James Bond: The Authorised Biography

by John Pearson

  ‘But what about the Fleming books,’ I asked. ‘Once the Russians had rumbled the deception, what was the point of letting them continue?’

  ‘As I said yesterday, at one stage it was planned to finish them with From Russia With Love. Frankly, I think Fleming had had enough of them by then. He was getting bored with being what he called “the faithful Boswell to the Secret Service”. He even used to moan to me about the way his friends blamed him for all my vices. No, it was M. entirely who was to blame for the books continuing. You see, the Dr No affair came up and M. saw, quite rightly, that this could provide wonderful publicity for his department.’

  ‘But why should the Secret Service need publicity?’

  ‘That,’ replied Bond, ‘is a naïve question. In 1956 everyone was criticizing us. There was the Crabbe affair – you remember, the frogman who was caught in Portsmouth harbour with the latest Russian cruiser during Bulganin's visit. Caused quite a diplomatic incident. Well, we were blamed for that – quite unjustly as it happens. And the Americans were getting difficult. Precious little help was coming from the C.I.A. Against all this, Ian's books seemed to drive home the point that our Secret Service was still the finest in the world. And the Dr No affair of course did tell the public of that little favour that we did the American space programme. That was the message M. wanted to get over loud and clear.’

  ‘Then why not let the truth come out completely, and have the fact of your identity made public?’

  ‘No. We couldn't have done that. To start with, Ian just wasn't that sort of writer. I think he could only write about this fictional James Bond he had created in the past. He had to have what he used to call his author's licence to play around with facts and characters a little when he felt inclined. And of course it suited M. to have this enormously successful publicity put out as so-called fiction. In any other form it would have been impossible.’

  ‘And you really didn't mind?’

  ‘Quite honestly I didn't – not by now. My few close friends were in the Service, and it amused me to find myself suddenly becoming a sort of popular hero. Remember it was only now – say 1956 and ’57 – that the books started catching on. Ian became suddenly excited at the idea of having a best-seller on his hands and I really couldn't tell him it had got to stop. We used to get on very well together.’

  Another factor in the story of the books was that just about this time, Bond suddenly began to have the great successes of his career. Thanks to Sir James Molony he had avoided a recurrence of the trouble of the year before. Jamaica – and the fight with Dr No – had put him back on form. He was supremely confident, and fighting fit, and it was in this mood that he embarked upon the Goldfinger affair.

  Again, one must be grateful to Ian Fleming for simply being there to describe this most extraordinary coup in Goldfinger. Perhaps he paid overmuch attention to the more bizarre aspects of that arch villain and capitalist extraordinary, Arno Goldfinger. His cheating habits at cards, the game of golf he played with Bond at Sandwich are of no great importance, when put against the real menace of the man. But they were the sort of personal details no writer can resist and Goldfinger's obsession – his Midas-like craving for gold – was at the heart of his whole criminal achievement. Had it not been for Bond, he would undoubtedly have robbed Fort Knox: and once that happened, once the gold reserves of the world's richest nation had disappeared, the whole financial structure of the West would have been at risk. By beating Goldfinger, Bond became the man who saved the world's economy.

  But when he returned to London something distinctly odd occurred. He was expecting if not congratulations at least a certain warmth from M. There was no sign of it – rather the reverse. M.'s reception was distinctly frosty. The Prime Minister was anxious to offer Bond a knighthood, and the Americans had suggested the Congressional Medal of Honour. M. forbade both, and in a way that made it seem as if James Bond had actually been seeking honours.

  It was then that Bond got the first inkling of the truth – M. was jealous. This was Bill Tanner's theory too. Bond said he really didn't mind about the knighthood.

  ‘And didn't you?’ I asked.

  Bond smiled ruefully.

  ‘Sir James Bond? It isn't really me – but May would have liked it, and of course Aunt Charmian. If it had been offered I'd probably have accepted. But it wasn't.’

  Instead, M. recommended Bond for what he evidently felt his due. Bond was promoted to Grade IV. Practical as ever, Bond told himself that it was better than nothing: at any rate his salary increased by £750. And on the strength of this, James Bond decided to indulge himself.

  For some time now his old grey 4¼-litre Bentley with the Amhurst Villiers supercharger had been giving trouble. He had owned the car for more than twenty years. Marthe de Brandt had given it him before the war and he had been hanging on to it for sentimental reasons. He told himself that this was stupid – especially now that it was needing a new engine and regularly costing more each year to run. Wakeford, the former Bentley mechanic who looked after it for him had obviously grown tired of it, and it was Wakeford who told him about the Bentley Continental which, in Fleming's graphic phrase, ‘some rich idiot had married to a telegraph pole on the Great West Road’. Wakeford convinced him that the car could be restored, and Bond finally paid £1,500 for the whole wreck as it stood.

  Bond had always dreamed of building his ideal car. This was his chance. Rolls straightened out the chassis and fitted the new engine Bond had set his heart on – a six cylinder with 8.1 compression. Then came the biggest luxury of all – the body built to Bond's own private specification by Mulliners. It cost £3,000 which, as Fleming has revealed, was exactly half of Bond's remaining capital. It was the sort of body Bond had always wanted on a car – two bucket seats in black English hide (not morocco leather as Fleming said), big convex Triplex windscreeen, power operated steering, and the paintwork once more the old ‘elephant's breath grey’ that Bond had made his private livery. It was both simple and luxurious and Bond loved it.

  Despite his normal carefulness with money, he refused to think about the petrol it would use or the sheer cost of keeping such a monster on the road. For Bond the Bentley was an echo of that lost rich Europe he had known before the war, and, as he says, ‘everyone should have at least one folly in his life’. The Bentley was quite clearly his.

  Most of that year Bond was too busy to enjoy it, and the Bentley, lovingly maintained, languished in its garage as its owner rocketed around the world – France and the Bahamas, Canada and Italy – on the assignments chronicled by Fleming in his book, For Your Eyes Only. As Bond put it, ‘there wasn't much time that year for desk work or for getting bored. True, there were no major missions – rather too many fiddling affairs – but at least I felt that I was paying for my keep. M. couldn't really grumble.’

  It was in fact a crippling work load for a single agent and once again one wonders whether M., in some sadistic way, was out to break him. When I asked Bond this he shook his head.

  ‘I don't think so – not consciously at any rate. The work simply needed to be done, and the 00 section was short-staffed that year.’

  In fact there had been more casualties – and resignations, thanks to the crises that were still afflicting the Regent's Park Headquarters. Bond was unique in never arguing with M. He was also the only member of the section who could last the pace – although by 1959 even he was showing signs of strain. Fleming has explained what happened at the start of Thunderball. On the surface it was just a minor upset over Bond's state of health – but there was more to it than that.

  As Bond quite willingly admits, he had been ‘slightly overdoing things’ (entirely in the line of duty one should add) and this had led to certain symptoms which the Service's M.O. had noticed on his annual check-up. These were nothing serious, simply the usual signs of overwork – the occasional headache, slightly raised blood pressure and difficulty sleeping. His work had also forced on him a certain level of rich living. Sometimes he a
te and smoked and drank more than was strictly good for him, but this was something of an occupational hazard for James Bond. As he points out, the drinks and rich food Fleming took such pleasure in describing, belonged strictly to the world of his assignments. When he was on a job he needed alcohol (in what for him was moderation) and also nicotine. Rich food, too, tended to become part of the normal ritual of an assignment, simply because his work took him to good restaurants and excellent hotels. It would have been an affectation – and sometimes positively dangerous – to have tried to live off eggs, salad and fresh orange juice.

  But the pessimistic tone of James Bond's medical report gave M. the excuse he needed. As Fleming hinted, M. had become a health food addict. This was just one of his current manias and it was typical of him to have forced Bond off to the sitzbaths and meagre diet of the Shrublands health clinic. Not that Bond really minded. As he admits he was a few pounds overweight and the fortnight that he spent there toned him up, and gave the osteopath a chance to deal with the damage to his back caused by his jump from the Arlberg Express. Shrublands also gave him a fortnight's welcome rest at the expense of the department, and offered a vital lead to the operations of the notorious Spectre organization.

  Fleming has described the sequence of events – the meeting with the sinister, bronzed lady-killer, Count Lippe, in the treatment room at Shrublands. Bond's recognition of the tattoed ‘Red Lightning Tong’ sign on his arm, and then the hideous attempt Lippe made to have Bond literally torn apart on the traction machine. This, in turn, led to Bond's first encounter with that extraordinary criminal genius, Ernst Stavro Blofeld – killer, capitalist and founder-chairman of Spectre, ‘the Special Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion’.

  It was Herr Blofeld who had masterminded the hi-jacking of the NATO bomber and using its atomic bomb to extort £100 million from the Western European governments. Bond had the task of tracking Blofeld's minions to the Bahamas and recovering the bomb. This involved the famous underwater battle with Blofeld's man, Emilio Largo, and his accomplices. It was this battle which undoubtedly did save both Nassau and Miami from the atomic holocaust Blofeld had threatened. Blofeld, of course, survived, but Spectre almost fell apart, and Bond had the satisfaction of knowing he had saved the British taxpayer £100 million, and even worse extortions from the power-mad Blofeld.

  But once again for Bond success had to be its own reward. There were no medals, no citations for his bravery. He was used to this, but he admits that he did find M.'s behaviour strange. There was no word of congratulation when he returned. Even the personal note of thanks from the Prime Minister to Bond aroused no comment from the steely martinet, and Bill Tanner told Bond later that M. had vetoed the P.M.'s suggestion of a private lunch at Downing Street. M. had apparently ruled that it would be ‘quite improper’ and that it would set what he called ‘dangerous precedents’ for members of the Secret Service to have any contact with politicians. (Bond says that he was secretly relieved.)

  Late in the autumn of 1960, things started going strangely wrong for Bond. His carefree years were over.

  Most of the trouble lay not in him but in the Secret Service. During this period it was under fire from the politicians and there was fresh talk of purges from security. This had produced the customary irritated reaction from M. He was on his guard and there was talk now of disbanding the 00 section. It had come under frequent criticism as a source of provocation to the enemy, and M. was tired of defending it. These rumours naturally worried Bond: without his 00 rating, it was doubtful whether he would wish to stay within the Secret Service. Then on top of this came the big re-shuffle at Headquarters just before Christmas. For Bond, a true conservative at heart, the shake-up was more disturbing than he cared to admit.

  M.'s office was moved up from the sixth to the seventh floor, and Bond, to his horror, found himself relegated to ‘a small, cream-painted, hencoop of a place’ up on the eighth. In the circumstances, the move seemed ominous. Then, just a few days later, the devoted Ponsonby announced that she was leaving to get married to her mysterious broker boyfriend from the Baltic Exchange. For Bond, who had always liked to think that she was secretly in love with him, this was ‘the last bloody straw’.

  That Christmas he was champing for a long, involved assignment, preferably somewhere warm, which would keep him out of range of M. and Regent's Park as long as possible. Instead he found himself dispatched to Canada.

  It was the sort of dirty, brief assignment Bond had come to loathe – a trip to Toronto to protect a man called Boris from a hired assassin. Boris had defected from the Soviet Union, and, after giving his secrets to the British, had been settled in Toronto. The Russian K.G.B. had recently discovered his address and made a deal with the still functioning Spectre network to destroy him.

  Bond worked efficiently, but without much relish, finding the would-be murderer (an ex-Gestapo man called Uhlmann), taking the Russian's place on the night of the killing, and then quite calmly shooting Uhlmann in a gun-fight. Bond played his part like the professional he was, but it left him mildly disgusted with his calling. He liked to think that he was something more than a salaried trigger man for the British Secret Service. But it was obviously too much to hope for another of those missions like the Thunderball affair which gave him the luxury of feeling that his work had real value to society.

  M. seemed obsessed with Spectre and with Blofeld, and on Bond's return to London insisted firmly that from now on they were to be his sole concern. Bond tried to argue. M. was unsympathetic.

  Throughout that spring and early summer Bond persevered – still without success. He was convinced by now that Blofeld must have died and that M., for some perverse reason of his own, was keeping him at this pointless drudgery. Perhaps he wanted to deflate him after the success of the Thunderball affair. Perhaps … As he said to the sympathetic Bill Tanner during one of his periodic moans, ‘the trouble with the old man is that he's become so odd and difficult that one just never knows what he's up to.’

  Tanner nodded wearily. ‘And to make it worse,’ he replied, ‘he still has an infuriating habit of sometimes being right.’

  Another source of irritation to James Bond cropped up then. Urquhart reminded him that it was time that Fleming wrote another book. This had become an annual event. The publishers expected it. The public would think something had gone wrong if a new book failed to appear. Bond replied curtly that his life had now become so dull that there was nothing that would make a book.

  This time the argument was carried up to M. He still seemed anxious for the Bond books to continue. Urquhart had told him that what he called ‘the James Bond cult’ was catching on, and that there was talk of making a film now of the famous British agent. Bond hadn't heard and was horrified. Not so M.

  ‘One must be forward-looking in such matters, 007,’ he insisted. ‘Forward-looking’ was a phrase that he had recently taken to using. Bond mistrusted it. But M. appeared pleased that it was a British agent – and not an American or a French one – who was involved. Something else had pleased him too. ‘Look at this,’ he said to Bond, and pushed a magazine across the desk. It was the current issue of the American Life Magazine, and somebody in the press department had underlined the article. It was by the White House correspondent, Hugh Sidey, and it listed the ten favourite books of President John F. Kennedy. Number six in the list, after the Charterhouse of Parma, was a James Bond book – From Russia With Love. M. was delighted.

  But even M.'s enthusiasm was unable to produce a subject for a further book. ‘It had been,’ said Bond somewhat bitterly, ‘a fallow year.’ And then another complication cropped up which seemed to end all chance of a fresh Bond adventure for that year. That April Fleming had had a heart attack, and even as M. spoke, he was in the London Clinic. When James Bond heard this he went to visit him.

  Fleming appeared quite cheerful. He and Bond laughed about the Kennedy enthusiasm for From Russia With Love and Fleming seemed relieved no
t to have to write another James Bond book that year. Despite all this, Urquhart was not so easily diverted from his purpose. The same April he flew specially to Canada and it was while he was there that he found out about the girl called Vivienne Michel. Bond hadn't mentioned her in his departmental report on the Toronto job, although he did briefly mention his involvement with two gangsters in the motel she ran outside Toronto. This had no bearing on Bond's mission. The gangsters were two thugs attempting to extort money from the girl. Bond dealt with them, and handed the case over to the local police.

  But Urquhart had found out about her. She was attractive. Bond had slept with her. And Urquhart discovered something that Bond didn't know. The demure Miss Michel had literary ambitions; and she was more than willing to tell all. The result was that oddity among the James Bond books – The Spy Who Loved Me. Bond says it is the one book he regards with real distaste. Indeed, he feels that he was treated badly over it, and blames Urquhart for getting Fleming involved in the book at a time when he was obviously far from well. (Ian Fleming finally appeared as ‘co-author’ with Vivienne Michel.) Bond says that he was ‘hideously embarrassed by the whole enterprise’.

  Certainly one has to sympathize with Bond. Miss Michel's womens’-magazine style revelations would have worried any self-respecting male. For somebody as reticent as Bond these ‘true confession’ type descriptions of the night he spent with the ardent Miss Michel in the Shady Pines Motel must have made quite horrifying reading. Bond says he ‘hit the roof’ when he was finally allowed to see the proofs of the book, but there was nothing he could do except complain to M., and M. dismissed the whole affair as ‘just not worth discussing’. Urquhart had cleverly kept the text away from Bond as long as possible, and as Bond says resignedly, ‘What can one do about that sort of woman?’