What's It All About? by Michael Caine

Author:Michael Caine [Caine, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Acting & Auditioning, Autobiography, Biography, Entertainment & Performing Arts, Non-Fiction, Performing Arts, Personal Memoirs
ISBN: 9781448136483
Google: H8VbQbS7n78C
Amazon: B00M1WR7Y2
Publisher: Ballantine
Published: 1994-08-14T23:00:00+00:00

26

‘Oh yes – a Rolls Royce’

IT HAD BEEN three years and I was now finally home in London again. My first priority was to find a new flat. I was sharing this one with my brother Stanley which made it really crowded, I discovered, now that I was living there for a long period again. I didn’t have to search for long. Like everything else in the sixties, real estate was cheap and available. I found a beautiful flat in Grosvenor Square, a hundred yards along from the American Embassy, which gave me the added bonus, although I did not realise it at the time, of a grandstand seat at all the anti-Vietnam riots which always wound up with a march on the Embassy and a fairly violent fracas with the police. It became my Sunday afternoon entertainment for the seven years that I lived there. I was also against the Vietnam war but I am not a political animal at the best of times and this was someone else’s war and I did not know Vanessa Redgrave very well so I never joined the fray and sat, to my eternal shame, on the sidelines with an after-lunch cognac in my hand and watched out of the window as this battle nearer home was fought out.

The flat was stunning. There were three bedrooms, two large lounges, a big hall, an office and a vast kitchen in which you could dine, plus a dining room, which I immediately turned into a little cinema with a 16-millimetre projector. There were no videos in those days so they used to hire out actual films for projection. I also filled the place with state-of-the-art stereo and television equipment, bought all-new furniture and gave the old flat to Stanley with everything in it. Stanley was now working in the book department of Selfridge’s where he was very happy. He, like me, had always loved books, so he was in his element.

I caught up with my old friend Paul Challen again. He had been having a rough time but was now as robust as he was ever going to be, which was not very but at least he could keep up with me in my rounds of the discos and restaurants into which I plunged with my old enthusiasm intact. Not only was it great to have Paul back because he was my oldest friend, but there was another reason. The London scene had changed radically during my absence, and not for the better as far as I was concerned. Drugs had now taken hold quite firmly and I was very grateful to have Paul as a companion as he was, like me, a drinker. The big new drug was LSD which, like all new drugs, had been declared by experts to be not only harmless but actually beneficial in a lot of cases.

I was now comfortably ensconced in my new luxury abode and started to look at my life to see if there was anything else missing.

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