The Elephant to Hollywood (18 page)

From the heat of Louisiana I went straight to Finland, for the third of the Harry Palmer movies,
Billion Dollar Brain
(and if this feels like a breathless gallop from one film to another, it’s because it was . . .). I have never felt cold like it – and I hope I never do so again. But this was the first in a whole run of movies I was to make almost back-to-back, some of them memorable and some of them I’m only too happy to forget. Subconsciously I thought that my good fortune wouldn’t last and that I should line up as many as I could while the going was good and make as much money as possible before I found myself back in the dole queue.

Aside from the cold, I was very pleased to be playing Harry Palmer again and I thought – and still think – that
Billion Dollar Brain
is a really atmospheric movie. It was way ahead of its time, too. I recently discovered that in
Billion Dollar Brain
I was the first person ever to use the internet on screen. At the time, I just assumed it was one more piece of technological spy wizardry and back then I certainly couldn’t get the hang of it – so I did what all actors do, which is to ask the experts for some emergency coaching, to make me look as if I knew what I was doing . . .  Now, of course, it’s as much part of my life as it is of everyone’s – and I couldn’t do without it! A lot of the shooting was done out on the ice floes and, although the temperature never reached more than about three degrees, the ice was cracking under our feet and beginning to melt. Standing in three inches of water was a really miserable experience – and I got a sense of the potential danger we were in when our generator truck began sinking and had to be driven off the ice. It was followed by the catering lorry, which was a very serious business. So with hand-held battery-powered lights, and no lunch, we were thoroughly fed up.

There were other problems with the extreme cold, too. I found close-ups very hard because my face had literally frozen. So Harry Palmer’s expression was not so much wooden as completely glacial! And in temperatures like this, the camera slowed right down – and then fogged up the minute we had to do an inside shot. Some of the scenes were filmed in the Helsinki botanical gardens, which were of course much warmer to preserve the plants, and there was a lot of hanging about waiting for the camera lenses to de-mist.

My head was warm, at least, and without my beautiful sable fur hat I wouldn’t have survived. The first time I put it on, a Finnish journalist was standing nearby and said – with a completely straight face – ‘You know, you bear a remarkable resemblance to Anita Ekberg.’ Anita Ekberg – me? I stole a glance at myself every time I passed a mirror, but I couldn’t quite see what she was getting at. Anita Ekberg or not, the hat looked pretty good on screen and I became very fond of it and took it home afterwards to join all the hats from my other films, that I had amassed in my bedroom. The only one missing from the collection then – the rest of it all disappeared long ago – was my pith helmet from
Zulu
. I’m sorry not to have kept that, but it was big and would have been a bit heavy to carry home from filming in South Africa. God knows who did end up with that helmet. When Berman’s, the London theatrical and film costumiers, put the uniform on display in their window the whole lot was smash-and-grabbed.

I really enjoyed playing Harry Palmer in the three movies. In some ways I felt a certain affinity with the way his character develops during the course of them. In
The Ipcress File
he was a complete innocent, just as I had been in the film business. By
Funeral in Berlin
we had both learned a lot more. And by the time we got to
Billion Dollar Brain
I felt that both Harry and I had become pretty hardened by our experiences. In many ways, playing Harry Palmer required a certain frame of mind, rather than straight-out dramatic acting. He’s cool all right, but he has to be. Being a spy is a twenty-four-hour-a-day job and he can never afford to relax.

Well, after
Billion Dollar Brain
I felt I probably could afford to relax and after we had left Finland for the distinctly milder climate of England to finish the movie, I shot off to Paris for a bit of fun. I had a bit part in Shirley Maclaine’s new film,
Woman Times Seven
, and I was only too happy to do it in return for everything Shirley had done for me in Hollywood. Anita Ekberg was appearing with Shirley, so I also got a chance to look at her a bit more closely, which was nothing but a pleasure, although I still couldn’t spot much resemblance.

Thoroughly defrosted by Paris, I then went off to Spain to do the first of a two-picture deal for Twentieth Century Fox.
Deadfall
was directed by my old friend Bryan Forbes and although the movie didn’t turn out as well as we’d hoped, it was a happy time. As soon as we’d finished filming in London I went straight back to Spain, this time for a Harry Salzman production,
Play Dirty
. I had signed to do this one not just because of Harry, but also because it was to be directed by the great French film director, René Clément. Unfortunately as soon as I’d put my name on the dotted line, Clément walked out after a huge row with Harry – I should have taken it as an omen . . .

Play Dirty
was being filmed in the southern Spanish town of Almería, which had become the centre of the Spaghetti Western industry after Sergio Leone made
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
there and it was also a favourite location for wartime desert battle movies, which was why we were there. In fact there were only about four sand dunes and all the high crane shots also managed to include the local beaches, crowded with hordes of sun-loving tourists.

The ‘desert’, such as it was, was rather overcrowded – there were two Spaghetti Westerns being filmed at the same time as our movie, as well as a new British-produced Western,
Shalako
, starring my friend Sean Connery, and this made for some frustrating – if actually very funny – moments. One day we were shooting a scene in which Rommel’s Afrika Korps were advancing their tanks across the desert sands only to be confronted round one of the dunes by a horde of American Indians in full battle-cry in pursuit of a nineteenth-century stagecoach. As soon as they saw the tanks, the horses reared up and threw their riders and we had to hang about while they were picked up and dusted off and all the horseshit and hoofmarks were eliminated.

Despite the overcrowding, it was still possible to get some peace and one afternoon one of my friends from the crew and I found a quiet spot to sit and have a couple of beers. I was bemoaning the lack of beautiful girls around the place to my happily married companion, when he suddenly jabbed me in the ribs. ‘Michael!’ he said urgently. I looked up and nearly fell off my chair. Standing before me was Brigitte Bardot. ‘’ello, Michael,’ she purred. ‘We meet at last. I ’ave been looking for you everywhere . . .’ She introduced herself and her two companions – two equally beautiful women: Gloria, her secretary, known as Glo Glo, and Monique, her French stand-in, known as Mo Mo. I leapt to my feet and promptly knocked the table and all the drinks on it flying. Not exactly the impression of
un homme du
monde
I had hoped to make. Nonetheless, we soon found ourselves whisked by white Rolls Royce (plus black chauffeur) to the divine Miss Bardot’s luxury suite. When I eventually found my voice I managed to ask how she knew I was in town. ‘My friend Sean tells me,’ said the screen goddess. Ah – Sean, again: Brigitte, or Bri Bri as she was known, was his co-star in
Shalako
. Still, Sean was out in the desert somewhere and I was here in the suite . . . Unfortunately it didn’t quite work out the way I’d planned. It wasn’t Brigitte who had had her eye on me, it was her assistant, Gloria. Bri Bri’s own tastes ran to extremely young, very beautiful and very dark Spanish men and as I didn’t score highly in any of those categories, I gave up the unequal struggle.

Both Sean and I had been very busy and hadn’t seen much of each other, but he did invite me to the end-of-filming dinner for
Shalako
. By now rather miffed at the way that BB had managed to resist my obvious attractions, I grabbed a table at the back with my friend the comedian Eric Sykes who was also in the cast. ‘Just watch,’ whispered Eric as Bardot swept into the restaurant, ‘she is completely crazy about me . . . just watch as she comes past. She’ll pretend to ignore me completely. She’s done it since the first day on set – but it’s all an act.’ And indeed BB did walk straight past us without saying hello. ‘You see?’ insisted Eric. By now I was so hysterical with laughter that I had to lay my head down on the table. I raised it just in time to get hit square on the nose with a hunk of stale Spanish bread and looked over to see the divine Miss Bardot smiling wickedly and rubbing breadcrumbs off her hands . . .

The Magus
, my next film, was the second of my disastrous Twentieth Century Fox contract and one I’d rather forget, because I simply didn’t have a clue what it was all about – and I still don’t. It marked the end of a three-year stint of movie making and I was more than happy to find myself back home in London – and in a new flat in Grosvenor Square with a grandstand view of the anti-Vietnam riots – with the chance to pick up with friends and family again. My brother Stanley, now happily working in Selfridges’ book department, had been looking after my old flat and so I gave it to him, along with all its contents, and started afresh.

It wasn’t long, though, before another picture came along and this one, I’m happy to say, was nothing but a pleasure from beginning to end – and a successful pleasure, too. I’ve always taken the view that you get paid as much for a bad film as you do for a good one, but I’m only too aware that you need to keep the proportion of good films to bad high enough to avoid the stink of failure and to maintain your credibility at the box office.
The Italian Job
– that script I had mentioned to Charles Blühdorn the day after he bought Paramount – satisfied on all fronts.

We started on location in London and for me one of the greatest pleasures of the film was working with Noël Coward. The director of the film, Peter Collinson, had grown up in an orphanage sponsored by Coward – he still called him ‘Master Coward’, just like a schoolboy – and he had persuaded Coward to take on the unlikely role of the underworld boss who masterminds the entire heist from inside prison. It may have been an unlikely role, but Noël played it to perfection: being an old queen, he loved taking on the role of a gangster boss with all these tough guys under his command. He was gloriously unfussy and unstuffy about the whole thing and mucked in with everybody: it was a fantastic opportunity for me to learn from the master of comic timing. He was a generous, amusing and lovable man and every Wednesday while we were shooting in London we had dinner together at the Savoy Grill – I still can’t believe I had that chance to get to know him. Noël told me that he had been given a free room for life at the Savoy because he had played cabaret there during the war and had kept going, right through the Blitz. ‘Perfect for me . . .’ he confided, ‘a truly captive audience!’ He was warm and witty and a wonderful dinner companion, although I relished his waspish side. On one occasion I was describing the anti-Vietnam demos I could see from the window of my flat and how I had seen Vanessa Redgrave in the frontline. Noël sniffed. ‘She will keep
on
demonstrating,’ he said. ‘But then she’s a very tall girl and I suppose she’s pleased to sit down.’

From London we moved to Turin where all the great car stunts took place. We spent days throwing little Mini Coopers off the top of Mont Blanc. We needed about sixteen altogether by the time we had assembled a team of crash cars, stunt cars, doubles and others on standby, so we went to the British Motor Corporation, as it was then, and asked if they would donate some in return for the publicity the Mini would receive. They were fantastically snooty about it and said they could only manage a token few. Fiat, on the other hand, completely got the idea, and offered us as many cars as we wanted, including sports cars for the Mafia scene. No wonder the British car industry went down the toilet –
The Italian Job
was and still is the best publicity the Mini Cooper has ever had.

The Italian Job
was a classic, British, family comic caper and it did very well at the time in the UK. America was another story. I got off the plane in LA on the first leg of the US publicity tour to be confronted by an ad in which a naked woman was perched in front of a gun-toting gangster – hardly family viewing. I more or less turned round on the spot and went back home. As a result, we never did the sequel and Charlie Croker and the boys are still in that bus hanging over the edge of the cliff.