And the Bond Played On
As a celebrity memoirist Roger Moore trips at the first hurdle. In the foreword to My Word Is My Bond, Moore promises to deliver "a fun book with no recycled scandal, tittle-tattle or dirtdishing." This seems to me to reflect a fundamental misunderstanding on Moore's part of the genre to which he is contributing. Fortunately for us Moore is not quite as good as his word.
Most celebrities can't write, and neither can the people they pay to write for them. But there's something compelling about a good celebrity memoir just because it's so achingly predictable: the humble beginnings of the plucky, plain little waif from Nowheresville, the chance discovery, the lucky break, the pieces of a fabulously successful and lucrative career magically magnetizing together. (For a lengthier and smarter consideration of this topic see the late David Foster Wallace's "How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart," an extended review of Austin's Beyond Center Court: My Story collected in Wallace's Consider the Lobster.) And they have a funny mirrors-within-mirrors, mise-en-abyme effect: they pull back the smooth glossy surface of familiar images and show us the rough, grainy verso. Despite being outside the boundaries of anything remotely resembling literary quality, Moore's book delivers on both counts.
Moore wasn't exactly a waif. Born in 1927, he was the son of a happily married London policeman. Moore had more than his share of childhood illnesses — tonsils, pneumonia — but still succeeded in growing up into an almost freakishly handsome young man. His first love was drawing and animation, but one day — he must have been around 17 — he tagged along with some chums to pick up work as a film extra. A friendly director put him up for an audition at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. "As I stood on the stage, I knew at that moment that all I'd ever wanted to be was an actor. I'd found my true vocation." So you had, Rog.
Or had he? Moore's real talent isn't so much acting as having a good time while acting on the side. Say what you like about him, Moore is not vain, and he doesn't have exaggerated ideas about his abilities as a thespian. He cheerfully cops to having been the most lightweight of Bonds. He presents himself as a cheerfully overgrown boy blessed with astounding leading-man looks, a greater-than-average air of aplomb, the bare minimum of dramatic talent and no intellectual gifts or hidden depths to speak of. His greatest joys in life are his children, eating, drinking, getting married to diverse women and laughing at his own or other people's farts.
But he paid his dues. He kicked around various movie studios and did minor TV work — Maverick, The Alaskans, Ivanhoe — for years before The Saint landed in his lap. It was heaven-sent: just like that he was famous and rich, and after moving on to a one-season series, The Persuaders with Tony Curtis, he was more so. (Curtis comes across as a crusty and eccentric character whose obsession with his gloves was so great that he left them on when he washed his hands. In his own memoir, also out this month, Curtis describes himself and Moore as "the best of friends." Both actors recount an incident in which Curtis used the c-word on guest-star Joan Collins; interestingly, their stories square completely. Maybe they compared notes.)
From there Moore stepped easily into the lethal tuxedos of 007 (Read Richard Corliss' review of the new Bond film, Quantum of Solace). There are no bombshells in My Word Is My Bond, or if there are Q must have cleverly disguised them as fart jokes. But there is plenty to interest people who avidly consume, as I do, the trivia pages of the Internet Movie Database. It may interest you to know, for example, that during the filming of Live and Let Die, Moore's first outing as Bond, he had a kidney stone episode for which he took a painkiller, methylene, that both knocked him out and turned his urine blue. Waking up in the middle of the night, he mistook his closet for a bathroom and peed all over his clothes, dying them a delightful azure.
Read the Quantum of Solace Review.
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You'll hear a lot about clothes in My Word Is My Bond. Moore's beautiful crocodile shoes were ruined when he lent them to a stunt double in Live and Let Die and an actual alligator took a bite out of them. He longed to keep the silk suit he wore in The Man with the Golden Gun, but after the last shot wrapped Cubby Brocolli — who produced the Bond movies — emptied a bucket of paste over him as a practical joke, destroying it. Moore also mourns Bond's gorgeous Ferragamo luggage, which was lost when a prop boat sank in Venice during the filming of Moonraker.
If you are a certain kind of reader — and I am — then your appetite for this kind of trivia is infinite. Watch Maurice Binder, who designed the movies' famous opening credit sequences, "lovingly spreading Vaseline over the private parts of one of his female nudes," to preserve their sleek sillhouettes! Watch as the film crew sprays Moore's cheeks with air hoses to simulate the G-forces Bond endured in Moonraker! Moore has a fondness for practical jokes: when Richard Harris put a rubber snake in his bed during the filming of The Wild Geese, in Africa, Moore struck back the next night by putting real snakes in Harris's boots. "The moral of this story? 'Don't f--- around with Moore!'"
There are dark moments in My Word Is My Bond, but they mostly belong to other people. Many of Moore's co-stars suffered from epic alcohol problems — look for a wasted Lee Marvin flashing back to his WWII service and laying waste to a crowd of Japanese tourists during a layover in Rome. Moore himself is almost pathologically sunny. To simulate hatred of the villains he faced as Bond, Moore pretended they had halitosis. In For Your Eyes Only, he balked at pushing a car containing Bond's arch-enemy Locque off a cliff. He didn't think Bond would do that. (In the end they shot the scene more or less as written.) "My contention about my 'light' portrayal of Bond is this," he writes. "How can he be a spy, yet walk into any bar in the world and have the bartender recognize him and serve him his favourite drink? Come on, it's all a big joke."
Through four marriages, various health crises and innumerable, authentically noble tours of duty as an ambassador for UNICEF, the most powerful moment of authentic pain in My Word Is My Bond is the death of Moore's longtime friend David Niven. Moore loathes Niven's widow, who on hearing of Nivens' death turns up drunk, her wig askew, and greets Moore with the words, "Here for the press, are you?" He writes: "I could hear myself saying, 'Just get in the f---ing house.'"
Moore does have a temper, though he rarely lets it out for a good tantrum. He reserves his ire for only an elite few, such as Grace Jones, his co-star in View to a Kill, ("I've always said if you've nothing nice to say about someone...") and Jean-Claude Van Damme (perhaps you've forgotten that they worked together in The Quest) but he's too gracious to go into details. The book's most poignant moment for me, if I'm being honest, comes when, after a full run of rehearsals, Andrew Lloyd Webber cut Moore from the lead role in the stage musical Aspects of Love at the final run-through.
But Moore's upper lip remains stiff through it all. A nice guy who finished first — or at least in the top five — he's the Obama of Bonds: no drama. It's a relief to see a celebrity really enjoying his celebrity, without having to pretend he's secretly tortured. As Bond, Moore gladly gave us all he had to give, and if that wasn't much, is that really such a crime?