The Elephant to Hollywood (31 page)

I didn’t bump into Peter again until some time later – and when I did, he was completely sober. I almost didn’t recognise him: he was off the booze, he explained, because someone had bet him he couldn’t stay away from it for a whole month. He asked me whether I’d had any more thoughts about opening a restaurant and I was about to say no, when something stopped me. Sober, Peter was very impressive – and his track record in the restaurant business was very good. ‘Yes . . .’ I said cautiously. He beamed. ‘I’ll be in touch as soon as I’ve found some premises,’ he said. ‘Do we have a deal?’ We shook hands and as we parted I shouted after him, ‘When’s the month up?’ ‘Tomorrow!’ he yelled back.

We next met in the lobby of the Ritz. However shabby Peter looked – and he could look like a down and out because he was so often sleeping rough – he always wore a tie and so they always let him in. He had found premises, he said, and went on to outline a business plan that would give me a third of the profits in return for an investment of £25,000. ‘Was I in?’ he asked. I looked over at this scruffy Irishman – the last person you would ever think of as a trustworthy and reliable person to go into business with – and I thought of what my father would have said, and I said, ‘Yes.’ There was no reply: Peter had fallen asleep.

When I’d woken him up, we went across the road to look at the premises he’d found in Stratton Street. It didn’t look very enticing, but I trusted Peter to get it right and he did. He stripped out all the interior walls to leave a big open room, which he painted a faded orange colour that looked as if it had always been there. He covered the walls with pictures that were hung randomly to give an informal look and lit the place so that although you could see what you were eating, you would never be blinded by looking at a light bulb. We hired a chef from Alsace to recreate good bistro food and opened very quietly on a Monday lunch. The word got round very quickly: our Alsace chef was used to feeding French manual labourers and the portions were enormous. On the second night we were full, and by the third there was a queue round the block so long we actually ran out of food.

And so Langan’s was up and running. Peter’s antics – he would occasionally get so drunk he would insult the customers and one time actually got under the table and bit a woman’s leg – ensured us constant coverage in the gossip columns, but our long-term success was really established when the chef Richard Shepherd joined us to give us the stability we needed.

As Langan’s thrived, Peter’s alcoholism worsened. By the time Shakira and I had moved to Los Angeles in 1979 he was really out of control. He had taken to sleeping under a table at the restaurant overnight and would often still be there at lunchtime the next day. But he seemed completely oblivious to the havoc he caused and I was rather alarmed to hear that he was planning to come out and see me in LA to discuss opening a restaurant there. The English find drunks quite amusing, but it’s not like that in health-conscious Beverly Hills so I was dreading his visit. I was right to do so. He’d asked me to get together some investors to discuss the project, so, because I felt I owed Peter in part, for the success of Langan’s, with a certain amount of dread, I did. Peter was half an hour late for the meeting and when he arrived he collapsed in a drunken heap on the floor. There was a long silence and the potential investors looked appalled. Eventually one of them said, ‘So – if we invest, who would be in charge?’ I pointed to the crumpled, snoring heap on the floor. They got up and left without another word.

I should have learnt my lesson but, ever hopeful, I invited Peter to lunch at Ma Maison, at that time
the
star-studded restaurant in LA. We sat outside and he was surprisingly well behaved during the meal, in spite of his prodigious intake of cocktails and champagne. I wasn’t taking any chances, though, and when he decided he needed a pee, I went with him into the restaurant to make sure he found the toilet. Unfortunately, he put on a turn of speed and before I could stop him he had lurched over to a table where Orson Welles was sitting. ‘Orson Welles?’ he asked politely. Orson said yes. Peter stood up straight and with all the misplaced dignity of the very drunk announced, ‘You are an arrogant fat arsehole.’ All hell broke loose. Patrick Terrall, the owner, came over and barred Peter from the restaurant for life and told me off for bringing him in the first place. I stayed behind to apologise to Orson while Patrick escorted Peter – effing and blinding the whole way – off the premises. As I dashed out after them, I heard a scream and emerged to find Peter peeing in the flowerpots lined up by the entrance. Peter left LA a day later and I didn’t go back to Ma Maison for some time . . .

Over the following years Peter’s behaviour got more and more out of hand. He was on a path of self-destruction and neither Richard Shepherd nor I had the slightest chance of persuading him off it. There was no chance of getting him to Alcoholics Anonymous, so I tried at least to get him to a doctor. But he refused, with the inevitable and tragic result that one night, in the middle of his customary drunken stupor, and in a set of very bizarre circumstances, he set fire to himself. He lived on, in agony, in an Intensive Care Unit for five terrible weeks before finally succumbing to the oblivion he had been looking for. I owe him a great deal – a career in the restaurant business, friendship, those good times, when we were buzzing with the delight that running a successful convival restaurant brings – but eventually the demons took him over completely. I miss him still.

My partnership with Peter was the first of a number of other such ventures. At one time I owned seven restaurants, including The Canteen in Chelsea Harbour, which we opened in 1993 with Marco Pierre White as chef. I had always sworn I wouldn’t work with another temperamental partner after Peter, but Marco was so talented that I made an exception. It didn’t last. The sous-chef under Marco at The Canteen was Gordon Ramsay – so one of the invisible costs involved with this sort of talent was the installation of extra doors between the kitchen and the restaurant so the customers couldn’t hear the language . . . I had a couple of restaurants with Marco in charge – and they all needed extra doors. I thought movie stars were temperamental, but they’ve got nothing on chefs, although I think both Marco and Gordon are brilliant at what they do.

After three very successful years at The Canteen, the owners of Chelsea Harbour put up security gates, which destroyed our business, and we had to close it down. I also got an offer from my partner in the Langan’s Group of restaurants, Richard Shepherd, to buy me out and I decided to call it a day. I have absolutely no regrets about getting involved in the restaurant business, but it is a relief to be out of it now. It isn’t only the challenges of dealing with brilliant chefs, it’s the customers too. I was minding my own business on a British Airways flight the other day, when a woman came up to me and said, ‘I had a steak in Langan’s the day before yesterday, and I asked for it to be medium and it was well done.’ I was very glad to be able to say to her, ‘Madam, I no longer own any restaurants, so it’s not my fault.’

15

Highs and Lows in Miami Beach

In 1992, I had a bit of a surprise. As part of the American publicity tour for my first autobiography
What’s It All About?,
I went to the Miami Book Fair. I wasn’t expecting much: the first time I’d been to Miami was in 1979 for a horror/thriller movie called
The Island
and I didn’t have very happy memories of that. The film should have been a success: producers Richard Zanuck and David Brown and author Peter Benchley had all been involved in the blockbuster
Jaws
and consequently the budget was huge. The Caribbean location was a plus, too, but somewhere along the line the film just wasn’t scary. And in the end, the only sharks frightening enough to pose a real threat turned out to be the critics. Nonetheless, Shakira and I enjoyed our stay on the luxury Turnberry Isle just outside Miami itself and were looking forward to exploring the area.  It started off very promising. We headed for Miami Beach and were driven there across MacArthur Causeway, which runs for a fabulous three miles. We discovered that Miami Beach is a completely separate city from Miami itself, forming a barrier island between the Atlantic and Miami proper, with a beautiful fifteen-mile sandy beach. That was fine, but South Beach, which starts at the end of the causeway, was a shock. It was a dumping ground – not just for litter, but for people, too. Human waste and wasted humans were everywhere; bums and junkies were holed up under every bridge and in every doorway of the many closed shops. Driving through in the daytime, it seemed as if everything was shut for business – but after darkness fell we soon found out that business picked up, as all the drug dealers came out of the woodwork. When we did, finally, find a shop that was open on the rundown and potholed Lincoln Road, the shopkeeper told us he always carried a gun after sunset. As I looked round in the bright light of the afternoon sun I began to wish I’d had one with me.

Perhaps the most bizarre spectacle was the rows of old New Yorkers sitting outside the rotting Art Deco hotels. They had been sent by their families from the freezing east coast to die under the sun and under the jurisdiction of Miami’s generous inheritance tax provisions. There was a feeling of death everywhere: the old baking to death under the sun, the young drug addicts dying for pleasure at any time and the dealers killing for territory after dark. South Beach was two miles of the most beautiful Art Deco buildings, beaches and weather in the world and it was a rubbish dump. In those days it was known as ‘God’s Waiting Room’ because of the number of old people there. Looking at it on that first trip, I couldn’t see that God had anything to do with it: this was a man-made hellhole and we vowed never to come back.

What we didn’t know was that things were about to get a whole lot worse. In 1980, President Castro of Cuba graciously allowed any Cuban citizen who wanted to immigrate to the United States to leave – and 125,000 people took up the offer and headed to Miami. Among them must have been a criminal element, because the city nearly went under a new and even more vicious crime wave. Sometimes situations need to get desperate before solutions emerge – and this is what happened. As the inhabitants of God’s Waiting Room fled and the hotels emptied of the dying, it was not the demolishers who moved in, but the preservers. Under the leadership of entrepreneurs like Tony Goldman, Barbara Capitman and Chris Blackwell, the ‘Architectural District’ was born, the place chilled out, livened up and the world’s glamorati began to sit up and take notice. From 1984, which was the year
Miami Vice
was first shown on TV, to the Miami Book Fair in 1992, the place began to grow and prosper. International photographers, models and designers came, lured by the winter sun, and international hotels, clubs and restaurants sprang up to cater for their every need. The glamorati glowed, the glitterati glittered – and South Beach was re-born.

When I turned up for the Miami Book Fair, I barely recognised the place. Granted, as we came over the Causeway and onto Ocean Drive there were still some bums and druggies and pushers around, but they were skulking out of sight rather than strutting their stuff in the bright daylight. The violence had gone, to be replaced by a fantastic young scene: I loved it immediately. ‘I want a holiday here!’ I said to someone. ‘If you can get a reservation . . .’ was the muttered reply. South Beach was up and running and I felt like running with it.

I couldn’t get South Beach out of my mind. In 1993, during the considerable lull that had suddenly developed in my movie-making schedule, Shakira and I were in New York visiting Shakira’s mother, who lives there. While they spent time together, I spent a great deal of time not only with my best New York friend, restaurateur Elaine Kauffman, but also with Danny Zarem, the brother of Bobby, the press agent who had had to get me out of bed for the
Today
show on my first US publicity tour. Now retired, Danny was previously the vice-president and head of design for Bonwit Teller, one of the best clothing stores anywhere and he is still the most stylish man I know. We always lunch at the Russian Tea Room, which is one of my favourite restaurants in New York – not just for the food, but because when it opened and they put up their first Christmas decorations they liked them so much they just left them. It’s always fun going in there on a boiling hot day and finding the Christmas decorations up.

During one of our many lunches amid the baubles, I told Danny all about South Beach. Of course it turned out he was already in the know and the two of us took off there for a long weekend and stayed with Danny’s friend the restaurateur Ray Schnitzer. Ray lived in the South Pointe Tower, at twenty-eight storeys then the tallest building in South Beach. It was amazing to sit in Danny’s apartment and watch the huge boats pass by his window as they sailed into Miami Harbour.

In the year since I’d last been in Miami, things had got even more exciting: Jack Nicholson was now spending a lot of time in South Beach. Jack, of course, knew where all the fun was to be had (and if he couldn’t find it, either it sort of found him or he’d make it himself) and I tagged along for the ride. And then I was delighted to discover that Oliver Stone, the director of the 1981 film
The Hand
– a movie that did not reflect great credit on either of us – was also there. I had taken on
The Hand
in the first place partly because I had never done a horror movie before, but mainly because I’d wanted to work with Oliver. I made two discoveries during the course of filming: first, that I hated making horror movies, and second, that Oliver Stone was a genius. It turned out that he, like me, was an ex-infantryman and we spent a lot of our time together on set talking about our time in the army. He was not surprised to hear that I had never seen a film that remotely captured the atmosphere and reality of Korea: he had never seen one that reflected his experiences in Vietnam, he said, and one day he would put that right . . . I’ve often reflected on the irony of having had the chance of working with a director like Oliver Stone – who would go on to direct
Platoon
and
JFK
– on a picture in which the real star of the show is my hand, which, severed in a car crash, takes on a murderous life of its own . . . As my mother used to say: be careful what you wish for. In spite of our mauling by the critics, Oliver and I had remained good friends and once I knew that he, Jack and another Hollywood friend Sylvester Stallone had invested in South Beach, the attractions of the place proved hard to resist.