James Bond: The Secret History

by Sean Egan

  Some of the retoolings since then have been more to do with cost-cutting than improvement. Corgi’s ownership has changed hands. Production has switched from the UK to China. There have been many other Bond-related toy vehicles, some arguably snazzier, such as the Lotus Esprit from The Spy Who Loved Me. Yet, throughout it all, Corgi’s DB5 has remained in continuous production.

  During this period, the status of the real-life DB5 has changed more than once. Formerly fashionable, it became dated. The passage of time then gave it the aura of ‘classic’, something that means Eon have been able to sit behind its steering wheel latter-day Bonds Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig without sacrificing Bond’s stylishness.

  Corgi’s Aston Martin DB5 seems unassailable in its position as iconic 007 toy and the most famous piece of Bond merchandise of all time.

  ‘For this is, alas, the last Bond and, again alas, I mean it, for I really have run out of both puff + zest, and I would not like to short-weight my faithful readers …’ Ian Fleming had no way of knowing when he wrote those words to his publisher to accompany the delivery of The Man with the Golden Gun, his latest Bond manuscript, that this time fate would call his bluff on his assertion of a lack of a future for prose Bond.

  The title may be an allusion to Nelson Algren’s 1949 novel about a lowlife card dealer, The Man with the Golden Arm. There was an even closer involvement in Fleming’s book by another author. Although he had diligently tapped away at a new Bond tale during his final months, Fleming’s declining health had reduced him to a mere hour-and-a-half’s typing per day. He told William Plomer that he wasn’t happy with the resultant manuscript and suggested that he – for the first time – take it back to Jamaica for additional work the next time he went. He reasoned that he should ‘go out with a bang instead of a whimper’. Plomer disagreed with his proposal for reworking, although may have been motivated less by quality than the fact that Bond books were now an annual fiscal bonanza for Cape not to be postponed lightly. You Only Live Twice – published in the same month as Fleming completed Golden Gun – had advance orders that were a 50 per cent increase on even On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

  Yet Cape did eventually decide that The Man with the Golden Gun needed work. Perhaps their change of mind was motivated by the fact that the book had been transformed by tragedy from latest instalment to swansong. The man they engaged to take on the task was Kingsley Amis. Amis had no thriller-writing experiences, but he was both a renowned literary novelist and a Bond expert. His The James Bond Dossier was due for publication by Cape, and in fact was delayed in order that Amis be able to incorporate an evaluation of The Man with the Golden Gun. Raymond Benson says of Amis, ‘Despite any kind of rumours you may have heard, he did not rewrite or write most of The Man with the Golden Gun. That’s a myth. The manuscript was completed but it needed a lot of polishing and fixing up, and he did that. He didn’t add any plot elements or anything like that. He just made it acceptable to publish.’ Benson cites his sources for this as Fleming’s agent Peter Janson-Smith and Amis himself. The Man with the Golden Gun was published on 1 April 1965.

  A year after Bond’s death was announced in the press, he turns up at the Service’s new address in Kensington – where they now use the cover name ‘Transworld Consortium’. Bond denounces M as a warmonger and unsuccessfully tries to kill him with a jet of cyanide. He is a brainwashed double agent.

  That cute Times obituary now begins to undermine credibility at every turn as M decrees that, if Bond can be rendered fit for duty again, he should be sent off on a new mission as a means of expiation for the day’s events. Even if we are to accept that Bond had previously operated in a situation of low-level fame incongruous for a secret agent, how are we now to believe that his job has not been made untenable by the explosion in his celebrity engendered by that obituary’s confirmation of his existence?

  It should also be noted that M comes ridiculously quickly to his decision that 007 should be required to complete a new mission – barely after the door has been closed on the overpowered Bond. The book is strewn with such nonsenses.

  Bond’s task is to dispose of one Francisco Scaramanga. A Latin American freelance assassin mainly under KGB control through Havana, he has killed and maimed several operatives of the Secret Service, the CIA and other friendly agencies with his trademark gold-plated, long-barrelled Colt .45. As usual, the villain has a bodily deformity: a third nipple. Not as usual, he is hot-headed and not very articulate.

  Bond catches up with Scaramanga in Jamaica. When the undercover 007 tells the gunman his line of employment is insurance investigation, Scaramanga offers him some security work at an imminent conference of stockholders of a holiday-resort development. A convincing reason for this overture is never really provided. Perhaps the wrinkle would have been ironed out by the further work made impossible by Fleming’s death and the author would have realised that Scaramanga’s homosexuality provided the logical motive.

  Bond uncovers murder, the disturbing precedent of the Mafia consorting with the KGB and a scheme to increase the world price of sugar to aid Castro’s regime. A hunting trip on a private train culminates in Bond chasing Scaramanga through marshland and taking a bullet before fatally putting Scaramanga out of business.

  Bond is offered a knighthood. M is inexplicably in favour, despite its being established in both Moonraker and Goldfinger that working secret agents can’t accept honours. Bond, though, is contemptuous, stating that he is a ‘Scottish peasant’, a yet further downgrading of the social class Fleming had once been proud to make unambiguously upper-middle. Despite this authorial muddle-headedness, Fleming then evocatively writes of Service reunions where ex-agents ‘talked about dusty triumphs and tragedies which, since they would never be recorded in the history books, must be told again that night’.

  An unexpected motif of the book is dreams, with Bond experiencing several – including a daytime reverie – all of which possess a persuasive flavour of fractured reality. In fact, in this book, Bond gets off with someone – Mary Goodnight – only via this method. One wonders whether the dream aspect is the major contribution to the book by Amis, who suggested in his James Bond Dossier, ‘What about a few dreams? – known as the handy off-the-peg method of injecting significance into any form of fiction.’

  Reviews of The Man with the Golden Gun tended to focus not on whether it was a good read but on whether it constituted a fitting valedictory. It is indeed the latter because, like so much of Fleming’s oeuvre, the fact that it is full of flaws doesn’t prevent it being an assured, stately page-turner.

  That having been said, the thought also occurs that Fleming, had he lived, would have been wise to make good on his insistence to Plomer that he would not write any more Bonds. Not only had Fleming painted himself into a corner with the Times obituary, but his weariness is becoming ever more evident. We are used to his continuity errors, but the lapses of concentration seem to be accumulating: he speaks of Honeychile ‘Wilder’ and Maria ‘Freudenstadt’ and states that Bond and Leiter have never shaken hands in their lives when we saw them do exactly that when they met in Live and Let Die. Moreover, the franchise is moving towards antiquatedness. Goodnight’s furious blushes when Bond describes a building as a ‘whorehouse’ are part of a portrayal of women as a simpering breed that is disappearing into history.

  That the bomb in Goldfinger ended its countdown on ‘007’ was cute, but it was an afterthought: those at the premiere saw it stop at ‘003’. This was not the only alteration to the original print of Goldfinger.

  The credits had initially ended with the information that the movie in which Bond would return was On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Maibaum had already begun a treatment on that adaptation. However, with Kevin McClory now in possession of the right to make a James Bond movie of his own, Broccoli and Saltzman decided that joining forces with him was a less objectionable vista than the prospect of a rival picture. Accordingly, future prints declared ‘James Bond will return in Thunderb
all’.

  McClory had originally intended to make his own Bond film independently of Eon. Laurence Harvey and Richard Burton were talked of as playing Bond. However, McClory had second thoughts and announced, ‘… deep down I knew I wanted Sean.’

  Thunderball underlined that Connery certainly had a special something. Because Eon were now shooting in Panavision, a new gun-barrel sequence was required. The difference between a stuntman and an actor immediately becomes apparent: Connery strolls, swivels and shoots with the utmost panache.

  The theme tune – Barry’s music decorated by Don Black’s lyric, which is sung by Tom Jones – is, like that of Goldfinger, both rousing and risible.

  Terence Young returned as director. Richard Maibaum shared the screenplay credit with John Hopkins, although the project’s tangled history is illustrated by the addendum, ‘Based on an original screenplay by Jack Whittingham’, which has its own addendum: ‘Based on the original story by Kevin McClory, Jack Whittingham and Ian Fleming’. McClory is credited as producer, Broccoli–Saltzman as executive producers.

  Those members of the public who did not take interest in such behind-the-scenes stuff perceived Thunderball as simply the latest Bond flick. The latest Bond flick was by now a momentous thing. When McClory had launched his suit, nobody knew for sure that James Bond movies would be money-spinners. By the time Thunderball premiered on 9 December 1965 in Tokyo (the series’ first non-British entrée), 007 pictures were cinema ‘events’ more than a decade before Jaws supposedly inaugurated the concept. In fact, anticipation of its arrival and fond regard for its predecessors enabled Thunderball to achieve a success out of all proportion to its quality.

  There is something ‘off’ about Thunderball. It’s a little over the top and a little conceited. When Maibaum had first started work on a Thunderball screenplay four years previously, there was no self-consciousness about the process. Now he admitted, ‘I realise how much we have been influenced by audience reaction.’ The alternate pandering and laziness is evident in many places. An otherwise good pre-title sequence that sees Bond make an escape via a jetpack ends limply with his departing Aston Martin spraying the camera with water. Bond inanely rattles off to a romantic partner the line, ‘See you later, alligator,’ as if he were a bequiffed leading man in a teenage-oriented rock’n’roll movie. He endangers himself by smugly delaying his departure from an enemy’s room for the sake of stealing a grape. The dialogue is pat and knowing: ‘That gun looks more fitting for a woman’; ‘You know much about guns, Mr Bond?’; ‘No, I know a little about women.’ The narrative injects idiotic coincidences into Fleming source material already burdened with implausibilities, one example being the fact that, direct from an underwater skirmish with Largo’s men, Bond hitches a lift on land from a woman who turns out to be a SPECTRE agent. This overall glibness has the result of our never feeling that Bond is in danger.

  Meanwhile, 007’s customary cocksure attitude towards the fairer sex is beginning to cross a line. When asked for something to put on by a woman he catches in the bath, he proffers a pair of shoes and then settles back to watch; he virtually blackmails into sex a Shrublands employee fearful of losing her job.

  There are other fundamental problems. However well shot and choreographed are the frogmen fights, they can’t ultimately overcome the obstacle of being fundamentally slow. That the man who agrees to hijack the nuclear weapons has undergone plastic surgery to make him the real pilot’s exact double would be a science-fiction concept even today. Additionally, a certain sense of déjà vu is beginning to creep in. When we see Bond smuggle himself into the heart of the enemy’s operations by donning an antagonist’s identity-veiling apparel, we are instantly reminded of the climactic scene in Dr. No.

  However debased, Bond was still impressive on one level. John Stears won an Oscar for his visual effects. Stears, incidentally, was the man responsible for bringing to life the Aston Martin DB5 in this and the previous movie.

  Thunderball so vexed British censors that it was almost given an ‘X’ certificate, which would have barred admission to it for anyone under sixteen. This was an unthinkable scenario considering the series’ vast youth demographic. The British Board of Film Censorship wanted thirty changes made to a film they stated to be characterised by ‘sex, sadism and violence’. Eon’s powers of persuasion seem to have been considerable. The film was so unscathed that it still ran to 125 minutes (the longest yet), the BBFC settling for changes only to the scene in which Bond is stroking a woman’s back with a mink glove. That Thunderball was granted the usual UK ‘A’ certificate – accessible to children, although some local councils insisted on an accompanying adult – paved the way to its enjoying the status of highest-grossing Bond film. This achievement was not that remarkable at a time when the franchise was three years old. What is remarkable is that it held on to that status for nearly half a century.

  With vast success comes imitation.

  One of the first significant riders on the coattails of Fleming was Donald Hamilton, whose character Matt Helm debuted in 1960 in the blood-and revenge-strewn Death of a Citizen. Helm went on to appear in twenty-six other novels up to 1993. He did not merely have a licence to kill but was specifically employed as a government assassin, albeit one who usually killed only Communist agents or terrorists.

  Bond-style fiction ballooned in print with the success of the Bond films, and from that point often tended to conflate the literary and cinematic 007s.

  Nick Carter was a character originating in nineteenth-century pulp magazines. In the wake of the first two cinema Bonds, he was resurrected, updated and recalibrated, metamorphosing from a police detective to a secret agent with the blunt rank of ‘Killmaster’. The pulp traditions were maintained, however: of the more than 250 Nick Carter Killmaster novels that appeared over a quarter-century from Run, Spy, Run (1964), none carried an author credit.

  Adam Diment’s secret agent Philip McAlpine made his debut in 1967 in The Dolly Dolly Spy. Naturally, the hero was sexually promiscuous, but it was the promiscuity of a new generation, one that went hand in hand with long hair, Swinging London ‘gear’, hipster speak and joints. The hero worked for British intelligence only on threat of drug-related prosecution. This counterculture James Bond was in large part just a version of his creator. Diment was, astoundingly a mere twenty-three years old when his first McAlpine novel appeared. For a brief period, Diment had the aura of a pop star, gracing magazine spreads dressed in regency coats and candy-stripe trousers, sometimes in the company of mini-skirted admirers.

  Even Richard Llewellyn, best known for Welsh-mining-village novel How Green Was My Valley, got in on the Bond act. Between 1969 and 1974, he penned three books about Edmund Trothe. The trilogy proved that the profession of secret agent did not prohibit a rather pompous and staid personality: Trothe objects to his children listening to the product of pop stars he considers ‘callow importunates’ and is discomforted by his daughter’s boyfriend being black.

  There were also what could be termed ‘anti-Bonds’. The Ipcress File (1962) and its sequels saw Len Deighton create a new secret agent paradigm: unlike Bulldog Drummond, Richard Hannay or James Bond, its nameless hero was not only from the lower orders but had severe misgivings about upper-class values. John le Carré’s depictions of the inhabitants of the ‘Circus’ – the British intelligence services – in books such as Call for the Dead (1961) and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) posited a mundane, paranoid and grey world devoid of Bond-style sex and glamour.

  Although he financially benefited from the way Fleming’s success broadened the espionage market, John le Carré disliked Bond. In a 1966 BBC interview, he told Malcolm Muggeridge, ‘I’m not sure that Bond is a spy … he’s more some kind of international gangster with, as it is said, a licence to kill … He’s a man entirely out of the political context. It’s of no interest to Bond who, for instance, is president of the United States or of the Union of Soviet Republics.’ This lack of accuracy about Bond – w
hose political morality studs Fleming’s prose – can perhaps be forgiven in light of the fact that le Carré’s disdain for 007 arose partly from the fact that he knew the world of espionage intimately, having worked for both MI5 and MI6.

  Although motivated by the same desire to make money, parodies are distinct from pastiches or imitations. Possibly the earliest example of Bond being mocked in print is a curious and brief one-page short story titled ‘Some Are Born Great’, which appeared in Nursery World in September 1959. A scene in which Bond is playing a tense card game soon evaporates into comedy when he is chided by his nanny for taking it too seriously. The nanny then proceeds to wonder what will become of him. Credited author J.M. Harwood was none other than the Johanna Harwood given a script credit on the first two Bond movies.

  Alligator was a novella-length Bond spoof written by Christopher Cerf and Michael K. Frith, editors of Harvard University’s undergraduate monthly publication Harvard Lampoon. Sub-titled A J*MES B*ND Thriller by I*N FL*M*NG, it finds B*nd – as he is called throughout – investigating Lacertus Alligator and his organisation TOOTH (The Organization Organized To Hate). B*nd works for ‘World-Wide Import & Export Ltd’, where ‘the few innocents who occasionally wandered in trying to import or export something were politely, but firmly, shot’.

  Amusing stuff like this and a detailed knowledge of the Bond universe led to a stapled, thirty-seven-page publication becoming a critical success and a surprise bestseller. However, both it and a short-story sequel in Playboy in 1966 titled ‘Toadstool’ have disappeared into the folds of history. Despite the legal protection afforded parody, Fleming took action against the publisher. He may have had just cause: several reviewers noted that its humour was sometimes so subtle that Alligator read like an only slightly exaggerated Fleming novel.

  Cyril Connolly also published a Bond parody – perhaps a natural extension of the fact that it was he whom Fleming had found mockingly reading out a passage of a Bond novel to a gathering of his wife’s friends. Connolly’s short story, ‘Bond Strikes Camp’, could almost be postulated as what is now called slash fiction, the Internet phenomenon wherein fictional cultural icons are portrayed in incongruous gay scenarios. However, in dressing Bond in drag to uncover a traitor who turns out to be an M intent on seducing him, Connolly was not motivated by whimsy but was making the point that the Cambridge spy ring had been homosexual. Although Connolly and Fleming went way back, there is some evidence that there was a degree of malice behind the former’s parody. Fleming neutered it slightly by buying the copyright for £100 before its first appearance in London Magazine in April 1963.