The Elephant to Hollywood - Michael Caine [47]
Marvin was a real wheeler-dealer and a bit of a rascal and I adored him (I’ve got a soft spot for rascals, being a bit of one myself). His father, a Polish Jew, was a boxer known as Fighting Joe Davis and he’d landed up in London before signing up to the British merchant navy and then jumping ship in America. Marvin made all his money in Texan oil and ended up buying Fox and selling it to Rupert Murdoch and buying the Beverly Hills Hotel and selling it to the Sultan of Brunei. Mind you, when he died, it turned out he wasn’t quite as rich as we all thought, but while he was alive it was luxury all the way. He was very interested in art and the art market and I recall one evening round there when David Hockney came to dinner. Marvin spent a long time trying to get David to tell him how much his paintings were to buy and how much they might be worth in the future. David didn’t have the faintest idea – it was fascinating to watch art meeting commerce and both finding the other completely incomprehensible.
If Marvin had been unable to ascertain the value of a David Hockney from the man himself, he was on surer ground with his Renoirs and Picassos – the house was full of them. He showed me round once and there in the middle of all this incredible art was a still of Sly Stallone and Dolly Parton in Rhinestone, the 1984 movie Marvin backed and that was released with, shall we say, indifferent results. When I pointed out the incongruity of this photograph hanging side by side with some of the world’s greatest paintings he pretended to look surprised. ‘But that’s the most expensive picture in the house, Michael,’ he said. ‘It cost me forty million dollars!’
Marvin had everything and knew everybody. You could turn up to dinner there and find yourself – as we once did – at a political fund-raiser for Bill Clinton being sung to by Barbra Streisand, or, on another occasion, sitting next to Ronald Reagan. For some reason President Reagan seemed to think I was a friend of his and he greeted me with a hug and asked me how my sons were. And he did that from then on whenever we met. He never actually used my name and as I don’t have any sons I never actually found out who he thought I was – and after a bit it would have been too awkward to put it right. He was a funny guy and had a great way with words and a knack of getting to the nub of things that really appealed to me. He once told me that California was not a place to live but a way of life and I think he got that absolutely right. Another time he said to me that he didn’t mind at all no longer being president. ‘You know . . .’ – and I waited for him to say a name, but he adroitly avoided it – ‘I’m very happy living in a private home after eleven years in a public house.’ I wonder if he realised how funny that was to a Brit.
Ex-presidents, presidents-in-waiting – there was nothing you could do socially for Marvin, nothing you could give him that he couldn’t buy, but I did once do something for him that no one else could have done and that even Marvin, with all that money, couldn’t have done for himself. Shakira and I were friendly with Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson while they were married and introduced Marvin to them. Sarah really liked him and when we asked if Marvin and Barbara could join a dinner party she was organising at Buckingham Palace, she kindly agreed. It was something Marvin never quite got over – I guess he had finally found a mansion he really couldn’t afford.
7
No Holly, No Woods
Back when I arrived for the first time, it didn’t take me long to work out that a lot of what I had thought about Hollywood was wrong. Looking back, I was a wide-eyed innocent and I spent months thinking to myself, ‘I guess Hollywood just isn’t really like that,’ every time I made a new discovery about the reality of the place. Even my grasp of the geography and history was off, never mind the power politics. For a start, I’d assumed Hollywood was the biggest centre of film-making in the world, but I soon discovered that