James Bond: The Secret History

by Sean Egan

  Although there is no violent action whatsoever, the narrative is compelling. Fleming, as usual, keenly observes and eloquently annotates the customs of a different world, in this case auction houses. Almost nowhere does ‘The Property of a Lady’ show signs of being the gimmick it really is. Fleming, though, considered it so slight that he refused to accept payment for it.

  The Thunderball court battle began on 20 November 1963 at the Chancery Division of the High Court. Despite the case having been fought all the way for three years, it was all over by 2 December.

  Kevin McClory came away with £50,000 damages. This is close to a million in today’s coinage, possibly enough to bankrupt Fleming. Luckily for the author, his costs and damages were paid by his co-respondent Ivar Bryce, a very wealthy man through marriage to A&P heiress Josephine Hartford. McClory also won all film rights to the story. Although Fleming was allowed to keep book rights and the ability to use SPECTRE in his novels, it was decreed that the title pages of all future editions of Thunderball carry the line, ‘Based on a script treatment by Kevin McClory, Jack Whittingham and Ian Fleming’, the sequence of names court-mandated. This line was the sort of attribution normally to be found in film novelisations and, accordingly, was a matter of no little confusion to people reading Thunderball for the first time. Another upshot of the judgment was that Eon had to license from McClory the right to use SPECTRE in further Bond films.

  Some people point to the fact of Fleming’s frail health – there is talk of his having suffered two heart attacks during the hearings – as a reason for his settling. However, the author seems to have come under strong pressure from his lawyers to concede the case. There is evidence that Fleming and Bryce deliberately undermined and obstructed McClory in his attempts to make a Bond picture, and even that he committed perjury.

  In Fleming’s defence, a reason for his disenchantment with McClory may have been the fact that the Irishman repeatedly failed to provide Ivar Bryce accounts relating to the Bryce-funded The Boy and the Bridge, which didn’t bode well for the interrelated Bond finances. Moreover, by failing to formally set up a company to make the film, McClory was in breach of the agreement entered into with him to produce a Bond movie.

  Furthermore, as with his previous recycling of ideas from Commander Jamaica/James Gunn, Secret Agent and the aborted CBS Bond TV series, Fleming may have considered what he was doing just a harmless exploitation of a property that was apparently going nowhere. Moreover, Moonraker had started life as an idea for a film script, even if one not previously pledged to third parties. The fact that Thunderball concerned a character who was indubitably his own must have been a powerful plank in his reasoning, as must the fact that his own first screenplay included the same story arc and some of the major elements of the subsequent committee-devised plots and Whittingham screenplays.

  What may have ultimately made Fleming do what he did, though, was the fact that he was bereft of ideas. Before starting the Thunderball novel, Fleming told Plomer he was ‘terribly stuck with James Bond. What was easy at 40 is very difficult at 50.’ Part of the problem was his wife and child. ‘They knock the ruthlessness out of one.’ He added, ‘I shall definitely kill off Bond with my next book – better a poor bang than a rich whimper!’ Something not mentioned by Fleming is that his diminishing libido may have played a part in his increasing distance from Bond and his voracious interests. In 1962, he had written in a notebook, ‘Suddenly you reach the age when it crosses your mind to say no to pleasure. For an instant you think that you have been virtuous. Then you realise the desire was not there. It was dead, and you are sad because sensuality is leaving you.’

  Jack Whittingham acted as principal witness for McClory despite health problems. Giving evidence wasn’t the first act by Whittingham on McClory’s behalf that could partly be construed as one of generosity. In November 1959, Whittingham agreed to write the Thunderball screenplay for £1,000 less than his normal fee – a difference of approximately £20,000 today – on the understanding that he would be the screenwriter of choice if James Bond became a series of movies. One of the few things with which McClory did not emerge from the court case was the cinematic Bond rights he thought he had been granted by Fleming, so Whittingham’s assuming the role of regular Bond screenwriter was not in his gift. However, when McClory did bring Thunderball to the screen two years later by going into partnership with Eon, he did not bring Whittingham aboard.

  This wasn’t the only Thunderball-related disappointment for Whittingham. A week after the 1963 court case had been wrapped up, Whittingham issued a writ against Ian Fleming for libel, malicious falsehood and damage to professional reputation. As he would be relying on the same evidence that resulted in McClory’s triumph, it would seem he had a good case. Fleming’s August 1964 death, however, caused its abandonment, leaving Whittingham with considerable legal costs, ones with which the newly rich McClory did not help.

  Whittingham, who died in 1972, might well have agreed with the assessment of Jeremy Vaughn, a friend of McClory, who told author Robert Sellers, ‘He’s been very cruel to a number of people over the years who thought they were his friends.’

  The tragedy about the Thunderball court case is that so much bitterness, tarnishing of reputation and depletion of health revolved around such a substandard novel.

  At the start of the next Bond novel, You Only Live Twice, published on 26 March 1964, 007 is anything but the swaggering character portrayed by Connery.

  Rather, he is a wreck, broken by the death of Tracy in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. He takes solace in prostitutes. (Contrary to his superstud aura, this is not too unusual: as well as the arguable case of his losing his virginity to a hooker, in Dr. No he admits to Honeychile that he has paid for sex, while he contemplates visiting a brothel in ‘The Living Daylights’.) Adjudging him on the edge of becoming a security risk, M decides to send Bond on a job to make him forget his personal troubles. He tells Bond that he is taking him out of the double-O section and giving him acting promotion to the Diplomatic Service. He will be leaving for Japan, where his job will be to persuade Tiger Tanaka, head of the Japanese Secret Service, to yield up the secrets of his country’s code-cracking machine and break the Service’s dependence on a CIA increasingly uncooperative in the wake of British intelligence scandals. Bond is given a new number: 7777.

  In Japan, Tanaka offers Bond a quid pro quo. He talks of a man who entered his country six months previously whom he considers a ‘fiend in human form’ but whom geopolitical sensitivities prevent the Japanese authorities dealing with. The man is the splendidly named Doctor Guntram Shatterhand, who lives in a castle on a southern island where he has built around himself a death trap. His grounds are filled with poisonous plants and deadly snakes, scorpions, spiders and fish. Moreover, the highly volcanic grounds contain many geysers and fumaroles, which, like the flora and fauna, are a magnet for suicide-seekers in a country with deep-seated notions of shame.

  Bond agrees to Tanaka’s proposal that he ‘enter this Castle of Death and slay the Dragon within’, but before he does he must first be acclimatised to Japanese conduct and culture so as not to attract attention. Cue a travelogue, much of it interesting.

  When Tanaka suggests Bond try his hand at haiku poetry, the agent is game. His effort reads:

  You only live twice

  Once when you are born

  And once when you look death in the face

  Although translating it into Japanese reveals it does not have the form’s requisite number of syllables, Tanaka is delighted at this ‘most honourable attempt’.

  When Bond is shown a photograph of Shatterhand, he is staggered: it is Blofeld. Naturally, his wife Emmy is Irma Bunt. This turn of events is ridiculous, pointless and disappointing, and not simply because of the pulpy improbability of Bond’s and Blofeld’s paths crossing with such frequency (or, as Fleming would rather have us believe, ‘the long, strong gut of fate had lassoed him to them’). It rather spoils what had seemed an intr
iguing villainous addition to the series.

  Bond uses the island of Kuro as a base while he awaits a manageable tide that will allow him to scale the towering seaward wall of Shatterhand’s castle. Here he meets the beautiful and sensuous Kissy Suzuki.

  Secreted in the grounds, it doesn’t take Bond long to bear witness to suicides, one via an immersion into piranha-infested waters, the other by the stepping into of a bubbling fumarole. Bond awakes to screams: from his hiding-place he observes the horrifying sight of the guards’ morning tidying process whereby they laughingly slaughter those nocturnal callers who have changed their mind or lost their nerve.

  Bond inevitably gets captured and is subjected by the villain to a speech that even Fleming states to be ‘expository’. It’s also not for the first time that a villain in the series admits to ‘accidie’; Blofeld’s denunciation of 007 as a ‘blunt instrument’, however, is the inaugural appearance for the term mentioned in so many Fleming letters and interviews.

  This denouement feels a little limp: Bond merely throttles Shatterhand when Fleming should surely have engineered a fate for the villain suffused with grisly poetic justice via one of the perils with which he had packed the grounds of his lair. However, Bond adroitly demolishes the castle, twisting closed a wheel that acts as a vent for a geyser before making a Douglas Fairbanks-like escape via a canvas banner. Unfortunately, because 007 is rendered unconscious by a bullet grazing his head, we don’t coherently experience the consequence of diverting the geyser: it’s initially unclear whether the crumbling of the castle walls is a hallucination.

  That said, Bond’s delirium is poetic stuff, and the final line of the chapter – ‘Bond let go with hands and feet and plummeted down towards peace, towards the rippling feathers of some childhood dream of softness and escape from pain’ – would actually have made a good ending to the novel, and indeed to the series as a whole.

  Instead we are presented with two further and rather peculiar chapters. The first is a Times obituary for ‘Commander James Bond, CMG, RNVR’, which includes that newspaper’s masthead. (Not the string-pulling it might seem, as at that point there was no connection between The Times and The Sunday Times.) The reason for the eulogy is the fact that Bond is ‘missing, believed killed, while on an official mission to Japan’. It is presumably because Fleming is so bored with his creation that he then proceeds to get transcendentally silly with him. The obit – written by M – states that the publicity accorded Bond’s adventures, particularly overseas, had the ‘inevitable result that a series of popular books came to be written about him by a personal friend and former colleague of James Bond’. Although it may be endearing that it is stated that only the poor quality and caricatured nature of these books has prevented Fleming being prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act, this whimsical conceit raises all sorts of problems, even leaving aside the innate awkwardness of the breaking of the fourth wall. Why, for instance, did the wide broadcasting of Bond’s adventures never cause problems to a man whose trade is secrecy? And why was the existence of the Fleming Bond books never mentioned in, er, any of the Fleming Bond books? And, furthermore, is You Only Live Twice one of these aforesaid ‘caricatures’ or is it – as the supposed myth-debunking of the obituary it contains implies – on a higher plane of authenticity?

  The final chapter shows Kissy – who had rescued Bond from the sea after his escape – shamelessly exploiting Bond’s loss of memory, telling him they are lovers. Although Bond proceeds to spend his days quite happily with her, he is haunted by strange dreams full of white faces and big cities. The chapter takes an even more bizarre turn when Kissy, frustrated by Bond’s lack of sexual interest in her, travels to a Fukuoka sex shop to purchase an aphrodisiac partly comprising toad sweat. The potion and some Kama Sutra-like pornography work well enough for Kissy to wind up pregnant. However, before she can tell him the news, Bond discovers the word ‘Vladivostok’ on one of the newspaper squares in the toilet. The story ends with Bond determined to travel to this place to resolve the vague feelings and memories its name has stirred up.

  Fleming uses the conceit of the Times obituary to unleash a veritable torrent of biographical information that dwarfs the dribs and drabs he has doled out in this area over the previous decade. Bond’s parents were Andrew Bond of Glencoe and Monique Delacroix, from the Swiss Canton de Vaud. Because his father was a foreign rep for Vickers, James Bond’s early schooling took place entirely abroad and gave him a first-class command of French and German. Both his parents were killed in a climbing accident in France when he was eleven, after which he was raised by his aunt Charmian in Kent. He attended Eton, for which his father had put him down at birth, but was transferred to his father’s old school Fettes because of ‘some alleged trouble with one of the boys’ maids’. He left school at seventeen and, by claiming he was two years older, wangled a place in what would become the Ministry of Defence.

  The obituary’s statement that it was 1941 when Bond was seventeen and that he was married to Teresa in 1962 is less authorial fudging of Bond’s vintage than grand resetting of the clock. Other alterations of established history seem to have a different motive. It being the case that Fettes is the Scottish equivalent of Eton but far less associated with public-school privilege, Fleming’s decision to make this a Bond alma mater could be posited as the bisecting of his recent determination to make his creation both less posh and more Caledonian. There is also a purpose, if a more personal one, to the name Fleming chose for Bond’s mother: Monique was the name of the girl to whom Fleming was engaged before his mother forced him to break it off.

  Despite the perplexing concluding chapters, some nonsensicalities and some tedious padding, You Only Live Twice is not only a return to form but one of the best Bond books – sparklingly written, exotic, informative and ingenious. The considerable research that has gone into it is communicated unshowily. The smooth flow is assisted by the fact that, unusually, there are few instances where the narrative breaks out of Bond’s point of view. Again, there seems a little more humour than usual, particularly Bond’s harrumphing responses to Japanese culture and his banter with Tanaka, and again this seems a response to the quippy Bond movies.

  There is another quality wholly unexpected of a Bond book, usually such a cold proposition: its protagonist is likeable.

  Following Ian Fleming’s 1961 heart attack, a friend suggested to him that he pass the recuperation longueurs by writing down the self-composed bedtime story he had taken to reciting to eight-year-old Caspar. The result was Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang: The Magical Car, which although quite good didn’t appear until three years later, by which time Fleming was dead.

  There are some sad ironies surrounding Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang. The evident love for Fleming’s son that provided its impetus was, it would seem, not reflected in the pastoral care that Caspar received. The fact that Caspar committed suicide in 1975 doesn’t suggest a product of a well-balanced childhood. Even more tragic and symbolic is the fact that Ian Fleming’s death was a horrific twelfth-birthday present for Caspar.

  Fleming suffered a heart attack on 11 August 1964 when staying at a hotel in Canterbury. He died in hospital the next day. He was just fifty-six. Fleming had lived for real Bond’s existence of smoking, drinking and lovelessness, and it had killed him. Had the bypass procedure been common at the time, Fleming might have gone on to properly enjoy the fruits of his labours. However, enjoyment wasn’t the wont of a ‘Death-Wish Charlie’, although his perennial disinclination to allow his feelings of lack of self-worth to be manifested in inconsiderateness is revealed in his comment to the ambulance staff who responded to the emergency call: ‘I am sorry to trouble you chaps.’

  John Pearson says Fleming was ‘going downhill towards the end. He used to say he was running out of puff. Life was going very sour for him. He had medical problems. Bond had a very complicated role within what was already a very unusual life.’

  Fleming’s death meant he missed out on a financial bonanza. Says
Pearson, ‘He’d never have dreamt of the success, otherwise he’d never have sold the franchise to his friend Jock Campbell, who was the head of Booker McConnell.’ Pearson is referring to the fact that, in the first quarter of 1964, Booker Brothers acquired 51 per cent of Glidrose for £100,000. The impetus for this was Fleming’s desire for a tax-free capital sum. (The New York Times estimated that ‘income tax takes about $2.73 of every $2.80 he earns.’) However, the low figure raised eyebrows: an auction might have generated far more. Moreover, in a sickening twist of fate, the £100,000 was lost in death duties upon Fleming’s passing. ‘It was a sad story, really, because everyone made money out of it except poor old Ian,’ says Pearson. ‘He died before the Bond boom really started.’

  As Fleming passed, his creation assumed the mantle of immortality. August 1964 was the very month that saw the start of the process of the mythologisation of the Bond literary canon.

  O.F. Snelling, a writer and expert on rare books, got to know Fleming through Sotheby’s, where he worked in the Rare Book Department. He assisted Fleming with some research for his Bond stories and got Fleming’s blessing for his 007 James Bond: A Report. That Fleming died just days after the appearance of what was the first book-length study of the Bond phenomenon caused the work to seem almost a tribute to the deceased man. It eventually sold, by Snelling’s estimation, a million copies around the world.

  By the following year, there was a deluge of books about Bond. Some were lightweight, such as Ian Fleming’s Incredible Creation, split into two parts: ‘My Friend Ian Fleming’ by Paul Anthony, and ‘The World of James Bond’ by Jacquelyn Fried. Some were heavyweight, such as Kingsley Amis’s The James Bond Dossier, similar to Snelling’s sober study. Others were playful, such as the one Amis published under the pseudonym ‘Lt Col. William “Bill” Tanner,’ The Book of Bond, or, Every Man His Own 007, a slender volume that provided tongue-in-cheek instruction on how to live like the secret agent. Some books were rather specialist. In James Bond: Modern-day Dragonslayer, Ann S. Boyd wrote from a Christian point of view, and her Bible-quote-littered text turned cartwheels to impose a religiosity on Bond that Fleming never intended.