The Elephant to Hollywood (20 page)

Get Carter
is the complete antithesis of films such as
The Italian Job
, with its larky criminals who get beaten up and appear in the next scene with barely a scratch on them. The only film I had ever seen (as a kid growing up in the Elephant) that seemed to me to give a halfway realistic portrait of gangland life was
Brighton Rock
, the Boulting brothers’ film of Graham Greene’s novel, starring Richard Attenborough. Michael Klinger and I were determined to achieve at least as convincing a portrait as that.

Realistic portraits of gangland life require gritty settings and so Michael Klinger, Mike Hodges and I decided to shoot the film in Newcastle upon Tyne. Once a great shipbuilding town, it had long since fallen into decline and gave us exactly the dark and brooding atmosphere of urban decay we were looking for. Many people have taken
Get Carter
as a Western, and we were certainly aiming for that sense of a wild frontier. As for me, I wanted the challenge of creating a real villain. Up until
Get Carter
I’d more or less always played nice characters – even Alfie is nice in his way, a real charmer – but Jack Carter is a cold, cold man.

People often think that
Get Carter
is a film about vengeance, but it’s not: it’s about honour, family honour. I understood all that, because there was a very strong code of honour round where I came from. It was a bit like Sicily: you kissed a girl and the brothers came round and you had to get married the following Saturday or you would besmirch the family name – and you wouldn’t get away with that. I was in a club somewhere in the West End just after
Get Carter
was released and the gangster I’d based Jack Carter on – not that he ever knew it – came up to me and said, ‘I saw that
Get Carter
, Michael.’ Uh-oh, I thought, but I kept a dead straight face and I said, ‘Did you?’ and he went on, ‘Biggest load of crap I’ve ever seen.’ ‘Really?’ I said, looking round for the exit. ‘What makes you think that?’ And he said, ‘Michael, you weren’t married, you never had any kids and you had no responsibilities. You don’t understand why we do things. I had to keep a wife and kids with no special skills.’ And I thought – no special skills? He’d only killed about five people – not that he’d ever been charged with anything, but everyone knew . . . and I said, ‘Oh, blimey – you’re right. That was a terrible mistake.’ I completely agreed with everything he said. You don’t want to argue with someone like that.

Violence has consequences and you don’t often see that in movies. It’s a sort of pornography: people are struck time and time again and the next time they appear they just sport a bit of Elastoplast, not even a black eye or missing teeth. If you were a real victim of the violence you see in some films, you would be in hospital or dead. In
Get Carter
you see the effect of one whack, although we never cut to the gore. I’m worried by the sorts of computer games kids play these days when their characters smash someone over the head and there’s no blood – what sort of a generation are we bringing up? And I’m amazed at what you can see on television even before the watershed. People seem to glory in it and that scares me.

9

Falling in Love

Get Carter
was followed very swiftly by
Kidnapped
– a dud from the very start and the only film I’ve never been paid for. I couldn’t wait to get back to London from location in Scotland, but when I finally got home, I was in a very poor way. I was drinking and smoking heavily and although I enjoyed living in my Grosvenor Square flat, I felt something was missing from my life. I had set up Stanley comfortably, and I had bought Mum a big house in Streatham, a suburb of south London, which I split up into flats so that various family members could move there with her. Everyone was happy with their new arrangements – but what about me? I was thirty-eight, unmarried, although not, you might say, without offers, and yet something in me felt unfulfilled. I looked back at my life and at the enormous journey I had travelled and I asked myself where I had really been happiest. Hollywood was a high, of course, and the last ten years had included some fantastic experiences, but it hadn’t exactly been tranquil. And then I thought back to Norfolk. That’s what I need to do, I decided. I need to become an evacuee again.

I wanted to be able to get to London quickly but I wanted to live in real countryside. Berkshire seemed to me to offer the best of both worlds; the Queen seemed to agree with me as she obviously enjoyed spending time at Windsor Castle. So I started to look for a place on the River Thames and I found what I wanted almost at once. The Mill House was 200 years old and sat on a hundred yards of river frontage in five acres just outside the little village of Clewer, near Windsor. Both house and garden were in a bit of a state, but although this suited me, I decided to subject the place to the ultimate test and invited Mum and my old friend Paul Challen, from youth club days in the Elephant, along to view it. I’d read somewhere that you should only make an offer on a new home if, when you take your nearest and dearest along to see it, they sit down. I was home and dry. When I got back from looking round the garden, I found them both sitting outside having tea with the owner’s wife. I made an offer on the spot.

I’ve always loved gardens and gardening and over the course of my life I’ve created a few gardens from scratch. For me, working with your hands, designing and growing things, is the best form of therapy money can buy and tackling the Mill House garden was the beginning for me of a long slow climb back to health and happiness. In fact I had been given a timely helping hand on the health front from a surprising source. I was at a party in London one evening and chain-smoking as usual when I looked down just in time to see a hand snake into my jacket pocket, pull out my fag packet and hurl it on the fire. I opened my mouth to give the thief a bollocking and stopped. It was Tony Curtis. ‘That’s the third cigarette you’ve had since you arrived,’ he said severely and proceeded to outline a very clinically detailed and convincing argument about the risks posed by smoking. I had been smoking for years – two packets of French Gauloises a day, which I considered very chic, but I did think about his warning and gave up cigarettes for a year, and then fell by the wayside and started smoking cigars. Many years later I was having dinner at Gregory Peck’s house and when I went through to the drawing room to have a cigar I found myself sitting next to Yul Brynner. ‘I have lung cancer,’ he said to me quietly. I was absolutely stunned and, embarrassed, started to stub out my cigar, but he put his hand on my arm to stop me. ‘Don’t bother,’ he said. ‘I’m already dying; your smoke can’t harm me.’ He looked at me for a moment. ‘Do you know what I did yesterday?’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘I made an anti-smoking commercial. To be played after my death.’ A few months later, Yul did die and the commercial was indeed shown. I took no notice. Yul smoked cigarettes, I reasoned; I smoked cigars and in any case, I didn’t inhale  (now where have I heard that before?). But one evening I was watching TV at home in Britain, cigar in hand, when the snooker player Alex ‘Hurricane’ Higgins came on to do an anti-smoking commercial. I barely recognised him. He had lost a lot of weight and he looked terrible: he had throat cancer, he said. I sat there for a while, shocked, and then I put my cigar in the ashtray, got up and walked out of the room – and I have never smoked again since.

But back in the Seventies, although I had given up smoking cigarettes, I was still drinking very heavily – up to three bottles of vodka a day. And I was bored. I had plenty of money, plenty of friends, plenty of work, but nothing seemed to satisfy me. I hadn’t yet moved in permanently to Mill House so I was still spending a lot of time in London and although Paul and I would go out every night to all our old haunts, somehow my heart just didn’t seem to be in it anymore. One evening I decided I was just too tired to hit the clubs and rang up Paul and asked him round for a fry-up. We’d watch television, I suggested, have an evening in. He seemed a bit surprised by this sudden onset of domesticity, but came round anyway and we settled down for the night.

What happened next is a story I’m often asked to tell. It sounds incredible but it’s true and I often go cold when I think of all the things that could have gone wrong. I could have changed channels (although admittedly there were only two then – I was changing them, back in those pre-remote days, by means of a broom handle so I didn’t have to leave my seat); I could have gone into the kitchen for a fill-up; we could have decided to go out after all. In the end, though, it’s no use speculating on what might have happened, because what did happen is that during the commercial break, an ad for Maxwell House coffee came on and there, right in front of me, was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. I threw the broomstick aside and crouched next to the screen, trying to get a closer look. ‘What on earth are you doing?’ asked Paul. ‘You gone mad or something?’ ‘That girl,’ I said hoarsely. ‘That girl is the most beautiful girl in the world. I have to meet her.’ ‘Now look, Michael,’ Paul said kindly. ‘That ad’s been shot in Brazil. What are you going to do? Fly to fucking Brazil?’ ‘Yes,’ I said simply. He looked at me sympathetically, but I could tell he thought I’d really lost it.

I paced around the flat for a bit, desperate for time to pass so I could ring up Maxwell House headquarters the next morning and find out who had shot the commercial. Eventually I could bear it no longer and Paul and I grabbed our coats and headed down to Tramp to find Johnny Gold, who could always be relied on for a sympathetic ear. Johnny pointed out beautiful girl after beautiful girl to me on the dance floor, but it was no good, I was in love. Eventually, emotionally wrung out, I decided to call it a night and just as I was leaving, I ran into Nigel Politzer, a guy I vaguely knew. ‘Going so soon?’ he asked. ‘And alone?’ ‘I’m in love!’ I declared dramatically. ‘And it’s hopeless. I saw this beautiful Brazilian girl on television tonight and I may never see her again.’ Nigel patted my shoulder. ‘Which show?’ he asked. ‘It wasn’t a show,’ I replied mournfully. ‘It was an ad for Maxwell House.’ He burst out laughing. ‘The girl with the maracas?’ he asked. ‘Yes!’ I howled. ‘How did you know?’ ‘Because I work for the company that made the ad,’ he said. ‘Then you can help me!’ I clawed at his jacket. ‘Paul and I are going to Brazil tomorrow to find her. Do you know how we can get in touch with her when we arrive?’ Nigel roared with laughter again. ‘No need, mate! She’s not in Brazil and she’s not Brazilian. Her name is Shakira Baksh, she’s Indian and she lives off the Fulham Road.’

I spent the rest of the night alternating between bliss and despair. The Fulham Road – only a mile or so from my flat! So near – and, yet, what if she already had a boyfriend? What if she was married? What if – the final irony – she was a lesbian? Nigel had promised to give her a call the next morning and ask her if she would let me have her phone number – what if he forgot? Eventually I dropped off into a fitful sleep only to be shaken awake by Paul at around noon. ‘Nigel’s on the phone,’ he said. I grabbed the receiver. ‘She’s agreed to give you her number,’ said Nigel. He sounded a long way away. Grabbing a pen, I took the number down in a shaking hand.

It took two vodkas and a cigar before I made the first call, only to be told by a flatmate (female, I noted with relief) that Shakira was in the shower and I should ring back in half an hour. It took another vodka and another cigar before I was ready to make the second call. This time she answered herself. Yes, she knew who I was. Yes, she had seen some of my films (no mention of whether or not she had liked them). But I should be aware that she didn’t make a habit of giving her number to strangers. ‘Of course not!’ I dithered and went on to make some silly point about us not being strangers because I had seen her on TV. I could almost hear her arching her exquisite eyebrow on the other end of the phone. Hastily I attempted to recover my position by asking if I could take her out to dinner. I could, it seemed, but not for ten days.
Ten days
? I agreed, of course, but those ten days were the slowest of my life and I counted the hours and minutes before I could call her again. When the day came, two vodkas down, I called and suggested that I pick her up at eight the following evening. She wasn’t having any of it. ‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘You give me
your
address and I’ll pick
you
up.’ Not unreasonable – but by this stage I would have agreed to just about anything she asked.

I needed more vodkas to get through the following twenty-four hours, but by the time eight o’clock came around I had eliminated any sign of booze or cigars in the flat and had gargled with so much mouthwash my mouth was on fire. I don’t think I have ever been as nervous as I was that evening, waiting for the doorbell.

At last it went: a long assertive ring. Trying my best to remain cool, I walked calmly to the door, opened it and fell in love. Shakira was even more beautiful in the flesh than she had been on screen. I couldn’t speak. She held out her hand for me to shake and I took it but then just held it because I never wanted to let it go again. Eventually I came to my senses and ushered her into my flat – and she walked into my flat and into my life, and she has been at the very centre of it ever since. We did, of course, eventually make it out to dinner. And I discovered that she was from a Kashmiri family that had immigrated to Guyana, which was where she was born and that, as Miss Guyana, she had come to England to compete in the Miss World competition. ‘Where did you come?’ I blurted out gauchely. ‘Third,’ she said sternly. I can’t remember exactly what we talked about now, but I will never forget the intensity of our first meeting. We spent the next few weeks constantly in each other’s company, until she had to leave for a modelling job in Mexico and I had to go to Malta to make
Pulp
, the second film Michael Klinger and I produced together. This would be a good test, we decided. Our affair had become so intense so quickly that I think we were both frightened by the strength of our feelings and a week apart seemed like a good idea. In fact it was a terrible idea; we missed each other desperately and phoning Mexico from Malta in 1972 was an almost impossible task. As soon as Shakira’s shoot was over, she flew to join me in Malta and we have been together ever since.