Cubby Broccoli: the man who served up James Bond

The James Bond producer Cubby Broccoli, born 100 years ago on Sunday, gets a season dedicated to his films at the BFI. Wendy Ide of The Times looks at the life of a legend.

Luxor, Egypt, 1976. There are rumblings of discontent among the crew of The Spy Who Loved Me. Like an army, a movie crew marches on its stomach and, thanks to the dubious catering in Egypt, they are running on empty. The producer Cubby Broccoli orders a refrigerated lorry full of tasty tuck from Britain, but when it arrives, they discover that the fridge is turned off and the food is ruined.

Always a calm head in a crisis, Broccoli commandeers a Jeep and some crew, drives into the local town and buys every tin of tomatoes he can lay his hands on, orders in an emergency supply of pasta, rolls up his sleeves and cooks up a feast for a crew of more than 100 people. Cubby and Roger Moore serve the meal and another on-set disaster is averted.

It’s a story typical of Albert R. Broccoli, a man who treated everyone he ever worked with as a member of his extended family and who believed that there were few problems in life that weren’t improved by large portions of pasta. Cubby Broccoli remained Italian-American through and through. A larger-than-life character both in personality and his ever-increasing girth, Broccoli needed Italian home cooking like other people need air.

The only thing bigger than Broccoli’s personality was his impact on popular cinema of the past 50 years. And it is this, in the centenary of Broccoli’s birth, that the BFI is celebrating with a two-month season of his films, starting on April 8. But while plenty of producers achieve box-office success, fewer seem to accrue the goodwill that surrounds the Broccoli name from almost everyone who encountered him.

The notable exception was Sean Connery, who felt that he should have been paid more for his work as Bond and carped to the press about “a lot of fat-slob producers living off the backs of lean actors”. But even Connery put aside his grudges before Broccoli died in 1996, calling the family as soon as he learnt that Cubby was ill.

According to Barbara, Broccoli’s daughter, and his stepson Michael Wilson, the secret of his success was that, even at the height of his fame, he never lost touch with his roots. Cubby (the nickname came from the young Albert’s resemblance to a cartoon character, Abie Kabibble) was the son of a housekeeper and a hod-carrier, raised to respect hard graft by working on his family’s farm. One of his first jobs in Los Angeles was hawking Christmas trees from a street corner and sleeping with them at night to safeguard his investment. Wilson says: “He never took it for granted. He always felt he was lucky to make the films and put his heart and soul into them.” Barbara adds: “He treated everybody the same. There were no affectations. He went from being a farm boy to a successful Hollywood producer but he didn’t really alter.”

Broccoli’s first brush with the glamour of Hollywood came when he visited his cousin, the agent and man-about-town Pat DiCicco, in Los Angeles. Within a few days the self-described “hick from the country” had met Cary Grant and Randolph Scott. He had lost $3 gambling, to a stranger who turned out to be Howard Hughes.

That chance encounter was the start of a firm friendship between Broccoli and the brilliant, eccentric billionaire producer and aviator, and those first few days in LA fired a love affair with the world of film that would last a lifetime.

“It’s an exciting business,” Barbara Broccoli says. “It’s hard not to find it intoxicating. It takes you places that you can’t imagine having access to otherwise.” She described Cubby’s experience working as an assistant on Hughes’s picture The Outlaw. “One of his jobs was to go and wake the Native Americans every morning because they needed them as extras. He would go wandering out into the wilderness looking for them because they were all sleeping outside. And they were all covered in frost from spending the night in the desert. How would you experience anything like that if it wasn’t for the film world?”

The former Bond and close friend of Broccoli Sir Roger Moore recalls one of Cubby’s anecdotes about his time working with Hughes. Cubby had run up huge debts with a local florist sending flowers on behalf of Hughes to his numerous and varied conquests. But when the young Cubby tentatively broached the outstanding bill, Hughes, who, as was his habit, was locked in the toilet and refused to come out, denied all knowledge. “Cubby said he was sweating outside of the bathroom, waiting for approval. Eventually there was a lot of laughter inside and ten dollar bills came sliding under the toilet door, one by one. Howard was a bit sadistic.”

But although Broccoli learnt his trade in Hollywood, his producing career took off in the UK, where he took advantage of a government subsidy for films made in Britain with British crews. “He just loved it when he got here,” Barbara says. “He felt very comfortable here. He loved the British sense of humour.” It’s no exaggeration to say that, particularly thanks to his contribution to the Bond franchise, Broccoli was among the most dynamic and influential figures to have worked in British cinema.

In his early producing days, Broccoli quickly perfected the art of celebrity wrangling. He was forced to share his tent with Victor Mature, a self-confessed “snivelling coward”, during the making of the 1956 film Safari (Mature reasoned that if anyone was going to be safe from wild animals, it would be the producer). And on the Caribbean shoot for Fire Down Below, Broccoli was the only man brave enough to dump a bucket of water over a comatose Robert Mitchum to wake up the boozy actor.

But it is the Bond films, of course, that made Broccoli a household name. “Success came late in life,” Barbara says. “And he had a very harsh time just before. His wife died of cancer, he went bankrupt, he had two little children. So he had to reinvent himself. Then he met my mother [Broccoli’s beloved third wife, Dana] and she helped him with that. I think that was one of the reasons he never took anything for granted because he knew how quickly it could all be taken away.”

Broccoli had long believed that Ian Fleming’s Bond stories would translate to cinema. But not everyone shared his vision. An early treatment by the writers of Dr No suggested that the eponymous evil supercriminal should turn out to be a monkey — a marmoset to be precise. The casting of Bond proved equally problematic. When Sean Connery was suggested, the studio, United Artists, curtly cabled back: “No. Keep trying.” The reaction of the film’s director, Terence Young, to Connery was even less promising: “Oh, disaster, disaster, disaster!” Even the finished film failed to convince the American bookers, who threatened to show the film at an Oklahoma drive-in rather than premiere it in LA or New York.

Of all the Bonds, Cubby had a particularly strong friendship with Roger Moore, with whom he shared a sense of humour and a love of high-stakes backgammon. “We would say terrible things,” Moore recalls. “I could get away with it, I suppose. Cubby would walk on set and I would say: ‘Oh that’s great, we don’t have to light it any more because the sun shines out of Cubby’s arse!’ ” The pair delighted in playing pranks on each other. Barbara recalls an incident when Cubby dumped a large pot of flour and water paste over Moore to jeopardise his plan of taking one of Bond’s bespoke suits home with him. Wilson adds: “Then Roger ran away, showered and combed his hair and came back wearing a duplicate suit that he had already stored away safely.”

According to Moore, the secret to their enduring friendship was the fact that they never discussed business. “Agents and lawyers do that. I forget what film it was, but negotiations were going on while we were filming. Cubby was obviously thinking about this and we were playing backgammon. He picks up the cup to roll the dice and he’s just about to spill the dice across the board and he looks at me and he says: ‘You can tell your agent to go shit in his hat!’ Then threw the dice. That’s the closest we ever got to discussing business.”

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