The Elephant to Hollywood

by Michael Caine

Of course it’s hard not to look back at the filming of Hannah and Her Sisters and look for the signs of the bitter split between Woody and Mia that was to come. It seems extraordinary now to think that two such vastly different people ever got together in the first place, but at the time we all accepted the set-up and, eccentric though it was, it seemed to work. Perhaps there was one indication that not all was well. At one point in the film I have a row with Mia and say the line (scripted, remember, by Woody), ‘I hate the country and I don’t particularly like kids.’ At the first rehearsal Mia pulled a face, which puzzled me at the time – I think I now know why.

  My nomination for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for Hannah and Her Sisters came in 1986. It was a surprise on two counts: first, I’d never been nominated in this category before, and second, Woody Allen was very publicly anti-Oscar. In fact he was so opposed to the whole idea of the Awards that he was always publicised playing his clarinet with his group in New York during the broadcast of the show, even when he got nominated himself. The film had also been released in February the previous year during the whole Oscar run-up, so I had assumed it had been long forgotten.

  In fact, I was so sure I would not be nominated, I hadn’t even bothered to put the date of the Oscars in my diary and the irony was that I had signed to do a small ten-day part in the Caribbean in Jaws 4 (not a film that was ever likely to feature on the Academy nomination list, at least in any of the acting categories), which coincided with the show. By the time the nomination came through it was too late to do anything about it and so when, finally, I won an Oscar, I wasn’t even there to collect it and it was Shakira and Natasha who rang me from one of Swifty’s Oscar parties to give me the good news. I was reminded of the time during the filming of Too Late the Hero when my co-star Cliff Robertson heard he’d won an Oscar as Best Actor for a film called Charlie. As we were stuck in the Philippine jungle he couldn’t go and pick it up, but he was determined not to lose a PR opportunity and got a local woodcarver to make him an exact replica of the statuette so he could be filmed carrying it when we eventually got home. It seemed like a good plan and indeed there was a huge press pack waiting for us when we got off the plane, Cliff clutching his replica Oscar, but there was a surprise in store: Gregory Peck, the President of the Academy, had turned up to make a surprise presentation of the real Oscar. As the crowds parted and Greg came forward, Cliff reacted with lightning speed and chucked his fake Oscar over his shoulder so he could reach out and accept the real one. It hit me square on the forehead. So there is Cliff, triumphant with Oscar aloft, and me behind, clutching my head and pouring blood . . . In the end, I learnt my lesson – and the next two times I was nominated I made sure I was there in person (though I’ve never made the mistake of hosting the ceremony again!).

  After Hannah, I took on a number of movies, again with Rectory Farm in mind, and we began to prepare for our imminent relocation back to England. Renovations on the house were going well but slowly and it wasn’t until the summer of 1987 that we made the final move, after eight and a half years in Hollywood. It was good to be home and to be able to spend more time with my mother. She was eighty-seven now, and although she was still pretty lively, she didn’t always cotton on to what was going on. We invited her to Natasha’s fourteenth birthday party to show her the new house. We still didn’t have any curtains in the living room and she told me that she thought the place looked bloody awful. ‘You’d think,’ she said, gesturing round at all the guests, ‘that if they’re doing this sort of business they’d be able to afford curtains, wouldn’t you?’ I realised she thought our house was a pub. ‘And have you run short of money?’ she demanded. ‘No, Ma,’ I said. ‘Why do you think that?’ ‘Well, look at Shakira!’ Ma said. Shakira was pouring out drinks and refilling glasses. ‘Why’s she working as a barmaid?’ I gave up. ‘It’s only a part-time job, Ma,’ I said. It was a sad moment but I was just glad to be back in the UK so that we could make the most of the time we had left.

  There are no part-time jobs in the movie business, and at this point in the late Eighties, the British film industry was on its knees. As I didn’t want to leave Shakira and Natasha behind to do a film abroad, I went back to television for the first time in twenty-five years. It was quite a revelation: when I last worked for the BBC I got paid in guineas – and very few of them at that – this time, with an American TV company attached to the deal, the fee was as much as I’d have got from a film. It was a drama called Jack the Ripper based on a new theory of the identity of the killer and we shot it in London, which suited me perfectly – although the TV shooting schedule was a bit of a surprise after the slower pace of movies. Still, I kept up, and we were rewarded by the most incredible ratings for the show – I think only the wedding of Charles and Diana had ever achieved a higher rating.

  I was feeling pretty pleased with myself about this, but I was even more excited when the next project came along. Dirty Rotten Scoundrels appealed from the very start. My co-star was to be Steve Martin, and the director was Frank Oz, who is only slightly better known as Miss Piggy from the Muppets. I asked them both down to Rectory Farm for a lunch party we were having, to discuss the film, and was surprised to find that Steve was actually very shy. There were about thirty of us gathered there that day, but because the sitting room was huge, it was far from crowded. ‘I’d love to have a place like this,’ Steve said rather wistfully, looking round. ‘Well you could!’ I said, surprised by his comment: I knew how successful Steve was. ‘Yes . . .’ he said, ‘but I wouldn’t have the friends to fill it.’ It’s strange how often actors who are able to come across as the most gregarious of people on screen can actually be quite inhibited in real life.

  Inhibition is not one of my problems and eventually, at the end of the lunch, I broached the subject of location with Frank. The story for Scoundrels is set – according to the script – in the south of France in summer, but I was all too aware of the costs that would be involved in taking a crew there at the height of the season. ‘So where are we actually shooting, then, Frank?’ I asked, prepared for some decaying Eastern European resort. ‘It’s set in the south of France,’ Frank replied, ‘so we shoot in the south of France.’ Those words were music to my ears.

  The south of France is one of my favourite places in the world. I first went there when Peter Ustinov lent my friend Terence Stamp his yacht and house in the hills behind Cannes as a present for starring in Peter’s movie Billy Budd and Terry took me along for the ride. I had never had a holiday in a sunny place before – or anywhere else, come to think of it – and although I had been in a hot place before – Korea – on that trip, the sunbathing was compulsory and it wasn’t exactly much of a holiday. In spite of my experiences there, I hadn’t learnt the lesson that every fair-skinned person should know by heart and I rushed out on to the beach at Cannes on the first day and fell asleep. By the time I woke up, I was lobster-red and practically a burns victim. I stayed in bed over the next few days and was tended to by the housekeeper at the villa who rubbed me all over with tomatoes. It’s not as sexy as it sounds: my skin was so hot it smelt as if she was frying them. I decided I could get fried tomatoes in London and as soon as I could move without wincing I headed straight back home. I have rarely sunbathed since and every time I see one of those ageing fanatic sunbathers with skin like a crocodile handbag I’m glad I had the early warning!

  Although I went back to Cannes several times for the film festival, it was always so crowded that it was impossible to leave the hotel without being pursued and it wasn’t until I was invited by Peter Sellers, who was filming There’s a Girl in my Soup with Goldie Hawn there, that I got to know the south of France better. Peter had rented a yacht and he and his agent and my agent Dennis Selinger and I spent an idyllic weekend sailing from port to port. We eventually wound up in St Tropez, the location for Peter’s movie honeymoon. I remember being on the set watching Peter and Goldie sitting up in the nuptial bed when a waiter brings in a bottle of champagne from
the management and, in a comedy French accent, wishes them love and ‘a penis’. Peter cracked up every time the actor said this and it took several takes to get it right.

  While Peter and Goldie were working, Dennis and I explored St Tropez. It was right in the middle of the boom that Brigitte Bardot had created after she and Roger Vadim made the movie And God Created Woman there in the late Fifties. The beaches were incredible, the restaurants were unforgettable and the whole place was full of the most beautiful people I had ever seen. It was as if there was a customs post keeping all the uglies at bay. I’m happy to say that Dennis, Peter and I had arrived by sea where the checks must have been more lax, because I fell in love with the place and have spent the rest of my life looking for excuses to head back there.

  I couldn’t have had a better excuse than Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. We rented a villa close to Roger and Luisa Moore’s and our friends, Leslie and Evie Bricusse, and as it was the school holidays Natasha came out to join us with two friends. The movie was nothing but a pleasure from start to finish – although I had a moment early on when I suddenly remembered why the script had seemed familiar. I had seen it years before when it was released under the title Bedtime Story starring Marlon Brando and David Niven, and it had been a complete flop. ‘Why,’ I asked Frank and Steve, ‘are we remaking a movie that flopped first time round?’ ‘Because,’ Frank said very reasonably, ‘there would be no point re-making a film that had been a success.’ I tried to think of a good counter-argument, but this was Hollywood logic and I gave up.

  Hollywood logic or not, Frank was a fantastic director – and comedy takes some real directing. In the film, Steve and I play conmen who make their living off middle-aged ladies; any time it looked like one of our marks was becoming a bit too serious about me, Steve would appear disguised as one of a series of eccentric relatives to put them off. He was so off the wall in his characterisation that it was actually quite difficult to play opposite him. In the end, though, the solution was simple: I played my part completely straight and let the laughs take care of themselves.

  Dirty Rotten Scoundrels is one of my favourite films – for me it’s the funniest movie I ever made. I think its appeal lies in the fact that my character and Steve Martin’s are rogues who only ever hurt the pompous and the rich – and they always get away with it. It looks fabulous, too – it’s stylish, it’s wicked – and people love it. Whenever it comes on the television, I always stop and watch a bit of it and it still makes me laugh. There’s one scene in particular I just can’t resist, where I’m pretending to be an eminent psychiatrist, Dr Emil Schaffhausen, who is lashing the legs of Steve Martin, who’s posing as a psychosomatically crippled soldier, to prove they don’t work. I had to intersperse each of my words with a lash of the whip: ‘My name is –’ lash, ‘Dr –’ lash, ‘Emil –’ lash, ‘Schaffhausen,’ lash. On the second, and final, take I added an ad lib. After ‘Schaffhausen –’ lash, I added, ‘the Third –’ and a final lash, to give him one more. I just wanted to have the last lash . . .

  13

  Family Secrets

  After that glorious summer in the south of France, I plunged straight back into work and by the end of 1988 I was pretty exhausted. We’d bought an apartment in Chelsea Harbour, west London, and decided to take things a little bit easier for a while. If it was meant to be a sabbatical, it didn’t last long. After a wonderful trip to Los Angeles during which Swifty Lazar first suggested that I might write my autobiography (I said no, on the grounds that I couldn’t remember anything – but it planted a seed, which was something Swifty was very good at!), I did a small-budget thriller, Shock to the System, set in New York, and then went back to England to follow up the success of the Jack the Ripper mini-series with Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which was five weeks on location in London, so easy to manage from that point of view, but a lot of my time was spent in make-up being turned into the hideous Mr Hyde. Never again! I have no idea how John Hurt managed to get through The Elephant Man . . .

  The end of the year looked like running its normal course and we were just planning our usual over-the-top Christmas, when we got the phone call I had, of course, been half expecting for some time. On 12 December 1989, my brother Stanley’s birthday, my mother died. Ma had been living in a nursing home for many years, where she was looked after beautifully. As was typical of many women of her generation and background, she viewed all doctors with great suspicion and the only way her thoughtful nurse, Gemma, managed to get her to see one at all was by finding an Indian doctor and telling her he was Shakira’s brother! If it was family, you see, that was all right . . . Ma wouldn’t have wanted to hear the message that a doctor would have given her, either. For the last twenty years of her life she had been smoking over eighty cigarettes and drinking a bottle of white wine a day, on top of her favourite English fry-up, not to mention the cups of tea with full fat milk and spoonfuls of white sugar. Still, at the age of eighty-nine there was no point in arguing.

  Gemma called on 11 December to say that Ma had a bad cold and I rushed over to see her, knowing how frail she was and how the slightest setback can escalate into something more serious with vulnerable old people. We had a great old time and she was very perky and I left feeling relieved that she seemed to be fine, but the next morning Gemma called to say that she had died in her sleep. Apparently she had eaten well, drunk well, as usual, smoked her fags and gone to bed very happy – and they hadn’t been able to wake her the next morning.

  When I went in to see her, she looked so peaceful and almost as if she was smiling. I held it together as I kissed her for the last time, but first Gemma – who had been very fond of my mother – burst into tears and then I did, too. I thought back over fifty years to the day Dad went off to war, when she had said to Stanley and me – he was only three and a half and I was six – ‘You’ve got to take care of me now your father’s gone.’ She had made little men out of us then, but I couldn’t hold back the tears now. Gemma and I held on to each other and sobbed our hearts out before I managed to get a grip and we went outside to see the rest of the staff, who were waiting with the usual British solution in times of grief – a cup of tea.

  Ma’s funeral took place on a cold, wet London winter’s day. Stanley was ill with pneumonia and couldn’t come, so Shakira and I were the only family members there. I was very conscious – I think anyone losing a parent is, no matter at what age it happens – of her passing as the end of an era, of the loss of the last link to the previous generation, a chapter closed. Or so I thought . . .

  But the past wasn’t quite ready to let me go. In the spring of 1991 I was filming Noises Off in Los Angeles. 1990 had been a grim year in the aftermath of the stock market crash in 1989 and the hurricane that had swept across Britain. 1991 had started even more grimly with the first Gulf War. Although we couldn’t escape the news, it was a relief to escape the cold weather in Britain and we were delighted to find ourselves back in the Californian sunshine. We were even more thrilled to hear that Natasha had been given a place at Manchester University – it felt as if a new chapter was opening for the whole family.

  One Friday afternoon, just as I’d got in from a day’s filming, the phone rang. I picked it up without a thought – and in an instant the story I thought I knew about my family changed forever. The guy on the other end was a reporter from the English tabloid newspaper The People and he was calling to say that they had discovered the existence of my half-brother.

  My mother’s first child, a son called David, was born illegitimate and with epilepsy in a Salvation Army hospital in 1924. In those days there was little treatment available for epilepsy and as a result of the fits he had as a child, during which he would bang his head repeatedly on the stone floors of the workhouse, he became brain-damaged and would remain in an institution for the rest of his life.

  It was a terrible shock to me and to Stanley. I had had absolutely no idea of David’s existence – and neither had my father or any of our large extended family. My mothe
r had kept him a secret for sixty-seven years, and yet she had visited him every Monday, except when we were in Norfolk during the war. Shock soon turned to admiration when I found out what she had done and how loyal she had been to him. And I started to think back to our childhood and to wonder how she had managed to keep this secret for so long.

  I was never aware of her absence on Mondays, as a little boy – when we were babies she probably took us with her, but I have no memories of that. And then when I was six and Stanley was three and a half, we were evacuated. When we got back to London – and David had been moved by then and I think she had to trace him all over again – we didn’t think anything of the trips she took on a Monday to see Aunt Lil in Dagenham. Dagenham was a long way from the Elephant so she’d be gone all day, but we were at school and there was no reason to query it at all. I tell you, she was an amazing woman. Although I’ll always wonder what went through her mind when I told her that I had chosen ‘Michael Caine’ as my stage name. The asylum where David spent his first fifty years was called Cane Hill.

  What is extraordinary is that it took so long for the secret to emerge. Apparently my mother always carried a Bible in her handbag and would get any new members of staff, first in the asylum and then in the nursing home, to swear to keep the fact that David was my half-brother a secret – and no one ever spilt the beans. But as I’ve thought more and more about it over the years, some little things begin to make sense – little oddities that had never been enough to arouse any suspicions on their own, but that all came together with this incredible revelation. Whenever we were in the UK, Ma used to visit Shakira and me in the country every Sunday and she would be driven back to London the next day. One day, the driver mentioned that she always insisted on getting out at the bus stop on Streatham High Road, rather than being taken back to her house. The penny never dropped, of course, but she must have been going straight off to the asylum to visit David. And then there was Ma’s incredible consumption of sweets, biscuits and chocolates. She always used to leave us on Monday morning piled up with packets and boxes and yet when I’d go there and see her on a Wednesday for a cup of tea and ask for a biscuit, she’d always insist that she’d eaten them all. And I’d think, bloody hell, she gets through all these chocolates and biscuits very quickly – but of course she was saving them to take to David.