How Joan Collins saw off randy studio boss who pinned her against a wall . . .
SCREEN hero Sir Roger Moore, who died last week aged 89, was everyone’s favourite James Bond — and as charming off screen as he was on it. Here, in the third and final part of our serialisation of his wickedly deadpan memoirs, he reveals how a young Joan Collins escaped the clutches of a Hollywood tycoon and tells the story of when an Oscar-winning actress took to wearing his underwear...
HOWEvER famous you think you are, whoever your wonderful friends might be, whichever fabulous places you’ve seen (and where perhaps you have even owned homes), there will always be moments waiting to bring you back to earth with a bump.
A few years ago, my passport was up for renewal. Since I was visiting London from my base in Switzerland, I thought it would be easiest to drop into the Passport Office, fill in a form, hand over a couple of photos and collect my new document after lunch.
Silly me. The first problem was that my signature was not exactly ‘inside the box’, according to the rules. I had to re-do the entire form. The second was that my photos were from a printshop in Switzerland, not on approved UK photographic paper.
Once this was fixed, the third problem was my name. ‘I am sorry,’ announced the official at the desk, ‘ but these documents are for two different people. On your current passport you are named as Mr Roger Moore, but now you say your name is Sir Roger Moore. It’s different.’
My temper fraying very slightly, I explained that I had been knighted in the meantime. The jobsworth wondered whether I had any proof of this. ‘Proof?’ I seethed between clenched teeth. ‘What would you like — a letter from the Queen?’
Following lunch and a muchneeded glass of wine, I returned to queue at a hatch in the wall where another little man asked my name and date of birth. ‘Got any ID on you?’ he said.
The unforgivable words, ‘ Don’t you know who I am?’, were on the tip of my tongue, but I bit them back. Forcing a smile, I produced my driving licence, and received a new passport in return.
As I walked away, the man hailed me: ‘Excuse me!’ I trudged back to the window in the wall. ‘Can I have an autograph, Sir Roger?’ he said. ‘I’ve always been a big fan.’
AND with that cautionary tale fresh in my mind, I’d like to share a few stories with you of my favourite co-stars and movie chums. I’ve always been a terrible name- dropper, but I appreciate that this won’t impress everybody. Especially passport officials.
Let’s start with the ladies. I have known Joan Collins ever since the days of pool parties at the palatial Kent home I shared in the Fifties with my second wife, Dorothy Squires. Joan’s father, Joe, was Dot’s agent.
Joanie in a bathing costume made quite an impression on some of the male guests, I can tell you. She had just been offered a sevenyear contract with 20th Century Fox in California. The studio boss was Darryl F. Zanuck, tiny but incredibly randy, and he had been obsessed with Joan since seeing her with a diamond in her navel in Land Of The Pharaohs.
Zanuck had a reputation for propositioning virtually every actress he met, and when he bumped into Joanie outside his office, he pinned her against the wall. ‘You haven’t had anyone till you’ve had me,’ he bragged. ‘I’ve got the biggest and the best, and I can go all night.’
Joanie sensibly declined his kind invitation, but through the doorway she did catch sight of his famous desk ornament — a lifesize model of his manhood, in gold. Zanuck made sure every woman who visited his office saw it.
When screen goddess Joan Crawford clapped eyes on it, though, she wasn’t impressed. ‘I’ve seen bigger things crawl out of cabbages,’ she told him.
Size mattered in Hollywood, which is why Eva Gabor, who appeared alongside me in 1954’s The Last Time I Saw Paris, wore a diamond the size of a baseball on her ring finger. I was sitting in her trailer when an assistant director called Eva’s name.
‘Oh my goodness,’ she gasped, in her exotic accent, and tugged the ring off her finger. ‘I vas not vearing zis in ze last shot — will you look after it?’ The assistant director volunteered to keep it in the pocket of his trousers. He blanched when he saw the size of the rock, and demanded to know how much it was worth.
‘Fifty zousand dollars, dahlink,’ purred Eva. The poor man started to shake at the thought of losing it, or being mugged perhaps. ‘Oh don’t vorry,’ Eva reassured him. ‘It vas only two nights’ hard work.’ That was Eva, self-deprecating as always. Her big sister Zsa Zsa would have said it was ‘only one night’s hard work’.
Of course, there are all sorts of ways for a girl to boost her jewellery box on a film set. When I was shooting That Lucky Touch in Belgium in 1975, my co-star Lee J. Cobb ran a poker school that had half the crew — and yours truly — queuing up to lose money.
The marvellous Shelley Winters was on the film, too. ‘Ooh! What’s this game?’ she asked with bashful sweetness. ‘Poker? I think I played that once. May I join in?’
She pulled up a chair and within 30 minutes she had cleaned us all out. We knew better than to let her play with us again.
Belgium in winter was inclement, especially during night-time shoots, and my wardrobe man had procured all manner of thermal underwear for me. When Shelley dropped into my dressing room to discuss a scene, she saw the long
johns and vests and announced: ‘If it’s going to be cold, then I want some as well.’
An indelible imprint is left on my memory from our next scene. She played a general’s wife and had to alight from a staff car in an anklelength fur coat. Just as she stepped out, she flashed at us — revealing rolls of ample flesh held in place by my white thermals.
A few years later, Shelley told me an up-and- coming director had asked her to audition for a role. Now, you don’t ask stars of her calibre to come in and read a script: you invite them to lunch and fling flattery at them.
But Shelley duly reported to the whippersnapper’s office, with a huge bag over one shoulder. The director welcomed her and suggested they might just run through a scene. Instead, Shelley rummaged through hrough her bag for a bit, pulled out an Oscar and put it on the desk. Then she pulled out a second Oscar, before fixing the man with her eye. ‘Still need to audition?’ she said.
Come to think of it, I never did get those long johns back.
SHELLEY wasn’t the worst culprit for pinching clothes, though. That prize goes to Tony Curtis, my co- star in The Persuaders.
It is customary for the leading actors on a show to be offered some of the clothes their character wore. Tony took everything — then held a sale in his trailer where the crew could buy it off him.
That was at the end of the Sixties,Sixties when anything went went. A decade earlier, the film world had been a much more strait-laced place — or at least most of it was. In 1961, I agreed to star in a classic epic called Romulus And The Sabines. It was shot in Italy, and I was cast as Romulus, the founder of Rome, who kidnaps the womenfolk of a local tribe.
One day, we drove into the mountains to film beside a limpid blue pool, fed by a stream tumbling down from the Alps.
In this scene, all the captured women were bathing merrily in their gauzy togas, splashing around in the pool and causing a fair bit of interest among the crew.
Then the assistant director shouted: ‘OK, now we’ll shoot the South American version!’ The girls flung off their wet clothes and began re-enacting the scene, but now completely naked. This caused even more interest among the crew.
What we weren’t expecting was a sudden torrent of icewater rushing into the pool. The girls screamed and scrambled up the banks, with the gallant crew helping them out.
At least no one drowned. My f friend Gregory Peck very nearly w was not so lucky when he filmed Moby Dick. He was still fuming at the director, John Huston, when h he told me the story years later.
GREG played mad Captain Ahab, who spends the movie hunting a white whale and finally dies after harpooning it. The rope gets tangled round Ahab’s body and, as the whale dives, it drags him down.
The scene was filmed in the water tank at Elstree studios, with the waves cranked up to maximum, but Huston wasn’t satisfied with how the action looked.
Each time he shot again, Greg was plunged under the water — and each time Huston kept him down for longer than before.
‘It was much more than I could reasonably hold my breath,’ Greg told me. ‘I was furious. He damn near drowned me.’
Funnily enough, we went fishing together once off Cap Ferrat in the South of France. We fished all day and didn’t catch so much as a sprat. Greg asked the captain if any of the other boats knew where all the fish had gone.
And then we spied our answer. Just off the starboard bow, an enormous whale poked its nose out of the water. Moby Dick had frightened them all away.
If ever an Oscar was deserved, Greg should have got one as Captain Ahab. But he had to wait until 1963, when he took the Academy Award for Best Actor in To Kill A Mockingbird.
I got mine rather more easily. In 1972, Liv Ullman and I were presenting the Oscar for Best Actor, and the name that came out of the envelope was Marlon Brando, for The Godfather.
But the person who came up to collect the trophy was not Brando, but a Native American woman called Sacheen Littlefeather.
As she strode up the steps, she held her hand up. I held my hand up too, and said, ‘How!’ That did not go down well. Miss Littlefeather launched into an impassioned speech about her people’s rights — something that Brando also held close to his heart.
The trouble was, amid all the confusion, she forgot to collect the Oscar from me. I left the stage clutching it in my sweaty palm.
I was staying with my family at Bond producer Cubby Broccoli’s house, and when I got in I placed the statuette on the hall table. Next morning, I was greeted by my young daughter’s ecstatic shouts: ‘Oh Daddy! You won the Oscar!’ I had to explain that it wasn’t really mine.
‘What are you going to do with it?’ she asked. I had just decided that I would present it to my friend Michael Caine, who had also been nominated that year, when the Academy sent an armoured car to collect it. It seems it wasn’t mine to give away.
It’s never wise to start believing your own publicity.