We used to have a competition for a fiver a time. It went like this: we’d see a woman from the back and one of us would say, ‘Ugly or beautiful?’ And the other would choose and then when she turned round you would either win or lose. (Sexist, I know, but it was the Sixties.) One day we were out together and we saw a girl with her back to us buying one of the London newspapers. ‘Ugly or beautiful?’ Warren asked, quick as a flash. ‘Ugly,’ I said, and he said, ‘All right – beautiful.’ And she turned round and it was Candice Bergen, one of the most beautiful women in the world. I felt such a putz I nearly paid double – but then Warren always did have an eye for the ladies.
I last saw Shirley a year ago. We’re still good friends, but as she now lives in New Mexico we don’t see each other as often as we used to. She’s as lovely as ever, although these days frankly more and more eccentric, but I’m happy to say she’s never tried to dangle her New Age crystals over me. I think she realised very early on that I was a lost cause as far as that sort of thing was concerned. Mind you, in the surroundings of Beverly Hills – as I very soon learnt – it passes for normal.
The day after dinner with the Beatty family I took myself off to explore those new surroundings. Back then, Beverly Hills, which now features some of the world’s most expensive and luxurious boutiques, was quite a sleepy place with just a few shops including, bizarrely, a hardware store on Beverly Drive. I once nipped in there for a ball of string and there was Fred Astaire looking for sandpaper and when I was lining up by the till, I found myself behind Danny Kaye who was buying a single light bulb. It was in that store that I had what still ranks as my most terrifying experience in America: I was browsing through the power tool display when I popped my head round the corner and there in the next aisle was Klaus Kinski buying an axe. Never has a shop full of DIY aficionados cleared so quickly…
Rodeo Drive contained two places that were destined to play a big part in my future social life. The first was the Luau, a Tahitian bar and restaurant where everybody who was anybody in the young and gorgeous A list set would meet at the beginning of the evening to find out the who, what, why, where and when of the night’s social activities. On the other side of the street was the Daisy, the first discotheque in Beverly Hills. Shirley took me to the Daisy one evening early to have a drink before dinner and it was practically empty, but as we sat there, the door flew open and in burst about forty girls who all looked just like Doris Day. It turned out that this was no accident – they were all competitors in a Doris Day lookalike competition, called ‘Doris for a Day’, and were being shown round the haunts of the stars at a time when it was unlikely there would be any stars in the haunts. Tonight, however, they had struck lucky. When they spotted Shirley, they all started screaming at full pitch, two of the girls fainted and several of them burst into tears. In the pandemonium that followed we made our escape. Welcome to Hollywood!
By the time I started work on Gambit I had begun to get a bit more familiar with the high life – but I still had to pinch myself to convince myself it was all real. On my first day’s filming a limousine picked me up to take me to Universal Studios. When we got to the gate, the guard smiled at me and said, ‘Good morning, Michael. Your parking space is down on the right by your bungalow. It’s got your name on it.’ We drove on and the driver pulled up outside this luxurious bungalow and it did indeed have my name on it. Even more exciting for me was the name on the bungalow next door: Alfred Hitchcock. And when I went into mine, I discovered that my first dressing room in Hollywood was bigger and more comfortable than anywhere I had ever lived until then.
The filming of Gambit went so well – largely thanks to the calm genius of its English director, Ronald Neame – that I was able to focus much of my energy on my new social life. It centred largely on the Luau and the Daisy and I owe much of the good time I had there to Steve Brandt, a new friend and reporter from Photoplay, who seemed to know everybody in town. The very first night I walked into the Daisy I couldn’t quite believe what – or who – I was seeing. Paul Newman was playing pool just by the entrance and once I’d recovered from that and wandered inside, I realised that the song they were playing – ‘Mac the Knife’ by Bobby Darin – was being sung along to by the real Bobby Darin, who was at the next table. I stood there gaping until Steve nudged me and introduced me to Mia Farrow who I took on to the floor to dance. And as we were dancing, I looked over my shoulder and there was Sammy Davis Jr dancing next to me. It really was that sort of place.
After a few weeks of this I had just about got over my shock at the casual proximity of major stars when late one night at the Daisy, Steve was called to the phone. He came back to our table to tell Mia (who was with us) and me that we were going round to Rita Hayworth’s place. Now this really would be Hollywood glamour, I thought, but when we got to the house, I was in for a bit of a shock. Rita Hayworth greeted us at the door wearing a grubby white towelling dressing gown and slippers and with a half-empty bottle in her hand. She appeared to be drunk. So was I, by now, and I proceeded to get even drunker as I watched the screen legend drag Mia round the room in a parody of a dance to the theme music to Rita’s greatest ever movie Gilda. Drunk as I was, it was a sobering moment. In fact I found out much later that although everyone always thought Rita was a drunk, she was already suffering from the Alzheimer’s that would eventually kill her.
As the new boy in town and, what’s more (and surprisingly rare in Beverly Hills), a straight single man, I found myself in great demand as party fodder. Luckily I quickly acquired three mentors who helped me navigate my way through the social minefield. I was staying in a succession of hotels and rented houses and one of them would always be on the phone telling me what was going on. And then it was just party after party. As well as the incomparable Swifty Lazar, who always had his finger on the Hollywood pulse, there was Denise Minnelli, the second wife of Vincent Minnelli, Liza’s father, and Minna Wallis, sister of the great movie producer Hal Wallis. Minna may have looked like a sweet and harmless old lady but, as with Miss Marple, you underestimated her at your peril. Minna had been an actors’ agent and her greatest discovery was Clark Gable. In fact she had discovered his talent in more ways than one, she told me confidentially, and once – just once – they had gone to bed together. I never heard the precise details so I can’t share with you the secret of Clark’s success, but I can tell you that Minna never got over it. Minna saw it as her job to marry me off and steered me in very short order towards three amazing women: Natalie Wood, Barbra Streisand and, finally, Nancy Sinatra. Although all three became good friends, I’ve always insisted on sorting out my own love life and in the end Minna had to give up on me.
For a young man who had always dreamed of Hollywood and wondered what it would be like, it turned out to be a continuous stream of life’s best bits with no real life intervening at all. Nothing was real. In fact my days on the set of Gambit were the most normal experiences I was having. Universal had just started what would become its world famous studio tour in which tourists get to see round the movie lot and, back then, they had simply hired an open tramcar to drive everyone about. In those days you didn’t go to a big separate exhibit like you do now; people would actually stand at the back of the sound stage and watch the actors during the shoot. One of the drivers was particularly clever and always managed to work out where we would be, and he would drive by slowly so his busload always got to see the stars – Shirley or Hitchcock in our case. It was a bit disruptive because if they did catch up with you, you had to stand around signing autographs, but I had to admire his initiative and I got friendly with him – at last, I thought, an ordinary guy! Wrong again – that tram driver was Mike Ovitz, who went on to become one of the most powerful agents in the business, the head of CAA. There just doesn’t seem to be any such thing as ordinary in Hollywood – and nothing is quite the way you think it will be…