‘Hollywood was different back then.’ For a start, the Awards ceremonies of the ‘60’s weren’t dominated by ‘very small young men who had just been in a vampire film’. Soirees brimmed with the gravitas of Beverley Hills’ most statuesque, those around whom a youthful Michael Caine gawped and assimilated anecdotes until, all of a sudden, he realised he was counted among them.
Diminutive vampires aside, The Elephant to Hollywood, which is Michael Caine’s second autobiography, contains equal reverence for a select crème of today’s acting talent, and the giants of the Hollywood heyday. Jude Law received mixed reviews for Alfie, but Caine can’t rate him highly enough. Even the original Alfie of 1966, in which Caine plays the eponymous lothario, had its critics. The French, Caine recalls, ‘couldn’t believe that an Englishman could attract one woman, let alone ten of them’. But for the most part, Alfie and its aftermath affirmed that Michael Caine had made it. It was the first of his movies to earn him an Academy nomination and a US release, as well as a more literal release – from the clutches of the Taiwan police. When it transpired that a girl he’d bedded in a break from filming Too late the Hero was a Chinese dignitary’s daughter, Caine only escaped scot free because of his prosecutor’s awe. ‘”You are Alfie! Me,” he thumped himself on his chest, “I am Chinese Alfie! I fuck many women.” Yeah, right, I thought, but I nodded vigorously.’
The book teams with hilarious anecdotes like these, but certainly doesn’t hang upon memorable one-liners. Caine’s father was an uneducated fish market porter who loved reading biographies. In his 79th year and second autobiography, Michael Caine seems driven, more than anything, by a desire to do his father’s spirit proud. As the book progresses, he noticeably sheds the uncertainty that typified his early career, to write, in the later chapters, with the confidence and self-belief one would naturally assume of Sir Michael, the Cockney knight.
It’s fascinating how often success is born out of tight-knit cliques. Long before he was famous, Caine had already befriended Peter O’Toole, Sean Connery and Terence Stamp, all hungry for work, all still awaiting their big break.
For Caine in particular, this could hardly have seemed more remote. Raised in Elephant & Castle in elephant-like boots to cure his rickets, kept in a cupboard as an evacuee, packed off to Korea for national service, his early life was hard, and uncertain. After contracting malaria upon his return from Korea, his early theatre director could only advise him to audition for horror plays. And then there was his severely epileptic half-brother, David, kept a secret from him until late in life, when there was little he could do to help.
All this would make for pretty depressing reading if it wasn’t peppered, at perfect intervals, with a history of his backstage capers (not to mention his favourite home-cooked recipes). Naturally, this is where Caine is at his best. From negotiating a love scene with Mia Farrow in Hannah and Her Sisters – on Farrow’s real bed, with both her ex-husband and current partner (the film’s director) Woody Allen, looking on – to ad-libbing with Steve Martin on the set of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and hurling countless cars off cliffs in the Italian Job, he never ceases from penning what could only be described as a very apt epitaph, ‘I always look as if you could have a laugh with me’.
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