The Elephant to Hollywood (12 page)

In the end
The Ipcress File
was one of the best movies Sidney Furie – who would later become a friend and neighbour in Beverly Hills – ever made. It was certainly the most commercially successful. It still ran into the old movie executive problem, though. After the first rushes we got a cable from Hollywood.
‘Dump Caine’s spectacles and make the girl cook the meal – he is coming across as a homosexual.’
 This is not the exact message – I’ve cleaned it up a bit – but the implication is clear enough. We had deliberately gone anti-Bond and as well as the glasses, we’d decided that Harry Palmer should be a cook, which was admittedly risky stuff in Britain in 1964, but we made it work. So when Harry goes shopping in a supermarket and pushes his trolley round, it turns into a fight with the trolleys as weapons. And when Harry seduces the girl, he doesn’t wine and dine her in a fancy restaurant, he takes her home and cooks her dinner – making an omelette by breaking two eggs at once in one hand. (I could see how seductive this would be, but I never mastered it and so in the movie it is writer – and fantastic cook – Len Deighton’s hand you see doing the trick.) And as for the glasses, when the girl (played by Sue Lloyd) asks if I always wear them, I reply, ‘I only take them off in bed,’ and she reaches over and takes them off. It’s now classed as one of the great moments of movie seduction, so I’m glad we stuck to our guns.

My next major film role would finally nail the idea that I looked gay on screen once and for all: Alfie is one of cinema’s great womanisers. I wasn’t first choice for the part; the director, Lewis Gilbert, wanted Terence Stamp, who’d played Alfie in Bill Naughton’s stage version, and I spent three hours trying to persuade him to do it. But Terry had taken the play to Broadway where it had flopped and wasn’t keen to repeat the experience. Thank God.

Apart from stepping in the dog shit on day one of the filming, I found
Alfie
a surprisingly straightforward movie to make. I was growing in confidence with every new role and I found Lewis Gilbert – who came from a similar background to me – great to work with. Unlike some directors, he actually worked with his cast and took their opinions into account, even asking me who we might cast as the middle-aged married woman Alfie seduces. I immediately thought of Vivien Merchant, with whom I’d appeared in Harold Pinter’s
The Room
at the Royal Court. She was a brilliant stage actress, but she’d never appeared in a film before and Lewis wanted her to do a screen test, which she refused to do. It looked as if that was that, but Lewis took a chance on my judgement and we cast her anyway. She turned out to be a huge success and was eventually nominated for an Oscar. Lewis and I also came up with a way to have Alfie address the audience without making it seem as if he was delivering a long declamatory speech: I spoke instead as if I was talking just to one person, so the audience felt as if they were an intimate friend of the character.

In spite of all Lewis’s encouragement, however, and my gut feeling that things were going well, I still refused to see any of the rushes. I could now well afford a new pair of shoes, but I still didn’t want to be sick all over them. It’s not about being competitive with other actors; my competition has always been me. My only question is: can I be better than I was the last time? I’m not just self-critical, I’m a nightmare! And with rushes, I’d learnt from my experience with
Zulu
that if you see them you’ll just screw up the next day’s shooting worrying about yesterday’s. It’s a lesson in life – don’t look back, you’ll trip over.

‘Why not just wait outside?’ Lewis said to me kindly one day when he was about to go into the screening room with the latest reels. Feeling decidedly queasy, I hung about nervously – and was immensely relieved to hear gales of laughter coming from inside. Maybe, just maybe, this was going to be a hit.

Lewis certainly thought so. We had lunch in that twilight zone in between finishing filming and awaiting news of a release date, and he said to me, ‘You know you’re really very good in this. I think you could be nominated for an Oscar.’ I just sat there dumbly, gaping at him. I’d never imagined that
Alfie
would have any traction in America whatsoever. Alfie himself spoke in such a heavy Cockney accent that Shelley Winters, my co-star, told me that she hadn’t understood a single thing I’d said to her during the course of the movie and had resorted to just watching my lips to know when to come in on cue. I’d had to lip-synch a clearer version of my lines onto the original take, in case we did get an American release (if you ever see the American version of the film you’ll think I can’t do a Cockney accent, but you will get to hear the closing titles sound track ‘What’s it all about, Alfie?’ because Burt Bacharach only wrote it after he saw an American preview), but I hadn’t really thought it was likely to happen. Just shows how much I knew . . . And Lewis was right. I did get nominated for an Academy Award by the people in my boyhood dreamland, Hollywood. I didn’t go to the ceremony and in the end it was just as well. The Oscar was won by my favourite stage actor (and friend) Paul Scofield in the movie version of my favourite stage play,
A Man for All Seasons
. I asked his wife later where he was when he heard the news. ‘On the roof of our barn,’ she said, ‘mending it.’ ‘What did he say?’ I persisted. ‘Oh – you know, “Isn’t that nice, dear?”’ I have been nominated many times for an Oscar and won it twice, and whenever I see the tears and tantrums at today’s ceremony, I always think of Paul and smile.

But all this was in the future. I had filmed
Ipcress
and
Alfie
back to back, and was first waiting for the release of
The Ipcress File
and the verdict of the critics. It didn’t look too promising. Harry Salzman and I sneaked out of the low-key premiere to gauge the reaction of the audience and the first man we spoke to told us he thought it was the biggest load of crap he’d ever seen. I was immediately plunged into the depths of gloom and went off and got very drunk. I woke up the next morning with a stinking hangover and, feeling very sick, went off to get the papers.

The first review I read confirmed my worst fears: it was awful. But the next one was good, the one after that was even better and after that the good notices began to pile up so consistently that even I could see that I had made it. I began to cry – not just quietly, but great heaving sobs I couldn’t control. After all this time, after all the knock-backs, the rejections, the struggle – I really was a success. Without quite realising what I was doing, I scrunched up the papers and started throwing them out of the window, howling as I did so. ‘Oi!’ a voice from the street below shouted. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ An old charlady was standing there looking up at me, hands on hips. ‘Come down here and pick these up!’ she shrieked and, then, seeing my tear-stained face staring down at her, ‘You don’t need to cry,’ she said more kindly. ‘It’s time you grew up.’

I took a deep breath and looked around me. She was right: I did need to grow up. I was thirty-two. I had been so focused on work that I hadn’t had a chance to sit back and take stock. I went down to the street and picked up all the paper and vowed that from now on I’d take things a little more calmly.

I couldn’t have got away with sneaking out of the premiere of
Alfie
as I had at
The Ipcress File
. This was the real deal. It was held a year later in March 1966 at the Plaza in Piccadilly and was a massive event. It seemed as if anyone who was anyone in the Sixties was there – from all of the Rolling Stones and the Fab Four Beatles to Barbra Streisand and Tippi Hedren, who fainted during the abortion scene and had to be carried out. This time I did take my mum. When I look back, I can see that she hadn’t wanted to go to the
Zulu
premiere because she was terrified she might make a mistake and screw up my career at such a delicate stage – that was the way she thought. I think it was probably a class thing and she was intimidated by the thought of all those people in evening dress. She was completely devoted to what I was doing – mind you, she wasn’t quite sure what it was – but she trusted me. She hadn’t wanted to go to the premiere, but she still wanted to witness it.

Things were different at the premiere for
Alfie
. The party afterwards was in a pub called The Cockney Pride and Mum almost had to be forcibly removed at two in the morning. It was a great night, but best of all was sharing it with the person who had done so much to make it all possible. But my mum was not going to let any of my success go to her head. She still worked as a charlady, getting up at six in the morning to clean people’s houses and no matter how often I told her that I had enough money for her never to work again, she stubbornly refused to give it up. I didn’t know what to do but eventually, I hit on the right solution. ‘Mum,’ I said, ‘what do you think the press would say if they knew you were still scrubbing floors when I was earning all this money? They’d crucify me!’ She saw the sense in that at once. As I said, there was nothing she wouldn’t do for her boys.

In the end, after a very tough start, Mum had a very happy life – although I’m not sure she ever quite understood what I did and she certainly never understood how much I earned. She asked me a few years later, ‘How much do you earn for a film?’ And I said, ‘A million pounds.’ ‘Oh,’ she said and she was quiet for a bit and then she said, ‘How much is that?’ She had no way of computing that sort of money, so I said, ‘It means you don’t have to do anything, Mum, work for anything, or want for anything ever, ever, ever again. So no taking crafty cleaning jobs to be with your mates or I’ll get into trouble with the papers.’ She never let me see how important my success was to her, or how proud she was of what I’d achieved. In fact she hardly mentioned it at all – unless it was to take the piss out of me. But when she died in 1989 her friends and members of our family all told me that she’d spoken of me with tremendous pride. She was just very careful not to let me get too big for my boots.

Meanwhile, there was something she was keeping from me. She’d lost touch with my brother Stanley and she was very upset about it. None of his friends seemed to know where he’d gone and I began to get worried too as all my efforts to trace him failed. I’d almost given up when one day I was in Heal’s, the classy furniture store, ordering a new sofa and I asked to see one they had out the back. Two blokes in overalls heaved it in to the showroom for me and as they manoeuvred it into place, one of them turned in my direction and I saw it was Stanley. I was really shocked to see him looking so shabby and felt terrible that he was working so hard to keep his head above water while I was ordering sofas without a second thought. In the end, it worked out brilliantly. I took care of things for Stanley and as I was about to go away to the Cannes film festival where they were showing
The Ipcress File
, he moved into my flat to take care of things for me.

It was in Cannes that I finally realised what my life had become. Harry Salzman put me up in a very grand suite at the Carlton Hotel and I revelled in the luxury of it, but as soon as
Ipcress
was shown I realised that my days of freedom were over. I couldn’t leave the hotel without being mobbed by the press. Sean Connery was also in town and he hated it so much – he couldn’t even get to the hotel dining room in peace – that he left the same day. I wasn’t in quite that league yet, so I stuck it out and went to the reception given by the British Consul. The Beatles were also in the line-up and I was next to John Lennon. After the fiftieth person had shaken our hands and asked who we were and what we did, John and I changed our names – his to Joe Lemon and mine back to Maurice Micklewhite. It didn’t seem to make much difference, but it cheered us up. John and I made a nice little drinking team for the couple of days we were in Cannes and toured the parties together. He was a tough, no-nonsense man and completely indifferent to the glamour of our surroundings. At one party, we found ourselves both needing a pee and all the lavatories occupied. We roamed round some great palace of a house and eventually I found an en suite bathroom upstairs and rushed in. When I’d finished, I came out to find John rather unsteadily peeing out of the bedroom window. ‘John, you’ve got it on the bloody curtains!’ I said. ‘Who cares?’ said John in that unmistakeable voice. ‘They’re rich – fuck ’em!’

If Cannes seemed like impossible glamour, then New York, where I was off to next, was in another league.

6

To Hollywood

Alfie
had opened in the US and had been such a hit (those long hours getting the lip-synching right had obviously paid off) that it went on general release, which was a rare event for a British-made picture. So the plan was that I too would go on general release along with it and do my first ever American publicity tour from New York. When I got there, I discovered that
The Ipcress File
had been bought by Universal and was also on general release, and I was overwhelmed by the response I got. A year ago I had been a complete unknown, here I was with two hit movies playing to packed houses across the States and I was hailed everywhere as a star. In fact I was the one who was starstruck – at parties given for me and in restaurants, night after night, I found myself next to one movie legend after another. At the 21 Club I sat next to Kirk Douglas and Maureen O’Hara; at Elaine’s (soon to become a fixture of my New York life) I knocked over Woody Allen’s wine glass and trod on Ursula Andress’s foot; and at the Russian Tea Room I sat in between Helen Hayes and Walter Matthau. If anyone had told that little boy sitting in that dark, smoky cinema in the Elephant all those years ago that this was where he’d end up, he’d have thought they were mad.