James Bond: The Secret History

by Sean Egan

  Continuity howlers include the fact that an escape from death sees Bond crying his ‘first tears since his childhood’ (in fact, he wept at Vesper’s death in Casino Royale – and, one would assume, at the treatment of his testicles in the same text) and the statement that Bond has shared ‘so many adventures’ with Felix Leiter (he only met the American in the first book and has been on leave since).

  As before – and as ever – there is a certain flatness of tone brought about by the fact that Bond is neither excitable nor warm. One doesn’t love this character.

  Stylistically, though, Fleming is sure-footed. Particularly lyrical are the passages that draw upon this keen snorkeller’s deep knowledge of the sea, such as the depiction of the mysterious, creepy, multi-coloured, multi-tentacled aquatic life Bond has to negotiate on his way to plant the mine. The action sequences are consistently good. When Bond is discovered after breaking into the Floridian worm-and-bait shop that acts as a cover for Mr Big’s activities, we feel we are right in the middle of the resultant gun battle (‘a shot whammed between his legs into a pile of conchs, sending splinters of their hard china buzzing round him like wasps’). This same scene results in the book’s most powerful passage: a Mr Big henchman begs Bond for mercy as he finds himself dangling over a shark tank and Bond – cognisant of the fact that it is this man who is responsible for Leiter’s losing an arm and a leg in the same tank – coldly kicks him to a watery grave.

  What completes the impression that Live and Let Die would have made more sense than Casino Royale as the opening novel in the franchise is Bond’s skirmishes with Mr Big. Here, Fleming provides the ingredients for many classic Bond showdowns to come: the villain’s menace tempered by ironic politeness (Mr Big addresses the hero as ‘Mister James Bond’), Bond’s calm defiance in the villain’s clutches, the villain’s incongruous eloquence, the notice given Bond of his death that grants him convenient thinking time – all are elements that would become lovably familiar in the Bond canon.

  There was interest from an early stage in adapting Bond to the big screen. The UK’s Associated British Pictures and Hollywood’s MCA made enquiries about Casino Royale, but both overtures failed to make any progress because of squabbles over percentages between Cape and Fleming’s US agent, Curtis Brown.

  However, a television deal was struck for the property and, on 21 October 1954 at 8.30 p.m. EST, the American television network CBS broadcast an adaptation of Casino Royale as part of its Climax! drama strand.

  Excluding commercials, CBS’s adaptation of the first Bond novel ran to just under fifty-two minutes. As with all television of the era it was in monochrome and, as with much televised drama of that time, it was broadcast live. It was directed by William H. Brown and its script came from Antony Lewis and Charles Bennett.

  Actor Barry Nelson was not Bond as we know him. Referred to as ‘Jimmy’ (‘007’ is nowhere mentioned), he works for the ‘Combined Intelligence Agency’ in Washington, has a bouffant of swept-back hair and uses his American accent to drawl unperturbed quips (‘Still in one piece, but I wouldn’t know how’). The redrawing of the character’s nationality was typical of an era when there was no reason for the United States to dance to any other nation’s tune, economic, political or cultural.

  As in the book, Le Chiffre has a gambling vice that makes him vulnerable and Bond’s objective is to clean him out. He is assisted by Clarence (sic) Leiter, played by Michael Pate, the show’s token Brit.

  Unlike in the book, Chiffre (as opposed to the affectation of Le Chiffre) is a real name. Naturally, on fifties prime-time TV, testicle torture to obtain the hidden cheque is out of the question, although the pliers-and-toes substitution has its own wince-making properties, even if not directly seen. A torture-racked Bond manages to shoot Chiffre dead as Chiffre is about to dispatch Valerie Mathis (Linda Christian), the production’s substitute for Vesper Lynd.

  Cut to host William Lundigan previewing the next week’s episode. He also, on behalf of the network, salutes the 42nd National Safety Congress currently occurring in Chicago – an act that is the epitome of the sort of clean-cut gushing alien to Fleming, his creation and the rest of the British race.

  Despite that grisly all-American kiss-off, Casino Royale is not a half-bad entrée for James Bond to the world of visual drama. Leaving aside the necessary truncation and dilution, the adaptation is fairly faithful and adroit, and actually quite sophisticated in the way it convincingly portrays the procedures and tempo of the baccarat table. Although Bond is not in full tuxedo, his bow tie in the casino scenes even provides a precursor to one of the trademarks of the cinema Bond, as does his snogging the girl as the closing music starts up. While Nelson might be a boringly identikit square-jawed type common to the time, Peter Lorre as Chiffre is indeed as repulsively ‘toad-like’ as Leiter describes him.

  Fleming never saw the broadcast, having to content himself with a critique provided by old friend Clare Blanshard. In a video/DVD/Internet-less world, Fleming must have written it off as a shady buck-making little secret that wasn’t likely to contaminate his literary series. If its being forgotten not long after he had banked his $1,000 fee was his desire, he got his wish, at least in his lifetime. The Americanisation of Bond remained merely the stuff of rumour and increasingly fading memories for several decades, giving rise to urban myths such as the one about Lorre getting up after he is killed because he doesn’t realise he’s still in shot. The show was long considered lost when a partial copy surfaced in 1981 followed by other, full, copies, and it has now graduated to commercially available DVDs.

  The cultural heavy-handedness of the Casino Royale TV production also attended Bond’s entrée on the American literary scene. Casino Royale was published in hardback by Macmillan in the States in March 1954. However, a paperback was initially passed over in favour of a soft-cover version of the third Bond novel, Moonraker, which appeared in 1955 through Permabooks. It reduced the title to a parenthesised subheading in favour of something one could more imagine coming out of the mouth of Humphrey Bogart than a British government agent: Too Hot To Handle. The text had been tweaked to make it more understandable to non-Britons, ‘lifts’ becoming ‘elevators,’ ‘zebra crossings’ changed to ‘pedestrian crossings’, etc. Whole paragraphs containing material thought inordinately English were excised and there were some explanatory footnotes from Fleming. When Casino Royale did make it into paperback in the States in 1955 via American Popular Library, its title was reduced to a bracketed subtitle beneath a gumshoe-y new name: You Asked for It. On the back, the hero was ‘Jimmy Bond’.

  Mercifully, this was the extent of American tampering. The US would, moreover, embrace Bond specifically because of his Englishness. In a short course of time, the success of the Bond books and, especially, movies would be one of the things mainly responsible for making America more open to the virtues of the ‘Briddish’.

  In 1954, Fleming sold to producer Gregory Ratoff a $600 option on a movie version of Casino Royale. Ratoff bought full rights for $6,000 in 1955. By the beginning of the following year, Ratoff was announcing that Twentieth Century Fox would distribute an adaptation he planned to start filming in the summer. (It was revealed that Fleming had written a screenplay but that it would not be used.)

  A surviving Casino Royale script dating from 1957 is by an unknown hand. Like the CBS adaptation, it’s fairly faithful to the book except for its disdain for the idea of the hero being British: Bond becomes American gangster and poker expert Lucky Fortunato. ‘I did think it was good,’ says Jeremy Duns. However, he adds, ‘It’s a draft script – it’s not filmable. It felt quite old-fashioned. It felt much more like a Sinatra film.’

  In what would become a pattern over the following years with putative Bond live-action projects, the Ratoff film failed to materialise.

  Novelist Len Deighton – who first met him in 1963 – recalled that for Ian Fleming ‘writing was a challenge and a test of his manly resilience to pain; he made no secret of the fact that
he hated it.’

  While it may not be the case that by the time of the third Bond book he was already detesting the process, it seems that what had started as a hobby for Fleming was already on the cusp of becoming a resented chore. After he had produced its first draft, he wrote to Cape to tell them that he might already be moving into self-parody. He said that ‘the future of James Bond is going to require far more thought than I have so far devoted to him’ and that the books seemed destined to follow ‘more or less the same pattern, but losing freshness with each volume’. To Fleming’s credit, little or none of this showed in Moonraker, published on 5 April 1955. The book lacks the exotic backdrops and sometimes hectic action of Live and Let Die, but is a smoother read than both that and Casino Royale.

  This is despite the fact that there is remarkably little action in Moonraker: a kick up the backside, some mild torture and a high-speed car chase are about the extent of it. We do, though, get a positive landslide of insight into Bond’s private and professional lives.

  ‘It was only two or three times a year that an assignment came along requiring his particular abilities,’ we are told of 007. The rest of the year he is more like an ‘easy-going senior civil servant’, laboriously reading through the endless dockets and files about anything that the Service thinks he may need to know.

  Musing on the fact that the compulsory double-O retirement age is forty-five, Bond is glumly conscious of the potential for only two dozen tough assignments in the eight years he has left until he is given a staff job at headquarters. Thirty-seven is a fairly realistic age for an espionage agent and, interestingly, is the age Fleming was when his own intelligence career ended with the conclusion of World War II. One should also note that before youth culture (the dawn of which was then just around the corner), thirty-seven was not the quintessential ‘middle-age’ that it is to modern sensibilities. The mental definition herein of Bond as a ‘young man’ by female character Gala Brand would have been a common categorisation in 1955.

  Bond’s yearly salary of £1,500 (about £32k in today’s money) is that of a principal officer in the Civil Service. He lives very well because he also has a yearly, tax-free private income of £1,000 and when on assignment can spend as much money as he likes. Despite his financial comfort, Bond hasn’t much use for filthy lucre. In his depressed moments he is sure he will be killed before that forty-five cut-off and wants to have as little as possible in his bank account when that happens.

  His private life – when not involving playing cards with a few close friends or high-stakes golf at weekends – revolves around three married women, to whom he makes love ‘with rather cold passion’.

  Plotwise, Bond is – courtesy of his fluency in German, expertise in sabotage and knowledge of geopolitical issues – assigned to be a government security man at the site of the Moonraker rocket. The Moonraker is funded, designed and staffed by wealthy industrialist Hugo Drax in lieu of Britain’s ability to provide its own nuclear deterrent. (In real life, it would have one by the late fifties.) The Prime Minister has to give the authority for a Secret Service agent to become involved in what is technically a domestic affair. (This is in fact the only Fleming novel in which Bond doesn’t go abroad.)

  Drax is, like Le Chiffre, somebody who claims to have no idea who he is. He has distorted teeth and a face deformed by the same wartime accident that robbed him of his memory, something he tries to cover up with a big red moustache and the tufts of hair on his cheeks. Drax also has filthy manners. Worse than those shortcomings is the fact that he cheats at cards, something exposed by Bond at M’s behest in a first section whose relationship to what follows is curiously superficial.

  It transpires that Moonraker’s test-flight coordinates have deliberately been changed so that it will land not in the Channel but the middle of London, which must naturally mean that its dummy weaponry has been replaced by a real warhead. Although Bond discovers some suspicious facts, the full nefarious plan is uncovered by Gala, a beautiful Special Branch policewoman.

  ‘You don’t know how I have longed to tell my story,’ Drax informs Bond and Gala, who have been captured and bound. This is of course a precursor to a self-justifying backstory and gloating revelation of malevolent plan, interspersed with Bond’s ejaculations of scorn. It’s now known as the epitome of Bondian, but Jeremy Duns points out, ‘The thing with the villain explaining to Bond what his plot is before he kills him – the supposedly amazingly clever villain actually stupidly tells Bond everything – this was already being parodied by Leslie Charteris twenty years earlier, it was so common.’

  Drax is in fact a Nazi, as are all his German scientists. The Soviet Union has assisted him in his plans for its own ideological reasons. Drax intends that Bond and Gala be incinerated with the explosion of the warhead, but the two free themselves and alter the flight plan. That Bond and Gala then listen to the radio to find out whether their plan has succeeded is a damp squib of a climax to be sure, but is in the book’s general spirit of realism. The interaction with what is nominally the ‘Bond girl’ also turns out to be a damp squib: Bond’s presumptions about her are upended by the revelation that Gala is about to get married. In a melancholy ending, they decorously shake hands.

  A glut of error, inconsistency and nonsense is by now to be expected in a Bond book, but it’s difficult to overlook the fact that it is inconceivable, even at the height of the Cold War, that Moscow would have sanctioned a missile strike that would almost certainly have precipitated global nuclear combat. Yet such is the verisimilitude of Fleming’s story – especially his research on rocket science and the way he conveys the Moonraker’s awe-inspiring, gleaming giganticness – that this occurs to one only when mulling it over, and that this mulling process does not occur when the pages are being turned.

  Moonraker aroused the interest of Hollywood. However, just as famed director Alexander Korda had failed to follow-up his interest after seeing an advance copy of Live and Let Die, John Payne and subsequently the Rank Organisation did not capitalise on the property on which they had taken out options. Moonraker rights transferred back to Fleming in 1959.

  The book, though, did get adapted to another medium, even if Fleming may not have known about it. A South African radio broadcast of a Moonraker production by the Durban Repertory Theatre has variously been reported as occurring in 1955, 1956, 1957 and 1958 and to have been both an hour and ninety minutes long. There is a suspicion that it may not have been authorised by Fleming or his agents.

  The second actor to portray James Bond was, like Barry Nelson, not British. Bob Holness spent most of his formative years in the UK but was born in South Africa and returned there as a young adult. Holness told one Bond fan that his performance as 007 was broadcast live and that no recording was made.

  Some might suggest this to be for the best. The idea of Holness playing a blunt instrument is rather comical for Britain, where Holness eventually returned in his grey-haired, bespectacled late middle age and became known as quizmaster of iconic British teenage game show Countdown, remembered for its sniggering catchphrase, ‘I’ll ’ave a “P”, please, Bob.’ However, Holness in real life was clearly somewhat less clean-cut than his television persona. He once reported that his reaction to the news that Sean Connery had been cast as 007 was, ‘That cunt’s got my job!’

  Over the subsequent decades, there have been few further Bond radio dramas, perhaps because broadcasters perceive the idea of them as pointless in light of the lush visual spectacle of Bond films.

  Diamonds are Forever, the fourth Bond novel, was published on 4 April 1956.

  It was serialised that month in the Daily Express newspaper. The Express was then, as now, middle-market, pitched halfway between the intellectualism of The Times and the populism of the Daily Mirror. Unlike now, it was then a top seller and the serialisation served to proffer Bond to a large captive audience who may not have previously been aware of the character. The Express would from that point on routinely run Bond novel serialisat
ions, albeit condensed and sanitised for a family audience.

  In the first recounted Bond mission with no involvement on the part of Russia, Bond is dispatched to the United States to disrupt a diamond-smuggling route to there from Africa. The American end of the smuggling operation is here referred to as ‘American gangsters’ or ‘The Mob’ but for some reason never ‘The Mafia’. Bond has a contempt for such types, whom he considers ‘Italian bums with monogrammed shirts who spend the day eating spaghetti and meat-balls and squirting scent over themselves’.

  Bond is able to get into the diamond-smuggling pipeline because he can pass as intended courier Peter Franks to someone who has only a description on which to go – a situation so lacking in what would now be basic security requirements as to remind us that the world of Fleming’s Bond is as close to the nineteenth century as it is to our own. Bond quickly starts unravelling a trail of diverse but intertwined criminality involving fixed horse races in Saratoga Springs and rigged blackjack games in Las Vegas. Bond is unexpectedly assisted/shadowed by Felix Leiter, now working for the famous private detective agency Pinkerton’s. Leiter has a steel hook in place of his right hand, and a false left leg. Not for the first or last time, Bond has a romantic coupling with a woman whose name is simultaneously ridiculous and sublime: Tiffany Case.

  On his seaborne passage home with Tiffany, Bond discovers that also aboard are Mr Wint and Mr Kidd, a pair of Mob-employed homosexual killers. After dispatching them, Bond is compelled to cover his tracks to make the deaths look like an argument that has ended in murder and suicide. This is realistic, but somewhat less intoxicating than the cavalier attitude of the cinema Bond, who has never given a stuff about the carnage and official headaches caused by his actions.