The Elephant to Hollywood - Michael Caine [36]
Harry was always working, always thinking. I’m shortsighted and I’ve always worn glasses. Over dinner one Sunday I noticed Harry staring at me. ‘You know what to do with your glasses,’ he observed. ‘I wear them because I need them,’ I pointed out a bit defensively. ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘It’s good. Let’s have Harry Palmer wear them, too. You’ll make them look good.’ He was right again and he’d also laid to rest a worry I’d had – which was, at the time, a bit presumptuous, to say the least. My mate Sean Connery was vastly successful as James Bond but he’d said to me a few times recently that he feared being typecast and so identified with the character that he’d never get another part again. If Ipcress took off and there were sequels (I told you this was presumptuous!), I wanted the glasses to be the character, not me. If Harry Palmer wore glasses, then Michael Caine could hide behind them and emerge if the opportunity presented itself – which it did . . .
Even with this level of advance preparation, things didn’t go entirely smoothly. On the first day of shooting I was picked up by a chauffeur and settled back in luxury to be driven to Pinewood Studios, on the western outskirts of London. ‘You the star of this film?’ the driver asked. I said I was. ‘Biggest piece of shit I’ve ever read,’ he announced. Not a good start. It wasn’t about to get much better. When I walked on to the set for the first rehearsal, the director, Sidney Furie, asked me for a match. I handed him one, he put the script on the floor and set it alight. We all stood round in silence watching as it burned into ashes. ‘That’s what I think of that,’ said Sidney. We all shuffled our feet and mumbled a bit. ‘Now,’ Sidney said to me. ‘Can I borrow your script?’ I handed it over. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘let’s get to work.’
It was a stormy beginning and it didn’t get much easier. A lot of the dialogue in the movie is ad-libbed – especially by me – and although it was great fun, it was pretty stressful. Sid and Harry Salzman argued all the time about everything and tempers became so frayed that one day Sid walked off the set. We were on location in a rundown area of Shepherds Bush in west London when Sid had finally had enough – and he ran down the road and jumped on a number 12 bus. ‘Get in the car!’ Harry Salzman screamed at me, and the two of us leapt into his Rolls Royce and took off in pursuit. It must have been an extraordinary moment for the other passengers as a huge Roller pulled up alongside their bus and this fat man leant out of the window shouting, ‘Get off the fucking bus!’ The conductor stopped the bus at the next stop, Harry and I got on and by the time we’d got to Marble Arch (four-pence) we’d persuaded Sidney to come back and finish the film.
In the end The Ipcress File was one of the best movies Sidney Furie – who would later become a friend and neighbour in Beverly Hills – ever made. It was certainly the most commercially successful. It still ran into the old movie executive problem, though. After the first rushes we got a cable from Hollywood. ‘Dump Caine’s spectacles and make the girl cook the meal – he is coming across as a homosexual.’ This is not the exact message – I’ve cleaned it up a bit – but the implication is clear enough. We had deliberately gone anti-Bond and as well as the glasses, we’d decided that Harry Palmer should be a cook, which was admittedly risky stuff in Britain in 1964, but we made it