VANITY FAIR June 1993

Great Scot

Sean Connery is 62 now, no longer the young lion who made James Bond a cinematic icon- and so much the better. In a string of memorable performances, Connery has emerged as the senior statesman of the screen. But the years have not softened him, as ZOE HELLER found out when she asked him about his roots, his reputation as a male chauvinist, and his controversial new movie, Rising Sun

            It was the socks that got me. After I rang the bell, there was a long wait before Sean Connery came to the front door of his Nassau villa, and when he finally appeared, towering on the threshold, I was peering rudely through one of the windows. He was wearing baggy green shorts and a deeply unglamorous pair of blue toweling socks. "Hi. Come in," he said. "I'm on the phone."

            He padded away to finish making arrangements for a golf game that Sunday, and I paused a moment in the hallway: Sean Connery in blue toweling socks? It was a little like that famous 1960s photograph of Twiggy-the one taken to prove that, yes, she did look good even in a potato sack. Does Connery look good even in grunge mode? Oh God, yes. Horribly good.

            He has always adopted a scrupulously ironic attitude toward the slobber that his handsomeness inspires. In 1989, when People magazine phoned to tell him he'd been voted the sexiest man alive, he dryly suggested that there weren't many men who looked sexy dead. "Well, Jesus Christ," he exclaimed when reminded of this. (His growly Scottish accent turns "Christ" into "Keriste.") "What was I meant to say? 'Oh, I've known it for a long time and I was just wondering how long it was going to take before you realized'?"

            He has actually known about his sexiness a long time. What he calls "his first decisive sexual experience" took place during the Second World War. At 14 he was picked up by an older woman from the Armed Territorial Service and whisked off to an Edinburgh air-raid shelter. "I couldn't believe my good fortune," he says. "I remember the fantastic heat. She was hot all here." He points to his abdomen. "The heat was immense..."

            Forty-eight years later, at 62, he is still prodigiously appealing. His resilience against age is not the sort associated with secret elixirs or devilish pacts. There has been no plastic surgery. Deep wrinkles score his forehead, and the baldness that had started to encroach when he made his first Bond movie in 1962 has now claimed most of his scalp. But his attraction never did rely on the airbrushed perfections of youth. As he himself points out, “A person doesn't have to be standing there with a piano keyboard of teeth and glossy hair and shining eyes for him to be attractive.”

            With the golf arrangements made, he comes and sits down in the vanilla-colored living room and outlines his zippy schedule, counting off cities and states on his fingers: "I've just been in L.A.," he says, "and from here I'll go to Florida. From Florida I'll go to London. From London to Johannesburg. From Johannesburg to London. From London back here…” The cross-hatching of plane journeys-testament to a flourishing career-clearly gives him pleasure.

            Connery is shortly to be seen co-starring with Wesley Snipes as an L.A.P.D. detective in Rising Sun, a movie on which he also served as executive producer. Based on Michael Crichton's best-selling novel of the same name, it is a thriller set against the corporate wars of Japanese and American business interests. Next, he starts location work on A Good Man in Africa, an adaptation of William Boyd's satirical novel. He also has four or five projects (including a possible directorial job) currently in development.

            "I think Rising Sun is a good movie," he says, "which has worked out very well, so that's given me a gee-up in enthusiasm. My films tend to go in cycles of three and it looks now as if I'm about to enter another cycle of three or maybe four movies." He sucks his teeth contentedly. Connery has never been exactly short of employment. And not since the Bond films has he ever been considered less than a star. But his buoyancy now is that of a man experiencing a quite remarkable professional renaissance.

            For a time in the late 70s and early 80s, he seemed to have gotten stuck in a series of bad choices. His performances in movies like Meteor, Cuba, Outland, and The Man with the Deadly Lens were valiant enough, but the movies themselves did no credit to him. Connery was still a big star, one felt-it was the pictures that were getting small.

            Then, in 1982, he was persuaded to do what he had sworn he never would, make one last outing as James Bond. (His wife, Micheline, suggested the movie's title, Never Say Never Again.) Getting out the old toupee and flexing the famous Bond eyebrow once more should have been a lighthearted antidote to the recent run of disappointments, but in fact it merely served to underscore them.

            Although Never Say Never was a financial success, the chaos and confusion of its production confirmed Connery's growing irritation with moviemaking. Connery claimed that he ended up having to produce the movie himself. By the end of the production he was drained. For too long, it seemed to him, there had been a disparity between the energy he put into making movies and the quality of the results.

            "There are periods of disenchantment," he explains, “when you don't do much, because you're not enthusiastic about the things you're offered, or because of a bad experience like Never Say Never. Because of the disenchantment of making that picture I just didn't do anything for two years."

            But something happened during the two-year break. When Connery returned to movies in 1986 with the action adventure Highlander, his career began slowly to change gear. His 1987 Oscar-winning performance in The Untouchables was the turning point. From the slightly uncomfortable position of being a sex symbol d'un certain age, he had graduated into the more dignified role of senior star, still good-looking and fit enough to have love interests, but now capable of bringing gravitas and an aura of hard-earned wisdom to a movie.

            The part of John Connor in Rising Sun (Michael Crichton always imagined Connery in the role) exemplifies the sort of sage mentor figure that has come to be Connery's specialty. Connor is a worldly-wise L.A.P.D. detective who leads a fellow police officer (Snipes) through a murder mystery while instructing him on the subtleties of Japanese culture. He is, Connery says, “the voice of reason" in the movie, and his appreciation of Japanese mores is one of the more telling arguments against accusations that Rising Sun, with its alarmist vision of a Japanese "invasion" of the American economy, is simply "Japan-bashing."

            "It's a dangerous precedent calling [this film] Japan-bashing," Connery says, "because it's not....What it's really about is what's happening realistically in the United States. What Crichton's book was saying was that the Japanese and the Americans were in bed together whether they liked it or not, but there is a culture clash and there has to be a bridge to cross it. A lot of people are inclined to blame the Japanese for the fact that American productivity is lower than theirs. What they should really be doing is like Ross Perot says-they should say, 'Well, if they're that good, why don't we try and match it?' That's what the old American axiom was."

            He takes the fact that Crichton wrote the Connor role for him as a great compliment. "I do seem to have become this kind of old guy who teaches or guides," he muses. "It's quite flattering, but I don't think it's true of me. I would like to think that I've learned something over the years, and obviously I have, but as time goes on, it would appear from the mistakes I make that I haven't learned that much."

            The director Sidney Lumet, an old friend of Connery's who first met him when he cast him in The Hill in 1965, believes that Connery’s second wind has had less to do with a change in him than a long-overdue change in public perceptions: "I don't think he's so much grown as an actor. It's more that the estimation of him has finally caught up with what he can do. I always knew his ability. John Huston, when he cast him in The Man Who Would Be King, he knew it, too. Sean always had the capacity for giant acting. But it's only in the last 10 or 15 years that people have started saying, 'Oh! He can act!' "

            Lumet traces the difficulty back to the days of Bondmania, when Connery's personality was hopelessly eclipsed in the popular imagination by that of the suave superspy.

            "The length of time that the Bond image took to break disappointed him. But he knew it would take a long time to break the Bond mold. Christopher Reeve has gone through much the same process with Superman, and he still hasn't quite broken out of type yet. It takes 10, 12, maybe 14 pictures to break the image. In the Bond era, the general assumption was that Sean was this charming sex hulk. Nonprofessionals just didn't realize what superb high-comedy acting that Bond role was. It was like what they used to say about Cary Grant. 'Oh,' they'd say, 'he's just got charm. 'Well, first of all, charm is actually not all that easy a quality to come by. And what they overlooked in both Cary Grant and Sean was their enormous skill. They didn't realize they were watching acting."

            As a corrective to the notion of the "sex hulk," Lumet's emphasis on Connery's technical abilities is entirely understandable. Connery, too, is sensitive to any underestimation of his acting skill. (At one point, he interpreted something I was saying about Method acting as a suggestion that he has no method at all. "I have a method," he objected fiercely. "I'm a fully trained actor.") Still, it is no belittling of Connery’s talent to point out that his greatest strength on-screen is his physical authority. Connery gave a perfectly lousy Irish accent in The Untouchables, but it really didn't matter. Typically, it was the conviction of his bearing that made the portrayal of the Chicago beat cop work. Other actors may deliver up foreign accents of painstaking accuracy, but Connery's genius resides elsewhere, in the peculiarly intense quality that he exudes even when he is standing still.

            "It's a mysterious thing, really," says Philip Kaufman, director of Rising Sun. "Steve McQueen had it. Cagney had it. If an actor has it, it means that he can be taking stuff out of a supermarket freezer and there's something special about it. There's a sense in which people go to films to learn how to behave; the fact is people are very attracted to the way Sean behaves. They have an empathy with him-or they would like to have empathy. They would like to feel that they have his qualities, his grace under pressure."

            It is partly, of course, a matter of dimensions. Connery stands six feet two in his toweling socks, and he's Jack Sprat lean. Occasional bouts of abstinence help keep him in shape (his favorite tipple when he is drinking is vodka), but his figure owes most to good fortune. He used to body-build as a young man but long ago relinquished the dumbbell in favor of the golf club (his handicap floats somewhere between 8 and 12). His vast torso still forms a pleasing, equilateral triangle. As Lumet says, "Whatever the width of a doorway, Sean seems to fill it."

            Apart from his build, there is also the business of how he moves. Bond producers Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman were not convinced that Connery was right for the role of Bond until they happened to see him from their office window, "striding like a panther" down the street. The difference between Connery and the other actors who had tried out for the part, Broccoli later said, was like "comparing a still photograph with a film."

            Connery attributes some of his physical aplomb to the influence of the dance therapist Yat Malmgeren, with whom he, along with actor Anthony Hopkins and the late director Tony Richardson, studied movement for several years. "The dance, to me, is all-important," he says. "The place where you stand, how you use your space, is the number-one priority. How you stand in relation to other people in scenes, how you dance with them-that's what it's all about."

            Nonetheless, one suspects that the real source of Connery’s power on-screen is not something he ever learned in class.

            "He's not just physically big," Lumet says, "he's emotionally large, too. When he enters a room, it's the arrival of his persona, really. It's like those great eyebrows come into the room first, you know?"

            Fred Schepisi, who directed him in The Russia House, comments, "Sometimes what people are in life doesn't carry to the screen. Sean is one of those rare people whose qualities in life do translate onto the screen. He has a fantastic energy, a bonhomie. He has a largess-and a largeness-which carries to an audience. There is a strength in him, a solidity. There's a rock there, you know?"

            The rock in Connery is an admirable but not altogether comfortable thing. He is not a man to affect an amiability that he doesn't feel, or to let his dissatisfactions go unnoticed. His brusqueness is legendary. "He's not the most tolerant person," the British playwright Tom Stoppard acknowledges. "It's a cliche, but he really doesn't suffer fools gladly. He's a capable person, and he expects others to be capable, too."

            Sidney Lumet puts it even more bluntly. "Sean can't stand dopes! He's impatient with inadequacy. Things are very simple with Sean-very cut-and-dried. He can smell a fake. He knows in a minute if a director or a cameraman doesn't know what he's doing. He's very bright, and he can't stand people who don't know their business as well as he knows his."

            Most of those who have worked with him tend to see Connery's demanding nature as an inherent part of his professionalism. When he is irascible, they say, it is as an actor keen to get the best possible results, rather than as a diva eager for attention. “There is none of the star's self-indulgence about Sean," Lumet says. "He's not the type to get angry about the size of his trailer or any of that stuff....If you put him in a crew that's functioning well, there's no one more fun to make a movie with. You're kicking ass, in the best sense."

            Movie stars, it must be said, are always being congratulated on their unaffected manners and their simple, unstarry ways. Usually this putative normalcy amounts to no more than not wearing diamonds at breakfast or having gone to the supermarket once in the last decade. In Connery's case, however, the breathless tributes to an unpretentious life-style have more justification than usual. He has, as he puts it, “the normal features of a generous lifestyle," but he generally prefers good value and convenience to status symbols. The style in which his Nassau home is decorated is more bourgie burbs than movie-star swank. He has no press agent and no bodyguards. When he is in London, he likes to walk to his appointments. "I'm very secretive," he says. "I make my own travel arrangements-I go about what I'm doing by myself, and usually I've done it and gone on before anyone would know.” He drives an efficient Toyota Land Cruiser ("I can fill the tank and do 600 kilometers on it"). And it's a source of some pleasure to him that the Mercedes he bought 16 years ago is still "like new" and being driven by his brother.

            This absence of celebrity posturing makes people far more sympathetic than they might otherwise be to Connery's robust manners. Even Stoppard, who had a temporary falling-out with Connery back in 1989, when Connery was forced by ill health to withdraw from the film adaptation of Stoppard' s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, adds his voice to the chorus defending Connery's rigorous style. "He is tough in getting what he wants. Very tough," Stoppard says. "But I think a lot of what you hear about the rough side of his tongue is really to do with him wanting to get things right and having high standards. I think he's right to have high standards."

            This, unsurprisingly, is the way Connery sees it, too. When I asked him if he wasn't perhaps prone to the occasional bout of grouchiness, his face took on a forbidding quality that made me shift about on the sofa. "I never grouch," he said. "I have nothing but respect for everybody and anybody who works professionally-whether it's the clapper boy, the grip, or the carpenter. And anybody who's worked with me would know it. The only problem I have is with arses who create more problems than they solve. I have no ego when I'm making a picture. I expect everybody I'm working with to give 100 percent because I do."

            Connery's candor-his determination to say it how it is-is somewhat unusual in a star of his stature, and off the set his forth-right opinions have sometimes gotten him into hot water. His sentiments about women, for example, have earned him a reputation for male chauvinism that haunts him to this day. The roots of the reputation lie in an interview that he gave Playboy back in 1965. A man, he told the magazine, "has to be slightly advanced, ahead of a woman...by virtue of the way a man is built, if nothing else." In spite of this physical superiority, he didn't think there was "anything particularly wrong" with a man's hitting a woman: "I don't recommend doing it in the same way that you'd hit a man," he said. "An open-handed slap is justified-if all other alternatives fail and there has been plenty of warning. If a woman is a bitch, or hysterical, or bloody-minded continually, then I'd do it."

            As recently as 1991, Barbara Walters took him to task about this ancient quotation. Connery says that his comments on the Walters show were seen out of context and made to seem more sensational than they were. “They taped two hours of me and only showed 20 minutes. Barbara Walters was trying to get me to say it was O.K. to hit women. But I was really saying that to slap a woman was not the cruelest thing you can do to her. I said that in my book-it's much more cruel to psychologically damage somebody...to put them in such distress that they really come to hate themselves....Sometimes there are women who take it to the wire. That's what they're looking for, the ultimate confrontation-they want a smack."

            This may be less dramatic than what he appeared to be arguing on the Walters show, but it hardly establishes him as King of the Politically Correct. He agrees that, yes, he probably is a bit of a male chauvinist: "I mean, I like playing golf with men, right? At the club where I play, there's a men's bar and then there's a mixed bar. Women don't go into the men's bar. I think that's perfectly normal. A lot of things are happening now in America, where women are insisting that they become members not as wives but as members, which means they have access to the men's bar. I like a men's bar, where I can sit and talk only with men...It's harmless, really. Usually, you've come in from a round of golf and you're talking about the shots you missed, the shots you made....It's just camaraderie."

            A sarcastic glint appears in his eye. He is growing weary of justifying what seems to him so achingly obvious. "It's just like-what do they call it? That guy writes about it-you know: bonding. Where they go into the woods and dance and hug."

            "Robert Bly, you mean? Do you regard that stuff as idiotic?"

            "Nooo," he says, smirking slightly, "if it works, fine. But I can't see me dancing with some hairy-arsed guy with a beard in the woods. I mean..." He laughs and then stops suddenly. "Listen! I don't imagine that I couldn't find 50 women who could run Scotland. Of course! They'd be terrific-no question! I think women-yeah! They've got the ability to do things-yeah! I just think you should have the choice of being with them or not being with them.”

            "Would you prefer women to retain old-fashioned feminine charms?" I ask. "Do you think they should be demure-gentle, quiet?"

            "Well, I expect them to be gentler and quieter than me. I mean, there has to be a complementary thing between [a man and a woman] to make a unit. It's like the yin and the yang. A man has a feminine side as well. But I just think that [gentleness] is part of what femininity is.”

            "Are you aware of your feminine side?"

            "I suppose so...I mean, I don't wear dresses."

            "So how does it express itself?"

            "Well, I think when you choose to be an actor you've already made some moves in that direction, because you really have to free yourself a bit to be an actor. You have to be willing to make an arse of yourself."

            "To abandon a certain macho pride?"

            "Yeah, I think that's pretty accurate." Appropriately, Connery’s wife, Micheline, chooses this moment to arrive from the airport, having just flown in from the Connery’s home in Marbella. Micheline is Connery's second wife. They met in 1970 while he was still married to his first wife, actress Diane Cilento, mother of Connery's son, Jason. Their first encounter took place during a Moroccan golf tournament: Micheline shares her husband's passion for fiercely competitive golf.

            A tiny, energetic Frenchwoman a year younger than her husband, Micheline zips back and forth across the living room, adding her comments to the conversation with much theatrical rolling of eyes and whooping laughter. Connery tells a story about an argument he had some years ago, with a retired colonel in a Scottish public swimming pool. "And zen you said, 'You are a prick!' "Micheline interjects. "Ha! I fought zat you would bofe end up in ze sweeming pool!" She doesn't strike me as an easily daunted woman. In fact, she looks more than capable of giving her husband as good as she gets.

            Why, I ask, have the Connerys chosen to make their base in Marbella? (They also have homes in Monte Carlo and Los Angeles, but Marbella is where they keep the bulk of their stuff.) This seems an innocent enough question, but Connery imagines some latent impudence: "Why?" he shoots back. "I shouldn't have a place to live, you mean?"

            From time to time, Connery exhibits a thin-skinned, touchy quality, a readiness to take offense that can make dialogue a volatile affair. Later on, he explains the difficulty he has in forgiving wrongs done to him: "It's almost impossible to unknow something about somebody,” he says. “For example, if I know that you're a shit..."

            "Did you have to choose that example?" I ask, laughing.

            Connery falls silent and gives me a long hard stare. My laughter turns to a nervous giggle, and I make a mental note not to try bantering again. "No, no, I just meant...I, I was joking..."

            He stares at me a bit longer and then, somewhat mollified, he continues. "If I know something about you, it's very hard for me to unknow it.”

            "You're, um, pretty hard on people?" I suggest, wary now of making waves.

            "Well, I'm hard on myself," he replies, "so probably by other people's yardsticks I seem hard with them."

            I ask him whether he knows what people mean when they describe him as intimidating or scary.

           "No, obviously I don't," he says impatiently. “And it's certainly not a conscious presentation on my part. For example, are you impressed? Are you nervous?"

            "Er, yes. Quite."

            "Now?"

            "Yes."

            He rolls his eyes.

            "Let me ask you, then, why? Why are you nervous? Have I given you any cause? We've been talking for however long and I...Do you think I'm aggressive?"

            "Yes, a bit. Do people tell you that you're aggressive?"

            "Well, my wife says sometimes I am. I don't think so."

            "What? You think you're Mr. Sweetie and you're just misread?"

            "Oh, no." He shakes his head vigorously. "I don't think I'm Mr. Sweetie. I don't profess to be Mr. Sweetie."

            One formal index of Connery's tough- nut style is to be found in his long and byzantine history of litigations. He has spent the better part of his career engaged in one lawsuit or another. In the course of all his battles for the appropriate cuts of movie profits, or for justice from crooked business management, he has, he claims, "put lawyers' children through school." He has audited every single film he's ever starred in, he says, and if he seems untrusting, well, that's because he's been given very little cause to be otherwise: "I've been screwed more times than a hooker! I've been caught out twice with guys who were involved with my finances, and I had to go to court and bankrupt them. It's deep-a deep kind of resentment I have for that kind of betrayal and injustice. I hate injustice. It's the reason why I've sued every one of those film companies....If someone like myself doesn't continue doing it, who's going to? There's a lot of people in Hollywood who don 't make an issue out of it, just accept it. It's unfair! It's bent!"

            One of Connery's oldest friends, the British actor and producer Michael Medwin, sees this litigious passion as Confiery's noble refusal to have his moral sense compromised by fear. "In our sycophantic business, all of us are always slightly cap-in-hand to our employers," he says. "But in some extraordinary way Sean never became like that. He is unique in that sense. I think he's the most lion-hearted man. To me he is quite heroic. He has always taken on his employers if he thought they were at fault. He never brownnosed or oiled anyone. And what you have to remember is he did that when he was no one, fearlessly and simply-he spoke up for himself. Perhaps it had to do with his simple background-but for him things were always either right or wrong.”

            Medwin may well be correct about the influence of Connery's background-although “simple” suggests something rather more picturesque than the cramped Edinburgh tenement in which Connery grew up. When he was a baby, his crib was a bottom drawer. He began delivering milk at the age of nine to help supplement his father's income as a van driver. (One of the places to which he delivered milk was Fettes College, the elite institution from which James Bond was meant to have been expelled.) After he left school, he tried his hand at a variety of jobs- bricklayer, cinema usher, coal man.

            "If I were to go back and think of how far I've come," Connery says, gesturing at his surroundings, "how much fame one's had, how much money one's made, how much traveling one's done, one would think-well, it wouldn't be physically possible, considering where I've come from."

            These days, apart from the odd golf tournament at St. Andrew's, Connery doesn't go back to Scotland much. Nonetheless, he remains proud of his Scottish roots and keen to maintain links with the mother country .

            In 1970 he used the vast fee that he managed to extract from the Bond producers for Diamonds Are Forever (a million-dollar guarantee against 12 1/2 percent of the profits) to fund the Scottish International Educational Trust. He has provided generous support for this charity ever since. In recent years, he has also given his public support to the campaign, led by the Scottish Nationalist Party, for an independent Scotland. In Britain's last general election, he provided voice-overs for the Scottish National Party political broadcasts. "I worry about the situation in Scotland," he says, “and I've voiced my opinion for what it's worth. I plan to do more work for the S.N.P. in the future."

            Public gestures of this sort assert Connery's patriotism, but his memories of his childhood seem to have as much to do with class as with country. “I still get a charge out of a bath," he tells me at one point. "I still do. When I go to the Grosvenor House Hotel in London, I always lie in the bath-a real bath, you know what I mean? The bath is something special. There was only one bath in the whole of our street in Edinburgh, and that belonged to the brewery. There was no hot water in our street.”

            The connection between these early deprivations and the attitude he has taken toward fat-cat employers is not difficult to make. Connery's litigious battles are to him only a slightly elevated version of the age-old struggle between worker and exploitive boss.

            Another legacy of the "simple background', has been a certain amount of intellectual insecurity. Connery was an "introverted and unsure" young man, he says. His first foray into acting was as a member of the male chorus in a touring production of South Pacific, and it served to make him intensely aware of his academic shortcomings.

            He was 20 when he joined the theater company, a rough-looking man with tattoos and gold teeth. (The teeth have long since been prettied up, but the tattoos- "Scotland Forever" and "Mum and Dad"-remain.) He had recently been discharged from the Royal Navy after three years of service, owing to stomach ulcers, and he had been working as a laborer. It was while taking part in a Mr. Universe contest in London that he first heard about the chorus part. Suddenly he found himself among people who read Ibsen, and he was awestruck. "I was so impressed by actors and how articulate they were," he recalls. "How much they seemed to know about everything. I was impressed by most people I met. I was impressed by people that could express themselves. I had no confidence in terms of intellect at all because I'd had absolutely no exposure to it."

            Encouraged by one of the theater company's actor-managers, Connery embarked on a course of self-education. For 18 months, he sat in public libraries, poring over the classics. As a result of this dedicated autodidacticism, his confidence, he says, began to burgeon. "With the acquisition of all that comes a certain baggage. And suddenly one's got an ammunition to deal with others. And if you have any success in your chosen field, you start to develop more, and with that comes the confidence to have more opinions, to, you know, partake more.”

            But this version of his life-as a straight- forward leap from ignorance and self- doubt to empowerment and self-possession-is rather too neat. Even though Connery has long since graduated to the classless world of the movie star, his own class consciousness, and the resentments and insecurities that go with it, seems to have remained with him. He has the slightly rancorous right-wing politics peculiar to those who have been brought up at the wrong end of the British class system. His conversation bristles with what the British call "chippiness"-the state induced by having chips on one's shoulder.

            At one point he tells me about being snubbed by Baroness Thatcher when he suggested a plan for reviving the British film industry. "I approached her about it at the Salzburg Festival, and she gave me a look as if I was asking for a job." (He proceeds to parody Thatcher's dismissal, making her sound like one of the hairy old maiden aunts in an Ealing comedy.) "She was like 'Hwergh mergh, feurghh, wergggh'-some shit. And that was it! End of story!"

            It is impossible not to end up enjoying the frankness of Connery's enmities-the steadfastness of his refusal to schmooze. For all his spleen, there is not a trace of actorish angst in him. Connery doesn't flash you ingratiating orange-peel smiles and beg you to like him. He isn't wondering whether he has spinach in his teeth or how his last sentence sounded. In the best tradition of male heartthrobs, he doesn't seem to give a damn. As evening falls in the Bahamas, the half-light of dusk doesn't soften up his features much, and the rock in him shows no sign of crumbling. "I think that people's faces do express the lives they've led," he says, persuaded at last to talk seriously about his looks. "People who've done quite a lot in their lives have faces that show that. I'm not as old as Hemingway or Picasso were when they died. But I hope I'm on my way to getting their kinds of faces. You remember what Picasso was like?" He pauses, visualizing the painter's face. "It's something to do with an appetite- with being alive."