The Elephant to Hollywood

15 Highs and Lows in Miami Beach

In 1992, I had a bit of a surprise. As part of the American publicity tour for my first autobiography What’s It All About?, I went to the Miami Book Fair. I wasn’t expecting much: the first time I’d been to Miami was in 1979 for a horror/thriller movie called The Island and I didn’t have very happy memories of that. The film should have been a success: producers Richard Zanuck and David Brown and author Peter Benchley had all been involved in the blockbuster Jaws and consequently the budget was huge. The Caribbean location was a plus, too, but somewhere along the line the film just wasn’t scary. And in the end, the only sharks frightening enough to pose a real threat turned out to be the critics. Nonetheless, Shakira and I enjoyed our stay on the luxury Turnberry Isle just outside Miami itself and were looking forward to exploring the area. It started off very promising. We headed for Miami Beach and were driven there across MacArthur Causeway, which runs for a fabulous three miles. We discovered that Miami Beach is a completely separate city from Miami itself, forming a barrier island between the Atlantic and Miami proper, with a beautiful fifteen-mile sandy beach. That was fine, but South Beach, which starts at the end of the causeway, was a shock. It was a dumping ground – not just for litter, but for people, too. Human waste and wasted humans were everywhere; bums and junkies were holed up under every bridge and in every doorway of the many closed shops. Driving through in the daytime, it seemed as if everything was shut for business – but after darkness fell we soon found out that business picked up, as all the drug dealers came out of the woodwork. When we did, finally, find a shop that was open on the rundown and potholed Lincoln Road, the shopkeeper told us he always carried a gun after sunset. As I looked round in the bright light of the afternoon sun I began to wish I’d had one with me.

Perhaps the most bizarre spectacle was the rows of old New Yorkers sitting outside the rotting Art Deco hotels. They had been sent by their families from the freezing east coast to die under the sun and under the jurisdiction of Miami’s generous inheritance tax provisions. There was a feeling of death everywhere: the old baking to death under the sun, the young drug addicts dying for pleasure at any time and the dealers killing for territory after dark. South Beach was two miles of the most beautiful Art Deco buildings, beaches and weather in the world and it was a rubbish dump. In those days it was known as ‘God’s Waiting Room’ because of the number of old people there. Looking at it on that first trip, I couldn’t see that God had anything to do with it: this was a man-made hellhole and we vowed never to come back.

What we didn’t know was that things were about to get a whole lot worse. In 1980, President Castro of Cuba graciously allowed any Cuban citizen who wanted to immigrate to the United States to leave – and 125,000 people took up the offer and headed to Miami. Among them must have been a criminal element, because the city nearly went under a new and even more vicious crime wave. Sometimes situations need to get desperate before solutions emerge – and this is what happened. As the inhabitants of God’s Waiting Room fled and the hotels emptied of the dying, it was not the demolishers who moved in, but the preservers. Under the leadership of entrepreneurs like Tony Goldman, Barbara Capitman and Chris Blackwell, the ‘Architectural District’ was born, the place chilled out, livened up and the world’s glamorati began to sit up and take notice. From 1984, which was the year Miami Vice was first shown on TV, to the Miami Book Fair in 1992, the place began to grow and prosper. International photographers, models and designers came, lured by the winter sun, and international hotels, clubs and restaurants sprang up to cater for their every need. The glamorati glowed, the glitterati glittered – and South Beach was re-born.

When I turned up for the Miami Book Fair, I barely recognised the place. Granted, as we came over the Causeway and onto Ocean Drive there were still some bums and druggies and pushers around, but they were skulking out of sight rather than strutting their stuff in the bright daylight. The violence had gone, to be replaced by a fantastic young scene: I loved it immediately. ‘I want a holiday here!’ I said to someone. ‘If you can get a reservation…’ was the muttered reply. South Beach was up and running and I felt like running with it.

I couldn’t get South Beach out of my mind. In 1993, during the considerable lull that had suddenly developed in my movie-making schedule, Shakira and I were in New York visiting Shakira’s mother, who lives there. While they spent time together, I spent a great deal of time not only with my best New York friend, restaurateur Elaine Kauffman, but also with Danny Zarem, the brother of Bobby, the press agent who had had to get me out of bed for the Today show on my first US publicity tour. Now retired, Danny was previously the vice-president and head of design for Bonwit Teller, one of the best clothing stores anywhere and he is still the most stylish man I know. We always lunch at the Russian Tea Room, which is one of my favourite restaurants in New York – not just for the food, but because when it opened and they put up their first Christmas decorations they liked them so much they just left them. It’s always fun going in there on a boiling hot day and finding the Christmas decorations up.

During one of our many lunches amid the baubles, I told Danny all about South Beach. Of course it turned out he was already in the know and the two of us took off there for a long weekend and stayed with Danny’s friend the restaurateur Ray Schnitzer. Ray lived in the South Pointe Tower, at twenty-eight storeys then the tallest building in South Beach. It was amazing to sit in Danny’s apartment and watch the huge boats pass by his window as they sailed into Miami Harbour.

In the year since I’d last been in Miami, things had got even more exciting: Jack Nicholson was now spending a lot of time in South Beach. Jack, of course, knew where all the fun was to be had (and if he couldn’t find it, either it sort of found him or he’d make it himself) and I tagged along for the ride. And then I was delighted to discover that Oliver Stone, the director of the 1981 film The Hand – a movie that did not reflect great credit on either of us – was also there. I had taken on The Hand in the first place partly because I had never done a horror movie before, but mainly because I’d wanted to work with Oliver. I made two discoveries during the course of filming: first, that I hated making horror movies, and second, that Oliver Stone was a genius. It turned out that he, like me, was an ex-infantryman and we spent a lot of our time together on set talking about our time in the army. He was not surprised to hear that I had never seen a film that remotely captured the atmosphere and reality of Korea: he had never seen one that reflected his experiences in Vietnam, he said, and one day he would put that right… I’ve often reflected on the irony of having had the chance of working with a director like Oliver Stone – who would go on to direct Platoon and JFK – on a picture in which the real star of the show is my hand, which, severed in a car crash, takes on a murderous life of its own… As my mother used to say: be careful what you wish for. In spite of our mauling by the critics, Oliver and I had remained good friends and once I knew that he, Jack and another Hollywood friend Sylvester Stallone had invested in South Beach, the attractions of the place proved hard to resist.

I flew back to New York to pick up Shakira and persuaded her to give Miami a try again. Although she was prepared to admit that things had improved, she wasn’t quite as enthusiastic as I was. But in the new dawn of what I thought was going to be my dual retirement career of writing and restaurant owning – at that point I had built up partnerships in five London restaurants – I was very excited by the possibilities and eventually decided to extend the restaurant empire from London to Miami. Ray Schnitzer and I went into partnership and I bought an old church on the burgeoning – although still quite rackety – Lincoln Road and we opened the South Beach Brasserie. It was a great success; I managed to win Shakira over and we rented a flat in South Pointe Tower and for several years we went back every winter, eventually buying a flat there, which we still own.

South Beach was booming. New restaurants and clubs seemed to open every day – and close with equal rapidity. The South Beach crowd were fun, but they were also flaky and fickle; I often thought that South Beach was like a lamp burning extra bright and then blowing its bulb every year or so. The night when the bulb finally blew beyond repair was a very bright one indeed. Chris Paciello and Ingrid Casares, two people we all knew and liked, had opened a club called Liquid, which was the biggest thing so far in the new South Beach and the glamorati and glitterati, including Madonna, all turned out for the launch on Thanksgiving weekend 1995, which was a party to celebrate Madonna’s brother, Christopher Ciccione’s birthday. We arrived after dinner at about 11.00 p.m. and were surprised to find that we were almost the first people there. Almost, but not quite. As Chris greeted us, I noticed six portly older gentlemen with very thick necks sitting in the darkest corner of the bar. ‘Who are they?’ I asked. ‘Oh – just some of my investors,’ Chris answered vaguely. He seemed to be a bit nervous but I’d had a few drinks and thought nothing of it. After all, an invitation to this party was highly prized and had been extended to only the favoured few. Gradually the club began to fill up. Madonna and her entourage arrived and were very friendly and then the ‘favorati’ began to crowd in in such numbers that the roped off VIP area ended up with more guests crammed in shoulder to shoulder than the rest of the club. We left quite early – I love parties and clubs, but even I had had enough – and as I left I looked around and for some reason I thought of the last ball on the Titanic.

My instincts – so hopeless at picking up the signs of doom in my own movie career – that South Beach was changing, were absolutely right. Shortly afterwards, Chris Paciello was arrested, convicted of being an accessory to murder and imprisoned. It turned out that he had been a career criminal for years, long before he came to South Beach, and that the empire he founded in Miami was based on his Mafia connections. An era was beginning to come to an end.

While it lasted, however, Miami was the perfect place to sit back and contemplate the new life I thought I was going to be leading. At the time of the Miami Book Fair in 1992, when my love affair with the place began, I knew that if I wasn’t going to be a movie star any longer, I didn’t need the oxygen of LA; if I was going to be a restaurant owner and a writer then I could do that for most of the year from England with winters spent in Miami.

But the movie business still had one last surprise for me. Over the years I had watched as all my friends had appeared on The Muppet Show and I tried not to mind that I was never invited – but of course in the end I got the big part. I played Scrooge in The Muppet Christmas Carol and I had a wonderful time doing it, although I found it a very long process because the continuity is a nightmare. I loved working with the Muppeteers who are all very gentle souls and really do inhabit their characters and I found that I didn’t have to change my style as an actor at all: working with the Muppets was just like working with real people. Apart from anything else, it gave me the chance to work again with the director of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Miss Piggy herself, better known as Frank Oz. Whenever anyone asks me whether I have been in a movie directed by a woman, I always reply, ‘Yeah – Miss Piggy!’ People also always assume that working with the Muppets would be non-stop fun. Well it was, but in fact comedy is a very serious business; you can get far more laughs on a horror film. I once asked Anthony Hopkins – an actor who, like me, at one point thought his career was over – what it was like working on Silence of the Lambs and he said, ‘We had a lot of laughs on that.’ He would know – he’s a very funny man and one of the best impressionists I’ve ever met. I’ve got an audio tape he once gave me of him impersonating Sir Laurence Olivier standing on Waterloo Bridge at the time he was founding the National Theatre and asking passing actors to come and do Hamlet – and I think it is one of the funniest things I have ever heard.

The Muppet Christmas Carol was a success – but it was the last I was going to have for quite some time. The scripts started to dry up completely – even the bad ones – and if there is one thing worse than being offered bad scripts it’s being offered none at all. It wasn’t all terrible, though – I had a wonderful, joint sixtieth birthday party back in Hollywood with my old friend Quincy Jones, who is my ‘celestial twin’. We’ve worked out that, taking into account time differences, we were born at exactly the same time, on the same day and in the same year – me in London, and him in Chicago. We took over a club on Beverly Drive and had a fantastic celebration. With his friends and mine, it was quite a star-studded affair and it was wonderful to see so many people from both our pasts and presents all gathered together – from John Barry and Sidney Furie from my Ipcress File days, to Barbra Streisand, Oprah Winfrey and Jack Nicholson. There were many highlights of that night, but I’ll never forget rapping with Ice-T – I actually surprised myself; I wasn’t bad – and perhaps most memorably of all, having Stevie Wonder himself singing ‘Happy Birthday’ to Quincy and me. What a night!

The birthday party was a high spot in an otherwise low year. The danger is, of course, that the wait for a decent movie makes you desperate, and in the end I got desperate to the point that I accepted a picture in Alaska with Steven Seagal, the martial arts expert. The movie was called On Deadly Ground and the title was to prove very apt. Although Steven and the rest of the team were great to work with, I had broken one of the cardinal rules of bad movies: if you’re going to do a bad movie, at least do it in a great location. Here I was, doing a movie where the work was freezing my brain and the weather was freezing my arse. I vowed never to work in a tough location again. The litmus test for this, I decided, would be my wife. If Shakira refuses to come, I ain’t going. That was going to be my motto from now on, I vowed. I remember asking her if she would like to come to Alaska and she didn’t even bother to reply to the question. I should have got the warning.

But not even Shakira could have foreseen the mess I got myself into with the next movie.

As I’ve said before, I’ve been lucky over my career. Like most people, I’ve screwed up a couple of times and got away with it. What I was about to do almost finished me off. The thing is, it sounded really attractive. I was asked to work with an old friend – the spy Harry Palmer, one of my favourite characters and my first starring role – in two back-to-back sequels to the 1965 film The Ipcress File: Bullet to Beijing and Midnight in St Petersburg. It turned out to be my worst professional experience ever. Of course like all bad experiences, there were some good things – Jason Connery, Sean’s son, whom I’d met as a small boy and was pleased to meet again, and Marsha, the assistant and interpreter who guided Shakira and me around St Petersburg. (Yes, in my defence, Shakira had agreed to come with me on location.) Marsha was intelligent and melancholic in equal measure, in a very Russian way. She came to work one day with eyes all red from crying. ‘What’s wrong?’ Shakira asked, very concerned. ‘I’ve been crying all night,’ she replied. ‘What for?’ Shakira persisted. She just shrugged her shoulders. ‘We all do,’ she said.

Eighteen years ago and in the immediate aftermath of the fall of communism, St Petersburg was a very different place from the way it is today. It was beyond chaos – and the Mafia had jumped in to the vacuum and taken over. The first lunchtime on the set just before we started filming, we were all given personal Geiger counters to test the food for radiation. The first thing we all did was buy new batteries. Radioactive or not, the food was terrible and Shakira would go back and forth to London, returning to St Petersburg with Marks and Spencer’s steak and kidney pudding and other goodies to keep us all going.

Our hotel turned out to be the centre for the local Mafia. Oddly enough, they didn’t hang out in the dimly lit bar or the disco, but in the central café that only served tea and cakes and played genteel light music. It was a very ladylike place and it was very strange watching some of the toughest men on earth plotting mayhem over afternoon tea and scones.

One afternoon, we were sitting peacefully in the tea room when out of the blue, with no shouting or warning, a dozen men in black overalls and black masks came tearing across the café – not on the floor, but leaping straight across the room, crashing on top of the tables and hurling themselves straight at their target. It was all over in a second, but we were in complete shock. It turned out that what we initially thought was a hit squad of rival gangsters was the elite force of the Russian police – they wore masks so the Mafia could not recognise them and retaliate against their families.

I was eventually assigned a few bodyguards, two guys with Kalashnikovs who followed me everywhere in the street in a jeep and another one with a pistol who apparently was watching over me when I was inside. I never found out who he was, but I took the production manager’s word that he existed and I hung onto those guards right up to the last passenger barrier at the airport.

A couple of days before I left, I was sitting in my usual corner of the café (now with the damage repaired) when one of the Mafia guys came over and asked if he could join me. As if I could possibly say no. ‘Why do you have these stupid bodyguards?’ he asked. I replied to him all innocently, as if I had no idea of his occupation, ‘They say that there’s Mafia here in St Petersburg and I’m worried about our safety.’ He let out a great laugh and slapped his enormous thigh. ‘You work for—’ and he gave the name of a Russian movie company I didn’t quite catch. Did I? He stood up and said, ‘We own that. There’s no need to worry – you’re the safest man in the whole of St Petersburg,’ and walked away.

The city architecture of St Petersburg and the Hermitage in particular was fabulous. Shakira and I spent hours wandering around the museum. But the filming itself was a joke. The final blow came when we were shooting in the Lenfilm studio itself. I wanted to go for a pee and they directed me to the toilet. I could smell it fifty yards away and when I got there I found the filthiest toilet I have ever seen in my life. I went outside and peed up against the soundstage, which I noticed several other men had done before. So this is where my career has ended, I thought to myself: in the toilet. I’m done.

Shakira and I made one last visit to Hollywood to see Swifty Lazar for what we knew would be the last time. He was on a life support system – this man who had once seemed the life support system for Hollywood all on his own. ‘Have fun, kid,’ he said to me as I went to say goodbye. Shakira saw him separately and when I asked her what he’d said to her she said: ‘In the end it all comes down to tits and arse!’ He’s probably right.

It was winter. I picked myself up and took the family off to our place in Miami straight after Christmas. The sun was shining, everyone was happy, the book was still selling, my restaurants were doing well. Fine, I thought, life was different – but that was life.

And this is when Jack Nicholson changed everything. Having been one of the original reasons we’d decided to buy our South Beach apartment (they had been good times – they usually are, with Jack), he’d moved on from Miami – but he suddenly turned up there again with the director Bob Rafaelson and a script called Blood and Wine that they were going to shoot there. The combination of the three was very seductive and I decided to have one last shot at being a movie actor. It was the best decision I ever made – and I haven’t looked back.

Jack’s a tremendous actor who takes life easy and I owe him for restoring my faith in this often nasty business. It was a joy working with him and a great bunch of professionals again. Jack’s attitude to work was summed up for me one day when we were hurrying to get a shot before the sun went down. I started to run towards the set. ‘Don’t run, Michael!’ hissed Jack. ‘They’ll know it’s us who are late!’ So we kept strolling – and I still do.

Jack has a deservedly great reputation for the ladies, but he had me fooled one day. We broke for lunch and I saw Jack go into his motor home with one particularly pretty but very young girl. After lunch I tried to broach the subject diplomatically. ‘That was a very pretty girl I saw you with at lunchtime,’ I said, trying to keep a disapproving note out of my voice. He looked at me for a moment and then the wolfish Nicholson smile gradually spread across his features as he read my evil thoughts. ‘That was my daughter, Michael,’ he said, pretending to look puzzled. ‘By Miss Denmark,’ he added with a careless flourish. I dropped the subject immediately.

Although Blood and Wine was never a big hit with the public, it was a big hit with me. Filming was suddenly fun again and there was a whole new bunch of talented young actors to get to know – Jennifer Lopez, Heath Ledger, Sandra Bullock, Christian Bale, Charlize Theron, Scarlett Johansson to name but a few… It was the beginning of an exciting new phase of my life – slower to take off than I’d have liked, but I was definitely on my way back!