Patrick McGoohan: A Life

  

from VIDEO, July 1985

Patrick McGoohan knows what he wants. He enters a restaurant, walks with quick determined strides to a coffee machine, and pours himself some coffee. He sits, lights a cigarette, and orders corned beef on rye without glancing at the menu. He looks not unlike the man he was 17 years ago, shouting, "I am not a number! I am a free man!" on The Prisoner TV series, the man about whom Johnny Rivers sang in "Secret Agent Man": "They're givin' you a number and takin' way your name."

The face is more lined now, he wears horn-rimmed glasses, and at over six feet, he seems taller than you'd expect. But the eyes are still piercing blue, the large forehead is just as prominent, and the voice – that curious, mid-Atlantic accent that can give an ironic twist to the simplest phrase – is as forceful as ever.

He is talking about his TV work because, once again, it is in the news. Maljack Productions/MPI Home Video has just released the first Prisoner episodes on tape and they have sold about 3,000 copies each so far. Secret Agent is to follow.

"It was an allegory," he says of The Prisoner. "I am not sure that I can explain everything about it myself. But I was allowing instinct to carry me a certain amount of the way. I knew there were certaiin themes I wanted to go after."

Themes like personal identity. Trust. Imagination. Education. All of which keep cropping up in McGoohan's work – his stage role in Ibsen's Brand (for which he was named "best actor" by British critics in 1959), his early film work in The Quare Fellow, his later films like Escape from Alcatraz, and his current performance in Pack of Lies, a Broadway play dealing with betrayal.

Pack of Lies

"I don't want to make any statements," he remarks. "If I did, I would be a minister, a politician. Our first job is to entertain. Entertainment is therapy. But it can be inspiring. It can affect one's life."

Certainly that was part of the rationale behind his firsT TV series, Danger Man, which eventually became Secret Agent. The producers wanted a James Bond-type hero, shooting off quips as rapidly as his gun and hopping into bed with a new girl every week.

McGoohan had other ideas, however, and after seeing the first script wrote a long letter to the producer of the series, outlining what his character, John Drake, would and would not do. "We eventually did it without any of that rubbish in it," he says, and his strong feelings led to the most unusual – and fascinating – secret agent to appear among the 1960s crop of Napoleon Solos, John Steeds, and Simon Templars.

"You never saw me fire a gun," he says proudly. And he never dallied with the damsels. "I said to the producers, 'If I start going with a different girl in each episode, what are those kids going to think out there?" 

McGoohan as Drake 

McGoohan, married to former actress Joan Drummond for over 30 years, with three daughters of his own, feels Drake's morality was his strength. "When one says a moral hero, for some reason it has a sort of prissy sound to it. But you can have a hero of principle who is more of a man than a hero without principle."

For McGoohan, it was more important that Drake thought – rather than fought – his way out of tight spots.. "I used this," he says, tapping his forehead.

He has always used that brain – almost obsessively. Born in Astoria, New York, in 1928, he grew up in England, entered the British stage in the early 1950s annd TV in the late '50s.

"I wanted to get some experience with cameras. It was a great opportunity to learn about production. I used to spend every spare minute in the editing room; I handled cameras myself. I had plans to use my technical experience with filmmaking for my own productions. So when the time came, I would know what I was doing."

That attention to detail is just as strong in his private life. When he and his eldest daughter made a home movie, for instance, the actor insisted on a script, a budget, then "proper editing, proper music, just as though it were a 35-millimeter film. If you're going to do a painting, you are not going to throw a can of paint at the canvas and hope something sticks. Even if you are not an artist, you should try and put something on the canvas in some sort of order that says something. As opposed to saying, "Well, that doesn't matter.' Because everything matters in the end." 

McGoohan as No. 6

Such ideas culminated in The Prisoner, the story of one man's fight against a dehumanizing system. McGoohan plays Number Six, in one critic's words, "a man of great resource and cunning," a former secret agent who resigns his job and is spirited away to a sea town known only as the Village. Everyone has a number instead of a name.

"Nothing can be taken for granted in the Village," noted critic Hank Stine in 1970. "Nothing can be trusted but the self, and paranoia is a stable adjustment."

"I'd always had these obsessions in the back of my mind for man in isolation,fight against bureucracy, brainwashing, and numbers," remarks McGoohan.

A visit to the Welsh resort town of Portmeirion, with its fairy tale-like buildings, inspired him; a talk with Sir Lew Grade fired him into action. Grade had financed Secret Agent and wanted McGoohan to do another adventure series. "I said, 'I don't want to do anything quite like that. I want to do something different.' He said, 'What?' So I said, 'This.' And I pulled out a script that I had prepared of the first episode of The Prisoner."

McGoohan and his Secret Agent cohorts – David Tomblin, George Markstein, Bernard Williams – began work on the series after that. Grade wanted 26 episodes but McGoohan had planned only seven ("I didn't think we could sustain more than that"). Nonetheless, he and Tomblin came up with 10 more script ideas and each of the resulting 17 episodes dealt with the actor's favorite themes, from identity ("The Schizoid Man") and trust ("Checkmate") to elections ("Free for All") and education ("The General").

Patrick McGoohan, with Tom Soter, 1984

In "The General," the Prisoner opposes a brainwashing systeM known as "Speedlearn" that endows its users with a university-level degree in 10 minutes. You might know the facts and figures, argues Number Six, but you know nothing. You are one of many, a "row of educated cabbages."

"The right sort of education enables one to think original thoughts," McGoohan says now. "There are people who know something about every subject under the sun. But they are just a reference library. Learning too much stuff, that is closing up your mind. You will find that all the great inventors – Edison, Bell – I can't think of one who was highly educated. The exploration of their mind wasn't surrounded by too much education. The mind is set free. The innate power of creation was there."

Similarly, "I don't agree that travel broadens the mind. You have to find out where you live now. How much did Shakespeare travel? Yet it's all in Shakespeare. The world is there. Did he miss out on Broadway? Times Square? The broadening of the mind is here," he says, tapping his head again.

"I suppose that's an outrageous statement," he adds, with his characteristic half-smile. "Let's qualify that. I don't think it's an outrageous statement because I think it is true. Somebody else might, though – that is my point. If it is examined, the travel thing, the education thing, I think that at the very least there is a premise for debate about it. And that is always fascinating.

"Take The Prisoner. Each person would look at it and I hope have a different interpretation of what it was supposed to be about. That is the intention – to be left hanging somewhat and to lead people to say, 'Well, maybe this was intended.' But as long as they looked at it and thought about it and argued about it, that was the whole concept."

 

Article as it appeared in Video