But I think this whole class bit is changing. They’d dress up in these ridiculous costumes and put on an act for the amusement of the nobs…. They’re from the old days when Cockneys were kissing the ass of the upper classes. What am I going to say-‘Yah! I made it!’? Then foreign journalists keep asking me about the pearly kings and queens. Well, that was their attitude and they’re stuck with it because now they’re thirty-three, too, and I don’t hear of them. They said I had a horrible accent you could cut with a knife and I wasn’t very good-looking. Not a little jump-top Cockney shit like me. When I was very young and said I was going to be an actor, my friends said I’d never make it. The Cockneys themselves say to you, ‘You’re just a bum,’ and you’re told you can’t ever do anything. Certain hotels and restaurants, they hear your accent and they give you that thin-lip, glass-eye look. If you’re a Cockney, you’re made to feel you don’t belong. England is a socially prejudiced country, and I’ve been through all that. “They always want to interview my mother because she was a charlady for twenty years, and they say, ‘Oh, those Cockney people, they’re lovely!’ and they start talking about eight notches below my intelligence and four below theirs. Of Caine they say, “Isn’t it super? He’s a Cockney, you know,” which is about on a par with saying, “Isn’t it marvelous? He was born in the Bronx,” or “He has this divine Brooklyn accent.” (Only it isn’t the same, because in America practically all our celebrities were born in the Bronx or an equivalent social background.) Caine, himself, is getting pretty fed up with all the emphasis on the Cockney bit (“I wasn’t just standing outside some East End youth club with a razor in my hand and Harry Saltzman came riding up in a Cadillac and discovered me”), but he is going to be a lot more fed up before the brouhaha dies down. It’s so ‘in’ now to have a working-class background that any actor, painter or writer who is working class is automatically assumed to be great.”) Even his accent is imitated, and London debs interlard their conversation with Cockney phrases to show how sophisticated they are. “This New Aristocracy bit about actors, models and photographers is an idea I just can’t stand…. (“It must bore the pants off anybody with any intelligence,” he has said. As the newest idol of the anti-Establishment cult, Caine finds, rather to his contempt, that where he eats, where he gets his clothes and what he wears, where he takes his girls to dance, have become newsworthy items. He is the coolest of them all and currently the most fashionable example of the crumbling of old class prejudice.įor Caine is a Cockney, and to have a Cockney-of a group formerly always good for a laugh but rating socially along with the Untouchables-emerge as a stylish trend setter, an arbiter of tastes, a model Englishman, a sex symbol instead of the comic relief, is really discombobulating the old caste setup. ![]() In his first starring film, The Ipcress File, last year-and this year in Alfie-he established his reputation not only as an actor but as an emblem of the new Britain. No one exemplifies this transformation better than Caine. From this proletarian background have come actors like Sean Connery, Tom Courtenay, Albert Finney, Peter O’Toole, Terence Stamp and now Michael Caine, as well as most of the pop-music groups and those writers following in the wake of John Osborne, who is himself of working-class origin (his mother was a barmaid) and who first signaled to the rest of the world the coming revolutionary changes in the national physiognomy when he wrote Look Back in Anger ten years ago.Ĭaine on vacation in Italy, late ’60s. ![]() Their sexual mores are on a boy-meets-girl basis, and it is this happy leaven that is altering the old epicene image. You do not as a rule find a high incidence of swish among truck drivers, longshoremen and similar laborers. The old concept of the Englishman-tea, butlers, stiff upper lip, and dressing for dinner in the jungle-was also frequently tinged with effeminacy, but the present impact of young, what-the-bloody-hell, non-U trend setters is changing the picture. It’s dead chic today to be working-class English. For this, they can thank the rise of a youthful proletariat who, as everyone knows, are now setting styles-in fashion, speech, pop music, dancing, films, plays, painting, general behavior. One of the more agreeable aspects of the recent British renaissance has been the emergence of the Englishman as a symbol of masculine sexual virility. To read every Esquire story ever published, upgrade to All Access. It contains outdated and potentially offensive descriptions of homosexuality, gender, and class. ![]() This article originally appeared in the December 1966 issue of Esquire.
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