The Elephant to Hollywood - Michael Caine [44]
The filming of Gambit went so well – largely thanks to the calm genius of its English director, Ronald Neame – that I was able to focus much of my energy on my new social life. It centred largely on the Luau and the Daisy and I owe much of the good time I had there to Steve Brandt, a new friend and reporter from Photoplay, who seemed to know everybody in town. The very first night I walked into the Daisy I couldn’t quite believe what – or who – I was seeing. Paul Newman was playing pool just by the entrance and once I’d recovered from that and wandered inside, I realised that the song they were playing – ‘Mac the Knife’ by Bobby Darin – was being sung along to by the real Bobby Darin, who was at the next table. I stood there gaping until Steve nudged me and introduced me to Mia Farrow who I took on to the floor to dance. And as we were dancing, I looked over my shoulder and there was Sammy Davis Jr dancing next to me. It really was that sort of place.
After a few weeks of this I had just about got over my shock at the casual proximity of major stars when late one night at the Daisy, Steve was called to the phone. He came back to our table to tell Mia (who was with us) and me that we were going round to Rita Hayworth’s place. Now this really would be Hollywood glamour, I thought, but when we got to the house, I was in for a bit of a shock. Rita Hayworth greeted us at the door wearing a grubby white towelling dressing gown and slippers and with a half-empty bottle in her hand. She appeared to be drunk. So was I, by now, and I proceeded to get even drunker as I watched the screen legend drag Mia round the room in a parody of a dance to the theme music to Rita’s greatest ever movie Gilda. Drunk as I was, it was a sobering moment. In fact I found out much later that although everyone always thought Rita was a drunk, she was already suffering from the Alzheimer’s that would eventually kill her.
As the new boy in town and, what’s more (and surprisingly rare in Beverly Hills), a straight single man, I found myself in great demand as party fodder. Luckily I quickly acquired three mentors who helped me navigate my way through the social minefield. I was staying in a succession of hotels and rented houses and one of them would always be on the phone telling me what was going on. And then it was just party after party. As well as the incomparable Swifty Lazar, who always had his finger on the Hollywood pulse, there was Denise Minnelli, the second wife of Vincent Minnelli, Liza’s father, and Minna Wallis, sister of the great movie producer Hal Wallis. Minna may have looked like a sweet and harmless old lady but, as with Miss Marple, you underestimated her at your peril. Minna had been an actors’ agent and her greatest discovery was Clark Gable. In fact she had discovered his talent in more ways than one, she told me confidentially, and once – just once – they had gone to bed together. I never heard the precise details so I can’t share with you the secret of Clark’s success, but I can tell you that Minna never got over it. Minna saw it as her job to marry me off and steered me in very short order towards three amazing women: Natalie Wood, Barbra Streisand and, finally, Nancy Sinatra. Although all three became good friends, I’ve always insisted on sorting out my own love life and in the end Minna had to give up on me.
For a young man who had always dreamed of Hollywood and wondered what it would be like, it turned out to be a continuous stream of life’s best bits with no real life intervening at all. Nothing was real. In fact my days on the set of Gambit were the most normal experiences I was having. Universal had just started what would become its world famous studio tour in which tourists get to see round the movie lot and, back then, they had simply hired an open tramcar to drive everyone about. In those days you didn’t go to a big separate exhibit like you do now; people would actually stand at the back of the sound stage and watch