Michael Caine Outclasses the Class System : Biography: The British actor's life story, 'What's It All About?,' chronicles his rise from cockney to celebrity.

By CHARLES CHAMPLIN

Dec. 31, 1992 12 AM PT

SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

Years ago, after “Alfie” had made him a star, Michael Caine remarked that until then an actor with a heavy dose of cockney in his speech would be lucky to land a bit part in which he tugged his forelock and said to the arresting officer, “It’s a fair pinch, guv; I’ll go quiet.”

Actually, the challenge back in the mid-’60s might have been to find a professional actor who spoke BBC English regularly but could do a cockney accent. These days, the challenge is for the actor who speaks mellifluous Oxford or BBC English to find work anywhere this side of “Masterpiece Theatre.” Ordinary speech is in--on both sides of the Atlantic.

Caine, whose career began in the theater, was a central figure in a democratizing cultural revolution in early postwar Britain that gave the Beatles, the Stones and many another groups to music; brought John Osborne and Arnold Wesker to the company of dramatists, and made stars of Albert Finney, Tom Courtenay, Sean Connery, Terence Stamp, Roger Moore and Caine himself. Not a broad- A blueblood in the lot.

None of his contemporaries fought longer odds to get where he is, and so far none has written about both the hard times and the good times with more candor than Caine, whose autobiography, “What’s It All About?” is just out from a Random House imprint called Turtle Bay.

Amid his growing fame, Caine was never shy about admitting he grew up in working-class Elephant and Castle south of the Thames, that his father was a porter at Billingsgate Fish Market, his mother a charlady until, as soon as he could, Caine redeemed her to a life of ease. It was not simply that they were poor, Caine says in his fond portraits of them in the book. It was that they were exceptional people, but prisoners of class.

“What happens is that you look at the working class and they’re uneducated,” Caine said at lunch in Los Angeles a few days ago, “and you imagine they’re all the same. But they’re not. They have such character behind them and they’re so individual. Particularly in the case of my father, you wonder if he’d been born in different circumstances what he could have become.

“I bang on a bit about the class system in England. The editors cut a lot of it. It’s not so much the social discomfort of it any more. Class distinctions aren’t the problem. It’s the number of minds that are wasted. The old policy of deliberately educating kids to be laborers is backfiring now, because we have whole generations of men who have been put out of work and who are unemployable because of the new technology. My father was typical of that.”

(One of Caine’s friends is another south-of-the-Thames lad who grew up in thin circumstances, the son of a professional clown--John Major, England’s prime minister.)

Caine left grammar school at 16, but at that he’d had two more years of education than his mates.

“I was the brains and genius of the whole block,” he says. But he adds that he was 50 before he learned to drive a car or play tennis, and his daughter is the first in his family to attend university.

The late Sophie Tucker famously said, “I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor and, believe me, rich is better.” It will do as the subtext of Caine’s book. His portrayal of the suffocating meanness of the early years leaves no doubt why, when stardom arrived with “Alfie” in 1966, he seized every film he could get, including lucrative turkeys like “The Swarm.” (He offers fond memories of producer Irwin Allen, despite the failures of “The Swarm” and “Beyond the Poseidon Adventure.”).

“I have a definite standard by which I choose films,” Caine says. “I choose the best one available when I need one.”

Neil Simon, whom Caine met during the making of “California Suite” and who was delighted by Caine’s stories, urged him to write a book. And, for evident reasons, so did well-known literary agent Irving Lazar. It took Caine two years, pecking at a word processor with two fingers and prompting his memory from the scrapbooks his longtime press agent, Jerry Pam, had kept for him.

In six months he’d written 70 pages. He gave the first 10 to his wife, Shakira. “I said, ‘Read it and tell me the truth. Is it worth continuing? Can I write or can’t I?’ And I got a glass of brandy and a cigar and went into the other room and got very quickly bombed, out of nerves.”

He went back to Shakira after a time and said, “Well?”

She said, “You can write.”

The shelf of self-written Hollywood autobiographies is considerably narrower than the shelf of Hollywood autobiographies in which the teller tends to be obscured by the “as told to.” Caine’s tales are obviously his own, and occasionally unsparingly candid: the busted first marriage, the birds who enlivened his life between marriages, the three bottles of vodka a day (no more), the friendships that lasted and those that didn’t, the locations that were glorious hell (“The Man Who Would Be King,” filmed in Morocco) and those that were just hell (“Too Late the Hero,” made in the Philippines).

He is wonderful on London’s swinging ‘60s, when every dream seemed to be coming true not only for himself but for everyone he knew.

(Among the latter was Terence Stamp’s kid brother, who came to London without job, prospects or qualifications that would go on a resume. After months of laying about, he joined up as road manager with a new and struggling rock group, the Who, and ended up, Caine says, a millionaire.)

Caine wishes he had written more about the psychology of the ‘60s. “Why was it my generation that made it happen?” Caine asks rhetorically, then gives his answer: “We were born in the ‘30s, which was the Depression, and went straight into the war, which was fear. Almost every father was away. All single-parent families. We had no candy, no cookies, no cake, no ice cream, no chocolate, no fruit, nothing, for six years. We were taken from our homes and slung all over England.

“As we got older in the ‘50s, they said, ‘Now we’ve got the hydrogen bomb and when the siren goes off you’ve got four minutes to live.’ The four-minute warning. And everybody said, ‘The hell with it, let’s party.’ Very simplistic, but psychologically correct, I’ll bet you.”

Having established to his own satisfaction that he can write, Caine is now set on doing a novel. His plan is that the book will then become a film, with which he will make his debut as a director.

“I thought as I’ve taken up writing so late in life, I might as well take up something else late in life. Also there’s a sort of feeling with me that anything I dream seems to come true. So I have to make them more and more impossible.”

It will be a gangster novel, and he has several dozen pages of notes in hand already. “Films in England have always treated gangsters as though they were either funny or stupid. And I knew for a fact they were neither.”

Caine, finishing a tour on behalf of the book, and Shakira are in winter residence at a house he recently acquired in the Trousdale section of Beverly Hills. They had lived here for several years, but grew homesick for England and bought a place on the Thames where the river has no locks for six miles. “That means you can take a 12-mile cruise on a Sunday afternoon. That’s about right.”

Caine currently can be seen as Scrooge in “The Muppet Christmas Carol,” the only human in view. “And if I wasn’t off my rocker before I did that, I am now,” he says with a fond smile.

The late Jim Henson’s son, Brian, directed; Frank Oz (who directed Caine in “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels”) was Miss Piggy, and Steve Whitmire took over as Kermit the Frog after Henson’s death.

“You make no concessions to the fact that they’re puppets,” Caine says. “When I played the cruel side of Scrooge, I played it really, really, really cruel. And I think it’s funny. I was smart enough in this case to realize I’m working with the greatest scene stealers in the world. But I had one thing they didn’t have and I hung on to it like grim death, and that was reality. I played it as though I was working with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and it works. Jeffrey Katzenberg called me and told me it works. If he calls you, it works. If it doesn’t, he doesn’t.”

Caine has also co-produced a film for HBO here and theatrical release elsewhere called “Blue Ice,” with Sean Young. “I play an aging, retired MI6 agent who owns a jazz club in Soho. It’s meant to be a series if it goes.”

He was petrified because of all the bad press about Young. “All her scenes were with me. But everybody on the picture loved her. She was professional. She told the loveliest jokes. She looked great. No problem at all. I mean, she’s nuts, kind of. I’m nuts as well, but she’s nuts in a funny kind of way and so am I. Most people in this business are slightly off their rockers anyway.”

Caine thinks the British film industry has grown all but dormant. “You’ve got no instigators over there. Anybody with any get up and go got up and went to America or Australia or somewhere,” Caine says. Yet there is a new generation of British actors who have become international stars. “Daniel Day-Lewis, Gary Oldman, Jeremy Irons, Tony Hopkins. They could all come back and help the industry--if the projects were there.”

Caine has approached Prime Minister Major with an investment tax-credit scheme to help the film business and, in particular, lure American entrepreneurs who caused London to be called “Hollywood U.K.” in the ‘60s.

“Give us a couple of years. It’s beginning to liven up. But we British are very traditional. We adjust to nothing if we can help it.”