The Elephant to Hollywood - Michael Caine [116]
And while all this was happening in Surrey, we had also reconnected with Miami. After the particularly brutal winter of 2007, during which our daughter Natasha had got married to her lovely husband Michael, we rented a house to escape the cold after Christmas. It was the perfect place to relax and just enjoy ourselves for a week and wandering round, we found the place had changed again since we were last there. The society around South Beach and Lincoln Road was no longer exclusively gay and had suddenly become much more diverse: first Miami had been the province of the down and outs, then the old glitz and glamour, then it was all rock and roll, then it was a gay ghetto – and now it is all of that, but with no particular group predominating. And we discovered that the London restaurant scene had invaded the place: apart from Hakkasan Fontainebleau in Miami Beach, the most enormous Mr Chow has now been established in the W Hotel in South Beach and Cipriani and Cecconi are due shortly. Nick Jones is building The Soho Beach House, too. The weather, of course, is perfect, and I didn’t need much persuading to buy another apartment there – and we found one overlooking the ocean, the beach and the cut where the great liners go into the port of Miami, right past my window.
You might think that there is no connection whatsoever between our life in Surrey and our life in Miami but there is. The world is not only strange, it is also small. Not long ago the manor house to which our barn was once attached was sold to a Georgian billionaire called Badri Patarkatsishvili. Shortly after he moved in, he sent his butler down to our house and I happened to open the door to him. ‘Mr Badri would like to know how much you want for your house,’ he said. I was so taken aback I forgot to say fifty million dollars and just said rather pompously, ‘It’s not for sale.’ Why, I wondered, as I walked back inside, would he want to buy another house so close to his own? I thought it might be for his two daughters but I later found out that he never stayed in a house for more than one night for security reasons. It was perhaps just as well because I would never have got my fifty million dollars anyway. Mr Badri, who was a very fit fifty-three-year-old, died suddenly of a heart attack. Our quiet country lane was packed with press and TV vans as limousines with blacked-out windows honked their way through. It turned out that the lane wasn’t the only thing that got blocked: there was a big lawsuit over Mr Badri’s will and all his assets were frozen. This didn’t mean much to me, until I went to Miami for our winter break and noticed from the window of my apartment that building on the new block of apartments on Fisher Island, a massive luxury estate on the other side of Government Cut, the entrance to the port of Miami, had come to a stop. I put it down to the credit crunch, but it was in fact down to Mr Badri, who owned Fisher Island. So in Miami as well as in Surrey I can look out of my window and see Mr Badri’s former homes. Funny old world.
Which of Mr Badri’s former residences I’m seeing from my window is entirely dependent on the outside temperature. We leave for Miami on 28 December, after a proper over-the-top Christmas, and don’t come back until the daffodils are out – usually around my birthday on 14 March. I have a big birthday-cum-homecoming party and then my year in England starts. There are all sorts of reasons to celebrate: it’s spring and I suddenly become a gardener again, and then the cricket season begins just in time for the April showers. I always think that any country with a drought should send for eleven Englishmen