Last Man Standing: Tales from Tinseltown (26 page)

Sadly, Michael had been ill, and in and out of hospital himself, ever since consuming a bad oyster in 2007. He told me, on numerous occasions, of how he underwent scores of operations, dying several times on the table, but each time he bounced back and defied the doctors’ pessimistic prognosis.

In the summer of 2012 he was told he had only two years left to live, and even joked about it in his newspaper column. Such was his spirit that, even from his hospital bed and throughout his long illness, he continued to write his
Sunday Times
restaurant reviews – only he had the restaurants send the food in to him.

Michael had written his restaurant reviews ‘Winner’s Dinners’ in the
Sunday Times
since 1994, and he used to mail me photocopies of the column when I was abroad. Aside from being a critic, he was also a great host at any meal. Our last memorable dinner together was after his final ‘Winner’s Dinners Awards’, which was held at the Belvedere Restaurant (chosen because of its close proximity to his house in Kensington) and afterwards Michael and his long-term partner Geraldine invited us back to their home for a superb dinner. At the table were Knights of the Realm Michael Parkinson, David Frost, Tim Rice and me, together with Lord Lloyd Webber and our respective wives.
It was a hysterically funny dinner, with Michael being the host par excellence, despite his occasional good-humoured screams to the kitchen for the next course.

Although famous for having many girlfriends, there was one in particular who remained very dear to Michael. He’d known Geraldine since 1957, and they got together again in the early 2000s. Geraldine was at Michael’s side every day he spent in hospital and helped nurse him back to health. Such was his love for Geraldine that after returning home he proposed to her and threw a big engagement party at the Ritz where he warned everyone, ‘It’s taken me this long to get engaged, so don’t expect a wedding anytime soon.’

Over three years later, Mr Winner was enjoying all the benefits of wedded life but hadn’t actually made the commitment of marrying Geraldine. One evening at Scott’s restaurant in Mayfair, Kristina and I joined Michael and Geraldine, the Caines and the Bricusses and turned the conversation around to marriage. We told him he’d been engaged long enough and his reasons for remaining a bachelor were no longer convincing. We all urged him to make the commitment. The wedding followed in 2011 and I know it made Michael the happiest man on earth.

Aside from films, his other great passion was the Police Memorial Trust, a charity dedicated to raising plinths in memory of policemen and women killed in the line of duty. In 2005 he presided as the Queen unveiled the National Police Memorial in The Mall, designed by Norman Foster. Ever the film director, Michael called Her Majesty ‘dear’ when she unveiled the memorial.

Michael was offered an OBE for his work on behalf of the police, but turned it down remarking, ‘an OBE is what
you get if you clean the toilets well at King’s Cross Station’.

My last conversation with him was towards the end of 2012, when I called to wish him a happy birthday. He’d just returned from another stay in intensive care and sounded terribly weak. Sadly, his liver was in failing health and a short time afterwards, Michael called ‘Cut’ on his final scene. As per the Jewish faith, his funeral took place within a couple of days of his passing and, sadly, I wasn’t able to be there.

Fittingly, his memorial on 23 June 2013 was held at his beloved National Police Memorial and I was delighted to attend with Kristina and speak, along with Michael Caine, Michael Parkinson, Leslie Bricusse and a whole roster of police nobility, all keen to express their gratitude to Michael for establishing permanent memorials to their fallen colleagues.

Celebrating Michael Winner’s seventieth birthday. He chartered a private plane and flew us all to Venice. (
back row, l to r
) Leslie Bricusse, Terry O’Neill, Johnny Gold, me, Michael Caine, and (
front row
) Andrew Lloyd Webber and Michael Winner.

He was a great director, a talented writer and tireless charity worker, but more than that he was a real character who enjoyed nothing more than taking the rise out of himself with his newspaper columns, letters pages and in person.

One story I wish I’d told Michael related to my assistant Gareth, who does a rather good impersonation of the great man. On occasion Gareth would call up our travel agent, driver and airport VIP service lady (who had all dealt with Michael Winner over the years, and had the scars to prove it), along with other unsuspecting innocents and would bark down the telephone at them with the most bizarre requests.

That was all well and good until a driver we used to use called Gareth in a fit of hysterics. It was fast approaching Christmas, and thus a busy time for car companies, so when Eddie took a call from ‘Michael Winner’, who was ranting on about wanting four cars that evening and how he dare not be late and so on, Eddie said, ‘Fuck off, Gareth. I haven’t got time for this today!’ and hung up.

A few seconds later the phone rang again and the voice said, ‘Eddie Wilcox, this is Michael Winner! Did you just hang up on me?’

‘Oh! Hello, erm, Michael,’ said a sheepish Eddie, ‘I’m sorry, I think we had a crossed line there!’

‘OK, dear,’ said the great man. ‘Now, about cars for my staff Christmas outing ...’

He’d have laughed so much had he known about Gareth’s mischief. I really don’t think we’ll ever see his like again.

Another great pal who is mentioned many times within these pages is composer and lyricist Leslie Bricusse, and that’s because Leslie’s always been around throughout my life. It was when I moved to Stanmore during my days on
The Saint
that I first met Leslie, at a restaurant called Maxim’s. We hit it off immediately and a friendship developed. Mind you, soon after that I worked with Leslie’s wife, Yvonne Romain (Evie), on an episode of
The Saint
entitled ‘The King of the Beggars’, in which we both dressed down to play down-and-outs – so I know I was destined to get to know the lovely couple, one way or another.

As well as being a talented lyricist and composer with hit musicals
Stop The World – I Want To Get Off
,
Pickwick
and
Doctor Dolittle
to his credit, Leslie is also an accomplished playwright and I’ve collaborated with him on two projects,
Sunday Lovers
and
Bullseye!
, one of which I’m sure he’d probably rather forget – I’ll leave you to guess which.

We would often meet up for dinner with Jackie Collins and Oscar Lerman and Johnny and Jan Gold, along with Leslie and Evie at their house in Beverly Hills. Even when they weren’t at home, I quite often stayed at the house when I had to go to Hollywood.

Evie and Leslie also had homes in Acapulco and Portofino at various times, and I stayed in those, too. In fact, I distinctly remember being at the Italian house when Neil Armstrong took the first step on the moon, as Leslie woke me up to watch it on TV.

It was on that trip that he told me he was building a home in St Paul in the South of France, and, then living by the water in Tuscany myself, I couldn’t understand why someone would want to build up in the hills, miles from anywhere and a half-hour drive from the ocean. It was only me
when I visited that house – and I’m actually very grateful to Leslie for the free holidays I’ve had – that I fell in love with the area and knew
exactly
why he wanted to build there. On one occasion when I had to be out of England for a while, for tax reasons, Leslie was having some work done at the house in St Paul and asked me to move in and supervise the builders. A fair exchange, I reckoned.

With Yvonne – Evie – Romain in an episode of
The Saint
called ‘The King of the Beggars’ back in the 1960s. Yes, that’s me on the left, raising an eyebrow.

It was at that time I discovered, via local architect Robert Dallas, a plot of land on which foundations for a house had been laid was lying abandoned, with the developer having run out of money. I put in a bid, and that is how I came to own my pad in St Paul.

At St Paul, we have the best restaurant you could want right on our doorstep – the Colombe d’Or. Kristina and I still take our holidays there and in the five decades I’ve been visiting I don’t think it’s changed much at all. Whenever I come into the tree-lined courtyard, I think back to seeing regular visitors Simone Signoret and Yves Montand sitting in the corner, in their favourite spot. They loved it so much that they were married there, too. I had lunch with Yves in the mid-80s, a while after Simone passed away, and he explained that he’d met a lady who had fallen pregnant.

‘I think I’ve made a mistake, Roger,’ he said, ‘and the child will grow up without knowing his father.’ Yves died just three years later, aged seventy, on the set of
IP5: The Island of Pachyderms
. It was the very last day of shooting and, after his very last shot, he literally dropped dead of a heart attack.

Despite no longer living in St Paul, my connection with the village continues as my son Christian was married there, and since my last book there have been additions to the Moore ranks as Christian and his wife, Lara, are now the proud parents of Tristan, who was born in December
2009, and Maximillian who was born in November 2011. Both boys were baptised in the same church in which their parents were married.

It was also through Leslie Bricusse that I met Danny Kaye. Of course, I knew of him, and had seen many of his shows, but through getting to know him I came to appreciate how magical Danny was, not only as an entertainer but as a humanitarian as well. He had a natural ability to make children smile, quite often children who had little to smile about. Danny became the first UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador and I’m so grateful to be able to help continue, in my own modest way, the work he started.

After Danny’s death, his daughter Dena invited me and the Bricusses to join her for one last meal in the kitchen Danny loved (and the room where we’d enjoyed so many marvellous meals – he was a terrific chef) before the house was sold. The only thing missing was Danny rushing in to another room afterwards to watch a VHS show of himself conducting an orchestra – he loved to conduct, and loved sharing the experience with friends, although I don’t think he’d ever read music, he just felt the rhythm.