The Elephant to Hollywood - Michael Caine [103]
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.
I flew back to New York to pick up Shakira and persuaded her to give Miami a try again. Although she was prepared to admit that things had improved, she wasn’t quite as enthusiastic as I was. But in the new dawn of what I thought was going to be my dual retirement career of writing and restaurant owning – at that point I had built up partnerships in five London restaurants – I was very excited by the possibilities and eventually decided to extend the restaurant