One of the things I’d read about before I arrived was the Hollywood homes of the stars, but in fact no stars live in Hollywood, and it took me a while to work this out. It’s just not like that. There are a few in the Hollywood Hills, but none in Hollywood itself. Some stars live in and around Beverly Hills – Frank Sinatra did and, as far as Frank was concerned, so did everyone else who mattered. Frank had a Twenty Minute Rule. If he was invited to dinner and he was in his car for more than twenty minutes, he would simply demand that his driver turn round and go home. ‘I’m twenty minutes,’ he would call out. ‘Turn around. It’s too far.’
Beverly Hills took me by surprise, too… For a start, there are hardly any hills there – and the most expensive area of all is the Beverly Estate, which is in fact a very deep valley. Stars who want bigger estates than those in Beverly Hills – and for less money – live in Beverly Hills Post Office, or BHPO. It’s not actually Beverly Hills, but it is according to your address. I lived in BHPO, but I never managed to find a post office there – in fact I had to go to Beverly Hills proper to find one. Just to complicate things further, most of the stars don’t live in Beverly Hills at all; they live in the surrounding glitzy areas like Bel Air (which has its own security guard force), Holmby Hills (where the Playboy Mansion is), or in luxury apartments on the Wilshire corridor, the bit of Wilshire Boulevard between Beverly Hills and Westwood where my friend Billy Wilder lived. (I went to the toilet when I went round to his apartment for dinner once, and stacked up against the walls in the corridor were what must have been about fifty paintings. I kicked over a couple by accident on the way back from the bathroom and when I bent to pick them up I nearly had a nervous breakdown. They were a Klimt and a Hockney.) And then some people live by the sea at Malibu (where the richest people in Hollywood live closer to each other than any other wealthy people in the world). Confused? I certainly was.
I did, of course, eventually sort it all out and when, after I was married, Shakira and I moved to LA in 1979, we chose BHPO. The house we bought was originally built by Barbara Hutton, the Woolworths heiress, as her son Lance Reventlow’s twenty-first birthday present. (Hmmm – I think all I got for my twenty-first birthday was a bollocking from my dad for being an unemployed, so-called actor…) It had been built in the shape of an L, which takes personalised gifts to a new high, but although this made it an awkward fit on the site, we loved it. The swimming pool stretched from the outside, right into the living room, which sounds very Hollywood, but as I didn’t want to be woken in the night by a wet burglar – or a dry one, come to think of it – I had to have it blocked up.
Buying and then selling the house turned out to be a real lesson in Hollywood real estate. It cost $750,000 in 1979, which was a fortune to me at that time, and I thought I was being very clever when I sold it eight years later when we decided to make Britain our permanent base again, for $2,500,000, which was another fortune to me at that time. But, as often happens in areas where real estate changes hands for this sort of money, the original was then torn down, rebuilt and offered back to me a few years ago for $14,000,000. It was an offer I found quite easy to refuse… And now I hear it’s been re-rebuilt again, the swimming pool has been moved and it’s being offered at $26,000,000. I’m not surprised – I’ve checked out all of them and it does have the best views in the whole of Los Angeles. (Rupert Murdoch lived in the house behind and we had to keep cutting our eucalyptus trees so it didn’t block his view.)
In 2006 I came back to Los Angeles to make the thriller The Prestige for Christopher Nolan and hired the only really ‘Hollywood’ house we have ever lived in. It was billed as having previously been rented by the Artist Formerly Known as Prince and also Mariah Carey, who had apparently run up massive heating bills because she sat in the heated outdoor swimming pool all night. It was just off Mulholland Drive, near Jack Nicholson’s, and I realised just what circles I was moving in when I turned into the road and saw a sign which read: ‘Your licence plate has just been photographed and stored for future reference’. I’m a bit ambivalent about heavy security: on the one hand I’m pleased that it is there, but on the other I always think that something bad must have happened to make them so keen. At the entrance to the drive were two of the biggest real palm trees I have ever seen. As I come from South London, I haven’t had experience of palm trees from birth, but I’ve been around a bit and I’ve seen a few palm trees in my time and these were gigantic. They were just a sign of things to come: the house itself was also absolutely enormous – when we eventually moved in, it was too big to find each other so when the phone went we just had to take messages. It’s true: the super-rich really are different. The sitting room had over a hundred museum-quality tribal masks from all over the world hung on one wall, and a thirty-foot-high ceiling. It was a bit like being in a cathedral dedicated to some pagan religion and I never felt entirely comfortable passing through late at night. The dining room seated thirty-two. When the estate agent showed us round he said in that enthusiastic way they have, ‘You could have some great dinner parties here!’ ‘I’m planning on opening a small bistro,’ I said and I could see that he wasn’t sure if I was joking or not. I wasn’t surprised to find that he came back later to check… When we went into the bedroom, I paced it out and it was thirty foot long and fifty foot wide: bigger than the whole of the house I grew up in. There were ‘his and her’ bathrooms, ‘his and her’ dressing rooms and ‘his and her’ outdoor patios – I began to feel that Shakira and I would never see each other again – and bizarrely, given the climate in Los Angeles – ‘his and her’ fireplaces. Perhaps strangest of all, the bedroom featured something I had never seen before: nine small trees. I suddenly remembered that when I’d been in hospital with malaria all those years ago, someone had brought in a bunch of tulips and the nurse had whisked them away because, she insisted, they ‘sucked up all the oxygen in the air.’ ‘If a bunch of tulips can do that,’ I said to Shakira, ‘what on earth will nine trees do to us? We’ll suffocate during the night!’ She gave me a long look and went over to examine the trees more closely. ‘They’re plastic, Michael,’ she said kindly.
Glamorous as this house was, there are many far more luxurious in and around Beverly Hills. Our friends Marvin and Barbara Davis had one that seemed to define the term ‘Hollywood mansion’: the driveway didn’t just go in and out, it was a whole dual carriageway… We were in the middle of dinner there one night when a slightly embarrassed butler brought in the telephone and whispered in Marvin’s ear. Marvin shrugged and took the phone. ‘Yeah?’ Pause. ‘Sixty.’ Another pause. ‘I told you: sixty.’ Further pause. ‘That’s it. Yeah. Bye.’ He gave the phone back to the butler and someone – not me – had the courage to ask him who was on the other end. ‘Michael Jackson,’ said Marvin. ‘He keeps ringing me wanting to buy this house for forty-five million dollars and I keep telling him it’s sixty.’ There didn’t seem much to add to this, so we went back to our dinner.