Last Man Standing: Tales from Tinseltown

by Moore, Roger

  Being a jobbing actor I was happy to accept anything, but when the mention of a film was made I thought I’d hit the big time. The Automobile Association (AA) made a number of training films and semi-documentaries, and I was drafted in to play a patrolman, along with my old friend Leslie Phillips. I wasn’t sure it would lead to my name in lights over the entrance to the Odeon, but it was a start. The exotic location for the twenty-minute epic was a road somewhere on the outskirts of Guildford and while the crew set up the cameras behind a hedgerow on one side, I was to be found across the way, happily leaning on my motorcycle combination, dragging on a cigarette while awaiting my call to duty.

  Just then, an old Austin 7 with two rather antiquated ladies in the front pulled up.

  ‘I say, patrolman! Patrolman!’ called the driver, with a rather strained upper-crust accent. It took a few moments for it to sink into my thick skull that she meant me and so in my full AA uniform, puffing on my fag, I ambled over.

  ‘Is this the road to Guildford?’ she asked.

  ‘Guildford?’ I pondered. ‘Well, back there I did see a sign that had Guildford on it, but I can’t remember in which direction it was pointing ...’

  At that moment it obviously dawned on the old dear that there was something rather peculiar about this particular patrolman, as not only did I slouch and not salute (as a real AA man at that time would have), I was also smeared in make-up. Without taking her eyes off me, she feigned a smile, reached down with her left hand and, after a few attempts, ground the gear stick into first and kangarooed off down the road. Sixty-four years later they’re probably still circling the outskirts somewhere looking for Guildford.

  Meanwhile, back at Pinewood, things were ticking over nicely with British crowd-pleaser films such as the Norman Wisdom comedies, the Doctor series, starring Rank’s biggest star, Dirk Bogarde, and (a little later) the Carry Ons.

  Dirk Bogarde made most of his Pinewood films with Betty Box and Ralph Thomas. Betty, his producer, was married to Carry On producer Peter Rogers and was one of only a couple of women who had held such a role within the film industry, while Ralph – the director – was the brother of Carry On director Gerald Thomas. They were often described as the ‘royal family’ of the studio. One of the duo’s films with Bogarde was The Wind Cannot Read, in which he played a flying officer in World War II who fell in love with a Japanese language instructor. Not a lot of people know that Bogarde had a false tooth in his upper set of gnashers and wore it throughout all of his films, only ever removing it at night when he turned in and placed it on his bedside table. Every morning the first thing he did was slip the tooth back in.

  On location, Bogarde was having terrible trouble sleeping and consequently, day by day, looked increasingly more haggard on set. Ralph Thomas was becoming concerned that his leading man was going to look anything but his best, and suggested Bogarde might take a sleeping pill. Bogarde wasn’t keen on the idea, but Ralph nevertheless left a couple on his bedside table and suggested if he couldn’t get off to sleep after an hour or so, he should take one.

  After an hour of tossing and turning, the star finally reached over and took a pill. At three o’clock in the morning, Ralph Thomas was woken by Bogarde banging furiously on his hotel room door. The star told his director that he’d taken his advice, but after getting up to use the bathroom he had noticed that both pills were still next to the bed and, yes you’ve guessed it, the false tooth wasn’t. The next day’s schedule called for a number of close-ups of Bogarde and, understandably, panic set in. Half a dozen bottles of castor oil and a jug of disinfectant were sent up to the room ... and yes, they got their close-ups.

  Which is your favourite, Simon Templar’s Volvo P1800 coupe in The Saint …

  However, it wasn’t until 1961, when Cubby Broccoli and his new producing partner Harry Saltzman wanted to set up a series of spy adventures based on Ian Fleming’s hero James Bond, that Pinewood really hit the big time. Typically, I missed out on all that fun as I didn’t return to Pinewood until 1970, after hanging up my halo on The Saint at Elstree, when Bob Baker, Johnny Goodman and I set up a new series called The Persuaders!.

  When Tony Curtis’s name was mentioned to me by Lew Grade as being one of the three possible co-stars for the 1971 series The Persuaders! (the other two being Glenn Ford and Rock Hudson) I was immediately grabbed by the idea. I thought Tony was a brilliant actor in films like The Sweet Smell of Success, Trapeze, The Boston Strangler and, of course, he showed his comedic skills in Some Like It Hot in which he based his English accent on Cary Grant. Incidentally, when director Billy Wilder later told Cary, he said, ‘But I don’t talk like that!’ in exactly the same way in which Tony had taken him off.

  … or Brett Sinclair’s Aston Martin DBS in The Persuaders!?

  Tony had worked with an impressive roster of directors, and while he rarely spoke ill of anyone, he did tell me he had a tough time on Spartacus with director Stanley Kubrick. The whole cast had endured an agonizingly long shoot, and one day Tony turned to co-star Jean Simmons and asked, ‘Who do you have to fuck to get off this picture?’

  Danny Wilde and Sir Brett Sinclair doing what they did best on The Persuaders!. As you might imagine, Tony and I had a great deal of fun on and off set.

  As part of the package of luring Tony to make a TV series, Lew Grade bought him a house in Chester Square in London’s fashionable Belgravia for an astonishing £49,000 – and it was Tony’s to keep. A few years later he sold it for £250,000 and thought he’d made a pretty good deal, but a couple of years after that, when he returned to England and looked at buying a similar property, he discovered the asking price was nearer £2 million.

  Throughout the fifteen-month shoot, or at least most of it, Tony’s wife Leslie was pregnant. She was already ‘well endowed’, but was now even more ample of bosom. Tony had always been what you’d call a ‘boob man’, and so he liked Leslie to wear low-cut dresses that exposed as much as possible. One evening I was at his house for a party and, as his wife walked into the room, Tony said to the assembled throng, ‘Look at my darling Leslie, doesn’t she have the most wonderful tits?’

  In between set-ups one day on set Tony said, ‘Dear sweet Roger, Burt Lancaster once told me that if you’re in your dressing room at the studio with a young lady and your wife should walk in, continue with what you’re doing and when you get home deny it, and say, “But they have people who look like me”.’

  I was never tempted into such a situation, though a year or two later I found myself filming in South Africa, and in one scene my character was to bed a rather attractive young lady in her apartment, demonstrating his Bond-like masculinity no doubt, and in a very thick Afrikaans accent the young actress said to me, ‘I really wish there weren’t all these people around’, referring, of course, to the crew.

  ‘Oh, why?’ I asked innocently.

  ‘Because I could show you a really good time!’ I thought about Tony’s words for a split second, but that thought soon turned to my (then) Italian wife, who was sitting downstairs and who knew my stunt double was off that day!

  The Persuaders! was scheduled for a twelve-month shoot but ended up taking fifteen. You see, not only did Tony like to wander off script and improvise on occasions, meaning we found ourselves taking a little longer to shoot a particular sequence, he had a total aversion to overtime.

  The British Trade Unions were all powerful at this time, and the ACTT (Association of Cinematograph Television and Allied Technicians) had very strict rules about working hours, with the only exception being you could ‘call the quarter’ (an extra fifteen minutes) if the red ‘shooting’ light was on at 5.30 p.m. and you needed to finish a certain scene.

  Tony got wise to this, and would never start a scene after 5.15 p.m.!

  We also found it particularly difficult to persuade him to come in for looping. This is the process undertaken at the end of all movies to make sure the soundtrack is consistent in each scene or to add music.

  ‘But why
do we need to do it?’ Tony – a veteran of twenty years in movies – asked.

  ‘Tony, in the last set-up in the gardens there was a close-up of me talking, and then it cut to you but an aeroplane was flying over at that point. So when we edit it together it’ll go from no background noise on me, to noise on you, to no noise on me again ... we need to re-record your dialogue,’ I explained.

  ‘Audiences are sophisticated,’ he replied in all seriousness. ‘They understand these things.’

  Knowing he didn’t want to stay back after 5.30 p.m., when it was usual to loop any such scenes, I suggested we might do it during our lunchtime for half an hour.

  ‘Okay, okay,’ he conceded. ‘But I want champagne and smoked salmon in the theatre.’

  The next day, he arrived at the theatre in Pinewood and a few moments later Johnny Goodman, our Associate Producer, just happened to walk in.

  ‘Tony!’ Johnny shouted. ‘Smoked salmon and champagne! You’ve never had it so good!’

  ‘Goddam son of a bitch!’ Tony shouted. ‘You’ve just blown your half hour!’ and he stormed out.

  Tony was what you might call ‘very careful’ with his money, to the point you might have actually wondered if his trouser pockets were sewn up. One Christmas, we were shooting The Persuaders! over the Festive period and he invited my (then) wife and I to join him and Leslie for dinner one night. I’ll never forget it: he produced the tiniest roast chicken, which, we discovered, was not only to serve us four, but his two household staff as well. Talk about trying to pick the meat off the bones!

  Just then a group of carol singers arrived outside the front door and piped up with ‘Once In Royal David’s City’. At the end of it, they rang the bell in expectation of receiving a little Christmas offering. Tony started waving his arms and screamed like a banshee, ‘Get away, get away or I’ll call the cops!’

  Leslie, who obviously felt pleased at having picked up a little English, said, ‘No, Tony! It’s Bobbies, honey, Bobbies!’

  His meanness was demonstrated further at the end of filming, when it is customary for the leading actors to be offered some of the items of clothing they had worn in the production. Tony took absolutely everything, and then held a sale for the crew to come over and buy it all off him!

  He next called Johnny Goodman to his dressing room.

  ‘Well, Johnny, we’ve been working together for fifteen months and I’d like to give you something in appreciation of everything you’ve done for me.’

  Johnny, being somewhat surprised at this out-of-character generosity, thanked Tony profusely – and was duly presented with a bottle of the cheapest sherry you could buy from the local supermarket.

  ‘Now, what shall I write on it?’ Tony pondered aloud. ‘I know ...’ and he scribbled ‘Best wishes, Tony’.

  Johnny has never opened it, and often stares at it ... in disbelief.

  But you couldn’t help but love Tony, he was a terrific character and a gift as a co-star.

  Meanness is not an attractive trait in actors, and I remember a production accountant telling me he had been working with a certain thespian of Scottish origin and had arranged for his per diem (agreed daily out-of-pocket expenses) to be dropped in to the actor’s dressing room each morning.

  ‘Keep hold of it until the end of the week, would you?’ the actor said each morning. Then at the end of the week he said, ‘I don’t need it at present, so keep hold of it until I come and see you.’

  A couple of months later, with filming complete, there was a stack of these little brown envelopes in the safe, and together they amounted to a considerable sum. The actor came to collect them with a large briefcase.

  The following week bills started arriving from restaurants, theatres, car companies – the actor had charged everything he should have paid with his per diem to the production and pocketed the cash!

  Whatever his eccentricities, though, Tony ensured that there was never a dull day when we were making The Persuaders!. Over our fifteen-month schedule we filmed in every nook and cranny of Pinewood and the adjoining Black Park.

  Cubby Broccoli was a regular in the Pinewood dining room and always made a point of introducing me to his guests. He sat at the large round table – the same one that had been reserved for Emeric Pressburger all those years earlier – where he entertained backers, sponsors, royalty and visiting journalists over sumptuous lunches. It was a magical environment in which to impress visitors and inveigle finance. Stars such as Bette Davis, James Caan, Peter Ustinov, Katharine Hepburn, David Niven, Gregory Peck, Stewart Granger, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor could all be spotted at the tables. Liz would be showing off her latest jewel, and they’d talk about who was doing what next and for how much, or what offers they’d refused, or gossip about who was sleeping with whom, all often punctuated by the unmistakable laugh of Sid James and the Carry On gang on neighbouring tables.

  ‘How many set-ups did you get in this morning?’ Sid would shout across, inducing a sort of friendly rivalry to anyone in earshot (he’d no doubt taken side bets on it).Tony Curtis was once prompted to boast that we’d managed ‘five’.

  The Carry On films were in their early days when this shot was taken in the 1960s, but Barbara Windsor and the gang were always around at Pinewood, and we enjoyed a friendly rivalry in the dining room.

  ‘Oh, we slipped in eight,’ Barbara Windsor chuckled back, much to Tony’s chagrin.

  Meanwhile, the Carry On producer Peter Rogers locked the stage doors at lunchtime to prevent any of his artistes or crew claiming overtime.

  Kenneth Williams starred in more of the Carry On films than any other actor, though he never stopped complaining about what he felt were poor scripts, terrible money and co-stars with whom he didn’t get along. However, his moaning and bitching aside, he was without doubt one of the funniest raconteurs you could ever meet. When I started on my first book tour in 2008, I was reminded of the story Kenneth told about attending a store signing in Australia – though actually he stole the story from Monica Dickens, to whom it actually happened, but we won’t let that detract from my tale.

  ‘Who’s it for?’ he asked the lady at the front of the queue.

  ‘Emma Chisset.’

  He duly signed and handed her the book.

  ‘What’s this?’ asked the lady, looking at the inscription.

  ‘Your name!’ exclaimed Williams.

  ‘No, I didn’t say “Emma Chisset”, I asked “Ha much issit?”.’

  Aside from his acting work, and borrowing other people’s stories, Kenneth also took great pride in another job within the industry, which not a lot of people know about.

  When director Kevin Connor and casting director Allan Foenander set out in search of a young leading lady for Arabian Adventure in the late 1970s, they scoured the length and breadth of Britain without success, but then someone suggested they go and see a young girl at drama school by the name of Emma Samuelson. They were absolutely bowled over by the young actress and Kevin was in no doubt that he’d found his young lead. However, there was a problem: being still in drama school, Emma was not yet a member of the actors’ union Equity and as such wouldn’t be allowed to work on a British film. Ironically, the rules at the time stated that she would not be able to get her Equity ticket until she had a certain number of paid acting jobs under her belt. It was quite a ridiculous situation, but the union was all-powerful back then. All was not lost though as, in extraordinary circumstances, Equity might consider waiving the rule provided they could be convinced there was no one else suitable for the part.

  Kevin, Allan and producer John Dark convened a meeting at Pinewood for the visiting Equity representative, in the knowledge it was really make or break for young Emma’s film career – and the picture. They sat solemnly waiting for the rep to arrive ... and in walked Kenneth Williams, with his trademark nostrils flaring.

  The trio argued the case for casting Emma, and a stern and very serious Kenneth asked, ‘And there is no member of Equity wh
o could play this role?’

  ‘No, we’ve cast extensively and Emma really is the only one suitable,’ replied Kevin Connor.

  ‘Then, in the circumstances, we shall offer Miss Samuelson membership and permission to be contracted.’

  Despite taking his union role very seriously, he couldn’t help but then let his guard down over tea and biscuits and revert to his outrageous self, telling everyone about his recent ‘bum trouble’.

  Incidentally, producer John Dark said that the name ‘Emma Samuelson’ would be too long to appear on cinema marquees and so shortened it to Samms. And so began the career of a wonderful actress.

  The first Bond girl, Eunice Gayson, had a similar discussion with her employers. She was born ‘Eunice Sargaison’ and when she secured her first West End play, the producer – who paid for signage out in front of the theatre by the letter – said she must shorten her name. Funny how these things happen, isn’t it? And as for my old mate Maurice Micklewhite, his agent suggested it wasn’t the sort of name that tripped off the tongue easily, so young Maurice looked across from the phone box at Leicester Square where he was calling from and saw The Caine Mutiny was playing at the Odeon. Henceforth Michael Caine, film star, was born.

  Kenneth Williams, meanwhile, had a habit of flashing his manhood around the Pinewood sets. ‘Oh no, Kenny, put it away!’ his female co-stars would moan. I think he did it more in an attempt to shock than anything else, although I did hear on one occasion that he complained to producer Peter Rogers that he had ‘grazed his penis’ on set and was sent off to see the nurse. Twenty minutes later, and with his director and co-stars waiting, there was still no sign of Williams, so Peter marched down to the nurse’s office, opened the door and saw him lying on the table naked, sighing gently, while the nurse was massaging his tool with a handful of ointment.