Day I cuddled up to 007 under the duvet
GLENYS ROBERTS’S magical memories of her friend Roger Moore
ON A sunny Sunday back in the Seventies, my husband Doug Hayward and I, with hungry baby daughter in tow, turned up at Roger Moore’s beautiful mock Tudor detached home in Stanmore, Middlesex.
We were there for lunch with him, his Italian wife Luisa Mattioli and their three children and were looking forward to what we hoped would be a delicious, traditional meal, roast beef, possibly even Yorkshire pudding – or at the very least an amazing pasta dish.
It was Luisa, Roger’s third wife, who opened the door to us, squeezed into tight jeans, looking splendidly tousled, her magnificent mane of auburn hair all over the place.
But instead of welcoming us, she started screaming, ‘Roger, Roger!’
Roger appeared, as suave and goodhumoured as usual, the perfect weekend gentleman in a cashmere pullover. He invited us in and made us welcome – while Luisa continued screaming at the top of her voice in her heavily accented English.
The gist of it was that there was no lunch, she hadn’t done the shopping, it was the staff’s day off, she didn’t want visitors, she didn’t like cooking and she was going back to bed.
As the children cowered and we prepared to head to the local pub, Roger, a model of calm, took charge. Off he went to the kitchen, where he found several tins of beans. Then, with Luisa still screaming in the background, he made us all baked beans on toast.
He served them in the formal dining room, with a lace cloth and silver cutlery – along with a Mouton Rothschild – as if it was the most delicious feast in the world, all the while holding court at the head of the highly polished table with the most entertaining stories and perfect delivery as if nothing was remotely out of the ordinary.
And he never once chided Luisa or made a comment about her lack of hospitality.
That was Roger for you. In nearly 50 years of knowing him, his behaviour was almost impossible to fault. He made the best of every situation, tried to soothe ruffled feathers and would round it off with the wittiest of remarks.
In fact he was pretty unique in show business circles; it wasn’t all about him and if you ever needed a friend, somehow he was there.
Roger was one of my favourite people and one of the funniest men I met. He is completely irreplaceable and I will miss him enormously. Until quite recently I would see him and his fourth wife, Kiki, in our favourite London restaurants, usually with his sons and daughter. And our email exchanges were always funny and frank.
We first met in the early Seventies when my husband, the famous Mayfair tailor Doug Hayward, started making suits for the Bond films.
DOUG’S skill and Roger’s physical elegance were a magical combination. Just to recall the sublime image of dapper 007 running for his life across the Egyptian desert in a Hayward dinner jacket in The Spy Who Loved Me prompts a smile and a tear today.
Roger was so impossibly handsome. He must have known it, but he wore this knowledge with such ease.
Humour was his default, as I learned when we spent time with him in the south of France. He loved dining out on the story of how one of his greatest friends, David Niven, had meticulously planned the digging of his new swimming pool at his home in Cap Ferrat and left it in the hands of the local workforce. All seemed to have gone to plan until Niven dived into the pool and couldn’t find the bottom. He had given his measurements in feet but the French labourers thought they were metres. The deep end was now about 40ft, and from the poolside the water looked dark and menacing.
Roger and I once loyally swam in it together, silently wishing we were on the other side of the garden wall in the azure waters of the Mediterranean.
When Roger and Niven got together you knew you were in for a non-stop laughter. Whether he modelled himself on Niven or not – they had first met in London when Roger was a teenager taking cans of wartime propaganda film to Lt Col David Niven, then working for the Army Film Unit – both had the knack of delivering the wildest remarks in deadpan fashion, which made them doubly funny.
Of course, they told jokes, but mainly it was slices of life, observation enlivened by the quickest repartee if anyone else chimed in.
My husband could easily hold his own in this company, and when we were with Tom Mankiewicz, the James Bond scriptwriter, who wrote many of 007’s risqué jokes, it was always a memorable evening (with unrepeatable gags).
Once we sat at one of Roger’s favourite restaurants halfway up the foothills between Nice and Vence till the small hours, enjoying slow-roasted lamb hung over an open fire and many, many bottles of fine wine.
By the time the evening was over I was under the table – not because of the alcohol consumption, but because I was helpless with laughter.
Then there was the time I bumped into Roger on the Via Sistina in Rome. The Italian capital in the spring should have been divine, but the temperature had taken an unseasonal dive.
The airline had lost my luggage and I certainly didn’t have the proper clothes for the weather, so Roger took me back to his suite in the five-star Hassler Hotel, where he assured me that the heating would be full on.
Alas, the hotel too had been fooled by the weather, and had turned the boilers off.
There was nothing for it but to snuggle up under a huge duvet together – yes, chastely, believe it or not, for Roger was always the perfect gentleman – and watch old movies while room service wheeled in a fabulous dinner.
BUT I was really grateful for Roger’s friendship years later when Doug, by this time diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, was still trying to run his London shop. Of all his celebrity friends, it was Roger on whom we discovered we could count the most.
By now in advancing years himself, and blessed with a bespoke wardrobe so large he really needed his four homes in Switzerland, London, LA and Monaco to store it, he nevertheless made a point every time he came to London of ordering new suits he didn’t need – just to help me balance the books.
He was a friend in need at my daughter Polly’s wedding, too, shepherding her failing father into the right place at the right time. And when he leapt onto the double decker bus carrying guests to the reception, he had everyone in the right mood by pretending to be the conductor.
Nine years ago, almost to the day, Roger gave one of the addresses at Doug’s funeral in his usual style, light, complimentary but not without a proper acknowledgment of the loss he obviously felt. They had laughed together again and again and now it was all over. And now Roger is gone, too, and there are so few people left to laugh with.
I was visiting a patient in a hospital in the Dordogne on Tuesday when the news broke that Roger had died. I am not exaggerating when I say staff and patients threw their hands in the air and cried ‘Ce n’est pas possible!’
They loved him on the continent – despite his vigorous campaigning against what he saw as the cruel production of foie gras – perhaps because he had lived in the south of France for so long.
But it was not just that. Despite humble beginnings, Roger was the quintessential, good-humoured English gentleman – suave, and always self-effacing on screen and, delightfully, off screen, too.
As they acknowledged in that French hospital, it seems impossible that he has gone. For Nobody Did it Better – and I doubt they ever will.