(Evening Standard, March 1971)
Michael Caine can speak fluent French. I bet you didn’t know that. He’s also very good at German. Practically no one knows that either, but he’s quietly proud of the fact. It’s an accomplishment of which no one considers him capable. Sometimes when he’s in a restaurant and he speaks to the waiter in French, the company he’s with just gape in astonishment, because they just know that he ought not to be intelligent enough to have learned a foreign language, he says.
‘And, you know, I just have to go off into the gents and take a good look at myself in the mirror to see if I really look like the dumdum that seems to be my image. I mean it makes you wonder about yourself. Somehow I seem to have got the image of the world’s luckiest half-wit. But in my view I’m not half-witted and I’ve never had an ounce of luck in my life.
‘I’ve never been given any credit as a craftsman, and my whole press image has always been rather frivolous. And, of course, there’s always been the crumpet thing about me.
‘Everyone always assumes that the parts I’ve played have been parts where I haven’t had to think about creating a character. Oh God, it annoys me to death to be written about as though I were the real village-idiot, a real, lazy, stupid, good-for-nothing, like one of those actors in the old days when it was said that the studio electrician used to put the sparkle in his eyes.
‘I suppose the press wanted a Cinderella story and I was it. But Cinderella was lucky.’
I’m being very lucky tonight. I’m gliding along in the polished cream leather back seat of Michael Caine’s metallic blue Rolls (he had it copied from one owned by a Texas millionaire) on the way back from Shepperton Film Studios to his Grosvenor Square apartment.
Caine’s chauffeur drives with a royal grace as though we are a couple of delicate eggs, and the journey has a royal super-suspended elegance to it.
Now and then we pull gently to a halt at an unobliging red light, and Caine chuckles as he watches the cheaper family cars line up for the inevitable racing start.
‘It’s always like a Le Mans start when we’re in the Rolls. As soon as the lights go amber they all start pissing across the road grinding their gears to get away ahead of us. But we’re not speedy or flash. If I were flash I’d have the car number MC 1 but I just took what I was given. I like to think I was born cool.’
So there we are. He is not flash. During the last fourteen weeks he’s been filming X, Y and Zee (Edna O’Brien’s formerly titled screenplay Zee and Co) with Elizabeth Taylor and Susannah York. Whenever Elizabeth Taylor went on the set a caravan of four or five limousines made their way down to Shepperton – His, Hers, and presumably a couple more for the dogs and dogsbodies, I understand. The studio joke is that if only the Burtons’ retinue go to see the film it’ll make money.
Caine’s circle is more tightly knit. Basically it is Peter, friend and chauffeur for five years, and a nice bloke called Johnny Morris. Together they look like three first division footballers – not sharp or hippy or trendy, but honest and scrubbed, neat polo necked shirts and working-class smart, with undandified hair cuts and manicured nails.
If you didn’t know you wouldn’t necessarily guess which one was the star. There’s no air of unapproachability; just an easy chattiness.
‘What I like,’ says Caine, ‘is a very efficient organisation around me. My homes (he has a mill house at Windsor for the weekends) are full of gadgets to make things easier. There are an awful lot of pressures in this business so I surround myself with buffers. Johnny is my main buffer, he sort of manages everything for me – like an aide. Then there’s a secretary and all sorts of cleaners.’
Still more boyish than most men approaching middle age, the freckles now hide a bit among the more deeply-etched lines in his face, while on screen he looks positively beefy.
At thirty-eight he’s going through an upturn in his career. He didn’t make it until he was thirty (‘I thought I was too late’) but after a couple of smashing pictures like Alfie and The Ipcress File his career became a little more chequered.
He admits: ‘I had some real dogs, but I’m doing well now. I got good reviews in America for The Last Valley (yet to be shown here) and think Get Carter will do well.’
By now I imagine it unlikely that anyone living in the greater London area can be unaware that Caine is Carter and that Carter is a villain – a real bastard in fact. The message hollers at you from the front of practically every London bus, black double-breasted raincoat, shot-gun and air of menace. It’s a film of unremitting violence and chilling deadpan dialogue.
‘I modelled that part on an actual hard case,’ he says. ‘I watched everything he did and once saw him put someone in hospital for eighteen months. These guys are very polite, but they act right out of the blue. They’re not conversationalists about violence, they’re professionals. The message is that violence does exist. Most people think it only happens in America, but there’s a creeping brutality everywhere. It’s like ignoring Nazis because they’re just a gang of ruffians in brown shirts.
‘We accept violence here because the way we see it on TV no one really gets hurt. So when we read in the papers about someone getting beaten up in the street we think nothing has happened. In Get Carter we try to show what really does happen, and how innocent people like children can be involved. We’re saying it happens so don’t think it can’t touch you. He’s a real repellent character. Those guys are like that. They’re as likely to kick their old mum down the stairs as be nice to her.’
It has been suggested that the character of Carter is a ‘there-but-for-the grace-of-God-goes-Michael Caine’. But that’s a bit far fetched.
‘My point is that there but for the grace of me goes me. If you are born into that working-class milieu, as I was and as virtually every violent criminal is, then you’re sure to want something different. And if the world treats you violently enough then you will act in a violent way to alter your circumstances. Or you can go another way. I became an actor which was considered a sissy thing, but it does allow you to act out your fantasies.’
And as Marlon Brando pointed out, you can pull birds easier, I say, and he laughs. Yes, there’s a lot of truth in that. It’s wonderful when you grew up not being able to pull birds. He used to have very bad luck indeed, he says. It was always difficult. Probably it still it if you’re seventeen and haven’t yet got the chat.
‘You know blokes come over here and talk about the permissive society, but I think it’s all a bit of a myth. They’re just balling the same couple of hundred girls that everybody else has been having. I’m sure the whole thing is kept going by a couple of hundred ravers.’
His lifestyle (with his investments in antiques and pictures) seems to vary with the whims of the moment. Tonight dinner with Charlton Heston, followed by a party given by a girl in Oh, Calcutta! Tomorrow – well there’s usually something, although he doesn’t always go.
This weekend he is off to New York for the Ali-Frazier fight together with a group of friends and the Burtons. Filming should be finished by Sunday, for which he’ll be thankful, although he’s enjoyed working with both Elizabeth Taylor and Susannah York.
‘I’ve been very lucky with the people I’ve worked with,’ he says. ‘Very few have been a pain in the neck. When we began this film both Elizabeth and I were nervous of each other and it was difficult because we had to go right into fights and love scenes rolling around the bed and we never even knew each other.
‘But after the first couple of days we admitted that we were nervous and I gave her a bit of a hug – you know, not being familiar, but just to make human contact and we were fine after that.’
He is rich, of course, but mention the postal strike and his background shows like an X-ray. Tom Jackson can have few more fervent supporters.
‘If you’re gonna spend the rest of your life tramping round the streets sticking bits of paper through holes in pieces of wood then I reckon you need some decent recompense. These men lead hard lives, and if by going on strike they’re being pushed to lead even harder lives then I reckon there must be something seriously wrong. They’re not fooling, or goofing off to watch football. Their wives and kids are going without.’
What now for him? The stage? No he’d never go back. He spent ten years there learning his business and it was a very hard mistress that did not return his love. Cinema is now wife, mother, mistress and daughter to him.
‘I think some day I’d rather like to be a writer-producer. I’ve written several screenplays, in fact I write a lot, but I never show them to anyone. When I read them again after about six weeks I realise they’re a lot of crap and burn them. But one day I won’t.’
A lovely, leggy girl crosses the road in front of us looking smashing. We all smile: ‘I love to see them walking about like that – all fresh, you know,’ he says.
POSTSCRIPT Somehow the idea of sitting in the back of a Rolls, cruising back to town looking at the pretty, leggy girls in Knightsbridge has always seemed to me one of the most lasting images of London when it was just about to stop swinging. Of all the British actors who moved into films in the sixties, only Michael Caine has become real ‘box office’ and survived totally in that medium. So far as I know he hasn’t yet had any of his screenplays filmed. Perhaps he hasn’t submitted them.
