The Elephant to Hollywood - Michael Caine [46]
In 2006 I came back to Los Angeles to make the thriller The Prestige for Christopher Nolan and hired the only really ‘Hollywood’ house we have ever lived in. It was billed as having previously been rented by the Artist Formerly Known as Prince and also Mariah Carey, who had apparently run up massive heating bills because she sat in the heated outdoor swimming pool all night. It was just off Mulholland Drive, near Jack Nicholson’s, and I realised just what circles I was moving in when I turned into the road and saw a sign which read: ‘Your licence plate has just been photographed and stored for future reference’. I’m a bit ambivalent about heavy security: on the one hand I’m pleased that it is there, but on the other I always think that something bad must have happened to make them so keen. At the entrance to the drive were two of the biggest real palm trees I have ever seen. As I come from South London, I haven’t had experience of palm trees from birth, but I’ve been around a bit and I’ve seen a few palm trees in my time and these were gigantic. They were just a sign of things to come: the house itself was also absolutely enormous – when we eventually moved in, it was too big to find each other so when the phone went we just had to take messages. It’s true: the super-rich really are different. The sitting room had over a hundred museum-quality tribal masks from all over the world hung on one wall, and a thirty-foot-high ceiling. It was a bit like being in a cathedral dedicated to some pagan religion and I never felt entirely comfortable passing through late at night. The dining room seated thirty-two. When the estate agent showed us round he said in that enthusiastic way they have, ‘You could have some great dinner parties here!’ ‘I’m planning on opening a small bistro,’ I said and I could see that he wasn’t sure if I was joking or not. I wasn’t surprised to find that he came back later to check . . . When we went into the bedroom, I paced it out and it was thirty foot long and fifty foot wide: bigger than the whole of the house I grew up in. There were ‘his and her’ bathrooms, ‘his and her’ dressing rooms and ‘his and her’ outdoor patios – I began to feel that Shakira and I would never see each other again – and bizarrely, given the climate in Los Angeles – ‘his and her’ fireplaces. Perhaps strangest of all, the bedroom featured something I had never seen before: nine small trees. I suddenly remembered that when I’d been in hospital with malaria all those years ago, someone had brought in a bunch of tulips and the nurse had whisked them away because, she insisted, they ‘sucked up all the oxygen in the air.’ ‘If a bunch of tulips can do that,’ I said to Shakira, ‘what on earth will nine trees do to us? We’ll suffocate during the night!’ She gave me a long look and went over to examine the trees more closely. ‘They’re plastic, Michael,’ she said kindly.
Glamorous as this house was, there are many far more luxurious in and around Beverly Hills. Our friends Marvin and Barbara Davis had one that seemed to define the term ‘Hollywood mansion’: the driveway didn’t just go in and out, it was a whole dual carriageway . . . We were in the middle of dinner there one night when a slightly embarrassed butler brought in the telephone and whispered in Marvin’s ear. Marvin shrugged and took the phone. ‘Yeah?’ Pause. ‘Sixty.’ Another pause. ‘I told you: sixty.’ Further pause. ‘That’s it. Yeah. Bye.’ He gave the phone back to the butler and someone – not me – had the courage to ask him who was on the other end. ‘Michael Jackson,’ said Marvin. ‘He keeps ringing me wanting to buy this house for forty-five million dollars and I keep telling him it’s sixty.’ There didn