KEY POINTS:
Those seeking gossip and revelation will be frustrated, but those wanting to know about Sean Connery's native land will be richly rewarded.
In that it is impossibly handsome and steadfastly, infuriatingly, refuses to be quite what we want it to be, this long-awaited book is that rare beast: an autobiography that absolutely mirrors its subject. After years of fraught negotiation, and courteous but unmistakably final fallings-out with two ghost-writers who wanted to clatter the pans by lifting too many lids on the broth of Connery's life, he went with an old friend, Scottish film-maker Murray Grigor.
The result is safe but valiantly surprising, and deeply rewarding if you want to learn about being a Scot. But it is deeply disappointing if you're just a Bond fan. Or a gossip fan. Or a film fan. Or even if you simply want to know what makes the big man tick. As he has always done, Connery calls the shots. He decided he didn't want to dish the dirt on himself or on anyone else.
So there are precious few anecdotes and they're tantalisingly brief. It is a quite wilful swerve from what might have been expected: something about the women, about infidelity, perhaps more than one paragraph on the viciousness of the Scottish press. It's not that he doesn't mention the elephant in the room. He and Grigor simply don't acknowledge the possibility of elephants.
Check the index under T and you will find Turner. You might, legitimately, in Connery's only autobiography, expect at least a passing mention of "Turner, Lana". Sadly, but not strangely, no. The only Turner mentioned is JMW and his early "misty tartan proto-impressionism".
Rather than a glorious Hollywood Babylon through the eyes of a former Fountainbridge milkman, what we get is a lecture: on art, architecture, history, music, drainage and cartooning. But that is not, astonishingly, to its discredit. He does it well. You can, among the sumptuous etchings and photos, begin to discern the key to the man and it is this: autodidacticism. He freely admits his jaunty early ignorance, his debt to near-forgotten directors who ordered him to pick up Turgenev, Proust, Joyce, Ibsen, Stanislavski.
Anecdotes attest to how ungladly he suffered his own foolishness: buying a reel-to-reel Grundig "to hear how heavily accented my voice really was" or "wondering how you could play an intelligent person if you were stupid and vice versa".
There is an old-Scottish voice to many of his enthusiastic lectures: a dislike of trends, buzzwords, fads; a reverence for achievement and discovery; precious little pause to reflect, forgive or wallow.
Even if you accept that this series of exuberant lectures is all you're going to get from the star - and it is, in a phrase I'm sure he'd loathe, a big ask - there are a couple of problems.
The book is strangely ill-served, given the brilliance of the rest of the design, by a back-page quote from John Huston that manages to both demean and vainglorify its subject: "I wish, for Chrissake, that Sean Connery would become King of Scotland." A clearer timeline and some simple context would have made this an even better read.
There is a lurch, as we move straight from his first, thrilling pay cheque for acting into lengthy chapters about Ossian and Macbeth, and he only reconnects with his film world in infuriatingly casual fits and starts. But there's no doubt that Sean Connery does know, still, what it means to be a Scot. He tells of a friend sending him a card with this seasonal inscription: "In case you're having a merry Christmas, just remember where you came from." Another very Scottish trait.
I remember a fishwife in Aberdeen telling me why her lobsters needed no lid on the pan. "They're all Scottish. One of them climbs near the top, the ithers'll pull him right back in."
Being a Scot
By Sean Connery and Murray Grigor (Weidenfeld & Nicholson $47.99)
- OBSERVER
