James Bond: The Secret History

by Sean Egan

  Yet, while it’s understandable that DC didn’t exercise their option for a regular Bond title at this point, it’s inexplicable that over the following years – as Bond became a phenomenon whose name was known to every man, woman and child in America – they didn’t revisit the property. It’s perfectly plausible that a mid-sixties James Bond title would have become the biggest-selling comic on the planet. Instead, again according to Evanier by way of Kashdan, there was no further discussion of a James Bond title at the company until early 1972, when its business division mentioned to publisher Carmine Infantino that their ten-year option on the character was nearing its end. A surprised Infantino then entered into discussions about a DC Bond title, and even got to the stage of considering artists such as Jack Kirby and Alex Toth for illustration duties. However, he ultimately decided against the project. One of the considerations was the fact that, at that point in history, a question mark was felt to hang over the Bond film franchise.

  The story is symptomatic of 007 in this medium. For a character with an all-conquering track record in prose, film, music and merchandise, James Bond has been the subject of an amazingly small number of comics. In the decade after DC’s US option expired, no other publisher showed any inclination to produce a Bond title. This was a juncture where it might be assumed that Gold Key – who specialised in comics based on licensed properties, most notably Star Trek and Tarzan but also manqué Bond The Man from U.N.C.L.E. – would axiomatically be interested. Meanwhile, although Bond’s home country had a tradition of weekly titles such as TV Comic and the renowned TV 21 that were oriented around licensed live-action properties, no publisher appears to have ever enquired about 007 being given the same treatment.

  YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE

  Ian Fleming told Jonathan Cape that The Spy Who Loved Me ‘wrote rather easily’, an unusually – possibly uniquely – upbeat comment to his publishers about his Bond writing. However, that didn’t stop him suggesting to Plomer that he should use the book to kill off his character ‘appropriately & gracefully’. Plomer demurred and/or Fleming changed his mind and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service – published on 1 April 1963 – became the first of Fleming’s Bond books released after 007’s fame had been massively expanded by the Dr. No movie.

  In it, Bond gets involved with a beautiful but unhappy young woman who is formally known as La Comtesse Teresa di Vicenzo but who prefers to go by ‘Tracy’. Her father turns out to be Marc-Ange Draco, head of the Union Corse, which runs nearly all organised crime in France. To Bond’s surprise, Draco has, courtesy of his high connections, heard of him: ‘You are a member, an important member, of Her Majesty’s Secret Service.’ Although the story is that Fleming took the book’s title from a nineteenth-century sailing-adventure novel, it would also seem to be a play on the legend ‘On Her Majesty’s Service’, which at that point in history (and for quite a while thereafter) adorned the brown envelopes in which arrived letters from British governmental departments.

  Loelia Ponsonby has married and left the Service. She has been replaced by a woman with the extremely Bondian name Mary Goodnight, who, we are told, is a ‘honey’. In our first exposure to her, Goodnight tells Bond he is to report to the College of Arms, who have a new lead on the elusive Ernst Stavro Blofeld.

  In a chapter that verges on comedy, Bond is granted an audience with the Pursuivant, Griffon Or. Under the impression that Bond is here to research his family background, he pumps him with questions, something that grants the long-term Fleming reader new information: Bond’s father was from the Highlands, near Glencoe, and his mother was Swiss. The speculation that providing Bond a Scottish hinterland was Fleming’s way of conferring approval on the casting of Sean Connery as his hero would certainly fit timeframe-wise: this book was written in January and February 1962 at the very time Dr. No was being filmed in locations near Fleming’s Jamaican home. (He almost wandered into shot during one beach scene.) Moreover, the author’s determination to attribute a Scots grounding to his creation became more and more pronounced. However, the proof is not conclusive. It could just as easily have been another example of weathervane Fleming bending with the wind; plus, there is the fact of the Caledonian background of Fleming’s own parents.

  Fleming has clearly engaged the services of a real-life Griffon Or, as he has the character run through genuine Bonds who might have been ancestors of his fictional one, including the baronet who gave his name to London’s famous Bond Street and whose family motto was ‘The World is Not Enough’.

  Or’s colleague, Sable Basilisk, informs Bond that the College has been approached by a firm of Zürich solicitors whose client, Blofeld, wishes to have it confirmed that he is the rightful heir to the title Monsieur le Comte Balthazar de Bleuville. ‘He wants to become a new, respectable personality,’ theorises Basilisk, a man seasoned in such vanities.

  In Switzerland, Bond – posing as geologist Sir Hilary Bray – finds himself in the company of a group of ten women who have in common a British farming background and a lack of intellectual sophistication. They are resident at the mountain resort of Blofeld (who has had extensive plastic surgery to disguise his identity) and his ‘personal secretary’, Irma Bunt, because they are receiving treatment from him for various allergies. The girls seem to make Bond as sweaty and gauche as a teenager, although his nocturnal fun with one Ruby yields the information that her allergy cure is effected via deep hypnosis each midnight. One of the resort’s guests, incidentally, happens to be the actress Ursula Andress, recently made famous by a film Fleming doesn’t quite stoop to naming.

  Bond has to make his escape when his identity is in danger of discovery. The night-time ski chase that ensues provides some of the few examples here of the fine writing usually so common in Fleming’s prose: ‘The three-quarter moon burned down with an almost dazzling fire and the snow crystals scintillated back at it like a carpet of diamond dust’; ‘The first vertical drop had a spine-chilling bliss to it.’

  Reaching a railway track, Bond is gruesomely drenched in blood when one of his pursuers is diced by a train’s snow fan. Knowing that the Swiss police will also now be after him, Bond tries to recover from the chase, ‘… the breath sobbing in his throat’. Although it is refreshing to see the vulnerable side of 007, his state of exhaustion, dread and despair as he wanders through a busy local town seems inordinate. He has been through worse than this. It’s as though Fleming had transferred to him the fatigue – mental and physical – of a man in his mid-fifties recovering from a heart attack.

  With some relief, Bond comes across a familiar and friendly face in the crowds of seasonal celebrants: Tracy, directed to the vicinity by her father. As Bond had been searching for Blofeld’s Swiss lair for months, the odds of their being in the area at the same time are slim. Tracy’s reward for providing with her car a deus ex machina is a marriage proposal from Bond the following morning. The snap decision is made at least a little credible by Bond thinking, ‘I’m fed up with all these untidy, casual affairs that leave me with a bad conscience.’

  Back in Britain, the Service works out that Blofeld is scheming with the Russians to launch a biological attack on Britain’s agricultural and livestock resources, something that would render the country bankrupt within months. With his soon-to-be father-in-law’s help, Bond launches an assault on Blofeld’s mountain lair. (M seems utterly unconcerned about an agent fraternising with, and even about to be related to, a gangster.) Bond loses Blofeld in a bobsleigh chase.

  With – Blofeld excepted – the case tidied up, Bond and Tracy travel to Munich for their New Year’s Day nuptials. The ‘playing Red Indians’ dismissal of Bond’s job crops up for the third time in the series as Bond contemplates that life ‘… would now be fuller, have more meaning, for having someone to share it with’. Driving off on honeymoon, Tracy notices a car behind them on the autobahn and asks her husband if she should try to ‘lose’ it. ‘No,’ says Bond. ‘Let him go. We have all the time in the world.’

  The overtaki
ng car delivers tragedy (‘The wind-screen of the Lancia disappeared as if hit by a monster fist’). As a gun-wielding Blofeld sails by, the Bonds’ car goes off the road. An autobahn patrolman finds a shattered Bond cradling a dead Tracy. Bond assures the man that everything is all right because they have all the time in the world.

  As ever, some of the new things learned about Bond during the course of the book contradict previously established facts, but this time inconsistencies seem more due to things other than carelessness. Bond’s claim to Marc-Ange that he has no ‘inherited money’ raises the question of what was the yearly, tax-free private income of £1,000 mentioned in Moonraker and how he was ever able to afford a £4,500 Bentley. Once again, Fleming seems to be moving the goalposts to make his character less of an easy target for the Left. However, when Bond abandons with relief his nobleman’s prop of The Times for the more populist Daily Express (contradicting what we were told in From Russia with Love that The Times is his paper of choice) it strikes one as not so much a tilt at belatedly making Bond a man of the people but part of the campaign of grovelling Fleming undertook to get the Bond serialisations and comic strip reinstated by Beaverbrook.

  Although there is not a return to the explicitness that the distaff perspective of The Spy Who Loved Me seemed to give Fleming the confidence to deploy, there is some rare and bawdy humour from Bond. When told by Griffon Or that the Sir Thomas Bond coat of arms had three golden balls, Bond quips, ‘That is certainly a valuable bonus …’ Although it’s more ribald than anything in the Dr. No film, perhaps significantly one can easily imagine it emerging from Connery’s mouth.

  Despite the shocking and moving ending, Fleming has – bizarrely, in the wake of the explosion of the fame of his character in the previous year – proffered probably the least interesting, most hackneyed and least well-written Bond book of all. The blizzard of brand names feels like self-parody. Repeatedly, Fleming ends sentences with exclamation marks, a hack’s tactic to convey tension. Time and again we come across sentences that, though they aren’t technically terrible, seem for Fleming either lazy or low-rent: ‘He guessed that he might have to get away from this place. But quick!’; ‘He listened, his ears pricked like an animal’s’; ‘Bond was gaining, gaining.’

  Yet the poor quality turned out not to matter a whit. The six months in which the world had had the chance to see Connery bringing Bond to life had an astounding effect on the success of the character’s literary incarnation. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service received 42,000 advance orders, more than any previous 007 adventure by almost one quarter. It immediately secured a reprint of 15,000 and, by the end of April, had sold more than 60,000 copies. This was as nothing compared with the 1965 paperback. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service made history twice over: no previous UK paperback had had a million-copy print run, let alone this book’s 1.5 million.

  Norman Wanstall recalls the filming of From Russia with Love, the second James Bond motion picture, as being a very different affair from that of Dr. No. ‘I remember looking at the scene for a gypsy encampment,’ he says. ‘It was meant to be in Turkey but in fact it was shot on the backlot of Pinewood. I walked into the production office and I said, “I want ten Turkish men, ten Turkish women and as many Russians as you could get.” And the production manager just looked at the calendar, he said, “Would Thursday be all right?” I thought, “Jesus Christ! Now we’re making movies.” From then on, whatever I asked for on the Bond films, I got.’

  From Russia with Love saw the debut of what would be another Bond movie institution: the pre-title sequence, a mini-drama that precedes everything except the gun-barrel section. Sometimes it was a disconnected aperitif; other times, as in From Russia with Love, it took the form of a prologue. During this pre-title sequence, we see 007 apparently executed by this movie’s chief villain Red Grant (Donovan Grant from the book, played by Robert Shaw) via a garrotte hidden in a wristwatch. However, this turns out to be a SPECTRE training exercise: a face mask is peeled from the corpse to reveal another man entirely.

  The theme song is the first to give a Bond film its title rather than the other way around: it’s playing on Bond’s radio when he is called into HQ. Although John Barry – co-composer of most of the Bond themes people remember – was formally on board to score the picture, the song was not written by him. Lionel Bart fails to bring to his pedestrian, slushy creation any of the sprightliness and colour that marked his compositions for the likes of Oliver!. Nonetheless, Matt Monro’s rendering was the first Bond theme to become a pop hit, reaching No. 20 in the UK. Far better was Barry’s noble, stately, brass-dominated ‘007’, whose perennial presence in Bond films over the next decade-and-a-half made it a sort of alternative ‘James Bond Theme’.

  From Russia with Love – a book in which Bond is meagrely represented – is a peculiar choice to film so early in the series. Perhaps the decision had something to do with Kennedy’s endorsement having made the novel famous. It’s also a peculiar choice for a series whose production team had decided to sidestep the Cold War. However, Richard Maibaum (credited with the screenplay) and Johanna Harwood (‘adaptation’) get around this by making completely innocent the Russian to whom the title alludes: Tatiana is forced into a mission to tempt Bond with the cryptographic machine (here called a Lektor, to avoid Spektor/SPECTRE confusion) upon pain of death. Her superior, Rosa Klebb (the superbly villainous Lotte Lenya), is only nominally working for the Soviets, having – as her superior puts it – ‘come over from the Russians’ to SPECTRE. Said superior is depicted merely as a pair of arms stroking a white cat and referred to as ‘Number One’.

  For the only time in the series, we see Bond as the driver of a Bentley. This one has a telephone, highly unusual for motor cars in 1963. ‘I’ve just been reviewing an old case,’ he tells Moneypenny over the line, a reference to Sylvia Trench, with whom he has just been canoodling on a moored boat. After this encore, the very first ‘Bond girl’ never reappeared, but variants of Bond’s dialogue here – ‘I’ll be there in an hour. [Glance at girl.] Er, make that an hour-and-a-half’ – did become another 007 film motif.

  In Dr. No, the armourer who brought Bond his new gun was played by Peter Burton. Here the equivalent character is the equipment officer of Q Branch and played by Desmond Llewelyn. By the next movie – and ever after – he would be gadget provider ‘Q’. In this film, Q provides Bond a more complex version of the briefcase that Bond is issued in the book, the contents augmented by a collapsible rifle and a teargas canister that explodes if the case is opened incorrectly.

  The comic-book-like pre-title sequence is actually at odds with the rest of the film. Notwithstanding the presence of the stylisation and gimmickry that would always be hallmarks of the movie world’s version of Bond, there is something realistic and pleasantly small-scale about From Russia with Love. It manages to possess a leisurely, procedural quality and often feels as cramped as the compartments on the Orient Express, on which almost thirty minutes of the movie are set, an unthinkable stasis for a modern Bond picture.

  The sensuality is even more pronounced than in Dr. No. Bond’s conquest tally this time is four – including an implied threesome with the gypsy girls. Grant’s masseuse, completely unnecessarily, strips to her underwear and there is even some fleeting nudity when Tatiana is seen from a gauzy distance slipping into bed.

  Fleming had instituted in the books the Bond tradition of an action coda. It makes its first movie appearance here in the form of the showdown with Klebb. The closing credits inaugurate another Bond movie tradition when we are provided the teaser, ‘The End. Not quite the End. James Bond will return in the next Ian Fleming thriller “Goldfinger”.’

  From Russia with Love premiered on 10 October 1963. Terence Young considered it the finest Bond film of all time, while Sean Connery feels it was the best he himself appeared in. It’s certainly a connoisseur’s Bond picture, one that subscribers to Bond magazines and visitors to 007 fansites disproportionately cite as their favourite.
/>
  Nineteen sixty-three saw the appearance of two further Bond short stories: ‘Agent 007 in New York’, printed in the New York Herald Tribune in October, and ‘The Property of a Lady’, commissioned from Fleming by the famous London auction house Sotheby’s and printed in their Ivory Hammer annual in November, later reprinted in Playboy. The New York story was reprinted (as ‘007 in New York’, the title it has kept in subsequent appearances) in the American edition of Fleming’s travelogue book Thrilling Cities (1964), specifically to head off US outrage over Fleming’s unflattering assessment in said tome of the Big Apple.

  Barely more than half a dozen pages long in book form, ‘007 in New York’ sees Bond travelling to America’s East Coast to warn an ex-service employee that her live-in lover is a KGB man. As Bond morosely contemplates the decline into homogeneity of a city he knows well, it hardly constitutes an antidote to Fleming’s Thrilling Cities assessment of the same place. Nor does the ending. A perfunctory twist in the tale revolves around the fact that Bond’s rendezvous almost ends in catastrophe because the planned location – the reptile house at Central Park Zoo – does not exist, proving that, contrary to his earlier musing, ‘New York had not got everything’. A lengthy footnote detailing Bond’s recipe for scrambled eggs doesn’t exactly dispel the air of insubstantiality.

  In ‘The Property of a Lady’, Maria Freudenstein, a Communications Department member of the Secret Service, has been sent a Fabergé egg. It is suspected to be a reward for services rendered as a double agent. Freudenstein has put the item up for auction at Sotheby’s, its catalogue billing ‘The Property of a Lady’.

  Knowing that the Russians will use an ‘underbidder’, someone in the auction room raising the bidding artificially to get the best price possible for their woman, Bond has a brainwave. The underbidder will be the KGB’s British Resident Director; as tradition and expedience dictates he will be the only person who knows of the double agent’s payment method. The Service can finally identify the Resident Director and get him declared persona non grata.