The Elephant to Hollywood - Michael Caine [43]
We used to have a competition for a fiver a time. It went like this: we’d see a woman from the back and one of us would say, ‘Ugly or beautiful?’ And the other would choose and then when she turned round you would either win or lose. (Sexist, I know, but it was the Sixties.) One day we were out together and we saw a girl with her back to us buying one of the London newspapers. ‘Ugly or beautiful?’ Warren asked, quick as a flash. ‘Ugly,’ I said, and he said, ‘All right – beautiful.’ And she turned round and it was Candice Bergen, one of the most beautiful women in the world. I felt such a putz I nearly paid double – but then Warren always did have an eye for the ladies.
I last saw Shirley a year ago. We’re still good friends, but as she now lives in New Mexico we don’t see each other as often as we used to. She’s as lovely as ever, although these days frankly more and more eccentric, but I’m happy to say she’s never tried to dangle her New Age crystals over me. I think she realised very early on that I was a lost cause as far as that sort of thing was concerned. Mind you, in the surroundings of Beverly Hills – as I very soon learnt – it passes for normal.
The day after dinner with the Beatty family I took myself off to explore those new surroundings. Back then, Beverly Hills, which now features some of the world’s most expensive and luxurious boutiques, was quite a sleepy place with just a few shops including, bizarrely, a hardware store on Beverly Drive. I once nipped in there for a ball of string and there was Fred Astaire looking for sandpaper and when I was lining up by the till, I found myself behind Danny Kaye who was buying a single light bulb. It was in that store that I had what still ranks as my most terrifying experience in America: I was browsing through the power tool display when I popped my head round the corner and there in the next aisle was Klaus Kinski buying an axe. Never has a shop full of DIY aficionados cleared so quickly . . .
Rodeo Drive contained two places that were destined to play a big part in my future social life. The first was the Luau, a Tahitian bar and restaurant where everybody who was anybody in the young and gorgeous A list set would meet at the beginning of the evening to find out the who, what, why, where and when of the night’s social activities. On the other side of the street was the Daisy, the first discotheque in Beverly Hills. Shirley took me to the Daisy one evening early to have a drink before dinner and it was practically empty, but as we sat there, the door flew open and in burst about forty girls who all looked just like Doris Day. It turned out that this was no accident – they were all competitors in a Doris Day lookalike competition, called ‘Doris for a Day’, and were being shown round the haunts of the stars at a time when it was unlikely there would be any stars in the haunts. Tonight, however, they had struck lucky. When they spotted Shirley, they all started screaming at full pitch, two of the girls fainted and several of them burst into tears. In the pandemonium that followed we made our escape. Welcome to Hollywood!
By the time I started work on Gambit I had begun to get a bit more familiar with the high life – but I still had to pinch myself to convince myself it was all real. On my first day’s filming a limousine picked me up to take me to Universal Studios. When we got to the gate, the guard smiled at me and said, ‘Good morning, Michael. Your parking space is down on the right by your bungalow. It’s got your name on it.’ We drove on and the driver pulled up outside this luxurious bungalow and it did indeed have my name on it. Even more exciting for me was the name on the bungalow next door: Alfred Hitchcock. And when I went into mine, I discovered that my first