This cheesily-titled memoir of former James Bond actor Sir Roger Moore details his rise from the son of a police scene-draughtsman, amateur magician, and housewife, through Hollywood bit-player and knitwear catalogue model, to textile executive, Saint and knight. Written in a very straightforward style, the more than occasionally salty book shines with the self-deprecating author’s “terrible practical jokes and schoolboy humour,” surprisingly so, given a life clouded by three divorces and the suicides of many people he knew.
Filled with aptly-textured details of a London boyhood with horse-chestnut games and constant uprooting during the Blitz and seemingly endless trips to the hospital, it progresses to his career in Westerns, Ivanhoe and as Bond.
Throughout, the reader can all but taste the tobacco he describes with a connoisseur’s discernment (he later quit cigarettes but not cigars and became an anti-smoking advocate), the food (including eggs, about which he is particular) can all but see lavish sets and oak-paneled houses, steam rising from raincoats, a dogfight appearing overhead as he swims in a flooded quarry, hear swordplay and glimpse the mysterious and verdant vales of Wales.
The name-dropping is mind-boggling – from Mae West to William Shatner, from Noël Coward to Ronald Reagan, from Elvis Presley to the King and Queen of Sweden. He worked with a disappointingly nice Richard Kiel (Jaws in the Bond films), Jane Seymour (not Henry VIII’s wife), James Mason and Miss Piggy (with whom he confesses a brief relationship). The book is jam-packed with amusing, and, rarely tragic anecdotes about bush babies, “flightless” parrots, crocodiles, double-shadowed noses and amazing stunts, air travel’s history, the advantages of film over video and insights into Bond’s character. The author doesn’t shy away from controversy, from Maurice Binder’s risqué credits to Moore’s filming in apartheid South Africa. Where it is strongest, however, is in its description of the horrors he encountered on his tireless work as an ambassador for UNICEF, particularly against iodide deficiency, and in his country-by-country travelogue at the end.
Moore, asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, said he didn’t want to work. Thus, even as he has been pelted by fake snow including “six inch nails and lumps of wood,” it is appropriate how often he has lived in a spirit of adventure and creativity. Though sometimes he doesn’t come off well in his own book, more important is this spirit, which animates it over and again.