The Elephant to Hollywood - Michael Caine [58]
Play Dirty was being filmed in the southern Spanish town of Almería, which had become the centre of the Spaghetti Western industry after Sergio Leone made The Good, the Bad and the Ugly there and it was also a favourite location for wartime desert battle movies, which was why we were there. In fact there were only about four sand dunes and all the high crane shots also managed to include the local beaches, crowded with hordes of sun-loving tourists.
The ‘desert’, such as it was, was rather overcrowded – there were two Spaghetti Westerns being filmed at the same time as our movie, as well as a new British-produced Western, Shalako, starring my friend Sean Connery, and this made for some frustrating – if actually very funny – moments. One day we were shooting a scene in which Rommel’s Afrika Korps were advancing their tanks across the desert sands only to be confronted round one of the dunes by a horde of American Indians in full battle-cry in pursuit of a nineteenth-century stagecoach. As soon as they saw the tanks, the horses reared up and threw their riders and we had to hang about while they were picked up and dusted off and all the horseshit and hoofmarks were eliminated.
Despite the overcrowding, it was still possible to get some peace and one afternoon one of my friends from the crew and I found a quiet spot to sit and have a couple of beers. I was bemoaning the lack of beautiful girls around the place to my happily married companion, when he suddenly jabbed me in the ribs. ‘Michael!’ he said urgently. I looked up and nearly fell off my chair. Standing before me was Brigitte Bardot. ‘’ello, Michael,’ she purred. ‘We meet at last. I ’ave been looking for you everywhere . . .’ She introduced herself and her two companions – two equally beautiful women: Gloria, her secretary, known as Glo Glo, and Monique, her French stand-in, known as Mo Mo. I leapt to my feet and promptly knocked the table and all the drinks on it flying. Not exactly the impression of un homme du monde I had hoped to make. Nonetheless, we soon found ourselves whisked by white Rolls Royce (plus black chauffeur) to the divine Miss Bardot’s luxury suite. When I eventually found my voice I managed to ask how she knew I was in town. ‘My friend Sean tells me,’ said the screen goddess. Ah – Sean, again: Brigitte, or Bri Bri as she was known, was his co-star in Shalako. Still, Sean was out in the desert somewhere and I was here in the suite . . . Unfortunately it didn’t quite work out the way I’d planned. It wasn’t Brigitte who had had her eye on me, it was her assistant, Gloria. Bri Bri’s own tastes ran to extremely young, very beautiful and very dark Spanish men and as I didn’t score highly in any of those categories, I gave up the unequal struggle.
Both Sean and I had been very busy and hadn’t seen much of each other, but he did invite me to the end-of-filming dinner for Shalako. By now rather miffed at the way that BB had managed to resist my obvious attractions, I grabbed a table at the back with my friend the comedian Eric Sykes who was also in the cast. ‘Just watch,’ whispered Eric as Bardot swept into the restaurant, ‘she is completely crazy about me . . . just watch as she comes past. She’ll pretend to ignore me completely. She’s done it since the first day on set – but it’s all an act.’ And indeed BB did walk straight past us without saying hello. ‘You see?’ insisted Eric. By now I was so hysterical with laughter that I had to lay my head down on the table. I raised it just in time to get hit square on the nose with a hunk of stale Spanish bread and looked over to see the divine Miss Bardot smiling wickedly and rubbing breadcrumbs off her hands . . .
The Magus, my next film, was the second of my disastrous Twentieth Century Fox contract and one I’d rather forget, because I simply didn’t have a clue what it was all about – and I still don’t. It marked the end of a three-year stint of movie making and I was more than happy to find myself back home in London – and in a new flat in Grosvenor Square