The Elephant to Hollywood (24 page)

Working with Sean was another great pleasure. He is one of the most generous and unselfish actors I have ever worked with and because we trusted each other – and because John trusted both of us – it meant that we could risk some improvisation and experiment, which I think paid off in the finished film. Off the set, Sean and I were not seeing as much of each other as you might have thought. He was a fanatical golfer – he’d had to learn the game for the James Bond movie
Goldfinger
where there’s a scene in which James Bond and the arch-villain Goldfinger have to play golf with each other – and he was spending most of his spare time on the links. Trying to take an interest in my friend’s all-consuming hobby, I asked him what playing golf on a Moroccan golf course was like and he told me that if you lost your ball in the lake you couldn’t get it back because the crocodiles would have it. I could just see Sean working himself up over losing that ball so I didn’t enquire further . . . I was a bit puzzled as to why he seemed
quite
so obsessed with the game but after a while I found out why. He had met a beautiful French woman on the course, someone who shared his passion for the game . . . Michelene went on to become his second wife.

As I’ve mentioned before, Sean Connery is the second reason I don’t play golf. Unlike my other golfing friend Sidney Poitier, Sean is not the kindest, gentlest person in the world and my lack of grasp of the sport would not make him sad as it did Sidney, it would just make him angry. In fact, Sean has a terrible temper and when he tried to teach me golf he was so incensed by my performance, he grabbed my club and broke it in two. I have never played golf since and I never will because I do not want to upset two of my best friends.

Sean lives full time in Nassau these days, but we stay in touch regularly. The last time we met we had dinner in London and had a great time reminiscing about the old days, the struggles we’d had, meeting each other in the dole queue . . . We had the same old laughs – he’s a very funny guy – and I reminded him about how tough he’d been on the way up. I thought I was quite tough but I was never anywhere near as tough as Sean was. There was one time in the early sixties, when we were in a London club together and it was amateur night and people were standing up to sing. They weren’t very good, but they were only kids trying their best. There was a group of drunks behind us and they started taking the piss out of the kids and Sean spoke to them a couple of times politely, asking, ‘Will you give the kids a chance? They’re trying to make their way in life.’ Finally Sean had had enough and he got up, said, ‘Shut the fuck up!’ and knocked all four of them out. I didn’t even leave the chair. I tell you, you wouldn’t mess with Sean unless you were very silly.

The relationship that developed between the two Johns, Chris Plummer, Sean and me made for a very special atmosphere on set. This was just as well, because
The Man Who Would Be King
was a hard picture to make. I had picked up terrible diarrhoea and had to play most of my scenes with half an eye on the location of the portable toilets – not that they offered much of a refuge. I remember rushing over to them once, desperate, and being knocked back by the unbelievable stench and the cloud of flies. The attendant, who was reading the paper, apparently oblivious, had forgotten the disinfectant. I bawled him out for this, but he just shrugged. ‘Come back at lunchtime,’ he suggested. ‘The flies will have moved on to the kitchen by then.’ You couldn’t fault the logic . . .

Chronic diarrhoea and – for me – a mild but frightening typhoid attack from breathing in filthy dust and dried camel dung were unpleasant enough, but neither Sean nor I were ever in real physical danger. The closest Sean got to it was shooting the last scene of the film, where his character is executed by being forced to stand on a rope bridge above a ravine before the ropes are cut and he plunges to his death. The bridge was built specially, but it seemed to both of us to be swaying in the breeze in a rather too convincing manner. I couldn’t manage more than a few steps, but Sean had to go right out into the middle. ‘It’s leaning to the right,’ he said to John Huston. ‘It wasn’t doing that yesterday.’ ‘Ah – that’s because yesterday you didn’t have to walk on it and today you do,’ said John. ‘You’re looking at it from a different point of view.’ I could see Sean weighing this up, but there was no way he wouldn’t accept the challenge and he turned round and walked straight out to the middle of the bridge. His character has to sing as the ropes are cut and Sean sang at the top of his voice, with not a wobble in it, as the fake ropes were cut – but there was no mistaking his relief when he got back to solid ground.

The real hero then took his place. Joe Powell was an experienced stuntman and the bottom of the ravine had been filled with foam and mattresses, but it was a genuine heart-in-the-mouth moment when the axes fell on the real ropes and he leapt off the bridge. It was windy and I’ve never forgotten looking down at those mattresses, which seemed to present a very small landing target all those hundreds of feet below. Joe fell so skillfully, twisting and turning on the way down to avoid all the sharp rocks, countering the pull of the wind as he went, and at the very last minute straightening himself out so that he hit the mattresses dead centre. There was a gasp of relief all round and then cheers as he got up uninjured, and John Huston turned to me and said, ‘That’s the darnedest stunt I’ve ever seen.’

I adored John Huston. He was like a father figure to me, a director who was very gentle with actors because he loved being one himself. Men like John have an aura about them that you can sense from a mile away. You could call it charisma or you could call it star quality, but whatever it is, it commands attention and respect. In a very different and rather less reassuring way, one of the other Hollywood greats whom I got to know well and who had this in spades was, of course, Frank Sinatra. We first met at the
Gambit
party, but we got to know each other better when I started dating his daughter Nancy, shortly afterwards, and he took us on a memorable weekend trip to hear him sing with Count Basie in Las Vegas.

Nancy and I flew to Las Vegas with Frank in his private plane and I sat next to him on the flight quite unable to believe that I was there next to my idol. He noticed that I seemed a bit on edge and asked me what was wrong and I told him and he laughed. When he first came to Hollywood, he said, he was equally struck dumb when he found himself sitting next to Ronald Colman. ‘Relax!’ Frank said to me. ‘We’re all the same. We live, love and die.’ And then he told me his motto, which was: ‘Live every day as though it’s your last – because one day it will be.’

When we got to our hotel, however, I realised that Frank wasn’t quite the easy-going guy he sometimes seemed. The Sands Hotel consisted of a squat square block with a tall tower next to it and I was booked into a suite in the square block. As I was going along the corridor I bumped into Frank. ‘Where’s Nancy’s room?’ I asked, without thinking. He smiled and led me to a window. ‘Up there,’ he said, pointing to the very top of the tower. He then opened the door of the suite next to mine and said, ‘And you’re down here with me.’

My intentions were entirely honourable as far as Nancy was concerned, in fact, but I was a bit worried because I was aware that Frank might well consider that I already had form . . . When I first arrived in Hollywood, Frank had just charged his friend, the scriptwriter Harry Kurnitz, with keeping an eye on Mia Farrow (Frank and Mia were about to get married). Harry became one of my mates and he, Mia and I all went out together in a gang with Steve Brandt. We were very effective at keeping Mia away from trouble until one evening we went to a film premiere together and the four of us were photographed in a row holding hands and smiling. Innocent stuff – until I opened the papers the next day and saw the same picture, but with Harry and Steve cut off the end and the caption, ‘
Mia with new beau Michael Caine
’. It was a nasty moment: I was only too aware that it wasn’t a good idea to get on the wrong side of Frank. Luckily Harry was there to put in a good word for me and disaster was avoided.

Over the years I became good friends with Frank and, later, Shakira and I would enjoy spending time with him and his wife Barbara. I’ve often wondered why Frank liked me, but I think it was because he thought I was funny – and he liked to laugh. He also liked my accent and he used to say to the people around him, ‘Did you hear that?
Good morning
? Did you hear the way he said that?’ And he always had this thing that I made too many movies. Every time we met he’d say, ‘How many movies you make today?’ and I’d say,’ Only one, Frank, only one.’ I think Frank also found me a bit unusual. He didn’t suffer fools and I think he respected the fact that I didn’t defer to him. He was very generous about my acting, too. He loved
Alfie
, in particular. It wasn’t surprising, I guess – he
was
Alfie and then some! I think there was also a connection between us because of our backgrounds: he was a slum kid and I was a slum kid. He liked the fact that I wasn’t a toffee-nosed Englishman. And then there was his affection for London. He told me about the time his career was in the doldrums and how he’d just finished
From Here to Eternity
and they asked him to go to the Columbia offices in Wardour Street to see the finished movie. ‘And from the moment I saw it,’ he said, ‘I knew that there I was, in London, and I was on my way back. And, Michael, I always remember it was in London.’

I was in England when Frank died in 1998. Of course the surprise wasn’t that he’d died, but that he lived so long. He smoked like a chimney, which was unusual for a singer, and he was a heavy drinker. On one of the last occasions we met, it was at a dinner he gave in Palm Springs. I was standing near the bar about to place an order when Frank came over. He put his hand on my elbow. ‘You’re not going to order a Perrier, are you, Michael?’ he said with only the faintest hint of menace. ‘No, Frank,’ I said, hastily changing my mind. ‘Vodka and tonic.’

Hollywood was different back then. It seems to me that perhaps the stars of today are not the big characters I used to know and work with. I’ve just watched the Academy Awards and all the people nominated seemed to be very small young men who had just been in a vampire film. They were all dark looking and a bit pale – as I guess you would be – and I’m not sure that among them I can identify the new De Niro, Pacino or Hoffman. There’s the physical thing, too: they really do seem to be getting smaller. Sean Connery, Peter O’Toole and I are all over six foot: Tom Cruise is short and so is Jude Law. Bogart was small, but then he made it work for him by getting all the parts George Raft didn’t want to do.

I suspect one of the reasons the old star system worked was because there was no TV at the time and when those big stars were up there on the huge screen they seemed much more remote than they are now when they are beamed directly into our sitting rooms. These days there’s complete fluidity between movies and television and it’s possible to switch between the two seamlessly. Alec Baldwin, for instance, who almost became a great film star and then suddenly he made a success of
30 Rock
and his movie career took off again. Tina Fey – to me, she’s the funniest girl in the business and she makes me laugh just to look at her – began in TV and has now moved into movies. Of course, it can work the other way round – Lucille Ball started off as a movie star but the peak of her career was in television.

Stars of the magnitude of Elizabeth Taylor and Vivien Leigh – and male stars like Cary Grant, Robert Redford, Paul Newman or Clint Eastwood – have always been careful about the roles they chose. I took a different view. Between
Gambit
in the late Sixties and what I thought was going to be my retirement from the movie business in 1992, I was in well over seventy films. I always took a pragmatic view: if a movie came along and I liked the look of it and I needed the work, I did it. I had no concerns about letting down my fans by playing a particular role. I am an actor and I work for a living. And I think it’s why, when the time came to morph from movie star to leading actor that – once I’d got used to the idea – I was able to do so. I have always kept the example of Sir John Gielgud in my mind, too – a wonderfully gifted actor who kept working right until the end of his life. His agent told me that even aged ninety-two, Gielgud was still ringing to ask, ‘Are there any scripts this week? Is there any work?’ And he famously sacked an agent when he was ninety-six for not getting him a part in the TV adaptation of
David Copperfield
. We worked together on one of my more obscure works,
The Whistle Blower
, which was released in 1987, and I always found him eccentric, charming and very funny. Like me, he developed a useful line in butlers (he won an Oscar as Dudley Moore’s butler in
Arthur
), although his butler was very different indeed from the one I would go on to play in the Batman movies.