The Elephant to Hollywood

11 An Englishman in LA

After The Man Who Would Be King, I think any movie would have been a bit of a comedown, but it was 1976, the summer was glorious, we were enjoying living at the Mill House and I was filming The Eagle Has Landed only fifteen minutes further up the Thames. Life was good and the film could have been brilliant – the cast included Donald Sutherland, Robert Duvall, Donald Pleasence and Anthony Quayle, as well as Jenny Agutter – but despite the book, which I love, it was never more than mediocre. I think the problem was that the veteran Hollywood director, John Sturges – who had a great reputation – had by this stage in his career rather lost interest in the movie business. He openly admitted to me one day that he only took on a picture to fund his very expensive hobby of deep-sea fishing and as soon as filming was done and he’d been paid he scarpered. I can’t pretend I haven’t taken on the occasional movie for the money, but much of the real work for directors comes in the editing and post-production work, and although it was perfectly well handled, without his input it could never have reached its potential.

The Mill House was the centre of our social world in the mid-Seventies and we welcomed our friends there – Roger and Luisa Moore, Dennis Selinger, Bryan and Nanette Forbes among others – most weekends. Sunday lunches had become quite a tradition although not all of them were as memorable as the one to which we invited Peter Sellers and his girlfriend Liza Minnelli; Liza’s father, Vincent and his companion Kay Thompson, the Broadway star; and the singer Jack Jones, with his then fiancée Susan George. Liza and Peter were so in love and I took a wonderful Polaroid photograph (then a relatively new invention) of them, as well as a group photo, to mark the occasion. Sunday lunch was just the warm-up to Liza’s birthday party which was due to be held on the following Tuesday at Rex Harrison’s flat, but when I got there, I found Liza in floods of tears. She and Peter had broken up the previous day. ‘Look!’ she said, handing me the photograph I had taken of her and Peter two days before. ‘Turn it over.’ It said, ‘Thanks for the memory, Peter.’

I didn’t know what to say. I was a friend of Peter’s and I had had no inkling that this was about to happen. I was shocked, and sad for Liza. Unable to think of anything that would be of much comfort, I grabbed a plate of food and took an empty chair at a table beside an elderly woman I recognised vaguely. I smiled at her and then did a double take: it was Marlene Dietrich. ‘Michael Caine?’ she demanded sharply. ‘Yes,’ I said, rather taken aback by her tone. ‘You are a friend of Peter Sellers?’ ‘Yes,’ I said, rather more cautiously. ‘Well, you may tell him from me that he’s a bastard to treat Liza in this way! Why are you friends with a man like him?’ Her blue, blue eyes were fixed on me in a way that made me very uncomfortable. I muttered something to the effect that Peter had always been nice to me, but it didn’t wash. ‘Liza is my goddaughter,’ Marlene Dietrich said coldly. By now I was gobbling down my food so I could escape. As I rose to leave the table as politely as I could, she suddenly burst out, ‘And you should dress better when you go out! You look like a bum!’ An encounter I’ll never forget!

I loved being able to host our friends at the Mill House, so I was in for a bit of a shock when my accountant summoned me to a meeting to let me know that with taxes at the unprecedented levels they were back in the Seventies, we were living just too lavishly for our income. I was outraged – I had worked hard to make a life for my family and myself and I was not going to be bullied into cutting back now. There seemed only one option, and although I knew that there was much I would miss about my life in England, it was one I felt ready to take: we would move to Hollywood.

The movie producer Irwin Allen was just one of a number of friends encouraging us to leave England and move to Los Angeles – but he was the only one who also offered an inducement to do so. My mum was happy in her new home in Streatham and Dominique’s career as a show-jumper was going from strength to strength, so I felt happy about making the move from that point of view, but I had a real problem. Even taking into account selling the Mill House (which I eventually did to Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin), I couldn’t afford the incredible house prices in Beverly Hills, and this is where Irwin stepped in with an offer of the lead role in a picture called The Swarm, to help pay for my move.

Irwin was the producer of Towering Inferno and The Poseidon Adventure, so I reasoned that he knew a thing or two about disaster movies, and I was intrigued at the idea of working on a film with spectacular special effects. What I hadn’t quite taken on board was that a burning skyscraper and a huge upside down ship are high-stakes visual drama, whereas a swarm of bees is – well, let’s just say it’s not in the same league. In fact, making our movie was in reality probably a great deal more dangerous than either of the other two, which merely involved plywood sets, some flames and a big water tank. The Swarm required us to spend much of the time filming inside big glass cages along with millions of real bees, none of which had been told they were only acting. They were all supposed to have been de-stung, but it was an inexact science and every so often there would be a yelp and the cry ‘Hot one!’ would go up and we’d all take cover. One of my co-stars on the movie was Henry Fonda and it was an enormous privilege to work alongside a screen legend like him, as well as Olivia de Havilland, another movie great. Hank actually kept bees and was always handing out small pots with the modest legend ‘Hank’s Honey’ written on the sides. Unfortunately, his expert knowledge didn’t extend to the lavatorial habits of bees, and he was as surprised as Fred MacMurray and I were (we were all playing scientists) when the bees were released from their boxes and took their revenge on us by immediately crapping all over our white coats. I should have taken it as an omen: when it was eventually released, the critics followed suit…

So with the money from The Swarm and the proceeds from the Mill House we finally made the big move in autumn 1979. We had a wonderful welcome from our friends when we arrived in LA. We spent the first week moving into our lovely new home and sorting out furniture and so on. The only thing missing – unusual for Beverly Hills – was a phone, but I managed to persuade the phone company to come out on a Saturday morning and install it for us and so we were all set. That evening the composer Leslie Bricusse and his wife Evie, close friends of ours from London way back, gave us a party and it was great to see everyone we knew there. Shakira – who loves Hollywood and thrives there – was on great form, but about halfway through the evening her leather belt suddenly snapped. She’s always been very slim and so there were lots of jokes about how much she might have eaten and whether there was a baby on the way, but we thought nothing of it and eventually went home, exhausted but happy at the beginning of our new life.

In the middle of the night I was woken by a fist crashing into my nose. Shakira had turned over and hit me in her sleep. ‘Hey!’ I protested, and rolled over, but just as I did so, she hit me again, this time on the ear. She’d never done this before, but I tucked her hand back under the cover and turned over once more. This time she hit me in the mouth. I sat up and put the light on – and froze in horror. Shakira’s face was a terrible grey colour, her eyes had rolled up into her head and she was on the verge of passing out. She had been trying to get me to wake up before she lost consciousness. With my heart beating wildly I grabbed the phone – thank God I had insisted on getting it put in – and dialled 911.

I desperately felt for a pulse – and couldn’t find one, although her eyes flickered for just a moment. My Shakira was cold, almost dead cold, and I held her in my arms, trying to warm her, while Joan, my secretary, gathered some things together to take to the hospital. At last the paramedics arrived and – in consultation with a doctor at the UCLA hospital – within minutes had rigged up the life-support system that would keep her alive while she was taken to the emergency room. She had a burst appendix, which is incredibly dangerous.

As soon as we got there, Shakira was wheeled into the operating theatre and – this being America – I was pointed in the direction of the cashier. ‘That will be five thousand dollars, please,’ he said. Five thousand dollars? It was seven o’clock on a Sunday morning – where was I supposed to find that sort of money? Not for the first time it made me grateful for the NHS. ‘No money – no operation,’ said the cashier. Just as I was about to become completely apoplectic with rage and worry, he suddenly asked, ‘Aren’t you an actor?’ I had reached boiling point. Did he want my autograph while my wife was dying? Luckily for him he went on, ‘If you’re a member of the Screen Actors Guild, you’ll be covered.’ I was; we were. I signed the form in a shaking hand and went back out to the waiting room. As I paced up and down, a man on a gurney beckoned me over. He had an oxygen mask over his face and was struggling to breathe. He seemed to be trying to say something. As I leant close, he took a couple of extra gulps, let the mask fall and gasped, ‘I loved you in The Man Who Would Be King!’ and then collapsed. I grabbed the mask and shoved it back over his mouth; no fan of mine deserved to die!

At last the doctors came out of the operating theatre to tell me that Shakira was out of danger. Although I felt enormous relief, I couldn’t help thinking about all the ‘what ifs’. What if we hadn’t got the phone installed in time? What if the ambulance hadn’t been able to find the house? What if I hadn’t woken up? What if we’d still been in England where the ambulance men were on strike? What if I’d never joined the Screen Actors Guild and was uninsured? These questions rolled round and round in my mind over the next few days and weeks as, gradually, Shakira began to get better. And they roll round in my mind still, when I look at my wife and at Natasha. I know that I owe my family and the happiness they bring to me to the medical profession – and I’m very grateful.

Once Shakira was on the mend we began to be able to enjoy our new surroundings and to get to know the neighbours. As I’ve said before, Hollywood and Beverly Hills are not the way you might think and this is especially true of the people who live there. Films, TV series, gossip magazines always seem to make out that LA society is full of ruthless, bitchy, mean men and women – but we met nothing but kindness from friends old and new. This was partly due to the brilliance of Irving Lazar, who took us in hand and introduced us to all his friends – and Irving had an address book like no one else’s on the planet – but mostly it was because of Shakira. Now, Shakira is a beautiful woman, inside and out, but Hollywood, for all that it is not the nest of vipers it’s sometimes portrayed as, is a tough town, and she won everyone over. I believe that eventually you do become what you make of yourself. I was Maurice Micklewhite and I became Michael Caine. Shakira had been a beauty queen but she was originally a shy Muslim girl who had only become one so she could get out of Guyana and see the world (and she made a good job of that!): in Hollywood she became Shakira Caine. People – women as well as men – warmed to her, because unlike some women in Hollywood, she was uncompetitive. Other women like her because she isn’t after their husbands or boyfriends. She’s very cool, she never flirts and she never responds to anything like that. So while people may have liked me, or found me funny – everyone loved Shakira. In fact I once told her that if we ever divorced I’d sue her for loss of status… We were lucky, too, I think, because – and perhaps it was because we were British – we were invited everywhere. Hollywood society divides itself quite sharply into the executives and the stars, but we found ourselves able to mix freely with both groups and to be accepted by all.

Real life couldn’t have been better for us at this point but my celluloid life was in the doldrums. I’d had a run of disasters – The Swarm, Ashanti (no, you won’t have heard of it and I hope you never see it), Beyond the Poseidon Adventure and The Island (which, as it was written and produced by the team who made Jaws, ought to have been good, but very definitely wasn’t…) – and even the good reviews I had picked up for California Suite with Maggie Smith couldn’t disguise the fact that I badly needed a success.

Who would have thought that the role that would rescue my career at that point would be that of a transvestite psychiatrist turned murderer? You couldn’t make it up… but Dressed to Kill became a huge box office success. It was an opportunity for me, too, to show the versatility of my acting skills, not to mention a first outing for me in women’s clothing. My only worry was that I would get to like it! It didn’t happen… it had to be the most uncomfortable costume I ever wore. I hated the tights, couldn’t walk in the high heels, found that the lipstick got all over my cigars and stubbornly insisted on wearing my own underpants. Apart from my experiences in Berlin during the filming of Funeral in Berlin, the only other encounter I had had with cross-dressing was second-hand. I was friendly, in her later years, with the great swimming star of the forties, Esther Williams, who told me a story about Jeff Chandler, a very handsome second-string actor, with whom she was romantically linked for a time. One day she found him wearing a woman’s dress. She told me this quite matter-of-factly, although it must have been a bit of a shock. ‘What did you say?’ I asked, fascinated. She said, ‘I told him, “Jeff, you are six foot four. You cannot wear polka dots.”’

I didn’t have to wear polka dots in Dressed to Kill, thank God, but at the end of the shoot, I took the clothes home with me for Shakira as a joke – she is a regular on the Best-Dressed Women in the World lists – but it backfired on me when she accused me of having an affair… With a six foot two inch woman of heavy build? She certainly should have known me better – and she certainly should have known me better than that!

In the end, many of the long shots in the film were actually played by a double – a real woman – who was as tall as me, but needed a bit of padding out. It was she who played the most notorious scene in the film when my character slashes Angie Dickinson’s character to death with a razor. It is a horrifying scene – one that I only saw later on – and it caused a lot of trouble at the time. Brian De Palma – who is one of the most technically proficient directors I’ve ever worked with – was insistent that it was the right thing to do. It was the only death in the entire movie and he wanted maximum impact: he got it, all right.

In fact Brian De Palma’s approach to directing reminded me very much of Alfred Hitchcock’s – not that I ever worked with Hitchcock, but I did get to know him very well. Neither of them were exactly Mr Warmth, but both of them were brilliant technically and went for a very cool approach, which is probably right for scary movies, where the editing has to be spot on because it’s less about the actors making connections with their audience and more about the atmosphere. I love the way Tarantino has taken the genre, played with it and turned it on its head: Pulp Fiction, in particular, I think is brilliant.

I reckon Dressed to Kill is a bloody good thriller – and it still scares me. It came out at around the time they were trying to catch the serial killer known as the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ and various groups lobbied the distributors to withdraw it in the north of England, because they claimed it might have encouraged the murders. (When they eventually caught Peter Sutcliffe they asked him if he had ever seen it and he hadn’t.)

I’m pretty sure my mother never got to see my performance in Dressed to Kill (just as well – it might have triggered memories of my father’s worst fears about my chosen career), but she did come out to visit us in Los Angeles at about this time. She was now eighty-one and almost everything about the trip and our life there was a completely new experience for her. She wasn’t going to let it faze her, though – rather like the mother of another British working-class lad made good and Hollywood neighbour of ours, David Hockney. When Mrs Hockney came over for afternoon tea with us and I asked her what she thought of Beverly Hills, she said, ‘It’s lovely, dear – but it’s a terrible waste.’ ‘Waste of what?’ I asked. ‘All that sunshine,’ she said, ‘and no one’s got the washing out!’ My own mother hit the nail right on the head without meaning to, in her usual guise as Mrs Malaprop. ‘Oooh,’ she said, pointing out of the car window at the lush flowers and plants on the way in to Beverly Hills from the airport, ‘look at all that hysteria climbing up the walls.’ She’d summed up Hollywood, in a nutshell.

When Dominique flew over to join us, the whole family was reunited and I took her and Mum to Las Vegas as a special treat. My mother was in her element and stayed up every night until three o’clock in the morning, partying as I suppose she’d never had the chance to as a young woman. Eventually she would agree that it was time to go to bed, although she wasn’t happy with the décor of her bedroom at Caesar’s Palace. ‘That mirror over the bed,’ she said. ‘What’s that for? Complete waste of money.’ I had to think on my feet: Mum still undressed in the dark. ‘It’s so women can put on their make-up before they get up,’ I offered. Mum sniffed. ‘Lazy cows,’ she said. Indeed.

After Mum went back to England (she was keen to catch up with her favourite soap opera), and we had taken a short holiday there, too, I went off to Hungary to work with John Huston again. This time it was on a film called Escape to Victory set during the Second World War and telling the story of a group of prisoners of war who play a game of soccer against a German team. Not only was John directing it, but Sylvester Stallone – who had just made the smash hits Rocky and Rocky II – was playing the goalkeeper. Sly was great to work with, if a bit exhausting: he never stopped exercising. If there was a five-minute break he would do push-ups, if there was a ten-minute break he would do push-ups and sit-ups. I lost weight just watching him. On the whole he was great fun – except for one piece of Hollywood ‘star’ behaviour he had picked up from somewhere. He was in the middle of writing Rocky III (but then again it might have been IV, or V) and insisted on only being called to the set if his scenes were about to be filmed. He had much better things to be getting on with than hanging around waiting. One morning he was called to shoot a scene and the weather changed and he was kept waiting for three hours while another scene was shot. He would, he informed us, make us all wait three hours the next day to make up for this. And so the following day we all had to sit around so he could make his point. Everyone was waiting for me to explode – and I was pissed off – but I had had a better idea. When Sly eventually deigned to appear, I asked him if I could have a private word. ‘I just want to say thanks,’ I said. ‘I was at a party last night and hadn’t learnt my lines – those extra three hours saved my bacon.’ He looked a bit nonplussed and I went on, ‘And I’ve got another party tonight, and more dialogue tomorrow – so could you be three hours late again so I don’t get into trouble?’ He was never late again.

John Huston and Sly were great to work with, but for me the real joy of the movie was playing football along with such giants of the game as Pelé, Bobby Moore and Ossie Ardiles – it was a dream come true! It’s just one more of those ‘only in Hollywood’ moments – I mean, Pelé, Bobby Moore, Ossie Ardiles with Rambo in goal? No one could beat us! I love football and used to kick a ball around in the street, as all boys do – in fact I did it last weekend with my grandson. I played right back at school and I thought I was pretty good – well, no one could get past me at Hackney Downs, anyway – but, as someone who likes their comforts, I never liked the cold mornings or worse the cold showers with other blokes, so I didn’t pursue it beyond school sports. Just as well – I had a knockabout with Pelé and Bobby Moore while we were filming and I realised how bad I was… But I am a huge armchair football fan and a great supporter of Chelsea. I took Shakira once to a Chelsea game (and, yes, I did have to explain the off-side rule), because she’d never been. It was great – we were in Abramovich’s box – and she enjoyed it, but I’d much rather watch a match on TV where you can see all the action and the replays. If you’ve turned your head at the wrong moment, or the play is at the other end of the pitch, you can miss something important entirely. As I’m writing this, I’m glued to the World Cup. I’ll support England through anything but I have just watched them crash out disastrously. They remind me of an all-star movie in which the members of the cast are so full of their own importance they can’t work as a team.

Life on the pitch filming Escape to Victory may have been exciting, but life off the pitch in Budapest was very drab. Still under Communist rule, it looked beautiful – and of course, now it is a wonderful and lively city to visit – but back then it was grey and depressing. There were only two decent restaurants and both of them were patronised by members of the Party and their mistresses. I couldn’t wait to leave every weekend and would rush off to the airport to get back to London, where Shakira and Natasha were staying.

It was fantastic to be back in England and I loved catching up with friends and family, but because I was a tax exile, I was only allowed up to ninety days in the UK and so it wasn’t long before we found ourselves back in Hollywood. Although I was happy to be spending the winter months in the warmth of LA and we had a regular flow of British friends passing through, all of them in despair about the state of the British film industry, I was aware that I was beginning to miss my own country. I even found myself recreating our Mill House Sunday lunches with the traditional roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, which was bizarre in a-hundred-degree heat. I’ve always enjoyed cooking, and although after Shakira and I got together I expanded my repertoire from the classic English fry-ups I’d loved as a kid to include some healthier options, the roast Sunday lunch has always been a family favourite. And here in California it seemed a way of connecting with a piece of England I have always loved.

My father, of course, believed that cooking was women’s work and real men didn’t go near it. He was always a bit dubious about the acting profession for the same reason. He would have been horrified enough if he had lived to see California Suite (in which I played a gay man) and Dressed to Kill, but what he would have thought of Deathtrap, my next film, doesn’t bear thinking about. In this film I achieved what no other male actor has ever managed before or since: I kissed Superman. My co-star was Christopher Reeve, already an international star through Superman, and a good friend of mine, which was perhaps just as well: Christopher and I were playing closet gays who murder my ‘wife’. We were filming in New York, which was great for me as I could hang out at Elaine’s, the restaurant, and spend time with friends like Elaine herself, Bobbie Zarem, my press agent, his brother, Danny, who was in the menswear business, and the producer Marty Bregman and his wife, Cornelia. The director of Deathtrap – which was an adaptation of Ira Levin’s brilliant play of the same name – was Sidney Lumet. I had wanted to work with him and I was delighted to have a chance to work together.

With a great script and a co-star like Christopher Reeve, who had been keen to take on the role to avoid the almost inevitable typecasting that he feared would come with a role like Superman, the filming was going really well. But eventually we got to the point where there was no avoiding the big moment. Although we had had several dry runs, as it were, where we just mimed the kiss, we both knew what was coming. Christopher and I had been drinking brandy to get up courage steadily over the course of the afternoon and by the time we got to the real thing, we had had so much we couldn’t remember the dialogue and Sidney Lumet got very pissed off. I really don’t remember much about the actual kiss itself, but I do remember saying to Christopher just as we were getting into position and before Sidney Lumet called ‘Action’, ‘Whatever you do, don’t open your mouth!’ It must be the longest close-mouthed kiss in cinema history… I was in a café quite recently and bursting for a pee and there were only two cubicles, one for men and one for women. The Men’s was occupied but Ladies’ was free, so having checked no one was around, I dived into it. While I was in there, the doorknob rattled; unfortunately a real lady had turned up. When I’d finished, I opened the door and said to the woman waiting, ‘It’s OK, I’m a lesbian.’ And she said, quick as a flash, ‘No you’re not. I saw you kiss Superman in Deathtrap…’

After Deathtrap, I went back to Beverly Hills for some time off. Shakira was loving the Hollywood life and with Natasha happy at a wonderful school, Marymount, in Westwood nearby, we were delighted to take a break and just enjoy ourselves. I became a sort of unpaid social ambassador and among other events, hosted a dinner for Princess Michael of Kent at Morton’s, the newest, hottest restaurant in LA, as well as being roped in whenever other visiting royalty came to town. My agent, Sue Mengers – who was besotted by the British royal family – was chosen to give a dinner for Princess Margaret and invited me as a ‘safe’ dinner party guest. Sue, truly one of Hollywood’s toughest dealmakers, was so overcome by the proximity of royalty that she nearly collapsed with nerves on the night, but she needn’t have worried. The stars all turned out – for Sue, as much as for Princess Margaret – including Clint Eastwood, Jack Nicholson, Barbra Streisand and (apparently by special request) Barry Manilow, and the evening was a huge success.

I can’t have disgraced myself on that occasion, because I found myself wheeled out when the Queen visited LA. It was a very grand affair, held at the Twentieth Century Fox studios, with the British Hollywood contingent lined up on a dais either side of the Queen and the rest of Hollywood on tables below. The evening had been financed by a multi-millionaire car dealer who, as a reward, got to sit on one side of the Queen, while the director, ex-husband of Vanessa Redgrave and father of Natasha and Joely Richardson, Tony Richardson, sat on the other. The Queen seemed happy enough chatting to Tony, who always had a great fund of stories, but she was obviously finding it harder going with the car-dealer. I was sitting on his other side and I sympathised… It was not long before I heard an unmistakeable voice. ‘Mr Caine!’ There, peeping round the side of the tongue-tied car-dealer, was the Queen. ‘Mr Caine!’ she said again. ‘Yes, Your Majesty,’ I replied, hoping that was the right way to address a sovereign. ‘Do you know any good jokes?’ she asked. ‘I do, ma’am,’ I said, ‘but I’m not sure they would be suitable…’ ‘Well, why not have a go?’ she suggested with a twinkle. ‘And then I’ll tell you one.’ Not sure whether or not I was risking extradition and a spell in the Tower of London, I embarked on a story about a four-legged chicken, which seemed to go down very well – and we spent the rest of the evening swapping jokes. Of course if I passed on the ones she told me I might very well end up in the Tower, so I won’t, but I can tell you that the Queen has a great sense of humour!

While I might have been enjoying a reputation as a bit of a comedian off-screen in Hollywood, most of the films I had starred in over the previous few years were not at all funny. By the time we’d finished Deathtrap I was beginning to long for a really good comedy – and when it came, it was worth the wait.