The Elephant to Hollywood - Michael Caine [100]
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