The Elephant to Hollywood - Michael Caine [28]
1961 began well with a TV play, Ring of Truth, followed by a two-week run of a play called Why the Chicken? (don’t ask – I did and was none the wiser) written by John McGrath, a theatre and TV director who had become a good friend, and directed by Lionel Bart, also by now a friend. That was good, but I was very disappointed not to get the part of Bill Sykes when Lionel Bart went on to do Oliver. I thought it was made for me and it would have been good steady work at a time when that was hard to come by. But it just goes to show, you never know how things are going to work out. I can see now it was a blessing in disguise: the show ran for six years and was still running the day I drove past the theatre in my Rolls Royce, after a triumphant success not only in Britain but also in America with Alfie. I shuddered as I passed the billboard: that actor had been up there in lights since 1961. I’d have missed out on so much.
Although I couldn’t see it then (and in fact it would have taken a genius to work it out), the pieces in the jigsaw that led to Alfie and stardom were beginning to fall into place. As a result of Why the Chicken? (I know, I know . . .), John McGrath cast me in his next TV show, The Compartment, a two-handed psychological thriller about two men – a posh git and a Cockney – sharing a railway carriage. Now this really was made for me – the posh git won’t respond to the Cockney’s friendly approach and by the end of the forty-five minutes the Cockney tries to kill him. Perfect – summed up everything I thought about posh gits. Perfect, too, because it was basically a monologue – and on live TV. And perfect, ultimately, because a lot of influential people saw it and realised that I could carry an entire show. But even I hadn’t quite understood the significance of The Compartment until a few weeks after the play had been broadcast. Terry Stamp and I were walking down Piccadilly when someone called out to us from the other side of the road. We turned round – and it was Roger Moore. Roger Moore, star of The Saint and Ivanhoe, the ultimate debonair, suave, English hero. We looked around to see who he was hailing, but he was coming over to us. ‘Are you Michael Caine?’ he asked me. I nodded. ‘I saw you in The Compartment,’ he said, ‘and I want to tell you that you’re going to be a big star.’ He shook my hand, smiled and strode on. I just stood there with my mouth open. If Roger Moore said so – perhaps it really might be true.
And Roger was not the only one. Dennis Selinger, the top actors’ agent in Britain, had seen The Compartment and taken me on. And Dennis was one of the key pieces in the puzzle. He knew that I was short of money but he was determined that at this point in my career I should appear in the right shows, not ones that merely made money. It was he who steered me towards Next Time I’ll Sing to You by James Saunders. It was clearly going to be a hit with the critics, which meant that the pay was terrible, but Dennis could see just what rave notices it was going to get – and he was right. It transferred to the Criterion Theatre in Piccadilly, our wages doubled and I finally got the West End at the age of thirty. What’s more, all sorts of influential people came to see the show, including Orson Welles who came backstage to congratulate me, which was a bit overwhelming. But even more significantly for me, one night, Stanley Baker, the star all those years ago of A Hill in Korea, stopped by my dressing room. Stanley was now one of the biggest British film stars and he told me that he was starring in and producing a film called Zulu about the 1879 battle of Rorke’s Drift between the British army and the Zulu nation, and they were looking for an actor to play a Cockney corporal. ‘Go and see Cy Endfield