Play Bond? Sorry, Mr Moore you’re too fat
And your hair’s too long! Untold 007 stories the stars would rather you didn’t know
JAMES BOND is the biggest movie franchise in history — but, over the past 53 years, he has become so much more. As Daniel Craig returns in the 24th 007 blockbuster, Spectre, authors MATTHEW FIELD and AJAY CHOWDHURY unravel the myths, mysteries and sheer majesty of the suavest secret agent of them all . . . DR NO’S SEXY SEA LION . . . AND GROUCHO MARX IN A TOWEL
URSULA ANDRESS was cast as the first Bond girl, Honey Ryder in Dr No (1962), after producer ‘Cubby’ Broccoli saw a publicity shot of her in a wet shirt, and thought: ‘she looked very attractive, wet, like a sea lion.’
Former glamour model Molly Peters, playing nurse Patricia Fearing, was almost nude for her steam-room scene with Bond in thunderball (1965). she wore strategically placed strips of sticking plaster, which she thought ‘more obscene than anything’.
sean Connery, the first screen 007, mucked around constantly during the takes, doing Groucho Marx impressions in nothing but a towel.
Jane seymour was cast as solitaire in Live And Let Die (1973) when Broccoli’s co-producer Harry saltzman saw her remove her hat and shake out her long hair in their office’s reception area.
He hired her on the spot. seymour was so shocked that outside, when she got into her VW Beetle, she backed into saltzman’s Rolls-Royce.
the all-girl pilots of Pussy Galore’s Flying Circus in Goldfinger (1964) were actually men in blond wigs and black jumpsuits. Director Guy Hamilton claimed that, in one shot, some of the fliers could be seen smoking cigars.
007’s creator Ian Fleming was a connoisseur of the Bond girls, but his favourite was Lois Maxwell, who played Miss Moneypenny. He told her the secret service secretary should be ‘ a tall, elegant woman with the most kissable lips in the world. And you are precisely that.’
WARTIME SPIES WHO BROUGHT BOND TO LIFE
NOVELIST Ian Fleming was so confident his first James Bond story, Casino Royale, would be a success that, halfway through the initial draft, he commissioned a goldplated Royal Quiet Deluxe typewriter, using it to finish the book.
Fleming sold the 007 movie rights to fellow World War II intelligence officer Harry saltzman — a Canadian who, like him, had specialised in psychological warfare. the two men had probably met as wartime spies, almost 20 years before their first official encounter in 1961.
Fleming gave saltzman exclusive cinema rights to the Bond books for just six months, in exchange for $50,000 (£300,000 today), but told a friend next day that he believed the franchise could not survive for more than two or three films — ‘then the joke will be over’.
CONNERY’S ANIMAL VIRILITY . . . IN A WALT DISNEY MOVIE
HOLLYWOOD star Cary Grant, an englishman, had been best man at Broccoli’s wedding and was known to be a Bond aficionado. But the producers, hoping for a series, feared he would refuse to play the role more than twice. Another Brit, David Niven, was deemed not tough enough.
But when Broccoli saw a live- action Disney musical he raved about the leading man: ‘Handsome, personable, projecting a kind of animal virility, with just the right hint of threat behind that hard smile.’
the Disney actor was, of course, sean Connery.
the famous golf sequence between Bond and arch- enemy Auric Goldfinger (Gert Frobe) ignited Connery’s passion for the game. Within a few years he was playing at a professional standard.
When news of Fleming’s death in August 1964 reached him, he was on the golf course with My Fair Lady star Rex Harrison: they played an extra 18 holes in the author’s honour.
By 1966, shooting you only Live twice in Japan, Connery was overwhelmed by the ‘fishbowl frenzy’ of fame and regarded Bond as ‘a Frankenstein monster’. Lois Maxwel l , as Moneypenny, watching him pile on weight and grow ‘ a Fu Manchu moustache and muttonchop sideburns’, believed he was trying to make himself too fat and ugly to be 007 again. Connery came to loathe both the producers. When he heard Harry saltzman had Bell’s palsy on one side of his face, he retorted: ‘I hope he gets it on the other side.’ one of his conditions for returning in Diamonds Are Forever (1971) was that he would never have to speak to saltzman or Broccoli.
HOW BASHFUL ROGER SAID NO TO A COSMO NUDE SHOT
ROGER MOORE, famous in the sixties for the saint and the Persuaders, was originally ruled out for Bond because Broccoli regarded him as ‘slightly too young, perhaps a shade too pretty’.
By 1970, the actor had become friendly with producers Broccoli and saltzman, playing poker with them every week. they finally invited him to play Bond — on condition that he lost weight and got his hair cut.
Cosmopolitan magazine invited Moore to pose naked for their centrefold with a Walther PPK protecting his dignity. the actor retorted that he wouldn’t do it, even with a tommy gun.
Moore’s enthusiasm for practical jokes turned the movies into action-comedies. It was his idea, as his underwater Lotus esprit drove out of the sea in the spy Who Loved Me (1977), to lower the window and toss out a fish.
His light- hearted style suited the new British mood in cinemas. When Moore casually kicked an assassin off a cliff, the board of censors insisted that it was cut from the final film.
PLIED WITH WOMEN, TO TEST 007’S SEXUALITY
WHEN an agent invited him to audition as sean Connery’s replacement, Australian model George Lazenby left nothing to chance. He bought a suit from Connery’s tailor, got his hair cut by Connery’s barber and turned up with his arm resting on the doorframe to show off his Rolex. ‘I hear you’re looking for James Bond,’ he purred.
the producers put Lazenby up in an apartment overlooking Hyde Park and, to reassure themselves their new star wasn’t gay, he was plied with women. Lazenby was delighted: he wanted to play Bond ‘for the bread and the girls’ he told the Press.
Pierce Brosnan was initially offered the role in 1985, but was unable to get out of a tv contract. ‘one day I was driving through Beverly Hills and I remember seeing the Bond billboards [showing timothy Dalton in the role instead] — by the time I got to the beach I had to pull over to the side of the road and scream at the seagulls.’ tomorrow Never Dies ( 1997), Brosnan’s second outing, was the first in which Bond didn’t smoke. some of the love scenes, the actor admitted, ‘cried out for a cigarette’.
Cubby Broccoli’s daughter, Barbara, had taken over as producer. she cut one of Brosnan’s favourite pieces of dialogue: ‘ M’, played by Judi Dench, says: ‘Contrary to what you believe, 007, the world is not populated by madmen who can hollow out a volcano, fill it with big-breasted women and threaten the world with nuclear annihilation.’ Bond replies: ‘It only takes one.’ It was Barbara Broccoli who spotted Brosnan’s successor, in the crime thriller Layer Cake.
‘I’m in love with Daniel Craig,’ she announced. ‘ He’s going to be our next Bond.’
GOLDFINGER — ARCHITECT OF INTERNATIONAL CRIME
BOND’s arch-enemy, Blofeld, made his first appearance in an unfilmed screenplay for a pre-Connery Bond movie, in 1959. the villain was the evil genius behind the special executive for Counter-Intelligence, terrorism, Revenge and extortion, or SPECTRE. Blofeld is also the focus of the new movie, spectre.
Fleming borrowed the name from a boy he went to eton with, tom Blofeld — father of the cricket commentator Henry.
scaramanga was also the name of an old schoolfellow . . . one Fleming had detested.
Auric Goldfinger was named after an architect whose work Fleming couldn’t stand: the Hungarian-born erno Goldfinger. When the real Goldfinger protested, Fleming threatened to alter the character’s name to Goldp***k — with a note in every paperback explaining the reason for the change.
Christopher Lee, who played scaramanga in the Man With the Golden Gun (1974), was a stepcousin of Ian Fleming — his divorced mother was married to Fleming’s maternal uncle.
Fleming invited his neighbour in Jamaica, sir Noel Coward, to play the title villain role in Dr No. Coward cabled him: ‘Dear Ian, the answer to Dr No is No, No, No, No!’ the part went to actor Joseph Wiseman.
A MINI-COPTER IN A CROCODILE SUITCASE
THE designer on the early Bonds was ex-fighter pilot Ken Adam, who issued 007 with a one-man autogyro called Little Nellie, on you only Live twice (1967), after he saw the minihelicopter being demonstrated on a BBC programme. screenwriter Roald Dahl decided it should fold flat, so it could be packed into crocodile-skin suitcases.
the jet pack Bond uses to escape in thunderball was a real military gadget, codenamed the BARB or Bell Aerosystems Rocket Belt. ‘No well-dressed man should be without one,’ Bond quipped.
the DB5 returned in Casino Royale (2006) with a new paint job, a bespoke dark grey colour dubbed Casino Ice. For the set-piece crash scene, a new Aston Martin was fired from a nitrogen cannon at Dunsfold Airfield in surrey and rolled seven times — a stunt record.
SOME Kind Of Hero: The Remarkable Story Of The James Bond Films by Matthew Field and Ajay Chowdhury (History Press, £25). To buy a copy for £17.50 visit mailbookshop.co.uk or call 0808 272 0808. Offer available until October 31, p&p is free on orders over £12. © Matthew Field 2015