How Sean Connery seduced a movie legend and faced the wrath of the Mafia
12-Aug-2008 • Actor News
Share the Story
Recently a friend paid a visit to Sir Sean Connery's lavish apartment on New York's exclusive Upper East Side, and commented on how far the actor had come since his childhood in the tenements of Edinburgh.
'I'm still having to share a building with some ugly b*****ds,' the star retorted with typical gruffness. 'The only difference is here I've got my own toilet - and don't think I would be afraid to go back to the rough area grew up in.'
It might strain the imagination to see the similarities between the top two floors of a Manhattan brownstone townhouse - so important it is a listed building - and the dank two-room flat that was Connery's home for the first 22 years of his life.
But we should probably put Connery's bad humour down to his ongoing dispute with his neighbour, eye doctor Burton Sultan, who owns the bottom four floors of the building.
The two men have been swopping lawsuits for years, with Dr Sultan claiming Connery is trying to force him out with loud music and noisy renovations.
What is certain is that Connery, who will be 78 this month, has come a long way. Worth a reputed £80 million and knighted in 2000, he also has an ocean-side home in the tax-haven of the Bahamas.
But, as I wrote yesterday, despite his fabulous wealth, he remains strangely insecure on the subject of money.
To this day, it is the single biggest driving force in his life. It has, as we have learned, led him to spectacular fall- outs with some of the most powerful people in Hollywood.
To understand why, it is necessary to go back to Connery's dirt poor beginnings in the tough Fountainbridge district and a red sandstone tenement near Edinburgh's West End.
Next door to a brewery, the rented ground-floor flat consisted of one bedroom and a living room that doubled as a tiny kitchen. There was no hot water. Two toilets on the landing served four families.
When Tommy Connery, as he was then known, was born shortly after
6pm on August 25, 1930, his parents, unable to afford a cot, laid their first child in the open bottom drawer of their bedroom wardrobe.
His father, Joe, worked in the local rubber works and later for Rolls-Royce in Glasgow, but in the depression-hit Thirties he was often out of work. Tommy's mother, Effie, who would give birth to a second son, Neil, eight years later, drummed into her boys the value of thrift and hard work.
The strapping Tommy, known by everyone in Fountainbridge as 'Big Tam', left Darroch Secondary School as soon as he could, aged 13, and often worked three jobs, delivering milk by horse and cart, working at a butcher's shop and doing an evening paper round.
But even from an early age he was keen to escape the grime of his straitened upbringing. The opportunity came, so he thought, by joining the Royal Navy at 16.
Yet instead of seeing the world, he never got farther than Portsmouth and was invalided out less than two years later with stomach ulcers. (During his stint in the Forces, he did, however, get two tattoos on his arms - one proclaiming 'Scotland Forever' and the other 'Mum and Dad'.)
Connery took on a series of dead-end jobs: French-polishing coffins, toiling in the machine room of a newspaper and delivering coal. He also posed nude for artists. It was during a stint as a swimming pool lifeguard that he began to work out in the gym to attract girls.
His new love of bodybuilding led Connery to London to enter the 1953 Mr Universe contest, in which he came third in the junior section.
But the trip also - inadvertently - launched his career in showbusiness. Now calling himself Shane Connery, he heard from a friend that there were parts available in the chorus line of South Pacific.
Connery was not as interested in a life in the theatre as he was in the £12-a-week pay packet. When he was offered the job, his first question was: 'What's the wage?'
The producer airily replied: 'It really doesn't concern me.'
'Well,' barked back Connery, 'it concerns me!'
When the show toured, a football team made up of cast members played a Manchester United youth side. The game was watched by the United manager Matt Busby, who offered to take on the muscular striker at twice what he was earning in South Pacific. But Connery refused the offer, reasoning that his playing career could be over by the time he was 30 and acting could offer him a living for life. It was a wise choice.
By now, Shane had become Sean and he progressed slowly through
a string of lowly theatre and television roles before landing the part of James Bond in 1962.
His short career so far had not, however, been without pitfalls. He was dismissed from an early 1950s stage production after making a cack-handed pass at the show's star Anna Neagle, who was already in her late 40s and nearly 30 years his senior.
Connery could also count himself fortunate that he had stayed alive long enough to bag the part of Bond - a role that would make him the object of a million women's fantasies.
In 1957 he had been cast by Hollywood bombshell Lana Turner as her love interest in a small British-made picture called Another Time, Another Place.
Turner, Hollywood's original 'Sweater Girl', had seen her career go downhill in recent years, and at nearly 40 was already being written off as past it in Tinseltown. Yet despite the age difference - she was more than ten years older than Connery - rumours quickly began circulating on set that the screen lovers had continued the action off screen.
Connery was also seen on her arm at West End shows and in fashionable London restaurants. It did not take long for word of their relationship to travel across the Atlantic to the ears of Turner's hoodlum boyfriend Johnny Stompanato.
Stompanato was a snappily dressed small-time crook with a taste for violence. He had been introduced to the actress by the gambling racketeer Mickey Cohen.
When he heard the stories about her and Connery, a furious Stompanato phoned Turner and threatened to kill her - or at least disfigure her with a knife. He boarded a plane for London to sort out the man he thought was sleeping with his girlfriend.
When the American arrived, Turner tried to have her aggressive boyfriend barred from the set. He
holed himself up, brooding at her rented house in Hampstead.
Then one day, Stompanato, consumed with jealousy and anger, burst into the studios in Borehamwood, Hertfordshire, where Turner and Connery were filming, and waved a gun at Connery, warning him to stay away from the actress. Connery wrestled the gun off him and laid him out cold with a right hook. Turner later had her American boyfriend quietly kicked out of the country by Scotland Yard.
But when she returned to Los Angeles, Stompanato exacted retribution, beating her up and trying to smother her with a pillow.
Then, a few months later, in April 1958, in one of the biggest Hollywood scandals, Turner's 14-year-old daughter Cheryl stabbed Johnny to death with a carving knife in the actress's Beverly Hills home, after witnessing him yet again attacking her mother.
Meanwhile, Connery had been hired by the Walt Disney organisation to play a supporting part in the fantasy tale Darby O'Gill And The Little People. The role required him to make his first visit to Tinseltown.
He checked into the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. One evening he received a call from one of the henchmen of Stompanato's associate Mickey Cohen. Cohen had heard of Connery's involvement with Turner and was set on taking revenge for his friend Stompanato's death.
The message delivered by Cohen's sidekick was simple: 'Get out of town or a contract will be put on your life.'
Connery, not one to be cowed by such threats, did, however, check out, and on the advice of Disney executives laid low at a small guesthouse outside LA as he waited for Cohen's temper to subside.
He began reinventing himself, too, attempting to smooth out his thick Scottish accent and reading the works of Proust and Ibsen.
Central to this transformation was Connery's first wife Diane Cilento, the Australian-born daughter of eminent doctor Sir Raphael Cilento. Rada-trained Diane, who was already a successful actress in her own right, would later spend hours schooling him for the role of the upper-crust Bond.
More bizarrely, the well-bred Diane, whom Connery married in 1962, also introduced her new husband to a string of off-beat alternative therapies.
Their friend, the actor Robert Hardy, remembers staying with the couple in London when he was
rehearsing a West End show in which he was appearing with Diane.
The Connerys had a large box upstairs which looked like a coffin standing on end and was lined in zinc. Each morning Diane and Sean would take turns to get inside. It was, they said, supposed to help concentrate their energies and they both swore by it.
Yet Connery was still seen by many in the acting world as boorish and uncouth. Jill Craigie, the wife of future Labour leader Michael Foot, was horrified when her daughter Julie Hamilton - who was later dumped for Miss Cilento - brought Connery home.
She was even more furious when the ill-mannered Connery let his new girlfriend, who was recovering from a serious back operation, carry his luggage for him up the long track to her mother's house in Ebbw Vale, South Wales.
Despite his wealth and knighthood, a few of the rough edges remain today. Last month, police were called to Connery's New York home as the row with Dr Sultan escalated.
The battle has led his neighbour to describe Sir Sean as a 'rude, foul-mouthed, fat old man' who is wont to answer his door in his dressing-gown looking 'unkempt and dishevelled'.
Nor has his hair-trigger temper been quietened by age. Recently, Connery branded Miss Cilento, whom he was divorced from in 1973, 'insane' after she accused the actor of being a skinflint who had threatened to cut off their only son Jason, 45, without a penny.
Manhattan might seem a long way from Edinburgh's mean streets, but Sir Sean has never truly been able to shake off his impoverished beginnings.
Discuss this news here...
