Show Business: Cuddly Dudley, the Wee Wonder

Hollywood embraces a most unlikely romantic lead

When he was six or seven and spending many of his days in British hospitals, a nurse gave Dudley Moore a good-night kiss. Her name was Pat, and 40 years later he can still feel the imprint of her lips on his cheek. He describes it in Proustian terms. “I almost spin when I think of it,” he says. “She was truly an angel of mercy, and that kiss was probably the first taste of real, unqualified, uncomplicated affection I had ever had. In many ways my entire life is based on recapturing that single moment of affection.”

These days that quest is closer to its goal than it ever was before. Moore, 47, has become America’s newest, and least likely, romantic hero. At 5 ft. 2½ in., he looks up at all of his leading ladies. He is neither handsome nor intriguingly ugly, just nice looking, like millions of men in the paying public. But American audiences are now discovering what the British knew two decades ago. “He was known as Cuddly Dudley then,” says Humorist Peter Cook, who collaborated with Moore through much of his career. “Whether women wanted to mother him or smother him, I don’t know.”

In “10,” Moore’s first megasuccess in film, Bo Derek did a little of both, accompanied by the hard-breathing beat of Ravel’s Boléro. In Arthur, an even bigger hit, duties were shared by Liza Minnelli and John Gielgud, who played his long-suffering valet. There have been a couple of flops along the way, notably the ghoulish Six Weeks, whose bad reviews have left the star angry and bewildered.

In Lovesick, which opens on Feb. 18, Moore is a middle-aged Manhattan psychiatrist who falls in love with a nubile patient and finds happiness under the ironic eyes of Sigmund Freud’s fantasy-ghost (Alec Guinness). The film was written and directed by Marshall Brickman, who collaborated with Woody Allen on the screenplays of Sleeper, Annie Hall and Manhattan, and it has many of the funny, arch touches of Allen’s best pictures. The early scenes, particularly, in which a motley group of patients pass through Moore’s office, are hilarious, knowing satire at its best. But the script ravels, wandering into contrivance and predictability. Moore gives a subtle, warm, finely tuned performance, however, and Elizabeth McGovern, 21, who had attention-grabbing parts in Ordinary People and Ragtime, shows enormous promise as the patient who sets off his mid-life crisis. She has an unusual beauty, with dark hair and blue eyes as bright as headlights and a sandy voice reminiscent of Jean Arthur’s. The two of them form an odd combination, but it works.

Moore has finished Romantic Comedy, based on Bernard Slade’s Broadway play, which will be released in October, and he is now working on Unfaithfully Yours, a remake of the Preston Sturges comedy, in which he portrays a famous conductor, convinced that his beautiful young wife (Nastassia Kinski) is having an affair behind his back. Five years ago, Moore was a well-known British comic who had a small American public; today he is one of Hollywood’s top box-office draws, cuddling to his own bosom a salary of $2½ million for his latest picture.

To Lovesick Moore brought many touches from his own experience: he spent 17 years in the office of one shrink or another, trying to come to terms with a childhood that was more than unhappy. His father was a railway electrician, his mother was a shorthand typist, and he grew up in a poor, row-house neighborhood in the London suburb of Dagenham. But poverty was not the problem: it was a clubfoot and a skinny, slightly shorter left leg, which sent him in and out of hospitals from the age of two weeks on. “Psychologically it was made harrowing by the fact that my parents felt guilty about it,” he says. “That made me feel as if I had done something wrong. Years later my mother quite honestly said to me, ‘I wanted to kill you when you were born, because I felt so angry at myself and so terrible about the pain I knew you were going to have.’ I’m not grim, but I’m still basically cringing from the defect. I remember kids sniggering and smirking—they called me Hopalong—and it has only been in recent years that I’ve pulled myself out of a certain anesthesia.”

Only later, as he grew, or failed to grow, did Moore realize that he had another problem. “I felt very humiliated about my height when I was a child. Then, when I became interested in what can only be described as the opposite sex, I felt that being small was a disadvantage. I felt unworthy of anything, a little runt with a twisted foot.” His was not a loving home, and his parents, both of whom were also 5 ft. 2 in., seemed to have two basic emotions, fear and anxiety. “They huddled together for some sort of comfort,” he says. “I don’t know that either of them could express love very well, to each other or to us.”

In his early teens Moore learned how to win affection, and the lesson has dominated his life: people like to laugh, and they love those who can make them do so. Having discovered that vintage truth, he became the class clown. Says he: “I think it’s every comedian’s story.” He was developing another crowd-pleasing talent as well; he was a fine pianist who concocted melodies easily. He vaulted over the class barrier by winning a scholarship in music to Oxford; by the time he left with two degrees in 1958, he was an accomplished Garner-style jazzman and the prolific composer of tunes for local skits and cabarets. “Dudley has always had a promiscuous talent as a musician,” says his old friend Jonathan Miller. “He secretes music like sweat.”

Moore became famous in 1961 when he teamed with three other Oxbridge grads—Cook, Miller and Alan Bennett—in the satirical review Beyond the Fringe. Moore’s most brilliant contributions were at the keyboard, in a lampoon of Myra Hess playing the “Moonlight”Sonata and in a hilarious, dizzy bit about a pianist who is unable to conclude a coda to a florid piece. The show played for four years to packed houses, first in London, then in New York. When it ended, Moore and Cook went on to do a television series and five movies, including Bedazzled, their zany version of the Faust legend. Their style was blithe, bizarre humor that turned logic upside down. In Bedazzled, for instance, they invented an order of leaping nuns who would jump on trampolines to get closer to God. In their knockabout revue Good Evening, which ran almost continuously for five years, they constructed an imaginary restaurant buried deep in the Yorkshire moors. It was called the Frog and the Peach, and there were only two entrées on the menu: Frog à la pêche and Pêche à la frog.

Cook, who calls Moore “the Wee Wonder” and “the Megamidget,” probably became as close to Moore as anyone ever has, but their relationship was sometimes stormy. “We always got along well together when we were alone,” says Moore, “but sometimes when other people were around, there was a competition. One of us was always trying to get the better of the other and, in public, we each adopted a superior attitude. He was bored by my desire to please, and I scorned his relentless and perverse cynicism.”

In 1977 they split up. Cook worked in London while Moore tried his luck in Hollywood. The following year he co-starred with Chevy Chase and Goldie Hawn as a sex-crazed swinger in the movie Foul Play. Since then he has never been idle, and rarely lonely.

Moore’s height, or lack of it, has not hampered his relations with, in his words, what can only be described as the opposite sex. He is, in two words, girl crazy. He enjoys sex immensely and, given an opportunity, talks about it endlessly, with innocent self-absorption, as if he were describing the movements of the stars and planets. In a recent Playboy interview, almost the entire conversation is devoted to that one subject, and he recounts his love life, graphically and all too vividly, without inhibitions or constraints. “I have been talking about those things for years,” he notes. “It’s just that nobody likes to print them usually.”

Moore has been married twice, to British Actress Suzy Kendall and to American Actress Tuesday Weld, with whom he has a son, Patrick, 6. Now divorced and living alone in Marina del Rey in Los Angeles County, he spends most of his time with Singer Susan Anton, 32, who is blond, toothy and very, very tall (5 ft. 11 in.). “Susan and I have been thrown together in the night for the past three years,” he says, “and our relationship has been lingering on very pleasantly. I am relatively monogamous, but I don’t believe in monogamy unless it happens to fall on one like a Russian satellite out of the sky. I don’t want to be married again. It makes me feel that I have joined a club I don’t want to be in.”

Despite the money pouring down on him, Moore lives modestly by Hollywood standards. His airy beach house, which was once owned by Rudy Vallee, is comfortable but not luxurious. A Yamaha grand piano is the focal point of the living room, and an electronic piano adorns his bedroom. “Having a piano nearby is an ever present box of delights in which I can always dip my hand,” he says. He plays classical music for Anton, works out scores for movies, at the moment the love motif for Unfaithfully Yours. He pairs off easily with his friend Jazz Singer Cleo Laine, whether in a birthday serenade for Susan or on last summer’s irresistible old-favorites album Smilin’ Through.

He is content with this kind of “self-expression.” He has no ambition to get behind the camera, package deals or plunge into real estate. Apart from the house, a white 1963 Bentley is one of his few major possessions. “I don’t gain pleasure acquiring things to look at,” he says. “I’d buy a museum reproduction before I’d go for the real antique. My mother used to keep books showing how much she spent—four pieces of bacon, three eggs—and made sure she had the right change in her purse. Maybe that strange sort of anal thoroughness stayed with me.”

He is one of the few stars who admit to loving Hollywood parties; he enjoys dinners with six or eight guests, and he likes going to the movies as well as making them. One of his main goals still is to make people laugh, and that will probably never change. “I try to seduce,” he says. “I want to attract people. I want their warmth. I want their love.”

—By Gerald Clarke. Reported by Denise Worrell/Los Angeles