The Elephant to Hollywood - Michael Caine [16]
Korea turned out to be the most frightening and also the most important experience of my life and I was lucky to stay alive. When I did get back, Dad welcomed me home, but we’d never talked about what he’d gone through in the Second World War and he never asked me about Korea. Old soldiers never do. His attitude was, ‘Now you’re a man, you understand,’ but it was unspoken. We were now on the same level. He didn’t want to talk about his war because he would never have wanted to come across as the big hero, and neither did I. There are no heroes in war: it’s just a question of doing a job and surviving. And all I know is that surviving Korea made me all the more determined to make my dream of becoming an actor come true.
Working in a butter factory may not seem the most obvious first step to stardom, but opportunities were few and far between after I was demobbed. It was 1952 and butter was still rationed. I was put alongside a little old man and we were given the job of mixing the different qualities of butter together to make one big glob. God forbid you should have different qualities of butter available. One day we were mixing away and the old man said out of the blue: ‘You don’t want to do this all your life, do you?’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘Well, what do you want to do?’ he persisted. ‘I want to be an actor,’ I said, and waited for him to crack up like they usually did. But he didn’t laugh. Instead he said, ‘And how are you going to do that?’ I shrugged. ‘Don’t know,’ I mumbled, turning back to the butter. ‘You want to get The Stage,’ he said. ‘They advertise for actors in the back of the newspaper. My daughter’s a semi-professional singer and she gets a lot of work that way. Go down to Solosy’s, the newsagents in Charing Cross Road – they stock it.’
The next Saturday I was outside Solosy’s when it opened. Five minutes later I was round the corner, sitting on a bench in Leicester Square looking at an advertisement for an Assistant Stage Manager (‘plus minor acting roles’) for a small theatre company based in Horsham, Sussex. By Monday I had sent off my application (in what I hoped would be the less risible name of ‘Michael Scott’), including a hastily taken photograph of me in which I appeared to be wearing lipstick. The following week I found myself sitting in the office of the owner and director of the company, Mr Alwyn D. Fox. He seemed to be a bit disappointed. ‘You’re nothing like your photograph, are you?’ he said. Ah, I understood. I was twenty years old, six foot two, with long blond curly hair and the remnants of a tan I had acquired on the boat back from Korea, but I was categorically and unmistakably butch. ‘Edgar!’ Alwyn D. Fox suddenly shrieked. From out of an inner office emerged a man even smaller and more delicate than Mr Fox. The two of them stood side by side, hands on hips, gazing at me. ‘Oh, I think he’ll do,’ said Edgar eventually. And I was hired.
One of the upsides of working in a largely gay company was that, with less competition around, my sex life increased dramatically. Another was that I got given most of the butch minor roles to cut my teeth on. My very first role as a professional actor was as the policeman who comes along at the end of the play to arrest the villain who has been discovered by the posh, effete amateur detective. I can’t remember the name of the play, or who wrote it, but I can remember my one line – ‘Come along with me, sir,’ – which is all the more remarkable after nearly fifty years, since I forgot it at the time. The problem was that – yes, again – I had forgotten to do my flies up and so when I went on, the audience fell about, which threw me completely. One of the actors helpfully whispered my words