by Sean Egan
The third and fifth stories not only feature little or no espionage, but could easily not be Bond tales at all.
‘Quantum of Solace’ is a real curiosity, starting with an opening that finds Bond at the aftermath of a dinner party, a territory instantly recognisable as alien for a man whose recreational backdrops are roads, restaurants, gentlemen’s clubs and bedrooms. Sure enough, Bond is discomforted by being seated on a softly cushioned sofa with the Governor of Nassau, a scenario he finds inappropriately ‘feminine’. Bond is in the area because he has been ordered to stop arms reaching the Cuban supporters of Castro.
The ice begins to break after a half-joking remark by Bond that if he ever got married it would be to an air hostess. The Governor proceeds to tell Bond the story of a man who had achieved that then-newish fantasy, a civil servant he gives the pseudonym Philip Masters. Once the air hostess married Masters, she behaved in a lazy, cruel and faithless way that brought out a not-necessarily beneficial inner steel in her husband. The latter refused to grant a ‘quantum of solace’ to the wife he spurned and discarded. This is a term of the Governor’s coinage, meaning a residue of humanity in a wounded spouse. The woman was left destitute but fell into luck by marrying a Canadian millionaire. A twist in the tale is provided by the Governor’s dropping the bombshell that the woman is one half of the couple with whom Bond and the Governor have just dined, a woman Bond found dull. This all leaves Bond thinking that ‘Fate plays a more authentic game than any Secret Service conspiracy devised by Governments’.
The story is an interesting failure. Fleming would have been better advised to depict the drama rather than have it relayed: lines like, ‘Philip Masters gazed out of the window, seeing her in the sea of white clouds below’ do not convince as having come out of a human mouth.
Even here, we learn important things about 007. Very unexpectedly, Bond’s attitude towards the Cuban situation is that, ‘If anything, his sympathies were with the rebels’. One wonders whether this is a response by Fleming to the recent attacks on him by left-wing critics. It’s not the last time in the series that Bond’s attitudes suggest an authorial tweaking in the cause of such appeasement, and Fleming even took it into the interview sphere, telling Playboy of Bond, ‘I should think what politics he has are just a little bit left of centre.’
Closer ‘The Hildebrand Rarity’ is another experimental story that does not need to include Bond for whatever power it possesses. It finds 007 awaiting his ship home from the Seychelles after having completed a report on whether the location is susceptible to Communist infiltration. A local friend persuades Bond to accompany him on an errand aboard The Wavekrest, a yacht owned by Milton Krest. The latter is an American millionaire who, to help justify the tax-exempt status of his foundation, is seeking a specimen of a fish called the Hildebrand Rarity.
Krest disciplines his young and cowed wife Liz with ‘The Corrector’, the amputated tail of a stingray. His method of killing the Hildebrand Rarity is a toxin that will make many other fish collateral damage. Despite his own blood-drenched profession, Bond takes such an exception to Krest that he tries to sabotage the mission. It doesn’t work and Krest throws a party to celebrate the capture of his valuable specimen, at which the American drunkenly offends Bond’s friend Barbey and frightens his own wife. Later that night, both Bond and Krest sleep on deck, where Krest’s snoring is abruptly terminated. Bond finds him with the Hildebrand Rarity fatally stuffed into his mouth. Mindful of the prospect of the scandal and embarrassment of a murder trial in which a secret agent might be a suspect, Bond throws the body overboard. On the trip home, he studies Liz and Barbey closely to try to work out who is responsible for the bizarre slaying, but neither gives anything away and the story ends on an inconclusive note.
In a story centred on water, Fleming is inevitably on strong ground. Moreover, the way the author depicts Bond, detective-like, testing the reactions of Barbey and Liz to Krest’s death, is impressive for its economy. (‘… Liz Krest had a short but credible fit of hysterics.’)
It should be noted that, at the time, For Your Eyes Only was not necessarily perceived as the start of a downward gradient. Some reviewers previously hostile to Fleming’s full-length Bond prose felt that these miniature Bond adventures removed excesses from the author’s outlandish plots, while others were impressed by the exploration of new pastures.
In hindsight, ‘Quantum of Solace’ and ‘The Hildebrand Rarity’ are very interesting for what they say about the workings of Flemings’s mind. Via such only nominally Bond writing, Fleming seems to have been surreptitiously producing ‘worthy’ work without breaking the cover granted by genre fiction and thus leaving himself open to the ridicule of his wife’s set. He was also, it would seem, trying to break out of what James Bond had become for him: a gilded cage.
By the turn of the sixties, a flurry of activity indicated that James Bond’s repeated failure to graduate to any further live-action representation was nearing an end. Multiple parties were now involved in a veritable race to bring Bond to the big screen.
Fleming himself was involved in one of those film projects. It was the only one not based on an existing Bond novel. Explains Raymond Benson, ‘Nineteen fifty-eight, Ivar Bryce was working with Kevin McClory as a producer. Kevin had this movie called The Boy and the Bridge that Bryce produced and McClory wrote and directed. They thought that was going to be Ian’s ticket to get Bond on the silver screen.’ The Boy and the Bridge won several film-festival awards. In May 1959, a group gathered at the Essex home of Ivar Bryce. He was a lifelong friend of Fleming: they attended Eton together and both worked in intelligence during the war. The rest of the party comprised Fleming, McClory and Ernest Cuneo, a lawyer friend of both Fleming and Bryce. Benson: ‘They were throwing around ideas for a Bond movie. McClory didn’t want to adapt an existing book. He wanted to do an original screenplay and he wanted to make it in the Bahamas ’cause he lived there and did underwater stuff and he thought that would be very visual.’
Duns: ‘They’d decided that none of the books were going to work, we’ll do a new story from scratch. So the idea as far as McClory saw it was we’re going to use all this new technology and this is all going to be brilliant, and this is going to be the first James Bond film – hopefully of a series.’
Benson: ‘It was Ernest Cuneo who came up with this two-page outline of a plot that weekend and he sold it to Ivar Bryce for a dollar, relinquishing any rights to it ’cause he didn’t care. Bryce was acting as producer. Fleming took the first stab at writing a screenplay. It was terrible. It was called James Bond of the Secret Service. Then McClory gave him notes and Fleming wrote another treatment. He retitled it Longitude 78 West. Then McClory hired another writer named Jack Whittingham to come in and rewrite it, ’cause Fleming really wasn’t a screenwriter. There were a couple of drafts of the script that Whittingham wrote. He was a professional screenwriter. Somewhere along the way the title got changed to Thunderball.’
In his Fleming biography, John Pearson dated to 1958 Fleming’s stated preference for an actor to play Bond: David Niven. That McClory demurred is understandable. Niven was a debonair and usually mustachioed man who didn’t give the impression of being able to look after himself in a fight. He was also already pushing fifty. Perhaps Fleming was blinded by sentimentality: the two were friends. (Possibly as recompense for not pushing Niven’s case hard enough, Niven got an adoring mention from the character Kissy Suzuki in the Bond book You Only Live Twice.)
By August 1959 a letter Fleming wrote to Bryce showed a new preference: ‘Richard Burton would be by far the best James Bond!’ Fleming was on more solid ground here. Burton had been criticised in 1959 for looking too old for the part of Jimmy Porter in the film version of John Osborne’s angry-young-man stage play Look Back in Anger. He was, though, pretty much ideal for the part of 007: thirty-four and possessed of a brawny physique, smouldering good looks and a voice of booming authority.
Meanwhile, in July 1960 the Ratoff-produc
ed, 20th Century-Fox-funded Casino Royale once again flickered into life. The Los Angeles Times reported that Ratoff would be the director and Peter Finch the lead actor. Although this wasn’t the first time the announcement of a Ratoff-helmed Bond flick had been made, it was still news to McClory. Duns: ‘Kevin McClory had been told that he had the right to make the first Bond film … He says, “What the fuck is going on? Who is this Ratoff guy?” Basically, the problem is that Fleming had sold off different books.’
Gregory Ratoff died in December 1960 with the filming of Casino Royale still not yet begun. However, if McClory thought that was the end – or even the extent – of his unexpected competition troubles, he was mistaken. In June 1961 it was reported that the production partnership of Albert ‘Cubby’ Broccoli and Harry Saltzman was set to bring 007 to the big screen. Saltzman enthused in the press, ‘Actors are falling over themselves to play Bond: Cary Grant, David Niven, Trevor Howard, James Mason, all are interested but I want to use an unknown.’ Further media stories made clearer the picture about their rights: Saltzman and Broccoli had bought seven of the books.
This in turn reactivated the Casino Royale project that had seemed to die with Gregory Ratoff. The right to adapt the first Bond novel to the big screen was one of several film properties sold by Ratoff’s widow to ease her financial difficulties. The buyer was agent Charles K. Feldman. It so happened that Feldman had once been an employer of Cubby Broccoli, who started his film career as a talent agent for Feldman’s company Famous Artists. (Broccoli would later claim that he had tried to buy the Casino Royale rights from Mrs Ratoff but was rebuffed.) ‘Feldman did it as a favour to the widow,’ says Duns. ‘He wasn’t particularly thinking about anything to do with James Bond. Then suddenly he realises, “Christ, Broccoli – the guy who used to work for me – has bought seven of these damn things and it’s all over the press.”’
Feldman decided to go full steam ahead with his own Bond project. The seriousness of his intent is illustrated by the fact that he engaged the ultra-expensive services of legendary screenwriter Ben Hecht. Dubbed the ‘Shakespeare of Hollywood’, Hecht had been responsible for the scripts of It’s a Wonderful World, Spellbound, Notorious and several other cinema classics. However, his renown in the industry was far greater than among that part of the public who paid attention during the credits: as often as not, he polished scripts without credit.
When in 2011 Duns tracked down several drafts of Hecht’s Casino Royale – which had lain undisturbed in the Newberry Library in Chicago since 1979, and no doubt had been similarly neglected before being deposited there – he found them, one or two outlandish drafts aside, to be ‘a masterclass in thriller-writing’.
Hecht seems to have been fifty years ahead of his time: the tone of his Casino Royale script is comparable to the one filmed with Daniel Craig. Duns says, ‘Hecht was trying to do in sixty-three, sixty-four what they did in [2006], which is to film a near-unfilmable novella, really, in which not an awful lot happens and most of it’s a card game, and a torture scene which is a little unacceptable for cinema audiences, and to try and make it into an exciting thriller … It’s grim but it’s totally brilliant. It’s possible that Hecht’s version would have flopped. It’s very dark. It’s got the ending from the novel, with her dying and a heartbroken Bond having proposed marriage. It’s got some very dark stuff about paedophilia in it.’ However, Duns also says, ‘It’s a very Hitchcockian film. It’s got chases on water skis. It’s got an incredible torture scene. It’s got all of the stuff there for the best Bond film ever made.’
Broccoli and Saltzman, though, beat Feldman to the punch by releasing Dr. No. Duns says of Hecht’s Bond scripts, ‘It looks like the first stuff that he was doing was late 1963. It’s informed by [the film] Dr. No and, while he’s writing it, it’s informed by [the film] From Russia with Love.’ Apart from a single scene in a draft around halfway through the process where he makes Bond an American who has inherited the 007 number, Hecht’s Bond is British. Or perhaps that should more accurately be Scottish. Duns: ‘The character of James Bond is a very, very subtle and clever melding of Ian Fleming’s character and Sean Connery.’
Unfortunately, at this point death entered the story again: Hecht succumbed to a heart attack in April 1964 without having completed a planned next draft of Casino Royale.
The spikes in interest in James Bond caused by newspaper serialisations, the prime-ministerial visit to Goldeneye and the Express strip were as nothing compared with some positive publicity generated in March 1961. It was in that month that Fleming’s writing was granted an unexpected endorsement from the most powerful man in the world.
Ian Fleming had met John Fitzgerald Kennedy in March 1960 through the aegis of his friend Marion ‘Oatsie’ Leiter, wife of Tommy Leiter, a couple after whom Fleming had named Bond’s CIA chum. At the relevant dinner party at the home of the then Senator Kennedy, Fleming proceeded to amuse his host with his semi-facetious proposals to undermine the recently installed Castro regime in Cuba. A year to the month after their meeting, Kennedy – now ensconced in his position as young, handsome, hatless President for a new liberal era – was the subject of a feature in Life magazine. The puff piece by Hugh Sidey was titled ‘The President’s Voracious Reading Habits’ and boasted that Kennedy had a reading speed almost five times the national average. It also contained a list of the President’s ten favourite books. They were mostly ostentatiously erudite works, but in ninth position sat From Russia with Love.
‘That was bullshit,’ says John Pearson. ‘Kennedy didn’t read for pleasure ever. He did get a rather fancy list of books up, which included Lord David Cecil’s The Young Melbourne, a most unlikely book for Kennedy to have [read], and several others. It was Sidey who actually slipped in From Russia with Love.’
In a more deferential age, the motivation for, and authenticity of, the article’s contents wasn’t the subject of much discussion, but the consensus that has grown in the years since is that the article was a calculated attempt to provide specific dimensions to the President’s image. Contrary to what Pearson suggests, Kennedy certainly read and enjoyed the Bond books, having been introduced to them either (sources differ) by his wife Jacqueline with From Russia with Love itself or by Oatsie Leiter with Casino Royale. However, it can be reasonably assumed that the book’s inclusion on the list was for a reason other than admiration. It’s in the nature of such politician puff pieces that they attempt to suggest the subject shares some of the tastes of the average – and much less well-educated – man. Kennedy’s being a Bond-lover made him one of the guys.
Of course, it hardly mattered that the endorsement was a bogus, or at least exaggerated, one. It had an electrifying effect on the standing in the world – general and literary – of both Ian Fleming and James Bond. The visit of the British Prime Minister to Fleming’s house hadn’t been attended by any public endorsement of his works, yet it prompted people to go into bookshops to buy them. The explicit approval conferred by the American President was exponentially more beneficial, not only in terms of the simple fact of spotlighting the books but in the implication that they proffered an accurate depiction of the behaviour of the Soviet intelligence organisations with which Kennedy had to grapple daily. Capitalising on this, Fleming’s American paperback publisher, Signet, launched a major advertising campaign. By the end of the year, Fleming was the biggest-selling thriller writer in the USA.
It may even be the case that Bond finally made it to the medium of cinema after so many failed previous attempts precisely because Kennedy was a fan. ‘JFK’ was a friend of Arthur Krim, chairman of United Artists studios, and had spoken to him of his liking for the Bond books.
Fleming was in the habit of rewarding other writers for their friendship and support by portraying Bond reading their books (in Goldfinger, Raymond Chandler had become the latest to be paid that compliment). He would reciprocate Kennedy’s endorsement via complimentary references to him and his writing in future Bond stories. There was re
ally no way, though, of returning the favour of one of the greatest boons that could possibly be conferred on any author.
However, Fleming received the good tidings about the Kennedy endorsement on the same day as he received some worrying news: he was facing legal action over his next Bond novel, due to be published imminently. This action would cause him considerable stress and embarrassment, and arguably severely reduce the number of Bond books he would write by the simple fact of shortening his life.
By 1960, Fleming’s film project was, as far as he could see, floundering.
Benson: ‘McClory and Bryce had been trying to sell this idea to studios and had no luck, so the project just died. It just fell apart. So Fleming went off and wrote his next novel and he used the plot that was in these screenplays.’ The result was Thunderball, Fleming’s ninth Bond book, published on 27 March 1961.
‘… these jobs with people like SMERSH that I used to get tangled up in.’ With that past-tense reference by 007 to Smert Shpionam, Thunderball delineates, rather quietly, a new Bond era. The organisation whose evil way back in Casino Royale provided Bond a life-mission is herein wound up via Fleming claiming that it was abolished by Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev in 1958.
The Special Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion (the American comma before the ‘and’ is, peculiarly, Fleming’s) is a private syndicate unaffiliated to any government or ideology. That Fleming decided to make SPECTRE Bond’s new nemesis was a bad misjudgement. Author Robert Sellers unearthed a memo in which Fleming told his movie-script collaborators, ‘It might be very unwise to point directly at Russia as the enemy … the film will take about two years to produce, and peace might conceivably break out in the meantime …’ Occurrences in the Soviet Union such as the reforms of Khrushchev had convinced Fleming that the Cold War was nearing an end. However, Bond’s thoughts in this book – such as, ‘With the Cold War easing off, it was not like the old days’ – were the types of things that would within two years seem a bitter joke as the world was shocked by such events as the Cuban Missile Crisis and the construction of the Berlin Wall. The Cold War would remain very much ‘on’ and the defining focus of global relations for a further quarter of a century. Fleming would later recognise his mistake and begin bringing the KGB (under that name) into the Bond texts.