The Elephant to Hollywood (6 page)

The next Saturday I was outside Solosy’s when it opened. Five minutes later I was round the corner, sitting on a bench in Leicester Square looking at an advertisement for an Assistant Stage Manager (‘plus minor acting roles’) for a small theatre company based in Horsham, Sussex. By Monday I had sent off my application (in what I hoped would be the less risible name of ‘Michael Scott’), including a hastily taken photograph of me in which I appeared to be wearing lipstick. The following week I found myself sitting in the office of the owner and director of the company, Mr Alwyn D. Fox. He seemed to be a bit disappointed. ‘You’re nothing like your photograph, are you?’ he said. Ah, I understood. I was twenty years old, six foot two, with long blond curly hair and the remnants of a tan I had acquired on the boat back from Korea, but I was categorically and unmistakably butch. ‘Edgar!’ Alwyn D. Fox suddenly shrieked. From out of an inner office emerged a man even smaller and more delicate than Mr Fox. The two of them stood side by side, hands on hips, gazing at me. ‘Oh, I think he’ll
do
,’ said Edgar eventually. And I was hired.

One of the upsides of working in a largely gay company was that, with less competition around, my sex life increased dramatically. Another was that I got given most of the butch minor roles to cut my teeth on. My very first role as a professional actor was as the policeman who comes along at the end of the play to arrest the villain who has been discovered by the posh, effete amateur detective. I can’t remember the name of the play, or who wrote it, but I can remember my one line – ‘Come along with me, sir,’ – which is all the more remarkable after nearly fifty years, since I forgot it at the time. The problem was that – yes, again – I had forgotten to do my flies up and so when I went on, the audience fell about, which threw me completely. One of the actors helpfully whispered my words to me but I couldn’t hear what he said and asked, crossly, and in my normal speaking voice, ‘
What
?’ Another gale of laughter – and I was banned from performing for the next three weeks.

Now I look back, I realise I learnt a huge amount from Alwyn D. Fox and my time in Horsham. Of course I always now check my flies before each take, but I also always bring a pencil to rehearsals so I can take notes on the moves. (‘The first thing you need to become an actor is a pencil!’ Alwyn screamed at me the first day.) He also drummed into me the importance of speaking clearly. During my very first rehearsal he stopped me mid speech and pointed to the balcony. ‘The person sitting at the back there,’ he said, ‘has paid to hear every word you have to say and every gesture you have to make.’ He was right. He was right, too, about something else. In one play we did, I was playing a scene in which my character was not on speaking terms with the rest of the cast. I had to sit in a corner, downstage. One night, one of the old ladies in the audience took pity on me and leant out of her seat, over the footlights and offered me a caramel. I took it and nodded my thanks. The minute we’d taken the last curtain call, Alwyn rounded on me. ‘How dare you break the fourth wall!’ The fourth wall? What on earth was he talking about? ‘The fourth wall!’ he went on, working himself up into a frenzy. ‘It’s the invisible fourth wall between us and the audience and if you break it the magic of theatre is
completely
destroyed!’

The sort of training I had in rep has more or less disappeared for young actors. TV is the training ground now, and that work just didn’t exist when I started in the business. But I still think that if you’re going to be any good at comedy you do have to do live theatre, or you can’t time laughs. When you make a movie or a TV series there’s no audience response to test yourself against, so I always make sure I speak as loudly as I can in rehearsal and then check the reaction of the technicians. If they laugh – and they’ve seen it all before – then I know I’m doing the right thing.

In the end I did nine years of theatre rep, rather than the three years of training that students get at RADA. There’s no doubt in my mind that RADA offers amazing opportunities to its students. At the end of the courses they do these show pieces and agents and casting directors all come along. I never had that sort of chance and I think it’s great that kids these days do – and kids from all sorts of backgrounds, too. I gave a speech to the graduating year at RADA the other day and I told this joke. Two actors meet and one says in a posh voice, ‘Oh, hell
air
! How
are
you?’ And the other says, ‘I’m not too good.’ ‘Why? What’s the matter?’ asks the posh one. And his friend says, ‘I can’t get any work ’cos I’ve got this, y’know, workin’ class accent. It’s all right for you,’ he says, ‘you talk posh.’ ‘No, listen,’ says the posh one. ‘You can’t get a job because you’ve got a Cockney accent? Well, let me tell you something – I’m a Cockney, too.’ And the other one says, ‘What?’ And the posh one says, ‘Yes. What I say to you is that you should go to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and learn to speak properly like what I done!’ Standing there at RADA, looking down at all those hopefuls in the audience, I felt rather envious – at their age I would have loved to have been in their shoes. After all, what did I gain from those nine years in rep that I couldn’t have learned in college? I survived. Someone once asked me what my greatest talent as an actor was, and I said, ‘Survival – I’ll still be here when I’m seventy.’ Well, as I write, I’m seventy-seven . . .

Although I was learning the craft of acting fast at Horsham, I still suffered from acute stage fright and kept a bucket in the wings into which I would throw up each time I went on. By now I had progressed to bigger parts but I still felt sick and soon nausea was joined by violent attacks of shivering, which got worse and worse over the weeks. We were playing
Wuthering Heights
and in a spectacular piece of miscasting, I was acting the drunken, shambolic Hindley Earnshaw against Alwyn D. Fox’s tiny and delicate friend Edgar, who had been cast as the powerful brute Heathcliff. The magic of theatre remained surprisingly intact until it came to the fight scene in which Heathcliff has to beat Hindley Earnshaw to a pulp, when the fourth wall came crashing down spectacularly. The problem was that, by the end of a week of this I was shivering and shaking so hard that even if the roles had been reversed Edgar would have won hands down – and during the Saturday matinee, I collapsed.

It was cerebral malaria. Not something you would associate with Sussex, and you would be right. It seemed that Korea was determined not to let me go. When I was finally released from hospital and sent back home to my mother I had lost over forty pounds, my clothes hung off my body and my face had gone a terrible yellow colour. I had been told that my type of malaria was incurable, that I would have to take pills for the rest of my life and that that life would probably not last more than another twenty years. Since it was clear that Hollywood was no longer a possibility, as soon as I could I rang up Alwyn. ‘Well – where have
you
been?’ he demanded. ‘We thought you’d abandoned us!’ I was so overwhelmed, I started crying. ‘I should warn you,’ I said, gulping back tears, ‘I don’t look the same.’ ‘Oh, don’t I know it!’ he said. ‘I came to see you in hospital. Never mind – we’ll do a season of horror plays.’

In fact I had only been back in Horsham a few weeks when I was summoned back to hospital. The army had found a tropical diseases expert who had come up with a cure for my particular type of malaria and I was to be part of proving him right. I wasn’t the only one. When I arrived on the ward I found all my mates from the unit – and every one of them had turned the colour of a daffodil. We were strapped to our beds for ten days because the medicine we were given made our blood so heavy that if we moved, we would knock ourselves unconscious. I never found out exactly what it was that Colonel Solomons gave us to put us right, but I’m still here, I’m no longer yellow and the reason I leave England in the winter is because I never want to shiver again.

As soon as I’d fully recovered I rang Alwyn again to find out if the job was still open but while I’d been in hospital the company had folded. I never saw Alwyn or Edgar again – although years later, when I was in Beverly Hills, I got a letter from a social worker in Hammersmith, London. He said he had an old man called Alwyn D. Fox lying destitute in one of his wards. Mr Fox, he said, was claiming he had discovered Michael Caine. In all likelihood it was fantasy, but if there was any truth in it, would I mind writing Mr Fox a letter and perhaps sending a small amount of money to make his last few weeks a bit easier? I wrote at once to confirm Alwyn’s story and enclosed a cheque for five thousand dollars. Two weeks later I had another letter from the social worker, returning the cheque. Alwyn had been delighted to get my letter, he wrote, and had spent the day he received it showing it to everyone on the ward. He had died later that night.

No Alwyn Fox meant no job for me, so I headed back to Solosy’s to pick up another copy of
The Stage
. My time at Horsham meant that I had left the Assistant Stage Manager category behind and could now (with a certain amount of artistic licence) call myself an ‘experienced juvenile’. Unfortunately, my artistic licence extended a bit too far and I added the part of ‘George’ from
George and Margaret
, a popular play that would have been the next production at Horsham, to my list of parts. When I got to one audition, in a theatre in the east-coast town of Lowestoft, I was taken aback to find that the seventy-year-old director seemed a bit hostile. ‘It says here, you played George in
George and Margaret
,’ he said. Something was clearly not right. ‘Well, I did,’ I retorted, determined to stick to the story. ‘Well, you’re a bloody liar!’ he roared. ‘You’ve never even seen the play – or you’d know that the cast spends two hours waiting for George and Margaret to turn up and they never do!’

In spite of this – perhaps he liked the way I’d acted so indignant – I got the job. I learnt a great deal from this wily old man. Three pieces of advice in particular have always stuck in my mind. In one play I did in Lowestoft I was cast as a drunkard and at the first rehearsal I came rolling onto the stage and staggered about. The director held up his hand to stop proceedings. ‘What do you think you are doing?’ he demanded. Feeling rather aggrieved, I said, ‘I’m playing a drunk.’ ‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘You are
playing
a drunk – I am paying you to
be
a drunk. A drunk is a man who is trying to act sober; you are a man who is trying to act drunk. It’s the wrong way round.’ Spot on. Another time I was on stage, but not speaking. The director held up his hand and said, again, ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ ‘Nothing!’ I replied. ‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘You may not have any lines, you are on stage and you are listening to what’s being said and in fact you have wonderful things to say, but you have just decided not to say them. You are every bit as much part of the action as the people who are speaking. Half of acting is listening – and the other half is reacting to what’s been said.’ Spot on. I also remember a scene in which I had to cry. I thought it was going very well, but again the director stopped me with the line I was hearing rather too frequently for my liking. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ he shouted. ‘Crying,’ I said, rather offended that he appeared unmoved by my performance. ‘No, you’re not!’ he said.  ‘You’re an actor trying to cry. A real man is someone who is trying desperately not to cry.’  Spot on, again.

I was keen enough to abide by the rules of theatre when it came to acting but I was determined not to let my lowly status as juvenile lead interfere with my love life. I had fallen in love with an impossible dream – Lowestoft’s leading lady, Patricia Haines. Pat was absolutely gorgeous, two years older than me, light years away in sophistication and a brilliant actress who didn’t have to add any extra parts to her CV. However, although she was always polite, she didn’t seem to have really noticed me at all, in fact she didn’t seem to have noticed that the company even had a new juvenile lead, no matter how often I hung around casting meaningful glances in her direction.

Things went on this way for a couple of weeks and then, one night after the show, one of the actors gave a party. As usual, Pat was the centre of attention. As usual, she acknowledged me with a brief smile and then ignored me. Realising my love for her was forever doomed to be unrequited, I settled down to concentrate on getting thoroughly plastered. I sat there alone all night, mired in misery, until the party began to fold. Just as I was contemplating an unsteady return to my lonely digs, I heard a voice from behind me. ‘Are you shy?’ I jerked round to see Pat standing there, all five feet nine of her (plus her three-inch heels). ‘Shy?’ I lurched to my feet, spilling my drink down my trousers. ‘Me? What makes you say that?’ She was a blunt Northern lass. ‘Because I can see you fancy me and you’ve not even tried to make a pass.’ A pass? Was she mad? Me, make a pass at Pat Haines? I wobbled there for a moment, intoxicated not just with cheap beer but by her closeness and the smell of her perfume, and then I took the plunge. What did I have to lose, after all? With all the confidence I could muster from all the Bogart films I had ever seen, I looked her straight in the eyes. ‘I’m in love with you,’ I said. There was absolute silence for a minute. The blood was pumping through my head so strongly I had to lean forward to catch her reply. ‘I know,’ she said with a smile. ‘And I’m in love with you, too.’ This time I knew just what to do. I leant forward and kissed her.