Whenever Roger Moore, who will be 87 on Tuesday, gets depressed thinking about all his movie friends who have gone to “that great cutting room in the sky,” he recalls a story another friend up in the cutting room, actor Geoffrey Keen, once told him.
Keen, as James Bond fans know, played Sir Frederick Gray, Minister of Defence, in five 007 movies that made Moore an international superstar in the ’70s and ’80s — “The Spy Who Loved Me,” “Moonraker,” “For Your Eyes Only,” “Octopussy” and “A View To a Kill.”
Keen was home, sitting at his writing desk, when his plumber popped into the study. A bunch of English actors from the 1920s and ’30s, including Laurence Olivier, had just died, one right after the other.
The plumber eyed Keen and said, “You’re an actor, aren’t you, sir?”
“Indeed I am,” Keen replied.
“Well, you lot are dropping like f - - kin’ flies!”
“I feel a bit like that,” Moore told me over the phone the other day. “Someone’s always asking me to do a eulogy. As Albert Finney, a very funny man, once said to me after he’d done two or three actor memorials, ‘You’d better get your name down. I’m getting booked up.’ ”
Moore has a new memoir, “One Lucky Bastard: Tales From Tinseltown,” out Oct. 21 — a follow-up to his popular 2008 book, “My Word Is My Bond.”
As you would expect from an actor who’s never taken himself too seriously, “One Lucky Bastard” is charming and breezy, full of anecdotes, self-deprecating observations and salutes to many great actors who are no longer with us.
I caught up with him over the phone from his hotel in London, where he was on a book tour. He divides his time, with his fourth wife, Kristina, between Switzerland and Monaco.
I’ve been a Roger Moore fan since 1979, when, as a kid, I went to my local movie theater in upstate New York and saw “Moonraker.” It was Bond going into outer space, attempting to capitalize on the “Star Wars” craze. There were plenty of special effects. But not a single one of them upstaged Sir Roger, as Queen Elizabeth II calls him. Sir Rog just carried on, raising the occasional eyebrow at all the intergalactic explosions going off around him.
I loved every minute of it.
Years later, I was asked to speak at a tribute to Moore at the Players Club. Just before my little speech, Moore introduced himself to me and said, “Say whatever you want to about my acting. It won’t bother me.”
What I said was this: “I grew up watching Roger Moore as James Bond. In college, I took a film class and we watched Cary Grant in ‘Notorious!’: He was suave, cool, elegant and so well-tailored. He was a Hollywood legend. But I must say, the first time I saw Cary Grant he reminded me of Roger Moore.”
I think Sir Roger enjoyed my little speech because the next day we met for a drink at Sardi’s. As we were leaving the restaurant, Sir Rog passed a group of middle-aged women at the bar. “He’s still so handsome,” one of them said.
“Thank you, ladies,” Moore said.
They swooned.
On the sidewalk outside Sardi’s, a homeless man came up to him and did the James Bond theme: “Dum, di-di, dum, dum.”
Sir Rog raised a finger and said, “I know the tune!”
The other day, Moore was, as always, quick to make fun of himself. Of his acting, he said: “Most of the films I did were action-oriented. All I did was get out of the way of the explosions, with pleasant ladies passing by. I did, however, learn not to blink when the guns went off.
“I suppose the best advice about acting is what Robert Mitchum, Spencer Tracy and probably a few others said, ‘Say the lines and don’t bump into the furniture.’ Lee Marvin went one better: ‘Say the marks and hit the lines.’ ”
That probably sums up Moore’s acting career. He never aspired to be Hamlet, but because of his good looks, he got jobs — a contract with MGM in his early days, “The Saint,” which made him a TV star in England, “The Persuaders!,” a very underrated British TV series that never made it here in America, and, eventually, the James Bond job, which he got because he knew Bond producer Albert Broccoli from the gambling dens in London.
Broccoli, a Queens-born boy, is in the parade of colorful characters Moore brings back to life in his book. Among the others are David Niven, Gregory Peck, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Sellers, Rex Harrison and Trevor Howard.
One of Moore’s favorite non-Bond film shoots was “The Sea Wolves,” a nifty action picture filmed in India, with co-stars Peck, Niven and Howard. After the day’s work, they’d all have dinner and drink good wine. Howard had a reputation as a hell-raiser when drunk.
Moore says his reputation was exaggerated, but he does report that early one morning after lying on the beach, the director said, “Rog, I think it’s time we hit the drink” — meaning the Indian Ocean. Out of nowhere Howard appeared and said, “Good idea! Do you think we can get a waiter down here?”
Drink flows through the book, since many of Moore’s friends were champions in that department.
Richard Harris, starring in a revival of “Camelot,” once bragged that he’d just done a matinee after downing two pints of vodka. He might have been able to handle the booze, but he was having trouble with the cup of coffee in his hand. As he was talking, coffee ran out of his mouth and down his shirt.
Harrison was a mean-spirited drunk. He lived in a mansion off Belgrave Square, and every morning after breakfast would meet with his butler to discuss the wine list for lunch. Inevitably, when the butler offered him a taste of the wine, he would scream: “How dare you serve me corked wine!”
“Rex always sent the wine back in restaurants,” Moore writes, “and is the only person I ever knew who did the same at home, too.”
We’re actors. We don’t like ourselves. And you find you can become somebody else when you get pissed [drunk]. But you pay a terrible price for indulging too much.
- Roger Moore
Moore liked a good bottle of wine, too. And he could toss back Jack Daniel’s with Sinatra late into the night. But he was disciplined about his drinking, having seen the toll it took on many friends.
“We’re actors,” he says. “We don’t like ourselves. And you find you can become somebody else when you get pissed [drunk]. But you pay a terrible price for indulging too much.”
Moore met Sinatra in passing at a party in Hollywood in the 1950s. “Hi, I’m Frank Sinatra,” he said to the young actor. “As if I didn’t know,” Moore recalls. Ten years later, Moore ran into Sinatra and his then-wife, Mia Farrow, at a restaurant in London.
Farrow said: “We just love watching ‘The Saint’!”
Sinatra said: “We watch it in bed, in our hotel room. It’s the best thing on TV.”
That began a friendship that lasted until the end of Sinatra’s life. Moore spent Easters at Sinatra’s house in Palm Springs, Calif. They would swim in the pool, watch movies, drink and eat. But come Easter Sunday, Sinatra would throw everybody out of the kitchen so he could cook his own special recipe of spicy meatballs and pasta. Moore’s only involvement in the dinner was selecting the wine from Sinatra’s well-stocked cellar.
“Come on down to the wine room and choose a bottle,” Sinatra told him.
Moore doesn’t drink at all anymore because he’s diabetic. “I do believe you can live by Champagne alone, but now I have Diet Coke mixed with nonalcoholic beer. I have forgotten what real beer tastes like. I do take a little sip of my wife’s wine, just to taste it on the tongue. And every now and then I’ll have a little sip of a martini — I prefer gin to vodka — and let my mind imagine what the whole glass would be like. But now when I wake up in the morning, I do remember the night before.”
What Moore remembers most are his old friends, who are gone to that “cutting room in the sky” — a phrase coined by his “Persuaders!” co-star, Tony Curtis, who died in 2010.
As for his own inevitable trip to the “cutting room in the sky,” Moore says: “I’m not going. I like it here too much. It’s fun.”