generation Our four said right, minutes we’ve got to live, so let’s have some fun
Marijuana ? ‘I laughed for five hours and nearly got a hernia!’ Coca Cola? ‘I thought it was a posh drink!’ The Beatles and Stones? ‘They were dancing next to me.’ As a new film explores the Swinging Sixties two of the era’s greatest icons reveal how the
Looking back at the decade that made him, Michael Caine admits some odd things happened to him during the Sixties. ‘I went to dinner at my agent’s house in Hollywood one night,’ he recalls. ‘We were having coffee and I went to spoon some sugar into my drink. She goes, “Don’t do that. That’s not sugar. It’s cocaine”.’
Not that he was interested in that sort of thing. ‘Never touched the stuff,’ he says. Indeed, he reckons that might be one of the reasons why, half a century later, he’s still around, approaching his 85th birthday next month. ‘No one’s more surprised than me that I am still here,’ he smiles. ‘I assumed that when I got to 85, I’d be talking like this...’ He assumes a comedy, old man’s voice. ‘Or, more likely, I’d be dead.’
As he sits in a studio in West London, still slim, still agile, and immaculately dressed in a black suit, Caine explains that he’s been thinking a lot about the Sixties recently, ever since he began making My Generation, a new documentary about the time when he was at the epicentre of Swinging London.
The idea for the film, he says, was not his – not given to retrospection, he rarely thought about the old days. Rather, it came from his friend Simon Fuller, the man behind the Spice Girls.
‘He was always asking me about the Sixties because he wasn’t there. So when he suggested a movie about it, I thought, yeah, this might shut him up.’
Caine was 27 in 1960, a struggling actor in local repertory. Ambitious and determined, he was perfectly placed to surf the extraordinary wave of new opportunity that engulfed his home city. ‘We were inventing a whole new world as we went along,’ he says. ‘But the thing is, we had no idea that’s what we were doing.’
It took three years to put My Generation together, and the makers had to work around Caine’s still-prodigious film schedule. But it was worth the wait. Giving voice to magnificent archive footage of mini skirts, Mini cars and major social change, are interviews he did with those who rose to prominence at the time – Paul McCartney, David Bailey, Marianne Faithfull, Roger Daltrey and Mary Quant.
And, of course, Twiggy, the girlnext-door turned supermodel, with whom he’s sharing More’s photoshoot. As they josh and giggle under the scrutiny of the lens, for a moment it is like it’s 1966 all over again. ‘That was a laugh, wasn’t it?’ says Twiggy of the shoot. ‘Still love it.’ In the film we see the young model, with her huge blue eyes, slight frame and Vidal Sassoon bob, changing the shape of fashion and transforming the high street. And, like Caine, she says that at the time she had no idea that what she was doing would have any lasting significance.
‘I was 16 when I started, and really young for my age. I see 16-year-old girls today and I’ll tell you what, I wasn’t like them. I lived in Neasden for God’s sake.
‘I’ll tell you how naive I was. The first time I went to Paris in ’66, we were in a restaurant and all the photographers were ordering wine, and the waiter said to me, “What do you want?” And I said, “I’ll have a CocaCola”. And he sneered and said, “What vintage mademoiselle?” But for me then Coke was posh.’
And that’s how we see her in the film: wide-eyed, short-skirted and in her Sixties prime. It is only Caine who appears as he is now. Although we hear their present day voices, the rest of the cast remain visually as if preserved in aspic: the wildhaired Bailey snapping the exquisite Jean Shrimpton, Daltrey stomping the stage with The Who, Faithfull cavorting with rock royalty. And Twiggy bestriding the ever-changing world of fashion.
‘I loved fashion,’ she says. ‘I was a right mod. Were you a mod Michael?’
‘What do you think Twiggs?’ he replies. ‘Can you imagine me as a rocker?’
The longer they chat, the more the pair confound that cliché about the Sixties: if you can remember them, you can’t have been there. Caine’s memory remains pin sharp. As does his analysis. There were, he says, many reasons behind the huge social upheaval of the decade: baby boomers coming of age, rising incomes and rapid technological advances.
But Caine reckons he knows the moment when things really took off. The trigger, he says, was the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. ‘It was when [Soviet leader] Khrushchev said it would take four minutes to obliterate the world. We, as a generation, said, “Right, we’ve got four minutes to live, so we’d better have some fun”. ‘People say to me, “Did you realise you were living at a special time?” When you’re living in the moment, you don’t stop to think, “This is amazing”. It’s only in retrospect you realise.
‘Though I do remember thinking it can’t have been easy for our parents to see us having so much more fun than they had.’ He pauses and smiles. ‘Didn’t stop me, mind.’
He was not alone. Everywhere in London’s whirligig of hedonism he encountered like minds. ‘One night I went to the Ad Lib Club and dancing with me – well, not with me but at the same time – were all the Rolling Stones and all the Beatles. It wasn’t just that everybody knew each other. Everybody you knew became famous.
‘I had this actor friend called David Baron. We were both broke, having a cup of tea in the Arts Theatre café, where out-of-work actors went to pass the time. He said to me, “I’m giving this up. I’m going to write a play and you’re going to be in it”. I said, “Yeah, right”. He said, “I’m going to write under my proper name”. So I said, “David Baron’s not your real name?” He said, “No, it’s Harold Pinter”.’
Those starting out often shared flats together, and those flats were all close to each other, becoming informal communes of the ambitious. It helped that London was then so inexpensive. ‘My first place was in Notting Hill,’ says Twiggy. ‘Dirt cheap. That’s where everyone lived – Notting Hill, Chelsea, Fulham. Imagine that. Look at it now.’
Caine also lived in Notting Hill, sharing a flat with Terence Stamp. ‘I had to look after his girlfriends when he was away. Jean Shrimpton, Julie Christie – I had to keep them company. Terrible job, but someone had to do it!’
Caine reckons that his contemporaries were fuelled by a shared motivation. ‘I’ll tell you why London was the centre of things, and not Paris or New York. It was class. Sure, America had its own issues like race. But we were driven by this urge to defy our class. Workingclass kids like me and Twiggs had been told we couldn’t do what we wanted to do. That made us all the
WHEN YOU ARE LIVING IN THE MOMENT, YOU DON’T STOP AND SAY, ‘THIS IS AMAZING’
more determined. We thought, sod this, we’re doing it.
‘I was so lucky to be in the theatre. Suddenly there were parts for working-class people in plays about working-class people. Pinter wrote The Caretaker. Oscar Wilde and Terence Rattigan didn’t write about caretakers, for Gawd’s sake.’
One thing that has changed from the days when Caine and Twiggy first came to prominence is the accent. Young people no longer speak in the cockney tones they do.
‘I know, where’s it gone?’ says Caine. ‘One of the oldest accents in the English language, gone in a generation.’
It’s not just working-class Londoners who speak in a different way,’ adds Twiggy. ‘Posh people don’t speak like they used to. They’ve toned right down. Even at the top. I mean, you listen to William and Harry and they sound middle class, normal.’
And it is class, Caine thinks, that has changed the most since the Sixties. Not least in the fact that he, a lad from Elephant and Castle, could become a knight of the realm.
‘I couldn’t believe it when I got the knighthood,’ he says. ‘The Queen took one look at me and said, “I’ve a feeling you’ve been doing what you’ve been doing for a long time”. I nearly said, “So have you, your Majesty”. She’d probably have loved it.’
It was a rather different encounter from the one Twiggy had when she first met royalty back in the Sixties.
‘I went to a Vogue party and Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon were there. I was at her table. We’d been told how to behave: don’t speak to her unless she speaks to you and all that.
‘And she ignored me the whole meal, chain-smoking through it. Then suddenly, over pudding, she leaned across the table and said, “And what’s your name?” I said, “My name’s Lesley Hornby, ma’am, but everyone calls me Twiggy”. She went, “Oh, how unfortunate”, puffed on her cigarette and never spoke to me again.’
Do these Sixties superstars think it could happen again? Could there be as groundbreaking a swell of youthful creativity today?
‘You can never say never,’ says Caine. ‘But I don’t see it. We were so lucky. Everything went right for us. I don’t see that luck being there today.’
Twiggy agrees. ‘It’s really tough for young people today. You hear everyone saying all the actors now come from Eton. Maybe kids from my background don’t go to drama school because of the fees.’
‘They certainly can’t afford to live where we did,’ says Caine. ‘And kids today tell me they want to be actors because they want to become rich and famous.
‘I became an actor precisely because I knew I wouldn’t become rich and famous. I did it because I wanted to act.’
But never mind it happening again, Caine reckons he knows why it all stopped in the first place.
‘The Sixties ended about 1971,’ he says. ‘Drugs brought it to an end. They changed the dynamic. If people went out having taken cocaine they didn’t stop talking rubbish for two hours, and if they’d smoked some pot they’d sit there all evening going, “Wow”, and boring the arse off everybody. I smoked marijuana once and laughed for five hours. Nearly got a hernia. Truth was, you couldn’t work properly on drugs. At least, not in the theatre when you had to learn your lines.’
‘I never did drugs either,’ says Twiggy. ‘Maybe that’s why we’re still around. A lot didn’t make it.’ Indeed, watching them on the big screen, lighting up the world with their confidence, it’s easy to imagine that none of those who electrified the Sixties imagined they would one day grow into senior citizens. Quite the opposite. After all, that is the memorable line from My Generation, the song that gives the film its title: ‘Hope I die before I get old.’
‘People did think that,’ recalls Caine. ‘I used to say to friends mixing with drugs, “Why are you doing this? Don’t you want to grow old?” And they’d go, “Why would I want to do that?” But I did. I wanted to hang around for as long as I could do. I just never thought it would happen.’
But he and Twiggy are still around, still current, still working, still relevant. Indeed, if you want to know the most significant way the Sixties changed the world, it’s writ large in Twiggy. When she was growing up, she would never have seen any woman aged 68 dressed in the clothes she slips into after our photo-shoot. And yet here is the face of a generation, 50 years on, not looking remotely out of place stepping out in a pair of leather trousers.
‘I know,’ she agrees. ‘There is no way my mum would have looked like this.
‘Though, to be honest, when I say my age to myself I think: I can’t be 68. Come on, how on earth did that happen? I mean, I lived through the Sixties.’ My Generation is in cinemas on March 14.
I HAD TO KEEP JULIE CHRISTIE COMPANY. TERRIBLE JOB, BUT SOMEONE HAD TO DO IT!