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Sean Connery vs Robert Vaughn: Bedroom Spy vs Living Room Spy - Photoplay Jan 1966

The Undercover Facts: Who Is More Of A Man?

Imagine yourself to be a young aspiring actress. You have been signed to play two small roles. One opposite Sean Connery in a Bond film - the scene being set in a bedroom, and the other with Robert Vaughn, that rugged U.N.C.L.E. agent. With Bob you will play your scene in a living-room. You have never met either Sean or Robert before. You wonder what kind of men they will be. Will they be charming? Will they like you? Will you like them? Well, here is how we imagine your meetings with the screen's top two agents will go. First, the master-spy of the bedroom - Janes Bond, played by Sean Connery...

A tall, rangy man with dark, menacing good looks slithers onto the bedroom set with the slim-hipped grace of a panther on the prowl. He has an undulating, stealthy walk, patented and perfected by Secret Agent 007 James Bond, except that this incarnation of strength and masculinity is no fictional or cinematic character. He is Sean Connery himself.

The scream you were about to emit as you see Sean for the first time, stripped to the waist, dies in your throat as you notice his brown eyes, his dark brown hair, his slightly up-tilted nose, his wide, firm mouth and his dimpled cheeks (no, you're wrong - they only seem like dimples, but are actually fascinating creases in his dark, dark skin). His ferocious eyebrows, his wolflike, long, protruding ears, the small scar on his left cheekbone, the gold fillings that glint faintly from amidst his white-white teeth - all these characteristics reinforce rather than detract from his virile, aggressive handsomeness and appeal.

You remember having read somewhere that his wife, beautiful Diane Cilento, had characterised Sean's unique appeal as being that of "masculinity, pure male authority."

Sean looks straight at you. "Why, hello there!" he says, his voice deep and soft and marked by a most un-Bondish Scottish burr, and he reaches out one of his ham-sized strong hands to grasp yours. Despite your fear (is it fear - really?) that your own hand will be entrapped in his and never released, your fingers, as if with an independent will of their own, reach out and touch his hand. And at this second of contact this broad-shouldered, powerful male (of whom Earl Wilson, who's seen handsome actors come and go, has said, "He's all man!") suddenly blushes beet-red like a schoolboy on his first date.

The sight of his muscular arms and mighty triceps (on one arm is tattooed Scotland Forever, on the other, Mum And Dad) and hairy chest makes you remember the way he appeared bare down to the waist in Marnie and the way he ran around with a towel wrapped around his middle in From Russia With Love. But you manage to keep from blushing by recalling how Sean himself had blushed when his hand first touched yours. You smile instead as you think of director Sidney Lumet's tongue-in-cheek observation that, eventually, Connery's bare chest will become as celebrated photographically as Ursula Andress's bare chest.

You play your scene with him, and after five takes the director is satisfied. Maybe Sean will carry on talking to you in a quiet corner of the studio while the next shot is being lined up.

Feeling confident now in his company, you tell him how surprised you were when he blushed.

"I blush all the time," Sean says, staring at the floor and not daring to meet your eyes. "It's been that way since I was six," he continues. "I was playing an Indian in a school play in my hometown of Edinburgh in Scotland. My squaw kissed me and I was the reddest Indian you ever saw. The audience roared with laughter. That did it. I've been blushing ever since."

At fifteen, after he left school, the young women he met as he made his milk-route rounds made him blush. And, subsequently, when he worked as a sailor, cement-mixer loader, printer's assistant, steel bender, bricklayer and coffin polisher, it was blush-blush all the time.

"I think one is attracted to women from nine onward," he admits, blushing as he says the words. It was blush when he drove to Gullane outside Edinburgh to have beach parties with the girls - playing records and dancing; when he sneaked out of the house, which he shared with his mother, father and brother to meet a young lady at Benn's Corner on the west side of the town. Because he was always short of money and "didn't have the clothes anyway," he'd "usually take a date to the cinema, or a dance or for a spin on my bike."

You ask Sean about his early life before he became James Bond. He will tell you about the days when he took a job at Portobello Beach for a couple of summers where he was guaranteed £17 a week and a tan. "It was great for the girls though," he recalls. "I'd just make a date and down they would come - right to where I worked."  And about how he broke into movies.

When he was chosen to play James Bond in Dr. No, he was given the full grooming treatment, including lessons in elocution and deportment. But one thing they were unable to change was his tendency to blush whenever he was close to or touched an attractive member of the opposite sex. "I've been to doctors and skin specialists," Sean confides to you. "But nobody helped. Women still make me blush."

In Goldfinger there was a scene in which he had to spend five minutes next to a shapely blonde on a four-poster bed. "I had to tear off her negligee," Sean tells you. "Then with seventy technicians looking on, the director kept yelling, 'Closer, get closer.' I tell you, I was blushing like fury." Later, when the location for the Goldfinger shooting shifted to Miami Beach, Florida, Sean - as James Bond, of course - was called upon to slap some bikini-clad behinds. Slap he did, and blush he did, until, during one break between takes, he tried to conceal his embarrassment by quipping, "Hell, I suppose I'll be late going home again tonight."

A few months ago he delivered the understatement of the year to a group of newspaper-men in Nassau after his arrival there to film scenes for Thunderball (premiered in London on December 29). Holding his ripped clothes together with one hand (the back of which had been bitten by an over-excited female) and smoothing down his hair (from which two ladies had tried to pull out souvenirs) with the other, he said, "One is always surprised by such a welcome."

Sean gets to his feet, stretches lazily so that the golden, sun-tanned muscles in his arms ripple, smiles and then tells you he has to get back to work. You envy the attractive girl who has just walked on to the set. She will be spending the afternoon with Sean shooting another scene.

But then you have another dream assignment - one with that smoothest of smooth operators - Mr. Napoleon Solo, Robert Vaughn. But you approach this particular job with apprehension for you remember reading a comment Bob made about actresses. He said, "Many actresses I've worked with were nervous, sulking, self-pitying, intolerant, emotionally disturbed little girls. They may look nice in a wedding scene, but they make lousy wives."

Well! But this doesn't put you off.

On the set Bob greets you warmly, which makes you wonder if he really meant what he said. You notice how well he is dressed, his immaculate grooming, his manners cultured, his deportment exemplary. In real life he is charming, witty, and very intelligent. As soon as you meet him you want to date him. And you know, having read him up, that he is a connoisseur of fine food and vintage wine. You're dying to find out if you're the kind of girl he likes to date. You hope that when he finishes his scene with you on that rather lavishly decorated living-room set, he will have time to talk with you.

Most of the day is taken up with filming. Bob is a dynamo at work. He hates wasting time. You don't talk with him because he's too busy, but towards the end of the day, when he's feeling a little tired, he will come over to you, maybe put his arm around your shoulder and start chatting away.

To sustain his interest in a conversation a girl must be fairly intelligent. He talks deeply, intellectually. Maybe your kind of talk. You want to get him onto the subject of women as you're inquisitive about your own rating with him.

"I've always been physically attracted to the Marilyn Monroe type of girl," he says. "Blonde, blue-eyed and voluptuous..."

But this time you don't quite believe him. You remember - but you don't tell him so, of course - that he also flipped for Natalie Wood, hardly the Marilyn Monroe type, and that at one time or another his name has been linked with assorted other brunettes, and redheads, as well as blondes, both actresses and non-actresses. And just because he claims he doesn't want to marry an actress doesn't mean he won't get married at all.

As if reading your mind, Bob says, "I have no desire for married life, not for a moment."

For even as he mouths the words, in the next breath Bob contradicts himself in a way. "Ironic, some people think me cold, aloof, devoid of feeling. It's because I feel so deeply that I have learned to restrain my emotions perfectly. Long ago I decided to save my tears for in front of the camera."

Then he plunges on. "There are a lot of personal reasons in my upbringing that I won't go into that I'm sure have influenced me. My childhood certainly conditioned me to being somewhat detached from an emotional need for marriage. But I would say in good time it probably will happen."

But nevertheless - and here you know you may be grasping at a straw - Bob himself has just indicated that "in good time" he probably would get married. Now what could "in good time" possibly mean to him? And again, as if he knows exactly what you're thinking, Bob explains that when he'd been going with Joyce Jameson for about six months (she's been his on-and-off girl friend for the last eight years), he told her he wouldn't marry her. "Anyway, not until I get to be an important, big-shot movie star. Then I can deal with any woman."

Bob freely admits that this same pattern of thinking - first I must be a huge success, I must be famous and independent, then I can consider love and marriage - has nipped many romances in the bud.

He clearly has a master plan for his life. But what if love, which laughs at all plans, should slip past Bob's defences and pierce his heart?

This, too, has happened to Bob, and so his defences are even stronger than before. Grimly he tells you about the one girl for whom, twelve years ago, he was willing to "give up everything." But, though he loved her "fully and deeply," she was engaged to another man and finally rejected Bob.

"Vulnerable" and hurt that one time, he resolved never again to allow himself to be put in the position where he might be "devastated."

And yet...and yet you can tell from the sound of his voice and the expression in his eyes that behind the protective wall of his master plan Bob's heart yearns to break out and merge with another's.

More than that, by the terms of his own master plan, he is now ready for love and marriage. He is famous. He is a "big-shot star" ("the part of Solo is just what I wanted," he says. "It puts me right in the leading man category, which is where I want to be.") He is wealthy (owner of a £25,000 house in the Hollywood Hills, he earns upward of nearly £2,000 a week and, with investments in herds of livestock and several gas wells, is well on his way to making his fortune.) He is independent, but you know that he desperately needs a woman he can depend on, and who, in turn, will depend on him. To think it could be you!

So now you've worked and talked to Sean Connery and Robert Vaughn.

In real life, who would be more the man for you - Sean, the bedroom spy, or Bob, the living-room spy? Now that you've read our undercover report and you know them both intimately, you should be able to decide.


Thanks to Tsukichan for scanning this article! Mary Sue fanfic writers, eat your heart out.

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