Lunch With the FT: 52 Classic Interviews Read online

  The west must speak out. ‘When we declare we are morally superior to the Taliban, we’re declaring ourselves morally superior to the 15th century.’ Still, it is no mystery why moderate Muslims are reluctant to follow suit. ‘They (the extremists) have the monopoly of violence, of intimidation.’ Slowly, the Amis invective gives way to sober reflection. He confesses to feeling guilty about being absent from England during the July 7 bombings. One of his sons had a holiday job which, if extended, would have seen him at Edgware Road tube station at the time of the bomb.

  Shortly afterwards, a journalist came to visit Amis in Long Island. He had been on a transatlantic flight where passengers were not allowed to carry a book. Amis exploded in anger at this ‘hideous symbol of humourless literalism’. He spoke about having to make the Muslim community suffer.

  Now he regrets those words – a rare retreat for the macho wordsmith. Maybe Amis, 58, is mellowing. Odette’s, he reveals, was where he and Kingsley lunched together in his father’s final years. He looks at his watch: ‘How are we doing?’

  As an opening chapter, pretty good, I say to myself.

  ODETTE’S

  Regents Park Road, London NW1

  * * *

  1 x velouté of sweetcorn with pickled mushrooms and salted corn

  1 x pan-fried organic salmon with braised lentils and caramelized baby onions

  1 x roast breast of quail, confit leg with celeriac salad, jelly consommé, summer truffles

  1 x green salad

  2 x glasses of Chardonnay Bouscade

  1 x fruit juice

  1 x mineral water

  1 x espresso

  1 x peppermint tea

  * * *

  Total £66.94

  * * *

  1 OCTOBER 2010

  Michael Caine

  ‘I can never pour these bleedin’ things’

  The actor talks about class, cholesterol, Jack Nicholson and becoming a ‘Google freak’

  By Peter Aspden

  Disappointingly, Sir Michael Caine does not, when we are introduced, look me firmly in the eye and declare, ‘My name’s Michael Caine.’ Nor, during the course of our tea together, does he at any stage say, ‘Not a lot of people know that’, or – and this admittedly asked too much – ‘You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off.’ Is there a greater deliverer of catchphrases in the history of cinema than Michael Caine?

  He is, at 77, still an impressive figure, standing tall and possessing a rich baritone with which he fires jokes with deft and natural comic timing. The accent is much imitated and inimitable. ‘They’ve got scones and clotted cream here,’ he offers, and somehow makes it sound funny. I am not sure about the word ‘clotted’, I say. It doesn’t have good connotations. ‘That’s just what I thought,’ he replies. ‘If it had just said “cream” I’d have had it.’

  A shared concern for cholesterol levels established, we settle on smoked salmon and cream-cheese sandwiches and cups of tea, English breakfast for him and Earl Grey for me. We are in a suite at the slightly soulless Wyndham hotel in Chelsea Harbour and there is a barrage of helicopter noise outside, as if there is a nationwide search for a runaway spy going on. ‘It is because we are next to the Thames,’ says Caine knowledgeably (he has a flat just round the corner), the kind of thing Harry Palmer might say to put me off the scent.

  Now that dates both of us. Harry Palmer – star of The Ipcress File, Caine’s breakthrough role – hit the screens 45 years ago. The longevity of Caine’s career is not the least remarkable thing about him. In his new autobiography, The Elephant to Hollywood, there are poignant personal recollections of two movie stars who were brought down by the pressures of stardom: one is Heath Ledger, the other Rita Hayworth. That is some chronological range. But Caine is still going strong.

  Next year he once more reprises his role as Alfred the butler in Christopher Nolan’s third Batman movie. He won critical acclaim for last year’s Harry Brown, a hard-nosed vigilante movie shot in his native Elephant and Castle – a tough inner-London district (hence the title of his book). These are high-profile roles, in challenging and/or lucrative films. That is a rare feat for any actor, let alone one in the latter part of his eighth decade. How do you keep getting such great parts? I ask him. ‘I dunno,’ he deadpans. ‘I sit back and wait for my agent to ring.’

  But it wasn’t always like that. The autobiography starts at an awkward moment for Caine. It is the early 1990s, and he is shooting a belated sequel to the Harry Palmer films, Midnight in St Petersburg, in the Russian city. He goes to the toilet. It is, he recalls, ‘the filthiest toilet I have ever seen in my life. No one had cleaned it out. And I suddenly thought, “What am I doing here?” ’ He makes the existential crisis sound as desolate as Beckett. It sounds like a forlorn experience, I say. ‘It was just after the communists had gone. When we had lunch on location they gave us Geiger counters, to test the food for radiation. And of course the first thing we did was test the batteries!’ He laughs loudly. ‘You don’t want a duff battery!’

  ‘It was a low moment,’ he confesses, turning serious again. ‘But I was quite philosophical about it.’ He saw the incident as a turning point. He was preparing to wind his career down, getting increasingly involved with his restaurant businesses and enjoying the easy life in his new apartment in Miami’s South Beach. And then, wouldn’t you know it, Jack Nicholson called. ‘He was the catalyst,’ says Caine. ‘I had got to that stage in life when you wouldn’t even send me a good script. I had done a couple of duff ones. And then Jack was doing a movie with Bob Rafelson in Miami, and asked me to come. He said, “Get off your ass and just do it.” And that changed everything. Jack is the nicest and kindest person, it was such a joy working with him.’

  The resulting film – the noir thriller Blood and Wine – didn’t change the landscape of motion pictures, but Caine’s appetite was refreshed, his career revivified. Along came Little Voice, The Cider House Rules, The Quiet American, Baftas, Golden Globes and an Oscar. He says one of the aims in writing the book is to inspire readers of a certain age. ‘As they get older, people think, “It’s over.” But it isn’t. It doesn’t have to be.’

  The food arrives. The sandwiches are triple-deckers. ‘Blimey! They give you a lot, don’t they? We will weigh 400lb by the end of this!’ He offers to serve the tea but is flummoxed by a designer teapot. ‘I can never pour these bleedin’ things. Either nothing comes out or it all goes all over the table.’ Between us, we crack it. Caine dutifully removes one of the slices of his sandwich and tucks in with relish.

  Caine has a habit of saying nice things about everyone. He makes Hollywood parties sound like village green fêtes. He doesn’t even have a bad word for Frank Sinatra, for goodness’ sake. I am suspicious of this. When he first travelled there in the 1960s, was Hollywood not full of predators trying to shaft this presumptuous Limey?

  ‘No, truly not. And you know why? Because I wasn’t their idea of a Limey. I wasn’t posh. I didn’t have this superior English attitude. And I was all for them.’ His love affair with things American started during the war. ‘There were American soldiers parked in the local recreation ground and we used to make their beds in exchange for chewing gum and Coca-Cola. I didn’t actually go there until Alfie.’ His maiden voyage happily coincided with an Oscar nomination. ‘But then I saw Paul Scofield in A Man for All Seasons and thought, “There’s no point in turning up.” ’ (Scofield duly won the award.)

  Was he an innocent when he went to Hollywood? ‘I was an innocent by Hollywood standards. What surprised me was the hospitality, how kind people were. Even the lawyers and agents were the nicest people.’ I raise an eyebrow. ‘Remember, I wasn’t really competing with anyone. You weren’t going to lose a part to me if you were Jack Nicholson.’ And then, in 2000, there was the knighthood, which helped. ‘They like a bit of King Arthur.’

  Never mind that, this was a town that famously spat people out for its own entertainment, I say. ‘It can do. But I wasn’t succes
sful until I was 30. And I was a very tough 30, not some giddy little girl.’

  The toughening of Michael Caine is the most sobering part of the book. Born Maurice Micklewhite to a working-class family in south-east London ‘with funny eyes, sticking-out ears and, just to round it all off, rickets’, he was evacuated during the war to a couple who would lock him in the cupboard for the weekend while they went socializing. That’s the kind of thing you read about in the Sunday papers, I say.

  He shrugs it off. ‘A lot of children had a very bad time.’ But to be locked in a cupboard for a whole weekend? ‘They weren’t wicked people. They took in the children for the money, and then didn’t want to look after them. They wanted to go away for the weekend and didn’t want to cart these dirty tykes from London around with them. Of course, when my mother came, she nearly went to prison for assaulting the woman. She beat her up.’

  He is unsentimental about the war. ‘I benefited from it. For a start I ate nothing but organic food for six years. We had no sugar, no biscuits, no fizzy drinks.’ He went on to serve in Korea. ‘It was a nightmare at the time. But I saw the world, and mixed with people from all classes and societies.’

  He speaks movingly of his parents, particularly his father, whom he describes as a ‘hero’, a market porter at Billingsgate, who read voraciously and had an aptitude for technology, building his own radio from scratch. ‘He was a symptom of this country losing out on talent because of class,’ he says. ‘They never knew they had it, they never knew they lost it. But today computers will compensate for any bad education there is.’ He pauses for a second, and free-associates. ‘I’m a Google freak.’

  What do you google? I ask.

  ‘Everything. It’s a wonderful thing. I had a gardener who didn’t know much about gardening.’ (Read this out loud in a Caine voice and it is somehow hilarious.) ‘Every time I bought a plant I googled it to find out how to look after it, and gave it to him and said, “There you go.” ’

  It can be a terrible distraction, I add. He evidently agrees. ‘I was looking for a penthouse once. And so I put in “Penthouse”. Oh my God.’ I quickly wonder to myself how many people who hit the Penthouse website are actually after a penthouse. ‘And it’s a funny thing – you can’t switch it off. I had to take it out of the wall. I had to take the battery out.’ There is something endearing about this techno-porno nightmare. Perhaps Jack Nicholson should have been around, I almost say.

  He says in the book that 1967’s Billion Dollar Brain, the third Harry Palmer film, featured an early version of the internet. ‘I read that in the paper,’ he says. He remembers an adviser on the set trying to explain it to him. ‘I said, “What a load of bollocks. Just tell me which knob to turn.” I thought it was the most preposterous thing I had ever heard.’

  Like many people, I say, I became fully converted to Caine’s acting talents by his performance in Educating Rita, for which he gained weight, looked permanently drunk and gave a startling portrayal of vulnerability. ‘I had never been offered parts like that. But it is the proudest piece of acting I have ever done. An English professor in a college – it was the furthest thing from me that you could get. It was the first time I completely disappeared.’ Was it hard to let his ego go like that? ‘I realized that I didn’t have that kind of ego, worrying about looking great. I didn’t care about that.’ He reminds me that he was in repertory theatre for nine years before his big movie break. ‘A different role every week. I love being an actor. And I love not being me.’

  Caine spends his time today between his Chelsea flat and his 200-year-old converted barn in Box Hill, Surrey, spending part of the winter in Miami. His days in Hollywood are over (he lived there for eight years, as a vociferous critic of Britain’s tax regime). There is a touching account of a mournful farewell to his press agent on Rodeo Drive. ‘I went straight to Ermenegildo Zegna [he mangles the name magnificently] and bought a shirt.’ Did the retail therapy have the required effect? ‘I was all right. I got on a plane and went home.’

  Home is where his heart is. He is ‘besotted’ with his three grandchildren, a strength of reaction that surprised him, and reveres family life. Both in the book and our conversation, he repeatedly pays tribute to his wife of 37 years Shakira, ‘the nicest person in the world’, with whom he has a daughter (he also has a daughter with his first wife, the actress Patricia Haines). It is because of his family, he says, that his book is studiedly discreet about all those Hollywood parties. ‘When you fall in love, that becomes part of your past. Like mumps and measles. I didn’t want to go into all that. Not like Kirk Douglas – he named them all, Marlene Dietrich, bleedin’ Marilyn Monroe, everybody!’

  As for the films, he says, touching every piece of wood in the vicinity, they keep rolling in. As well as the next Batman, he is preparing for a part in a version of Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island, about which he is unexpectedly rapturous. ‘I have grandchildren now. And I get to fly off on a giant bumblebee. I want them to see that.’

  WYNDHAM GRAND

  Chelsea Harbour, London SW 10

  * * *

  2 x Traditional Afternoon Tea (all incl.) £30

  2 x Scottish smoked salmon with herbed cream cheese

  Royal English Breakfast tea Earl Grey tea

  * * *

  Total £30

  * * *

  29 OCTOBER 2004

  Sean ‘P. Diddy’ Combs

  When Diddy met daddy

  The rapper, model, actor and king of bling tells the FT’s Washington bureau chief (aka cat daddy) that come election day, the youth of America will have their say

  By James Harding

  When I go back and listen to the tape of my conversation with Sean ‘P. Diddy’ Combs, I can hear myself launching into loud, uncertain guffaws and then stopping the laugh short, because I am not altogether clear whether he is joking.

  Take his response to the question of which man he wants to win the election: ‘I don’t answer. It would sway people. If I endorse a candidate right now, I mean the race would probably be over.’ I laugh, then wonder if he is being serious. Does he genuinely think that?

  The hip hop magnate is just saying that for fun, he says, and then pauses. ‘No,’ he reflects. ‘I could. I think a couple of people could: I think Russell Simmons [the founder of Def Jam records] could, I think Jay-Z [a rapper] could, I think Eminem could. There are a lot of people who have a lot of power that could. I think Oprah [Winfrey] could.’

  Or, for example, his answer when asked about running for office. ‘No … This is me doing my good thing. I like to party a little bit too hard to be in public office,’ he smiles. ‘I don’t think I would be the best person to be in politics, because I would feel so passionately about something, they would probably have to pull me off somebody’s ass in the Senate.’ I suggest he would do well in Seoul’s wrestling ring of a parliament and he agrees: ‘I would be a champion there, I would get a lot of things done in South Korea.’

  Even his assessment of his effort to get black people and young people to the polls is half jest, half earnest: ‘This is the thing right now, cat daddy … this is like a pair of bellbottoms. You know what I’m saying, your parents are just looking at you and they’re not looking down and then one day they’re like: “Oh shit, everybody has on bellbottoms,” ’ he says. ‘You were late. In this world, it is going down. On November 2, it is going down and the revolution will be televised.’

  And, I guess, that’s the point: at the end of our lunch, I was left wondering whether he may, in fact, be in the thick of the most significant phenomenon of the 2004 election or just an entertaining sideshow.

  I had dropped off the campaign trail for a day to talk to Combs about the Vote or Die campaign, his drive to get generally poll-shy young Americans to vote on Tuesday. And, to begin with, it seemed more glitter than power.

  A beefy man in a black suit, black shirt and black tie escorted me up to reception at Combs’s Broadway office, where I waited for a while in a meet
ing room adorned with racks of the ultimate ‘bling bling’ accessory: chrome hubcaps engraved with the Sean John signature logo. Sophie, his miniature Maltese, wearing a magenta bow in her hair and a diamanté dog collar, trotted in, sniffed my feet and left. When I was shown into Combs’s modest, cluttered office, he was on the phone, complaining about being ripped off by a building contractor. He finished the call, got up and shook my hand: ‘Hey, baby,’ he said.

  From there on in, it was all politics and some soup. Me talking to Combs about voter mobilization is a bit like sending Donald Trump to interview Dr Ruth about gardening: a white Englishman boasting a sizeable Van Morrison collection and biting at the ankles of middle age talking to an icon of black youth in America with a résumé of rap music hits and enviable lovers about one of the more obscure areas of political science.

  Combs is known by many names for many things: Puff Daddy, party promoter, music producer and former boss of Bad Boy Entertainment; P. Diddy, rapper and friend of the late Notorious B. I. G.; Puffy, ex-boyfriend of Jennifer Lopez and successful defendant in a bizarre criminal saga involving shooting in a nightclub and charges of bribery and illegal gun possession; Sean John, model and marketing man for his own fashion label; Sean Combs, Broadway actor; Mr Combs, salesman of an ever-expanding circle of selves, and frontman of Vote or Die.

  There are roughly 42 million Americans aged 18 to 34. Combs has reach well beyond African American young men, pointing out that nearly 80 per cent of hip hop is bought by white people. And what is true for both young white and black people is they have a lousy record on election day: 36 per cent of 18-to 24-year-olds voted in 2000, compared with 72 per cent of 65-to 72-year-olds. (Not that voting statistics are Combs’s forte – ‘I can’t fuck with you on that,’ he told me.)

  The political apathy makes simple sense when Combs explains it in his part-fumbling prose, part-street poetry style: ‘We come from the community of people that is like, “Politics is bullshit, politicians are full of shit …” Just growing up in Harlem and seeing nothing change,’ he says. ‘You have a lot of people in those communities, whether it is Harlem, the South Side of Chicago, Detroit, Watts, wherever; they don’t feel connected. There is a disconnect.’