Not many people want to know this
Julie Burchill
WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT by Michael Caine Century, f16.99, pp. 473 If Michael Caine did not exist, The Spectator would have to invent him. Or the Telegraph, or one of the Waughs. For he is the snob's dream of the self-made English oik; coarse, immodest, smarmily concupis- cent — and, of course, a crashing snob himself. Which conveniently justifies the snobbery of those who might be tempted to mock him.
We've heard the story of the Caine mutiny from rags to Langan's so often that it has become almost a piece of family album apocrypha. Son of Billingsgate Porter; made it big in the cocky Cockney Sixties; got leg over in the company of Terry Stamp; wondered what it was all about, Alfredo; saw Shakira Baksh shim- mying across the television screen with her hands around a pair of maracas and wished they were .his; married her; hired bolshy electrician who refused to work for such a flashy geezer (cf Politics of Envy); left Poxy, envious, `socialist' old Blighty for LA; made crap films; got homesick; came back to brilliant Thatcherite old Blighty. Swanked about, smirking irrepressibly; wrote book about it all.
Even in shorthand it's a fairly ordinaire success story, remarkable only for its gravity-defying level of self-congratulation; in close up, told over more than 400 pages, it is a banquet of banality. The interesting paradoxes of Caine's career — such as the fact that it took the moribund English film Industry to give him his commercial and critical successes (The Iperess File, Alfie, Zulu, Educating Rita, Mona Lisa) while in supposedly hot Hollywood he was landed with such turkeys as The Swarm, Jaws 4 and Beyond the Poseidon Adventure — are relat- ed with bland self-regard and no analysis whatsoever. Yet pointless and even cretinous pieces of information — that in Somalia there is a type of camel which looks quite sexy or that Mr Caine regularly has to do battle with copious amounts of nostril hair — are given full rein. The book is often quite unintentionally hilarious. On location in Africa, he begins to learn the true wisdom which 'we in the so-called civilised world have forgotten'. But then he goes on to relate the horren- dous Masai superstition that every fly carries the spirit of a god and must never be swatted — even when crawling into the mouths and eyes of Masai babies and giving them God knows what germs. What's that all about, Mikey?
On a thankfully lighter note, one of the funniest bits of the book reads thus, with no apparent irony: I have new things to do and new places to go and I intend to keep dealing with the unknown and the unpredictable, two danger- ous elements that have been the norm in my life . . . I am currently in the middle of making the Muppets movie version of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol.
So much for the comedy; the tragedy of this book is its appalling and vulgar obsession with royalty. We are asked to admire Prince Philip as a jolly old josher for calling Caine 'old Iperess' whenever he meets him; in a member of the public, this would be used as proof of their moronic inability to distinguish between fact and fiction. We are pointed towards 'a picture of the Queen laughing at my joke'. Caine relates in shocked tones the story of Governor Brown's 'rudeness' to Princess Margaret (he had to leave a dinner before she did.) Mr Caine obviously believes that running your state when you could be brown-nosing foreign princesses should be some sort of capital offence.
His other main squeeze is Mrs Thatcher. Politically he is a lethal blend of the sentimental and the cynical; there is a mov- ing and genuine passage of writing about nurses, and how watching the care for his sick wife and baby made him ashamed to be an overpaid, underworked actor. But he proceeds to moan on ceaselessly about the `socialist' taxation system in Britain; what It's so nice of you young people to take me for this lovely outing . . . Its wonderful to have such caring, thoughtful relatives . . else but taxes pay the wages of these wonderful women?
There is little sign of any intentional humour; what there is is bitchery of an archetypically actorish kind. Early in his career, Joe Levine told the young Caine he would never make it because he looked too faggy (it's the hair; it looks permed) and he did actually go on to play fruits in Califor- nia Suite, Deathtrap and Dressed to Kill. Writing about making The Romantic Englishwoman with Glenda Jackson and Helmut Berger, he confides very queenily that Helmut obviously disliked Glenda because he wanted to play the title role.
It's a book in which even little things seem somehow off, but you can't be sure whether this is through dumbness or duplicity. Eliza Doolittle becomes Liza, several times (but he doesn't spell Liza Minelli's name wrong); his role as Frank in Educating Rita he claims to have based on Emil Jannings in The Blue Angel, which is a bit like hearing that Leslie Caron based Gigi on Lola-Lola. He keeps complaining that films he was innocently involved in like Dressed to Kill and Blame it on Rio turned out 'vulgar' and 'gratuitous'. Surely he read the scripts?
And there are some weird, nasty little bits, like when he very elaborately forgets — 'Sorry, Sweetheart' — the name of the girl he took to the premiere of Zulu, when surely a quick call to his cuttings people could have supplied the answer. The girl in question was in fact Edina Ronay, who is not merely beautiful but beautiful in a quite singular, sinister way — not a forgettable identikit dolly by any stretch. Or it just might be his wife's jealous temper, described in blood-curdling detail here. It must be this or a natural sense of chivalry which prevents Mr Caine from naming any of the women he 'dated% instead, his voice suddenly becomes a stage whisper, and he says things like, 'Only you know who you are, and your secret is safe with me.' This is all very well and good, but the apocalyptic tone tends to make it sound as though Mrs X and Mr Caine share some absolutely appalling secret, not just a quick shtup. The slight shadow of Shakira, the second Mrs Caine, falls full across these confi- dences, as indeed it does across the entire book. She is, as we must all know by now, a sleek Indian whippet of a woman, with a beauty that is almost sexless in its elegance. The pictures of them, scattered throughout the book, are strange; he, slack-jawed, goggle-eyed and gaping, his arm around her, looks like Joe Blow who has just won the pools and is posing for the press with the latest Asian supermodel.
Still, the chapter about Shakira is quite beautiful; when writing about his wife, Caine displays something suspiciously like talent. It is odd that the creator of the greatest slut in the British cinema can only come to life on the rather sticky wicket of monogamous sexual love.
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