The Elephant to Hollywood (15 page)

Marvin was a real wheeler-dealer and a bit of a rascal and I adored him (I’ve got a soft spot for rascals, being a bit of one myself). His father, a Polish Jew, was a boxer known as Fighting Joe Davis and he’d landed up in London before signing up to the British merchant navy and then jumping ship in America. Marvin made all his money in Texan oil and ended up buying Fox and selling it to Rupert Murdoch and buying the Beverly Hills Hotel and selling it to the Sultan of Brunei. Mind you, when he died, it turned out he wasn’t quite as rich as we all thought, but while he was alive it was luxury all the way. He was very interested in art and the art market and I recall one evening round there when David Hockney came to dinner. Marvin spent a long time trying to get David to tell him how much his paintings were to buy and how much they might be worth in the future. David didn’t have the faintest idea – it was fascinating to watch art meeting commerce and both finding the other completely incomprehensible.

If Marvin had been unable to ascertain the value of a David Hockney from the man himself, he was on surer ground with his Renoirs and Picassos – the house was full of them. He showed me round once and there in the middle of all this incredible art was a still of Sly Stallone and Dolly Parton in
Rhinestone
, the 1984 movie Marvin backed and that was released with, shall we say, indifferent results. When I pointed out the incongruity of this photograph hanging side by side with some of the world’s greatest paintings he pretended to look surprised. ‘But that’s the most expensive picture in the house, Michael,’ he said. ‘It cost me forty million dollars!’

Marvin had everything and knew everybody. You could turn up to dinner there and find yourself – as we once did – at a political fund-raiser for Bill Clinton being sung to by Barbra Streisand, or, on another occasion, sitting next to Ronald Reagan. For some reason President Reagan seemed to think I was a friend of his and he greeted me with a hug and asked me how my sons were. And he did that from then on whenever we met. He never actually used my name and as I don’t have any sons I never actually found out who he thought I was – and after a bit it would have been too awkward to put it right. He was a funny guy and had a great way with words and a knack of getting to the nub of things that really appealed to me. He once told me that California was not a place to live but a way of life and I think he got that absolutely right. Another time he said to me that he didn’t mind at all no longer being president. ‘You know . . .’ – and I waited for him to say a name, but he adroitly avoided it – ‘I’m very happy living in a private home after eleven years in a public house.’ I wonder if he realised how funny that was to a Brit.

Ex-presidents, presidents-in-waiting – there was nothing you could do socially for Marvin, nothing you could give him that he couldn’t buy, but I did once do something for him that no one else could have done and that even Marvin, with all that money, couldn’t have done for himself. Shakira and I were friendly with Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson while they were married and introduced Marvin to them. Sarah really liked him and when we asked if Marvin and Barbara could join a dinner party she was organising at Buckingham Palace, she kindly agreed. It was something Marvin never quite got over – I guess he had finally found a mansion he really couldn’t afford.

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
.