by Ray Connolly
Still more boyish than most men approaching middle age, the freckles now hide a bit among the more deeply-etched lines in his face, while on screen he looks positively beefy.
At thirty-eight he’s going through an upturn in his career. He didn’t make it until he was thirty (’I thought I was too late’) but after a couple of smashing pictures like Alfie and The Ipcress File his career became a little more chequered.
He admits: ‘I had some real dogs, but I’m doing well now. I got good reviews in America for The Last Valley (yet to be shown here) and think Get Carter will do well.’
By now I imagine it unlikely that anyone living in the greater London area can be unaware that Caine is Carter and that Carter is a villain — a real bastard in fact. The message hollers at you from the front of practically every London bus, black double-breasted raincoat, shot-gun and air of menace. It’s a film of unremitting violence and chilling deadpan dialogue.
‘I modelled that part on an actual hard case,’ he says. ‘I watched everything he did and once saw him put someone in hospital for eighteen months. These guys are very polite, but they act right out of the blue. They’re not conversationalists about violence, they’re professionals. The message is that violence does exist. Most people think it only happens in America, but there’s a creeping brutality everywhere. It’s like ignoring Nazis because they’re just a gang of ruffians in brown shirts.
‘We accept violence here because the way we see it on TV no one really gets hurt. So when we read in the papers about someone getting beaten up in the street we think nothing has happened. In Get Carter we try to show what really does happen, and how innocent people like children can be involved. We’re saying it happens so don’t think it can’t touch you. He’s a real repellent character. Those guys are like that. They’re as likely to kick their old mum down the stairs as be nice to her.’
It has been suggested that the character of Carter is a ‘there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-goes-Michael Caine’. But that’s a bit far fetched.
‘My point is that there but for the grace of me goes me. If you are born into that working-class milieu as I was and as virtually every violent criminal is, then you’re sure to want something different. And if the world treats you violently enough then you will act in a violent way to alter your circumstances. Or you can go another way. I became an actor which was considered a sissy thing, but it does allow you to act out your fantasies.’
And as Marlon Brando pointed out, you can pull birds easier, I say, and he laughs. Yes, there’s a lot of truth in that. It’s wonderful when you grew up not being able to pull birds. He used to have very bad luck indeed, he says. It was always difficult. Probably it still is if you’re seventeen and haven’t yet got the chat.
‘You know blokes come over here and talk about the permissive society, but I think it’s all a bit of a myth. They’re just balling the same couple of hundred girls that everybody else has been having. I’m sure the whole thing is kept going by a couple of hundred ravers.’
His lifestyle (with his investments in antiques and pictures) seems to vary with the whims of the moment. Tonight dinner with Charlton Heston, followed by a party given by a girl in Oh, Calcutta! Tomorrow — well there’s usually something, although he doesn’t always go.
This weekend he is off to New York for the Ali-Frazier fight together with a group of friends and the Burtons. Filming should be finished by Sunday, for which he’ll be thankful, although he’s enjoyed working with both Elizabeth Taylor and Susannah York.
‘I’ve been very lucky with the people I’ve worked with,’ he says. ‘Very few have been a pain in the neck. When we began this film both Elizabeth and I were nervous of each other and it was difficult because we had to go right into fights and love scenes rolling around the bed and we never even knew each other.
‘But after the first couple of days we admitted that we were nervous and I gave her a bit of a hug — you know, not being familiar, but just to make human contact and we were fine after that.’
He is rich, of course, but mention the postal strike and his background shows through like an X-ray. Tom Jackson can have few more fervent supporters.
‘If you’re gonna spend the rest of your life tramping round the streets sticking bits of paper through holes in pieces of wood then I reckon you need some decent recompense. These men lead hard lives, and if by going on strike they’re being pushed to lead even harder lives then I reckon there must be something seriously wrong. They’re not fooling, or goofing off to watch football. Their wives and kids are going without.’
What now for him? The stage? No he’d never go back. He spent ten years there learning his business and it was a very hard mistress that did not return his love. Cinema is now wife, mother, mistress and daughter to him.
‘I think some day I’d rather like to be a writer-producer. I’ve written several screenplays, in fact I write a lot, but I never show them to anyone. When I read them again after about six weeks I realise they’re a lot of crap and burn them. But one day I won’t.’
A lovely, leggy girl crosses the road in front of us looking smashing. We all smile: ‘I love to see them walking about like that — all fresh, you know,’ he says.
POSTSCRIPT Somehow the idea of sitting in the back of a Rolls, cruising back to town looking at the pretty, leggy girls in Knights-bridge has always seemed to me one of the most lasting images of London when it was just about to stop swinging. Of all the British actors who moved into films in the sixties, only Michael Caine has become real ‘box office’ and survived totally in that medium. So far as I know he hasn’t yet had any of his screenplays filmed. Perhaps he hasn’t submitted them.
April 1971
David Puttnam
David Putnam remembers exactly the first moment he saw Patsy. He was fifteen and coming out of school geography room and she was queuing up with her class to go in. She was twelve and felt very conspicuous because she was in the wrong colour uniform, and her shirt had shrunk at the cleaners. It was one of the first days for her at her new school.
He fancied her immediately, and she remembers that he said ‘hello’, but she couldn’t believe he was looking at her and assumed he must be saying hello to Sonia who was behind her on the stairs. Eventually, however, he let it be known through the channels of co-educational grammar school life that he was interested, and he began taking her home.
When he was twenty they got married and were penniless, and now he’s thirty and successful in just about all the many varied fields of his life, and he and Patsy have two children, Debbie and Sacha, and a good life. That’s one side of David Puttnam’s life, but he reckons it’s the most important. Why has he been so successful, you ask him, and he thinks and says: ‘Well, I’m thirty — which is an incredibly good age to be at the present moment. It’s perfect timing. And then I’ve always been married, so I’ve never had to go out chasing after birds.
‘When you’re single that’s all you do — I hear the blokes in the office on the phone fixing up for tonight and all that. Their lives revolve around it. And then since I’ve been married I’ve never had to look after myself. Also I’ve always liked what I’ve been doing.’
David Puttnam is what he and I might jokingly refer to as a ‘bright lad’. He owns a successful photographers’ agency, is the producer of the film Melody, is already working on his next film The Pied Piper, but now, and best of all as far as he is concerned, he and a friend have moved into the audio-visual cassette market, which means that he’ll be making educational cassettes to slot into the back of your television to be ready when the cassette explosion (his description) happens in about five years.
When he first started talking about audio-visual cassettes a couple of years ago everyone thought he was a crank. Now he has a great deal of backing from Rothschild’s and is working with Sotheby’s on an hour-long programme devoted to the development of art.
He was born in Southgate (son of a Fleet Street photographer) and his first job was as a
dogsbody in an advertising agency.
‘I remember,’ he says, ‘that I was very energetic even then, always making out little charts for myself showing how fast I could get to Fleet Street and back.’
But with only three O-levels he reckoned he needed further education so he took evening classes until he was twenty in business administration, psychology, economics, company law, copy-writing and printing.
Eventually someone must have noticed this bubbling lad dashing about the place because he was made an assistant account executive, and with a couple of fortuitous changes of jobs his salary started to rise from £8 a week to £16, to £1,000 a year, and within three years to £4500.
He was clearly no ordinary twenty-three-year-old advertising whizz kid, because with an assured future and all that that might entail, and a marvellous house just behind Sloane Square, he suddenly decided to pack it all in and open his own photographic agency.
‘I just knew I’d done all I wanted to do in advertising,’ he says.
At first the agency was run from his home and in the first six months he nearly went bankrupt a dozen times, but eventually he was handling a large proportion of the top photographers in Europe (Richard Avedon, David Bailey, David Montgomery, Clive Arrowsmith).
‘But then I was out of it again within two and a half years,’ he says. ‘I still own 60 per cent of the company, David Puttnam Associates, but I only ever saw it as a means to an end. To be honest, I don’t have much to do with the day-to-day running of it at all now.’
Then about two and a half years ago he had lunch with a friend called Sandy Lieberson, who was busy producing Performance at the time, and they both found that they wanted to start an audiovisual cassette company.
As soon as he begins to talk about cassettes he becomes highly animated, gabbling away like mad with wild enthusiasm. It is, he says, his career. Advertising wasn’t, nor photography nor film producing, but he just knows that he’ll be making cassettes until he’s eighty.
‘Basically,’ he explains, ‘it works in just the same way as the ordinary sound cassette, but instead of slotting it into a tape recorder, you slot it into the back of a television. So far we’ve finished pilot films on the political history of the twentieth century in collaboration with A. J. P. Taylor, we’re working on the art series with Colin Clark who is Sir Kenneth Clark’s son, there’s another on the development of film which we’re doing with the British Film Institute and we’re hoping to do an audio-visual Michelin Guide.’
His enthusiasm for cassettes knows no bounds. Magazines, he’s certain, are doomed, and he got into a lot of hot water last year when asked to give three lectures at the London School of Printing. He calmly told all the students that they were being trained into redundancy. What about newspapers, I ask with some trepidation? ‘They’ll probably survive for a bit longer, but eventually your evening paper will be large screens on the commuter trains home.’
Although they have received some financial backing from Rothschild’s (’they were the only merchant bankers I’d ever heard of so in my naivete I wrote to them first’) he’s also invested just about everything he has in the venture.
Patsy thinks he’s a gambler in that he plays everything so close to the edge. But then if they fall over, she says, they can always start again.
His other career as a film producer is equally hectic. He’d always wanted to get into films and about eighteen months ago decided to have a go when everyone was writing articles in the newspapers saying that there weren’t films for family audiences any more. The result was Melody, which after rave reviews in New York (the New York Times and Newsweek were both beside themselves with appreciation) got a pretty general clobbering over here when it opened last week. Two reviews hurt him particularly. He didn’t mind those which he saw as an intelligent criticism, but a couple were unthinking reviews, he reckoned.
‘I know it wasn’t a Kes or an If,’ he says, ‘and we didn’t want to make Coronation-Street-on-wheels. But we will have succeeded if some of the people who watch Coronation Street go and see that film. It may not have been as good as they said it was in New York, but I don’t think it was as bad as they said it was here.’
So far his involvement in the film industry has proved a chastening experience. But he’s learning fast, and now the whole family is living the Pied Piper, studying medieval history, playing Donovan’s theme song for it and worrying about such small matters as how one gets a rat to co-operate with you.
‘We’ve had quite a few people in to see us, explaining different theories about how to handle rats,’ he explains. ‘And one of them told us that if every member of the cast kept a rat in his pocket all day then they’d get friendly and be easier to work with.
‘Then one day a ratty man came up from Dorset and we told him the theory and he just looked at us and said — “Well, I should point out that a rat getting to know you is not the same thing as a rat getting to like you” Isn’t that great? I know just what he means. It happens to me every day. I’ve had it framed and put up in my office.’
For years he worried about not having a degree, convinced that eventually the floodgates of university graduates would catch up with him and he’d get passed by. But it never happened. Instead he’s gone from strength to strength, always competing, and seemingly always winning. Everyone I know appears to know David Puttnam, and no one has a cross word for him.
Patsy (whom he calls Billie because his father called his mother Billie) is the perfect complement to him — pretty, yet equally level headed.
‘If he does make a lot of money (and he thinks he can hardly fail) I think he’ll be very glad that he’s done it out of his educational cassette things, rather than say making a film like Love Story, when he might have felt a bit ashamed to take it,’ she explains.
As it is, they’ve both come a long way since the night six years ago when he arrived home quite green with fear having just had an unexpected tea with Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon.
‘I was totally unequipped to deal with the situation,’ he says. ‘I mean I was brought up a real pleb. I never expected to meet Princess Margaret. And my mother never expected me to meet Princess Margaret.’
POSTSCRIPT This was one of the pieces which, in one way or another, was to change my career. I had known David Puttnam vaguely for about a year before Melody was released, but it was only when I offered him the chance to answer the critics back that we spent any time together. We got on well immediately, and a year later we got together to plan That’ll Be The Day, which was followed by Stardust, which was followed by Trick or Treat? … which is the subject of the last chapter of this book. Looking back on this article now I remember being amazed when David outlined for me the future of the audio-visual cassette market as he saw it. Unfortunately for him he was about ten years ahead of his time in predicting the video boom, but since he now has an Oscar for Chariots of Fire and a CBE for services to the British film industry, I suspect he has re-evaluated the importance of being a good producer.
June 1971
Joe Frazier
Right on 6.30 yesterday evening, just three weeks after negotiations for our meeting were begun and ten days after I first tried to interview him, Joe Frazier, naked from the waist up, came lumbering out of his hotel bathroom, yawned and stretched so wide that I momentarily wondered whether the room was big enough for both of us, and hurled himself down across his bed like a jumbo jet doing a belly flop landing. King Kong himself couldn’t have made a more impressive entrance.
We all know that Joe Frazier, the heavyweight boxing champion of the world, is a big man, but it is not until you actually find yourself gaping at the staggering width and depth of that barrel chest that you begin to realise what bigness means in his league. At five feet eleven he isn’t a tall man, but no tank was ever built on so solid a chassis.
‘I recall the time when people said to me I’d never be champ,’ he says. ‘They said I was too short, my arms wasn’t long enough and that I didn
’t have the punch to put those big fellows away. But I proved it to them. I did it. And now I’m gonna prove that I’m a singer too.’
Touring Europe with his own show as a soul singer, Joe and his group the Knockouts, have not met with an overwhelming display of enthusiasm. In fact, the truth is that although there have been some full houses, an awful lot of their appearances have been notable for the lack of public interest and for the bad critical notices in the newspapers. He may be world champion boxer but his appeal has strict limits: he took Ali’s crown but none of his charisma.
Poor Joe can’t understand it. He knows he’s not so bad as they say he is so why do reporters write such lies, he asks, with a gentle, warming innocence.
‘Why do they say such things like “the champ can’t perform”? All the time I’ve been in the ring I’ve never done or said anything to hurt anyone, and now day after day these cats are throwing rocks at me in the papers. I mean there are all those bad guys in the world going around doing bad things but they don’t get the bad publicity I do. And I know there ain’t one other athlete done as well as me in entertainment. It really takes a champ to stomach it all sometimes.’
He’s such a friendly, guileless, wounded man that you wonder where he got his image as ‘Smoking Joe the killer tiger’ from, or from where he ever summons the necessary aggression to turn himself into a fighting machine. Yet as he lies there, alternately thumping each titanic fist into the opposing palm, it’s impossible to remain unaware of his enormous potency for destruction.
‘I’ve never fought out of the ring since I was a boy,’ he says. ‘Sometimes some guy will come and punch me in the tummy or challenge me, but I just try to walk away, because if I hit him I’d probably hurt him. And I don’t wanna do that. I’ve never been a violent man.’