Michael Caine names the one thing that ruined his experience of the 1960s
In the collective rosetinted view of the 1960s that culture, on mass, holds onto, everything was fun in the 1960s. It was the free love age, the age of musical, cinematic, and social pioneering when the best of the best were all around and working at the same time, gathering at glamorous get-togethers to share ideas and substances. It was history’s party era, but for Michael Caine, there was a moment when the fun stopped.
In the 1960s, Michael Caine was everything. As the favourite charming British actor of the moment, he was the leading man in British cinema, with directors and projects fighting over him as his star rose. With a golden run of Zulu, The Ipcress File and then Alfie in 1965 and 1966, he established himself as one of the top working actors around.
But don’t let his generally polite demeanour fool you; Caine was still plugged into the counterculture. Spending a lot of time in Los Angeles, he made close friends with everyone from John Wayne to Sharon Tate. In his autobiography, The Elephant to Hollywood, he even recalled a night spent at one of Mama Cass’s infamous parties, hanging out with the Mamas and Papas and their hippie circle, when he was introduced to a “scruffy little man” by the name of, Charles Manson.
For a while, Caine was having a lot of fun buzzing around the starlet crowd and soaking in the joy of the times, but then something shifted. “In the ’60s, we were drinkers,” he told The Guardian. “Boy, did we have fun,” he said as he discussed the hedonistic, carefree spirit of the moment.
But as time wore on, the ‘60s began to darken as it drew to a close. Writing about the Manson Family murders, which marked a moment when the spirit of the decade seemed to be murdered too, Joan Didion wrote that “no one was surprised”, suggesting that everyone knew that the fun would eventually have to stop. As the party atmosphere began to take more and more casualties and things began to feel unsettling, Caine didn’t like the way the energy had shifted, and he blamed it on one thing; drugs.
“What ruined the ’60s, towards the end of the decade, were drugs,” he said. “If people were taking cocaine, they’d start talking bollocks and not stop for hours. If they were on other drugs, they’d just sit around, going ‘Wow, man’”, he explained, painting a picture of the insufferable party-goers he began to encounter as he added, “So it was either people talking too fast to understand or people not saying anything at all.”
Up until then, Caine had defined the era as a period of movers and shakers, but once the substances started getting stronger, he thought it was ruined as the energy ground to a halt. He said, “It brought to an end the ’60s as we knew it – which was a load of drunks getting up to all sorts and dancing like mad.”
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