Recently, a friend visited Sir Sean Connery’s luxurious apartment on New York’s exclusive Upper East Side and remarked on how far the actor had come from his childhood in the tenements of Edinburgh.
“I’m still having to share a building with some ugly b*****ds,” Connery responded with his characteristic gruffness. “The only difference is here I’ve got my own toilet—and don’t think I would be afraid to go back to the rough area I grew up in.”
It might be challenging to see the similarities between the top two floors of a Manhattan brownstone townhouse—so significant it is a listed building—and the dank two-room flat that was Connery’s home for the first 22 years of his life.
Connery’s gruff humor can likely be attributed to his ongoing dispute with his neighbor, eye doctor Burton Sultan, who owns the bottom four floors of the building. The two men have been swapping lawsuits for years, with Dr. Sultan claiming that Connery is trying to force him out with loud music and noisy renovations.
What is certain is that Connery, who will be 78 this month, has come a long way. Worth a reputed £80 million and knighted in 2000, he also has an ocean-side home in the tax haven of the Bahamas.
Despite his fabulous wealth, Connery remains strangely insecure about money. To this day, it is the single biggest driving force in his life. This has led to spectacular fallouts with some of the most powerful people in Hollywood.
To understand why, one must look back to Connery’s dirt-poor beginnings in the tough Fountainbridge district and a red sandstone tenement near Edinburgh’s West End.
Next door to a brewery, the rented ground-floor flat consisted of one bedroom and a living room that doubled as a tiny kitchen. There was no hot water, and two toilets on the landing served four families.
When Tommy Connery, as he was then known, was born shortly after 6 p.m. on August 25, 1930, his parents, unable to afford a cot, laid their first child in the open bottom drawer of their bedroom wardrobe.
His father, Joe, worked in the local rubber works and later for Rolls-Royce in Glasgow, but in the depression-hit 1930s, he was often out of work. Tommy’s mother, Effie, who would give birth to a second son, Neil, eight years later, instilled in her boys the value of thrift and hard work.
The strapping Tommy, known by everyone in Fountainbridge as “Big Tam,” left Darroch Secondary School as soon as he could, at age 13. He often worked three jobs: delivering milk by horse and cart, working at a butcher’s shop, and doing an evening paper round.
Even from an early age, he was keen to escape the grime of his straitened upbringing. The opportunity seemed to come by joining the Royal Navy at 16. However, instead of seeing the world, he never got farther than Portsmouth and was invalided out less than two years later with stomach ulcers. During his stint in the Forces, he did get two tattoos on his arms—one proclaiming “Scotland Forever” and the other “Mum and Dad.”
Connery took on a series of dead-end jobs: French-polishing coffins, toiling in the machine room of a newspaper, and delivering coal. He also posed nude for artists. During a stint as a swimming pool lifeguard, he began to work out in the gym to attract girls.
His new love of bodybuilding led Connery to London to enter the 1953 Mr. Universe contest, where he placed third in the junior section.
This trip inadvertently launched his career in show business. Now calling himself Shane Connery, he learned from a friend that there were parts available in the chorus line of South Pacific.
Connery was more interested in the £12-a-week pay than in a theatrical career. When offered the job, his first question was, “What’s the wage?”
The producer airily replied, “It really doesn’t concern me.”
“Well,” barked Connery, “it concerns me!”
While on tour with the show, a football team made up of cast members played a Manchester United youth side. The game was watched by United manager Matt Busby, who offered Connery a spot on the team at twice what he was earning in South Pacific. However, Connery declined the offer, reasoning that a playing career could be over by the time he was 30, whereas acting could offer a lifelong career. It was a wise choice.
By now, Shane had become Sean, and he progressed slowly through a string of minor theater and television roles before landing the part of James Bond in 1962.
His brief career had not been without pitfalls. He was dismissed from an early 1950s stage production after making an awkward pass at the show’s star, Anna Neagle, who was nearly 30 years his senior.
Connery was also fortunate to have stayed alive long enough to bag the role of Bond—a part that would make him the object of a million women’s fantasies.
In 1957, he was cast by Hollywood bombshell Lana Turner as her love interest in a small British-made picture called Another Time, Another Place. Turner, Hollywood’s original “Sweater Girl,” had seen her career decline and, at nearly 40, was already being written off as past it in Tinseltown. Despite the age difference—she was more than ten years older than Connery—rumors quickly circulated on set that the screen lovers had continued their romance off-screen.
Connery was also seen on her arm at West End shows and in fashionable London restaurants. It didn’t take long for word of their relationship to reach Turner’s hoodlum boyfriend, Johnny Stompanato, across the Atlantic.
Stompanato was a snappily dressed small-time crook with a taste for violence, introduced to the actress by gambling racketeer Mickey Cohen. When he heard the rumors about her and Connery, a furious Stompanato phoned Turner and threatened to kill or disfigure her with a knife. He boarded a plane for London to confront the man he thought was sleeping with his girlfriend.
When the American arrived, Turner tried to have her aggressive boyfriend barred from the set. He holed himself up, brooding at her rented house in Hampstead.
Consumed with jealousy and anger, Johnny Stompanato burst into the studios in Borehamwood, Hertfordshire, where Lana Turner and Sean Connery were filming, and waved a gun at Connery, warning him to stay away from Turner. Connery wrestled the gun from him and knocked him out with a right hook. Turner later had Stompanato quietly deported by Scotland Yard.
When Turner returned to Los Angeles, Stompanato exacted retribution by beating her up and trying to smother her with a pillow. A few months later, in April 1958, Turner’s 14-year-old daughter Cheryl stabbed Johnny to death with a carving knife after witnessing him attacking her mother.
Meanwhile, Connery had been hired by Walt Disney to play a supporting part in Darby O’Gill and the Little People, requiring his first visit to Hollywood. At the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, he received a call from one of Mickey Cohen’s henchmen, threatening him to leave town or face a contract on his life. On Disney executives’ advice, Connery laid low at a small guesthouse outside LA.
Connery began reinventing himself, smoothing out his thick Scottish accent and reading Proust and Ibsen. Central to this transformation was his first wife, Diane Cilento, an Australian actress who helped prepare him for the role of James Bond.
Connery’s rough edges, however, remained. He was seen by many in the acting world as boorish and uncouth. His temper and demeanor have led to various disputes, including a recent row with his neighbor in New York, Dr. Burton Sultan, who described Connery as a “rude, foul-mouthed, fat old man.”
Despite his wealth and knighthood, Connery has never entirely shaken off his impoverished beginnings.
