The Elephant to Hollywood - Michael Caine [90]
After Swifty’s death, the mantle passed to Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, who started the very small and very exclusive Oscar party at Morton’s – which very quickly became the massive, but funnily enough still very exclusive Vanity Fair party at Morton’s, now with an enormous marquee. Morton’s restaurant is owned by Peter Morton who opened his first Hard Rock Café in London in 1971 on the same day Peter Langan and I opened Langan’s Brasserie all those years ago – the two Peters and I had opening lunch at Hard Rock and opening dinner at Langan’s.
I discovered just how exclusive the Vanity Fair party had become when one year Shakira and I were invited and we found ourselves seated right by the kitchen. This would definitely have been classed as ‘Siberia’ and a real social stigma, but so many stars were seated round us that it was very clearly not. In addition, it had two great advantages: we were served first and the food was piping hot! But it wasn’t until I went to the Gents that I realised quite what an exclusive crowd it was. There were three urinals. Left and right were occupied so I went for the middle one. All three of us finished round about the same time and we went to wash our hands and I found myself in the company of Rupert Murdoch and George Lucas. Back at our table, I found myself sitting next to an old friend, Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington. She had a Blackberry with her and every now and then would pick it up either to speak on it or to fiddle with it. As the awards show played on the giant television screens placed round the restaurant, we all started to give our uninhibited opinions, both negative and positive, of each award. During a commercial break I asked Arianna what she was doing on the phone. ‘I’m texting my blog,’ she said. I had never heard of a blog at the time and she had to explain to me that she was texting what was happening to her right now, live on the internet, to all the readers of her very popular Huffington Post. I panicked. ‘You haven’t put out what I’ve just been saying about some of the winners for millions of people to read, have you?’ I couldn’t keep the note of fear out of my voice: I had not been discreet . . . ‘No!’ She laughed. ‘I wouldn’t do that – I’ve just told my readers that I’m here sitting next to you, that’s all.’ Phew!
Morton’s restaurant isn’t big, so when the dinner and the Oscars show is over, they open up a door and you go into an enormous marquee and wait for the people who went to the actual ceremony to come to join the party. It doesn’t take long before the first ones come in, usually slightly pissed off and demanding a drink. These are the losers and the presenters who don’t have to stay for the Governor’s Ball. The winners do, and eventually turn up much later, brandishing their trophies. I remember bumping into Jack Nicholson, who was smoking. I started to give him the lecture I’d first had from Tony Curtis, about the dangers of smoking, but he interrupted me. ‘Michael,’ he said, with that wolfish Nicholson grin, ‘it has been proved that people who are left-handed die earlier than smokers. I am right-handed, so I am ahead of the game.’
Even Hollywood and the Oscars have been affected by the credit crunch. Morton’s has now closed down and been turned into another successful restaurant, and the Vanity Fair party is now a much smaller affair, held at the Sunset Towers restaurant on Sunset Boulevard – a trip down memory lane for me as I lived in that building on my first stay in Hollywood while I was making Gambit. There are hosts of other wonderful and much larger parties,