The Elephant to Hollywood - Michael Caine [83]
Once Shakira was on the mend we began to be able to enjoy our new surroundings and to get to know the neighbours. As I’ve said before, Hollywood and Beverly Hills are not the way you might think and this is especially true of the people who live there. Films, TV series, gossip magazines always seem to make out that LA society is full of ruthless, bitchy, mean men and women – but we met nothing but kindness from friends old and new. This was partly due to the brilliance of Irving Lazar, who took us in hand and introduced us to all his friends – and Irving had an address book like no one else’s on the planet – but mostly it was because of Shakira. Now, Shakira is a beautiful woman, inside and out, but Hollywood, for all that it is not the nest of vipers it’s sometimes portrayed as, is a tough town, and she won everyone over. I believe that eventually you do become what you make of yourself. I was Maurice Micklewhite and I became Michael Caine. Shakira had been a beauty queen but she was originally a shy Muslim girl who had only become one so she could get out of Guyana and see the world (and she made a good job of that!): in Hollywood she became Shakira Caine. People – women as well as men – warmed to her, because unlike some women in Hollywood, she was uncompetitive. Other women like her because she isn’t after their husbands or boyfriends. She’s very cool, she never flirts and she never responds to anything like that. So while people may have liked me, or found me funny – everyone loved Shakira. In fact I once told her that if we ever divorced I’d sue her for loss of status . . . We were lucky, too, I think, because – and perhaps it was because we were British – we were invited everywhere. Hollywood society divides itself quite sharply into the executives and the stars, but we found ourselves able to mix freely with both groups and to be accepted by all.
Real life couldn’t have been better for us at this point but my celluloid life was in the doldrums. I’d had a run of disasters – The Swarm, Ashanti (no, you won’t have heard of it and I hope you never see it), Beyond the Poseidon Adventure and The Island (which, as it was written and produced by the team who made Jaws, ought to have been good, but very definitely wasn’t . . .) – and even the good reviews I had picked up for California Suite with Maggie Smith couldn’t disguise the fact that I badly needed a success.
Who would have thought that the role that would rescue my career at that point would be that of a transvestite psychiatrist turned murderer? You couldn’t make it up . . . but Dressed to Kill became a huge box office success. It was an opportunity for me, too, to show the versatility of my acting skills, not to mention a first outing for me in women’s clothing. My only worry was that I would get to like it! It didn’t happen . . . it had to be the most uncomfortable costume I ever wore. I hated the tights, couldn’t walk in the high heels, found that the lipstick got all over my cigars and stubbornly insisted on wearing my own underpants. Apart from my experiences in Berlin during the filming of Funeral in Berlin, the only other encounter I had had with cross-dressing was second-hand. I was friendly, in her later years, with the great swimming star of the forties, Esther Williams, who told me a story about Jeff Chandler, a very handsome second-string actor, with whom she was romantically linked for a time. One day she found him wearing a woman’s dress. She told me this quite matter-of-factly, although it must have been a bit of a shock. ‘What did you say?’ I asked, fascinated. She said, ‘I told him, “Jeff, you are six foot four. You cannot wear polka dots.”’
I didn’t have to wear polka dots in Dressed to Kill, thank God, but at the end of the shoot, I took the clothes home with me for Shakira as a joke –