The Elephant to Hollywood (30 page)

13

Family Secrets

After that glorious summer in the south of France, I plunged straight back into work and by the end of 1988 I was pretty exhausted. We’d bought an apartment in Chelsea Harbour, west London, and decided to take things a little bit easier for a while. If it was meant to be a sabbatical, it didn’t last long. After a wonderful trip to Los Angeles during which Swifty Lazar first suggested that I might write my autobiography (I said no, on the grounds that I couldn’t remember anything – but it planted a seed, which was something Swifty was very good at!), I did a small-budget thriller,
Shock to the System
, set in New York, and then went back to England to follow up the success of the Jack the Ripper mini-series with
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
, which was five weeks on location in London, so easy to manage from that point of view, but a lot of my time was spent in make-up being turned into the hideous Mr Hyde. Never again! I have no idea how John Hurt managed to get through
The
Elephant Man
 . . .

The end of the year looked like running its normal course and we were just planning our usual over-the-top Christmas, when we got the phone call I had, of course, been half expecting for some time. On 12 December 1989, my brother Stanley’s birthday, my mother died. Ma had been living in a nursing home for many years, where she was looked after beautifully. As was typical of many women of her generation and background, she viewed all doctors with great suspicion and the only way her thoughtful nurse, Gemma, managed to get her to see one at all was by finding an Indian doctor and telling her he was Shakira’s brother! If it was family, you see, that was all right . . . Ma wouldn’t have wanted to hear the message that a doctor would have given her, either. For the last twenty years of her life she had been smoking over eighty cigarettes and drinking a bottle of white wine a day, on top of her favourite English fry-up, not to mention the cups of tea with full fat milk and spoonfuls of white sugar. Still, at the age of eighty-nine there was no point in arguing.

Gemma called on 11 December to say that Ma had a bad cold and I rushed over to see her, knowing how frail she was and how the slightest setback can escalate into something more serious with vulnerable old people. We had a great old time and she was very perky and I left feeling relieved that she seemed to be fine, but the next morning Gemma called to say that she had died in her sleep. Apparently she had eaten well, drunk well, as usual, smoked her fags and gone to bed very happy – and they hadn’t been able to wake her the next morning.

When I went in to see her, she looked so peaceful and almost as if she was smiling. I held it together as I kissed her for the last time, but first Gemma – who had been very fond of my mother – burst into tears and then I did, too. I thought back over fifty years to the day Dad went off to war, when she had said to Stanley and me – he was only three and a half and I was six – ‘You’ve got to take care of me now your father’s gone.’ She had made little men out of us then, but I couldn’t hold back the tears now. Gemma and I held on to each other and sobbed our hearts out before I managed to get a grip and we went outside to see the rest of the staff, who were waiting with the usual British solution in times of grief – a cup of tea.

Ma’s funeral took place on a cold, wet London winter’s day. Stanley was ill with pneumonia and couldn’t come, so Shakira and I were the only family members there. I was very conscious – I think anyone losing a parent is, no matter at what age it happens – of her passing as the end of an era, of the loss of the last link to the previous generation, a chapter closed. Or so I thought . . .

But the past wasn’t quite ready to let me go. In the spring of 1991 I was filming
Noises Off
in Los Angeles. 1990 had been a grim year in the aftermath of the stock market crash in 1989 and the hurricane that had swept across Britain. 1991 had started even more grimly with the first Gulf War. Although we couldn’t escape the news, it was a relief to escape the cold weather in Britain and we were delighted to find ourselves back in the Californian sunshine. We were even more thrilled to hear that Natasha had been given a place at Manchester University – it felt as if a new chapter was opening for the whole family.

One Friday afternoon, just as I’d got in from a day’s filming, the phone rang. I picked it up without a thought – and in an instant the story I thought I knew about my family changed forever. The guy on the other end was a reporter from the English tabloid newspaper
The People
and he was calling to say that they had discovered the existence of my half-brother.

My mother’s first child, a son called David, was born illegitimate and with epilepsy in a Salvation Army hospital in 1924. In those days there was little treatment available for epilepsy and as a result of the fits he had as a child, during which he would bang his head repeatedly on the stone floors of the workhouse, he became brain-damaged and would remain in an institution for the rest of his life.

It was a terrible shock to me and to Stanley. I had had absolutely no idea of David’s existence – and neither had my father or any of our large extended family. My mother had kept him a secret for sixty-seven years, and yet she had visited him every Monday, except when we were in Norfolk during the war. Shock soon turned to admiration when I found out what she had done and how loyal she had been to him. And I started to think back to our childhood and to wonder how she had managed to keep this secret for so long.

I was never aware of her absence on Mondays, as a little boy – when we were babies she probably took us with her, but I have no memories of that. And then when I was six and Stanley was three and a half, we were evacuated. When we got back to London – and David had been moved by then and I think she had to trace him all over again – we didn’t think anything of the trips she took on a Monday to see Aunt Lil in Dagenham. Dagenham was a long way from the Elephant so she’d be gone all day, but we were at school and there was no reason to query it at all. I tell you, she was an amazing woman. Although I’ll always wonder what went through her mind when I told her that I had chosen ‘Michael Caine’ as my stage name. The asylum where David spent his first fifty years was called Cane Hill.

What is extraordinary is that it took so long for the secret to emerge. Apparently my mother always carried a Bible in her handbag and would get any new members of staff, first in the asylum and then in the nursing home, to swear to keep the fact that David was my half-brother a secret – and no one ever spilt the beans. But as I’ve thought more and more about it over the years, some little things begin to make sense – little oddities that had never been enough to arouse any suspicions on their own, but that all came together with this incredible revelation. Whenever we were in the UK, Ma used to visit Shakira and me in the country every Sunday and she would be driven back to London the next day. One day, the driver mentioned that she always insisted on getting out at the bus stop on Streatham High Road, rather than being taken back to her house. The penny never dropped, of course, but she must have been going straight off to the asylum to visit David. And then there was Ma’s incredible consumption of sweets, biscuits and chocolates. She always used to leave us on Monday morning piled up with packets and boxes and yet when I’d go there and see her on a Wednesday for a cup of tea and ask for a biscuit, she’d always insist that she’d eaten them all. And I’d think, bloody hell, she gets through all these chocolates and biscuits very quickly – but of course she was saving them to take to David.

The People
had got hold of the story completely by accident. They had sent a reporter to do a piece on conditions in the old lunatic asylums – by now they were all shut down and the former inmates had been transferred to more humane nursing homes – and he was interviewing a group of people, amongst whom was David’s girlfriend, who was more lucid than the others and who could also speak distinctly. ‘Do you see that man over there?’ she said to the reporter. ‘Do you know Michael Caine, the actor?’ ‘Yes . . .’ said the reporter, obviously not quite sure what was coming. ‘Well, he’s his brother.’ And of course the reporter went – ‘Wait a minute . . . I’ve got a scoop here!’ I was very impressed by the way the paper handled it all. They rang me straight away and they didn’t try to make anything salacious out of it at all. In fact what they went with was the story that really matters: the story of my mother and her incredible loyalty to her son.

My first reaction was to jump on a plane straight back to England to visit David, but
Noises Off
was way behind schedule and I couldn’t get there for a couple of weeks, although Stanley went in the meantime. According to the matron of the nursing home, David knew all about us; he had seen
Zulu
on television and my mother had given him a picture of her with me so he knew I was his half-brother. When I eventually got home from LA – Shakira insisted on coming with me because she could see how shaken I was by the news – I went straight to the nursing home. Although the nurses had warned me that David was very handicapped, it was still a terrible shock to meet him. I went into his room and there he was: a very small man, with dark, slightly greying hair, in a wheelchair. No one knew who his father was – and he certainly bore very little physical resemblance to Stanley or me. Most upsetting of all was that when I held my hand out to shake his, I realised that he couldn’t speak – or at least not in a way that I could understand. The nurses hadn’t mentioned this, but I realised it was because they
could
understand him – it wasn’t that he couldn’t speak, it was that I was incapable of hearing what he had to say.

By the time I met David, there was very little I could do for him except make him comfortable. I got him a bigger room and his own television and the nurses said he was just happy to know that he had a family who cared for him. He died in 1992, not long after this, and his ashes are buried alongside our mother’s, together at last in the way they were never able to be during their lives.

It is, I think, an incredible story – but although it is unusual, such stories are not unknown. Now, of course, the birth of a child outside wedlock is nothing to be ashamed of; when my mother was a young woman, it was a terrible shame. The tragedy is that, had David’s epilepsy been properly treated, he might well have gone on to live a fulfilled and normal life; he might have had the chances that I did. But out of the tragedy emerged something else – the story of a courageous woman. My mother kept David a secret initially, because of society’s condemnation of her ‘sin’ and later because she was convinced that the existence of a half-brother in an asylum and not right in the head would ruin my career, and she was determined to protect me at all costs. As I’ve said before, there was nothing Ma wouldn’t do for her boys – but perhaps that was also because there was one boy she hadn’t been able to do much for.

14

Kitchen Sink Dramas

The death of my mother, the discovery of David and the publication of
What’s It All About?
were all watershed moments in my life. And when these were coupled with what looked as if it might become a permanent gap in my movie schedule, I was forced to take stock and consider the future. The book had gone brilliantly, and I had loved writing it, so I decided that writing might be one way to go – and then there was my restaurant business. It had been part of my life for thiry years, but it had definitely played second fiddle to my movie career. I could, I decided, perhaps take this chance to move it more centre stage – although, given some of my experiences with the ‘talent’, this wasn’t a step to be taken lightly!

The London I grew up in after the war was a bit of a culinary desert, to put it mildly. Restaurants were the province of the rich and the dress code of suit and tie was meant to keep the likes of me out. But gradually things began to change and when two Italians, Mario Cassandro and Franco Lagattolla opened their Italian restaurant La Trattoria Terrazza on Romilly Street in 1959, it had no dress code at all. Not only that, it stayed open until the last customer had left and it was open all day Sunday. The waiters were all friendly and helpful – unlike many of the English waiters who used to start looking at their watches and sighing before you were even halfway through your meal – and the whole atmosphere was fun and relaxed. As the Sixties got into full swing and London began to be the cosmopolitan city it is today, eating out started to be part of our culture – and I loved every minute of it.

I enjoyed eating out in other people’s restaurants, and as the London restaurant scene began to liven up, an idea began forming in the back of my mind: I wanted to open a big brasserie, a bit like La Coupole in Paris. This might have remained a fantasy if it hadn’t been for Sidney Poitier. He and I were in London together, working at Pinewood putting the final touches to
The Wilby Conspiracy
in 1974, and he and his wife Joanna and Shakira and I would eat out together a few evenings each week. When it was Sidney’s turn to take us, he always chose Odin’s, a great restaurant just off Marylebone High Street. On this particular evening, we had just been seated at our table when a short fat man reeled towards us, rather the worse for wear. He seemed to know Sidney. ‘Hello!’ he said and stood there, clutching the back of a chair for support. Sidney, who is a very polite man, immediately introduced us. ‘And this is Peter Langan, the owner of Odin’s.’ Peter stood there swaying for a bit, frowning. He appeared to be trying to retrieve some long-lost piece of information. Eventually light dawned. ‘Michael Caine!’ he said triumphantly. ‘Sidney tells me you want to open a restaurant!’ ‘Well – yes . . .’ I said, rather reluctantly. He bent over me and I nearly passed out from the fumes. ‘When you do, kid,’ he said, ‘give me a call. I’d like to be your partner.’ And with that he hauled himself upright and tottered away. ‘Is he always like that?’ I asked Sidney. ‘I don’t know,’ said Sidney, carefully. ‘But I have never seen him when he wasn’t.’ ‘Well, if I ever do open a restaurant,’ I said, ‘he’d be the last partner I’d choose.’ Famous last words . . .