Michael Caine: The Elephant to Hollywood

Michael Caine's second autobiography (the first being 1992's What's It All About) is like certain Western movie sets: a highly entertaining facade with nothing behind it.

Maurice Micklewhite started life in the London slums (Elephant & Castle) from working class parents and barely made a living in the theatre. Later in life he changed his name first to Michael Scott then to Michael Caine, became a movie star and moved to Hollywood. Mr Caine attributes it all to good luck and then goes on to recite countless stories or anecdotes of his experiences with his famous and very good friends. His language is straight forward and the book is highly entertaining. There is a laugh to be had at the end of every paragraph. The feeling you get is that you are having a quiet chat with him in a coffee shop. And after talking to you for an hour or two, I am sure he will call you his friend, and even give you the recipe of his delicious baked potatoes, which he does, near the end of the book. What a nice man!

If you want a coffee shop chat with Michael Caine, and haven't read What's It All About, I would highly recommend it. It's a longer and perhaps more interesting book. Not much has happened to him in the last eighteen years, and three quarters of this one is more or less an abbreviated repetition of his first one. But if you want to know something about the real Michael Caine, you are not in luck.

Mr Caine's autobiography is paper thin. Try going through the saloon door of a cheap Western movie set, and you'll rip the paper and find yourself in the back lot. Of course we don't believe that his trip to stardom was all luck. He has made 117 films to date so he must be a very hard working man. We know that he can't be as nice as he claims. He walks out on his first wife and daughter (while she's very young). He can't spare a penny for his daughter even after being arrested and taken to court a few years later by his wonderful wife who smiled at him in court. He claims his daughter really loves him now. I wonder if she can. He claims that for a period of time he drank three bottles of vodka a day. I wonder if that's medically possible. He first saw his second wife Shakira (“who doesn't have a single bad bone in her entire body”) in a TV commercial, traced her, married her after he left her pregnant and they've been living ideally together for forty years. I wonder if that can happen in real life. His life appears to have been a walkabout from a party to a movie set and back again. He name drops and tells stories about every one who is anyone in the movie world. They are all his good friends although it's apparent that, with some of them, he hasn't had more than a few minutes of face to face contact. I counted over 187 famous friends, but perhaps I am out of touch with today's reality (Facebook does allow you 5.000!) Of course they are all nice and wonderful. Does it matter that some of them have been connected to organized crime?

Who is the real Michael Caine? Well, he's called Maurice Micklewhite and I know that unlike most other actors, in his private life he uses his real name. I am sure that if he wanted to open-up to us, this is the name he would have used on the cover. And, perhaps because I write mystery thrillers, this is the book I would prefer to read. As it is, I can only tell you one thing about the man. He is not dishonest. What we have here is a book written by Michael Caine, the popular actor. We get to meet other stars and glamorous people at parties. We live in huge mansions, eat marvellous food, have thousands of friends and absolutely love everyone. Most important, it could have easily happened to us. The man admits it: he was just lucky. Why look beyond the facade?

But if you do look, then Michael Caine's The Elephant to Hollywood is not an autobiography but a ticket to a dream. It reminded me of a movie called GoodFellas, with the harsh violence edited out.