The Elephant to Hollywood - Michael Caine [122]
It was through Dennis that I met another Orphan, the press agent Theo Cowan. Despite his vast number of show business contacts, his glamorous social life and his great sense of humour, Theo always seemed to me to be a lonely man. There were rumours of an unrequited love affair with the great British screen actress of the Forties, Margaret Lockwood. Whether or not this was true, I don’t know, but he always appeared to be holding some torch for an imaginary woman. Theo’s passing was as quiet and measured as his life had been. He had lunch with the rest of us Orphans on the Thursday at Langan’s as usual, on the Friday he had a business lunch and then he went back to his office, made a pillow of his hands on his desk to have a little nap and never woke up. As one of us said at his funeral, ‘They’ve started bowling in our alley,’ and for the first time, our group faced the fact that we were all mortal.
The music scene in London in the Sixties was famously vibrant and one of the greatest icons of the period was one of our Orphans, Mickie Most, who produced records as varied as The Animals’ ‘House of the Rising Sun’, Donovan’s ‘Mellow Yellow’ and Lulu’s ‘To Sir with Love’. Mickie was the fittest of all of us: he regularly ran ten miles a day, whereas most of the rest of the Orphans probably couldn’t walk ten miles a day. One day at lunch he told us he wasn’t feeling great and had had to cut his daily run down to just five miles. We all laughed at the idea of someone who was running five miles a day thinking he was sick, but Mickie was right: he was sick. In fact he had lung cancer. It was a terrible shock; Mickie had never smoked. What was worse was that his lung cancer was the most virulent kind, totally incurable and had come about because of a lifetime of working in a sound studio, where, unbeknownst to anyone, the sound ‘baffles’ were made of asbestos.
The last time I saw Mickie, we had lunch, just the two of us, and I asked him what they had actually said to him when they told him the bad news. He smiled. ‘They told me not to send out any dry cleaning,’ he said, and we both laughed. And then I told him the Henny Youngman joke about the patient whose doctor told him he had only six months to live. When he said he didn’t have enough money to pay the bill, the doctor gave him another six months. We were both laughing as we left the restaurant. People must have thought we were having a great time, and the expression ‘dying with laughter’ came to my mind. But as we stood there on the pavement, Mickie said, ‘Unfortunately, I can pay that bill . . .’ We shook hands, walked off in opposite directions, and I never saw my friend alive again.
When the next spring came round, a camellia bush that Mickie had given me for my garden had died. I just couldn’t pull it out and throw it away and the following year it came back to life and is now thriving. A horticulturalist would probably give you a perfectly reasonable explanation for this, but, as I’ve said, actors are a superstitious lot and I know Mickie is out there in my garden every time I go for a walk. He is also with me when I am in one of my favourite places in the whole world: the French Riviera. Chrissie Most, Mickie’s lovely wife, who is a great friend of ours, told me that Mickie had asked to be cremated and for his ashes to be scattered in the bay of Cannes, in a spot they could see from their villa in the hills above. Every time I look across that bay, I can see Mickie and feel his presence with us again.
The next Orphan I met was through the director Bryan Forbes. Genius tailor, Doug Hayward, was known by the rest of us Orphans as the ‘Buddha of Mount Street’ and he became our rock and his Mayfair shop became our base. In fact it was because he would only ever give himself an hour off for lunch that we always had to eat in Mayfair. The rest of us travelled all over the world, but the one place we all came to first when we got home was his shop, where we would listen to Doug – who never left London – tell us what had happened while we’d been away, dispense wisdom