The Elephant to Hollywood - Michael Caine [130]
After we had unpacked and sampled the delights of a Vietnamese roast dinner (not bad at all), we went for a walk. Our impressions of what the streets would look like were all taken from films – mostly French – and featured horse-drawn taxis, vintage cars and locals on thousands of bicycles. Needless to say, we’d got that one wrong. Ho Chi Minh City has three million motor scooters and not one single traffic regulation or signal that anyone takes any notice of. I later asked a Vietnamese if he had any tips on how to cross a road. ‘A good start,’ he said, ‘is to be a Buddhist.’ Well, I had already failed that one. ‘Anything else?’ I persisted. ‘Just step off the pavement,’ he advised, ‘and don’t catch anyone’s eye. If you catch their eye it puts them off and they’ll hit you.’ He seemed to think this was an entirely reasonable explanation. Shakira and I never risked following his advice, but we did come up with a method of our own. We looked for groups of Buddhists, inserted ourselves into the very centre of them and crossed when they did. If we were going to be mown down, we would at least be in the right company.
Once we had mastered the art of crossing the road, I noticed that all the young women riding scooters wore full-length evening gloves that reached right up to their armpits: it was a truly bizarre sight. I asked our Vietnamese friend why this was and he told me that middle-class girls did not want sunburnt arms because only peasant women had sunburnt arms. Class distinction on scooters – that was a new one on me! If we made it safely to the other side unscathed by the scooters, we were ambushed by the small boys who swarmed the streets carrying trays of stuff to sell. Apart from the usual postcards and cigarettes, they also all carried the same three random and at first sight rather puzzling products: David Beckham Number 8 football shirts, pirate DVDs of Miss Congeniality, which hadn’t even come out in America at this point, and paperback copies of The Quiet American.
I was intrigued by all three of these items – not least by how the hell they had managed to smuggle out a black market copy of Miss Congeniality so quickly – but it was the presence of the Graham Greene novels I found the most interesting. It turned out that the book had almost iconic status in Ho Chi Minh City. People would point out the window of the room where Greene wrote it in the French colonial Majestic Hotel and just walking around, it was possible to sense the decadence, imagine the brothels and almost smell the drugs that had pervaded the city – and Greene’s novel – then. Although the Communist government had cleared out most of the signs of bourgeois decadence, there was one visible reminder of the Saigon Greene writes about so evocatively: portly, elderly European men could be seen everywhere with beautiful young Vietnamese girls on their arms. A couple of the reviews of our film implied that I was too old for the role of Fowler, but obviously they had never been to Vietnam. I, too, had been a bit worried about taking it on because of the age difference between my character and my young mistress and when we did the screen test, I asked make-up to make the actress Do Thi Hai Yen who was to play Phuong look as old and tarty as they could. It was an impossible task as she was stunningly beautiful – and I needn’t have bothered: such was the desperation of many young Vietnamese women to leave the country that they would go out with any foreigner, even one as old and creaky as me.
Everywhere I