The Herald - The Herald Magazine
On consorting with Lana Turner, acting with Tony Curtis and living with chronic insecurity
FROM THE SAINT TO JAMES BOND, ROGER MOORE IS SYNONYMOUS WITH A BRAND OF MASCULINITY MANY WOULD ARGUE HAS HAD ITS DAY. BUT FOR NOW HE’S UNRECONSTRUCTED … AND UNASHAMED
THERE are things we know about Sir Roger Moore. We know he says his eyebrows played a large part in his performances over the years. We know he was a Saint for seven years in the 1960s and James Bond in seven films, retiring at the age of 58 when his bank account had swelled to a much greater size than his arthritic, fluidfilled knees. We also know he’s a likeable chap and a natural survivor, having skipped across the surface of the crocodile-filled swamp that is Hollywood as effortlessly as his 007 did in Live and Let Die.
Yet you wonder about Moore. Is his selfdeprecation, for example, an act? While his eyebrows have certainly served him well, the actor fails to mention that he trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and had offers from the Royal Shakespeare Company before running for the Hollywood hills. (Noel Coward advised him: “Young man, with your devastating good looks and disastrous lack of talent you should take any job ever offered to you.”)
Was Coward right? Does Sir Roger really reckon Moore is less? And what, for example, motivates Britain’s most debonair man? Now 89, at an age when most of his contemporaries are taking their close-ups in that great film studio in the sky, he is touring the country with an autobiographical show. Why bother? Why not stay at home in Switzerland or Monaco and wave to the passing billionaire yachts which float past on filched pensioner money?
And there are his relationships. He’s been a ladies man, for sure, but why so keen to marry so many of them (four with three children in total)? Why commit to matrimony when divorce can prove so costly?
At a swish London W1 club, Moore looks as suave and stylish as he did when he played Brett Sinclair in The Persuaders! in 1971: white shirt, pink tie, navy blazer and dark flannels. Yes, his hair is a few shades further from grey than it has a right to be but he could still work as a model (as he did during the lean years) if the knitting pattern people came calling again.
An easy question to start. What’s the secret to looking great, Roger? “Good life, good wife,” he says, before smiling and adding: “And only ever one at a time.”
Moore’s vocal delivery may be slightly more languid these days, but it only serves to make him sound cooler. As a matter of interest, how does he rate his current Coolest Man competitor in the form of Mad Men’s Jon Hamm?
“Good series, Jon Hamm’s,” he acknowledges. “But so much of the 1960s was about chain smoking and Playtex bras.” Moore grins at the realisation he’s gone slightly off piste but continues. “I remember those days when women wore all those foundation garments and girdles and God knows what, and struggling to find that spare bit of flesh beneath the French knickers and the stocking tops.” He sighs. “But you never got much further up than that.”
Sounds honest. And Moore, it seems, is more honest than most in the business. But does he really not take himself too seriously or is it part of his shtick? “Nobody else has taken me seriously. Why should I?”
This can’t be entirely true, I suggest. The handsome young actor joined MGM Studios in 1954 on a seven-year contract but was dumped unceremoniously after two years and a series of duds. Surely he must have had a deep inner resolve to get back on the acting horse, which he did with Ivanhoe in 1958? “Yes, I’ve had people crapping on my doorstep,” he says, “but I’m not bitter. You’ve got to have a sense of humour, otherwise the first time you see yourself on the screen you’ll be ready to commit suicide. You think, ‘How awful I am.’”
Tony Curtis had problems sticking to the script, and he didn’t want to do plot lines. So we had to change the characters. I was the one who carried the plot and he liked to ad lib. We had a lot of laughs
Come on, Roger. Continuity in the business alone suggests an innate self-belief. Roger George Moore however insists he wasn’t born confident. “I was nervously shy,” says the son of a policeman and a housewife, who grew up in London’s Stockwell. Was it because he was an only child? “Possibly,” he says, a mischievous eyebrow darting upward. “I think that’s why I played with myself a great deal.”
On screen Moore appeared cooler than a mint imperial but that, he says, was acting. Shyness meant he wouldn’t even go into a restaurant on his own and it wasn’t until he returned to Hollywood in 1959, this time to Warner Bros to make The Miracle, that he met the man whom he says altered his entire outlook on life.
“In the film I played the Duke of Wellington’s nephew at the Battle of Waterloo. But surprisingly, the studio insisted I work with a voice coach, Joe Graham, because my voice was said to be too English.
“Joe talked to me a great deal then quizzed me: ‘Why, if you are 6ft 1in, do you only stand 5ft 10in?’ He then asked when I spoke to people who had gone to university if I felt worried I may mispronounce a word. I said that was possible and he said: ‘That’s the problem. You have to stand taller. You have to do something with what you’ve been given. And the reason they say you are too English is because you don’t open your mouth. Subconsciously, you are afraid you will use the wrong word. And it doesn’t make them better than you because they’ve had the good fortune to be able to study.’”
Moore grew taller with every day spent with Graham. “He was with me all the time when I worked on the film, and when I got the chance to do two more movies and the Maverick series I asked to have Joe with me.”
But if the actor was professionally insecure, surely he was more confident with the ladies? Even the suit of armour he wore in Ivanhoe looked bed-crumpled. And by the time he became The Saint in 1962 the halo was ironic. This was the man every shorthand typist in the land wanted to marry. Moore’s deep voice becomes more serious. “No. It may sound silly but I didn’t know I was attractive to them. I think that’s why I invented the confident, suave character Roger Moore.”
He smiles as his mind goes into flashback. “I remember when I was around 15 and a half, during the war, I met this 19-year-old blonde girl with very white teeth, and God she was tall, at the Locarno in Streatham. We found ourselves in this doorway during the blackout.
“I was doing quite well, right up until the moment the Old Bill came along. ‘Ello, ello, what’s going on ’ere?’ It was obvious, but then he asked me how old I was, and I lied. Then he asked me to produce the card which would explain why I wasn’t in the army. And I couldn’t, so the blonde learned my true age and said, ‘I’m off.’ So it didn’t leave me feeling too confident with the ladies.”
He married young. Moore met his first wife, Doorn Van Steyn, at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art aged 17 and married her at 19. “It was a mistake. We were too young. And it went wrong. For once, it wasn’t my fault. Then I met Dorothy Squires, who was wonderful. A lovely singer.” Squires was older. “Yes – nine years older, and very funny, with a great sense of humour. We laughed a lot. And there was a lot of passion.”
For passion you can read tempestuous battles and bricks being hurled through windows when Squires discovered Moore to be less than a saint. “When I moved to Hollywood she would go off and I’d be left alone.”
With temptation? He sidesteps the question with a little tale about actor Ty Hardin, who was married to a beautiful girl but was caught one day comforting the sad Scandinavian au pair. And he carried on comforting her every time she sobbed, until his wife could take no more. Clearly Moore did his share of comforting. Did this include the screen goddesses of the day such as Lana Turner, whom he starred alongside in The King’s Thief? “Edmund Purdom, an English actor who was my neighbour and