Hulu’s George Lazenby doc is a ‘curious’ yarn
I recently caught up with the curious Hulu 2017 docudrama ‘Becoming Bond‘ about George Lazenby, the Australian male model who was the first 007 after Connery – and, famously, for only one film: ‘On Her Majesty’s Secret Service’ (1969).
He was also at 29 the youngest, and fittest post-Connery Bond by a long chalk, until a 39 year-old Daniel Craig appeared in Speedos in Casino Royale, thirty six years later.
I would also say that On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is one of the better Bond films – though most of them are, let’s be honest, pretty fucking dreadful.
The account he (now 84) gives of his life, career, and Bond experience to camera – which actors dramatize in a cartoonish, slapstick fashion (with Josh Lawson as Lazenby) – bears almost no resemblance to the one you find in his Wikipedia entry. Wikipedia is notoriously unreliable. But I think it has been totally outgunned here. It seems Lazenby has been redrafting his life story over free drinks in bars for several decades.
But some details of that story are interesting, whether true or not. He was he says shagging loads of birds in London in the Swinging Sixties, before Bond. But he clearly took the ‘swinging’ part very seriously, since much of the bird shagging seems to have been done ‘MMF’ with a male model mate of his.
He also goes into a lengthy exposition about how his then-girlfriend’s ex (who he never met) was in the Australian Army and would always win the competition they liked to play in the barracks: whose erect cock could hold up the most pairs of boots by their tied laces. (I got the feeling Lazenby was keen to have an MMF with him as well.)
This competition is, I kid you not, faithfully re-enacted by Hulu in silhouette against the side of a tent.
He became a male model, he says, because when he was working as a car salesman, a male customer asked to take his photo. “‘Uh-oh’, I thought, ‘I’ve got a homosexual here!'”
But it turned out – phew! – that he was a professional photographer. (Who was probably homosexual.) And got Lazenby his introduction into the world of modelling, where he rapidly started earning big bucks.
Lazenby says he conned, bluffed, and barged his way into the auditions for the role of James Bond and lied about his acting experience (he had none). They loved him, but got cold feet when they discovered later that he was actually a male model. Bond was too butch to be a model, it seems.
Then a man and a sexy lady, naked under her fur coat, appeared at his hotel room door. Being a red-blooded Aussie, he naturally invited the lady into his bed. He also, like a proper Aussie mate, kept inviting the guy to “join in”, but he just sat watching. “So I thought he was a pervert!”.
Later Lazenby learned, he says, that it was a “test” – the Bond people were worried that he was gay, being a male model, so they sent a foxy lady accompanied by a man to observe. He passed the test with flying colours, you’ll be glad to know. (Despite asking the man to join in, repeatedly.)
He was then allowed to take further, lengthy tests of his manhood, that involved stage fighting (in which he knocked out a stunt man), horse-riding (which he did bareback, with ease), and knife throwing. Which he also and got the gig.
Boring old Wikipedia says that Lazenby got the role because producer Broccoli met him at his barbers and had seen him in a TV commercial, liked the cut of his jib, and offered him an audition. There is no mention of any ‘gay test’.
True or not, I admire the way Lazenby clearly doesn’t think there was anything homo about his taste for MMF action.
As his fellow hetero Aussie emigre Clive James, the critic and impressively frank author of Unreliable Memoirs, would have agreed – at least when he was an adolescent mad keen on mutual masturbation sessions – two cocks are just twice the fun.
