The Elephant to Hollywood - Michael Caine [39]
In the end, after a very tough start, Mum had a very happy life – although I’m not sure she ever quite understood what I did and she certainly never understood how much I earned. She asked me a few years later, ‘How much do you earn for a film?’ And I said, ‘A million pounds.’ ‘Oh,’ she said and she was quiet for a bit and then she said, ‘How much is that?’ She had no way of computing that sort of money, so I said, ‘It means you don’t have to do anything, Mum, work for anything, or want for anything ever, ever, ever again. So no taking crafty cleaning jobs to be with your mates or I’ll get into trouble with the papers.’ She never let me see how important my success was to her, or how proud she was of what I’d achieved. In fact she hardly mentioned it at all – unless it was to take the piss out of me. But when she died in 1989 her friends and members of our family all told me that she’d spoken of me with tremendous pride. She was just very careful not to let me get too big for my boots.
Meanwhile, there was something she was keeping from me. She’d lost touch with my brother Stanley and she was very upset about it. None of his friends seemed to know where he’d gone and I began to get worried too as all my efforts to trace him failed. I’d almost given up when one day I was in Heal’s, the classy furniture store, ordering a new sofa and I asked to see one they had out the back. Two blokes in overalls heaved it in to the showroom for me and as they manoeuvred it into place, one of them turned in my direction and I saw it was Stanley. I was really shocked to see him looking so shabby and felt terrible that he was working so hard to keep his head above water while I was ordering sofas without a second thought. In the end, it worked out brilliantly. I took care of things for Stanley and as I was about to go away to the Cannes film festival where they were showing The Ipcress File, he moved into my flat to take care of things for me.
It was in Cannes that I finally realised what my life had become. Harry Salzman put me up in a very grand suite at the Carlton Hotel and I revelled in the luxury of it, but as soon as Ipcress was shown I realised that my days of freedom were over. I couldn’t leave the hotel without being mobbed by the press. Sean Connery was also in town and he hated it so much – he couldn’t even get to the hotel dining room in peace – that he left the same day. I wasn’t in quite that league yet, so I stuck it out and went to the reception given by the British Consul. The Beatles were also in the line-up and I was next to John Lennon. After the fiftieth person had shaken our hands and asked who we were and what we did, John and I changed our names – his to Joe Lemon and mine back to Maurice Micklewhite. It didn’t seem to make much difference, but it cheered us up. John and I made a nice little drinking team for the couple of days we were in Cannes and toured the parties together. He was a tough, no-nonsense man and completely indifferent to the glamour of our surroundings. At one party, we found ourselves both needing a pee and all the lavatories occupied. We roamed round some great palace of a house and eventually I found an en suite bathroom upstairs and rushed in. When I’d finished, I came out to find John rather unsteadily peeing out of the bedroom window. ‘John, you’ve got it on the bloody curtains!’ I said. ‘Who cares?’ said John in that unmistakeable voice. ‘They’re rich – fuck ’em!’
If Cannes seemed like impossible glamour, then New York, where I was off to next, was in another league.
6
To Hollywood
Alfie had opened in the US and had been such a