Yahoo Movies Live and Let Die and the behind-the-scenes book that would never be published today
Roger Moore’s The 007 Diaries is one of the most candid and revealing books about moviemaking in the 1970s
In 1973, just as Live And Let Die was to hit cinemas, a book landed that, for the first time, told the full, unexpurgated story behind the filming of a major motion picture.
It’s difficult to imagine a book like 'Roger Moore’s James Bond Diary’, as it was titled back then, being okayed in 2023. PR departments are meticulously well-oiled machines these days, and any on-set happening that reflects badly on the production is — for the most part — kept well under wraps.
Which is why Roger Moore’s The 007 Diaries, as it’s known now, is such a gripping and relentlessly eye-popping read. It’s clear that nobody from Eon, the company behind the James Bond films, or United Artists, the movie’s distributor, went through it with a red pen or passed it by legal.
And even if the movie’s director did ask his star, “Please don’t tell that story about when I stormed off set,” Moore clearly didn’t listen. The set its lead actor paints a picture of is one where tantrums, egos, health-and-safety cock-ups and perpetual hangovers are just part of the movie furniture.
But it’s not just about the ego brawls and on-set calamities; the joy of these diaries, which start with Moore’s first day of filming ('B-Day 1') and end on what the author calls ‘B-Day (Bond Day) 84’, are often the moments in between that give a tantalising glimpse into what the life of a movie star was in 1972.
Moore drops names like carpet bombs, drifting from dinner party to cocktail do, hobnobbing with Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier one day to lunching with Joan and Jackie Collins the next to attending Michael Caine’s welcome home bash the day after.
While those jet-set revelations are to be expected, it’s the peeks into Moore’s domestic life that are the most revealing. It’s all too easy to imagine Bond dining at the same swanky eateries that Moore frequents on a seemingly daily basis, but it’s harder to picture James Bond 007 tucking into a bowl of All-Bran (“My favourite laxative cereal,” Moore quips), eagerly awaiting a supply of Typhoo tea (“The absence of good tea on foreign locations can drive you mad”) or even admitting to pains “in my lower regions” (turns out it’s kidney stones).
There’s a micro rant about the crapness of early morning telly (“a horrifying amount of twaddle is served up at the breakfast hour,” he moans) and the shocking reveal that Moore’s favourite food is not Beluga caviar or grilled sole but tripe (“Italian style,” he adds).
When Moore’s book was re-pressed in 2018, it came with an Editor’s Note, informing us “attitudes that would have once been commonplace are now markedly different, and idioms and expressions that were everyday are now all but obsolete.”
READ MORE: James Bond
It’s to The History Press’ credit that they haven’t tinkered with that original content, the occasional line of which evokes an uncomfortable wince half a century on. At one point, Moore recalls, to his horror he admits, producer Harry Saltzman referring to their props guy by the ‘N’ word, apparently a longtime nickname.
“I pointed out,” Moore writes, “that it might be better to find him another name here in the racial hotbed of Louisiana.” They later settled, he reveals, on ‘Chalky’.
Like the movie itself, race looms large in the book. Describing lensing in Harlem, Moore writes that “there is no welcome for whitey there,” while, on his first day on set, Yaphet Kotto (who plays the villainous Dr Kanaga in the film) performs a Black power salute in front of the world’s press, to the consternation of the movie’s publicity director Derek Coyte.
“Derek pointed out,” writes Moore, “that the pictures would rouse resentment from the rabid whites and could be seen as an endorsement of Black power by militant Blacks.” Moore goes on to reveal that Kotto was “incensed” by Coyte’s response, and that the publicity director was, after the incident, “ostracised” by the movie’s Black cast.
Later, Moore tells how he played an elaborate practical joke on the famously prickly actor. After Kotto had, in a conversation with Moore, berated the Black singer Lovelace Watkins for dying his hair blond (in fact, Moore confirms, “Lovelace’s streaky grey hair must have looked blond on Yaphet’s black and white TV set”), Moore faked a telegram from the singer to Kotto telling him he’d heard what the actor had been saying and that he was coming to see him.
He also convinced co-star Earl Jolly Brown to phone Kotto posing as Lovelace, and mocked up a poster announcing that Watkins had been cast in Live And Let Die. “Yaphet,” Moore wrote, “is going absolutely mad because he is uncertain how much is fact and how much is fiction.”
There are various asides. On one page, Moore discloses that he was screened a reel of film by the New Orleans DA Jim Garrison (later played by Kevin Costner in the 1992 drama JFK) that convinced him that John F Kennedy’s assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was “part of a CIA conspiracy”, and he recounts going to see Sean Connery’s then latest movie, The Offence, at the flicks, telephoning his 007 predecessor afterwards to congratulate him on an “excellent” picture.
Producer Harry Saltzman, meanwhile, comes over as quite the tyrant, berating Live And Let Die’s Production Supervisor for buying the crew drinks, bellowing at Derek Coyte and generally being pretty horrible to restaurant waiters.
Moore doesn’t paint an airbrushed picture of life on a movie set in 1972. There are days of boredom and days of discomfort (he fractured a tooth during one stunt) and, even though it’s his first James Bond movie, it’s clear that the attention of the world’s press is already wearing him down: “I am trying to think of new, bright, intelligent answers to the same questions. ‘How is your Bond going to be different from Sean’s Bond?’ is the inevitable question, to which I inevitably reply, ‘Well, he is he and I am me.’ I get the feeling I always give the same interview; the same answers to the same questions.”
The 007 Diaries is a fascinating and illuminating time capsule from an era when PR and marketing departments had a much looser grip on what stories escaped from a film set. Disarmingly candid and fearlessly honest, it’s a rarefied ‘access all areas’ pass to one of the James Bond greats.
So happy 50th Live And Let Die and a happy half-century to The 007 Diaries, the greatest film tie-in book ever written.
Live and Let Die is available to rent or buy on digital.
