The Elephant to Hollywood - Michael Caine [55]
Just as we were finishing up in Berlin, I heard that Alfie was being entered for the Cannes Film Festival. I’d had such a ball there with John Lennon when I’d gone the previous year for The Ipcress File that I took a few days off filming and hopped on a plane for a bit of southern French sunshine. Unfortunately, Alfie didn’t go down too well with the French, who couldn’t believe that an Englishman could attract one woman, let alone ten of them, and although we won a prize, the director Lewis Gilbert found himself being pelted with tomatoes when he went up on stage. The trip wasn’t entirely wasted, however. Paramount gave a grand lunch for Alfie at the Carlton Hotel and I found myself sitting next to an Austrian guy. Although I was partying hard every night, I made sure I was more or less sober during the day and this turned out to be just as well. ‘My name is Charles Blühdorn,’ he said in a thick accent. ‘I liked your movie and your performance very much.’ I thanked him and as we started eating I asked him what he did. He told me he was an industrialist and then he said, ‘But that is not interesting. You should ask me what I did yesterday.’ ‘And what did you do yesterday?’ I asked dutifully. ‘I bought Paramount Studios!’ he said. ‘So, if you ever have a script you want (he said ‘vant’) to do, let me have a look at it.’ Well – nothing ventured . . . ‘As a matter of fact,’ I said, ‘there is something . . .’ And I told Mr Blühdorn that my friend Troy Kennedy Martin (the creator of Z Cars) had written a script with a great part for me and a London producer called Michael Deeley had it. ‘What (‘vot’) is it called?’ Mr Blühdorn asked. ‘The Italian Job,’ I replied. You never can know what a chance meeting might bring about, can you?
Since I had got into the festival habit, I went more or less straight from Cannes to Acapulco in southern Mexico. Not perhaps the best known of the international festivals, nor the most prestigious, but certainly one of the warmest and that seemed a good enough reason to go there for Alfie. Along with Rita Tushingham, star of A Taste of Honey and a real Sixties icon, and Lynn Redgrave, star of Georgy Girl, we represented the cream of British talent. I had chosen to spend the day before the festival began on the beach and had got second-degree sunburn and a bright red peeling nose – and I had also picked up an appalling attack of the squitters. Rita was tiny, pale and cute, but no sex bomb, and Lynn (pre-Weight Watchers) was just large and pale. The glamorous South American press were not impressed: after a few polite questions, they lost interest and went off in quest of some real movie stars.
Acapulco had its memorable incidents, most notable of which was attending a bullfight with Rita and Lynn. Witnessing the massacre of the poor bull from our prestige front-row seats was too much for Lynn, who passed out as the blood spurted in front of our eyes. Carrying her out of the arena was almost too much for me and proved to be a more compelling spectacle than the fight itself for the thousands gathered in the bullring. When I finally struggled to the top of the long flight of steps leading to the exit with Lynn’s considerable dead weight in my arms, and tiny Rita trailing behind with all our belongings, a great cry of ‘Ole!’ rang out from the onlookers. What they didn’t know was that the diarrhoea that I thought I had well under control was not equal to the extra strain of my gallant mission. Thank God for dark brown trousers . . .
Lynn Redgrave was one of the funniest actresses I’ve ever seen – I’ve never forgotten her performance in Hay Fever at the Old Vic, which was absolutely hilarious. We didn’t see each other as much as I would have liked after she went to live in New York, and of course I knew she wasn’t well, but I was very sad to hear of her death. Whenever we did meet we always had a laugh about Mexico and those dark brown trousers . . .
And they would probably have been handy for the next stage in my