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By Root 388 0

Jolene Schlatter, seemed to reflect all that was good in our lives. It was a great Hollywood evening, full of in-jokes including a prime one from George that seemed to sum up perfectly the relationship between actors and their agents. George is one of the great TV producers, the man who discovered Goldie Hawn in his fantastic show Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, and every bit as funny as the shows he’s produced. I’ve been lucky – my agents have always been close friends – but the relationship between stars and agents is usually quite distant socially. The joke goes, an actor gets a telephone call to say that his house has been burnt down and his wife raped. The actor rushes home and a police officer meets him outside and tells him that it is his agent who has come to the house, burnt it down and raped his wife. The actor’s jaw drops and he turns to the policeman and says, completely astonished, ‘My agent came to my house?’

In fact, that dinner at Chasen’s, and one the following week at Barbra Streisand’s (all Art Nouveau, and sensational Shaker furniture), were to be the last highs for quite some time. Looking back to this period I can see now what I couldn’t see then: the storm clouds, as they say, were gathering. A movie I had made the previous year, Noises Off, had come out and gone out just as quickly. I wasn’t too bothered. Everyone has a flop movie now and then, I thought. But it was another little sign.

I took no notice. I had become part of Hollywood history. Completely out of the blue, Robert Mitchum, the great 1950s movie star, asked me to present his Lifetime Achievement Award at the Golden Globes. I loved Bob Mitchum and was honoured that he should ask me, but I didn’t know him and had never worked with him and I was curious. ‘Did you pick me because I had heavy eyelids like you?’ I asked him. And he said, ‘Yes. You’re the only one, you know. People were always talking about my eyelids and then I saw you in Alfie and I thought to myself: this guy’s got heavy eyelids, too. They’re not as heavy as mine, of course, but they’re quite heavy. It’s all to do with the eyelids.’ A charming story – and Bob was a charming guy – but I began to wonder if it was really because everyone else turned him down.

Whether or not that was the case, I’ve always liked the Golden Globes because you can sit at tables and get a drink and move around and talk to people. Burt Reynolds once pointed out something that everyone in the business knows but which is rarely mentioned: the class distinction. At awards ceremonies all the television people are seated at the back and the movie people at the front. It’s absurd, really – you get TV stars like those on Friends who are earning a million dollars a week, and their tables aren’t at the front. And I’m thinking – wait a minute – I’ve never earned a million dollars a week! I asked one of the organizers of the Golden Globes about it and he said simply, ‘Movies come first.’

I was just about to find out how true that was.

Back in England, my book came out and went straight to Number One. And I embarked on a world tour to publicise it – what could possibly go wrong?

For a start, doing publicity on a book tour turned out to be just like doing publicity for a movie, which is something I have done and hated all my life. People tell me that movie stars are overpaid. Well, I disagree. Movie stars only get a thousand dollars a time for the hard work: the hours in make-up, the endless takes, the craft, the experience, the star billing – the other million is for the publicity and believe me, we earn every cent. When I first went to America on a publicity tour for The Ipcress File and Alfie, it came as a big shock to be bundled out of bed at six in the morning by my press agent Bobby Zarem and told that I was appearing on the Today show at seven-thirty. ‘Seven-thirty?’ I said. I’d only flown in the night before. ‘So why do I have to get up at dawn for an evening show?’ He looked at me pityingly. ‘It’s seven-thirty this morning, Michael.’ ‘And who on earth’s going to be watching at that time of day?’ I