The Elephant to Hollywood - Michael Caine [106]
Our hotel turned out to be the centre for the local Mafia. Oddly enough, they didn’t hang out in the dimly lit bar or the disco, but in the central café that only served tea and cakes and played genteel light music. It was a very ladylike place and it was very strange watching some of the toughest men on earth plotting mayhem over afternoon tea and scones.
One afternoon, we were sitting peacefully in the tea room when out of the blue, with no shouting or warning, a dozen men in black overalls and black masks came tearing across the café – not on the floor, but leaping straight across the room, crashing on top of the tables and hurling themselves straight at their target. It was all over in a second, but we were in complete shock. It turned out that what we initially thought was a hit squad of rival gangsters was the elite force of the Russian police – they wore masks so the Mafia could not recognise them and retaliate against their families.
I was eventually assigned a few bodyguards, two guys with Kalashnikovs who followed me everywhere in the street in a jeep and another one with a pistol who apparently was watching over me when I was inside. I never found out who he was, but I took the production manager’s word that he existed and I hung onto those guards right up to the last passenger barrier at the airport.
A couple of days before I left, I was sitting in my usual corner of the café (now with the damage repaired) when one of the Mafia guys came over and asked if he could join me. As if I could possibly say no. ‘Why do you have these stupid bodyguards?’ he asked. I replied to him all innocently, as if I had no idea of his occupation, ‘They say that there’s Mafia here in St Petersburg and I’m worried about our safety.’ He let out a great laugh and slapped his enormous thigh. ‘You work for—’ and he gave the name of a Russian movie company I didn’t quite catch. Did I? He stood up and said, ‘We own that. There’s no need to worry – you’re the safest man in the whole of St Petersburg,’ and walked away.
The city architecture of St Petersburg and the Hermitage in particular was fabulous. Shakira and I spent hours wandering around the museum. But the filming itself was a joke. The final blow came when we were shooting in the Lenfilm studio itself. I wanted to go for a pee and they directed me to the toilet. I could smell it fifty yards away and when I got there I found the filthiest toilet I have ever seen in my life. I went outside and peed up against the soundstage, which I noticed several other men had done before. So this is where my career has ended, I thought to myself: in the toilet. I’m done.
Shakira and I made one last visit to Hollywood to see Swifty Lazar for what we knew would be the last time. He was on a life support system – this man who had once seemed the life support system for Hollywood all on his own. ‘Have fun, kid,’ he said to me as I went to say goodbye. Shakira saw him separately and when I asked her what he’d said to her she said: ‘In the end it all comes down to tits and arse!’ He’s probably right.
It was winter. I picked myself up and took the family off to our place in Miami straight after Christmas. The sun was shining, everyone was happy, the book was still selling, my restaurants were doing well. Fine, I thought, life was different – but that was life.
And this is when Jack Nicholson changed everything. Having been one of the original reasons we’d decided to buy our South Beach apartment (they had been good times – they usually are, with Jack), he’d moved on from Miami – but he suddenly turned up there again with the director Bob Rafaelson