The Elephant to Hollywood (28 page)

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, of course – Elton John’s annual AIDS Foundation party, for instance, which is now a regular fixture in the Hollywood calendar and combines high glamour with fund-raising for a worthy cause – but for me part of the pleasure has always been about finding the smaller, more intimate occasions in the midst of all the glitz.

Being one of the six thousand industry members of the Academy of Motion Picture, Arts and Sciences who vote for the awards involves being sent the most fantastic Christmas present any film buff could ever want: the ‘screeners’. These are the DVDs of the eligible films made over the previous year, sent to us by their producers, all of whom are hoping to get nominations. The screeners arrive at the beginning of November, just as the English weather is getting so nasty I don’t even want to look out of the window. Thanks to the Academy, we don’t ever have to – my family and I hibernate into the cinema and live on screeners until the worst is over. What better way is there to survive a British winter?

Although British winters were one of the many reasons Shakira and I had decided to relocate to LA, by 1983 I had found myself becoming increasingly homesick. I had given the performance of my life in
Educating Rita
and we decided that, much as we loved Hollywood, if I didn’t win the Oscar, there was no professional reason to stay on and we would move back to England. I didn’t win, but in my mind I
had
won because I was going home, and so my delight at Robert Duvall’s Oscar was genuine. It’s always awkward being a loser – especially when people come up and commiserate with you – and so it was somewhat of a relief not to have to go to the Governor’s Ball on the night of the Awards and instead go straight to Swifty’s party – the very first he ever gave. But I was completely unprepared for what awaited me there: as I came into the restaurant I was greeted by a standing ovation from all the brightest and best in the movie business. As I stood there with tears streaming down my face, Cary Grant came up to me and gave me a hug. ‘You’re a winner here, Michael,’ he whispered. I was overcome – how could I leave people like this? But I knew I had made the right decision – and I knew, too, that we would be back and that the friends we had made would be friends for life.

After a trip to Brazil for
Blame it on Rio
, an adaptation of a French comedy in which a middle-aged man (me) is seduced by his best friend’s daughter (unfortunately the charm of the original was lost in translation and it got panned by the critics), we went back to England to look for a house. The summer of 1984 was just gorgeous and the perfect time to house-hunt: the countryside was looking its absolute best. We wanted to find a house on the river, like the Mill House but further away from London in the deep country, and, above all, in a village that had no through road. Property prices were booming in southern England at the time and with this and our list of stipulations it was very difficult to find the right place. We had just been gazumped (a nasty English practice in which someone jumps in with a higher offer after a seller has accepted yours) on a house that met all our criteria and were feeling very grumpy when the estate agent told us an offer on another house in the same village had fallen through that day. As we drove up through the gates marked ‘Rectory Farmhouse’ Shakira leant over to me and whispered, ‘We’ve got to have it!’ ‘We haven’t even bloody seen it,’ I grumbled – but I should have known better. Shakira has an uncanny ability to
know
things, and in this instance she was absolutely right. The house was gorgeous – about two hundred years old, with gabled windows and beautiful oak beams and it was surrounded by what had once been a magnificent garden with – I could hardly believe our luck – two hundred yards of river frontage. We bought it on the spot – and what’s more, we arranged with the owner to rent it from her for the summer until the purchase went through.

So from all the glamour and organised luxury of Hollywood we moved in to a house that needed just about everything doing to it, but that we knew from the moment we stepped inside it, would be the family home we were looking for. It proved the perfect project: Shakira got on with plans for the old house, I began designing the new part we wanted to build and the garden, and Natasha made friends with Catherine, the daughter of a farming family just up the road and spent the entire summer on their farm. We indulged ourselves with all the most English summer pastimes we could find – the Derby, Wimbledon, evening dinners at Thameside restaurants – and gave the first of several 4 July parties at Langan’s bringing American and English friends together.

It was hard to tear myself away from such an idyllic summer, but I had to pay for it all somehow (and the builders were coming in) and so I headed off for ten weeks in Germany to film
The Holcroft Covenant
. It turned out to be yet another bad film, although it was good fun at the time, and as soon as it was done I headed back to LA to join Shakira and Natasha who had flown out already as Natasha was due back at school. In LA, the autumn is party season and I had always looked forward to it but, this year, Hollywood had a really special surprise for me: a private party at the Beverly Wilshire thrown by my friend the producer Irwin Allen just for Shakira and me – and all the comedians and their wives. This was a roasting party aimed at me fair and square, and I couldn’t have asked for anything better. Just as I was about to get a little bit sentimental and a little bit regretful about leaving Hollywood, I found myself laughing. I’ve always been a bit of a comedian myself and I’ve often thought that if I was young today I might have been a stand-up comic, so an evening in the company of such comic greats as George Burns, Milton Berle, Bob Newhart, Steve Allen and Red Buttons, to name just some of the line-up, was my idea of heaven.

A funny thing happened on the way to the room. I passed a big poster of Charlie Chaplin with a woman holding a baby. It was an image I had seen a hundred times before but this time Milton Berle stopped me. ‘You see that woman with Charlie?’ he asked. ‘That was my mother.’ I was astonished – I had no idea Milton’s mother had ever been in movies. ‘And the baby?’ Milton went on. He scanned the crowded room ahead of us and pointed to Steve Allen. ‘Steve was the baby.’

Irwin had arranged for everyone to do a ten-minute set but after that it was more or less a free for all. Everyone told their classics. Some of my favourites are Rodney Dangerfield’s. ‘I’ve given up sex for food: I have a mirror over the dining room table’ and Red Buttons joke, ‘My wife said, “Shall we go upstairs for sex?” And I replied: “It’s either one or the other – you choose.”’ Henny Youngman makes me laugh too: ‘I said to my wife, “Where shall we go on holiday this year?” And she said, “I’d like to go somewhere I’ve never been.” So we spent two weeks in the kitchen . . .’ And what about this from Roseanne Barr? ‘My husband says, “I can’t remember the last time we had sex.” And the wife says, “I can – and that’s why you can’t!”  And while we’re at it, here’s a favourite one of my own. An eastern potentate introduces his new wife to a friend. ‘Have you met the current sultana?’ It cracks me up every time . . .

I look around today and as far as I’m concerned, there are very few people who could come up to the standards of these great comedians. What I like is self-deprecating clever humour not cruelty: a lot of modern stand-up comedy can be quite sadistic. The greatest comedians are always self-deprecating – Tommy Cooper, for instance, who I think was a genius. I love his line: ‘I slept like a log last night – woke up in the fireplace.’  Or Milton Berle’s: ‘First sign of old age is when you go into a cafe and ask for a three minute egg and they want the money up front.’ These days if I want a laugh I’ll watch sit-coms that are character-based, rather than stand-up. I love
Friends
and
Frasier
, for instance, and I loved Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie’s sketch shows, too. And I think the way that Hugh Laurie has transformed himself from the sort of silly-arse British toff into House, who is a tough, going-downhill-fast American doctor, is nothing short of brilliant. His American accent is one of the best I’ve ever heard: I tell you, if I ever get another American part, I’m going to copy Hugh Laurie!

The movies I worked on in 1984 were taken on, more with the new conservatory at Rectory Farmhouse in mind than their critical reception, but in November I went to New York for a film that would come to mean a great deal to me. Woody Allen was a director I had long admired and never worked with so I was very excited to be starting on the filming of
Hannah and Her Sisters
.

Woody comes attached to many movie myths, most of which are untrue. I’d always heard that he never gives actors the script until the day of shooting – and even then he only gives you your part. I got the script of the whole thing weeks before we began with the only proviso being that I didn’t reveal it to anyone, which seemed fair enough. And it was a great script, I could tell that straight away. Woody works on the dialogue for months before a shoot and yet his films always have a very natural atmosphere, almost as if the actors were ad-libbing, which is absolutely not the case. And as an actor himself, Woody brings something very different to the role of director – and he notices everything. Once, he stopped a take and asked me why I had not moved my hand the way I had done in the rehearsal a few minutes before. I had had no idea I had even moved my hand at all, let alone in what way, but he had spotted it, liked it and we repeated the take to get it in.