The Elephant to Hollywood - Michael Caine [74]
I fell in love with Africa, with its vast landscape and its people, all over again while making this film. But I thought I sensed something even more profound going on with Sidney. One afternoon we were shooting at a little private airfield near Mount Kenya. During a break in the filming, I was leaning up against an old hangar, smoking, and I looked up to see Sidney standing right at the end of the runway gazing at Mount Kenya, silhouetted against it, the very essence of an African. As he walked back towards me, I said to him, ‘Discovering your roots, Sidney?’ He smiled and paused for a minute and then said, ‘They don’t go through Gucci shoes, Michael.’ But I knew they had.
Sidney is, of course, a mould-breaker. Always an actor first, this hugely talented man has had a huge impact on the advancement of black people without ever making a big deal of it. But he’s funny with it. One evening, about ten years ago, we were both at the house of a mutual friend, Arnie Kopelson, the producer of, among other films, Platoon. As is usually the case when you go round to people’s houses in Beverly Hills, Arnie was showing a film, a comedy with an all-black cast, in his home cinema. Now all of us are comedians, one way or another, so nothing is taken very seriously, but we finished this film without a single laugh: it was dreadful. And we all turned to Sidney, who was the only black person in the room, and he said with a completely straight face, ‘This movie has put African Americans back exactly eleven months.’
Not only is Sidney a great friend and someone I see whenever I’m in LA, there are also a few big things in my life that he’s answerable for. One is for my partnership in the restaurant business with Peter Langan (more on him later) and the other is golf. Sidney Poitier is one of two reasons that I don’t play golf. He’s the kindest, gentlest person you’d ever wish to meet, but when he tried to teach me the game, I was so bad he nearly lost his temper with me – and I decided I’d better give up trying to learn for his sake. The other reason I don’t play golf is Sean Connery, but more on him later, too.
Although I had loved being in Kenya, after The Wilby Conspiracy I was keen to settle down in England for a while and so I took on a so-called art movie, The Romantic Englishwoman. This gave me exposure to yet another type of star – the politically active kind – in this case, Glenda Jackson. In fact the whole movie turned out to be rather a serious business – certainly compared with The Wilby Conspiracy, which had been about a serious business, but still managed to be fun at the same time. Joseph Losey, the director of The Romantic Englishwoman, was not a bundle of laughs, for a start. He had one of those very grim faces and didn’t crack a smile from the first day of shooting to the last. I pride myself on being able to make people laugh and bet one of the crew a tenner that I’d get one from Joe by the end of the film. I lost hands down.
In The Romantic Englishwoman I was playing (rather against type) a wimpy husband who lets his wife (Glenda) get up to all sorts with her insatiable lover, who was played by Helmut Berger. Glenda and I got on fine, and Helmut and I got on fine, but Glenda and Helmut didn’t get on at all fine and I found myself a whole new role as I played shuttle diplomacy between the two of them. Their love scenes in particular lacked conviction and I was determined to do better when it came to my turn. Love scenes are actually very hard to do in movies. For a start they are rarely romantic – both partners are usually wearing a sort of padded codpiece to prevent anything untoward and it’s hard not to get a bit embarrassed. Glenda, however, seemed in complete command – although she managed to unnerve me completely. We were all set up in bed and ready to go when she held up her hand to stop