Last Man Standing: Tales from Tinseltown (17 page)

Derek, sensing that there could be trouble brewing with Jack’s somewhat misplaced feeling of self-importance, said, ‘Jack, look at you and then look at all these herberts here. You’re the perfect physical specimen, aren’t you?’

Jack was forced to nod in agreement.

‘Well, then. Which one of these herberts could
possibly
double you?’

Jack did the scene himself.

Being a cowardly actor, having to play heroes means I’m in no small way indebted to the stunt boys. Nosher Powell was the senior member of the Powell dynasty of stuntmen and
in between film stunt work, he used to look after security at the Jack of Clubs, a club underneath the famous Isow’s Restaurant on Brewer Street in Soho, which was run by Jack Isow’s son.

One night Nosher said to him, ‘This group that just came in, I think they’re going to be trouble and we should get them out.’

‘No, they’ll be fine,’ he assured Nosh.

Three or four hours later, a £500 bar tab had been run up and the group started to get up to leave. Remember, this was a few years ago and £500 was worth a lot more then. Nosher stood at the top of the stairs, ‘Look, boys, you owe a heck of a lot of money and you’re not leaving until you pay.’

‘Oh yeah?’ they said. ‘Who’s going to stop us, you and whose fucking army?’

‘Just me and my dog.’

With that, Nosh pulled round his huge German shepherd dog, which was snarling and salivating at the end of a leash.

‘Oh, and what’s your dog gonna do, Nosh?’

‘Well, when I say “attack”, he attacks,’ replied Nosher.

‘Well, let’s see then,’ they goaded.

‘Attack!’ Nosher commanded. With that, there was a terrible sound of snarling and the crunch of bones, and blood squirted everywhere as dog tore trousers, ripping into the flesh beneath ... and poor old Nosh was flat on his back trying to push the damn thing off!

The gang, in hysterics, threw the £500 on top of Nosher, thanking him for the best laugh they’d had in years.

Speaking of stuntmen, one rather famous one whom I won’t name ... let’s call him Roy ... was late reporting on set at Elstree Studios one day for a sequence in an episode of
The Saint
. It turned out that he was on an adjacent stage, upstairs in a dressing room. In fact he was in the wardrobe peeping out as one of his fellow stuntmen gave the horizontal performance of
his
life with a young aspiring starlet. All the time this was going on, our Assistant Director was calling out, ‘Roy! You’re wanted on set! Roy!’

After reaching the inevitable conclusion, our intrepid hero waited a few moments before he made good his exit from the wardrobe and dashed down the stairs, five at a time, towards the stage where the call of ‘Roy! Roy! We’re waiting!’ was becoming more and more audible around the entire studio. However, he missed his footing on the last stair, sprained his ankle and was unable to work for days. Voyeurism is not without its penalties!

I used to love spending time with the stunt boys, over dinner or a game of cards between set-ups. I always enjoyed hearing all their stories. One in particular that tickled me was of a card game organized when filming
El Cid.
Apparently one of the local boys had a terrible habit of slamming his hand of cards down with great force whenever he had a win. It rather annoyed the other boys, so the next day they decided to rig the table with charges and, when a winning hand was slammed down, the whole table went up in smoke.

There was another occasion I witnessed when I was on set with one of the elder statesmen of stuntmen. During breaks, he used to enjoy sitting in a chair and puffing on his old pipe and on this particular day he nodded off mid-puff. His kind and caring colleagues gently removed
the pipe from his mouth, filled it with gunpowder and carefully placed it back. When he awoke from his slumber, he relit his pipe and there was the most almighty bang. Our friend’s only reaction was to blow the cloud of smoke away, revealing his blackened face, and say, ‘That tobacco’s a bit fucking strong!’

My wonderful long-time stunt double and co-ordinator Martin Grace was quite probably the bravest man I ever knew. We’d worked together on about a dozen films and his easy-going Irish charm made him a firm favourite with everyone on the crew, though curiously nobody really ever got to know much about Martin himself. That’s the way he liked it, I guess.

In October 2008 we met up at Pinewood for a reunion dinner centred around
The Spy Who Loved Me
and picked up the conversation just as though the intervening fifteen years hadn’t occurred. There in the magnificent Pinewood Ballroom we met up with so many other Bond alumni, including director John Glen, writer Christopher Wood, stars Richard Kiel, Caroline Munro, Valerie Leon, Shane Rimmer and a host of wonderful friends from behind the camera. As I bade goodnight to Martin, I never for one moment thought it would be the last time I saw my super-fit friend.

Two years later, at his home in Spain, Martin was involved in a cycling accident that, on the face of it, seemed rather trivial compared to some of the great stunts he’d dared in my name, and indeed breaking almost every bone
in his body on a train stunt in
Octopussy
, but there were (unknown) complicating factors and aged just sixty-seven Martin died in hospital.

My fearless stunt double and dear friend Martin Grace stood in for me in many of my outings as Jimmy Bond.

I subsequently discovered – as did many of Martin’s mates – that he had a daughter from a short-lived marriage. I know she was incredibly proud of her father too. In death Martin was, as in life, an enigma but one to whom I owe such a great debt – as he made this coward look like a hero.

When tragic fatalities have happened while filming movies, canny producers have sometimes turned a disadvantage into quite the opposite in terms of publicity. For example, when Oliver Reed was filming
Gladiator
in Malta and, true to character, enjoying a few drinks in a local pub on his day off, he reportedly consumed liberal amounts of beer, suffered a massive heart attack and died. With most of his scenes in the can, the producers used a CGI mask on a double to complete the outstanding sequences and billed it as Reed’s last film – and it was actually one of his best performances. A similar thing happened on
The Misfits
when Clark Gable died before shooting had ended, and though CGI wasn’t around then, a body double was used.

Other actors who died mid-shoot and were doubled include John Candy, Bruce Lee, Heath Ledger and Donald Pleasence. A sense of morbid curiosity may have helped to fill seats, but ultimately I don’t think any of their final films fared tremendously well – you just can’t fake a star’s power (or even double it) and that was certainly the case when, aged just forty-four, Tyrone Power dropped dead on the set of
Solomon and Sheba
in Madrid.

Tyrone’s wife, Deborah, had asked the director King Vidor to ease the schedule but after a prolonged sword-fight scene with George Sanders, wearing heavy robes and working with real Roman swords that weighed fifteen pounds, on an elevated staircase landing, Sanders wasn’t pleased with some of the shots and asked that the scene be shot over. Finally, after the eighth take, Tyrone said he could stand no more and threw down his sword.

‘If you can’t find anything there you can use, just use the close-ups of me,’ he said angrily. ‘I’ve had it!’

A short time later, after complaining of being tired and feeling pain in his arm, Tyrone was rushed to hospital, where he died within the hour. Tyrone Power had filmed seventy-five per cent of his scenes and, in order that the film could be completed, was replaced by Yul Brynner – who had to wear a wig.

Perhaps the most exploitative of all stories, and one which did curiously benefit the project, was when director Ed Wood filmed just a couple of minutes of silent footage of Bela Lugosi wearing a cape for a planned vampire project that never came to fruition. After Lugosi died, Wood decided to use the footage in
Plan 9 From Outer Space
and edited it into his movie multiple times. A body double, Tom Mason – who looked absolutely nothing like Lugosi – was brought in to finish the film. Totally nonsensical, the film is regarded as one of the worst films ever made, though ironically it’s now a cult classic.

Good guy or rascal? You decide. Robert ‘Bobbie’ Newton in one of his most famous roles as Long John Silver in
Treasure Island
.

CHAPTER 5

The Good Guys (and a Few Rascals)

W
HEN
I
LOOK BACK OVER MY LIFE
I
CAN
’
T QUITE BELIEVE
I’ve counted some of my childhood acting heroes as being friends, co-stars and drinking buddies. I suppose I first met Gregory Peck sometime in the early 1970s, at the home of David Niven on Cap Ferrat in the South of France. They had been friends for years and Greg (along with his lovely wife, Veronique) became one of my dearest friends.

Greg had been a huge star from the 1940s and of course won the Academy Award for his role in
To Kill a Mockingbird
in 1962. As is often the way in this business, by the mid-70s leading roles in big films were not coming his way, but then he was cast in a fairly modest British-made horror film called
The Omen
. My dear old pal, publicist Jerry Pam, handled PR for the film, though ironically the studio told Jerry not to focus on Greg as they didn’t think he was ‘box office’ enough; so instead Jerry centred his campaign around the sign of the beast
– ‘666’. It was massively successful, the film became box-office dynamite, and Greg’s star shone brightly once again, leading to terrific roles in
The Boys from Brazil
and then
The Sea Wolves
with yours truly.