New Idea October 28, 1972

THE HEROES

What makes those ruggedly handsome heart-throbs Sean Connery, Richard Widmark and William Holden perennially sexy to millions of women?

ROBERT OTTOWAY TALKS TO THREE OF THE SCREEN’S LOVABLE ROGUES

IF APPETITE is the key word for James Bond, with his glut of women; vodka and fancy armament, then abstinence fits his screen creator, Sean Connery.

            He was the definitive star of the 60s, a sop to a world that lapped up fantasies.

            Yet no man has wrangled so heatedly with his image; no man, indeed, has been more maligned by it, Sean Connery has always given the impression of groaning all the way to the bank -and, by the way, he owns one.

            "When I pay the bill for dinner," he once told me, "I'm aware that it is more than my father could earn in a week. Money becomes meaningless when you start counting the noughts in a contract. And yet I will still dispute an account for a fiver, if I think someone is taking me for a ride. But I will put $100,000 into a business proposition without turning what remains of my hair."

            It is. of course, hard for us to squeeze a tear for a fellow who could retire tomorrow and still order a new Bentley every year. And Sean Connery doesn't solicit sympathy for that dilemma.

            But he is determined in his post-Bondage (and he won't reach for his toupee again - "not even for another million") to use his resources for two purposes -"to promote and help Scotland, and to make movie subjects that will extend me as an actor."

            Ever since he made his first karate chop in Dr. No 11 years ago (for which. incidentally, he was paid a mere $30,000). Connery has tried to divorce himself from his public identity.

            Many people forget that he has made more films outside Smersh-land than within it. He has shown himself a vastly more supple interpreter than the Bond films permit to escape. But no one really wants to know. And that bugs Sean Connery. That is why he has hung up his hair-pieces for good. That is why he made it a condition of making Diamonds Are Forever that United Artists should accept two subjects of his own choosing.

            The first, Something Like The Truth, has recently been completed. In this film, with a script by John Hopkins and direction by Sidney Lumet (who made The Hill), Connery cocks a deliberate snook at his girl-and-gold-fingering past.

            Tweed-hatted, with a square moustache, he plays an agonised detective, pondering his conscience after 20 years in the force. The excitement is in the character, rather than the trappings of thuggery.

            It is as if Connery is deliberately challenging the opinion the world holds of him - and it is up to us whether he spends the rest of his life living it down.

            "There's an impression around," he says, “that I have been constantly rebellious about playing Bond.

            This is not so. Certainly I wanted to opt out after I had played him five times, and I did Diamonds only because I could earn $1 million for the Scottish Educational Trust, which is very important to me.

            "But the Bond character has brought me money and fame -and I am not such an idiot that I regret either.

            "There comes a time, though, when you find yourself free, financially, to do whatever you like. I have just reached 42 -with quite a few years to go before I am carried out.

            "I am not the kind of man to spend the rest of my life on golf courses and in bars. My sort of upbringing gives you an urge to be useful, to contribute what you can. I've been lucky to do a lot of taking. Now I would like to be on the giving side."

            He has never moved easily into the gushing world of parties and easy flattery. He has a memory of his struggling years, of hoofing in the chorus of South Pacific, of playing bits in bad movies to pay the rent.

            Once a producer went up to him and hugged him like a long-lost brother, claiming, in front of others, that "we have been friends for years." Connery removed the arms encircling him as if he was shedding lice. "Yes, I know you," he said. "You turned me down for a small part in 1958, And you didn't even give me a cup of tea,"

           "This is a phony business," mused Connery. "You are accepted for your bank balance, your success -not for yourself. I have never been under any illusions about that side of it. You see, .I have never been afraid of other people's opinions.

            "I think that stems from something that happened to me when I was 12 years old. I had an accident on a sledge and was sent to hospital. I was put in a room with four old people, and one died while I was there. I can still remember vividly the way he died -the rattle in the throat, the sudden stopping of breath. An alarming experience, but useful.

            "An awareness of how life ends helps you to reach the right priorities in living it.

            "That may be why I've always been irreverent about Bond, about his standards. He, and they, are a joke, an entertainment. If you take that sort of thing seriously, then you really need a headshrinker."

            Connery is abrasive with other people's temperament -and will shudder at the memory of playing with Gina Lollobrigida in the film Woman Of Straw.

            "Acting is a job, like carpentry or building roads," he says. "There are 100 people involved in putting you up there on the screen. The trouble with a lot of stars is that they develop heads as big as their close-ups.

“I HAVE never believed that it's me up there on the wide screen. Just some guy who happens to have the same features and speaking more posh."

            The private voice is, in fact, more Scottish. He is passionate about his native land, and shows his concern practically.

            But he can be angry about it, too. While he ticks off grievances -that the Scots must come to London to make a living, that they must suffer above-average unemployment, that they are subject to decisions taken hundreds of miles away -he will also flay their tolerance of this situation.

            "I want the Scots to develop their own pride," he declares. "Of course, they can come down to London and beat the English at their own game. But I'd like them to promote their own future in their own land."

HE is a bashful socialist, conscious that he has, made his capitalist fortune in ways that would possibly make men like Clydeside shop steward Jimmy Reid spit. But he put money into a documentary, The Bowler And The Bonnet, about industrial relations on the Clyde, and offered it fruitlessly to both TV networks.

            He is backing educational grants to Scottish youngsters, and concerned to support projects that will illuminate, in film and play, the true nature of his country. He uses his box-office appeal to persuade production companies to premiere a film like The Anderson Tapes in Glasgow - with the proceeds going to his pet Trust.

            And yet, and yet, in all the areas of his life, the sincerity of Sean Connery, the man, would seem to have a hard struggle to impose itself on the Bond image created by Harry Saltzman and Ian Fleming.

            He will not talk of his sundered marriage with Diane Cilento, but he will acknowledge that it was also, partly, a victim of his success.

            “It was like putting two pints into the same pot," he declares. "We both had careers, and both needed them. The important thing was that our children (Jason and, by Diane's previous marriage, Joanna) should not suffer. We explained everything to them, and they seem to have accepted it.”

            In a sense, his professional future will depend on his own judgment. He is aware that “there are some pretty good movies made -and they get an audience of 25 people.”

            He has been lucky in enjoying one of the two successful film formulas of the past decade, with the Carry Ons its only rival.

            Sometimes, it must be admitted, that judgment has seemed suspect. The play in which he directed his wife three years ago died a deserved death after five nights in London's West End. He appeared in Alfred Hitchcock's unsuccessful Marnie, and his much-loved plan to film Macbeth was temporarily usurped when Roman Polanski got in first.

            But a man who's a director of his own bank has the cash to experiment. Like it or not, his word will be his Bond for the rest of his life.