Modern Screen April 1965

HOW TO KEEP THE SEXIEST MAN IN THE WORLD VERY, VERY HAPPY!!!

There’s one woman who knows all about what thrills and delights that delicious male, Sean Connery.

“I know that women the world over must say I’m crazy to take this chance,” Diane Cilento once said to me as she watched her husband leave for a location trip to Spain.  “But then, I’m lucky! For he invariably comes back to me and he’s all mine.”

            Blonde, green-eyed Diane sounded very confident as we spoke in London a while ago.  And she, seemingly, had a right to be sure of her husband’s devotion.  For, since he married, Sean Connery is no longer the avid girl-chaser he once was.

            And I remembered something Sean once said.  Talking about his role as James Bond, he talked about himself too.

            “All the girls still want to make love to him (Bond) but he doesn’t need to make love to all of them.  At first it was I who had to model myself on James Bond….But now I am making Bond more like me.  And I’m a chap nowadays, anyway, who still likes all the girls but doesn't necessarily have to have all the girls.

            "I guess I'm trying to make James Bond grow up a little-in the same way I'm growing up myself." And he added with a sardonic grin: "Definitely not too much, though. That would spoil the fun for both of us."

            A positive statement of fidelity-but not too positive.

            And now I was visiting the Connerys in Rome where Diane was making The Agony and the Ecstasy. I sat in the dining room of their rented villa just outside the city and watched Sean feed his son, Jason. It would be interesting to see the life he lived with his family and the bonds that kept the most desired man in the world with his wife.

            "Jason, my son," Sean said with a mellow grin on his rugged face, "Let's try and do it right this time..."

            Whereupon he picked up the plate with the tiny pieces of cut-up meat and resumed feeding his son, morsel by morsel, from a spoon. Jason, all of 20 months old, was strapped into a high baby chair which stood next to the kitchen table. Connery watched the pieces disappear in the little boy's mouth, nodding approval each time the mouth chewed well and swallowed. The child had straw-blond hair, so light in shade it was almost luminous, and big light blue eyes. Sean surveyed him with the contented look of a very, very proud father.

            I felt like an agent provocateur.  Outside the terracotta-pink villa Diane Cilento had been posing for photographers. They had started with "just a few" two hours earlier. They had taken full possession of her and would not let her go except for the costume changes that they sweet- talked her into every so often.

            It was not difficult to provoke her towering, gruff, handsome husband into action. He had felt gruff all morning. The photographers had not been allowed into the house but they had made Diane their willing hostage-outside the villa. There was no doubt about it. She enjoyed posing for those pictures and being told how beautiful she was. She had just had her hair dyed back to its original blond, following a long stretch as the dark-haired Contessina de Medici in her new film. She was being herself again. For a while, Sean watched the scene from the second story terrace. He was clad in a short black Japanese kimono and nothing whatever under it. This embarrassed Diane who sent up a warning, but not him. Eventually he grew tired of the spectacle below and yelled, "Enough, boys." He went back into the house, to change into a sweater and khaki pants for lunch. When, half an hour later, his wife was still outside, he suddenly grew angry. His face darkened and he strode outside.

            Whether he threw the men with the cameras bodily off the estate, or just took his wife by her arm and walked her off, I did not know. I had finished the beer and had wandered off into the laundry room next to the kitchen. A woman wearing glasses, a multiple strand of pearls dangling from her neck, was bending over the tub rinsing freshly washed baby clothes. There was the unmistakable air of grandmother about her and so I said, "You must be Mrs. Connery." Sean's folks are nice and simple Edinburgh people. His father still insists on driving the lorry the way he has all his life.

            I had made a mistake. She looked up from the wash basin, her hands dripping with soap water, a faint smile on her somewhat stern face. "No, I am not Mrs. Connery," she said firmly. "I am Lady Cilento." I had picked the wrong grandmother. We remained in the laundry chatting about Diane's wonderful baby.

            Not many of James Bond's feminine admirers realize that there is a Mrs. James Bond. He may well look like the perfect bachelor, the lady-killer, the suave lover. But in real life, Sean Connery is a man very much in love with his dainty, blond, green-eyed wife, and very lonely indeed when she is not with him. For she understands him and knows how to make him happy.

            The last time I saw Sean Connery, his chiseled profile surveying the local scenery with just enough disdain, was in Hollywood. He came to do the Alfred Hitchcock picture, Marnie and at first he was alone.

            Then Diane arrived. While alone in Hollywood, Sean lived by himself in an expensive if shabby little apartment at the Chateau Marmont on the Sunset Strip. He took his meals in a restaurant around the corner.

            By the time Diane and her two children were about to land, he had rented an elegant mansion, with swimming pool and the usual Hollywood accoutrements of good living.

            "That's what I mean," Diane told me as Sean looked on. "That's what it is being married to James Bond. That very same evening he came back to our new home from the studio and said, 'Okay, what do we have for dinner tonight?' It was as though we had never been separated or that we had never lived in any other place but this villa in Beverly Hills. So I gave him his dinner. We didn't talk much. He was being the typical husband-tired and quite untalkative about a long and hard day at the office....

            "Hollywood is quite pretty but rather boring," Diane continued. "And people don't respect privacy. I had a terrible time with snoopers. They were armed with binoculars, and they'd climb up the hillside to watch me swim in our swimming pool. As though they had never seen a swimming pool in their lives."

            What Diane didn't mention was that it wasn't the pool that was the attraction. They had rarely been treated to the sight of a beautiful girl with all the curves in the right places taking a swim in her birthday suit. "The point was," she reflected with a pout, "that I don't like the touch of a wet swimsuit. I always prefer to swim without one. Try it some time and you'll appreciate the difference. I told Sean about it that night. No, he didn't grab his gun and set out to catch the man," she smiled happily. "Maybe James Bond would have but Sean didn't. He simply shook his head and muttered about my being still so naive. Was he angry? Well, he didn't yell at me if that is what you mean.

            "Sean has the ability to suppress his anger," she insisted. "It doesn't show on his face all too obviously, but it does grow dark when he's mad, deep inside, and his face muscles sort of twitch a bit. Still, I don't think he lost his temper twice since we've been married. He makes a point of appearing perfectly controlled. Which makes me want to scream...."

            Had she? Screamed? Beautiful Mrs. Connery, her green eyes looked at me in silent reproach. "No, no, no." But it appeared more like "yes, yes, yes," especially in the light of her next disclosures. Sean was too much of the even-tempered husband for his wife not to blow a fuse. "He is so very quiet at home," she said almost apologetically, "and very considerate. And of course he loves the children." He has treated Giovanna, her seven-year-old from her first marriage to Andrea Volpi, as if she were his own. Their son, Jason, was born January 11, 1963. "Sean is an excellent father. But he's also the typical husband who kicks off his shoes the moment he steps inside the house, his haven.

            "Sean always kicks off his shoes when he comes home. He remains barefooted for the rest of the evening. He doesn't like shoes. He may spend the whole weekend around the house without putting on his shoes once....

            "Of course, James Bond would never do that," she grinned mischievously. "Also," she said happily, "he eats more than anyone I know. That man has the appetite of a dozen truck drivers. Cook and I are always prepared for that when we sit down for dinner at home. There's always enough for a second helping, and a third and a fourth, just in case our man asks for more.

            "And he does...."

            And like many men too tired at night to talk to their wives, this real life James Bond settles down happily in front of the television set, a glass of beer in his hand. "He loves television," Diane said. "He can sit in front of the telly for hours.... It relaxes him, he says."

            Sean looked at her appreciatively as she talked. Here was a woman who knew how to let him be.

            The James Bonds were about to face a new real life adventure and from where Sean sat things looked more than encouraging. The Hill, a war picture for which he was to be paid half a million dollars, was to be followed by yet another Bond movie. In fact, the Bond movies had proven such a success that he could make as many more as he wished. If Woman of Straw and Marnie, in which he tried his hand at different roles, had not proved money makers at the box office, they had not detracted from his drawing power as Bond. Thousands of fan letters pouring in from allover the world were ample proof of that.

            Diane was not doing so badly either even though she had lost the coveted role of Moll Flanders to Kim Novak. Sean had agreed to play opposite Diane in that movie, but the project came to naught because of Diane's previous commitments. Diane had set her heart on the role. She cried her eyes out and Sean dutifully withdrew his offer to play the leading man in The Amorous Adventures of Moll Flanders. Then to make up for the disappointment, Fox agreed to back the movie, Call Me When The Cross Turns Over which they would do together-their first co-starring film.

            On this day in the villa facing a picturesque Italian countryside, the air filled with the scent of flowers, it appeared to me that Mr. and Mrs. James Bond were one couple with few legitimate complaints. And, as they contemplated the spaghetti and veal, and the Chianti, they seemed very much at ease. "You know," I said, "it's nice to see you two look so happy!" I put no special meaning into it, and let them interpret the remark any way they liked. They smiled. Lady Cilento smiled. Earlier in the laundry room we had joked about the real James Bond home, and Lady Cilento observed how little he needed to be happy. No guns with silencers; no blondes on deadly missions; no redheads....Just a hungry baby named Jason-and a wife named Diane.

Diane began reflecting on the strange bonanza, almost unprecedented in the history of cinematography, that had fallen into her actor-husband's lap. "Did you know," she spoke huskily, "that were it not for me he might never have become James Bond?"

            "How come?"

            "Well, when they offered him the role of Bond in the first picture, Dr. No, he asked me what to do. To take it or not to take it? We weren't married yet but we were very close and Sean took my advice." (For the record, they had met when signed to do Anna Lucasta on London television four years earlier and liked each other instantly. She had left Volpi, her impetuous 1954 marriage at 20 to the young Italian, an admitted mistake.)

            "Sean wasn't sure he should take the role. I suggested that he insist on their putting more humor into the story. I thought this was the only way to escape the obvious corn. So Sean went back to them and told them that.

            "Well, they swallowed it. And a week later they called Sean. They were ready to sign.

            Diane's role in the shaping of Secret Agent 007 didn't end there. "I've been cueing him ever since," she said pleasantly. "In fact I can say I've played just about every part in Dr. No and in From Russia With Love and I still remember most of the dialogue." She did that while helping him go over the script at home.

            Still, she never did that on a movie set. "I rarely visit Sean during filming. Nor does he come to the studio when I'm working. There's all the time in the world when we get home." During the filming of Marnie she visited him on the set but when photographers asked them to pose for pictures, they were told-no pictures. It wouldn't go well with the James Bond image. The same happened during the filming of Goldfinger.

            By this time I had come to the inescapable conclusion that young Diane Cilento knows what she is doing. She knows exactly how to make herself absolutely indispensable to her man. She is also a very ambitious young woman, her heart set on acting in every shape and form. She loves playing Mrs. Sean Connery, but she also loves the role of Diane Cilento.

            She knows that she has more experience and is more talented than James Bond. And, make no mistake about it, he knows it too. As actors go, Mr. Sean Connery, the lad from Edinburgh whose Scottish brogue is still as heavy as the autumn rain slashing the Scottish lochs when he is not before cameras, is very much the do-it-yourself type. He is the former milkman, coffin-polisher and football player turned thespian. His formal education is close to nil. He comes from the bottom rung of the social ladder. Diane, on the other hand, is the daughter of a famous Australian knighted for his contribution to tropical medicine, a former member of the Australian delegation to the United Nations. Her mother is a noted gynaecologist and of her five brothers and sisters, four are doctors, and one is an artist. She attended two acting academies, the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York at 15, and the Royal Academy in London after that.

            Diane Cilento has appeared in more TV plays than she cares to remember, on the stage, in movies; and she has produced stage presentations and written and translated plays. At 30, she's a veteran and, of course, an all-out professional. Yet she got expelled from the Royal Academy, and she eked out a meager living working in a London wine shop and later in the Bertram Mills circus for about five pounds a week rather than accept an allowance from her wealthy parents.

.Somehow one would not imagine so fiercely independent a girl would share a roof with a James Bond, but then, as she candidly reminds you, Sean is not James Bond. All that is movie make believe. Yet, she is as concerned over his success as he is. "We both read the James Bond fan mail, in search of clues as to the secret of his popularity. We want to understand it." She refuses to be jealous of his fame even though it seems to indicate that the magic of success does not hinge on talent and experience. On the other hand, she worries much more than he over the strange fiasco of his two recent sallies into different portrayals. Why did he fail in Woman of Straw and Marnie? What went wrong? She knows that unless The Hill is a success, Sean will have proved himself a one-role actor. This will hurt her more than him.

            Lunch was finished and Diane was dashing off to the studio for a last minute dubbing job. Sean would stay behind, and maybe drive over to the country club for a round of golf. In the evening they would give a little party for her co-actors and that would more or less wind up their stay in Italy. Sean Connery carried Jason into the nursery upstairs, his muscular arms hugging the little boy, his tattoo looming big and strong over a mighty triceps.

            I left the villa in Rome then and knew it would be a while before I saw the Connerys again. As my car drove away I turned just in time to see Sean and Diane embracing as they walked indoors.

            I knew that, like all married couples, they had their problems. But they also had happiness. They knew the right things to give each other.

HENRY GRIS

Diane stars in THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY for 20th. Sean stars in THE HILL for MGM.