Sir Michael Caine--The Biography by William Hall

Author:William Hall [William Hall]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781784185350
Publisher: John Blake Publishing
Published: 2015-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

9

INTERLUDE IN SIN CITY

The girl was called Emmeline. She was tiny and brown except for her smiling white teeth, and she had just exposed the top half of her body for the third time in ten minutes.

Now she cupped her breasts in either hand and dipped them, one by one, into the whisky we had bought her.

Then she invited us to partake of them.

Michael Caine said thank you, but he preferred to drink his whisky in the traditional way, from a glass. I stayed on beer. It had been a rough ten minutes and we both needed a drink because it was going to become a lot rougher.

Around us the club was a dark, smoke-hazy cavern of noise and activity. Five hundred men and women – most of the men sailors, all of the women whores – were jammed into it. Muted light bulbs concealed shady goings-on in dim alcoves. Jive music was blaring out from a loudspeaker, making conversation almost impossible. It was like South Pacific with an X certificate.

There had been one brawl already, over in the far corner. There was about to be another. At our table.

It had seemed like a good idea when Caine suggested a night on the town, but now we weren’t too sure. Not just any old night, either, because this wasn’t any old town.

Its name was Olongapo, but everyone who knows it calls it Sin City.

A leading magazine voted it the Sin Capital of the World after a survey of such minor vice paddies as Tangiers, Harlem, Hamburg, Hong Kong, San Francisco, downtown Los Angeles and Soho.

Olongapo is happy to live up to its name.

On the map you will find it on the west coast of the Philippines in the province of Zambales, 100 miles from Manila. The clue to the status of Sin City is its rich neighbour: the U.S. Naval Base of Subic Bay, which after Pearl Harbor is the second biggest naval base in the world.

April 1969. When the fleet was in there could be as many as 12,000 fighting men ashore … with a week off from Vietnam, a month’s pay burning in their pockets, and their hearts set on a different kind of action. Olongapo was there to oblige them.

Eight thousand prostitutes, for a start. And clubs that give varying degrees of ‘exhibitions’ from the lowest to the unspeakable.

One foot away from the main street is off limits to the sailors – for their own safety. Every Philippino out on the streets after dark carries a knife or a gun, legitimately. Laws tend to be fluid in these parts. As the wife of a serviceman who had been two years on the base told us: ‘If every American family back home realized what their little boy got up to here, there’d be no base left!’

This was a good night to choose. Two giant aircraft carriers were in, the nuclear-powered Enterprise and the Hornet. The ladies were in waiting.

Caine was still fighting World War Two. Along with a

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