Hello Goodbye Hello: A Circle of 101 Remarkable Meetings (36 page)

Broccoli and his co-producer Harry Saltzman watch from their first-floor office as Lazenby crosses the road to their office. They are impressed by his self-assurance, and even more impressed when he darts past the receptionist and bolts upstairs, just like James Bond.

In his interview, he exudes a winning mix of defiance and indifference. When they offer him a screen test, he demands payment, and they agree to it. ‘Everyone was impressed by Lazenby. The infallible litmus test was to parade him in front of the office secretaries. Their eyes lit up as he swung past their desks and through to our office. Six foot two inches tall – the same height as Connery – he was a 186-pounder who knew how to walk tall and put himself over,’ says Broccoli.

Lazenby’s cocky persona is not contrived. ‘They tested three hundred actors on film and no one had what Connery had, that self-assurance with women, but I certainly did.
¹⁶¹
I’d been a model, had just hit London in the Swinging Sixties and was having a great time playing around with the girls there. I was always running around with a grin on my face.’ His cockiness extends to fibbing: he tells the casting director he has already made movies in Russia, Germany and Hong Kong, though he has never acted before.

At the screen test, Broccoli asks him to perform a fight sequence with an assassin. In the heat of the moment, Lazenby punches the assassin – a professional wrestler – in the face, thus further impressing Broccoli with his manliness. The role is his.

Soon after the filming of
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
begins,
¹⁶²
Broccoli’s admiration for Lazenby begins to wane. He dislikes the way he
is already behaving like a superstar, demanding special treatment and quarrelling with chauffeurs. At one point, his co-star Telly Savalas takes him to one side and advises him to stop being so difficult. By the end, the director, Peter Hunt, will speak to him only through a middle man. As Broccoli watches him lord it over everybody, it occurs to him that Lazenby is sawing off the branch he is sitting on.

Nevertheless, he is judged to have acquitted himself reasonably well as James Bond, and they offer him $1 million to play the role again. Lazenby demands twice the amount. They turn him down, and he subsequently announces his retirement on
The Johnny Carson Show
. Both Carson and the audience burst into laughter, assuming he is joking. Watching on television, Broccoli and Saltzman are furious, believing it will cause damage at the box office. Lazenby further infuriates them by making no effort to look like Bond: he is dressed like a hippy, with long hair and a beard.

Years later, George Lazenby regrets his prima-donna behaviour. ‘The trouble was I lived Bond out of the studios as well as in. I had to have a Rolls-Royce to go around in, and women just threw themselves at me if I stepped into a nightclub. I couldn’t count the parade that passed through my bedroom. I became hot-headed, greedy and big-headed. I got on the bandwagon and said I must be who they say I am and demanded limousines and did the whole bit, which was obnoxious and arrogant and all the things you hate about those people. I got what I deserved and had a long slide down, which was much harder than going up.’ He blames his decision to abandon Bond on his manager. ‘Ronan advised me: “Bond is over, finished, anyway it’s Sean Connery’s gig and you cannot match that guy. We’ll make other movies.” I listened to him. I thought he knew what it was all about, but I was dumb. I missed out on everything.’
¹⁶³

NAMES NAMES TO

Studio 5B, London Weekend Television

February 8th 1970

The new James Bond, George Lazenby, is promoting
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
. He is booked to appear with his co-star, Diana Rigg, on the first half of
The Simon Dee Show
, before John Lennon and Yoko Ono come on for the second half. What can possibly go wrong?

Since he transferred from the BBC to LWT a month ago, Simon Dee has been feeling increasingly unwanted. ‘I found myself not where I wanted to be, not on the television network I wanted, not on the day that I wanted, not with the guests that I wanted ... and in a general state of mental decay.’

His BBC show,
Dee Time
, first broadcast in April 1967, made him one of the most famous men in Britain. Originally spotted when starring in an advertisement for Smith’s Crisps, for three years he embodied the sixties dream, hosting his own chat show (‘It’s Siiiiiiimon Deeeee!’), dashing up and down the King’s Road in an Aston Martin, hosting the Miss World competition, presenting an award to the Beatles and numbering Michael Caine (‘Mike’) and Roger Moore (‘Rog’) among his famous friends. Every Saturday evening, up to eighteen million viewers regularly tuned in to
Dee Time
.

But as his fame grew, so too did his sense of entitlement. He became more and more difficult with his colleagues, his bosses, his studio audiences. Before long, he insisted on choosing his guests, and threatened to walk out whenever he didn’t get his way. When the time came to renew his contract, he strode into the office of the Head of BBC Light Entertainment and demanded more money. But Billy Cotton called his bluff, offering him 20 per cent less ‘to test his loyalty’.

He failed the test, and left for London Weekend Television, but the audience for his new show – transmitted at 11 p.m. on Sunday nights – rarely
reaches a million. He is unhappy and increasingly paranoid. He has always been prone to constructing clandestine explanations for humdrum events, but his sense of a conspiracy is escalating. He complains that he has spotted men in black hunched behind hedgerows, taking photographs of him; he is also convinced his telephone is bugged. Some blame his paranoia on marijuana, but he argues that, on the contrary, it is marijuana that keeps him sane.

Dee greets his first guest in the green room. (Oddly enough, Dee too auditioned for James Bond; he tells friends he was rejected simply because he was too tall.) His first impression of Lazenby is that he looks nothing like he did as James Bond; he now sports a beard and long hair, and is dressed like a cowboy. But, ever the pro, Dee masks his surprise.

The interview begins very slowly. Lazenby is perhaps a little distant, but Dee sees no real cause for alarm. Then, out of nowhere, Lazenby dips into his pocket, pulls out a piece of paper, turns to the camera and shouts: ‘I would like to draw everybody’s attention to the fact that the following senators were involved in a plot to kill President Kennedy!’

He starts reciting a long list of names. Dee attempts to steer the interview onto another topic by bringing in Diana Rigg. ‘That’s very interesting, George. What does Diana make of all that then? Isn’t she lovely!’

But Lazenby is furious at the interruption, and continues to read his list of murderous senators in a louder and louder voice. An enthusiast for conspiracies, Dee nevertheless realises that naming individual senators as conspirators in a presidential assassination is taking things too far. Across Lazenby’s shoulder, he sees the studio floor manager making furious ‘wind up’ signals to him, but Lazenby proves unstoppable.

Dee attempts to distance himself from Lazenby’s rants by saying, ‘I really don’t know anything about this subject, folks,’ and finally says, ‘Fascinating stuff, George. Thank you. And we’ll be talking to two more fascinating people, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, in just two minutes!’ This is the signal for an advertising break.

The show is recorded a few hours before transmission, so Dee imagines that any offending passages will be edited out. But for some reason they are not. On Monday morning, the newspapers are full of it.

Dee is summoned by Stella Richman, Managing Director of LWT. ‘Who said you could talk about Kennedy?’

‘I didn’t talk about Kennedy. Lazenby did, and it happens to be his right as a guest to talk about anything he likes.’

Richman behaves, in Dee’s opinion, ‘like some demented puppet’, accusing him of plotting the incident. ‘If you ever mention Kennedy on air again I shall tear up your contract. Now leave!’

Dee is affronted. ‘It really was an amazing moment. Here was this female terrier telling me that she had the right to tell me who I could or couldn’t book on my show and what I was supposed to say to them! And if I disagreed with her then I was out of a job!’

The incident fuels Dee’s already highly developed sense of conspiracy. Has he fallen into a carefully laid trap? Conspiracy piles upon conspiracy: he suspects Lazenby was put up to it by his old enemy Ronan O’Rahilly, who also talked Lazenby out of renewing his James Bond contract (‘All that Bond stuff’s on the wane, man. Look at
Easy Rider
and things, that’s the way to go’).

But Dee remains bullish. ‘I don’t give a damn. Last night, for this so-called disastrous programme, I had the highest viewing figures ever for a Sunday-night show. I’m supposed to feel ashamed of that? ... So George made a fool of himself, not me. He died the death, baby, not me! It doesn’t worry me, baby! I’m running my show, not anybody else.’

It is the beginning of the end for both host and guest. Soon afterwards, it is announced that this first series of
The Simon Dee Show
on LWT will also be the last.
¹⁶⁴
Dee blames this on his opposition to Britain entering the EEC.

TALKS OF HEAVEN AND HELL WITH

Studio 5B, London Weekend Television

June 5th 1970

The meteoric career of Simon Dee, King of the Chat Show, is on the point of disintegration. Over the past few months he has rubbed everyone up the wrong way.
¹⁶⁵
His paranoia has produced the enemies of which he had once only dreamed.

Tonight’s show is to be his last. The only remaining topic for discussion is his severance pay. ‘The company is in no mood to be generous with compensation,’ reports the
Sunday Telegraph
.

Dee casts around for explanations of his downfall beyond his opposition to Britain’s entry into the Common Market, and finds one in the looming presence of his rival chat-show host, David Frost:
Frost on Sunday
is broadcast in the prime evening slot of 7.25, whereas
The Simon Dee Show
goes out much later, and at no set time. Dee’s guests are seldom advertised in advance, whereas Frost’s always are. Moreover, Frost is given the heavyweight guests, while Dee has to make do with novelty acts: one of his recent shows featured Vincent Price poaching a haddock in a dishwasher.

Whenever Dee tries to make his show more interesting, he always seems to slip up. He detects David Frost’s fingerprints on every banana
skin. ‘I think he may have been rather worried that I might be better at it than he was. That he’d be beaten at his own game. Of course, he wasn’t about to allow that.’ Frost is a director of LWT, while Dee is the new boy, given his slot only after having fallen out with the BBC. When the two men pass each other in the corridor, no one ever sees them speak.

On screen, Dee remains as easy-going as ever, the epitome of Sixties Casual. But his end is nigh. Off screen he is more tense and difficult than ever. Only for his very last show is he permitted the sort of heavyweight guest he claims always to have wanted: the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Dr Ramsey and Simon Dee sit opposite each other in leather armchairs, Ramsey in his purple cassock, Dee in his electric-blue suit with matching silk cravat. To the viewers, it looks like a clash between ancient and modern: the venerable Establishment figure, a devoted advocate of silence,
¹⁶⁶
versus the slick and with-it young chat-show host.

And so, for the first few minutes of their conversation, it seems. Dee tries to get Ramsey onto the subject of sex, and succeeds. Ramsey says that he regrets ‘the modern obsession, concentration and attention on nudity and sex. There’s a kind of openness and frankness that is good and wholesome. But it’s absolutely wrong and unnecessary to have this obsession.’

But when Dee decides to quiz him on other aspects of the permissive society, Ramsey shows himself more in tune with the times than Dee expected, and praises elements of the hippy culture. Dee questions him about ‘the people who want peace, and because of their behaviour, and the fact that they don’t fit into any particular slot, are rejected’. But Ramsey comes out in support of the counter-culture: ‘The people are fed up with our civilisation, and the rot that’s in it. They try to escape from it by going into another world.’

Dee affects surprise at these opinions, but Ramsey has, in fact, always
been a liberal. Ten years ago, he defined the ‘three outstanding moral issues’ as the urgent need for disarmament, for radical changes in race relations, and for rich countries to help the poor. In the House of Lords, he has voted for liberalising the laws against homosexuality. He has called for military action against the Ian Smith regime in Rhodesia, and was a vociferous critic of General Pinochet in Chile. In 1967, when the proprietor of
Time
magazine made a jingoistic remark about the Vietnam war in his presence, Ramsey was outraged by his lack of compassion for suffering innocents, and showed him the door.
¹⁶⁷

Dee asks what he imagines to be a ‘cheeky’ question. ‘A colleague of yours in the Anglican Church, another bishop, was recently quoted as saying that he imagined heaven to be the kind of place where Mozart is permanently being played in the background by a kind of otherworldly orchestra and that delicious foie gras is permanently available on tap. Do you agree with him? Is that your vision of heaven too?’

Some of the team consider this a marvellously irreverent question. ‘You should have seen the look on Ramsey’s face!’ says one. ‘He just wasn’t expecting to be asked that!’

In fact, Ramsey has a profound belief in heaven, enriched by his deep knowledge not only of Western Christianity – he was Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge – but also of the Eastern Orthodox Churches. If there is a look of astonishment on Ramsey’s face, it is probably at the glibness of the question. ‘He bubbled with ecstasy over the beatific vision. He had a real sense of joining with angels and archangels here and now in worship,’ comments someone who hears him talk of heaven.