Feature
The man with the silver tongue
by Diana Wichtel
At 81, Roger Moore still gives plenty of Bond for your buck.
Roger Moore. He remains the second best Bond after Sean Connery, depending on your susceptibility to that brooding bruiser Daniel Craig, and easily the prettiest. If he was a bit lightweight, that just made him the right man for an increasingly crazy job. Back in 1979, Moonraker made Moore the first Bond to be fired into space. Incredibly, this is not the movie’s silliest moment. That happens in Venice, where Bond’s gondola, or, as it’s affectionately known, the Bondola, morphs into a speedboat. Then, perched on what appears to be a giant massage pillow, it takes to land, gliding majestically through the Piazza San Marco, with the ever-nonchalant Moore at the wheel. It’s a perfect metaphor for the whole brilliant, preposterous Bond franchise.
Moore looks like he could use a massage pillow, or possibly a shuttle to another planet, by the time we meet at the Hilton in Auckland. He’s flogging his autobiography, My Word Is My Bond. Asked about his day – radio interview at the crack of dawn, breakfast television, literary lunch, book signing, more interviews – he whimpers in a very un-007 manner. To cheer him up – wake him up – I tell him my children were uncharacteristically impressed when they heard I was interviewing Roger Moore. “Is he still alive?” quips Moore wearily.
Actually, he’s in good nick for 81 and pleased with all the attention. “I’m surprised anybody knows me in New Zealand,” he claims. His old mate Michael Caine advised him not to come. It seems Caine’s own literary efforts weren’t appreciated here. “He said, ‘I called the publisher and asked how many books we’d sold there. He said two. I said 2000? He said, no, two. Bloody two,’” says Moore, doing a very passable Michael Caine. “I think we’ve sold more than that.”
He likes the antipodean version of the book. “Having the red and the black makes it very Christmassy.” It’s also heftier. “They make it thicker,” he confides, “because they say people will feel it’s more important.” More Bond for your buck. The book is a rollicking read, hilarious even when Moore doesn’t mean to be. These days, he’s wealthy enough to live the life of a tax exile, with homes in Monaco and Switzerland. But he started out as the son of a policeman, living in the sort of flats where families shared a bathroom. Despite the Blitz, he seems to have had a contented childhood as a doted-upon only son. There were beloved pets including, at one stage, a dysfunctional monkey. Here, you discover how a conflict-shy, gun-hating hypochondriac morphed into a 20th-century icon.
Moore got into the film industry thanks to his talent for art. But biology was destiny. Those looks were not destined to bloom unseen. Photographs reveal a strapping, handsome lad though, apparently, rather sickly. There’s almost as much about the ailments as there is about the acting, and in gruelling Technicolor.
“Having vomited for what seemed like an eternity …”; “What’s more, I was passing extremely dark water …” There’s a circumcision, ulcers, shingles, appendicitis (acute) and kidney stones (recurrent). He suffers bright blue urine (reaction to medication, apparently). A few pages later: “My nipples started becoming sensitive before turning a very odd colour” (arsenic poisoning while filming down a mine). Later, there’s a tussle with prostate cancer.
He’s very … frank. “Well, you can’t hide your ailments, can you?” he says, blithely overlooking the fact that most people do. “I just want sympathy.”
He didn’t get much of that when a special-effects man hit the button too early during filming of The Spy Who Loved Me, and blew up his bottom. You shouldn’t laugh but Moore doesn’t mind. “Well, everybody laughed at the time. God, it was hysterical. Smoke was coming out of my rear end.” It was a very painful experience, if always good for another joke: “I had three holes where everyone else only has one!”
We may hear too much about his nether regions, but about his colleagues Moore remains circumspect. Legendary drinkers have “a little alcohol problem”. Tony Curtis is described as calling Joan Collins a c---, but Moore seems to have made it his mission to get on with every-one. When he doesn’t – he didn’t hit it off with Grace Jones – the reasons remain obscure. “It was not going to be a tell-all tittle-tattle, because it’s not my style.”
That style turns out to be of the “Yes, dear reader” variety – garrulous and reflexively self-mocking. “Ever the poseur,” he writes cheerfully, catching himself in some thespian vanity. Moore likes to cast himself as a sort of a lucky amateur. The man who began his acting life as a knitwear model seems genuinely surprised at how far he has come. He’s fond of the mantra of the hack actor: just hit the marks and say the lines.
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