The Elephant to Hollywood Read online

  Even if you’ve got the right face, you still need to have a sense of humour about yourself. I think I’m a good dramatic actor but I always look as if you could have a laugh with me. There’s a connection between the actor and the audience that goes far beyond the part you play and it’s got nothing to do with acting ability. Charisma – you’ve either got it or you haven’t. Who’s got it today? I’d pick Jude Law, Clive Owen, Matt Damon and of those, I identify most strongly with Jude Law. After all, he looks a bit like me – and he’s remade two of my movies. I identify with him in another way, too. The press spend a lot of time attacking him personally. When we played in Sleuth together, one of the critics mentioned that he’d screwed the nanny and I thought – hang on a minute – he didn’t screw the nanny in the movie! He’s a wonderful actor, a great dad to his kids, and he’s a bit of a jack-the-lad, like I was, although perhaps I was smarter at not being caught. But back when my pals and I were living the high life and dating a lot of girls, we didn’t have to contend with the paparazzi or the celebrity magazines the way stars do now. We’d never get away now with what we got up to in those days.

  3

  Learning the Ropes

  People still ask me if the character of Alfie is based on me. Around the time the film came out, interviewers would say, ‘Alfie’s you, isn’t he? You’re a young Cockney lad, you like girls.’ ‘Is that it?’ I’d say. ‘I’m a Cockney and all Cockneys are exactly the same? All Cockneys who like girls are exactly the same?’ What they misunderstood then – and some of them still misunderstand now – is that, yes, I’m a Cockney; Alfie’s a Cockney. I like girls; he liked girls. But the way Alfie treated them is the complete opposite of the way I would treat a woman.

  In fact I based Alfie on a guy called Jimmy Buckley who turned up one day at Clubland and made an instant impression on all the girls there. Jimmy had charisma. I didn’t recognise it at the time (and I certainly couldn’t have spelled it), but I could see that it worked for him and Jimmy Buckley became my new best friend. Unfortunately, none of his success with the girls rubbed off on me – although I was so desperate by now I would have taken even his rejects. But I did notice that he didn’t seem bothered who he went with and, in due course, neither was Alfie. I, on the other hand, have turned out to be quite fussy.

  In the end it wasn’t Jimmy Buckley who led me towards the promised land, it was another friend who invited me to his sixteenth birthday party. I wasn’t drinking at that point and I was sitting morosely in the kitchen, nursing my lemonade and watching all my friends get hammered when the back door opened and my friend’s auntie beckoned me out into the garden. She was drunk, too, but far from incapable, although mysteriously she did appear to have lost her skirt. I made a half-hearted gentlemanly attempt to help her find it, but after a bit it didn’t seem to matter any more. As I bowled back home with a whole new spring in my step, I couldn’t believe my luck – so that was what it was all about!

  I may have been gaining an education in some of the most fundamental aspects of life, but school continued to fail to capture my interest and I don’t know who was more relieved, me or the headmaster, when I left Wilson’s at the age of sixteen with a handful of passes in my final exams. I was free at last to pursue my show business dream.

  My first job was as an office boy for Frieze Films – a film company, certainly, but a highly specialised one, in this case offering eight millimetre tourist films of London and, at weekends, Jewish weddings. As a consequence, I was the only boy at Clubland who knew all the words to ‘Hava Nagila’. One Sunday evening we were filming a wedding cabaret featuring a band called Eddie Calvert and his Golden Trumpet. Everything was going according to plan. We dimmed the lights, the bride clutched the groom’s hand, a ripple of excitement ran through the guests and Eddie Calvert himself began to emerge from beneath the stage playing – yes – ‘Hava Nagila’ on his Golden Trumpet. I was in charge of the lighting, and, anxious to capture this climax to the evening on film, I plugged in all the lights again. Every fuse in the building blew at once, the room was plunged into darkness and Eddie Calvert was left stranded in mid-ascent, chin at stage level, still blowing his Golden Trumpet. I was fired on the spot.

  My next job lasted far less time. I was still an office boy but I had moved a little closer to Hollywood. The J. Arthur Rank Organisation was the biggest film company in Britain and, surely, I thought, with all those producers and casting directors going in and out of their Mayfair offices, I would be talent-spotted. In fact the place was like a morgue and, even worse, it was a morgue with rules. When I first started, my boss took me aside and explained that Mr Rank was a strict Methodist and consequently there was a long list of things employees were forbidden to do, including smoking. I’d just taken it up and wasn’t going to abandon the pleasure for anyone, so I took to going down to the gents and lighting a fag whenever I had a free moment. A few weeks or so after I began, I was just sitting there, minding my own business, having a quick drag, when there was a sudden bang on the toilet door. ‘You! Whoever’s in there! Come out – you’re fired!’

  After this episode it turned out that it would be me doing the firing for a while. The British government had established national service in the aftermath of the war and every eighteen-year-old boy was required to learn to defend his country, for two years. When I look back I can see that the two things in my life that should have been unpleasant actually formed me as a person – one was evacuation, the other was national service. There were some good and some very bad aspects to both of these experiences, but I can’t deny their impact on me. I don’t think anyone should be subjected to an involuntary two years in the services and certainly should never be sent into combat as I was, but I do think kids these days should be given six months’ training in the Forces to learn discipline and be taught how to use weapons properly in the defence of their country. I am sure the experience would change them so that when they come out they would feel they belong and that they have a God-given right to be here.

  In my day it was considerably less enlightened than that. I was subjected to eight weeks of boot camp courtesy of the Queen’s Royal Regiment in Guildford, which involved hours of senseless square-bashing and, when not marching, running round the barracks at the double or cleaning and polishing useless bits of equipment. This reached a peak of absurdity just before a visit to the barracks by Princess Margaret when I was ordered to join a detail whitewashing a pile of coal. Mad, I know, but it will be no surprise to anyone else who’s been through national service. And it gets worse: just before the princess arrived, the sergeant in charge noticed that although we had swept the parade ground earlier, leaves were continuing to drift down from the trees. It was early autumn; this was not unexpected. ‘Get up them trees and start shaking!’ the sergeant screamed at me. ‘I want every leaf off and on the ground and swept up before midday!’ A lifetime later, I went to Princess Margaret’s house on the island of Mustique for lunch, and when I arrived I found her scooping the leaves off the top of her swimming pool with a big net. I told her this story and she said with a wry smile, ‘I always wondered why autumn had come so early to Surrey . . .’ But I never found out what she thought about that unusual seam of white coal . . .

  After training, the government informed me that they desperately needed my help to occupy Germany, which I did for a year. They then informed me that unless I signed on for another year, I would be sent to Korea to fight communism and defend the capitalist system on a wage of four shillings a day. I couldn’t help feeling that someone who was fighting to save capitalism should be paid more than four shillings a day but, more than that, I bitterly resented being bossed about. I was known as ‘Bolshie’ by the officers because as well as helping the guys with reading and writing letters home (a lot of my intake were pretty well illiterate), I was the person everyone came to for advice about the letter of the law – I knew every army rule backwards and forwards and I knew just how far we could go. As a result I spent over a year on mor
e or less continuous punishment duty (including being made to scrape the guardroom floor clean with razor blades), and although it has turned me into the best potato peeler ever, the thought of another year of it was more than I could face, so I took the Korea option.

  Korea turned out to be the most frightening and also the most important experience of my life and I was lucky to stay alive. When I did get back, Dad welcomed me home, but we’d never talked about what he’d gone through in the Second World War and he never asked me about Korea. Old soldiers never do. His attitude was, ‘Now you’re a man, you understand,’ but it was unspoken. We were now on the same level. He didn’t want to talk about his war because he would never have wanted to come across as the big hero, and neither did I. There are no heroes in war: it’s just a question of doing a job and surviving. And all I know is that surviving Korea made me all the more determined to make my dream of becoming an actor come true.

  Working in a butter factory may not seem the most obvious first step to stardom, but opportunities were few and far between after I was demobbed. It was 1952 and butter was still rationed. I was put alongside a little old man and we were given the job of mixing the different qualities of butter together to make one big glob. God forbid you should have different qualities of butter available. One day we were mixing away and the old man said out of the blue: ‘You don’t want to do this all your life, do you?’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘Well, what do you want to do?’ he persisted. ‘I want to be an actor,’ I said, and waited for him to crack up like they usually did. But he didn’t laugh. Instead he said, ‘And how are you going to do that?’ I shrugged. ‘Don’t know,’ I mumbled, turning back to the butter. ‘You want to get The Stage,’ he said. ‘They advertise for actors in the back of the newspaper. My daughter’s a semi-professional singer and she gets a lot of work that way. Go down to Solosy’s, the newsagents in Charing Cross Road – they stock it.’

  The next Saturday I was outside Solosy’s when it opened. Five minutes later I was round the corner, sitting on a bench in Leicester Square looking at an advertisement for an Assistant Stage Manager (‘plus minor acting roles’) for a small theatre company based in Horsham, Sussex. By Monday I had sent off my application (in what I hoped would be the less risible name of ‘Michael Scott’), including a hastily taken photograph of me in which I appeared to be wearing lipstick. The following week I found myself sitting in the office of the owner and director of the company, Mr Alwyn D. Fox. He seemed to be a bit disappointed. ‘You’re nothing like your photograph, are you?’ he said. Ah, I understood. I was twenty years old, six foot two, with long blond curly hair and the remnants of a tan I had acquired on the boat back from Korea, but I was categorically and unmistakably butch. ‘Edgar!’ Alwyn D. Fox suddenly shrieked. From out of an inner office emerged a man even smaller and more delicate than Mr Fox. The two of them stood side by side, hands on hips, gazing at me. ‘Oh, I think he’ll do,’ said Edgar eventually. And I was hired.

  One of the upsides of working in a largely gay company was that, with less competition around, my sex life increased dramatically. Another was that I got given most of the butch minor roles to cut my teeth on. My very first role as a professional actor was as the policeman who comes along at the end of the play to arrest the villain who has been discovered by the posh, effete amateur detective. I can’t remember the name of the play, or who wrote it, but I can remember my one line – ‘Come along with me, sir,’ – which is all the more remarkable after nearly fifty years, since I forgot it at the time. The problem was that – yes, again – I had forgotten to do my flies up and so when I went on, the audience fell about, which threw me completely. One of the actors helpfully whispered my words to me but I couldn’t hear what he said and asked, crossly, and in my normal speaking voice, ‘What?’ Another gale of laughter – and I was banned from performing for the next three weeks.

  Now I look back, I realise I learnt a huge amount from Alwyn D. Fox and my time in Horsham. Of course I always now check my flies before each take, but I also always bring a pencil to rehearsals so I can take notes on the moves. (‘The first thing you need to become an actor is a pencil!’ Alwyn screamed at me the first day.) He also drummed into me the importance of speaking clearly. During my very first rehearsal he stopped me mid speech and pointed to the balcony. ‘The person sitting at the back there,’ he said, ‘has paid to hear every word you have to say and every gesture you have to make.’ He was right. He was right, too, about something else. In one play we did, I was playing a scene in which my character was not on speaking terms with the rest of the cast. I had to sit in a corner, downstage. One night, one of the old ladies in the audience took pity on me and leant out of her seat, over the footlights and offered me a caramel. I took it and nodded my thanks. The minute we’d taken the last curtain call, Alwyn rounded on me. ‘How dare you break the fourth wall!’ The fourth wall? What on earth was he talking about? ‘The fourth wall!’ he went on, working himself up into a frenzy. ‘It’s the invisible fourth wall between us and the audience and if you break it the magic of theatre is completely destroyed!’

  The sort of training I had in rep has more or less disappeared for young actors. TV is the training ground now, and that work just didn’t exist when I started in the business. But I still think that if you’re going to be any good at comedy you do have to do live theatre, or you can’t time laughs. When you make a movie or a TV series there’s no audience response to test yourself against, so I always make sure I speak as loudly as I can in rehearsal and then check the reaction of the technicians. If they laugh – and they’ve seen it all before – then I know I’m doing the right thing.

  In the end I did nine years of theatre rep, rather than the three years of training that students get at RADA. There’s no doubt in my mind that RADA offers amazing opportunities to its students. At the end of the courses they do these show pieces and agents and casting directors all come along. I never had that sort of chance and I think it’s great that kids these days do – and kids from all sorts of backgrounds, too. I gave a speech to the graduating year at RADA the other day and I told this joke. Two actors meet and one says in a posh voice, ‘Oh, hellair! How are you?’ And the other says, ‘I’m not too good.’ ‘Why? What’s the matter?’ asks the posh one. And his friend says, ‘I can’t get any work ’cos I’ve got this, y’know, workin’ class accent. It’s all right for you,’ he says, ‘you talk posh.’ ‘No, listen,’ says the posh one. ‘You can’t get a job because you’ve got a Cockney accent? Well, let me tell you something – I’m a Cockney, too.’ And the other one says, ‘What?’ And the posh one says, ‘Yes. What I say to you is that you should go to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and learn to speak properly like what I done!’ Standing there at RADA, looking down at all those hopefuls in the audience, I felt rather envious – at their age I would have loved to have been in their shoes. After all, what did I gain from those nine years in rep that I couldn’t have learned in college? I survived. Someone once asked me what my greatest talent as an actor was, and I said, ‘Survival – I’ll still be here when I’m seventy.’ Well, as I write, I’m seventy-seven . . .

  Although I was learning the craft of acting fast at Horsham, I still suffered from acute stage fright and kept a bucket in the wings into which I would throw up each time I went on. By now I had progressed to bigger parts but I still felt sick and soon nausea was joined by violent attacks of shivering, which got worse and worse over the weeks. We were playing Wuthering Heights and in a spectacular piece of miscasting, I was acting the drunken, shambolic Hindley Earnshaw against Alwyn D. Fox’s tiny and delicate friend Edgar, who had been cast as the powerful brute Heathcliff. The magic of theatre remained surprisingly intact until it came to the fight scene in which Heathcliff has to beat Hindley Earnshaw to a pulp, when the fourth wall came crashing down spectacularly. The problem was that, by the end of a week of this I was shivering and shaking so hard that even if the roles had been reversed Edgar would have won hands down – and dur
ing the Saturday matinee, I collapsed.

  It was cerebral malaria. Not something you would associate with Sussex, and you would be right. It seemed that Korea was determined not to let me go. When I was finally released from hospital and sent back home to my mother I had lost over forty pounds, my clothes hung off my body and my face had gone a terrible yellow colour. I had been told that my type of malaria was incurable, that I would have to take pills for the rest of my life and that that life would probably not last more than another twenty years. Since it was clear that Hollywood was no longer a possibility, as soon as I could I rang up Alwyn. ‘Well – where have you been?’ he demanded. ‘We thought you’d abandoned us!’ I was so overwhelmed, I started crying. ‘I should warn you,’ I said, gulping back tears, ‘I don’t look the same.’ ‘Oh, don’t I know it!’ he said. ‘I came to see you in hospital. Never mind – we’ll do a season of horror plays.’

  In fact I had only been back in Horsham a few weeks when I was summoned back to hospital. The army had found a tropical diseases expert who had come up with a cure for my particular type of malaria and I was to be part of proving him right. I wasn’t the only one. When I arrived on the ward I found all my mates from the unit – and every one of them had turned the colour of a daffodil. We were strapped to our beds for ten days because the medicine we were given made our blood so heavy that if we moved, we would knock ourselves unconscious. I never found out exactly what it was that Colonel Solomons gave us to put us right, but I’m still here, I’m no longer yellow and the reason I leave England in the winter is because I never want to shiver again.