The Elephant to Hollywood (5 page)

Bad notice or not, I was on my way – or so I thought. From then on until I was called up for my national service, I was always in a play. I was also taken under the wing of a man called Alec Reed, a movie fanatic, who used to show his collection of sixteen millimetre silent films at Clubland every Sunday evening. Not only did Alec teach me everything he knew about the history of film, he also introduced me to the technical side of movie-making. Every summer the whole club would go on holiday to the island of Guernsey, off the south coast of England, and Alec would make a documentary of the trip. It was a proud moment for me when my name came up on the credits for the first time – ‘Maurice Micklewhite, Director’. Once again, the audience laughed. Bastards. But I realised they were right. When I made it to the big screen it would have to be under a different name.

Even I had to admit, though, that my name was the least of my problems. I was a tall, gangly, skinny, awkward boy with blond hair, a big nose, pimples and a Cockney accent. All the movie stars of the day – Robert Taylor, Cary Grant and Tyrone Power, for instance – were dark-haired, smooth, sophisticated and very handsome. Even the ugly ones, like my hero Humphrey Bogart, were dark-haired, smooth, sophisticated and very handsome. It’s easier now, of course, but back then people who looked like me would only ever have been cast as the hero’s best friend. I remember even Steve McQueen telling me once that if he’d been an actor in the thirties he would have been the best friend.

So how did I make it in the end as a movie actor? There’s a good ten years of hard graft in the theatre and TV there, of course, before I got to
Alfie
, but even apart from the acting, you have to have the right face. Take a look in the mirror. Can you see the white on the top of the iris of your eye in relaxed position? Can you see your nostrils looking at your face straight on? Can you see the gums above your top teeth when you smile? Is your forehead longer than the space between the bottom of your nose and the bottom of your chin? If you are a man, do you have a very small head? If you are a woman, do you have a very big head? If you have any of these facial characteristics, you won’t get the romantic leading roles. If, however, you have all of the above, you could probably make a fortune in horror films.

All those years I spent acting at Clubland and later in the professional theatre turned out not to be a lot of help, ultimately. The art of cinema acting is the exact opposite of stage acting. In the theatre you have to be as big and broad and loud as possible, even in the quiet scenes, which is a trick that only the best actors can pull off. Film acting, on the other hand, is about standing six feet from a camera in blazing light and not letting the tiniest bit of acting show. If you are doing it right you make it look very easy, but it takes a great deal of hard work to accomplish. It’s a bit like watching Fred Astaire dancing and thinking, I could do that – and you couldn’t in a million years.

Of course there are some useful tips I’ve picked up along the way . . . In a close up, choose just one eye of the actor you’re playing opposite, don’t skip between the eyes or you will just look shifty; choose the eye that brings your face closest to the camera; don’t blink if you are playing a strong or menacing character (and remember your eye drops!); if you are playing a weak or ineffectual character, blink as much as you like – just look at Hugh Grant; and if you have to pause after another actor’s line, always start your line and then pause – and you can hold that pause as long as you like. Last of all – full frontal nudity. Don’t do it. Acting is all about control and the minute you are naked you have lost control of what the audience is looking at. But if you absolutely insist on disregarding my advice on that last point, let me offer one final tip: don’t move. When legendary ballet dancer Robert Helpmann was asked, as the notorious naked revue show
Oh! Calcutta
debuted in London, if he would ever do a naked ballet, he said, ‘Certainly not.’ When asked why, he replied, ‘Because everything doesn’t stop when the music does.’ Wise man.

Even if you’ve got the right face, you still need to have a sense of humour about yourself. I think I’m a good dramatic actor but I always look as if you could have a laugh with me. There’s a connection between the actor and the audience that goes far beyond the part you play and it’s got nothing to do with acting ability. Charisma – you’ve either got it or you haven’t. Who’s got it today? I’d pick Jude Law, Clive Owen, Matt Damon and of those, I identify most strongly with Jude Law. After all, he looks a bit like me – and he’s remade two of my movies. I identify with him in another way, too. The press spend a lot of time attacking him personally. When we played in
Sleuth
together, one of the critics mentioned that he’d screwed the nanny and I thought – hang on a minute – he didn’t screw the nanny in the movie! He’s a wonderful actor, a great dad to his kids, and he’s a bit of a jack-the-lad, like I was, although perhaps I was smarter at not being caught. But back when my pals and I were living the high life and dating a lot of girls, we didn’t have to contend with the paparazzi or the celebrity magazines the way stars do now.  We’d never get away now with what we got up to in those days.

3

Learning the Ropes

People still ask me if the character of
Alfie
is based on me. Around the time the film came out, interviewers would say, ‘Alfie’s you, isn’t he? You’re a young Cockney lad, you like girls.’ ‘Is that it?’ I’d say. ‘I’m a Cockney and all Cockneys are exactly the same? All Cockneys who like girls are exactly the same?’ What they misunderstood then – and some of them still misunderstand now – is that, yes, I’m a Cockney; Alfie’s a Cockney. I like girls; he liked girls. But the way Alfie treated them is the complete opposite of the way I would treat a woman.

In fact I based Alfie on a guy called Jimmy Buckley who turned up one day at Clubland and made an instant impression on all the girls there. Jimmy had charisma. I didn’t recognise it at the time (and I certainly couldn’t have spelled it), but I could see that it worked for him and Jimmy Buckley became my new best friend. Unfortunately, none of his success with the girls rubbed off on me – although I was so desperate by now I would have taken even his rejects. But I did notice that he didn’t seem bothered who he went with and, in due course, neither was Alfie. I, on the other hand, have turned out to be quite fussy.

In the end it wasn’t Jimmy Buckley who led me towards the promised land, it was another friend who invited me to his sixteenth birthday party. I wasn’t drinking at that point and I was sitting morosely in the kitchen, nursing my lemonade and watching all my friends get hammered when the back door opened and my friend’s auntie beckoned me out into the garden. She was drunk, too, but far from incapable, although mysteriously she did appear to have lost her skirt. I made a half-hearted gentlemanly attempt to help her find it, but after a bit it didn’t seem to matter any more. As I bowled back home with a whole new spring in my step, I couldn’t believe my luck – so
that
was what it was all about!

I may have been gaining an education in some of the most fundamental aspects of life, but school continued to fail to capture my interest and I don’t know who was more relieved, me or the headmaster, when I left Wilson’s at the age of sixteen with a handful of passes in my final exams. I was free at last to pursue my show business dream.

My first job was as an office boy for Frieze Films – a film company, certainly, but a highly specialised one, in this case offering eight millimetre tourist films of London and, at weekends, Jewish weddings. As a consequence, I was the only boy at Clubland who knew all the words to ‘Hava Nagila’. One Sunday evening we were filming a wedding cabaret featuring a band called Eddie Calvert and his Golden Trumpet. Everything was going according to plan. We dimmed the lights, the bride clutched the groom’s hand, a ripple of excitement ran through the guests and Eddie Calvert himself began to emerge from beneath the stage playing – yes – ‘Hava Nagila’ on his Golden Trumpet. I was in charge of the lighting, and, anxious to capture this climax to the evening on film, I plugged in all the lights again. Every fuse in the building blew at once, the room was plunged into darkness and Eddie Calvert was left stranded in mid-ascent, chin at stage level, still blowing his Golden Trumpet. I was fired on the spot.

My next job lasted far less time. I was still an office boy but I had moved a little closer to Hollywood. The J. Arthur Rank Organisation was the biggest film company in Britain and, surely, I thought, with all those producers and casting directors going in and out of their Mayfair offices, I would be talent-spotted. In fact the place was like a morgue and, even worse, it was a morgue with rules. When I first started, my boss took me aside and explained that Mr Rank was a strict Methodist and consequently there was a long list of things employees were forbidden to do, including smoking. I’d just taken it up and wasn’t going to abandon the pleasure for anyone, so I took to going down to the gents and lighting a fag whenever I had a free moment. A few weeks or so after I began, I was just sitting there, minding my own business, having a quick drag, when there was a sudden bang on the toilet door. ‘You! Whoever’s in there! Come out – you’re fired!’

After this episode it turned out that it would be me doing the firing for a while. The British government had established national service in the aftermath of the war and every eighteen-year-old boy was required to learn to defend his country, for two years. When I look back I can see that the two things in my life that should have been unpleasant actually formed me as a person – one was evacuation, the other was national service. There were some good and some very bad aspects to both of these experiences, but I can’t deny their impact on me. I don’t think anyone should be subjected to an involuntary two years in the services and certainly should never be sent into combat as I was, but I do think kids these days should be given six months’ training in the Forces to learn discipline and be taught how to use weapons properly in the defence of their country. I am sure the experience would change them so that when they come out they would feel they belong and that they have a God-given right to be here.

In my day it was considerably less enlightened than that. I was subjected to eight weeks of boot camp courtesy of the Queen’s Royal Regiment in Guildford, which involved hours of senseless square-bashing and, when not marching, running round the barracks at the double or cleaning and polishing useless bits of equipment. This reached a peak of absurdity just before a visit to the barracks by Princess Margaret when I was ordered to join a detail
whitewashing a pile of coal
. Mad, I know, but it will be no surprise to anyone else who’s been through national service. And it gets worse: just before the princess arrived, the sergeant in charge noticed that although we had swept the parade ground earlier, leaves were continuing to drift down from the trees. It was early autumn; this was not unexpected. ‘Get up them trees and start shaking!’ the sergeant screamed at me. ‘I want every leaf off and on the ground and swept up before midday!’ A lifetime later, I went to Princess Margaret’s house on the island of Mustique for lunch, and when I arrived I found her scooping the leaves off the top of her swimming pool with a big net. I told her this story and she said with a wry smile, ‘I always wondered why autumn had come so early to Surrey . . .’ But I never found out what she thought about that unusual seam of white coal . . .

After training, the government informed me that they desperately needed my help to occupy Germany, which I did for a year. They then informed me that unless I signed on for another year, I would be sent to Korea to fight communism and defend the capitalist system on a wage of four shillings a day. I couldn’t help feeling that someone who was fighting to save capitalism should be paid more than four shillings a day but, more than that, I bitterly resented being bossed about. I was known as ‘Bolshie’ by the officers because as well as helping the guys with reading and writing letters home (a lot of my intake were pretty well illiterate), I was the person everyone came to for advice about the letter of the law – I knew every army rule backwards and forwards and I knew just how far we could go. As a result I spent over a year on more or less continuous punishment duty (including being made to scrape the guardroom floor clean with razor blades), and although it has turned me into the best potato peeler ever, the thought of another year of it was more than I could face, so I took the Korea option.

Korea turned out to be the most frightening and also the most important experience of my life and I was lucky to stay alive. When I did get back, Dad welcomed me home, but we’d never talked about what he’d gone through in the Second World War and he never asked me about Korea. Old soldiers never do. His attitude was, ‘Now you’re a man, you understand,’ but it was unspoken. We were now on the same level. He didn’t want to talk about his war because he would never have wanted to come across as the big hero, and neither did I. There are no heroes in war: it’s just a question of doing a job and surviving. And all I know is that surviving Korea made me all the more determined to make my dream of becoming an actor come true.

Working in a butter factory may not seem the most obvious first step to stardom, but opportunities were few and far between after I was demobbed. It was 1952 and butter was still rationed. I was put alongside a little old man and we were given the job of mixing the different qualities of butter together to make one big glob. God forbid you should have different qualities of butter available. One day we were mixing away and the old man said out of the blue: ‘You don’t want to do this all your life, do you?’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘Well, what do you want to do?’ he persisted. ‘I want to be an actor,’ I said, and waited for him to crack up like they usually did. But he didn’t laugh. Instead he said, ‘And how are you going to do that?’ I shrugged. ‘Don’t know,’ I mumbled, turning back to the butter. ‘You want to get
The Stage
,’ he said. ‘They advertise for actors in the back of the newspaper. My daughter’s a semi-professional singer and she gets a lot of work that way. Go down to Solosy’s, the newsagents in Charing Cross Road – they stock it.’