By now, the English press had cottoned on to the affair, and there followed a game of cat-and-mouse, with the local Express stringer emerging as the most consistent pest, to the extent that at one point Ann was driven to send a telegram to Beaverbrook to call him off. While she was doing so at the post office in Oracabessa, Gaitskell, or ‘Heavenly’ as Ann had taken to calling him, waited in his car in a discreet side street. But he was spotted there by the Express man, at which point he panicked and sped off along the coast road to Port Maria.
From Johnson’s hardware store, Gaitskell telephoned Morris Cargill, who had been appointed his chaperone, to come and collect him. He had some of Ann’s belongings in his car that needed to be returned to Goldeneye. Cargill arrived to find the Leader of the Opposition hiding behind a keg of nails. Gaitskell concealed himself in the back of Cargill’s pick-up truck, and when they reached the house, he jumped out and hid behind some bushes. Here Ann found him and took him back to his hotel. By this point, Ian had had enough and took himself off to Bolt to see Blanche. It was all a huge mess.
‘Not at all nice there,’ Ann reported to Evelyn Waugh when she returned to England. To her friend Diana Cooper she wrote: ‘The gold’s out of Goldeneye. I wish I did not remain in love with Ian – isn’t it odd?’
Still, the book that would come out of all this chaos was one of Fleming’s very best.
Thunderball had begun its complicated gestation in the autumn of 1958, when Ivar Bryce introduced Fleming to a young film producer called Kevin McClory. McClory wanted to make a James Bond film, but from a new, specially written story featuring plenty of underwater scenes. Together with an experienced English scriptwriter, Jack Whittingham, and Ian’s American friend Ernie Cuneo, Fleming and McClory worked on a number of ideas that eventually produced a plot in which the villains steal two nuclear bombs and then use them to blackmail the US and UK governments. Unfortunately, the film would go the way of other earlier aborted Bond TV and movie projects, but in the meantime Fleming wrote the ‘novel of the film’, failing to credit the others for their input. This would lead to a long and protracted legal case that significantly contributed to his poor health.
Thunderball’s most significant departure was the abandonment of SMERSH and the Cold War. They had provided the ‘motivation’ for all the Bond villains so far, with the exception of the American gangsters of Diamonds are Forever (and possibly Dr No, who was prepared to sell his captured rockets to the Chinese if they outbid the Soviets). Instead, there is a new villainous organisation, SPECTRE, ‘The Special Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion’, manned by a potpourri of off-the-shelf baddies: ex-Gestapo, crime syndicates including the Mafia, drugs barons and former spies now freelance. The manuscript shows that the ‘R’ had originally stood for ‘Revolution’, but this was changed, making SPECTRE entirely unbothered by political or ideological motivation.
Curiously, near the beginning of the book, Bond reflects that ‘with the Cold War wearing off, it was not like the old days’. It has been suggested that Fleming believed that by the time his new book was published, this would indeed be the case; but that hope would have been extraordinarily misplaced, with the Berlin stand-off, the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban missile crisis just around the corner.
Another explanation for the intriguing move from SMERSH to SPECTRE is that Fleming felt that to put a British agent in the front line against the Russians, leading the battle against ‘Redland’, would have now, post-Suez, tested the credulity of his readers. But, to be frank, the ludicrous SPECTRE tested that credulity far more. Or it may have been, as Bond explains, that the British security forces now had their hands full dealing with the rapid retreat from empire and, as such, did not have the resources to fight the Cold War as well. In Thunderball, Felix Leiter comments that ‘Peace [is] bustin’ out all over.’ But Bond replies that for his country, ‘There always seems to be something boiling up somewhere … Cyprus, Kenya, Suez.’
Or perhaps Fleming was simply sickened by the Cold War and the bad in both sides. There is an early hint of this in Moonraker, when M implies that the United States is as dangerously bellicose as the Soviet Union. Similarly, in Thrilling Cities, there is a surprising moment during Fleming’s piece on East Berlin when he quotes an experienced ‘independent operator’ in the spy ‘game’ who suggests that the Western way may not be the best way: to intelligent East Germans, his informant says, the success of the Soviet Union in round one of the Space Race, which had triggered the ‘Sputnik Crisis’ in the US, had made a big impression. ‘The future with Communism looks just as good, if not better, than life in Europe and America. Such people are not attracted to democratic chaos,’ he tells Fleming. ‘They are quite sure they are on the winning side … Why should they exchange these solid things for the trashy “comforts” of the West?’ In Thunderball, the moment of most seriousness comes from the much-admired commander of the US nuclear submarine, who admits to being ‘terrified by the whole business. Got a wife and two children … These atomic weapons are just too damned dangerous.’ In early 1963, Fleming was interviewed by the Jamaica Gleaner and asked about nuclear disarmament: ‘I am all for it,’ he replied. ‘The two big poker players, America and Russia are evenly poised and the bluff and double bluff going on all the time is above my head. I hope it will all settle down in the end as I expect the two powers are so evenly matched, they will finally decide to call the game off and we shall all be able to settle down and not worry about it any more.’
Maybe Fleming’s decision to exclude the Cold War and SMERSH from Thunderball was a curious combination of all these contradictory explanations. Most importantly, SPECTRE is fantastical, gothic and melodramatic, even fun: the culmination of all the self-deprecatory remarks Fleming made about Bond being ‘adolescent pillow-fantasy’; the result of Ann and her circle’s many derogatory comments about how juvenile his books were; an acknowledgment about what he now knew his readers wanted; the logical culmination of all those knowing asides. In Thunderball, Leiter points out, ‘Planes with atom bombs don’t get stolen in real life’; on another occasion, Bond laughs: ‘It’s a damned good sequence for a comic strip.’ This self-awareness and silliness, a daydream on a Jamaican beach rather than the grim reality of, say, Le Carré’s seedy safe houses with their instant coffee, is the fatal flaw of the Bond books as serious spy fiction, but their greatest strength as enduring British cultural properties.
The leader of SPECTRE is Ernst Stavro Blofeld. The purity of his apolitical villainy, combined with his recurrence in two further novels, made him Bond’s Moriarty, the best known and even best loved of all the Fleming villains. He is, of course, a physical freak, a non-smoker and non-drinker and of mixed race, born of a Polish father and Greek mother.
Together with an arresting new villain, Thunderball’s setting and plot allowed Fleming to play to his Jamaica-inspired strengths. The many underwater scenes are superb, including a gripping night-time mission across a rubbish-strewn harbour, the horror of the downed aircraft – the ‘squirming, red-eyed catacomb’ – where octopuses are feasting on the decaying bodies of the crew, and the epic botched ambush at the end.
SPECTRE has chosen the lawless, free-wheeling space of the Caribbean in which to operate, where their scheme is headed by Blofeld’s number two, Emilio Largo, described as ‘an adventurer, a predator on the herd. Two hundred years before, he would have been a pirate – not one of the jolly ones of the story books, but a man like Blackbeard, a bloodstained cut-throat who scythed his way through people towards gold.’ His cover story is that with the help of a pirate’s map, he is searching for treasure, ‘a sunken galleon thickly overgrown with coral’. For here, Fleming tells us, used to be ‘the haunt of every famous pirate in the Western Atlantic’. At the end of the underwater fight, the men return with wounds ‘that looked as if they belonged to the days of the pirates’. It’s all told with swashbuckling relish.
The same year as Thunderball was written, Fleming lent Goldeney
e to writer Graham Greene, in the hope that he in return would provide an introduction for a new omnibus edition of Bond. Blanche helped look after the guests, although she didn’t like Greene. He was ‘obsessed by drugs’, she says. ‘I asked him if he’d ever tried ganja and quick as a flash, he said he’d like to, although he said he’d never taken drugs in his life. Which I think was a big, blackhearted lie!’ Blanche asked her overseer to bring some over to Goldeneye. ‘He wanted me to stay and watch how he reacted. Why should I? I left him to it. I went home to bed.’
Greene and his mistress also had a falling-out with Violet, accusing her of drinking their whisky and overcharging for groceries from Port Maria. Violet responded that they had soiled their sheets, and the odd tot of whisky was to steel herself to wash them. To Greene’s fury, Fleming sided with Violet as his code demanded; the introduction for the omnibus edition would not be forthcoming.
But a far better endorsement was round the corner. On his way back from Jamaica in March 1960, Ian flew to Washington, where he visited his friend ‘Oatsie’ Leiter. Oatsie was an old friend of the Kennedys from her youth in South Carolina. She had introduced Jack Kennedy to his first Bond book, Casino Royale, when he had been ill in bed in Newport, Rhode Island, five years earlier. In 1957, his wife, Jacqueline, had given a copy of From Russia, with Love to the head of the CIA, Allen Dulles, saying: ‘Here is a book you should have, Mr Director.’ From then on, it became a tradition that Dulles and Jack Kennedy would exchange copies of Bond novels as they appeared, Dulles adding notes in the margins. He later commented that ‘The modern spy could not permit himself to become the target of luscious dames … I fear that James Bond in real life would have had a thick dossier in the Kremlin after his first exploit, and would not have survived the second.’
‘Oatsie’ was going to the Kennedys’ for dinner that night, and after lunch she was driving Ian along Georgetown’s P Street in her white Chrysler when she saw the couple out walking. She stopped the car and asked them if she could bring a visitor to dinner with them that evening. Who’s that?’ asked Jack Kennedy politely. She introduced the two men. ‘Mr Ian Fleming – Senator Kennedy.’ Kennedy studied Fleming for a moment and said as they shook hands, ‘James Bond? But, of course, by all means – do please come.’
Fleming had the Thunderball manuscript in his suitcase at the time, in which the United States’ vulnerable southern flank is threatened with nuclear weapons. As the captain of the US submarine remarks: ‘any one of these little sandy cays around here could hold the whole of the United States to ransom’. Over dinner, Kennedy asked Fleming what James Bond would do to get rid of Fidel Castro, who had come to power in Cuba the year before, and the previous month had signed a deal to ship part of his country’s sugar crop to the Soviet Union in exchange for a loan of $20 million in convertible currency and $80 million worth of Soviet goods.
Fleming, clearly on top form, turned the whole thing into a joke, explaining that Bond would drop leaflets saying that the fallout from American nuclear tests provoked a strange reaction in men with facial hair, reducing them to sexual impotence. All the famous ‘bearded ones’ of the uprising would immediately shave off their beards, and the revolution would be over. (Ian’s own views on Cuba and Castro were probably close to those expressed by Scaramanga in The Man with the Golden Gun: ‘If the Americans once let up on their propaganda and needling and so forth, perhaps even make a friendly gesture or two, all the steam’ll go out of the little man.’)
The next day, Allen Dulles heard of Fleming’s suggestion and unsuccessfully tried to set up a meeting with him; Ian was already on his way home. But Dulles might have taken it seriously. In Red Heat: Conspiracy, Murder and the Cold War in the Caribbean, Alex von Tunzelmann adds a coda to her telling of the Fleming-Kennedy dinner: ‘Shortly afterwards, the CIA agent David Atlee Phillips remembered being told of a box of cigars, impregnated with a strong depilatory, that would be given to Fidel and would make his beard – indeed all his body hair – fall out. The agency also developed a thallium powder, which could be dusted on his shoes to the same effect.’ Writing about Ian just after his death, Dulles confessed that he was ‘always interested in the novel and secret “gadgetry” Fleming described’, and having read about the homing device in Goldfinger, ‘put my people in CIA to work on this as a serious project’.
Fleming worked the Kennedy connection hard, sending all his later books to Jack, his brother Robert and their sister Eunice Shriver. JFK was intrigued by Fleming, often asking the Sunday Times correspondent in Washington, Fleming’s friend Henry Brandon, for news of him. ‘Kennedy was fascinated by the line dividing Ian’s real life from the fantasy life that went into his books,’ Brandon explained. ‘He often asked me how such an intelligent, mature, urbane sort of man could have such an element of odd imagining in his make-up.’ When a few years later Ann met Bobby Kennedy at a dinner, she found him ‘obsessed by Ian’s books’.
Jack Kennedy would have an immense impact on Ian’s career. Fleming’s books had so far sold respectably in the United States, but not on the same level as in Britain. Then on 17 March 1961, Life magazine ran a piece on the President’s favourite books. In ninth place, just above Stendhal’s Scarlet and Black, was From Russia, with Love by Ian Fleming. It is hard to overestimate the importance of the article. From that moment, the Bond boom in the United States began.
The magazine publication was quickly exploited with a major push from Fleming’s US paperback publisher. One campaign, run a few months after the Bay of Pigs debacle, read: ‘INCREASE IN TENSION’. It showed a picture of the White House, with a single upstairs light burning, an arrow pointing to it labelled ‘You can bet on it he’s reading one of these Ian Fleming thrillers.’ Thereafter Fleming became the best-selling thriller writer in America.
But just as huge commercial success came his way, Fleming’s James Bond lifestyle – the Morland cigarettes and the cocktails – well and truly caught up with him. For the remaining few years of Fleming’s life, Bond would hit new height after new height, while his creator’s health and well-being went into freefall.
1961–2 The Spy Who Loved Me; On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
There were moments, as he grew older, when with his heavy eyelids and mixed look of determination and abstraction, his face looked like the sculptured mask of melancholy.
William Plomer on Ian Fleming
Thunderball’s heroine, Domino Vitali, named after another rare Caribbean bird, is everything Bond could wish for in a woman: she is beautiful and spirited in a slightly damaged way; she loves scuba diving and has romantic dreams about the Royal Navy; and, Bond notices approvingly, she ‘drives like a man’. But what provides him with his excuse for meeting her is her smoking habit.
Domino is in a Nassau tobacconist’s asking for cigarettes that taste so disgusting they will help her stop smoking. Bond makes his move. ‘I’m the world’s authority on giving up smoking,’ he tells her. ‘I do it constantly. You’re lucky I happen to be handy.’ They then go to a bar, where her idea of a ‘soft’ drink is a double Bloody Mary.
The beginning of the novel sees Bond suffering from his drinking, waking hung-over from a night that included eleven whiskies. ‘When he coughed – smoking too much goes with drinking too much and doubles the hangover – a cloud of small luminous black spots swam across his vision … Bond swallowed down two Phensics and reached for the Enos.’ He has ‘that nagging sense of morning guilt that one is slowly wrecking one’s body’. Later that day, he meets M, who reads part of his latest medical report: ‘Despite many previous warnings, he admits to smoking sixty cigarettes a day … the officer’s average daily consumption of alcohol is in the region of half a bottle of spirits.’
M sends him to Shrublands health farm to dry out. The scenes there, where Bond is prodded, weighed and checked, show that Fleming was now clearly a man in the grip of the doctors. The previous year he had given up his Sunday Times job (although he was kept on a retainer of £1,000 a year), but
the removal of this burden failed to improve his health. Ann’s letters from the summer and autumn of 1960 include several references to his new weakness, breathlessness and high blood pressure. In September, he spent a week at a ‘liver cure resort’ in Brittany.
At the beginning of 1961, Ann and Ian flew to Jamaica and Ian arrived suffering from bronchitis. ‘Ian had a high fever and was fearfully cross,’ Ann reported to Evelyn Waugh. ‘Happily Noël Coward came to call and proved himself a Florence Nightingale, changing Thunderbird’s sopping pajamas, turning the mattress, and fetching him iced drinks. Noël has always found T-B fearfully attractive and jumped at the opportunity to handle him. While Noël fetched ice cubes from the Frigidaire T-B’s language was something horrible, he blamed me for exposing him to homosexual approaches.’
In his diary, Coward reported a depressing scene: ‘Annie looking exhausted and strained’, Ian ‘scarlet and sweating in a sopping bed and in a hellish temper. Their connubial situation is rocky … My personal opinion is that although he is still fond of Annie, the physical side of it, in him, has worn away. It is extraordinary how many of my friends delight in torturing one another.’
Alec Guinness in the pool at Blue Harbour, where he stayed en route to Cuba to film Our Man in Havana’. He found the atmosphere at Coward’s house ‘too flamboyantly camp.’ He would also later complain of valuables pilfered from his room.
Part of the conflict involved Jamaica, now hated by Ann, Coward wrote, but still loved by Ian. She wanted him to sell Goldeneye to help pay for the renovations to a huge new house she planned to buy – Sevenhampton near Swindon – but Ian refused to do so. (In the event, the money was found from elsewhere.)
Ann was not alone in her new dislike. Coward himself wrote to a friend at the end of 1960 that he had ‘taken against Jamaica in a big way … the once peaceful island is full of noises – noises of tourists and noises of underlying discontent. All wages and prices have risen astronomically. The roads are, mostly, in a dreadful state and the whole atmosphere has changed.’
Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica Page 25