My Word Is My Bond: A Memoir Read online

  Roger Moore

  My Word is My Bond

  A Memoir

  with Gareth Owen

  I dedicate this book to my parents, who I miss so much;

  to my darling Kristina and our ever-growing family,

  Deborah, Geoffrey, Christian, Hans-Christian, Christina and

  the little ones–who get bigger by the day.

  Contents

  Foreword

  Memoirs of an Aspiring Actor

  One

  The Early Years

  ‘I was an only child. You see, they achieved perfection first time round’

  Two

  An Actor’s Life for Me

  ‘It is purple on the green below’

  Three

  You’re in the Army Now

  ‘Hands off your cocks and on with your socks!’

  Four

  Civvy Street

  ‘You’re not that good, so smile a lot when you come on!’

  Five

  The MGM Years

  ‘Is his cock all right?’

  Photographic Insert I

  Six

  The Warner Years

  ‘Please, mush, any mush’

  Seven

  Enter the Saint

  ‘You say, “Ladies and Gentlemen…” and then you’re humble’

  Eight

  The Persuaders

  ‘You can’t sell a programme with me in, it’s immoral’

  Nine

  And the Word was Bond

  ‘There’s only one thing I hate more than alligators’

  Photographic Insert II

  Ten

  Elementary, Dr Watson

  ‘Say the marks and hit the lines’

  Eleven

  It’s Bond and Beyond

  ‘Well, we shall air our crotches’

  Twelve

  A Farewell to Bond and Niv

  ‘You wanna be careful, mate, your lot are dropping like fucking flies’

  Thirteen

  Taking Stock

  ‘I’d gladly piss in your ear any time’

  Fourteen

  The Health Scare

  ‘In Kristina I had found my soul mate and it has made me happier than words can ever express’

  Around the World in Eighty Years

  My travels with UNICEF

  The End…

  …and with thanks

  Searchable Terms

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  This is a work of nonfiction. The events and experiences detailed herein are all true and have been faithfully rendered as I have remembered them, to the best of my ability. On occasion, I have left out names and other identifying features to preserve the privacy of certain individuals. Throughout, conversations come from my keen recollection of them, though they are not written to represent word-for-word documentation. Rather, I’ve retold them in a way that evokes the real feeling and meaning of what was said, in keeping with the true essence of the mood and spirit of the event.

  FOREWORD

  Memoirs of an Aspiring Actor

  For years, people have said to me ‘Write your book,’ and for years I said, ‘No, there are too many people I’d have to write about, and even if they’re dead, what I might say would be an intrusion on their privacy. And apart from that, I’m too lazy.’

  Irving ‘Swifty’ Lazar persuaded my friend Michael Caine to write his book, and tried the same tactics with me. Unfortunately, Swifty is now dead. He had said, ‘I’ll get you a ghostwriter.’ Well, maybe he is that ghost now; it would be nice to think so. He was a great character, miniature in stature but a giant of a human being.

  In 1992, I decided to put pen to paper, or finger to keyboard, to be more accurate. I thought I’d start by relating my many childhood illnesses and operations. Illness is a theme that you’ll find permeates my writing–and I’m only on the first page. I tapped away at 6,000 words or so on my laptop and then, later that year, tragedy struck. There we were, just before Christmas, at Geneva airport, having flown in from London; I stayed in the baggage area to claim the luggage, leaving my former wife, Luisa, to go through to the car with the carry-on baggage…which turned out to be carry off baggage, as it happens. Distracted for a moment, and believing that our driver had taken care of putting the small things in the back of the car, Luisa settled down happily to await my arrival with the other luggage.

  Imagine our horror when we discovered that the driver had not put the bags in the back at all. Instead they had, we presumed, been put in the back of some other vehicle and were well on their way to make some airport thieves’ Christmas a happy one. We spent the next two hours reporting our loss to the police: jewels, cash, gifts, all gone. It was much later that I realized I had also lost my precious words.

  In the years since then I’ve resisted returning to the keyboard. No, that’s not strictly true. I haven’t resisted, but rather have always been kept busy with so many other things that the idea of sitting down to put finger to keyboard was not one I could entertain…or at least that was my excuse. However, with renewed encouragement from my darling wife Kristina, my daughter Deborah and my dear friend Leslie Bricusse, I have decided it is now indeed time to make time and stop making excuses.

  When, on the eve of my eightieth birthday in October 2007, I announced that I was starting work on my story again, I was adamant that it would be a fun book with no recycled scandal, tittle-tattle or dirtdishing–the expected inclusion of which had worried me so much when I tackled my earlier version. But, dear reader, that isn’t to say this will be a ‘fluffy’ book. I want to tell things as I saw them: relay the funny stories and recall the many wonderful characters and friends that have enriched my life. When I have nothing nice to say about a person, I’d rather not say anything at all (unless pushed to say a few words by my editor!). Why give them the publicity, I say? No, I’d far rather fill these pages with words about me. This is, after all, a book about me: a suave, modest, sophisticated, talented, modest, debonair, modest and charming individual–of whom there is much to write.

  Throughout my tenure as James Bond, there were many wonderful scripts to work with, and one of my favourite lines from any Bond film came from Tom Mankiewicz, who wrote the screenplay for The Man With the Golden Gun. Trying to find out where the million-pounds-a-hit assassin Scaramanga is, Jimmy Bond tracks down gun-maker Lazar and aims a gun at Lazar’s crotch saying, ‘Speak now or for ever hold your piece.’

  Fearful of losing my piece, I feel it’s time for me to speak…

  The Early Years

  ‘I was an only child. You see, they achieved perfection first time round’

  It was just after midnight on 14 October 1927, when Lily Moore (née Pope) gave birth to a twenty-three-inch-long baby boy at a maternity hospital in Jeffreys Road, Stockwell, London SW8. The baby’s father, George Alfred Moore, was twenty-three and a police constable stationed at Bow Street. Of course, I’m only quoting this from hearsay. I was much too young to recall such a momentous event as my entry to this world.

  I was christened Roger George Moore and we lived about a mile from the hospital, on Aldebert Terrace, London SW8. I was to be the couple’s only child. You see, they achieved perfection first time round.

  I don’t remember what the flat on Aldebert Terrace was like, we moved before I was old enough to absorb my surroundings. However, I do remember our new home: it was a third-floor flat 200 yards away in Albert Square–number four, I think. It had two bedrooms and a living room-cum-kitchen. I remember the mantelpiece seeming so high to me; above it was a mirror and the only way I could see my reflection was to stand on the bench positioned along the opposite wall.

  Life was happy in Albert Square. It’s funny how little things stick in your mind: the beautiful smell of freshly cut wood from the timberyard next to our garden. To this day I can visualize the two gas brackets on either side of the mirror in the living room. There was no electricity, you see, and these were our only means of light. The china mantles gave off a low, hissing illumination. It was a comforting sound and one I associated with being home in the bosom of my family. The main source of heating was a coal fire. Oh, how this schoolboy’s bare legs would be red-mottled on the shin side from sitting too close to the burning coals; especially when making toast with a long-handled fork. We’d spread beef dripping on it, oh what joy! When I was a little older, I took pleasure in helping my mother black-lead the grate. I was a very obliging child.

  Illness played a great–and unwelcome–role in my early life. Mumps were soon followed by a raging sore throat, and it was decided that I should have my tonsils removed and adenoids scraped at the same time. I wasn’t really too sure what this would entail, but was promised that when I woke up from the tonsillectomy I would be fed ice cream. That alone would make my stay in hospital worthwhile, I decided.

  Wearing only a little surgical gown and bed socks, I was placed on a trolley, rolled down a corridor and pushed into a lift, its sliding trellis doors seeming very sinister. (I’d only ever been in a lift once before, at Gamages Department Store in Holborn, and that was a much happier occasion, when Mum took me to the toy department to meet Santa Claus.) As we descended in the hospital lift, I felt sure it was to the place where naughty children went if they couldn’t go to heaven. Sunday school had obviously left its mark. I still vividly remember looking up from the operating table upon which I’d been placed, at the big, round light
s glowering down at me and the people wearing green masks standing all around. A lady with a sieve filled with cotton wool gazed down into my eyes and then placed the sieve over my face. I felt suffocated by a strong foul-sweet odour, which pulled me down into a long tunnel with yellow and red rings flying at my face. The sound–which I can still hear in my imagination today–was a boom-bam-boom-bam, gradually getting faster and faster as I fell down into hell.

  My next recollection was of the smell growing fainter and the boom-bams replaced by the soft murmur of nurses’ voices. I was back on the ward. Then I was sick. I never did get the ice cream they had promised. I was deeply disappointed at the time, but looking on the bright side it might have been strawberry flavour, which I hate.

  Aged five, I started school at Hackford Road Elementary. A fifteen-minute walk from Albert Square: turn right on Clapham Road, go to Durand Gardens, cross the main road, trot round the Gardens and there was the school–three floors high, red-brick with large tall windows and surrounded by a red-brick wall.

  I don’t remember being left at the gates by my mother or indeed anything about my first sight of the classroom and the other boys and girls. I do, however, recall finding myself in the boys’ urinal and being forced to stand facing the dark grey wall, with a trough at the base, with my legs wide apart as some senior ruffians took turns to see whether or not they could aim between them without splashing my bare legs. English schoolboys’ short trousers left plenty of room between the top of the socks and the bottom of the trousers for the exercise. I can still see my mother waiting at the school gates that first day as I exited the playground, walking with my red-raw knees wide apart thanks to the stream of bubbling warm pee that did not quite make it between them. ‘Tut-tut-tut,’ she said, as I recounted my first day’s ordeal.

  It reminds me of a sign I later saw in toilets:

  Your head may be in the air, young man,

  Your thoughts away as you enter;

  But spare a thought for the floor young man,

  And direct your stream to the centre.

  One evening when we were walking home from school, I told Mum that some boys who had seen her drop me at the gates had asked, ‘Was that your mum? She’s a great-looking tart!’ I didn’t know what they meant. Mum was horrified, not at being described as great-looking–but a tart! Really!

  Mum was born just after the turn of the last century in Calcutta, where her father was stationed in the army. She had two sisters–the older, Amy, and then the younger, Nelly. Then came my Uncle Jack, who eventually followed my grandfather’s lead and became a regular soldier.

  RSM William George Pope was the grandfather I barely knew. He was widowed when Mum was just sixteen. The loss of her mother affected Mum very badly: she said she thought she would never smile again. It was never discussed how Grandma Hannah died, families didn’t talk about such things, but I suspect it was cancer. A few years later, after returning to Britain, Grandfather Pope took a second wife, whom I was to know as Aunt Ada. She gave birth to my three ‘cousins’: Nancy, Peter and Bob, with whom I spent many of my childhood holidays in Cliftonville, the posh end of Margate on the Kent coast. Though we were all around the same age, they insisted that I treated them with great respect and address them as Auntie Nancy, and Uncles Peter and Bob. I dutifully obliged. Grandfather Pope died in my fifth year.

  My paternal grandfather was Alfred George Moore. His only son was my dad, though there were a number of sisters born after him. Sadly, like Mum, Dad was sixteen when his mother, Jane Moore (née Cane), ended her life by placing her head in a gas oven. In those days, suicide precluded the right to a church burial. Dad, who up until that time had taught in a Sunday school, was left numb and disillusioned with organized religion. His father then married the woman whom my father believed was responsible for the suicide, an illicit affair had obviously been going on for some time, and I can only imagine how it must have destroyed my grandmother, to lead her into taking her own life.

  Understandably, after this, Dad was very unhappy at home and wanted to leave as soon as possible. At the age of nineteen he saw his chance, and enlisted in the Metropolitan Police. He moved into a police section house and gained his independence from the father he had now begun to despise.

  Mum, meanwhile, was working as a cashier at a restaurant in central London–Hill’s on The Strand. From her window position, she would often see this attractive young PC on point duty–before the days of traffic lights busy crossings were manned by policemen. Between directing the buses and cars Dad had also noticed the fair-haired blue-eyed beauty behind her till. Being a rather smart restaurant, Hill’s wasn’t the sort of place Dad would have been able to pop in for an afternoon cuppa. Eventually, however, the opportunity arose and he invited her to a dance. At that point he was actually considering joining the Hong Kong police–to get further away from his unhappy memories of home–but taking Mum to the dance convinced him the grass was greener at home. They married on 11 December 1926 at the Register Office of St Giles in London.

  I very rarely saw Dad in uniform, since by the time I was born he had become a plan-drawer, which meant he drew up the plans of, for example, the street on which an accident had occurred, or supplied the sketches and measurements of a crime scene. He had an office at Bow Street, where he and a fellow policeman, George Church, were the E Division plan-drawers, and he remained there until his retirement.

  A lot of the time Dad could work at home and, when required, would put on his uniform and go to court to swear to the accuracy of his plans–usually when I was out at school. Working at home meant that he was able to choose his hours and during the summers, if the sun was shining, he would take me swimming and complete his drawings at night. When I was asked as a child what work I wanted to do when I grew up, I replied that I wasn’t going to work–I was going to be a policeman like my father!

  Having left school at thirteen, Dad never lost his thirst for learning; he always had books on mathematics to hand and he taught himself French and Italian. He was a superb athlete and gymnast, and could perform on any equipment–the rings, parallel bars–you name it. He was very strong, and had powerful fingers that could grip the fleshy underside of my arms if I misbehaved. He was musical too–he could play the banjo and the ukulele–most stringed instruments, in fact. He was also an amateur magician, a member of The Magic Circle and Institute of Magicians; he even went semi-pro at one point, appearing under the name of Haphazard the Hazy Wizard.

  An accomplished amateur actor, as well as playing the lead roles Dad would often direct plays, do the make-up and build the sets. He was a real jack of all trades. I’d sometimes go along with Mum to see his shows. It was so exciting to be in the theatre or church hall and enter this world of make-believe. Early seeds were sown in my mind. I was very proud of my Dad.

  Mum and Dad were a great partnership. Mum was the homemaker, Dad was the breadwinner, and I always knew that they loved each other. They didn’t argue a great deal, but perhaps their secret lay in the fact that they never let the sun set on an argument–they would always make it up before they went to sleep.

  I’d only been at school a few months when I contracted double bronchial pneumonia. Too ill to be moved to hospital, I was attended at home by the local GP and a District Nurse. I have a clear memory of this lady putting what she called an ‘anti-flagestion’ poultice on my chest. I have tried to find out what exactly an ‘anti-flagestion’ poultice is, but to no avail; maybe it is the confusion of a child’s mind. Whatever it was called, the grey, earthy-looking mess that was spread on lint and placed on my chest and back burned like hell.