When Harry Met Cubby: The Story of the James Bond Producers

ISBN-13: 9781803990354

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: The History Press

Publication Date: 07-11-2023

Pages: 352

Product Dimensions: 5.08(w) x 7.80(h) x 0.00(d)

Robert Sellers is an author and journalist. He is the author of the bestselling Hellraisers (Preface, 2009), What Fresh Lunacy is This: The Authorised Biography of Oliver Reed (Constable, 2014) and When Harry Met Cubby (THP, 2019).

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Cubby

On the morning of 20 May 1927, the young Cubby Broccoli's outlook on life changed forever. He'd read in the papers about the aviator Charles Lindbergh's plan to fly the Atlantic solo, a course of action ridiculed by many since it had already claimed a number of capable pilots. To Cubby, Lindbergh wasn't a fool; he was a hero, and sitting on a tractor about to plough the fields on the family farm in Long Island, his heart started racing as the unmistakable drone of an aircraft's engine approached. Screenwriter Tom Mankiewicz recalled Cubby telling him what happened next:

He said, 'Lindbergh flew over my farm, and everyone knew the Spirit of St Louis, and there it was on the side of the plane. It was so loaded with fuel it was flying very low, and I jumped up and down and I waved at the plane, and I can't tell you for sure but it seemed to me he waggled his wings at me. That was the most thrilling moment of my life.'

That night Cubby listened intently on the radio as news of Lindbergh's historic flight was relayed back to a captivated nation. Cubby's hero had beaten the odds; he'd made it in spite of all the naysayers. It was an event that proved to Cubby that anything was possible, just so long as you believed in yourself and aimed at the big horizon.

* * *

Cubby's maternal grandmother Marietta, a widow, and her three children came to America from Calabria in Southern Italy in 1897, full of hopes and dreams, arriving by ocean liner at Ellis Island, the disembarkation point for all immigrants into New York. From there the family made their way by train to Astoria, Queens and settled into two small rooms at the top of a tenement block on Hoyt Avenue, packed with Polish, Jewish and German families. A tenacious woman, whose attitude to hard work inspired not only Cubby but the rest of the family, Marietta set herself up as a midwife and became a valuable asset to the neighbourhood.

Marietta's eldest daughter, Cristina, had met and fallen in love with another Italian immigrant, Giovanni Broccoli, a construction worker twice her age. They married in the spring of 1902 and within a year Cristina gave birth to a son, John. Six years later another son arrived, Albert Romolo Broccoli, on 5 April 1909, born in those same tenement rooms on Hoyt Avenue. Family legend has it that it was a breech birth and the baby had trouble breathing. Marietta resorted to a traditional Calabrian remedy – shoving the head of a black chicken into the mouth. The treatment worked and the boy started to breathe again.

Kids grew up fast in Queens and Cubby was no different; he even learnt to tolerate the taunts of other kids when they called him 'Dago'. One escape route was the picture house, where he went as often as he could, sometimes with his brother John or his cousin Pat de Cicco. Home was a warm and loving environment cultivated by his mother. His father worked at any construction job he could find, which sometimes took him away from the family for months at a time.

For a while Cristina landed a job as a live-in cook and housekeeper with a rich family before Cubby's uncle invited them to come live with him. Pasquale de Cicco had managed to scrape together enough cash to rent a farm outside Astoria and try his luck planting vegetables, especially broccoli. According to Cubby, Pasquale brought the very first broccoli seeds to America, taken from a particularly fine strain back home in Calabria. It would form the basis of a successful family enterprise.

The Broccolis happily earned their keep on the farm, with Cubby helping to wash and crate the produce for delivery to Harlem market on carts drawn by horses; 'beautiful big bay horses with feathers on their legs'. It was on the farm that Cubby and de Cicco's son Pat grew even closer; there were just nine months separating them, forging a friendship that lasted until Pat's death in 1978. It was Pat who came up with the now famous nickname of 'Cubby' that in time replaced his given name of Romolo. Pat said his cousin reminded him of a little fat, roly-poly comic strip character called Abie Kabible and that's what he went around calling him. Over time, Kabible was shortened to 'Kubbie' and finally 'Cubby'.

Just like Pasquale, Giovanni Broccoli dreamed of buying a farm, and after years of hard graft and putting as much money as he could afford to one side, that dream became a reality when he purchased a modest 25-acre piece of land close to Lake Ronkonkoma on Long Island. It came complete with a couple of tractors and a farmhouse, and the idea was to follow Pasquale's example and grow vegetables to sell in Harlem market. Unable to afford any labourers at first, the whole family lent a hand; it was backbreaking work. Cubby's shift started early in the morning before school, a 2-mile walk away. He'd plough the fields in a tractor, having learnt to drive at the age of 12, or crawl along the ground weeding out the crops. It was also his job to drive the produce to market and sell it. 'It was hard times,' he admitted. 'If nobody would buy the stuff, instead of hauling it back again we'd dump it in the river.'

Doing as well as he could at school, Cubby had no real idea what he wanted to do in life, 'just a fascination for painting and sculpting, trying to create things'. Then he made an important decision: to quit school early to work on the farm full-time and help out his parents, who were toiling in the fields and not getting any younger. As writer and family friend Donald Zec would recall, 'The thing that kept turning in Cubby's narrative would be his memory of his mother on her knees in appalling heat pulling out the weeds between the furrows of the crops.' The family finally persuaded Cristina to give up physical chores and instead concentrate on feeding the increasing number of migrant labourers who had been taken on. Tragically, it was too late for Giovanni. One hot summer's day working out in the fields with his two sons he suffered a massive heart attack and died within minutes.

After the death of their father, Cubby and John embarked on a farming venture out in Florida, with disastrous results. Blight and a hurricane decimated two successive crops and left them both cash-strapped. Calling it quits in 1933, Cubby went to work for a distant relative, Agostino d'Orta, who owned the Long Island Casket Company. The morbidity of working around funeral parlours and undertakers soon depressed him and he was looking for another avenue of employment, but those months with the company certainly stayed with Cubby and are the reason why coffins pop up periodically throughout the 007 series, from Bond being menaced by a hearse in Dr No, to almost being cremated in Diamonds Are Forever, avoiding a coffin full of snakes in Live and Let Die and threatened by a knife-wielding killer emerging from a floating coffin in Moonraker.

While he was thinking what to do with his life next, Cubby decided to take a short break in Hollywood, where his cousin Pat was now living. Pat became a rich man when his father Pasquale died. Ditching farming altogether, his dark good looks and sartorial elegance made an indelible impression on New York's social scene, where Cubby was sometimes asked to tag along, his first taste of an exciting new world that was a million miles away from clawing at the earth with your bare hands.

Now making a name for himself as an agent and business manager for actors in Hollywood, Cubby had been urged by his cousin to fly over and see him. Pat had married comedy actress Thelma Todd, then under contract to producer Hal Roach, working for the likes of Laurel and Hardy, along with being loaned out to star opposite the Marx Brothers and Buster Keaton. By the time Cubby landed in Hollywood the union had dissolved, but Pat still appeared to be very much a fixture about town, having cultivated friendships with the great and the good, including Cary Grant and Howard Hughes.

It didn't take long for Hollywood to rub off on Cubby; the glamour and excitement of the place was intoxicating. Renting a tuxedo, he went to his first movie premiere, mixing with the stars. What left the biggest impression, though, was the fact that all these movie tycoons who ran the studios were immigrants themselves, all hailing from his father's generation. From humble beginnings the Goldwyns, the Mayers and the Cohns had risen to the top, commanding absolute power over their empires.

With Pat keen for his cousin to stay in Los Angeles and try to find work, Cubby landed a job selling hair products door to door, then as a salesman in an exclusive Beverly Hills jeweller. But what he really hankered after was to get into the film business somehow. It was another immigrant tycoon, this one from Russia, Joe Schenck, who provided that invaluable first leg-up. Schenck, along with Darryl F. Zanuck, had established 20th Century Fox, and through Pat's contacts Cubby got a job there as a third assistant. 'If the director wanted a cup of coffee, or needed an actor to be called onto the set, I arranged it.'

Sharing a house with Pat, the two men were often seen together at the Trocadero, an upscale nightclub that had only just opened on the Sunset Strip and immediately become the place where a lot of stars went to be seen and photographed. It was owned by Billy Wilkerson, who ran the Hollywood Reporter, the town's most-read trade paper. Going there wasn't cheap so Cubby asked the manager, Tom Seward, if there were any jobs going. As luck would have it the club needed a bouncer, and Cubby's larger than life frame fitted the bill. The hours he worked paid for his food and bar bill. Seward recalled Cubby as an excellent doorman, certainly one not to mess with; 'Cubby never backed down from a fight.'

It wasn't only at the Trocadero that Cubby spent his leisure time. One August evening in 1938, he was seen out on the town with a young glamorous socialite by the name of Nancy 'Slim' Gross. Making up a threesome was King Kong actor Bruce Cabot, whom Nancy uncharitably labelled 'seriously dumb', as opposed to the 'truly intelligent' Cubby. After going to watch a prize fight, the cosy group called into the Clover Club, a private gambling nightspot on the Sunset Strip. As Cubby and Nancy danced to the soft, lilting music, a pair of eyes couldn't stop staring at them. They belonged to maverick film director Howard Hawks, whose picture Bringing Up Baby had recently opened. Hawks took Cubby aside to casually enquire, 'Who's the girl you're with? I'd like to meet her.' Hawks was pushing 42, Nancy was 20, but that didn't seem to matter. Nancy went on to become Hawks's wife and self-confessed muse, exerting a huge influence over his career.

Slowly but surely Cubby was rising up the Hollywood ladder, perhaps not from a professional point of view, but he was certainly mixing in the right circles. Most weekends, along with Pat, Cubby was invited round to Joe Schenck's house for a barbecue, and he had cultivated the friendship of businessman, filmmaker and aviator Howard Hughes. Often Hughes picked Cubby up and they'd fly out for a couple of days at the gaming tables of Las Vegas. Hughes also knew that if he needed help, Cubby was always there for him at the end of a telephone. 'He and I got along, I suppose, because I understood and respected his craving for privacy,' said Cubby. 'Also, we agreed on most things, and I liked him.'

Then there was Gloria Blondell, the younger sister of actress Joan who had starred alongside the likes of James Cagney and John Wayne. Gloria was an actress too, though not in Joan's class. She had met Cubby and fallen in love with him. So fast was their romance that Pat tried to talk his cousin out of it when news reached him of their intended plan to marry. It went ahead anyway, in July 1940 in Las Vegas.

Thanks to his connection with the two Howards – Hughes and Hawks – Cubby landed the role of assistant director on a Western picture the pair of them were making about Billy the Kid called The Outlaw. Hughes took personal charge of casting duties and snapped up at $50 a week a stunning 19-year-old girl that he was going to launch as a star. Her name was Jane Russell and she currently worked as a receptionist to a chiropodist.

About to travel with the crew to Flagstaff, Arizona, Hughes phoned Cubby the night before to ask if he could personally escort his starlet on the train to the location. 'Make sure she has everything she needs,' he ordered. 'Oh ... and Cubby. Keep all the characters away from her.' From that moment on, Cubby acted as Miss Russell's unofficial bodyguard.

Another responsibility was to wake the Native Americans who were working as extras. Out he would go every morning into the wilderness to find them all covered in frost having slept outside in the desert.

After just two weeks the film was in chaos. Hughes had the rushes flown to Los Angeles daily and was soon complaining of Hawks's method, that he was economising too much and not 'taking enough time' with the filming. Fine, said Hawks, and quit. Hughes brought the entire cast and crew back to Hollywood to take personal charge of the filming on the Samuel Goldwyn lot. A renowned perfectionist, requiring twenty-four takes for some scenes, Hughes completed The Outlaw in February 1941, although it didn't reach the nation's screens for another two years, in part due to censorship problems surrounding the natural assets of Miss Russell. The country's top censor, Joseph Breen, had seen nothing like them, according to a March 1941 interoffice memo: 'in my more than ten years of critical examination of motion pictures, I have never seen anything quite so unacceptable as the shots of the breasts of the character of Rio ... Throughout almost half the picture the girl's breasts, which are quite large and prominent, are shockingly emphasized'. Maybe Mr Breen should have got out more.

By the time The Outlaw opened across the US, Cubby had joined the navy in light of America's entry into the Second World War. His post was the Eleventh Naval District, which booked stars like Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, Danny Kaye and Dinah Shore to perform in shows for servicemen in camps and military hospitals across the States.

Cubby was discharged from the navy in late 1945. Going in as a yeoman First Class, he'd ended up an ensign and considered his three years in the services a life experience, and in many ways a privilege. Back in Hollywood, though, he was just an unemployment statistic, trying to get another break in the industry. He had worked briefly as production manager for his cousin Pat on a film he was producing called Avalanche, directed by Irving Allen, but this was strictly B-movie territory and didn't lead anywhere. The critic of the New York Times decried it as 'A painful hodgepodge', and that the most articulate member of the cast was a talking raven, 'whose comments are crisply put and mercifully brief'.

Things were no better at home, either. He and Gloria had decided they just weren't compatible and sought an amicable divorce. Already in his mid-30s, Cubby found himself at something of a crossroads.

In the winter of 1947, Cubby went into business with a friend of his called Bert Friedlob, a wealthy liquour salesman married to the actress Eleanor Parker. The idea was to sell Christmas trees and that's exactly what Cubby had to do, standing in the freezing cold on the north-west corner of Wilshire Boulevard. It wasn't very glamorous. 'Now and again I began thinking, I have a multimillion-dollar friend, Howard Hughes: I'm the former naval ensign who took Lana Turner out to dinner, and now I'm hustling trees on a street corner.'

The Christmas tree business lasted just the one season, after which Friedlob and Cubby tried their hand at the motor racing game. Along with another friend, Bob Topping, a millionaire socialite and the current husband of Lana Turner, they started promoting midget car racing, then a popular sport in the US. The idea was to take these cars and drivers over to Europe and race them there, but the whole thing turned into a financial disaster when crowds in London didn't take to it and the whole tour collapsed.

This was Cubby's first trip over to Britain and he fell in love with the place and its people. 'Where's the King's Arms?' he asked a passer-by one evening as he searched for a pub to meet some friends. 'Around the Queen's arse,' came the reply, which endeared him to the country instantly.

This was 1948 and Britain was still in the grip of austerity, so soon after the war. Staying at the Savoy, Cubby was politely told that due to rationing his breakfast order of bacon and eggs and a pot of coffee would not be possible. A couple of days later, the same waiter came over to his table and proudly unveiled two boiled eggs. When Cubby asked how he'd got them, the waiter answered, 'I brought them from home, sir.'

Back in Los Angeles, Cubby went to work for Charlie Feldman, who ran the Famous Artists Agency, which had some of the biggest stars in Hollywood signed to it. Cubby liked Feldman, he was suave and personable, and learnt a great deal from him, not just about making money, but how to use it the right way. Feldman was amongst the first in Hollywood to put together 'package deals', choosing the right story, the right director and stars, and sometimes even financing and producing the films himself.

---

Excerpted from "When Harry Met Cubby"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Robert Sellers.
Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements 7

Harry and Cubby: An Introduction 9

1 Cubby 13

2 Harry 46

3 Everything or Nothing 73

4 Just Another Movie 81

5 Calling Mr Hope 97

6 Turkish Delight 102

7 All That Glitters 111

8 Kitchen Sink Bond 126

9 Bond in the Bahamas 138

10 In the Money 150

11 Twice is the Only Way to Live 157

12 Palmer's Last Stand 168

13 It's Fantasmagorical 174

14 Wargames 181

15 The One Hit Wonder 190

16 A Musical Mishap 200

17 Return of the King 207

18 The Saintly Bond 218

19 The Last Encore 229

20 Breaking Up is Hard to Do 235

21 Out on Their Own 241

Bibliography 251

Notes 255

Index 283