The Elephant to Hollywood - Michael Caine [105]
The Muppet Christmas Carol was a success – but it was the last I was going to have for quite some time. The scripts started to dry up completely – even the bad ones – and if there is one thing worse than being offered bad scripts it’s being offered none at all. It wasn’t all terrible, though – I had a wonderful, joint sixtieth birthday party back in Hollywood with my old friend Quincy Jones, who is my ‘celestial twin’. We’ve worked out that, taking into account time differences, we were born at exactly the same time, on the same day and in the same year – me in London, and him in Chicago. We took over a club on Beverly Drive and had a fantastic celebration. With his friends and mine, it was quite a star-studded affair and it was wonderful to see so many people from both our pasts and presents all gathered together – from John Barry and Sidney Furie from my Ipcress File days, to Barbra Streisand, Oprah Winfrey and Jack Nicholson. There were many highlights of that night, but I’ll never forget rapping with Ice-T – I actually surprised myself; I wasn’t bad – and perhaps most memorably of all, having Stevie Wonder himself singing ‘Happy Birthday’ to Quincy and me. What a night!
The birthday party was a high spot in an otherwise low year. The danger is, of course, that the wait for a decent movie makes you desperate, and in the end I got desperate to the point that I accepted a picture in Alaska with Steven Seagal, the martial arts expert. The movie was called On Deadly Ground and the title was to prove very apt. Although Steven and the rest of the team were great to work with, I had broken one of the cardinal rules of bad movies: if you’re going to do a bad movie, at least do it in a great location. Here I was, doing a movie where the work was freezing my brain and the weather was freezing my arse. I vowed never to work in a tough location again. The litmus test for this, I decided, would be my wife. If Shakira refuses to come, I ain’t going. That was going to be my motto from now on, I vowed. I remember asking her if she would like to come to Alaska and she didn’t even bother to reply to the question. I should have got the warning.
But not even Shakira could have foreseen the mess I got myself into with the next movie.
As I’ve said before, I’ve been lucky over my career. Like most people, I’ve screwed up a couple of times and got away with it. What I was about to do almost finished me off. The thing is, it sounded really attractive. I was asked to work with an old friend – the spy Harry Palmer, one of my favourite characters and my first starring role – in two back-to-back sequels to the 1965 film The Ipcress File: Bullet to Beijing and Midnight in St Petersburg. It turned out to be my worst professional experience ever. Of course like all bad experiences, there were some good things – Jason Connery, Sean’s son, whom I’d met as a small boy and was pleased to meet again, and Marsha, the assistant and interpreter who guided Shakira and me around St Petersburg. (Yes, in my defence, Shakira had agreed to come with me on location.) Marsha was intelligent and melancholic in equal measure, in a very Russian way. She came to work one day with eyes all red from crying. ‘What’s wrong?’ Shakira asked, very concerned. ‘I’ve been crying all night,’ she replied. ‘What for?’ Shakira persisted. She just shrugged her shoulders. ‘We all do,’ she said.
Eighteen years ago and in the immediate aftermath of the fall of communism, St Petersburg was a very different place from the way it is today. It was beyond