The Elephant to Hollywood (35 page)

After lunch I was so bored and frustrated that I fished the ad out of the basket and read it again. I had nothing to do, so I decided I might as well go and look at the place. It was in a beautiful valley, named after the River Mole, which ran through it, and quite near Box Hill, where I had gone hiking as a Boy Scout. The site was set in twenty-one acres of the Surrey Hills and had stunning views. All this was, I had to admit, a good start. The barn itself was in good shape for its age and the developers were in the process of putting three storeys into the massive space – and that was as far as they had got. As I watched them, it suddenly occurred to me that I might be able to design the place myself. Would this be possible? I asked. The foreman shrugged. He didn’t care. ‘If you buy it,’ he said, ‘you can have it any way you like, as long as you pay for any changes to what we’ve done already.’ Well, what they had done already didn’t amount to much, so I began to get excited: it would be great fun to design a house again, I thought.

I decided to walk around the grounds, which were set on a beautiful sloping hillside. The place had been a barn and busy riding school, attached to the big manor house further up the hill, and so had no garden or cultivation of any kind – it was just virgin fields with a road for delivery trucks. It would be fantastic to design a garden again, I thought, and as I walked round the whole twenty-one acres, I felt excitement welling up inside me at the prospect. Just as I was circling round and back to the building site I saw something that made me certain that this place was right for me and for my family. (Actors are very superstitious people indeed – me included: it’s a dodgy profession and you need all the help you can get.) As I stood there, looking out at the view, a flock of about thirty beautiful yellow and green parrots flew over my head. What on earth were they doing in Surrey? When I asked the foreman he told me that they were Brazilian parrots that had escaped from a film set in Shepperton Studios, which wasn’t far away. ‘Which film?’ I asked, curious. ‘
The African Queen
,’ was the answer – and that was almost all I needed to know. Humphrey Bogart and John Huston? It was a sign . . . But the ultimate test for me is the ‘sitting-down test’. Just as I had done years before when I was looking at Mill House and invited Mum and Paul to come along, I brought Shakira and Natasha the next day. They loved the setting straight away, but there was one flaw in my experiment: it was a building site and so of course there was nowhere for them to sit down. I needn’t have worried. When I asked them where they would like to go for lunch, they both said they would like to go into town and buy some sandwiches and bring them back to the barn and have a picnic on the grass. I had my answer and I bought the place.

There are a couple of lessons I have learnt in life that applied to buying this house. Sometimes the greatest things that happen to you are out of your control, but they are destined for you anyway. It happened most significantly with Shakira, of course: I only met her because I stayed in one night and watched television. To this day I have no idea what made me do it – it was something I had never done before in my life and have hardly done since – but not a day goes by when I don’t thank my lucky stars for it. It was the same with our new house. I had the house of my dreams in my hand and threw it into the wastepaper basket not once, but twice . . . but something made me rescue the scrunched-up ad, smooth it out and – well, I’m sitting here now!

The house is in the Green Belt, a designated conservation area in which no one is allowed to build. The developer had only got planning permission to do the conversion if he agreed to tear down 46,000 square feet of other buildings on the estate. That had already happened by the time I came along, but I saw the photographs and the old riding school, stables and horses’ swimming pool were some of the ugliest buildings I have ever seen. There was also a drive straight up from the main road to the barn. When I bought it as a house, I was told that I couldn’t have a gate on the main road and that we would have to go round the back of the property. I was really upset at the time, because I did want to have this great drive up to the front of my house, but in fact it turned out to be the best thing that could have happened. In its place I put a hedge, which cuts the main road off – and now people pass the house without ever knowing it’s there, which is brilliant. I’m really grateful to the council for putting these obstacles in my way – sometimes things in life you think are bad are there for a good reason.

It was about ten months before we could move in and we couldn’t wait. We weren’t disappointed when we finally made it – the house and the grounds were wonderful. The only blot on the landscape was not our house (which was carefully designed to blend in), but some of the attitudes we encountered. The day after we moved I spotted a helicopter flying overhead, taking pictures. I knew it was a newspaper after a story. I wondered what nasty thing they could find to say about such a lovely place. When the piece came out it was every bit as snobbish as I feared. One of the big English supermarket chains bases the design of its country stores on the same sort of barn type as mine – an ‘Essex barn’, as it is known. So the journalist decided that I had built my house based on the design of a supermarket, obviously assuming that someone who is working-class by birth would be incapable of any taste or intelligence. I’m used to some daft stories in the press, but sometimes you do need to swallow hard . . . In Britain if you are successful and from a working-class background, you get this sort of thing all the time. It’s often a tiny and insignificant comment made by a tiny and insignificant person, but it’s annoying – a bit like being bitten by a flea you can’t quite ever squash. I remember talking to a reporter years ago about my elder daughter, Dominique. ‘Oh,’ he said, trying to stifle a laugh, ‘so you named her after the singing nun, did you?’ (There had recently been a number one hit called ‘Dominique’, by a Belgian nun.) ‘No,’ I said. ‘I named her after the heroine of the Ayn Rand novel
The Fountainhead
, Dominique Francon.’ I can still see the look on his stunned face: how could this ignorant Cockney bastard have read a book like that?

Class prejudice works in weird and wonderful ways in Britain. A supreme example of this is our planning system: thousands of apartment blocks were built for lower-income families after the war, with nowhere for tenants to park their cars. I suppose at the time the planners didn’t envisage that the working class would be able to buy cars. As well as stuffing up large-scale projects like that, the planning authorities also seem to like to stick their noses into small-scale affairs. We had some real trouble with the planning authorities at our Surrey place – although it had its funny moments. As soon as I moved in, I built a large pond at the bottom of my garden, which meant installing a rubber liner over sixty feet in diameter with a big hole in the middle for an island. We had to put this in manually and about thirty of our neighbours turned up to help us, which was wonderful. Now, on the whole we have been blessed with our neighbours, but there was one person who didn’t feel so warmly and reported me and my pond to the council . . . When the inspector eventually turned up – a young woman of about twenty-five – I recognised the attitude immediately. It’s called the ‘you may be a big movie star but that doesn’t impress me’ attitude and it usually means that you’re not going to be treated fairly at all. She was bristling with outrage and efficiency. She pointed to my lake. ‘Have you got planning permission for this building?’ she asked. ‘It’s a hole in the ground,’ I pointed out, ‘not a building.’ ‘Well,
that
is a building,’ she said and pointed to a tiny landing stage. ‘But it’s at water level,’ I said. I had her there, but she wasn’t going to give up and she held up a hand and looked around her. ‘What are those trees?’ she demanded. She was obviously on the scent of something. ‘Fir trees,’ I said, ‘planted to shield us from the sight and sound of the road.’ ‘You can’t plant trees,’ she said triumphantly, ‘it’s the Green Belt!’ She had
me
there and I couldn’t think of an answer for a moment, but eventually I came back with, ‘But they’re green!’ (Lame, I know, but I was desperate.) ‘Ah – but they are in a straight line,’ she said. ‘God doesn’t plant in straight lines.’ She had me there again, but I don’t give up easily. ‘I’m not God,’ I said, profoundly, but truthfully. She gave up and I kept my pond and my line of trees. I think she may have given in because she was the first person ever to hear a movie star admit they weren’t God!

And while all this was happening in Surrey, we had also reconnected with Miami. After the particularly brutal winter of 2007, during which our daughter Natasha had got married to her lovely husband Michael, we rented a house to escape the cold after Christmas. It was the perfect place to relax and just enjoy ourselves for a week and wandering round, we found the place had changed again since we were last there. The society around South Beach and Lincoln Road was no longer exclusively gay and had suddenly become much more diverse: first Miami had been the province of the down and outs, then the old glitz and glamour, then it was all rock and roll, then it was a gay ghetto – and now it is all of that, but with no particular group predominating. And we discovered that the London restaurant scene had invaded the place: apart from Hakkasan Fontainebleau in Miami Beach, the most enormous Mr Chow has now been established in the W Hotel in South Beach and Cipriani and Cecconi are due shortly. Nick Jones is building The Soho Beach House, too. The weather, of course, is perfect, and I didn’t need much persuading to buy another apartment there – and we found one overlooking the ocean, the beach and the cut where the great liners go into the port of Miami, right past my window.

You might think that there is no connection whatsoever between our life in Surrey and our life in Miami but there is. The world is not only strange, it is also small. Not long ago the manor house to which our barn was once attached was sold to a Georgian billionaire called Badri Patarkatsishvili. Shortly after he moved in, he sent his butler down to our house and I happened to open the door to him. ‘Mr Badri would like to know how much you want for your house,’ he said. I was so taken aback I forgot to say fifty million dollars and just said rather pompously, ‘It’s not for sale.’ Why, I wondered, as I walked back inside, would he want to buy another house so close to his own? I thought it might be for his two daughters but I later found out that he never stayed in a house for more than one night for security reasons. It was perhaps just as well because I would never have got my fifty million dollars anyway. Mr Badri, who was a very fit fifty-three-year-old, died suddenly of a heart attack. Our quiet country lane was packed with press and TV vans as limousines with blacked-out windows honked their way through. It turned out that the lane wasn’t the only thing that got blocked: there was a big lawsuit over Mr Badri’s will and all his assets were frozen. This didn’t mean much to me, until I went to Miami for our winter break and noticed from the window of my apartment that building on the new block of apartments on Fisher Island, a massive luxury estate on the other side of Government Cut, the entrance to the port of Miami, had come to a stop. I put it down to the credit crunch, but it was in fact down to Mr Badri, who owned Fisher Island. So in Miami as well as in Surrey I can look out of my window and see Mr Badri’s former homes. Funny old world.

Which of Mr Badri’s former residences I’m seeing from my window is entirely dependent on the outside temperature. We leave for Miami on 28 December, after a proper over-the-top Christmas, and don’t come back until the daffodils are out – usually around my birthday on 14 March. I have a big birthday-cum-homecoming party and then my year in England starts. There are all sorts of reasons to celebrate: it’s spring and I suddenly become a gardener again, and then the cricket season begins just in time for the April showers. I always think that any country with a drought should send for eleven Englishmen dressed in white, get them to stick three pieces of wood into the ground, then stand back and wait for the rain!

One of the joys of our new house in Surrey was planning and planting the garden. We have twenty-one acres, of which six are cultivated, including an ornamental garden, and I designed and built them all myself. They say that as you grow old you grow into your second childhood – and I think my garden takes me back to the Norfolk farm I was evacuated to during the war. A Chinese friend of mine told me that it was great ‘Zen’ to sow, grow, harvest, cook and eat your own food and that is what I do. Food from my kitchen garden tastes better than anything you can buy in the shops and it makes me very happy, so I guess he’s right. I think gardeners are every bit as superstitious as actors. I have a superstition about mulberry trees: if you plant one and it grows it is good luck – but you must never cut it or trim it. So now I have an enormous great mulberry tree blocking a path.

I love the changing seasons in Britain; it’s something I missed while we were living in California. My personal first day of summer coincides with the opening of the Chelsea Flower Show, although I know that’s really still classed as spring. There’s the first day of the Test match cricket season, the first day of the French Open tennis and, of course, Wimbledon – as a sports fanatic, I’m glued to my screen from here on right up to the US Open tennis, followed by the non-sporting, but incredibly patriotic, Last Night of the Proms which signals the end of summer and start of autumn for me.

I love the start of autumn when the trees in my garden change the colour of their leaves in one last dazzling display; I planted masses of trees just for their autumn colours – but I hate it when the leaves drop and reveal an endless view of bare twigs. The days get shorter, the clocks go back an hour and although there is the occasional beautifully crisp, sharp, sunny autumn day, the low grey clouds begin to dominate. The only shining light to guide me through the darkness to Christmas is the arrival of the ‘screeners’ – DVDs of the forty top films of the year sent to members of both the American Academy and the European Film Academy, for potential awards. So just as the outside world starts to darken and shrink and the days become impossibly short, we settle down for a two-month movie hibernation in our own cinema and don’t emerge until my favourite festival, Christmas.