The Elephant to Hollywood (26 page)

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 – she is a regular on the Best-Dressed Women in the World lists – but it backfired on me when she accused me of having an affair . . . With a six foot two inch woman of heavy build? She certainly should have known me better – and she certainly should have known me better than that!

In the end, many of the long shots in the film were actually played by a double – a real woman – who was as tall as me, but needed a bit of padding out. It was she who played the most notorious scene in the film when my character slashes Angie Dickinson’s character to death with a razor. It is a horrifying scene – one that I only saw later on – and it caused a lot of trouble at the time. Brian De Palma – who is one of the most technically proficient directors I’ve ever worked with – was insistent that it was the right thing to do. It was the only death in the entire movie and he wanted maximum impact: he got it, all right.

In fact Brian De Palma’s approach to directing reminded me very much of Alfred Hitchcock’s – not that I ever worked with Hitchcock, but I did get to know him very well. Neither of them were exactly Mr Warmth, but both of them were brilliant technically and went for a very cool approach, which is probably right for scary movies, where the editing has to be spot on because it’s less about the actors making connections with their audience and more about the atmosphere. I love the way Tarantino has taken the genre, played with it and turned it on its head:
Pulp Fiction
, in particular, I think is brilliant.

I reckon
Dressed to Kill
is a bloody good thriller – and it still scares me. It came out at around the time they were trying to catch the serial killer known as the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ and various groups lobbied the distributors to withdraw it in the north of England, because they claimed it might have encouraged the murders. (When they eventually caught Peter Sutcliffe they asked him if he had ever seen it and he hadn’t.)

I’m pretty sure my mother never got to see my performance in
Dressed to Kill
(just as well – it might have triggered memories of my father’s worst fears about my chosen career), but she did come out to visit us in Los Angeles at about this time. She was now eighty-one and almost everything about the trip and our life there was a completely new experience for her. She wasn’t going to let it faze her, though – rather like the mother of another British working-class lad made good and Hollywood neighbour of ours, David Hockney. When Mrs Hockney came over for afternoon tea with us and I asked her what she thought of Beverly Hills, she said, ‘It’s lovely, dear – but it’s a terrible waste.’ ‘Waste of what?’ I asked. ‘All that sunshine,’ she said, ‘and no one’s got the washing out!’ My own mother hit the nail right on the head without meaning to, in her usual guise as Mrs Malaprop. ‘Oooh,’ she said, pointing out of the car window at the lush flowers and plants on the way in to Beverly Hills from the airport, ‘look at all that hysteria climbing up the walls.’  She’d summed up Hollywood, in a nutshell.

When Dominique flew over to join us, the whole family was reunited and I took her and Mum to Las Vegas as a special treat. My mother was in her element and stayed up every night until three o’clock in the morning, partying as I suppose she’d never had the chance to as a young woman. Eventually she would agree that it was time to go to bed, although she wasn’t happy with the décor of her bedroom at Caesar’s Palace. ‘That mirror over the bed,’ she said. ‘What’s that for? Complete waste of money.’ I had to think on my feet: Mum still undressed in the dark. ‘It’s so women can put on their make-up before they get up,’ I offered. Mum sniffed. ‘Lazy cows,’ she said. Indeed.

After Mum went back to England (she was keen to catch up with her favourite soap opera), and we had taken a short holiday there, too, I went off to Hungary to work with John Huston again. This time it was on a film called
Escape to Victory
set during the Second World War and telling the story of a group of prisoners of war who play a game of soccer against a German team. Not only was John directing it, but Sylvester Stallone – who had just made the smash hits
Rocky
and
Rocky II
– was playing the goalkeeper. Sly was great to work with, if a bit exhausting: he never stopped exercising. If there was a five-minute break he would do push-ups, if there was a ten-minute break he would do push-ups and sit-ups. I lost weight just watching him. On the whole he was great fun – except for one piece of Hollywood ‘star’ behaviour he had picked up from somewhere. He was in the middle of writing
Rocky III
(but then again it might have been
IV
, or
V)
and insisted on only being called to the set if his scenes were about to be filmed. He had much better things to be getting on with than hanging around waiting. One morning he was called to shoot a scene and the weather changed and he was kept waiting for three hours while another scene was shot. He would, he informed us, make us all wait three hours the next day to make up for this. And so the following day we all had to sit around so he could make his point. Everyone was waiting for me to explode – and I was pissed off – but I had had a better idea. When Sly eventually deigned to appear, I asked him if I could have a private word. ‘I just want to say thanks,’ I said. ‘I was at a party last night and hadn’t learnt my lines – those extra three hours saved my bacon.’ He looked a bit nonplussed and I went on, ‘And I’ve got another party tonight, and more dialogue tomorrow – so could you be three hours late again so I don’t get into trouble?’ He was never late again.

John Huston and Sly were great to work with, but for me the real joy of the movie was playing football along with such giants of the game as Pelé, Bobby Moore and Ossie Ardiles – it was a dream come true! It’s just one more of those ‘only in Hollywood’ moments – I mean, Pelé, Bobby Moore, Ossie Ardiles with Rambo in goal? No one could beat us! I love football and used to kick a ball around in the street, as all boys do – in fact I did it last weekend with my grandson. I played right back at school and I thought I was pretty good – well, no one could get past me at Hackney Downs, anyway – but, as someone who likes their comforts, I never liked the cold mornings or worse the cold showers with other blokes, so I didn’t pursue it beyond school sports. Just as well – I had a knockabout with Pelé and Bobby Moore while we were filming and I realised how bad I was . . . But I am a huge armchair football fan and a great supporter of Chelsea. I took Shakira once to a Chelsea game (and, yes, I did have to explain the off-side rule), because she’d never been. It was great – we were in Abramovich’s box – and she enjoyed it, but I’d much rather watch a match on TV where you can see all the action and the replays. If you’ve turned your head at the wrong moment, or the play is at the other end of the pitch, you can miss something important entirely. As I’m writing this, I’m glued to the World Cup. I’ll support England through anything but I have just watched them crash out disastrously. They remind me of an all-star movie in which the members of the cast are so full of their own importance they can’t work as a team.

Life on the pitch filming
Escape to Victory
may have been exciting, but life off the pitch in Budapest was very drab. Still under Communist rule, it looked beautiful – and of course, now it is a wonderful and lively city to visit – but back then it was grey and depressing. There were only two decent restaurants and both of them were patronised by members of the Party and their mistresses. I couldn’t wait to leave every weekend and would rush off to the airport to get back to London, where Shakira and Natasha were staying.

It was fantastic to be back in England and I loved catching up with friends and family, but because I was a tax exile, I was only allowed up to ninety days in the UK and so it wasn’t long before we found ourselves back in Hollywood. Although I was happy to be spending the winter months in the warmth of LA and we had a regular flow of British friends passing through, all of them in despair about the state of the British film industry, I was aware that I was beginning to miss my own country. I even found myself recreating our Mill House Sunday lunches with the traditional roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, which was bizarre in a-hundred-degree heat. I’ve always enjoyed cooking, and although after Shakira and I got together I expanded my repertoire from the classic English fry-ups I’d loved as a kid to include some healthier options, the roast Sunday lunch has always been a family favourite. And here in California it seemed a way of connecting with a piece of England I have always loved.

My father, of course, believed that cooking was women’s work and real men didn’t go near it. He was always a bit dubious about the acting profession for the same reason. He would have been horrified enough if he had lived to see
California Suite
(in which I played a gay man) and
Dressed to Kill
, but what he would have thought of
Deathtrap
, my next film, doesn’t bear thinking about. In this film I achieved what no other male actor has ever managed before or since: I kissed Superman. My co-star was Christopher Reeve, already an international star through
Superman
, and a good friend of mine, which was perhaps just as well: Christopher and I were playing closet gays who murder my ‘wife’. We were filming in New York, which was great for me as I could hang out at Elaine’s, the restaurant, and spend time with friends like Elaine herself, Bobbie Zarem, my press agent, his brother, Danny, who was in the menswear business, and the producer Marty Bregman and his wife, Cornelia. The director of
Deathtrap
– which was an adaptation of Ira Levin’s brilliant play of the same name – was Sidney Lumet. I had wanted to work with him and I was delighted to have a chance to work together.

With a great script and a co-star like Christopher Reeve, who had been keen to take on the role to avoid the almost inevitable typecasting that he feared would come with a role like Superman, the filming was going really well. But eventually we got to the point where there was no avoiding the big moment. Although we had had several dry runs, as it were, where we just mimed the kiss, we both knew what was coming. Christopher and I had been drinking brandy to get up courage steadily over the course of the afternoon and by the time we got to the real thing, we had had so much we couldn’t remember the dialogue and Sidney Lumet got very pissed off. I really don’t remember much about the actual kiss itself, but I do remember saying to Christopher just as we were getting into position and before Sidney Lumet called ‘Action’, ‘Whatever you do,
don’t open your mouth
!’ It must be the longest close-mouthed kiss in cinema history . . . I was in a café quite recently and bursting for a pee and there were only two cubicles, one for men and one for women. The Men’s was occupied but Ladies’ was free, so having checked no one was around, I dived into it. While I was in there, the doorknob rattled; unfortunately a real lady had turned up. When I’d finished, I opened the door and said to the woman waiting, ‘It’s OK, I’m a lesbian.’ And she said, quick as a flash, ‘No you’re not. I saw you kiss Superman in
Deathtrap
 . . .’