The Elephant to Hollywood - Michael Caine [3]
I remember Chris Patten, the then governor of Hong Kong, sending an official to whip us through immigration and customs so we wouldn’t be late for our first-night dinner with him. We stayed in the Regent Hotel (now the InterContinental) and Shakira and I had a jacuzzi together in the most romantic setting ever – in the middle of the roof of the penthouse apartment thirty storeys up. There was nothing but the jacuzzi and a 360-degree view of the city – we spent hours in there. We must have been the cleanest tourists in the whole of Asia.
Spectacular though it was, that was pretty much all we saw of Hong Kong. We went on to Bangkok. As we came out of the airport we saw a Rolls Royce with a police escort waiting for someone. That someone turned out to be us. It all seemed a bit over the top until we hit the traffic on the freeway – I had never seen anything like it. It didn’t seem to matter to our policemen whether we went on the off ramps or off the on ramps, we just ploughed our way into the city, doing what normally would have been a four-hour trip in under an hour. When we got to the Oriental Hotel we were ushered into the Somerset Maugham suite – more than a bit intimidating for a first-time writer!
On to Australia, New Zealand . . . and then to Los Angeles for the first stop in a whirlwind publicity tour, punctuated by something that was beginning to happen more and more frequently in my life: a memorial service.
I suppose if I’d been looking for signs that there was a downturn in store for me, I might have taken one from the death of John Foreman, a friend and the producer of one of my favourites among my own movies, The Man Who Would Be King. I gave one of the eulogies at his memorial service and others also got up and spoke, including Jack Nicholson. John Foreman was a very special kind of guy and I’d put him in the category of the ‘nearly greats’ – I think he died just before he reached his full potential, although The Man Who Would Be King is more than enough to confirm his reputation.
Sitting in the packed chapel and listening as friends paid tribute to a wonderful man, I couldn’t help thinking back to that film and what it had meant – and still means – to me. Not only was I working with a man I regarded as God – director John Huston, who had directed three of my all-time favourite films including The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Maltese Falcon and The African Queen – but I was playing the part of Peachy Carnehan, a part Huston had planned for Humphrey Bogart, my screen idol. I thought back to the first time I saw The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, that great film classic about a bunch of misfits searching for gold, a dream as impossible as mine to be an actor seemed then. As a teenager I had identified with the Bogart character completely and now I found myself in a movie directed by Huston, playing a part intended for Bogart. It seemed as if impossible dreams really could come true.
The other thing that made The Man Who Would Be King so special was that I was playing opposite Sean Connery. Working with him proved to be a real pleasure and we became even closer as a result. Sean, like me, felt he owed a great deal to John Huston and we were both very sad to hear the news, many years later, that he was on his deathbed. The two of us went to Cedars Sinai Hospital in Hollywood to say goodbye. When we got there John was