Why less was (Roger) Moore for David Bowie
DAVID BOWIE felt so Under Pressure when James Bond actor Roger Moore tried to make friends with him that he ended up hiding from him ‘underneath the kitchen table’, a new biography has revealed.
Author Dylan Jones interviewed more than 150 people for David Bowie: A Life — and it was his fellow author Hanif Kureishi who reportedly shared the 007 gem.
Jones said: ‘Kureishi told me this story — that when David Bowie moved to Switzerland at the end of the Seventies to escape tax and drug dealers, he didn’t know anybody there. He was in this huge house on the outskirts of Geneva, he knew nobody.
‘One day, about half-past five in the afternoon, there’s a knock on the door, and there he was: “Hello, David.” Roger Moore comes in, and they had a cup of tea. He stays for drinks, and then dinner, and tells lots of stories about the James Bond films. They had a fantastic time — a brilliant night.’
The trouble came when Moore didn’t realise that less is in fact more and turned up again the next day — armed with exactly the same anecdotes, apparently.
After two weeks this ‘literally every day’, Jones claims: ‘David Bowie could be found underneath the kitchen table pretending not to be in.’
Could this be why Bowie turned down the chance to play Bond villain Zorin opposite Moore in 1985’s A View To A Kill?
Sure, he said it was because he ‘didn’t want to spend five months watching my stunt double fall off cliffs’, but perhaps it was five months of something else he was eager to avoid.
Author: Anna Thomson
