The Elephant to Hollywood

7 No Holly, No Woods

Back when I arrived for the first time, it didn’t take me long to work out that a lot of what I had thought about Hollywood was wrong. Looking back, I was a wide-eyed innocent and I spent months thinking to myself, ‘I guess Hollywood just isn’t really like that,’ every time I made a new discovery about the reality of the place. Even my grasp of the geography and history was off, never mind the power politics. For a start, I’d assumed Hollywood was the biggest centre of film-making in the world, but I soon discovered that very few films are actually made there…

The founder of the original Hollywood was a man named Hobart Johnstone Whitley. He and his business partners were land developers and built more than one hundred small towns all over the western United States. In 1886 they bought several hundred acres at the foot of the Cahuenga pass and decided to build a new town there. It was Whitley who came up with the name. The hillside above was covered with toyon, a plant also known as Californian Holly, because it’s covered in red berries in the winter. And that was that for a bit. It wasn’t until 1910 that the movies came to the town, with D. W. Griffith who was looking for a location for a picture called In Old California. Although they were able to shoot under electric light by that time, they found the bright Californian sunshine was perfect for the primitive film stock. Griffith and his crew went back east to New York and New Jersey, where most of the infant film industry had settled, and spread the word about the sunshine and light they had found in Hollywood.

The first movie studio built in Hollywood was called the Nestor Studio and it was on the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Gower Street. It was opened by David and William Horsley, two brothers from Bayonne, New Jersey. In 1913, Cecil B. DeMille and Jess Lasky bought a barn on the corner of Selma and Vine Street and turned it into a studio and in 1917 Charlie Chaplin opened his studio on the corner of Sunset and La Brea. After that, the rest of the movie industry came swarming in from the east and the myth of Hollywood was born.

Although the studios started there, most of them have since moved out and these days only three are left: Paramount, Chaplin and Goldwyn. Paramount, founded by Adolph Zukor in 1912, is the oldest working studio in America – and it certainly was Paramount for me. This studio financed Zulu, my first major film, and even though it didn’t get a US release to begin with, Paramount followed it up with Alfie, my breakout film, which they gave a major release in America where it got me my first Academy Award nomination. And my next Paramount film became The Italian Job. So – Zulu, Alfie and The Italian Job, three of the biggest films in my life: I have a lot to thank Paramount for. In fact I had a chance to thank Adolph Zukor personally when I was a guest at his hundredth birthday party in 1974. He was in a wheelchair, looking very frail, and I went up to him, shook his hand, wished him a Happy Birthday and said a big ‘thank you’. He looked at me blankly for a moment and said, ‘For what?’ He clearly had no idea who on earth I was. Bob Hope was the compère of the event and in a toast to this tiny old man all bundled up in his chair, he said, ‘If Adolph had known he was going to live to be a hundred, he would have taken better care of himself!’ And indeed it seemed touch and go as to whether the birthday boy would last the evening. I asked Bob what the protocol was in the event of sudden death. ‘The studio has thought of everything,’ he told me solemnly. ‘A hundred magicians stand ready in the kitchens, one for each table. Should Mr Zukor be unexpectedly taken from us before the festivities are over, at a pre-arranged signal from me, they will run in, whisk the white tablecloths off and reveal the black ones that have been laid beneath as a precaution.’ He kept a straight face longer than I did.

The Chaplin studio, is, to me, a sign that he was a little homesick for England. It sits on the corner of La Brea and Sunset Boulevard and is built to look like a street in an English village, complete with manor house and village green. It takes authenticity to the extreme: all the buildings have chimneys, which don’t get a lot of use in sunny Hollywood. I suppose it’s not surprising that Chaplin should want to recreate his version of England as a rural idyll: he grew up very close to where I did, in the Elephant, and no one would have wanted to recreate those slums as they were then. Once, years ago, I bumped into Charlie Chaplin walking round the area quite anonymously, unnoticed by the crowds. Like me, he had come to pay a visit and he seemed to feel quite nostalgic about it and sad about the way it had been destroyed – first by the Luftwaffe and then by the developers. He didn’t have a clue who I was, but we talked for a little while and he pointed out the ruins of the South London music hall he had appeared at in his last show before he went to America. It was only about 300 yards from the prefab I had grown up in. I once asked my mother where she went for her honeymoon. She laughed drily and said, ‘The South London theatre to see Charlie Chaplin in Humming Birds with Stan Laurel.’ Small world… When I met him, Chaplin was beautifully and expensively dressed, but even in his overcoat and hat – a trilby, not a bowler – I couldn’t help seeing the echo of the Little Tramp as he walked away.

My other connection with the Chaplin studio is that not only did we shoot the interiors of Too Late the Hero here, but it then became the headquarters of the Jim Henson Company with whom I made The Muppet Christmas Carol in 1991.

Samuel Goldwyn’s studio is the third and last studio still actually in Hollywood itself. It was originally built on land owned by Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks on the corner of Formosa and Santa Monica Boulevard known as ‘The Lot’, until it was renamed when they formed United Artists with Charlie Chaplin and D. W. Griffith. Goldwyn eventually took it over and named it after himself, after a lengthy legal battle with Mary Pickford, who owned the lease and wanted to name it after herself – an early Hollywood story but one that strikes a chord… Now the studio is called The Lot once more and is still used for independent film-making – I made the Austin Powers Goldmember movie there myself, with Mike Myers.

Next door to one of the most prime areas of real estate in the world, Holmby Hills, is the city that Cleopatra built. Century City was once the back lot of Twentieth Century Fox, which now sulks in a small corner of its formerly great property. Fox had a string of movie disasters in the late fifties and early sixties, most notably Cleopatra, the biopic starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton notorious for costing $44 million rather then the original $2 million budgeted, and in 1961 they were forced to sell their 180-acre back lot to the Alcoa company who turned it into the Century City you see there today. To be a city in Britain, you have to have a cathedral, but this is Hollywood and it has its own cathedrals: skyscrapers full of the archbishops, bishops and priests of our age – the accountants and lawyers (including my own) who guide our prayers.

All show business ends up as farce and Century City and Cleopatra are no exception. Many years later I was on a yacht in Monte Carlo harbour with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton and after dinner we all sat down and watched Carry On, Cleo, one of the lowest budget films ever made. They had brought it with them all the way from London – and in those days it wasn’t a matter of tucking a DVD into your handbag or briefcase, films were all on reels, so they had gone to some real effort to get it there. We all roared with laughter at the silly jokes – there was one in particular I remember Elizabeth and Richard cracking up over. The two Caesars are arguing about whose gladiator is better, and one of them says, ‘My gladiator is the greatest,’ and the other one counters with, ‘My gladiator is invincible,’ and the first one comes back with, ‘Well, my gladiator is impregnable!’ And the gladiator is standing there – he’s a raddled old Cockney of about sixty – and he says, ‘It’s not my fault, guv – my wife doesn’t want any kids!’ I tell you, they were killing themselves.

Although they started in Hollywood, Universal Pictures moved out to a 250-acre lot in the San Fernando Valley in 1914. They were still there in 1966 when they gave my career two massive boosts. The first was when they bought and released The Ipcress File in America – the first time any of my movies had a general release there. No one told me they had done it. I was shopping in Bloomingdale’s in New York during my publicity tour for Alfie, and I came out on the Third Avenue exit and there on the other side of the street was my name up in lights – it was a fantastic moment! It was Universal, too, that brought me to America to work with Shirley Maclaine on Gambit. It’s another studio to which I owe a debt of gratitude.

Warner Brothers also started in Hollywood, on Sunset Boulevard in 1923, and then followed Universal out to the San Fernando Valley in 1928 after their first great success, the first ‘talkie’, The Jazz Singer, with Al Jolson. They have had a great eighty-year history there, and although I have contributed to a few of the blips along the way, including The Swarm and Beyond the Poseidon Adventure, I’m pleased to have made it up for them eventually with Batman Begins, The Prestige, The Dark Knight and Inception.

The third of the great studios in the San Fernando Valley is Disney. Walt Disney opened a small studio there in 1923 and it went on to become the biggest entertainment company in the world. Long ago, in what seems like another life, I actually met Walt Disney. I was working as a tea boy for the producer Jay Lewis, who was making Morning Departure with John Mills. I’d never been to a film studio before and one day he took me with him to Pinewood. While we were there we ran into Walt Disney. I stood there at Jay Lewis’s elbow trying to merge with the wallpaper while they chatted and then he suddenly remembered I was there and told me to get Mr Disney a coffee. ‘Milk and sugar?’ was all I could manage to squeak to the great man – but I’ve never forgotten it. As a little boy I was a huge fan of Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Pluto and it gives me such pleasure now to watch the cartoons with the next generation of our family, my two-year-old grandson, Taylor. When I’ve been working in my study on this book, he’ll come in, march over to me, climb on my lap and say, ‘Mickey Mouse!’ until I give in. So, happily distracted, I enjoy it all over again.

As well as the enormous complexes owned by Universal, Warner Brothers and Disney, the San Fernando Valley is also home to NBC, the Getty Museum and the Hollywood Bowl. In spite of these high-prestige institutions, very few celebrities actually live in what’s known as ‘The Valley’, although of course most of them spend a lot of their time at the studios there. Bob Hope was one of the exceptions to this rule, and he had an enormous mansion and estate there and even an airport named after him. There are two reasons for avoiding the Valley: first it is insanely hot for most of the year, and second it is the porn movie capital of America. If you ever see an American porn film in which the participants are sweating before they even start on the action, you’ll know it was probably shot in the Valley. In fact the Valley can be a great place to live, although people can be quite snobbish about it as an address. I once heard a Valley parent ask, ‘At what age do you tell your children they live in the Valley?’ All I can say is: they should have tried living in the Elephant in my day…

The MGM studios were never in Hollywood at all. Instead they are seven miles away in Culver City, on the way to the airport. They were started in 1924 when a big cinema owner named Marcus Loew bought two production companies, the Metro Picture Corporation and Goldwyn Pictures. When these two were joined by Mayer Pictures, owned by Louis B. Mayer, the conglomerate was titled, with great imagination, Metro Goldwyn Mayer. For many years, under the leadership of Louis B. Mayer, it was the most successful movie company in the world.

MGM once did a movie with which I had the very slightest of connections. My friend Julie Christie had got a screen test for the lead role in Dr Zhivago, which was being directed by the great David Lean. I offered to support Julie by playing the ‘back of the head’ part opposite her in the screen test so she could play for the camera. David Lean liked the back of my head so much that he asked me if he could use it for all the screen tests, to which I agreed. I was just doing it as a favour, but it was obviously going quite well because one day David suggested that he actually tested me for the main part. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘if we shoot it this way, and maybe comb your hair like this…’ and we did, but when we saw the tests we both knew straight away I wasn’t right. ‘So what do you want?’ I asked David. He thought a bit and then he said, ‘What I want is a man who’s taken a long hard look at life and has decided there’s absolutely nothing to be done.’ It came to me in a flash. I had just seen Omar Sharif in Lawrence of Arabia and I said, ‘Omar Sharif!’ And David said, ‘Really?’ He thought some more and then he said, ‘You know, you could be right – I’m going to test him.’ And he did – and Omar got the part – although I’m not sure I’ve ever told him how it came about. So there you are – if I hadn’t failed the bloody screen test, like so many other things, I’d have been Dr Zhivago…

Next door to MGM there is another small studio, built by Thomas Ince, one of the first great silent film producers. The front door of the office block was very posh, designed to look like the front door of George Washington’s mansion, Mount Vernon. David O. Selznick, who was already a successful producer, bought it in 1935 for his own independent productions. One of these was Gone with the Wind – and the front door of the studio was used as the front door of Scarlett O’Hara’s mansion, Tara. David O. Selznick was a great and also very frugal producer. When he needed to film the burning of Atlanta for Gone with the Wind, he did it here on the back lot and burned all the old sets from King Kong, The Last of the Mohicans and Little Lord Fauntleroy. Not only did he get free firewood, he created the space to build Tara itself out of plywood and papier mâché. The set was eventually dismantled and is now for sale in 3 x 1 inch rectangles. As Selznick said himself at the time, ‘Like Hollywood, it was all a facade.’

Facade or not, like everyone else, I am in awe of Gone With The Wind – it’s one of my Top Ten all-time-favourite films (you’ll find more on this and the other nine at the back of the book) and Vivien Leigh is one of my all-time-favourite actors. I only met her once, while I was passing through London on my way to Louisiana to start the filming of Hurry Sundown with Otto Preminger in 1966. I was in a restaurant and John Gielgud came over and introduced himself and said that he and his companion – a tiny woman wearing sunglasses – had just been to see Alfie and had loved it. I thanked them and then the tiny woman whipped off her sunglasses and it was Vivien Leigh. I took a deep breath – even fresh from my first experiences in Hollywood I hadn’t quite got used to rubbing shoulders with a screen legend – but I was determined not to miss this chance. I explained I was about to play a southern character in Hurry Sundown with Jane Fonda and I needed some help. ‘What’s the basis of doing a southern accent?’ I asked her. ‘It’s easy,’ she said, (and she was being very nice to an annoying young actor), ‘you say, “Foah Doah Ford” – Four Door Ford – all day long. That’s all you do – “Foah Doah Ford” – Michael, and it will come to you.’ And I did say it over and over again, but I never quite sounded like Scarlett O’Hara…

After Selznick left, the studio became RKO pictures and Howard Hughes made some of his movies there, and after that it became Desilu, Lucille Ball’s studio. Now it is an independent studio again. I did Bewitched there myself in 2005, though even I would not claim it was in the same category as Gone with the Wind, Rebecca, Citizen Kane or King Kong…

In their early years, Paramount, Warner Brothers, Universal, Disney and the other great movie studios were all run by the moguls who had built them. By the time I arrived in Hollywood, the studio system had moved from the hands-on personal domination of the great studio heads, to the corporate structures they remain today. And a new set of power players had emerged: the actors themselves – and their agents. I always remember Henry Fonda – who had been a huge star at the time – saying to me, ‘You’re so lucky to be a star now, because you’ll make a lot of money – we never did.’ The irony was that I had been devastated when Joe Levine tore up my contract after Zulu: to me it represented the security I had never had. But these contracts – often for ten pictures or for five years – paid no heed to how big a hit a movie was. They paid plenty of heed to failure, of course – if an actor was seen as unsuccessful, there was nothing to prevent the studio from ripping up his or her contract without another thought. In other words, the studios couldn’t lose.

Even as a newcomer making his way in Hollywood for the first time I was well aware that there were plenty of pitfalls. Although there are no real holly woods, the name is actually quite appropriate – a holly, after all, is a dark, impenetrable tree festooned with bright attractive berries, surrounded by vicious thorns. The berries are highly prized as decoration, but to get to them, you have to find a path around the tree, choose the correct gloves and then pick the berries with great care. If you can make it without getting hurt, then it’s Christmas all the way. Sounds a bit like Hollywood to me.

The more I’ve thought about it, the more appropriate the name seems. Woods are often dark, dangerous places, uncomfortable and frightening, inhabited by vermin and stinging insects. On the other hand, they can be beautiful with open spaces covered with wild flowers. You need an experienced guide – and patience – to cut the right path through them and out into the sunlight. And that sounds even more like Hollywood to me.

In the holly woods, the path cutters are called agents – and over the years I have been lucky to have had three of the best. Number one was, of course, Dennis Selinger, who was the first to inform me that there were any woods for an actor to make his way through. He guided me through the English woods and became my closest friend and mentor. He died in 1998, and I miss him still. Although he was based in London, Dennis taught me a lot about the holly woods and helped me on my long hazardous journey towards them.

If it was Shirley Maclaine who first parted the undergrowth to let me through, she left me at the edge of the woods in the capable hands of the greatest path cutter in the world, Sue Mengers. Sue was Hollywood’s most powerful agent when I arrived in town, and I was her least-known client. Fortunately for me, like Dennis, she became a close personal friend and although she’s now retired, we keep in regular touch. Sue is a great getter-together of people and her dinners are legendary for the extraordinary group she’ll gather. One time Shakira and I went and there was Barbra Streisand and Sting and Sheryl Crow and her then boyfriend, a nice guy whose name was Lance Armstrong. ‘What do you do?’ I asked him, being friendly. ‘I’m a cyclist,’ he replied. I hadn’t got a clue. I thought he was going to ask me what I did…

It’s always the same thing on the menu for dinner – meatloaf – and Sue always says, ‘I want you all out of here by 10.30.’ But it’s the company that makes the evening: you never know who you’ll meet there and there’s always a bit of rivalry going on – ‘Were you at the Sue Mengers dinner?’ I’d known Sue for a few years before I graduated to her dinners and when I finally went round, she introduced me to her husband. There was something about him I couldn’t quite put my finger on and after a while I plucked up courage and said to him, ‘You know, it’s very funny, but years ago I spent some time in Paris and I had this French friend and he looked just like you.’ And he said, ‘Michael – it is me!’ And it was this guy Jean-Claude, whom I’d met on that trip to Paris my mum had funded all those years before. Since Sue retired, I’ve been very fortunate to have the wonderful Toni Howard cutting my paths for the last fifteen years and I’m very lucky to have her on my side.

As you cut your way through the dark holly woods, the person you need to trim the tops of the trees to let the light in is called a press agent. I had acquired my first UK press agent with The Ipcress File. Theo Cowan was a big, very funny middle-aged man with no visible family life, and I and my friends all loved him dearly. I always felt as if he had a sad romantic secret, an unrequited love, but he was one of the funniest men I’ve ever known. If you asked him what he was doing, he would always say, ‘Contrast.’ And if you asked him how he was, he’d say, ‘The hard ones first, eh?’ To help me see my way through the American holly woods I found Jerry Pam. Not only was he one of the best press agents in Hollywood, he turned out to be an Englishman and to have gone to the same school as I did, Hackney Downs. Jerry has recently retired, but while we worked together he lit my way through the woods and out the other side and kept the sun shining on me for over forty years.

The last hazards you may have to face in the woods are the stinging insects and the vermin that bite. For these you need to acquire an exterminator – or as they are known in the movie business, a lawyer. My lawyer, Barry Tyreman, is one of the nicest, gentlest, kindest men you could meet – unless of course you come under the vermin or insect category, in which case very quickly and almost painlessly, you are dead.

So these are the people who got me to the holly woods, through them and then out of the other side. But of course, that’s just the start; it’s still dangerous out there. Once you are out of the woods, you find yourself in the urban jungle and although the insects may have gone, some of the vermin are still lurking and sometimes they are bigger and more dangerous for being camouflaged. For these you need not only the combined forces of all of the above, but something extra – a business manager. I am lucky enough to have two: Stephen Marks in England and Nicholas Brown in America.

Hollywood is a rich and glamorous place, but without all these people on my side I’d have had a tough time. If you’re poisoned it will be by champagne or caviar. If you are run over it will be by a Rolls Royce. If you are strangled it will be with a string of perfectly matched pearls. But you’ll still be dead.

In spite of the many traps it lays for the unwary and in spite of the fact that it hardly has any movie studios there any longer, Hollywood is still a place that fosters and cherishes its own myths – and three of the industry’s most significant places of pilgrimage are sited right in the centre of town. The first is a cinema called, for reasons now lost in the mists of the past, Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, now one of the great tourist sites in Hollywood. It was opened on Hollywood Boulevard in 1927 by Sid Grauman (well, that explains the ‘Grauman’ element), who filled it with exotic Chinese art and topped it with a spectacular ninety-foot high jade-green roof (which I suppose would explain the ‘Chinese’ bit). The first shovel of dirt was dug by Norma Talmadge and the first rivet was inserted by Anna May Wong, both great stars of the time. In the forecourt, they installed a special exhibit where stars placed their hand and foot prints into the paving stones – a feature that has ensured the theatre its place in Hollywood history. Grauman’s has displayed the prints of just 200 stars since 1927 and the first stars so honoured were Mary Pickford and her husband, Douglas Fairbanks, who gave their hand and footprints on 30 April 1927. One of the most recent actors honoured is, I’m proud to say, me, on 11 July 2008.

The Hollywood Walk of Fame comes next. Stars each get a commemorative star-shaped plaque in the paving stones of Hollywood running west from Gower Street to La Brea Avenue, and south to north on both sides of Vine Street between Yucca Street and Sunset Boulevard, for three and a half miles. There are over 2000 stars in the pavement. The first recipient was Joanne Woodward on 9 February 1960 and one of the most recent is Roger Moore’s. I haven’t managed to go and receive mine yet, but I’m looking forward to it.

The last – but of course the one that has come to symbolise the film industry the world over – is the Hollywood sign itself that towers so proudly over the movie colony. And before we leave the myth that is Hollywood, here is the final proof that it’s not really like that: the sign has nothing to do with the studios. It was constructed in 1923 by two real estate developers called Woodruff and Shoults to advertise their development HOLLYWOODLAND – which was what the original sign read. Over the years the sign deteriorated. The first ‘O’ broke in half leaving a ‘u’ and then a second ‘O’ fell off altogether leaving a sign which read: ‘HuLLYWODLAND’. In 1932 an actress called Peg Entwhistle committed suicide by jumping off the letter ‘H’ and in the forties the official caretaker, Albert Kothe, drove his car into the ‘H’ while drunk and completely destroyed it. Since no one thought ‘uLLYWODLAND’ was much of an advertisement for one of America’s most iconic exports, the Hollywood chamber of commerce took it over, replaced the missing letters, chopped off ‘LAND’ and the legend was born. I’ve been delighted to call the place home on and off for more than forty years and its magic has never faded for me. I’ve just got much better at navigating through those wild woods.