The Elephant to Hollywood

by Michael Caine

  Littlefeather’s performance that night certainly caused consternation backstage. I was standing there with everyone else while it was going on, waiting for the finale, which was to be John Wayne leading the entire cast in singing ‘You Oughta Be in Pictures’. By the time we got on, everything was a bit chaotic: no one knew the words and John Wayne couldn’t sing in tune anyway. I was so embarrassed that I started to edge towards the back of the stage. I had been talking to Clint Eastwood, who had just been presenting an award, and he felt the same so he edged back with me. The problem is that we both edged back so far we fell off. It wasn’t far, and neither of us was hurt, but we both became hysterical with laughter and couldn’t finish the song.

  As Lewis Gilbert had predicted, I was nominated for Best Actor in Educating Rita in 1983 – as was Julie for Best Actress – but once again the odds were stacked against me, this time because, of the five nominees in my category, four were British: Tom Courtenay and Albert Finney in The Dresser, Tom Conti in Reuben, Reuben and of course me. The only American in the running was Robert Duvall in Tender Mercies – he was brilliant as a burnt-out country singer, but I suspect he would still have won even if he hadn’t been.

  And I was in for an agonisingly long wait to find out. The Academy Awards ceremony is a tense and very long evening. It starts very early, at around five o’clock in the afternoon so that it makes prime-time TV on the east coast, which means that you have to set off for the venue at about three-thirty because of the appalling traffic. It seems incongruous to have to put on evening dress in the middle of the day and of course you know you’re going to have to wait until nearly midnight for any food, so although it may all look glamorous, the reality is that there’s a great deal of hanging about. And of course as soon as you get inside the theatre you know what the likelihood of winning is: if you are seated on the aisle or near the front, then it’s clear you are in with a chance. If you are on the inside of a row, the chances are you’re not. I had already decided that I wasn’t going to win for Educating Rita, but as soon as I was shown to my seat, halfway back, and looked over to see Robert Duvall sitting bang in the front row, I started practising my gallant loser’s smile. I could see that Shirley Maclaine was in pole position for Terms of Endearment, too, so it wasn’t a wild guess to make that Julie Walters had also been unlucky for Best Actress.

  Tedious though all the hanging about might be, the annual Academy Awards are of course the most important fixtures in the Hollywood calendar and have been since they started, back on 16 May 1929, in the Hotel Roosevelt on Hollywood Boulevard, when they were hosted by Douglas Fairbanks Senior (not Junior) and by William C., rather than Cecil B., (he was his older brother) DeMille. It has been held in many places over the years – each time I was nominated we seemed to land up at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion – until it was found a permanent home at the Kodak Theatre, on Hollywood Boulevard, back where it started. The theatre was opened on 1 November 2001 and the first Oscar ceremony that took place there was in March 2002 – so although Hollywood itself has lost most of its major studios, it still hosts this iconic Hollywood event.

  Perhaps the most iconic event in the Hollywood social calendar and certainly the aspect of the whole Academy Award business I enjoyed the most – was for years Swifty Lazar’s Oscar party. Along with the other two top parties, media mogul Barry Diller’s lunch and the late Hollywood agent Ed Limato’s dinner, Swifty’s party ranked as the place to be and to be seen. Swifty’s Oscar parties were real high-octane affairs held first of all at the Bistro restaurant and then at Wolfgang Puck’s Spago. Swifty’s party may have been the hot ticket, but you could find yourself seated at the back of the restaurant in ‘Siberia’ if he didn’t like you or think you mattered, and he had a very keen sense of priority. He once invited me to dinner and I had to turn him down because I was already having dinner with someone else. When I told him who it was he looked at me, rather disappointed. ‘He’s not a dinner, Michael,’ he said, ‘he’s a lunch!’ So sitting at the front of Spago at Swifty’s Oscar parties were the ‘dinners’ – the ‘lunches’ were at the back . . . There’s always been a close connection between the Oscars and restaurants – the Oscar statuette itself was designed by one of MGM’s greatest art directors, Cedric Gibbons, who apparently did the first drawing of it on a tablecloth at one of Hollywood’s most iconic restaurants in the Twenties, the Brown Derby.

  After Swifty’s death, the mantle passed to Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, who started the very small and very exclusive Oscar party at Morton’s – which very quickly became the massive, but funnily enough still very exclusive Vanity Fair party at Morton’s, now with an enormous marquee. Morton’s restaurant is owned by Peter Morton who opened his first Hard Rock Café in London in 1971 on the same day Peter Langan and I opened Langan’s Brasserie all those years ago – the two Peters and I had opening lunch at Hard Rock and opening dinner at Langan’s.

  I discovered just how exclusive the Vanity Fair party had become when one year Shakira and I were invited and we found ourselves seated right by the kitchen. This would definitely have been classed as ‘Siberia’ and a real social stigma, but so many stars were seated round us that it was very clearly not. In addition, it had two great advantages: we were served first and the food was piping hot! But it wasn’t until I went to the Gents that I realised quite what an exclusive crowd it was. There were three urinals. Left and right were occupied so I went for the middle one. All three of us finished round about the same time and we went to wash our hands and I found myself in the company of Rupert Murdoch and George Lucas. Back at our table, I found myself sitting next to an old friend, Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington. She had a Blackberry with her and every now and then would pick it up either to speak on it or to fiddle with it. As the awards show played on the giant television screens placed round the restaurant, we all started to give our uninhibited opinions, both negative and positive, of each award. During a commercial break I asked Arianna what she was doing on the phone. ‘I’m texting my blog,’ she said. I had never heard of a blog at the time and she had to explain to me that she was texting what was happening to her right now, live on the internet, to all the readers of her very popular Huffington Post. I panicked. ‘You haven’t put out what I’ve just been saying about some of the winners for millions of people to read, have you?’ I couldn’t keep the note of fear out of my voice: I had not been discreet . . . ‘No!’ She laughed. ‘I wouldn’t do that – I’ve just told my readers that I’m here sitting next to you, that’s all.’ Phew!

  Morton’s restaurant isn’t big, so when the dinner and the Oscars show is over, they open up a door and you go into an enormous marquee and wait for the people who went to the actual ceremony to come to join the party. It doesn’t take long before the first ones come in, usually slightly pissed off and demanding a drink. These are the losers and the presenters who don’t have to stay for the Governor’s Ball. The winners do, and eventually turn up much later, brandishing their trophies. I remember bumping into Jack Nicholson, who was smoking. I started to give him the lecture I’d first had from Tony Curtis, about the dangers of smoking, but he interrupted me. ‘Michael,’ he said, with that wolfish Nicholson grin, ‘it has been proved that people who are left-handed die earlier than smokers. I am right-handed, so I am ahead of the game.’

  Even Hollywood and the Oscars have been affected by the credit crunch. Morton’s has now closed down and been turned into another successful restaurant, and the Vanity Fair party is now a much smaller affair, held at the Sunset Towers restaurant on Sunset Boulevard – a trip down memory lane for me as I lived in that building on my first stay in Hollywood while I was making Gambit. There are hosts of other wonderful and much larger parties, of course – Elton John’s annual AIDS Foundation party, for instance, which is now a regular fixture in the Hollywood calendar and combines high glamour with fund-raising for a worthy cause – but for me part of the pleasure has always been about finding the smaller, more intimate occa
sions in the midst of all the glitz.

  Being one of the six thousand industry members of the Academy of Motion Picture, Arts and Sciences who vote for the awards involves being sent the most fantastic Christmas present any film buff could ever want: the ‘screeners’. These are the DVDs of the eligible films made over the previous year, sent to us by their producers, all of whom are hoping to get nominations. The screeners arrive at the beginning of November, just as the English weather is getting so nasty I don’t even want to look out of the window. Thanks to the Academy, we don’t ever have to – my family and I hibernate into the cinema and live on screeners until the worst is over. What better way is there to survive a British winter?

  Although British winters were one of the many reasons Shakira and I had decided to relocate to LA, by 1983 I had found myself becoming increasingly homesick. I had given the performance of my life in Educating Rita and we decided that, much as we loved Hollywood, if I didn’t win the Oscar, there was no professional reason to stay on and we would move back to England. I didn’t win, but in my mind I had won because I was going home, and so my delight at Robert Duvall’s Oscar was genuine. It’s always awkward being a loser – especially when people come up and commiserate with you – and so it was somewhat of a relief not to have to go to the Governor’s Ball on the night of the Awards and instead go straight to Swifty’s party – the very first he ever gave. But I was completely unprepared for what awaited me there: as I came into the restaurant I was greeted by a standing ovation from all the brightest and best in the movie business. As I stood there with tears streaming down my face, Cary Grant came up to me and gave me a hug. ‘You’re a winner here, Michael,’ he whispered. I was overcome – how could I leave people like this? But I knew I had made the right decision – and I knew, too, that we would be back and that the friends we had made would be friends for life.

  After a trip to Brazil for Blame it on Rio, an adaptation of a French comedy in which a middle-aged man (me) is seduced by his best friend’s daughter (unfortunately the charm of the original was lost in translation and it got panned by the critics), we went back to England to look for a house. The summer of 1984 was just gorgeous and the perfect time to house-hunt: the countryside was looking its absolute best. We wanted to find a house on the river, like the Mill House but further away from London in the deep country, and, above all, in a village that had no through road. Property prices were booming in southern England at the time and with this and our list of stipulations it was very difficult to find the right place. We had just been gazumped (a nasty English practice in which someone jumps in with a higher offer after a seller has accepted yours) on a house that met all our criteria and were feeling very grumpy when the estate agent told us an offer on another house in the same village had fallen through that day. As we drove up through the gates marked ‘Rectory Farmhouse’ Shakira leant over to me and whispered, ‘We’ve got to have it!’ ‘We haven’t even bloody seen it,’ I grumbled – but I should have known better. Shakira has an uncanny ability to know things, and in this instance she was absolutely right. The house was gorgeous – about two hundred years old, with gabled windows and beautiful oak beams and it was surrounded by what had once been a magnificent garden with – I could hardly believe our luck – two hundred yards of river frontage. We bought it on the spot – and what’s more, we arranged with the owner to rent it from her for the summer until the purchase went through.

  So from all the glamour and organised luxury of Hollywood we moved in to a house that needed just about everything doing to it, but that we knew from the moment we stepped inside it, would be the family home we were looking for. It proved the perfect project: Shakira got on with plans for the old house, I began designing the new part we wanted to build and the garden, and Natasha made friends with Catherine, the daughter of a farming family just up the road and spent the entire summer on their farm. We indulged ourselves with all the most English summer pastimes we could find – the Derby, Wimbledon, evening dinners at Thameside restaurants – and gave the first of several 4 July parties at Langan’s bringing American and English friends together.

  It was hard to tear myself away from such an idyllic summer, but I had to pay for it all somehow (and the builders were coming in) and so I headed off for ten weeks in Germany to film The Holcroft Covenant. It turned out to be yet another bad film, although it was good fun at the time, and as soon as it was done I headed back to LA to join Shakira and Natasha who had flown out already as Natasha was due back at school. In LA, the autumn is party season and I had always looked forward to it but, this year, Hollywood had a really special surprise for me: a private party at the Beverly Wilshire thrown by my friend the producer Irwin Allen just for Shakira and me – and all the comedians and their wives. This was a roasting party aimed at me fair and square, and I couldn’t have asked for anything better. Just as I was about to get a little bit sentimental and a little bit regretful about leaving Hollywood, I found myself laughing. I’ve always been a bit of a comedian myself and I’ve often thought that if I was young today I might have been a stand-up comic, so an evening in the company of such comic greats as George Burns, Milton Berle, Bob Newhart, Steve Allen and Red Buttons, to name just some of the line-up, was my idea of heaven.

  A funny thing happened on the way to the room. I passed a big poster of Charlie Chaplin with a woman holding a baby. It was an image I had seen a hundred times before but this time Milton Berle stopped me. ‘You see that woman with Charlie?’ he asked. ‘That was my mother.’ I was astonished – I had no idea Milton’s mother had ever been in movies. ‘And the baby?’ Milton went on. He scanned the crowded room ahead of us and pointed to Steve Allen. ‘Steve was the baby.’

  Irwin had arranged for everyone to do a ten-minute set but after that it was more or less a free for all. Everyone told their classics. Some of my favourites are Rodney Dangerfield’s. ‘I’ve given up sex for food: I have a mirror over the dining room table’ and Red Buttons joke, ‘My wife said, “Shall we go upstairs for sex?” And I replied: “It’s either one or the other – you choose.”’ Henny Youngman makes me laugh too: ‘I said to my wife, “Where shall we go on holiday this year?” And she said, “I’d like to go somewhere I’ve never been.” So we spent two weeks in the kitchen . . .’ And what about this from Roseanne Barr? ‘My husband says, “I can’t remember the last time we had sex.” And the wife says, “I can – and that’s why you can’t!” And while we’re at it, here’s a favourite one of my own. An eastern potentate introduces his new wife to a friend. ‘Have you met the current sultana?’ It cracks me up every time . . .

  I look around today and as far as I’m concerned, there are very few people who could come up to the standards of these great comedians. What I like is self-deprecating clever humour not cruelty: a lot of modern stand-up comedy can be quite sadistic. The greatest comedians are always self-deprecating – Tommy Cooper, for instance, who I think was a genius. I love his line: ‘I slept like a log last night – woke up in the fireplace.’ Or Milton Berle’s: ‘First sign of old age is when you go into a cafe and ask for a three minute egg and they want the money up front.’ These days if I want a laugh I’ll watch sit-coms that are character-based, rather than stand-up. I love Friends and Frasier, for instance, and I loved Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie’s sketch shows, too. And I think the way that Hugh Laurie has transformed himself from the sort of silly-arse British toff into House, who is a tough, going-downhill-fast American doctor, is nothing short of brilliant. His American accent is one of the best I’ve ever heard: I tell you, if I ever get another American part, I’m going to copy Hugh Laurie!

  The movies I worked on in 1984 were taken on, more with the new conservatory at Rectory Farmhouse in mind than their critical reception, but in November I went to New York for a film that would come to mean a great deal to me. Woody Allen was a director I had long admired and never worked with so I was very excited to be starting on the filming of Hannah and Her Sisters.

  Woody
comes attached to many movie myths, most of which are untrue. I’d always heard that he never gives actors the script until the day of shooting – and even then he only gives you your part. I got the script of the whole thing weeks before we began with the only proviso being that I didn’t reveal it to anyone, which seemed fair enough. And it was a great script, I could tell that straight away. Woody works on the dialogue for months before a shoot and yet his films always have a very natural atmosphere, almost as if the actors were ad-libbing, which is absolutely not the case. And as an actor himself, Woody brings something very different to the role of director – and he notices everything. Once, he stopped a take and asked me why I had not moved my hand the way I had done in the rehearsal a few minutes before. I had had no idea I had even moved my hand at all, let alone in what way, but he had spotted it, liked it and we repeated the take to get it in.

  It takes a great deal of skill to achieve the levels of naturalism that Woody does. In Hannah and Her Sisters, Mia Farrow plays my wife (she was Woody’s partner at the time) and we shot the film in her apartment. It really was a family affair: some of Mia’s large brood of children played our children in the film, and when she was not required on ‘set’ (her own flat!), Mia could be found in the kitchen doling out food to the others. Being directed by Woody and doing a love scene with Mia in her own bedroom gave an added piquancy to the whole business, too – especially when I made the mistake of looking up at one point only to see Mia’s ex-husband André Previn watching the proceedings . . . As well as having her partner, children and ex-husband around, Mia’s real mother, Maureen O’Sullivan, was playing her screen mother and we were also occasionally visited by a little old man who used to wander in and try to sell us watches, who turned out to be none other than Woody’s dad. It was a bizarre and unforgettable experience!