The Elephant to Hollywood (10 page)

But I did have a problem. I had known lots of officers and I knew exactly how they had behaved towards me, but I had no idea how they behaved towards each other and
Zulu
was a picture about a relationship between two officers. So in the weeks before I left for South Africa, I arranged to go for lunch every Friday in the Grenadier Guards officers’ mess. The Guards were on the whole very tolerant of having this soppy actor hanging about, but I noticed that they gave the job of looking after me – which no one else wanted – to the youngest and newest member of the mess, a young second lieutenant called Patrick Lichfield. Neither of us knew it then, but Lord Lichfield and I would become great friends later in the sixties when he left the army and took up photography.

Perhaps I should also have asked the Guards for a bit of help with the horses. Riding lessons had been a bit hard to come by down at the Elephant but I’d told Cy Endfield confidently that I could ride. What I had omitted to mention was that I’d only actually done so twice and both times had been in Wimbledon. I’d booked lessons on the Common, but I only got as far as the High Street. I fell off the horse in front of a bus on the first day and I fell off the horse in front of a bicycle the second day (with far more damaging consequences), and I didn’t go back for the third. It wasn’t that I didn’t like horses – Lottie, the big old mare we’d had on the farm in Norfolk used to follow me round like a dog – but I’d never done much more than sit on her with my legs sticking straight out at the side. Through some equine sixth sense the brute of a horse I was sitting on for my first shot in
Zulu
seemed to know this and took an instant dislike to me. The feeling was mutual. We were filming a long shot of me coming back alone to the British military encampment after a hunting expedition and I was told to walk the horse back towards the camera slowly. It sounded simple enough, but the horse refused to budge. ‘Kick it up the backside!’ yelled Cy through the intercom and the prop man gave it a whack. The horse moved all right – just not forward. It reared up on its back legs and started prancing around with me clinging on for dear life. ‘Cut!’ Cy shouted. ‘You’re not auditioning for the fucking Spanish Riding School!’ The prop man calmed the horse down and we started off again, walking along a path down the side of the hill. All was going according to plan until we rounded a bend. The horse, by now as much of a nervous wreck as I was, must have caught sight of its own shadow on the hillside and with an ear-splitting whinny it leapt off the path and started hurtling towards a twenty-foot drop, with me yelling all the way. The prop man only just managed to catch up and grab the bridle and drag us both to a halt before we tipped over the edge. I’d really wrenched my back in the process and the prop man relayed this to Cy over the intercom. ‘Oh for God’s sake!’ I could hear Cy saying irritably. ‘We’ve got to get this shot today – the sun’s going down. Can you ride?’ he asked the prop man. The prop man could. And so my first appearance in my first ever major motion picture is in fact not me at all, but a prop man called Ginger in my hat and cape.

I was a bit aggrieved that no one seemed bothered about my back at the end of that day’s filming – or my knees, the following day, when the same horse, who had obviously really got it in for me, threw me into a pond. I brought this up with Stanley Baker. ‘Simple,’ he said. ‘You’ve only done two scenes and at this point we could replace you quite easily – almost more cheaply than we could replace the horse or your clothes.’ I opened my mouth to protest, but he went on, ‘The more shots you’re in, the more careful we’ll be about you – until the final scene when, once again, we won’t care a shit. A golden rule, Michael,’ he said, ‘never do a dangerous stunt on the last day of a picture.’ And I never have.

Things went more smoothly after that, but even so I was dreading the initial rushes. The film had to be sent to England to be processed so I had two weeks to get nervous about how my performance would come across on screen. The stakes were high; this was my big break. Eventually the big day came and I sat in the screening room surrounded by fellow-actors and cameramen and the other technicians from the set. The projectors whirred into action, the screen flickered and suddenly a huge face appeared and began to drone on in a ridiculously clipped British accent. I broke out in a sweat, my heart pounding. I wasn’t just bad – I was very bad. Career over, I thought. ‘Who told that silly bastard to pull his hat down over his fucking eyes?’ I heard someone say just behind me. I was outraged – this was a skilful piece of characterisation! I had worn a pith helmet that shaded the top half of my face and I would tip my head back to allow the sun to catch my eyes when I wanted to make a particular point.  Not that it mattered any more; I’d be on the first plane home. Once again I threw up all over my shoes and rushed out.

Next evening, determined to face the music like a man, I went down to the bar in the hotel we were all staying in, lined up a couple of drinks and waited for Stanley and Cy to come in from the day’s shooting. ‘Hey – not bad, kid!’ Stanley said as they breezed by. ‘Don’t worry – you’ll get better.’ I stood looking after them, mouth open. Did they really mean it? I downed the drinks and decided that I needed to work on my paranoia.

I wasn’t too successful. A few days later, one of the secretaries from the production department beckoned me in as I was passing by. She was gorgeous, and thinking my lucky day had come, I followed her in to her office anticipating a bit of action. Instead, she rather nervously handed me a telegram. It had come from a senior executive in Paramount head office in London.
‘Fire Michael Caine doesn’t know what to do with his hands.’
Again I was outraged. Searching around for someone on whom to model the character of Lieutenant Bromhead, a man from an immensely privileged background, I had lit upon Prince Philip. The first thing I’d noticed about him was that he always walked with his hands clasped behind his back because, I realised, he never had to do anything for himself. He never had to open doors, he never had to use his hands to gain attention – he would always be the centre of any conversation – and he was surrounded by bodyguards so he’d never have to use his hands in self-defence. This was yet another piece of skilful characterisation wasted on an unappreciative audience! Was I doomed always to be misunderstood?

Outrage aside, I was certain that Stanley really would have no alternative but to fire me this time and I hung about miserably for the next two days waiting for the axe to fall. The problem was that I couldn’t reveal I had seen the telegram without getting the secretary into trouble. Eventually I cracked and confronted him. ‘I know you’re going to fire me,’ I began, concocting some wildly improbable tale of having accidentally seen the telegram in his office, ‘and I completely understand and I’ll go at once,’ I finished in a rush. He stood there for a moment and I realised he was actually angry. ‘I am the producer of this movie, Michael,’ he said. ‘Have I fired you?’ ‘No, Stan,’ I said. ‘Then get on with your job – and stop reading my fucking mail or I
will
fire you!’ So I really was going to be in the movie. This time I managed to get to the gents before I was sick on my shoes.

It wasn’t just my first time on a major movie, it was my first time in Africa – a continent I love and would return to later with my friend Sidney Poitier to make
The Wilby Conspiracy
. The landscape of the Drakensberg mountains was powerful enough, and the wildlife was incredible, but it was the African people who really made the filming of
Zulu
so memorable.
Zulu
tells the story of the Battle of Rorke’s Drift between a small detachment of a Welsh regiment (hence Stanley Baker’s interest in the incident) and the Zulu nation, in 1879.

We were fortunate not only to have Chief Buthelezi, the head of the Zulu nation, playing the Zulu leader, but a Zulu princess as our historical consultant, which meant that the battle lines of the Zulu forces were drawn up exactly as they had been. This level of authenticity made a huge difference to the impact of the film – I still think the battle scenes are some of the best I have seen in any movie. Certainly my first sight of those two thousand Zulu warriors coming over the hills and into the valley where we were filming was unforgettable. They wore their own battle dress with high head dresses and loin cloths made of monkey skins and lions’ tails and as they approached they began beating their spears on their shields and singing a slow lament mourning the dead in battle. It was an incredible sight and sound. What it must have seemed like to the handful of British soldiers holding down their position at Rorke’s Drift I can only begin to imagine. Their bravery resulted in the award of eleven Victoria Crosses in one day – a unique event in British military history. Of course, as anyone who knows their British military history will have instantly spotted, the final Zulu assault on Rorke’s Drift didn’t involve just two thousand warriors – there were six thousand. Stanley and Cy were four thousand short. Cy Endfield, ever resourceful, had the solution. In the last scene the camera pans round to show the Zulus lining the hilltops in the distance, looking down on the British below. It’s an awesome sight and you would never guess that each of the two thousand warriors up there was holding a bit of wood with two shields and head dresses stuck on the top, instantly trebling the numbers. Genius – and nearly forty years before Peter Jackson’s spectacular CGI special effects in
Lord of the Rings.

The Zulu warriors weren’t the only Africans on set. One of the scenes involved a traditional women’s tribal dance and we’d recruited a mix of dancers, some from the tribal lands and some who had left and gone to work in Johannesburg. There was going to be a problem with the censor back home, though, as the Zulu costume involved nothing more than a little bead apron. Cy Endfield, resourceful once again, organised the costume department into making two hundred pairs of black knickers, which would appease the British Board of Film Censors while retaining a veneer of authenticity. He’d just managed to persuade the tribal dancers to wear the knickers when he was told that the city girls were insisting on also wearing bras. This was the ultimate test for a film director: how to get knickers on one set of dancers and bras off the others. He’d just about got it sorted it and the camera was rolling when the cameraman shouted, ‘Cut! We’ve got a lady here with no drawers on!’ The culprit was pulled out of the line. ‘What’s the problem now?’ Cy asked the translator, exasperated. The translator went over and spoke to the dancer. ‘She’s not used to them,’ was the reply when she came back. ‘She just forgot.’ That’s the first and last time I’ve heard that excuse on a film set . . .

South Africa was still in the grip of apartheid. I hadn’t known anything about the politics of the country when I arrived, but it made me increasingly uncomfortable to see how badly the foremen treated the black workers on the set – uncomfortable, and then plain angry.  One day, one of the workers made a simple mistake, but instead of telling him off, the brute of a foreman drew back his fist and smashed him in the face. I couldn’t believe it – and started running over, shouting as I went. Stanley got there before me and I have never witnessed fury like it. He fired the foreman on the spot and got all the other white foremen together. ‘From now on,’ he said, ‘on this set, no one treats their workers like this.’ We all shared his outrage, and it was fuelled by another incident. One of our English foremen had ‘gone native’, as you might say, and had taken up with three Zulu wives. We thought nothing of this – he seemed to be having a good time – until one day filming was interrupted by the sound of helicopters overhead. It was the police. They were going to close filming down. Our foreman had committed a crime under the South African miscegenation laws that forbade sexual contact between blacks and whites. Unbelievably, punishment was either a long prison sentence or twelve lashes with a whip – or both. We realised that one of the Afrikaans foremen must have informed on us. With diplomatic skills that wouldn’t have disgraced the UN, Stanley brokered a deal: the foreman would leave the country that night and we would stay to finish the film. It left us all with a very nasty taste in our mouths – and me with a determination never to go to South Africa again while apartheid still ruled.

Of course,
Zulu
represents the biggest piece of luck I personally ever had in show business, but it’s also a movie that has withstood the test of time. In fact it has achieved near-cult status, both in the UK and America, despite the fact that it didn’t have any sort of general release there originally. I think that one of the reasons for its lasting success is that it was one of the first British war films to treat a native enemy with dignity. Yes, the heroism of the British troops is celebrated, but so too is the heroism of the Zulu nation, whose forces are depicted as the disciplined, intelligent tacticians and soldiers that they undoubtedly were. The lack of jingoism means that it resonates for a modern audience in a way that other British war films just don’t any longer. It has never dated – and I remain very proud of it.

5

Hello, Alfie

There’s precious little to spend your money on in the Drakensberg mountains and I got back to London with my £4,000 earnings almost intact. Now was my chance to put things right. I went straight up to Sheffield to see Dominique. She was eight years old and mad about horses according to her grandmother, Claire, (that was obviously not something she’d inherited from me) and for the first time I felt I could do something for her. The pony I bought her from the proceeds of
Zulu
turned out to be the first step in what would prove to be a very satisfying career for Dominique, one I have been very proud to watch her succeed in.