The Elephant to Hollywood - Michael Caine [102]
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