‘That’s Our Bond!’
It took years of trying before a proper film adaptation of a James Bond novel was finally produced, with the release of Dr. No in 1962. Along the way, there were false starts, abandoned suitors, and an author, Ian Fleming, who was very particular about what could be done to his work and by whom. The biggest question of all, of course, was who would play Agent 007; producers Harry Saltzman and Albert “Cubby” Broccoli had come to United Artists with a plan to make a whole series of Bond films, so whoever got the part would have to be able to carry multiple movies. Taschen’s massive new book James Bond. Dr. No, written and edited by Paul Duncan, offers an intriguing and colorful journey into the production of the first James Bond movie. The book is filled with detailed script notes, production memos, and call sheets — not to mention more than a thousand images — that take us behind the scenes of the film. Perhaps the most fascinating story in it, however, concerns how a relatively little-known actor by the name of Sean Connery got the part of Bond. In this exclusive excerpt, Duncan tells the tale of Connery’s casting as well as how director Terence Young took the working-class actor under his wing and schooled him in how to actually play the high-living, suave Bond.
My books,” said Ian Fleming, “tremble on the brink of corn. One has to be very careful.”
United Artists announced the deal with producers Albert “Cubby” Broccoli and Harry Saltzman on June 29. Although Variety reported that either Dr. No or Diamonds Are Forever would be the first James Bond novel to be filmed, the producers wanted to film Ian Fleming’s most recent and most successful novel, Thunderball, the rights to which they had been led to believe would be made available soon. However, United Artists had different ideas. According to company chief David Picker, “Harry and Cubby pushed for Thunderball, but it was clear that since we were only prepared to risk a certain amount of money on these movies, Dr. No was the one to do first. It was the cheapest one to make.”
Four days later Bud Ornstein of United Artists’ London office sent production company EON a £3,000 check as an advance to Wolf Mankowitz to write the script for the first film, Dr. No, which they hoped to begin shooting before the end of the year. Cubby explained, “Harry and I decided that, since Wolf Mankowitz was a fine writer and had acted as the marriage broker in our partnership, he deserved to have a crack at the screenplay.” At the same time, they hired Richard Maibaum to write the second film, Thunderball, and, as per Maibaum’s assignments with Warwick, arranged for him to travel from Hollywood to live in London so he could be near the producers while he worked.
With work on the scripts in progress, Cubby admitted, “We now had the toughest problem of all: finding the actor to play James Bond.”
“Actors are falling over themselves to play Bond,” Harry told the press. “It’s the acting plum of the decade. Everyone’s been after it. Cary Grant, David Niven, Trevor Howard, and James Mason are interested. Hitchcock wanted to buy it for Cary Grant, and Jimmy Woolf tried to buy it for Larry Harvey. But I guess my timing just happened to be right. I’m also thinking about Michael Craig and Patrick McGoohan, but I’d prefer to use an unknown, as we did with Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.”
“Fleming’s physical descriptions of James Bond were very well drawn,” Cubby explained. “Fleming gives Bond’s height as a little over six feet, his weight as around 167 pounds, and his build slim. Furthermore, the various descriptions confirm that Bond possesses ‘dark, rather cruel good looks,’ and that women find him devastatingly irresistible. Well, we had our blueprint, but where was there an actor to fit it?
“I felt that we had to have an unknown actor, not a star; above all, a man you’d believe could be James Bond. Our theory was that if we cast a virtually unknown actor, the public would be more likely to accept him as the character. Also, we wanted to build the actor into the role so that he would grow with it and wouldn’t complain if we wanted him to do several more Bonds. Patrick McGoohan had been suggested [he was starring as secret agent John Drake in the TV series Danger Man], and might have made a fine Bond. But he was strongly religious and was uneasy about sex and violence. James Fox was also put forward, but he, likewise, was reluctant because of strong religious scruples.
“Roger Moore [then starring in American TV show Maverick] had also been touted as a possible Bond. But at that time I thought him slightly too young, perhaps a shade too pretty. He had what we called the ‘Arrow collar’ look: too buttoned-down smart.
“While all the discussions about the casting of Bond were going on, one face kept coming back into my mind. It belonged to an actor I had met briefly a few years before in London. He was Sean Connery, who at that time was making a film with Lana Turner, Another Time, Another Place (1958). He was a handsome, personable guy, projecting a kind of animal virility. He was tall, with a strong physical presence, and there was just the right hint of threat behind that hard smile and faint Scottish burr.
“Back in Hollywood I had arranged to see the only footage available on him, Darby O’Gill and the Little People (1959), at Goldwyn Studios [on June 28, 1961]. I phoned Dana to come down to see the picture. Dana’s reaction was immediate: ‘That’s our Bond!’ She thought he would be absolutely ideal for the role. I knew that her judgment was spot-on. I phoned Harry and told him to run some film on Sean, call his agent, and invite the actor to our office in London to meet us on my return.”
In June 1961, Sean Connery had finished filming the comedy On the Fiddle at Shepperton Studios, where he played a soldier with the strength of five men but the brains of only half of one, and was rehearsing Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina for the BBC with Claire Bloom in the title role. Peter Hunt, the editor of On the Fiddle, remembered, “One night the producer Ben Fisz and myself and a group of people were having dinner in the Polish Club, and Harry Saltzman came into the club with his new wife. We all sat together and that was when Harry said he was going to make this James Bond film and was looking for a James Bond. Ben Fisz suggested that maybe Sean would make a good James Bond. We were well into the film and on the way to dubbing it, so I sent up a couple of reels to Harry’s office.”
Harry remembered looking at several of Connery’s early films. “He was dreadful in most of them, we thought. He had suffered a small but fatal miscasting all the way down the line.”
Harry, Cubby, and Bud Ornstein waited for their potential star. Connery arrived wearing baggy trousers, loafers, and a five o’clock shadow. “Connery walked into our office and had a strength and energy about him, which I found riveting,” Cubby recalled. “Physically, and in his general persona, he was too much of a rough cut to be a replica of Fleming’s upper-class secret agent. This suited us fine, because we were looking to give our 007 a much broader box-office appeal: a sexual athlete who would look great in Savile Row suits but with the lean midriff of a character who starts his day with 20 push-ups. Everything about Connery that day was convincingly James Bond. Harry and I asked him a lot of questions. His answers, in that very appealing Scottish accent of his, were friendly and direct. There was no conceit to him and no false modesty, either. He didn’t come on in the style of a classical actor who thought James Bond was a little too down-market for his talents.
“There was, though, a slight change of tone in him when we got around to talk about specifics: the image we wanted to create and the money he expected to earn. Everybody accepted that, on a strictly limited production budget, big salaries were out. When we explained this to Sean the discussion became very lively. He started hammering the desk, his accent becoming even broader: ‘I want fooking so much or I won’t do the fooking picture! I won’t work for fooking nothing!’ And so forth. It was quite a performance. Privately, I was quite amused by it. And I gather that Sean himself admitted sometime later that it had been a bit of an act. But it all ended in a friendly way. We agreed on his salary, and he walked out happy.”
Cubby left for New York, to meet with United Artists, armed with photos of Sean Connery. He reported back to Harry on August 23 via a short, succinct cable: “[Bob] Blumofe [vice-president in charge of production] reports New York did not care for Connery feels we can do better.”
However, as Cubby recalled, “We dug our heels in then, insisting that Connery was the man we wanted, and we weren’t searching any further.”
Meanwhile, the script was going through some extreme changes. “When Wolf and I began working on the script,” Maibaum recalled, “we decided that Fleming’s Dr. No was the most ludicrous character in the world. He was just Fu Manchu with two steel hooks. It was 1961, and we felt that audiences wouldn’t stand for that kind of stuff anymore. So, bright boys that we were, we decided that there would be no Dr. No. There would be a villain who always had a little monkey sitting on his shoulder, and the monkey would be Dr. No.”
The writers were trying to utilize the real-world tension between East and West after the disaster of the Bay of Pigs invasion early in 1961, and they anticipated the Cuban missile crisis, which started in October the following year and put the world on the brink of nuclear war.
“Wolf and I thought it was marvelous, and we showed it to Cubby and Harry. Cubby was outraged, in his usual good-natured way. ‘You’ve got to throw the whole damn thing out. No monkey, d’you hear? It’s got to be the way the book is!’ He made a very strong point about it.
“Now I think about it, it was just a temporary collaborators’ aberration. But Cubby wasn’t going to forget it. Even now, 15 films later, if we got into an argument — we argued all the time — he hit me with ‘DR. NO IS A MONKEY!,’ which I can’t argue with, since he had the treatment on hand to prove it!”
The production had its star, but there was still the question of how James Bond, the character, would be portrayed. “Ian Fleming attended several of our meetings well before the picture started,” Cubby remembered. “It was good having him around. He never interfered in any way. There was no agreement giving him approval of the scripts, but we let him see them just the same, partly as a courtesy but mainly because we valued his expertise. After one of our meetings Ian sent me a fascinating memorandum which must be the definitive thesis on the way James Bond should be structured and played.”
Ian Fleming wrote, “James Bond is a blunt instrument wielded by a government department. He is quiet, hard, ruthless, sardonic, fatalistic. In his relationships with women he shows the same qualities as he does in his job, but he has a certain gentleness with them, and if they get into trouble he is sometimes prepared to sacrifice his life to rescue them. But not always, and certainly not if it interferes with his job. He likes gambling, golf, and fast motor cars.”
Cubby recalled, “So, incidentally, did Ian — and guns, espionage, and beautiful women, particularly in the uniform of the Women’s Royal Navy Service. He’d have given anything, I imagine, to have been James Bond.”
Ian Fleming continued, “Neither Bond nor his chief, M, should initially endear themselves to the audience. They are tough, uncompromising men and so are the people who work for and with them.”
Concurrent with script development, Harry and Cubby were looking for a director. Cubby recalled, “There was no great stampede to take on the job. I asked Guy Green, then Guy Hamilton, both with fine track records, to consider directing the picture. They turned it down. I talked to Ken Hughes, who had directed The Trials of Oscar Wilde for me and won universal praise for it, but he declined. Maybe they all thought the idea wasn’t good enough, corny perhaps. We finally offered the job to Terence Young, who had done such good work for me before.”
Young had directed four movies for Warwick Productions and 13 other productions, including Action of the Tiger (1957), in which Sean Connery appeared in a supporting role. Young signed a contract on October 15 and committed to 26 weeks’ work on the film.
Young remembered, “I knew Ian Fleming, but I never particularly liked him. I thought he was a pompous son of a bitch, immensely arrogant. When we met just after I’d been signed to do the picture at some big press show put on by United Artists, he said, ‘So they’ve decided on you to fuck up my work.’
“I said, ‘Well, let me put it this way, Ian, I don’t think anything you’ve written is immortal as yet, whereas the last picture I made [Black Tights] won [the Special Golden Award] at Venice. Now let’s start level.’ He said, ‘My, you’re a prickly guy, aren’t you?’ and I said, ‘Yes I am, now let’s go and have dinner quietly,’ which we did. We left the party and went off and had dinner.
“We eventually became enormously good friends. Ian was an intensely shy person, which never showed.
“I don’t care what anybody says, Ian obviously had some wish fulfillment in James Bond; I’m convinced there was an awful lot of Bond in his own makeup. I knew him well enough to ask him; there was no actual person who was James Bond, despite all the theories. Bond was how Fleming saw himself; the sardonic, cruel mouth; the hard, tight-skinned face. Ian was a charmer, though, once you got to know him. He was one of the most delightful people I ever met.”
Cubby commented that Young “was well educated, had done war service, and had a rapport with the higher echelons of the British establishment — all useful to bringing out the subtleties of the James Bond character.
“We had faith in his ability to put flesh on what was basically a two-dimensional character. He could also write and help out with the dialogue, which is a much tougher challenge than it might seem.
“Harry and I offered Terence a smaller, but still sizable, salary, plus a percentage of the profits. He was adamant: he preferred the cash.”
Young got a flat fee of £17,500 for directing the movie.
On October 24, Bob Simmons was hired as stunt coordinator. He had performed stunts on four of Terence Young’s films: “Terence was the best director they could have found to get the Bond films off to a cracking start. Terence never looked anything less than immaculate on the set. Even directing the most action-packed scenes in casual gear, his slacks had knife-edge creases, his cardigan looked laundry-fresh. On any film, whenever I saw him, he always had a Mercedes, Rolls, or a Bentley, and an unbelievable string of phone calls from something like 40 femmes trying to be fatale. And throughout it all he remained cucumber cool.
“My favorite memory was one shot where he had two cameras on the action and he was darting, diving, ducking about everywhere sizing up the angles. It was fascinating to watch. Suddenly he put out a hand, clicked his fingers — and there at his side was a tall, willowy, very gay fellow with dyed ginger hair holding out a tray with a nice bucket and a glass. Suitably chilled, of course. Another flick of Terence’s finger and this fellow proceeded to fill his glass with Champagne — smack in the middle of some hectic filming, with Terence not once taking his eye from the action! He traveled first class, did Terence. Very stylish. Very ’60s. Very Bond.”
Cubby said, “Once we had signed Sean Connery — for one Bond film and one non-Bond picture a year — we threw everything into grooming him for the part. The way Bond dressed was intrinsic to the character. We’re talking about an ex-Eton type who mixed with the aristocracy, belonged to the most exclusive clubs, gambled at Monte Carlo, and wore handmade silk shirts and Sea Island cotton pajamas.”
“It was Terence, really, who took me in hand,” recalled Sean Connery, “and knocked me into shape with his tailor, Anthony Sinclair, and the Turnbull & Asser shirts and all the gear.”
“Terence persuaded him,” Cubby continued, “to go out in the evenings wearing the clothes, so that he’d feel more and more at ease in them. We wanted him to get used to his Savile Row gear the way any good actor gets to know his costume.”
Bob Simmons recalled, “Terence insisted that Sean actually sleep in his Savile Row suit, together with his shirt collar and tie, so that he could wear it with the ease and nonchalance everyone associated with Bond.”
Cubby recalled, “Terence also took him out to lunch and dinner a couple of times in the most exclusive restaurants, with the sole purpose of developing Bond’s pretensions as a wine and food expert. We wanted to underscore the character a bit; make him look used to ordering Mouton Rothschild ’53 or Taittinger’s Blanc de Blanc in restaurants; the sort of chap who’d go to Fortnum’s to buy Norwegian Heather Honey on his way to have a last made by the royal shoemaker.
“We were lucky in one sense. I believe that Terence Young, like Ian Fleming, subconsciously saw himself as James Bond. He had a fair claim to the fantasy. Harrow, Cambridge, then service with the Guards Armoured Division during the war: He certainly had the background. He’d read the books, too, was a bon viveur and knew the odd countess here and there. The upshot of all this was that Sean took all the Bond trappings and used them to play the role the way he saw it.”
Excerpted from TASCHEN’s James Bond. Dr. No by Paul Duncan. Reprinted by permission of TASCHEN, EON Productions Limited and Danjaq LLC.
James Bond. Dr. No.