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I had known Lew for years. He and
Grade and I used to play snooker together in the
Empire billiard room in the West End. Lew had twice
before offered me television series but I was too
busy. This one though seemed a natural for me. Had
I not tried to buy the Saint rights myself? One
thing seemed a bit odd. The scripts seemed terribly
long for a half-hour show and I found out what at
the press conference Lew gave to announce the show.
They were going to be hour-shows. I was under a
different impression and we had to redraw the contracts
before work started. Thus began The Saint
and the rest is history. Luisa came to England.
The Saint escalated from success to success.
At first it was mightily panned
by the critics. But then so was Coronation Street.
And like the Street it was soon high up the
ratings. I don't believe bad reviews anyway. I only
believe the good ones. The Saint went into orbit,
yet my performance was precisely the same as in
anything I had been doing for years. I think it
was what I smelled before, when I tried to buy the
rights. The chemicals, the ingredients, were absolutely
correct for me.
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It was the right combination
of the right person for me to play and a way of playing
it. In the first episode we had Derek Farr and Patricia
Roc. But many established stars were a bit wary of appearing
in it because et was a completely unknown quantity. Two
"unknows" we had who went on to do extremely well
were Samantha Eggar and Julie Christie.
The Saint had a genuine brush
with the law on the first few days of location shooting.
I had a Volvo car with the fake number plates "ST 1".
It was a rare car, I doubt if there were more than 50 in
the country. Howewer, I had to park around a corner in Cookham
village and when I got the signal from the director I had
to jump into the car and drive it down the village high
street. As I waited a policeman came up on his bike, stopped,
walked around the car. "This is your car sir?"
he said. "Yes". "Hmmm, very nice indeed.
Very nice. Interesting those number plates - ST 1."
"Oh really", said I. "Yes", he said,
putting his hand into his breast pocket. "They're fake.
Perhaps sir, you'd like to..." At that point I got
the director's signal, dived into the car, and crashed away
around the corner. In fact, I went right round a block and
drove back to where ha was still standing, scratching his
head,a nd wondering what kind of massive international crime
he had stumbled upon!.
For seven years The Saint
completely dominated my life. It was eventually sold to
80 countries and some of them are still showing it. If The
Persuaders! go on that long I'll begin to think I've
arrived. Wath was going to be a six-month stint making the
series went on and on. Two or three times I vowed to hang
up the halo and call it quits and each time Uncle Lew wagged
his persuasive tongue - and one or two pound notes - and
I went back to work again. Money and fame were now mine.
Most of all so was domestic bliss. But there was a perpetual
nagging undercurrent which the whole world knows about.
Dorothy, for her own reasons, steadfastly refused to give
me a divorce. I was living with Luisa and everybody who
knew us considered us man and wife. For Luisa it was not
entirely a bed of roses. She had to put with the odd snipping
and the occasional guerilla attack. She also didn't like
some of the things that appeared from time to time in some
of the papers - especially Continental magazines. And she
sometimes thought I should react to some statements that
appeared by publicly ginving my side of the story. I felt
it best to say nothing. Silence, I felt, was the better
part of valour. Even actors have a right to a private life
and I also felt that if I never said anything then there
was no danger of being misquoted.
The English press always
behaved marvellously to me. The would come out to the studio
for an interview and inevitably it would reach a stage where
the reporter would say: "I'm sorry about this but my
editor is going to want to know why I didn't ask you about
Dorothy and Luisa..." And I would say: "I understand
but I'm afraid, I have no comment." They would invariably
say: "Well fine, we'll respect that." In fact,
when Luisa and I married, we had a joint wedding present
from the British press, a beautiful Vodka decanter and glasses.
But as I said we had the odd snide article about us in certain
foreign papers. They didn't bother me but they tended to
upset Luisa. Naturally is much more sensitive than a man
over that sort of things. What to a woman is the end of
the world is usually to a man the way of the world. With
or without the right to marry, Luisa and I determinated
to take our life together to a logical conclusion. We decided
to have children. Whith her Catholic background this was
a difficult decision for Luisa. It was awkwark enough our
living together. Yet through all our relationship she -
and I - had been given tremendously sympathetic support
from her family back in Italy. In 1963 we had Deborah and
three years later our son Geoffrey arrived. Our marital
problem, you must remember, was going on long before the
new divorce laws. A divorce in this country is obtainable
now on the basic - and I thing civilised - groundsof the
breakdwon of the marriage. It must be conceded that my marriage
with Dorothy had broken down... The most uncertain aspect
of it was that frequently I was led to believe that a divorce
would be given to me. After a while I learnt not to rely
on these false hopes.
Things were coming to a
head. I couldn't stand seeing Luisa suffer any longer. I
was getting fed up too. I decided that after all these years
of silence I was going to open my mouth. The position was
this. For years Luisa and I kept a pact. No interviews on
the subject. No pictures at home with us and the children.
No statements to the press. Nothing. Finally, for the sake
of Luisa, and for the sake of my own sanity, I decided I
would make a statement on the exact situation. This would
be a once-and-for-all statement about the position. That
would be the end of it. After that I would answer no questions
and refer any queries straight back
to the statement. There would be no further discussion.
I would put on public record what the situation was and
that would be the end. From that point onwards there would
be no more rumours - from any direction. Don Short from
the Daily Mirror came out to the house. We discussed
it and when he left I sat back relieved to feel that at
last a bit of stability was just around the corner. The
story with my statement was due to break on the Wednesday
morning. The night before, Luisa and I went to a Royal Variety
Show at the London Palladium and during the interval Don
Short came down the aisle looking for me. He beckoned me
out to one of the foyers and said the story wasn't going
to be used.
"Why" I said, a
bit put out. "Dorothy's lawyers have said that she
has decided to divorce you." I was delighted and told
Luisa the moment I got back to my seat. But a part of me
was saying to myself that I'd heard this story before. It
was to drag on for another two years, for one reason or
another. Then one day I was to go home and tell Luisa that
I was fixed. It looked like she could make an honest man
of me...
