Facade or not, like everyone else, I am in awe of Gone With The Wind – it’s one of my Top Ten all-time-favourite films (you’ll find more on this and the other nine at the back of the book) and Vivien Leigh is one of my all-time-favourite actors. I only met her once, while I was passing through London on my way to Louisiana to start the filming of Hurry Sundown with Otto Preminger in 1966. I was in a restaurant and John Gielgud came over and introduced himself and said that he and his companion – a tiny woman wearing sunglasses – had just been to see Alfie and had loved it. I thanked them and then the tiny woman whipped off her sunglasses and it was Vivien Leigh. I took a deep breath – even fresh from my first experiences in Hollywood I hadn’t quite got used to rubbing shoulders with a screen legend – but I was determined not to miss this chance. I explained I was about to play a southern character in Hurry Sundown with Jane Fonda and I needed some help. ‘What’s the basis of doing a southern accent?’ I asked her. ‘It’s easy,’ she said, (and she was being very nice to an annoying young actor), ‘you say, “Foah Doah Ford” – Four Door Ford – all day long. That’s all you do – “Foah Doah Ford” – Michael, and it will come to you.’ And I did say it over and over again, but I never quite sounded like Scarlett O’Hara . . .
After Selznick left, the studio became RKO pictures and Howard Hughes made some of his movies there, and after that it became Desilu, Lucille Ball’s studio. Now it is an independent studio again. I did Bewitched there myself in 2005, though even I would not claim it was in the same category as Gone with the Wind, Rebecca, Citizen Kane or King Kong . . .
In their early years, Paramount, Warner Brothers, Universal, Disney and the other great movie studios were all run by the moguls who had built them. By the time I arrived in Hollywood, the studio system had moved from the hands-on personal domination of the great studio heads, to the corporate structures they remain today. And a new set of power players had emerged: the actors themselves – and their agents. I always remember Henry Fonda – who had been a huge star at the time – saying to me, ‘You’re so lucky to be a star now, because you’ll make a lot of money – we never did.’ The irony was that I had been devastated when Joe Levine tore up my contract after Zulu: to me it represented the security I had never had. But these contracts – often for ten pictures or for five years – paid no heed to how big a hit a movie was. They paid plenty of heed to failure, of course – if an actor was seen as unsuccessful, there was nothing to prevent the studio from ripping up his or her contract without another thought. In other words, the studios couldn’t lose.
Even as a newcomer making his way in Hollywood for the first time I was well aware that there were plenty of pitfalls. Although there are no real holly woods, the name is actually quite appropriate – a holly, after all, is a dark, impenetrable tree festooned with bright attractive berries, surrounded by vicious thorns. The berries are highly prized as decoration, but to get to them, you have to find a path around the tree, choose the correct gloves and then pick the berries with great care. If you can make it without getting hurt, then it’s Christmas all the way. Sounds a bit like Hollywood to me.
The more I’ve thought about it, the more appropriate the name seems. Woods are often dark, dangerous places, uncomfortable and frightening, inhabited by vermin and stinging insects. On the other hand, they can be beautiful with open spaces covered with wild flowers. You need an experienced guide – and patience – to cut the right path through them and out into the sunlight. And that sounds even more like Hollywood to me.
In the holly woods, the path cutters are called agents – and over the years I have been lucky to have had three of the best. Number one was, of course, Dennis Selinger, who was the first to inform me that there were any woods for an actor to make his way through. He guided me through the English woods and became my closest friend and mentor. He died in 1998, and I miss him still. Although he was based in London, Dennis taught me a lot about the holly woods and helped me on my long hazardous journey towards them.
If it was Shirley Maclaine who first parted the undergrowth to let me through, she left me at the edge of the woods in the capable hands of the greatest path cutter in the world, Sue Mengers. Sue was Hollywood’s most powerful agent when I arrived in town, and I was her least-known client. Fortunately for me, like Dennis, she became a close personal friend and although she’s now retired, we keep in regular touch. Sue is a great getter-together of people and her dinners are legendary for the extraordinary group she’ll gather. One time Shakira and I went and there was Barbra Streisand and Sting and Sheryl Crow and her then boyfriend, a nice guy whose name was Lance Armstrong. ‘What do you do?’ I asked him, being friendly. ‘I’m a cyclist,’ he replied. I hadn’t got a clue. I thought he was going to ask me what I did . . .
It’s always the same thing on the menu for dinner – meatloaf – and Sue always says, ‘I want you all out of here by 10.30.’ But it’s the company that makes the evening: you never know who you’ll meet there and there’s always a bit of rivalry going on – ‘Were you at the Sue Mengers dinner?’ I’d known Sue for a few years before I graduated to her dinners and when I finally went round, she introduced me to her husband. There was something about him I couldn’t quite put my finger on and after a while I plucked up courage and said to him, ‘You know, it’s very funny, but years ago I spent some time in Paris and I had this French friend and he looked just like you.’ And he said, ‘Michael – it is me!’ And it was this guy Jean-Claude, whom I’d met on that trip to Paris my mum had funded all those years before. Since Sue retired, I’ve been very fortunate to have the wonderful Toni Howard cutting my paths for the last fifteen years and I’m very lucky to have her on my side.
As you cut your way through the dark holly woods, the person you need to trim the tops of the trees to let the light in is called a press agent. I had acquired my first UK press agent with The Ipcress File. Theo Cowan was a big, very funny middle-aged man with no visible family life, and I and my friends all loved him dearly. I always felt as if he had a sad romantic secret, an unrequited love, but he was one of the funniest men I’ve ever known. If you asked him what he was doing, he would always say, ‘Contrast.’ And if you asked him how he was, he’d say, ‘The hard ones first, eh?’ To help me see my way through the American holly woods I found Jerry Pam. Not only was he one of the best press agents in Hollywood, he turned out to be an Englishman and to have gone to the same school as I did, Hackney Downs. Jerry has recently retired, but while we worked together he lit my way through the woods and out the other side and kept the sun shining on me for over forty years.
The last hazards you may have to face in the woods are the stinging insects and the vermin that bite. For these you need to acquire an exterminator – or as they are known in the movie business, a lawyer. My lawyer, Barry Tyreman, is one of the nicest, gentlest, kindest men you could meet – unless of course you come under the vermin or insect category, in which case very quickly and almost painlessly, you are dead.
So these are the people who got me to the holly woods, through them and then out of the other side. But of course, that’s just the start; it’s still dangerous out there. Once you are out of the woods, you find yourself in the urban jungle and although the insects may have gone, some of the vermin are still lurking and sometimes they are bigger and more dangerous for being camouflaged. For these you need not only the combined forces of all of the above, but something extra – a business manager. I am lucky enough to have two: Stephen Marks in England and Nicholas Brown in America.
Hollywood is a rich and glamorous place, but without all these people on my side I’d have had a tough time. If you’re poisoned it will be by champagne or caviar. If you are run over it will be by a Rolls Royce. If you are strangled it will be with a string of perfectly matched pearls. But you’ll still be dead.
In spite of the many traps it lays for the unwary and in spite of the fact that it hardly has any movie studios there any longer, Hollywood is still a place that fosters
and cherishes its own myths – and three of the industry’s most significant places of pilgrimage are sited right in the centre of town. The first is a cinema called, for reasons now lost in the mists of the past, Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, now one of the great tourist sites in Hollywood. It was opened on Hollywood Boulevard in 1927 by Sid Grauman (well, that explains the ‘Grauman’ element), who filled it with exotic Chinese art and topped it with a spectacular ninety-foot high jade-green roof (which I suppose would explain the ‘Chinese’ bit). The first shovel of dirt was dug by Norma Talmadge and the first rivet was inserted by Anna May Wong, both great stars of the time. In the forecourt, they installed a special exhibit where stars placed their hand and foot prints into the paving stones – a feature that has ensured the theatre its place in Hollywood history. Grauman’s has displayed the prints of just 200 stars since 1927 and the first stars so honoured were Mary Pickford and her husband, Douglas Fairbanks, who gave their hand and footprints on 30 April 1927. One of the most recent actors honoured is, I’m proud to say, me, on 11 July 2008.
The Hollywood Walk of Fame comes next. Stars each get a commemorative star-shaped plaque in the paving stones of Hollywood running west from Gower Street to La Brea Avenue, and south to north on both sides of Vine Street between Yucca Street and Sunset Boulevard, for three and a half miles. There are over 2000 stars in the pavement. The first recipient was Joanne Woodward on 9 February 1960 and one of the most recent is Roger Moore’s. I haven’t managed to go and receive mine yet, but I’m looking forward to it.
The last – but of course the one that has come to symbolise the film industry the world over – is the Hollywood sign itself that towers so proudly over the movie colony. And before we leave the myth that is Hollywood, here is the final proof that it’s not really like that: the sign has nothing to do with the studios. It was constructed in 1923 by two real estate developers called Woodruff and Shoults to advertise their development HOLLYWOODLAND – which was what the original sign read. Over the years the sign deteriorated. The first ‘O’ broke in half leaving a ‘u’ and then a second ‘O’ fell off altogether leaving a sign which read: ‘HuLLYWODLAND’. In 1932 an actress called Peg Entwhistle committed suicide by jumping off the letter ‘H’ and in the forties the official caretaker, Albert Kothe, drove his car into the ‘H’ while drunk and completely destroyed it. Since no one thought ‘uLLYWODLAND’ was much of an advertisement for one of America’s most iconic exports, the Hollywood chamber of commerce took it over, replaced the missing letters, chopped off ‘LAND’ and the legend was born. I’ve been delighted to call the place home on and off for more than forty years and its magic has never faded for me. I’ve just got much better at navigating through those wild woods.
8
The Fast Lane
All that hard-won knowledge of the reality behind the dazzle of Hollywood was still years off when I returned to London after my first, almost overwhelmingly glamorous trip. I was still half suspecting that all good things have to come to an end and certainly, those three months in Hollywood rushed by so fast that the first morning I woke up back in my flat in London, I thought that it had all been a dream. Had I really met John Wayne and Frank Sinatra and been round to Danny Kaye’s for a Chinese? Had Shirley Maclaine actually chosen me to play opposite her in Gambit? As I paced round my small flat and began to pick up the pieces of my London life, I felt very odd, almost as if I had been on another planet. I didn’t have long to worry about it, though – before I knew it I was leaving London again, this time on my way to Berlin.
After the success of The Ipcress File, the studio were keen to keep going with Harry Palmer and decided to film Funeral in Berlin, Len Deighton’s third Harry Palmer novel. The last time I had occupied the city was during my national service days in 1951 and it had been a very different place. Now, the Wall dividing east and west was an ever-present reminder of the Cold War. The East German soldiers watched us through binoculars the whole time we were filming there. At one point they were obviously not happy with the way things were going and shone a mirror at our camera lenses until we had to give up and find another spot. The director, Guy Hamilton, had recently directed Sean Connery in Goldfinger and had himself been in British Intelligence during the war. I’m not sure in retrospect he was quite the right man to give Harry Palmer the gritty edge he needed to differentiate him from James Bond, but it was a great film to work on – and Berlin was a bit of a revelation, to say the least.
One of the scenes was shot in a transvestite club and it was quite an eye-opener. Waiting for the cameras to be set up, I was chatting to the receptionist, a beautiful girl, when a very burly, butch-looking man with heavy stubble and massive arms walked past. He was dressed as a schoolgirl and got up on stage to do his act, an unforgettable version of Shirley Temple’s ‘On the Good Ship Lollipop’. I leant over to my new friend and whispered confidentially, ‘He doesn’t look very feminine.’ ‘Oh?’ she said, with barely a flicker of interest. ‘That’s my dad. He owns the place.’ Later on I spilled a drink and went into what I thought was an empty dressing room to clean it off. It was already occupied: an enormous transvestite was standing there in frilly knickers, black silk stockings, suspender belt and high-heeled shoes, but no bra. His hairy chest had been shaved to just below his nipples and when he saw me he screamed and covered them with his hands, as a woman might have done. I thought it was very strange, but, mind you, I was a lot younger then.
Just as we were finishing up in Berlin, I heard that Alfie was being entered for the Cannes Film Festival. I’d had such a ball there with John Lennon when I’d gone the previous year for The Ipcress File that I took a few days off filming and hopped on a plane for a bit of southern French sunshine. Unfortunately, Alfie didn’t go down too well with the French, who couldn’t believe that an Englishman could attract one woman, let alone ten of them, and although we won a prize, the director Lewis Gilbert found himself being pelted with tomatoes when he went up on stage. The trip wasn’t entirely wasted, however. Paramount gave a grand lunch for Alfie at the Carlton Hotel and I found myself sitting next to an Austrian guy. Although I was partying hard every night, I made sure I was more or less sober during the day and this turned out to be just as well. ‘My name is Charles Blühdorn,’ he said in a thick accent. ‘I liked your movie and your performance very much.’ I thanked him and as we started eating I asked him what he did. He told me he was an industrialist and then he said, ‘But that is not interesting. You should ask me what I did yesterday.’ ‘And what did you do yesterday?’ I asked dutifully. ‘I bought Paramount Studios!’ he said. ‘So, if you ever have a script you want (he said ‘vant’) to do, let me have a look at it.’ Well – nothing ventured . . . ‘As a matter of fact,’ I said, ‘there is something . . .’ And I told Mr Blühdorn that my friend Troy Kennedy Martin (the creator of Z Cars) had written a script with a great part for me and a London producer called Michael Deeley had it. ‘What (‘vot’) is it called?’ Mr Blühdorn asked. ‘The Italian Job,’ I replied. You never can know what a chance meeting might bring about, can you?
Since I had got into the festival habit, I went more or less straight from Cannes to Acapulco in southern Mexico. Not perhaps the best known of the international festivals, nor the most prestigious, but certainly one of the warmest and that seemed a good enough reason to go there for Alfie. Along with Rita Tushingham, star of A Taste of Honey and a real Sixties icon, and Lynn Redgrave, star of Georgy Girl, we represented the cream of British talent. I had chosen to spend the day before the festival began on the beach and had got second-degree sunburn and a bright red peeling nose – and I had also picked up an appalling attack of the squitters. Rita was tiny, pale and cute, but no sex bomb, and Lynn (pre-Weight Watchers) was just large and pale. The glamorous South American press were not impressed: after a few polite questions, they lost interest and went off in quest of some real movie stars.
Acapulco had its memorable incidents, most notable of which was attending a bullfight with Rita and
Lynn. Witnessing the massacre of the poor bull from our prestige front-row seats was too much for Lynn, who passed out as the blood spurted in front of our eyes. Carrying her out of the arena was almost too much for me and proved to be a more compelling spectacle than the fight itself for the thousands gathered in the bullring. When I finally struggled to the top of the long flight of steps leading to the exit with Lynn’s considerable dead weight in my arms, and tiny Rita trailing behind with all our belongings, a great cry of ‘Ole!’ rang out from the onlookers. What they didn’t know was that the diarrhoea that I thought I had well under control was not equal to the extra strain of my gallant mission. Thank God for dark brown trousers . . .
Lynn Redgrave was one of the funniest actresses I’ve ever seen – I’ve never forgotten her performance in Hay Fever at the Old Vic, which was absolutely hilarious. We didn’t see each other as much as I would have liked after she went to live in New York, and of course I knew she wasn’t well, but I was very sad to hear of her death. Whenever we did meet we always had a laugh about Mexico and those dark brown trousers . . .
And they would probably have been handy for the next stage in my career. The legendary Otto Preminger, director of movies such as Carmen Jones, The Man with the Golden Arm and Anatomy of a Murder, had offered me a part in his new movie, Hurry Sundown. I was so excited I barely bothered to read the script and headed off to the sun of the Deep South with only those few words of advice from Vivien Leigh to help me. Otto was reputed to be a monster with a habit of screaming at actors and technical staff alike, but I decided up front that I was not going to let him scream at me. ‘You need to know something about me,’ I said to him on the first evening we met. ‘I’m very sensitive and I’ll cry if you or anyone else shouts at me while I’m working.’ Preminger raised an eyebrow in surprise. I plunged on. ‘And if anyone does shout at me, I’ll go straight to my dressing room and I won’t work again that day.’ A long silence. Otto seemed puzzled. ‘But I would never shout at Alfie!’ he said eventually – and he never did and in the end we became firm friends. Like many men – and perhaps this was one of the secrets of the film’s success – Otto Preminger saw himself as Alfie and, again like many others, made the mistake of seeing me as Alfie, too.
The Elephant to Hollywood Page 12