The Elephant to Hollywood - Michael Caine [124]
Leslie is a great wine connoisseur and lover of French food and part-owned the Pickwick, the restaurant where I was eating with Terry Stamp the night Harry Saltzman offered me the leading role in The Ipcress File. Leslie had spotted the meeting during the course of the evening and winked at me and gave me the thumbs up. When I told him later what had happened, it was he who suggested we went on to celebrate at a new disco, the Ad Lib, not far away – and it was there that we met two more people who would become a big part of our lives, the Ad Lib’s owner and husband of Jackie Collins, Oscar Lerman (who unfortunately would die before we officially named ourselves the Orphans), and his business partner, the incomparable Johnny Gold, one of the great nightclub hosts of all time. Oscar and Johnny went on to open Tramp, one of the most successful discotheques ever, which became the Orphans’ night shelter for many years – until we started meeting our own grandchildren there.
And so at last the Sixties, which had been so good to us and such fun, faded. But that decade didn’t die. It lives on in the memories of those of us who were there and especially in the hearts of the Mayfair Orphans who did so much to make it happen. Whether gathered together in our old haunts, sharing holidays together in our favourite places abroad, or just enjoying ourselves sitting round the table in Surrey, for me, home and happiness is all about friends and family.
19
A Date at the Palace
When an actor’s been around as long as I have, there’s a great temptation to choose a picture for the pleasure of working with old friends, but this can be a mistake. As soon as we had settled in Surrey, I was off again and made three movies in quick succession. In the first one, Curtain Call, which was about a camp theatrical couple, my co-star was the incomparable Maggie Smith, with whom I had so enjoyed making California Suite, and it was also going to be directed by Peter Yates, a good friend of mine. What could go wrong? Well, quite a lot, as it happened. I never actually saw the finished movie – and hardly anyone else did either . . .
I followed this up with something more serious and dramatic. Quills is the story of the Marquis de Sade’s descent into madness while locked up in an asylum. Geoffrey Rush played the Marquis brilliantly with all the stops pulled out; Joaquin Phoenix played the Catholic priest who ran the asylum. Joaquin was a pleasant young man, but somewhat strange. His two brothers were named River and Rain and his two sisters Summer and Liberty. He changed his own name for a while to Leaf (but changed it again before Autumn came . . .). Joaquin was hard to get to know. He was a combination of enigmatic and explosive, which is a difficult one to understand, but he worked incredibly hard – it made me feel lazy just to watch him prepare for a take – and his labours paid off. Kate Winslet, on the other hand, who played the laundry girl, was much more down to earth. Off screen as well as on, she is one of the most brilliant and unpretentious actresses I’ve ever met. I played the man sent by Napoleon to stop de Sade writing his books, which he had continued to do in the asylum, smuggling them out, rather aptly, in the baskets of dirty laundry. It was a great movie to do, and I took it because I wanted to do something prestigious after Curtain Call but it never caught on with the public.
My next film was Shiner, in which I played a Cockney gangster. Yes – probably a mistake. It wasn’t a bad film – and it was certainly a step up from Curtain Call and Quills – but it seemed as if the public were fed up with gangster films. We shot it in the East End of London. I hadn’t been there for years and it