A FORGOTTEN BOND
George Lazenby is back in spy game with audio series
He played 007 only once before walking away from the role, yet George Lazenby has been living the James Bond dream ever since.
Women? Too numerous to remember them all. Action-man stuff? You bet: Rugby and motocross have been two of the many sports that made Lazenby the only Bond with a broken nose.
With 89-year-old Sean Connery retired and Roger Moore having gone to that great single-breasted suitmaker in the sky, Lazenby is now the only old-school Bond still around to recall performing his own stunts on location as a martial arts whiz, and fending off hordes of Pill-liberated ’60s women in real life. Not to mention once being given a honeytrap “heterosexual” test.
It was all a world away from the “woke” times we find ourselves in now, which have ushered in a new puritanical era that is hard for Lazenby to fathom.
Having moved as a young man from Australia to Swinging London, he found worldwide fame at 29 as the youngest-ever Bond in 1969’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, but was already enjoying the attention of a number of women. “You had to run and hide from women in the ’60s,” he says. “There wasn’t any political correctness around then. It was totally different, so you could turn into a glutton for sex real easy.”
Lazenby, now a 6-foot-1 silver fox of 80 in a resplendent navy suit and yellow tie with matching pocket square, remembers his youthful antics well. “I was living with four other girls when I met my first wife, Chris (media heiress Christina Townsend), and it was hard to just be with one. But every man wants to be a ladies’ man, though they won’t admit it. It’s one of the best things in the world and it’s free.”
It won’t be a surprise to hear that in his 80s, Lazenby remains pretty unreconstructed. He sees no problem with being sexist “Why not be sexist? You get to the point (that way). Why waste your beer time chatting up a bird who you know is not going to go there?”
And while officially the twice-divorced father has seven children, he concedes that “there could be some little Lazenbys out there that I don’t know about.”
“I only met the seventh (child) when she was 27,” he says. “Her mother was a (physical education) instructor in the Australian military, and I was in the band. We had a quickie, and next thing she said, ‘I’m pregnant.’ I had to sell my car to give her the money for an abortion. I was 22, and thought that was the end of it. But 27 years later, my daughter came into my life, and told me that her mother had brought her up as her sister.”
It was Lazenby’s misfortune, of course, to follow Connery’s devil-may-care Bond. Yet, as a recent 50th anniversary screening of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service showed, Lazenby’s performance holds up astonishingly well.
Was it really true that the producers sent a beautiful girl round to his apartment with an offer of sex so they could make sure before filming that, for image-control purposes, this former male model wasn’t gay?
“Yes. The man with her was John Daly from Hemdale Films, who was a friend of Cubby’s (producer Albert R. Broccoli). I didn’t think twice ... I didn’t really understand it at the time, but I met John a few years later in London, and he explained.”
And what about the oft-repeated rumour that his highly experienced co-star Diana Rigg disliked him so much that she deliberately ate garlic before their love scenes?
“That’s baloney, Diana was just fooling around,” he says. “She said, ‘Hey George, I’m eating garlic for lunch, I hope you are, too.’ We were kissing and cuddling, and she said if I didn’t mess with the other girls, maybe we could have something together. But I couldn’t promise to be faithful — and I wasn’t.”
His Bond film did well at the box office, despite some decidedly mixed (and snobbish) reactions to Connery’s successor, so why turn down a lucrative contract to do six more Bonds?
It was Rigg who later said in the documentary Becoming Bond that his decision to leave after only one Bond meant “poor George is the architect of his own demise as a film star.”
“People thought I was nuts, but I thought (the Bond franchise) was going to be put out to pasture anyway after the hippies came in, with films like Easy Rider that same year,” Lazenby says.
Now based in Los Angeles, Lazenby is back in the U.K. to talk about his return to fictional spying for M16 after 50 years.
In the upcoming spy drama Passport to Oblivion, the first in a new audio series based on the bestselling Bond-influenced ’60s novels by James Leasor, Lazenby plays reluctant secret agent Dr. Jason Love.
Co-stars are Terence Stamp as M16 head “C,” Nickolas Grace and Glynis Barber and Michael Brandon from the English ’80s crime series Dempsey & Makepeace. Although Passport to Oblivion was filmed as the 1966 comedy caper Where The Spies Are with David Niven in the lead, this is the first audio drama version — which is how the veteran cast get away with not acting their ages.
Since playing 007, Lazenby has managed to work consistently both in and out of the movie business, making a fortune in property.
“I have been very fortunate in my life — I’ve been broke a few times, but then all of a sudden I’m a multimillionaire,” he says. “But I’m not as rich as my ex-wives. When my second (former tennis ace Pam Shriver) bought me a new BMW on our fourth date, I knew I had done something right.”
With such sexist bravado and bluster about him, I am curious to know what he thinks of Fleabag’s Phoebe Waller-bridge being drafted in to give a feminist touch to the script for the next Bond film, 2020’s No Time to Die. He says: “I think it will be very interesting, because I think women know men much better than we know women.”