“He introduced himself as Joe Lemon”: when John Lennon went undercover as Michael Caine’s assistant
Throughout a seven-decade career that saw him retire gracefully as one of Britain’s greatest-ever actors, the cluster of icons from all different walks of life that Michael Caine encountered, shot the breeze with, or befriended is nothing short of mind-boggling.
He became friends with Frank Sinatra when he was dating his daughter, Nancy, formed a close bond with Cary Grant, was warned by John Wayne never to wear suede shoes, knew in the early 1980s that Tom Cruise was destined for superstardom, went clubbing in a disco owned by the Kray twins, and used to live with Terence Stamp in the ’60s, whose brother was managing an up-and-coming band called The Who.
It seems only inevitable that the two-time Academy Award winner would eventually run into The Beatles, and he did. Multiple times, in fact. He knew them all, and while George Harrison was singled out as his favourite, his most unusual encounter with the ‘Fab Four’ came at the Cannes Film Festival in 1965 when John Lennon pretended to be his assistant.
Caine was there to promote The Ipcress File, which was screening on the Croisette, while Lennon was in attendance to publicise Help! The former was already a well-known actor fresh from his breakthrough performance in Zulu, and it wouldn’t do it justice to say that the latter was even more recognisable.
This was over a year after The Beatles’ legendary performance on The Ed Sullivan Show that rocketed them to global superstardom, and it had been a long time since any member of the quartet had been able to go anywhere without being mobbed by a throng of overzealous fans.
Somehow, though, the pair attended a reception hosted by the British Consul, where nobody seemed to have a clue who either of them was. “A lot of them knew nothing about films, the Festival, and even less about England, where they had not lived for years, so John and I changed our names to see if anybody would react,” Caine recalled in his memoir, What’s It All About.
“He introduced himself as Joe Lemon, and I used my real name of Maurice Micklewhite,” he recalled. “As each group approached us, we would introduce ourselves (none of them having the faintest idea who we were) and when they asked us what we did for a living, John would point at me and say, ‘I’m his assistant.'”
When the attendees asked Caine what he did, he’d point at Lennon and say, “I’m in charge of him.” To the uninitiated, they were working the room and shaking hands with a pair of bespectacled English fellas who worked together as assistant and employee, completely unaware they were in the presence of one of cinema’s fastest-rising stars and a quarter of the most famous band on the planet.
“This was our little revenge for being made to waste our time with friends at court, so to speak,” Caine revealed. “When we were supposed to be working and publicising our films.” Evidently, nobody gave much of a shit about The Ipcress File or Help!, so why shouldn’t they have a little fun at everyone’s expense?
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