The Real ‘Avenger’ : Patrick Macnee’s autobiography leaves few secrets left to be told

The Avenger is stouter these days, to be sure, but at age 70, actor Patrick Macnee still has all the droll suavity and joie de vivre he brought to the role of super-secret agent John Steed.

If you read his autobiography “Blind in One Ear: The Avenger Returns” (Mercury House, $9.95), you’ll see how Steed brought such aplomb to dispatching mad scientists and would-be world dominators on “The Avengers.”

It turns out that power-mad super villains are much more calm and down-to-earth than his parents, world-domination schemes much saner than his childhood, and secret agentry much easier than building a career as an actor.

As “Blind in One Ear” reveals, Macnee seems to have embraced his life, its loftiest highs and most abyssal lows, with the same droll, self-effacing wit.

The highs?

“I did ‘Sleuth’ for 16 months on Broadway,” he said. “But I played it and Tony Quayle played it because Rex Harrison turned it down. He couldn’t be bothered with running up and down those stairs.”

The lows?

“I’ve done dinner theater in the Middle East! I’ve done Dubai, Abu Dhabi ... I’ve been to the bottom! That’s the nadir.”

Macnee’s mother was a beautiful alcoholic who dumped his father to live with her lesbian lover, the formidable “Uncle Evelyn,” who wouldn’t allow men in the house and insisted that Macnee wear kilts.

Evelyn also paid his way to boarding school, where he discovered acting. He excelled in it at Eton. There, alas, he was “sent down” for bookmaking and peddling dirty pictures to the other lads.

Then came the British theater’s stern apprenticeship, followed by tours with provincial repertory companies and, in World War II, the Royal Navy.

Assigned to his first command, a motor torpedo boat in the English Channel, Macnee began by becoming violently seasick. (From the book: “Never mind, sir,” sympathized Able Seaman Parkins, “the Admiral Lord Nelson had a dicky tum.”)

After the war, Macnee pursued any acting job he could get. He worked in London theater, Canadian TV and tried, without varying degrees of success, to catch on in Hollywood.

Not until 1961, playing the sidekick in British TV’s original “Avengers” series, did he begin to attain financial stability and professional success--at a salary of 100 pounds a show.

“It went up to 125 after we had a strike. We earned that for at least five years,” he said. “Then we earned 300 pounds a week in the later years. And I think in the last six months of it, I earned about 600 pounds--about $1,500.”

Residuals and profit participation have made the show much more profitable to him in syndication. It still airs on cable’s Arts & Entertainment network.

“I earned more money in the last two months on the A&E; repeats than I earned in the whole nine years of the show!” he said. “Oh, they were robbers!”

Macnee is unsparingly critical of his own career moves.

In 1970, four months after “The Avengers” wrapped up, he was doing a play in Australia and was asked to take over for Quayle in the London “Sleuth” production. “I said, ‘No, I don’t think so,’ ” he said.

Pause for effect.

“Ruined my whole career,” he said, remarkably cheerful. “I did it 16 months on Broadway two years later, but it wasn’t the same thing. I wasn’t on the same level.”

Still, Macnee keeps busy, with the occasional guest shot in series TV, films (remember “The Howling”?) and books on cassette.

His next project is to record the Bible for compact disc.

“They wanted Charlton Heston,” he confides. “But it turned out that he couldn’t do it because he was doing the Bible, multimedia, in Israel, for the Japanese. Now, I don’t know how you reconcile all that. I was second choice.”

A man’s life is his own work in progress, they say. So is Macnee’s second installment of his autobiography. The working title, he said, is a reference to hot-air ballooning: “Bumpy in the Basket.”

“The Avengers” airs Monday-Friday at 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. and Saturday at 7 a.m. o n A&E.;