When it comes to buying art, actor Michael Caine doesn`t mess around. Consider his shopping strategy, a masterpiece of simplicity and ex-pediency:
”I walk into a gallery, see something I want, and go: `That painting. I must have it!` ” explains Caine, an avid art collector whose most recent purchase was ”an enormous painting by a man whose name I can`t pronounce who I think just died. I found out later he was the head teacher at the Moscow School of Art and it`s a painting of his garden in Russia.
”Actually, I prefer galleries to art museums,” he adds, climbing the steps to Chicago`s R.H. Love Galleries in navy blue overcoat, faded jeans, sneakers, white turtleneck and a navy sweater that conceals a nicotine patch. (A longtime cigar smoker, Caine gave up his beloved Havanas three weeks ago at the behest of his wife, Shakira, who found them disgusting.) ”Not that I`m necessarily going to buy something, but I don`t like the idea that I couldn`t buy something if I wanted to. . . . What a wonderful old Victorian building. Is it a museum or a commercial gallery? Could all these paintings be mine if I make the best-seller list?”
After signing 800 copies of his new autobiography, ”What`s It All About?” (Turtle Bay), at Kroch`s & Brentano`s Wabash Avenue store in about 2 1/2 hours, Caine needed a break before catching a plane to another book-signing session in Toronto. We suggested a serene interlude at the Love Galleries, housed in a gorgeous 19th Century Renaissance Revival mansion complete with parquet floors; a domed, Tiffany-style, leaded-glass ceiling;
and 27 varieties of Italian, Belgian and American marble.
The gallery`s current exhibit, ”Ladies in the Home & Garden: Glimpses of Women Indoors & Out by American Artists 1850-1925,” sounded like Caine`s cup of tea on all counts. He`s wild about gardening; he grows roses, fruit trees, shrubs, annuals and eggplants on 10 acres surrounding his centuries-old English country home on the River Thames. And, of course, he`s still considered to have an eye for the ladies, even though 25 years have passed since he shot to stardom as the womanizing cockney cad in the film ”Alfie”-a character many regarded as Caine`s alter ego, to his continuing dismay.
(Nevertheless, he titled his autobiography after a line in the film`s title song.)
”I`ve made 70 pictures since then,” laments Caine, who won an Academy Award for his supporting role in the 1986 film ”Hannah and Her Sisters” and currently is co-starring in ”The Muppet Christmas Carol” with Kermit the Frog. ”I`ve been happily married, no scandals, for 20 years. But to a lot of people, I`m still Alfie.
”What happened with Alfie was that when I made that film I was young and single and not particularly good looking. Then I became rich and famous, which immediately makes you extremely handsome. So suddenly I was young and single and extremely handsome and therefore I was going out with a lot of different girls.
”But I was never Alfie. The difference between Alfie and me was that Alfie would go after any woman. I only went after the women Alfie couldn`t get.
”Actually, most men aren`t looking for sex, but love,” adds Caine, turning serious. ”Personally, I could never perform any act of a sexual nature with a woman who didn`t feel as strongly about me as I felt about her. Most men are looking for a family life, too, even though many of them fall by the wayside.”
At 59, Caine is the subject of at least seven biographies so far. The affably candid but self-described ”very private person” decided to chronicle his own story, sans collaborator or ghostwriter, to set the record straight not only on the Alfie matter but also on what he calls the ”Cinderella boy” misconception.
”Biographers have always written about me as though I was an extremely lucky working-class slob who got picked up by a film producer and made into a star without ever having learned to do anything,” he says. ”To this day, people still regard me as lucky, because I come from a very rigid class society in England.
”When I first became an actor in the theater, people would hear my working-class accent and ask me how I remembered all the lines, as though I were some kind of moron. All the biographies about me, even the nice ones, have been patronizing and condescending, and it annoyed the hell out of me. So I wrote this.”
Lucky in art
But acting is one thing, art`s another. And Caine`s the first to admit that fortune has smiled upon him when it comes to collecting. His country home in England and house in Beverly Hills are filled with paintings by pal David Hockney and other contemporary acquisitions, but the pieces Caine loves to talk about most are the treasures he bought cheaply years ago, when he had more taste than money.
”I`ve been extraordinarily lucky for someone who started out buying without any real knowledge,” he says, pausing to admire an Art Nouveau hanging light fixture done in green leaded glass. ”This looks like a Tiffany. Is it?” (It is.)
”When I first started making money, back in the 1960s, I bought six Tiffany lamps for a total of $6,000,” Caine recalls. ”Now people ask me,
`How did you know (that the lamps` value would increase)?` The answer is, I didn`t. I just liked them.
”Then, a little later, I met Jiri Mucha, the son of (renowned Art Nouveau poster artist) Alphonse Mucha. He was broke and wanted to sell the original paintings his father did for the posters, and I bought them because I liked the way they looked. I had no idea of their importance.”
Another time, Caine relates with relish, he lucked out big-time with a Picasso drawing.
”I did know who Picasso was when I bought it,” he says, in answer to the obvious question. ”But it fell off the wall and the frame broke and I had to have it reframed. When we took the back off, we discovered the inscription, `Happy Birthday, Dora Maar,` along with Picasso`s signature and the date.
”Dora Maar was Man Ray`s model and mistress and later became Picasso`s mistress,” explains Caine, heading for a batch of unhung paintings leaning against a wall.
”Let me give you a tip about art galleries,” he says, rooting through the canvases. ”Always look at the stack of paintings they haven`t hung, because the one you want might be in there.
”Not people I`d want to go on holiday with,” Caine comments cheerfully, gesturing at a group of somber-visaged portraits before moving on to a summer scene. ”This one`s like a Renoir, but the artist blew it on the leaves. If it weren`t for that, it`s something I might buy. . . . Oh, those are nice,” says Caine, his attention suddenly caught by two large oils picturing women in their gardens, painted during the 1930s. ”I love that period,” he says.
”I`m not sure why, but I`ve always loved the designs of the `30s.”
The Micklewhite Mutiny
It was during the `30s-1933, to be exact-that Caine entered the world in the charity wing of St. Olave`s Hospital in London and was christened Maurice Joseph Micklewhite after his father, an unemployed laborer. He was ”acting,” he recalls, by the time he was 3-convincing irate bill collectors that
”Mummy`s out” while his mother hid behind the front door. Around this time, he also developed a hatred for ties that he harbors to this day.
”I had to wear a very scratchy sort of pullover shirt and a little tie to infants` school when I was 3, and I always had a red scratch around my neck,” he says. ”I hate ties. I never wear one unless I absolutely have to.”
When he began working in repertory theater in England, Maurice Micklewhite became Michael Scott at the suggestion of a producer. Later, when he broke into films, the existence of another actor named Michael Scott meant he had to come up with another name quickly.
”I was standing in a phone booth in London`s Leicester Square, which is like Times Square in New York with all the cinemas, when I found out I had to have a new last name,” Caine says. ”I happened to see a sign advertising
`The Caine Mutiny,` with Humphrey Bogart, and I chose the name Caine.”
Years later, as Caine relates in the final pages of his autobiography, his choice of a name would take on ironic new meaning. In the summer of 1991, two years after his mother`s death, Caine discovered that he had an illegitimate older half-brother, David, who had spent most of his life in an insane asylum near London. Caine`s mother had visited David nearly every Monday of her life, somehow managing to keep him a secret from her husband and two other children. The name of the asylum was Cain Hill.
”I`ve often wondered what she must have thought when I told her I was changing my name to Caine,” the actor muses. ”It`s spelled differently from the asylum, but it sounds the same. Did she think I had found out about David and was testing her?
”She wanted to protect both him and my career,” adds Caine, who established contact with David before his older brother`s death in a nursing home earlier this year; his ashes are buried in Caine`s garden. ”The nurses told me that after I became famous, she would take a Bible with her each time she visited and make any new nurses swear that they would never talk about David.”
Poor medicine for the poor
”The only reason he was in an insane asylum was because he was an epileptic,” Caine says. ”When he was young, they thought epilepsy was insanity and put epileptics in asylums. He could speak at one time, but because of the lack of care and the battering his head took on stone floors when he had a fit, he developed brain damage and lost the ability to talk. So he became brain damaged and institutionalized because of the moral outlook of people in those days.
”People are always asking me, `Were you surprised that your mother had an illegitimate child?` I was surprised, but I wasn`t shocked or upset about it,” Caine says. ”The greatest effect it had on me, which was why I decided to finish the book by writing about him, was that it suddenly occurred to me, there but for the extremely close grace of God go I. I`ve had tragedies and sad times, obviously, but for the most part my life has been wonderful, while David spent 67 years sitting in insane institutions because he came from a poor family.
”That`s what struck me most. Coming from an extremely poor family affected me in that I was angry about the class system almost-almost-having the power to keep me down, but it affected David physically. If my family had money, he would have been taken care of and could have led a normal life.”
Outside the warmly lit gallery, it looks like snow. Caine`s driver appears and signals that it`s time to leave for the airport to catch the plane to Toronto. Walking down the mansion`s marble staircase, Caine tries to sum up his book`s message-and his life, really-in one word.
”What`s it all about? Hope,” he says. ”It`s about hope, and going after what you want. It`s a very American thing, really, because the class system in America is irrelevant. In England, it`s almost irrelevant, but not quite.
”When I was born, the class system had the power to keep me down-almost. But there was a whole generation in the `60s that (rejected) class and made our own way. You`ve got to set your eyes on a target and go for it. And anyone can do it.”
