LOOK September 8, 1964

SEAN CONNERY:

The reluctant James Bond

IS THERE a hidden flaw in Secret Agent 007? Has he tired of chasing blondes and smashing SMERSH, the international spy ring? Is his deadly Walther 7.65-mm pistol rusty? Has his license to kill expired? Whatever the reason, James Bond, the indestructible, martini-sipping, acquiescent dagger man and indomitable lover of the Ian Fleming stories, is getting a brush block from Sean Connery. It's a personality problem, mostly. Connery is the man who is Bond to millions of movie fans this side of the Kremlin. The 34-year-old British actor is so right in the role that it would be an impertinence for anyone else to try it. He does not, however, want to be permanently put in Bond, and off-screen stubbornly rejects any identification with the famous superhero.

            An actor's career often hangs on a moment. For Connery, it came at the London preview of Dr. No, in September, 1962. The camera panned around a crowded gambling club and moved in for a close-up of a dark, lithely hand- some, rather menacing man. Looking directly into the lens, he said, "I'm Bond...James Bond." Something like a direct current ran through the audience. An hour later, a reviving matron asked her companions, "Who is that doll?" Dr. No and From Russia With Love left thousands of women limp in their seats and millions of dollars at the box office, and rocketed Connery into a career that threatens to endure until the last Fleming villain goes down.

            Although James Bond has raised him from an obscure actor earning $16,000 a picture to a star who collects $200,000 per, Edinburgh-born Connery has deliberately thwarted studio efforts to make a Bondsman out of him. He remains his Celtic self, down to the slogan tattooed in blue on his right forearm: "Scotland Forever." When producers Harry Saltzman and Albert R. Broccoli arranged a Mayfair cocktail party to introduce him as a suave Continental type, Connery arrived on his motor scooter and drank his usual-beer. Plans for a formal-dress London premiere of a Bond film were changed when Connery announced that his Dad did not own a dinner jacket and was not going to buy one just to see a blinking movie.

            Connery lives with his wife, actress Diane Cilento, and two children in a four-story brick house at Acton that once was a convent. It has two kitchens and two cooks-Diane and Sean. An old bachelor range hand (he married at 32), the actor is proud of his beef casserole. On Sundays, the Connerys serve breakfast to drop-in visitors, the children's nannie and her boyfriend.

            Until recently, the family rode around in a Volkswagen. It has since been traded in for a white XKE Jaguar. Lest any suspect that this indicates a creeping James Bond influence, be it noted that the new car is a hand-me-down 1960 model.

            H. L. Mencken once described the sort of person who wants to be an actor as "the neighborhood fop and beau, the human clotheshorse, the nimble squirer of dames." While Connery is recognizable on sight as an actor-the Mr. Universe build (6 feet 3 inches, 190 pounds) , the dark-brown hair and eyes, the long-lipped mouth framed by cheek-sized dimples, the softly burred baritone voice--his background is not what Mencken had in mind. His Irish father was an Edinburgh truck driver, and his Scottish mother went out to do housework most of her life. Connery quit school at 14 and worked at a succession of muscle-and-stamina jobs, including steel bending, coffin polishing and a three-year hitch in the Royal Navy.

            At 22, he broke into the chorus of the London company of South Pacific by taking a two-day crash course in dancing, and toured with the show for 18 months. Soon set on acting, he educated himself with 10 recommended books (including My Life in Art, Ulysses, Jean Christophe and Remembrance of Things Past), and still reads "a terrific amount." He went on to stock, repertory, Shakespeare, British TV and movies, where, because of his Scots accent, he played Americans, Italians and Germans. He had nine undistinguished films behind him when he was offered the James Bond role.

            Richard Maibaum, screenwriter for the first three Bond films, lays their success to Connery. "He has personality, humor and ability," says Maibaum, "and he's very good on the physical stuff. He's proof that a good actor can do it better."

            Now that Bond has shot him to glory, Connery views success cautiously. "Money can be a trap," he says, "although naturally it's attractive to anyone from my background." When he gets enough of it, he plans to buy land and be a farmer- "or something completely the antithesis of this acting business." Meanwhile, he will have the problem of how to avoid an indelible Bond label. But at $200,000 a picture, it's a problem that any number of actors would be happy to share with him.