t have been more wrong. When I walked into the restaurant, there was Shirley, her mum and dad – and Warren Beatty. Now, Warren and I had knocked about together in London a couple of years earlier. He’d heard what was going on in Swinging London and come over to see what it was like. I knew he was a bit of a jack-the-lad, but I had no idea he was dating Shirley. And of course he wasn’t – he was her brother and this really was a quiet family dinner. He was just as surprised to see me as I was to see him and as I wasn’t sure how much his parents knew about Warren’s London exploits, we didn’t do too much reminiscing about what we’d got up to.
We used to have a competition for a fiver a time. It went like this: we’d see a woman from the back and one of us would say, ‘Ugly or beautiful?’ And the other would choose and then when she turned round you would either win or lose. (Sexist, I know, but it was the Sixties.) One day we were out together and we saw a girl with her back to us buying one of the London newspapers. ‘Ugly or beautiful?’ Warren asked, quick as a flash. ‘Ugly,’ I said, and he said, ‘All right – beautiful.’ And she turned round and it was Candice Bergen, one of the most beautiful women in the world. I felt such a putz I nearly paid double – but then Warren always did have an eye for the ladies.
I last saw Shirley a year ago. We’re still good friends, but as she now lives in New Mexico we don’t see each other as often as we used to. She’s as lovely as ever, although these days frankly more and more eccentric, but I’m happy to say she’s never tried to dangle her New Age crystals over me. I think she realised very early on that I was a lost cause as far as that sort of thing was concerned. Mind you, in the surroundings of Beverly Hills – as I very soon learnt – it passes for normal.
The day after dinner with the Beatty family I took myself off to explore those new surroundings. Back then, Beverly Hills, which now features some of the world’s most expensive and luxurious boutiques, was quite a sleepy place with just a few shops including, bizarrely, a hardware store on Beverly Drive. I once nipped in there for a ball of string and there was Fred Astaire looking for sandpaper and when I was lining up by the till, I found myself behind Danny Kaye who was buying a single light bulb. It was in that store that I had what still ranks as my most terrifying experience in America: I was browsing through the power tool display when I popped my head round the corner and there in the next aisle was Klaus Kinski buying an axe. Never has a shop full of DIY aficionados cleared so quickly . . .
Rodeo Drive contained two places that were destined to play a big part in my future social life. The first was the Luau, a Tahitian bar and restaurant where everybody who was anybody in the young and gorgeous A list set would meet at the beginning of the evening to find out the who, what, why, where and when of the night’s social activities. On the other side of the street was the Daisy, the first discotheque in Beverly Hills. Shirley took me to the Daisy one evening early to have a drink before dinner and it was practically empty, but as we sat there, the door flew open and in burst about forty girls who all looked just like Doris Day. It turned out that this was no accident – they were all competitors in a Doris Day lookalike competition, called ‘Doris for a Day’, and were being shown round the haunts of the stars at a time when it was unlikely there would be any stars in the haunts. Tonight, however, they had struck lucky. When they spotted Shirley, they all started screaming at full pitch, two of the girls fainted and several of them burst into tears. In the pandemonium that followed we made our escape. Welcome to Hollywood!
By the time I started work on Gambit I had begun to get a bit more familiar with the high life – but I still had to pinch myself to convince myself it was all real. On my first day’s filming a limousine picked me up to take me to Universal Studios. When we got to the gate, the guard smiled at me and said, ‘Good morning, Michael. Your parking space is down on the right by your bungalow. It’s got your name on it.’ We drove on and the driver pulled up outside this luxurious bungalow and it did indeed have my name on it. Even more exciting for me was the name on the bungalow next door: Alfred Hitchcock. And when I went into mine, I discovered that my first dressing room in Hollywood was bigger and more comfortable than anywhere I had ever lived until then.
The filming of Gambit went so well – largely thanks to the calm genius of its English director, Ronald Neame – that I was able to focus much of my energy on my new social life. It centred largely on the Luau and the Daisy and I owe much of the good time I had there to Steve Brandt, a new friend and reporter from Photoplay, who seemed to know everybody in town. The very first night I walked into the Daisy I couldn’t quite believe what – or who – I was seeing. Paul Newman was playing pool just by the entrance and once I’d recovered from that and wand
ered inside, I realised that the song they were playing – ‘Mac the Knife’ by Bobby Darin – was being sung along to by the real Bobby Darin, who was at the next table. I stood there gaping until Steve nudged me and introduced me to Mia Farrow who I took on to the floor to dance. And as we were dancing, I looked over my shoulder and there was Sammy Davis Jr dancing next to me. It really was that sort of place.
After a few weeks of this I had just about got over my shock at the casual proximity of major stars when late one night at the Daisy, Steve was called to the phone. He came back to our table to tell Mia (who was with us) and me that we were going round to Rita Hayworth’s place. Now this really would be Hollywood glamour, I thought, but when we got to the house, I was in for a bit of a shock. Rita Hayworth greeted us at the door wearing a grubby white towelling dressing gown and slippers and with a half-empty bottle in her hand. She appeared to be drunk. So was I, by now, and I proceeded to get even drunker as I watched the screen legend drag Mia round the room in a parody of a dance to the theme music to Rita’s greatest ever movie Gilda. Drunk as I was, it was a sobering moment. In fact I found out much later that although everyone always thought Rita was a drunk, she was already suffering from the Alzheimer’s that would eventually kill her.
As the new boy in town and, what’s more (and surprisingly rare in Beverly Hills), a straight single man, I found myself in great demand as party fodder. Luckily I quickly acquired three mentors who helped me navigate my way through the social minefield. I was staying in a succession of hotels and rented houses and one of them would always be on the phone telling me what was going on. And then it was just party after party. As well as the incomparable Swifty Lazar, who always had his finger on the Hollywood pulse, there was Denise Minnelli, the second wife of Vincent Minnelli, Liza’s father, and Minna Wallis, sister of the great movie producer Hal Wallis. Minna may have looked like a sweet and harmless old lady but, as with Miss Marple, you underestimated her at your peril. Minna had been an actors’ agent and her greatest discovery was Clark Gable. In fact she had discovered his talent in more ways than one, she told me confidentially, and once – just once – they had gone to bed together. I never heard the precise details so I can’t share with you the secret of Clark’s success, but I can tell you that Minna never got over it. Minna saw it as her job to marry me off and steered me in very short order towards three amazing women: Natalie Wood, Barbra Streisand and, finally, Nancy Sinatra. Although all three became good friends, I’ve always insisted on sorting out my own love life and in the end Minna had to give up on me.
For a young man who had always dreamed of Hollywood and wondered what it would be like, it turned out to be a continuous stream of life’s best bits with no real life intervening at all. Nothing was real. In fact my days on the set of Gambit were the most normal experiences I was having. Universal had just started what would become its world famous studio tour in which tourists get to see round the movie lot and, back then, they had simply hired an open tramcar to drive everyone about. In those days you didn’t go to a big separate exhibit like you do now; people would actually stand at the back of the sound stage and watch the actors during the shoot. One of the drivers was particularly clever and always managed to work out where we would be, and he would drive by slowly so his busload always got to see the stars – Shirley or Hitchcock in our case. It was a bit disruptive because if they did catch up with you, you had to stand around signing autographs, but I had to admire his initiative and I got friendly with him – at last, I thought, an ordinary guy! Wrong again – that tram driver was Mike Ovitz, who went on to become one of the most powerful agents in the business, the head of CAA. There just doesn’t seem to be any such thing as ordinary in Hollywood – and nothing is quite the way you think it will be . . .
One of the things I’d read about before I arrived was the Hollywood homes of the stars, but in fact no stars live in Hollywood, and it took me a while to work this out. It’s just not like that. There are a few in the Hollywood Hills, but none in Hollywood itself. Some stars live in and around Beverly Hills – Frank Sinatra did and, as far as Frank was concerned, so did everyone else who mattered. Frank had a Twenty Minute Rule. If he was invited to dinner and he was in his car for more than twenty minutes, he would simply demand that his driver turn round and go home. ‘I’m twenty minutes,’ he would call out. ‘Turn around. It’s too far.’
Beverly Hills took me by surprise, too . . . For a start, there are hardly any hills there – and the most expensive area of all is the Beverly Estate, which is in fact a very deep valley. Stars who want bigger estates than those in Beverly Hills – and for less money – live in Beverly Hills Post Office, or BHPO. It’s not actually Beverly Hills, but it is according to your address. I lived in BHPO, but I never managed to find a post office there – in fact I had to go to Beverly Hills proper to find one. Just to complicate things further, most of the stars don’t live in Beverly Hills at all; they live in the surrounding glitzy areas like Bel Air (which has its own security guard force), Holmby Hills (where the Playboy Mansion is), or in luxury apartments on the Wilshire corridor, the bit of Wilshire Boulevard between Beverly Hills and Westwood where my friend Billy Wilder lived. (I went to the toilet when I went round to his apartment for dinner once, and stacked up against the walls in the corridor were what must have been about fifty paintings. I kicked over a couple by accident on the way back from the bathroom and when I bent to pick them up I nearly had a nervous breakdown. They were a Klimt and a Hockney.) And then some people live by the sea at Malibu (where the richest people in Hollywood live closer to each other than any other wealthy people in the world). Confused? I certainly was.
I did, of course, eventually sort it all out and when, after I was married, Shakira and I moved to LA in 1979, we chose BHPO. The house we bought was originally built by Barbara Hutton, the Woolworths heiress, as her son Lance Reventlow’s twenty-first birthday present. (Hmmm – I think all I got for my twenty-first birthday was a bollocking from my dad for being an unemployed, so-called actor . . .) It had been built in the shape of an L, which takes personalised gifts to a new high, but although this made it an awkward fit on the site, we loved it. The swimming pool stretched from the outside, right into the living room, which sounds very Hollywood, but as I didn’t want to be woken in the night by a wet burglar – or a dry one, come to think of it – I had to have it blocked up.
Buying and then selling the house turned out to be a real lesson in Hollywood real estate. It cost $750,000 in 1979, which was a fortune to me at that time, and I thought I was being very clever when I sold it eight years later when we decided to make Britain our permanent base again, for $2,500,000, which was another fortune to me at that time. But, as often happens in areas where real estate changes hands for this sort of money, the original was then torn down, rebuilt and offered back to me a few years ago for $14,000,000. It was an offer I found quite easy to refuse . . . And now I hear it’s been re-rebuilt again, the swimming pool has been moved and it’s being offered at $26,000,000. I’m not surprised – I’ve checked out all of them and it does have the best views in the whole of Los Angeles. (Rupert Murdoch lived in the house behind and we had to keep cutting our eucalyptus trees so it didn’t block his view.)
In 2006 I came back to Los Angeles to make the thriller The Prestige for Christopher Nolan and hired the only really ‘Hollywood’ house we have ever lived in. It was billed as having previously been rented by the Artist Formerly Known as Prince and also Mariah Carey, who had apparently run up massive heating bills because she sat in the heated outdoor swimming pool all night. It was just off Mulholland Drive, near Jack Nicholson’s, and I realised just what circles I was moving in when I turned into the road and saw a sign which read: ‘Your licence plate has just been photographed and stored for future reference’. I’m a bit ambivalent about heavy security: on the one hand I’m pleased that it is there, but on the other I always think that something bad must have happened to make them so keen. At the entrance to th
e drive were two of the biggest real palm trees I have ever seen. As I come from South London, I haven’t had experience of palm trees from birth, but I’ve been around a bit and I’ve seen a few palm trees in my time and these were gigantic. They were just a sign of things to come: the house itself was also absolutely enormous – when we eventually moved in, it was too big to find each other so when the phone went we just had to take messages. It’s true: the super-rich really are different. The sitting room had over a hundred museum-quality tribal masks from all over the world hung on one wall, and a thirty-foot-high ceiling. It was a bit like being in a cathedral dedicated to some pagan religion and I never felt entirely comfortable passing through late at night. The dining room seated thirty-two. When the estate agent showed us round he said in that enthusiastic way they have, ‘You could have some great dinner parties here!’ ‘I’m planning on opening a small bistro,’ I said and I could see that he wasn’t sure if I was joking or not. I wasn’t surprised to find that he came back later to check . . . When we went into the bedroom, I paced it out and it was thirty foot long and fifty foot wide: bigger than the whole of the house I grew up in. There were ‘his and her’ bathrooms, ‘his and her’ dressing rooms and ‘his and her’ outdoor patios – I began to feel that Shakira and I would never see each other again – and bizarrely, given the climate in Los Angeles – ‘his and her’ fireplaces. Perhaps strangest of all, the bedroom featured something I had never seen before: nine small trees. I suddenly remembered that when I’d been in hospital with malaria all those years ago, someone had brought in a bunch of tulips and the nurse had whisked them away because, she insisted, they ‘sucked up all the oxygen in the air.’ ‘If a bunch of tulips can do that,’ I said to Shakira, ‘what on earth will nine trees do to us? We’ll suffocate during the night!’ She gave me a long look and went over to examine the trees more closely. ‘They’re plastic, Michael,’ she said kindly.
The Elephant to Hollywood Page 10