The night was yet young so Terry and I went on to Ad Lib, a new club owned by the American art dealer Oscar Lerman (who was married to Jackie Collins) and run by the brilliant Johnny Gold, who was to become – and remain – one of my closest friends. Ad Lib was the best disco I had ever seen and that night was the beginning of my ‘night life’ (which I only gave up ten years ago). And even here it felt as if extraordinary things were happening. As we moved onto the dance floor we saw all the Beatles and all the Rolling Stones were out there with us. I don’t think it ever happened again.
Lunch at Les Amabassadeurs was a somewhat different occasion. I did wear a tie, and it was incredibly posh. In fact I was the only unknown in the whole place. Harry ordered champagne and caviar (‘It’s only the high life for you from now on, Michael!’) and I lapsed into silence; I was completely out of my depth. Harry cast me a sudden glance. A smile broke out over his features. ‘I wonder what the rich people are doing today?’ he said. I laughed and relaxed. It was the beginning of a very different life.
Even with a contract under my belt and money in my bank account I still felt that I was in the middle of a dream I would one day soon wake up from. Just in case, I stuck close to Harry Salzman and before long found myself invited to his family house – more like a mansion in fact – every Sunday for good food and even better conversation. Although we always had a great time, Harry also used these gatherings professionally and it was here that a lot of the decisions about Ipcress were made. Harry had made it quite clear that he wasn’t looking for James Bond as his central character. The whole point about Len Deighton’s anti-hero was that he was deeply ordinary – so ordinary he could always be underestimated. Deighton had never given him a name and that was our first challenge. ‘We need something dull,’ said Harry. There was a long silence while we all pondered. ‘Harry’s a dull name,’ I ventured brightly. The silence became very chilly indeed. Harry Salzman gave me a level glance. The room held its collective breath. Harry started to laugh. We all laughed with him. ‘You’re right!’ he said. ‘My real name,’ he said, turning to me, ‘is Herschel. Now for the surname.’ When I had stopped shaking I tuned into the rest of the discussion, but decided to avoid any more clever suggestions. Nothing seemed to be right. Harry, as always, had the last word. ‘I met a dull man once called Palmer,’ he said. And Harry Palmer I became.
Harry was always working, always thinking. I’m shortsighted and I’ve always worn glasses. Over dinner one Sunday I noticed Harry staring at me. ‘You know what to do with your glasses,’ he observed. ‘I wear them because I need them,’ I pointed out a bit defensively. ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘It’s good. Let’s have Harry Palmer wear them, too. You’ll make them look good.’ He was right again and he’d also laid to rest a worry I’d had – which was, at the time, a bit presumptuous, to say the least. My mate Sean Connery was vastly successful as James Bond but he’d said to me a few times recently that he feared being typecast and so identified with the character that he’d never get another part again. If Ipcress took off and there were sequels (I told you this was presumptuous!), I wanted the glasses to be the character, not me. If Harry Palmer wore glasses, then Michael Caine could hide behind them and emerge if the opportunity presented itself – which it did…
Even with this level of advance preparation, things didn’t go entirely smoothly. On the first day of shooting I was picked up by a chauffeur and settled back in luxury to be driven to Pinewood Studios, on the western outskirts of London. ‘You the star of this film?’ the driver asked. I said I was. ‘Biggest piece of shit I’ve ever read,’ he announced. Not a good start. It wasn’t about to get much better. When I walked on to the set for the first rehearsal, the director, Sidney Furie, asked me for a match. I handed him one, he put the script on the floor and set it alight. We all stood round in silence watching as it burned into ashes. ‘That’s what I think of that,’ said Sidney. We all shuffled our feet and mumbled a bit. ‘Now,’ Sidney said to me. ‘Can I borrow your script?’ I handed it over. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘let’s get to work.’
It was a stormy beginning and it didn’t get much easier. A lot of the dialogue in the movie is ad-libbed – especially by me – and although it was great fun, it was pretty stressful. Sid and Harry Salzman argued all the time about everything and tempers became so frayed that one day Sid walked off the set. We were on location in a rundown area of Shepherds Bush in west London when Sid had finally had enough – and he ran down the road and jumped on a number 12 bus. ‘Get in the car!’ Harry Salzman screamed at me, and the two of us leapt into his Rolls Royce and took off in pursuit. It must have been an extraordinary moment for the other passengers as a huge Roller pulled up alongside their bus and this fat man leant out of the window shouting, ‘Get off the fucking bus!’ The conductor stopped the bus at the next stop, Harry and I got on and by the time we’d got to Marble Arch (four-pence) we’d persuaded Sidney to come back and finish the film.
In the end The Ipcress File was one of the best movies Sidney Furie – who would later become a friend and neighbour in Beverly Hills – ever made. It was certainly the most commercially successful. It still ran into the old movie executive problem, though. After the first rushes we got a cable from Hollywood. ‘Dump Caine’s spectacles and make the girl cook the meal – he is coming across as a homosexual.’ This is not the exact message – I’ve cleaned it up a bit – but the implication is clear enough. We had deliberately gone anti-Bond and as well as the glasses, we’d decided that Harry Palmer should be a cook, which was admittedly risky stuff in Britain in 1964, but we made it work. So when Harry goes shopping in a supermarket and pushes his trolley round, it turns into a fight with the trolleys as weapons. And when Harry seduces the girl, he doesn’t wine and dine her in a fancy restaurant, he takes her home and cooks her dinner – making an omelette by breaking two eggs at once in one hand. (I could see how seductive this would be, but I never mastered it and so in the movie it is writer – and fantastic cook – Len Deighton’s hand you see doing the trick.) And as for the glasses, when the girl (played by Sue Lloyd) asks if I always wear them, I reply, ‘I only take them off in bed,’ and she reaches over and takes them off. It’s now classed as one of the great moments of movie seduction, so I’m glad we stuck to our guns.
My next major film role would finally nail the idea that I looked gay on screen once and for alclass="underline" Alfie is one of cinema’s great womanisers. I wasn’t first choice for the part; the director, Lewis Gilbert, wanted Terence Stamp, who’d played Alfie in Bill Naughton’s stage version, and I spent three hours trying to persuade him to do it. But Terry had taken the play to Broadway where it had flopped and wasn’t keen to repeat the experience. Thank God.
Apart from stepping in the dog shit on day one of the filming, I found Alfie a surprisingly straightforward movie to make. I was growing in confidence with every new role and I found Lewis Gilbert – who came from a similar background to me – great to work with. Unlike some directors, he actually worked with his cast and took their opinions into account, even asking me who we might cast as the middle-aged married woman Alfie seduces. I immediately thought of Vivien Merchant, with whom I’d appeared in Harold Pinter’s The Room at the Royal Court. She was a brilliant stage actress, but she’d never appeared in a film before and Lewis wanted her to do a screen test, which she refused to do. It looked as if that was that, but Lewis took a chance on my judgement and we cast her anyway. She turned out to be a huge success and was eventually nominated for an Oscar. Lewis and I also came up with a way to have Alfie address the audience without making it seem as if he was delivering a long declamatory speech: I spoke instead as if I was talking just to one person, so the audience felt as if they were an intimate friend of the character.