The Elephant to Hollywood - Michael Caine [70]
The following two weeks were two of the longest of my whole life but thankfully our daughter recovered and I was able to take both Shakira and the baby back to the safe haven of the Mill House. We had given our child two names, the Christian one of Natasha and Shakira’s choice, the Moslem one of Halima, which means wisdom. She could, we thought, decide for herself when she was older which religion – if any – she wanted: she would have a name for both. Over the rest of the summer and into the autumn, as Natasha put on weight and passed all her developmental milestones with ease, our worries about her began to recede and Shakira and I started to relax into the pleasures of parenthood. What we had been through had, if anything, strengthened our love for each other even more; now, with our daughter, we were bonded forever as a family.
But I am aware that it could all have been very different and the strain of it all came back to me when Natasha herself was due to give birth to her first child. I was probably as anxious as her husband Michael when she went into labour and I remember pacing up and down the sitting room during the long wait for news. Of course these days the anxiety is really more about the mother than the child. We’d seen pictures of the baby in the womb and so we knew he/she was fine, but I couldn’t help thinking back to Natasha and how tiny and vulnerable she had been in that incubator, and how tightly she had gripped my finger. It has all turned out well – not only once, but three times! – and Natasha is an incredible mother, which is something she has learnt from Shakira. We are lucky, indeed.
10
The Best of the Best
Maybe it was because of the time it took me to make it in the movies, and maybe it was because of the contentment that the arrival of Shakira and Natasha brought to my life, but despite the fact that I had felt instantly at home in Beverly Hills and love Hollywood life, what matters to me is not and has never been the trappings of stardom. I’ve never existed in what I’ve always thought of as the ‘Hollywood bubble’ the way some of the really massive stars do. For people like Frank Sinatra, for instance, even though he became a great friend of mine, everything was on his terms. When you went with him, you went into his world. Frank, of course, was a law unto himself; with Frank there was no equal partnership. Wherever he went he was surrounded by a retinue to smooth his way. I remember one of his guys whispering to me when I turned up one time, ‘Frank’s in a great mood today!’ (You very definitely did not want him to be in a bad mood.) I said, ‘And what about me? What about my bad mood?’ And the guy said, ‘Who gives a shit? No one cares how you feel.’ Frank was always the Guv’nor.
But stardom comes in many guises and although Hollywood has its fair share of egos and Guv’nors one of the most challenging and remarkable superstars I ever worked with was Laurence Olivier. Sleuth is inextricably bound up with that first magical summer Shakira and I got together and it almost seemed as if I needed the time and the space that our life in the Mill House offered in such abundance to prepare myself psychologically for playing opposite the most celebrated actor in the world at that time. It was to prove an extraordinary experience.
I was nervous enough about the acting, but I was also nervous about something else, which sounds a bit ridiculous now: how to address Larry. It may seem a quaint and particularly English problem, but he was ‘Lord Olivier’ and I didn’t know whether or not I should use his title. Sleuth is a two-hander and it seemed absurd to have to address the only other actor on set as ‘My Lord’, but on the other hand I didn’t want to get off on the wrong foot. I needn’t have worried. Larry had enough imagination and grace to anticipate my concerns. He sent me a charming letter a few weeks before