It begins innocently enough - a name given to a secretary over the phone, a credit card proffered.

"Roger Moore? Not the Roger Moore"

Um, no.

"Bond. James Bond. You know. I bet you get that a lot."

No, it never comes up. Let's change the subject before things turn ugly.

"You know, I always thought Sean Connery was better."

Yeah? So did his mama.

What's it like wandering through life with a famous name? Ask my Georgia friend, Jackie Cooper - my college buddy, Paul McCartney. But don't ask me. When it comes to Bond, James Bond - to too many people - there's Sean Connery and nobody else.

Of course, you could ask the real Roger Moore how he feels about that. He was in Orlando this week, a speaker to the 30,000 amusement park operators and vendors attending the convention of the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions. He was here to shake hands, make a few speeches, sign autographs and plug his main gig. He is the chief Goodwill Ambassador for the doggedly successful United Nations children's health organization, UNICEF.

"Mr. Roger Moore? Meet Roger Moore," says Sandee Borgman, a UNICEF spokeswoman who escorts Moore on these trips.

"Roger Moore? Moore, Roger Moore. Delighted," the real Moore says. "Do people ever confuse you for me?"

All the time. Same brown hair. Same blue eyes. Same worldwide fame. Same seven-figure income. In pesos, maybe.

In fact, I was named for you.

"Now that's a story I'd like to hear to hear."

My parents were big Maverick fans, so they tell me.

"You weren't conceived during it, I trust?"

Let's leave my mother out of this. Moore played Beau Maverick, the English cousin to James Garner's Bret Maverick in the Western comedy series.

"You're a very lucky young man," Moore says, looking very serious. "You could've been named Beauregard."

Indeed, a risk every Southern boy runs at birth.

A jokier Bond

Maverick is just one of the TV series Moore did before 007 came calling. He was in Ivanhoe, The Alaskans and Maverick in the late 1950s and early '60s. He starred as The Saint in the mid-to-late '60s. And he co-starred with Tony Curtis in The Persuaders in the early '70s.

And then he had a second chance to do the role he'd almost landed before Sean Connery signed on to be the first big-screen Bond. Moore became the longest-serving Bond, doing seven films over 14 years. The movies were jokier, sillier than they'd been under Connery. New Bond fans loved Live and Let Die, The Spy Who Loved Me and the others. Connery fans were appalled.

"I'm not that cold-blooded killer type," Moore said at the time. "I play it for laughs."

"You're still the best Bond," Doug Baker, a New Yorker in town for the convention gushes as the actor signs an autograph. "The only Bond!"

"I'll tell Sean you said so," Moore quips.

Like Connery, the general consensus is that Moore stayed in the role one or two films too long. "His boyish insouciance became less spontaneous and eventually grew tiresome," critic Leonard Maltin once wrote.

Yeah? You're tiresome!

In his time, Moore was licensed to kill. He was sort of the Hugh Grant of his day, a light comedian and pretty-boy with a posh accent. The son of a bobby, a British policeman, Moore grew up "with the same accent as Michael Caine," Moore tells an audience of amusement park managers. "But I went to RADA [the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts] and they trained (the Cockney) out of me."

Moore changed voices. Caine changed names, something Moore delights in bringing up. He and Caine - whose real name is Maurice Micklewhite - are pals.

Caine didn't attend RADA. The former Maurice Micklewhite kept the Cockney accent and has a knighthood and a couple of Oscars to show for it. And if Moore had kept his original accent?

"I'd be still out there, getting the great parts," Moore tells the managers, with a chuckle. "And he'd be up here talking to you."

Bond-actors change, but Bond endures. Pierce Brosnan is starring in his fourth film in the long-running franchise, Die Another Day, which opened Friday. Why are these films still popular? Is it the violence, the sex, the gadgets, the arched eyebrows of the leading men?

"They've always been very good at putting all the money they invest in them up on the screen," Moore says. "It's just that simple."

Did he save anything from the Bond years, a memento, a prop, Miss Moneypenny?

"Only my passion for skiing," he says. And the home in Switzerland that allows him to indulge that passion.

His most serious role

At 75, he's not really retired. Moore does the odd acting job here, a documentary narration there. But the world still takes his phone calls, which is why he remains a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador.

"I just got back from Zambia, and after seeing conditions in a hospital there, I called a medical equipment supplier in Copenhagen," he says. They worked out a deal.

Moore does a lot of that these days. He starts his speeches with jokes about his movie career and his age.

"The Bonds keep getting younger, and the Bond girls keep getting bigger . . . parts."

But you can hear a pin drop when he points out that "40,000 children die needlessly, every day on this planet." He speaks movingly and informedly on the AIDS epidemic in Africa, the looming threat of a terrible drought there, of "waking up at 2 in the morning and seeing the eyes of these children, many of whom have already lost their parents to AIDS -- children responsible for whole families of younger children."

He took over for Audrey Hepburn, who personally recruited Moore to the cause in the early 1990s.

"A very persuasive woman," Moore says with a grin.

When Hepburn died, her son was among those who pressed Moore to take over for her, full-time.

"You press the flesh, do favors and speeches for corporate sponsors and inform people about what UNICEF is and what it does," he says. That means talking to the press, a lot.

"They always want to talk about Bond," he says, arching the famous eyebrow. "But we always talk about UNICEF." In America, that can be an uphill struggle. A Fox News reporter the night before had mixed up UNICEF with U.N. weapons inspectors in Iraq.

"And they're always confusing us with 'some damned commie organization,' " Moore says, laughing and impersonating an American hick.

He straightens out the confused, points out how "91 cents of every dollar given to UNICEF goes to programs in the field," and plugs the new arrangement with the amusement parks represented at the convention called "Your Change for Real Change," similar to the old "Trick or Treat for UNICEF" Halloween campaigns.

Moore was named a Commander of the British Empire for his charitable efforts and given the Maurice Garvey Lifetime Achievement Award, a Jamaican honor for those "who have used their celebrity status to help improve the lives of many."

Which makes Moore sort of the Jimmy Carter of the ex-Bonds. Connery still earns the whopping paychecks, making indifferent movies in between tee times. Patrick Dalton reverted to being a character actor. And George Lazenby dropped off the face of the Earth. Moore, who didn't do too badly in the earnings department, (he and fourth wife Kristina have homes in Switzerland and Monaco), spends much of his time trying to make the world's children healthy.

Take that, Connery, you Scottish skinflint! Maybe it isn't so bad sharing the same name with everyone's second-favorite Bond.

"Yes, too bad it's not my real name," Moore says, putting a consoling hand on my shoulder.

What? Wait a minute . . . but . . . I didn't . . . So what IS your real name, then?

"Micklewhite," he says, waiting a perfect beat to deliver his punch line. "Maurice Micklewhite."