The Elephant to Hollywood - Michael Caine [80]
Stars from the so-called Golden Age of Hollywood were much more remote than stars are nowadays where there is much more of a movie community, and actors are no longer stuck in ivory towers. Early Hollywood was rather like a closed order, often as a means of protecting handsome men and women who couldn’t necessarily act – and indeed might be gay, as was the case with actors like Rock Hudson and Montgomery Clift. The contract system meant that the studios had complete control over their players’ public image, whereas the actors control that for themselves now. There were also no celebrity magazines picking over the bones of stars’ lives. The legendary Hollywood gossip columnists Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons could certainly make or break careers, but they knew if they went too far, the studios would ensure they would never get to talk to one of their stars again. It wasn’t really until Confidential magazine came along in the early fifties that the era of deference ended, although the emergence of the paparazzi and their new cameras with long lenses finished it off completely. Tangling with the celebrity magazines and the paparazzi with their endless appetite for gossip can be a very dangerous thing – I’ve never wanted or needed to do it – but actors on the way up often think they can manipulate them, although they almost always end up regretting it. But then for many of the bottom-feeders it’s the only thing they can do; big stars always manage to keep themselves aloof.
11
An Englishman in LA
After The Man Who Would Be King, I think any movie would have been a bit of a comedown, but it was 1976, the summer was glorious, we were enjoying living at the Mill House and I was filming The Eagle Has Landed only fifteen minutes further up the Thames. Life was good and the film could have been brilliant – the cast included Donald Sutherland, Robert Duvall, Donald Pleasence and Anthony Quayle, as well as Jenny Agutter – but despite the book, which I love, it was never more than mediocre. I think the problem was that the veteran Hollywood director, John Sturges – who had a great reputation – had by this stage in his career rather lost interest in the movie business. He openly admitted to me one day that he only took on a picture to fund his very expensive hobby of deep-sea fishing and as soon as filming was done and he’d been paid he scarpered. I can’t pretend I haven’t taken on the occasional movie for the money, but much of the real work for directors comes in the editing and post-production work, and although it was perfectly well handled, without his input it could never have reached its potential.
The Mill House was the centre of our social world in the mid-Seventies and we welcomed our friends there – Roger and Luisa Moore, Dennis Selinger, Bryan and Nanette Forbes among others – most weekends. Sunday lunches had become quite a tradition although not all of them were as memorable as the one to which we invited Peter Sellers and his girlfriend Liza Minnelli; Liza’s father, Vincent and his companion Kay Thompson, the Broadway star; and the singer Jack Jones, with his then fiancée Susan George. Liza and Peter were so in love and I took a wonderful Polaroid photograph (then a relatively new invention) of them, as well as a group photo, to mark the occasion. Sunday lunch was just the warm-up to Liza’s birthday party which was due to be held on the following Tuesday at Rex Harrison’s flat, but when I got there, I found Liza in floods of tears. She and Peter had broken