The Elephant to Hollywood

by Michael Caine

  It’s often difficult to explain the way that the movie world works. Theatrical legends like Olivier, icons like Frank Sinatra, glamorous Hollywood stars like Elizabeth Taylor, mould-breaking stars like Sidney Poitier, these were the people I worked with and the people we hung out with. But even in a world where the rich and famous can get together on a regular and casual basis it is still possible to be taken aback by who you could bump into – and this is what happened to me in Paris, in the autumn of 1974.

  Shakira and I were on a mini-honeymoon, staying at the Hotel Georges Cinq. We’d had a wonderful long weekend and were just sitting up in bed with our first cup of coffee of the morning discussing how we’d spend the day when the phone went. ‘Michael Caine?’ The voice seemed unmistakeable, but even so I couldn’t quite believe it. Was it one of my friends taking the mickey? ‘Yes?’ I said cautiously. ‘It’s John Huston here.’ I nearly dropped the phone. He was very easy to imitate – I always thought if you ever heard God talk he would sound just like John Huston – but this really was John Huston! I shook myself. ‘Michael? Are you still there? I’m in the bar next door – can you spare me a few minutes?’ It took me just eight to get shaved, washed and dressed and round the corner to meet the director above all directors I most admired, the man who had directed my hero Humphrey Bogart in six of his greatest films, the man I regarded as the greatest all-round movie talent of our time.

  The greatest all-round movie talent of our time was sitting at the bar nursing a large vodka when I walked in. When my own drink arrived I downed a large slug of it without flinching and he nodded approvingly. ‘For twenty years,’ he began, ‘I’ve been trying to make a movie based on a short story by Rudyard Kipling called ‘‘The Man Who Would Be King’’. I had it all set up. In fact,’ he paused and looked me in the eye, ‘the two stars I had lined up were sitting right where you are now.’ It would have been cooler to say nothing but I couldn’t help myself. ‘Who were they?’ I asked. ‘Gable and Bogart,’ said John Huston. I drew in my breath. There was a dramatic pause. ‘And then they both went and died on me.’ There was another long pause while he looked down mistily into his glass and I tried to work out what all this meant. At last he looked up again. ‘But I’ve got the backing now and I want you to play Peachy Carnehan.’ I hardly dared to ask, but went ahead anyway. ‘Which part was Bogart going to play?’ I blurted out. ‘Peachy,’ said John. ‘I’ll do it,’ I said. ‘Without reading the script?’ he asked, raising one of those bushy eyebrows. I had to admit it looked a bit eager. I tried to calm down and be sensible. ‘And the Gable character?’ I asked. ‘He’s called Daniel Dravot,’ said John, ‘and he’s Peachy’s best friend.’ I sincerely hoped it would be someone that could be my best friend. This time it was my turn to raise an eyebrow. ‘Sean Connery,’ he said. There was nothing more to be said.

  Peachy and Danny were two sergeants with the British Army in India who go AWOL in an attempt to become kings of the ancient – and fabulously rich – kingdom of Kafiristan. We were shooting the movie on location in Morocco and our ancient and fabulously rich kingdom was the Mamounia, a magnificent old hotel in Marrakesh. It was a wonderful place to base ourselves and although we had to get used to the rather slow pace of service in North Africa in those days, it was a haven for our team. I have very happy memories of the shoot. As well as Sean, I was working with Christopher Plummer to whose Hamlet I had played Horatio in my one and only venture into Shakespeare just before Zulu came out and the camera crew, sound technicians and one of the assistant directors were also old friends. In John Foreman as producer, too, we had a man who shared John Huston’s vision for the movie – which is not always the case – and so the team was a joy to work with from the top down.

  For me, as ever, one of the great pleasures was having Shakira along on the shoot. In fact it turned out that it was just as well she had joined me. On the night before we began, John Huston told us the news that the girl due to play the part of Roxanne, the beautiful Arabian princess, had dropped out at the last minute. He seemed to be casting his eyes around the room rather helplessly looking for inspiration, but I couldn’t help noticing that his gaze kept returning to my beautiful wife. Shakira had noticed it, too. ‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘Absolutely not.’ John shrugged and smiled enigmatically. ‘Of course not, honey,’ he said smoothly.

  I spent most of the night trying to persuade Shakira to have a go, but she was adamant and eventually I gave up. I didn’t blame her – it was not what she had signed up for and I could understand her reluctance. She turned up loyally on set, though, to watch us start shooting and I saw John go over to where she was standing, during a break. After just a moment she started smiling, after a few more minutes she was actually laughing and just before we began shooting again John announced that Shakira had agreed to play the part of Princess Roxanne. I’ve never managed to find out what he said, but I’d like to know!

  Shakira was very nervous about stepping in to the role at such short notice and with so little experience, but John was a brilliant director who inspired confidence in all of us. I was probably more nervous than Shakira was herself and John eventually told me to make myself scarce during her scenes unless I was actually in them, because I was not helping matters. In the end she played her part magnificently – including a very difficult scene in which she had to go into a strange sort of fit or trance, something which would have been hard enough for a very experienced actress let alone a beginner.

  In The Man Who Would Be King, John Huston lived up to every inch of his reputation as a great director. Throughout the making of the movie he addressed Sean and me as ‘Danny’ and ‘Peachy’, even off set, and he was somehow able to convey with the minimum of fuss or explanation exactly what he was looking for in a character. He didn’t tell you much, he just watched you very closely and you knew you were doing it right just by looking at him. He held the view – rare among directors – that good actors know what they are doing and should be left alone to do it if at all possible. I said to him once, ‘You don’t really tell us much, do you?’ And he said, ‘Two things, Michael. The art of good direction is casting. If you cast it right you don’t have to tell the actors what to do. Also,’ he went on, ‘you’re being paid a lot of money to do this, Michael. You should be able to get it right on your own – you don’t need me to tell you what to do!’ He only ever stopped me once mid-take, when I had to tell Christopher Plummer (who was playing Rudyard Kipling), what Danny and I were up to. Kipling warns us that what we were planning was very dangerous and Peachy replies, ‘We are not little men.’ I put the emphasis on the word ‘not’, but John held up his hand. ‘We are not little men,’ he said. I shrugged and did it his way and when we finished the take I saw he was smiling. He was right. We were not little men – under Huston’s direction we became giants.

  Working with Sean was another great pleasure. He is one of the most generous and unselfish actors I have ever worked with and because we trusted each other – and because John trusted both of us – it meant that we could risk some improvisation and experiment, which I think paid off in the finished film. Off the set, Sean and I were not seeing as much of each other as you might have thought. He was a fanatical golfer – he’d had to learn the game for the James Bond movie Goldfinger where there’s a scene in which James Bond and the arch-villain Goldfinger have to play golf with each other – and he was spending most of his spare time on the links. Trying to take an interest in my friend’s all-consuming hobby, I asked him what playing golf on a Moroccan golf course was like and he told me that if you lost your ball in the lake you couldn’t get it back because the crocodiles would have it. I could just see Sean working himself up over losing that ball so I didn’t enquire further . . . I was a bit puzzled as to why he seemed quite so obsessed with the game but after a while I found out why. He had met a beautiful French woman on the course, someone who shared his passion for the game . . . Michelene went on to become his second wife.

  As I’ve mentioned b
efore, Sean Connery is the second reason I don’t play golf. Unlike my other golfing friend Sidney Poitier, Sean is not the kindest, gentlest person in the world and my lack of grasp of the sport would not make him sad as it did Sidney, it would just make him angry. In fact, Sean has a terrible temper and when he tried to teach me golf he was so incensed by my performance, he grabbed my club and broke it in two. I have never played golf since and I never will because I do not want to upset two of my best friends.

  Sean lives full time in Nassau these days, but we stay in touch regularly. The last time we met we had dinner in London and had a great time reminiscing about the old days, the struggles we’d had, meeting each other in the dole queue . . . We had the same old laughs – he’s a very funny guy – and I reminded him about how tough he’d been on the way up. I thought I was quite tough but I was never anywhere near as tough as Sean was. There was one time in the early sixties, when we were in a London club together and it was amateur night and people were standing up to sing. They weren’t very good, but they were only kids trying their best. There was a group of drunks behind us and they started taking the piss out of the kids and Sean spoke to them a couple of times politely, asking, ‘Will you give the kids a chance? They’re trying to make their way in life.’ Finally Sean had had enough and he got up, said, ‘Shut the fuck up!’ and knocked all four of them out. I didn’t even leave the chair. I tell you, you wouldn’t mess with Sean unless you were very silly.

  The relationship that developed between the two Johns, Chris Plummer, Sean and me made for a very special atmosphere on set. This was just as well, because The Man Who Would Be King was a hard picture to make. I had picked up terrible diarrhoea and had to play most of my scenes with half an eye on the location of the portable toilets – not that they offered much of a refuge. I remember rushing over to them once, desperate, and being knocked back by the unbelievable stench and the cloud of flies. The attendant, who was reading the paper, apparently oblivious, had forgotten the disinfectant. I bawled him out for this, but he just shrugged. ‘Come back at lunchtime,’ he suggested. ‘The flies will have moved on to the kitchen by then.’ You couldn’t fault the logic . . .

  Chronic diarrhoea and – for me – a mild but frightening typhoid attack from breathing in filthy dust and dried camel dung were unpleasant enough, but neither Sean nor I were ever in real physical danger. The closest Sean got to it was shooting the last scene of the film, where his character is executed by being forced to stand on a rope bridge above a ravine before the ropes are cut and he plunges to his death. The bridge was built specially, but it seemed to both of us to be swaying in the breeze in a rather too convincing manner. I couldn’t manage more than a few steps, but Sean had to go right out into the middle. ‘It’s leaning to the right,’ he said to John Huston. ‘It wasn’t doing that yesterday.’ ‘Ah – that’s because yesterday you didn’t have to walk on it and today you do,’ said John. ‘You’re looking at it from a different point of view.’ I could see Sean weighing this up, but there was no way he wouldn’t accept the challenge and he turned round and walked straight out to the middle of the bridge. His character has to sing as the ropes are cut and Sean sang at the top of his voice, with not a wobble in it, as the fake ropes were cut – but there was no mistaking his relief when he got back to solid ground.

  The real hero then took his place. Joe Powell was an experienced stuntman and the bottom of the ravine had been filled with foam and mattresses, but it was a genuine heart-in-the-mouth moment when the axes fell on the real ropes and he leapt off the bridge. It was windy and I’ve never forgotten looking down at those mattresses, which seemed to present a very small landing target all those hundreds of feet below. Joe fell so skillfully, twisting and turning on the way down to avoid all the sharp rocks, countering the pull of the wind as he went, and at the very last minute straightening himself out so that he hit the mattresses dead centre. There was a gasp of relief all round and then cheers as he got up uninjured, and John Huston turned to me and said, ‘That’s the darnedest stunt I’ve ever seen.’

  I adored John Huston. He was like a father figure to me, a director who was very gentle with actors because he loved being one himself. Men like John have an aura about them that you can sense from a mile away. You could call it charisma or you could call it star quality, but whatever it is, it commands attention and respect. In a very different and rather less reassuring way, one of the other Hollywood greats whom I got to know well and who had this in spades was, of course, Frank Sinatra. We first met at the Gambit party, but we got to know each other better when I started dating his daughter Nancy, shortly afterwards, and he took us on a memorable weekend trip to hear him sing with Count Basie in Las Vegas.

  Nancy and I flew to Las Vegas with Frank in his private plane and I sat next to him on the flight quite unable to believe that I was there next to my idol. He noticed that I seemed a bit on edge and asked me what was wrong and I told him and he laughed. When he first came to Hollywood, he said, he was equally struck dumb when he found himself sitting next to Ronald Colman. ‘Relax!’ Frank said to me. ‘We’re all the same. We live, love and die.’ And then he told me his motto, which was: ‘Live every day as though it’s your last – because one day it will be.’

  When we got to our hotel, however, I realised that Frank wasn’t quite the easy-going guy he sometimes seemed. The Sands Hotel consisted of a squat square block with a tall tower next to it and I was booked into a suite in the square block. As I was going along the corridor I bumped into Frank. ‘Where’s Nancy’s room?’ I asked, without thinking. He smiled and led me to a window. ‘Up there,’ he said, pointing to the very top of the tower. He then opened the door of the suite next to mine and said, ‘And you’re down here with me.’

  My intentions were entirely honourable as far as Nancy was concerned, in fact, but I was a bit worried because I was aware that Frank might well consider that I already had form . . . When I first arrived in Hollywood, Frank had just charged his friend, the scriptwriter Harry Kurnitz, with keeping an eye on Mia Farrow (Frank and Mia were about to get married). Harry became one of my mates and he, Mia and I all went out together in a gang with Steve Brandt. We were very effective at keeping Mia away from trouble until one evening we went to a film premiere together and the four of us were photographed in a row holding hands and smiling. Innocent stuff – until I opened the papers the next day and saw the same picture, but with Harry and Steve cut off the end and the caption, ‘Mia with new beau Michael Caine’. It was a nasty moment: I was only too aware that it wasn’t a good idea to get on the wrong side of Frank. Luckily Harry was there to put in a good word for me and disaster was avoided.

  Over the years I became good friends with Frank and, later, Shakira and I would enjoy spending time with him and his wife Barbara. I’ve often wondered why Frank liked me, but I think it was because he thought I was funny – and he liked to laugh. He also liked my accent and he used to say to the people around him, ‘Did you hear that? Good morning? Did you hear the way he said that?’ And he always had this thing that I made too many movies. Every time we met he’d say, ‘How many movies you make today?’ and I’d say,’ Only one, Frank, only one.’ I think Frank also found me a bit unusual. He didn’t suffer fools and I think he respected the fact that I didn’t defer to him. He was very generous about my acting, too. He loved Alfie, in particular. It wasn’t surprising, I guess – he was Alfie and then some! I think there was also a connection between us because of our backgrounds: he was a slum kid and I was a slum kid. He liked the fact that I wasn’t a toffee-nosed Englishman. And then there was his affection for London. He told me about the time his career was in the doldrums and how he’d just finished From Here to Eternity and they asked him to go to the Columbia offices in Wardour Street to see the finished movie. ‘And from the moment I saw it,’ he said, ‘I knew that there I was, in London, and I was on my way back. And, Michael, I always remember it was in London.’

  I was in England when Frank died
in 1998. Of course the surprise wasn’t that he’d died, but that he lived so long. He smoked like a chimney, which was unusual for a singer, and he was a heavy drinker. On one of the last occasions we met, it was at a dinner he gave in Palm Springs. I was standing near the bar about to place an order when Frank came over. He put his hand on my elbow. ‘You’re not going to order a Perrier, are you, Michael?’ he said with only the faintest hint of menace. ‘No, Frank,’ I said, hastily changing my mind. ‘Vodka and tonic.’

  Hollywood was different back then. It seems to me that perhaps the stars of today are not the big characters I used to know and work with. I’ve just watched the Academy Awards and all the people nominated seemed to be very small young men who had just been in a vampire film. They were all dark looking and a bit pale – as I guess you would be – and I’m not sure that among them I can identify the new De Niro, Pacino or Hoffman. There’s the physical thing, too: they really do seem to be getting smaller. Sean Connery, Peter O’Toole and I are all over six foot: Tom Cruise is short and so is Jude Law. Bogart was small, but then he made it work for him by getting all the parts George Raft didn’t want to do.