by Andrew Cook
On the wall of his office at Grays Inn Road there was a map of the world with all eighty correspondents pinpointed by flashing lights. The whole room had a military, battle command centre look to it. Some of the Kemsley journalists would have felt quite at home, because they were still being paid by MI6. Ian wanted gripping reports written with economy and vim. He didn’t want fluff. His reporters must be likeable, good companions who were genuinely interested in all sorts of things. He would have no alcoholics, no blabbermouths and no invalids.
And yet he was low on self-discipline. There were certain rules that he could never apply to himself. At 38 he was already subject to chest pains. He reportedly drank a bottle of gin every day and smoked seventy cigarettes. This was 1946; research that linked cigarettes to cancer was largely ignored even by doctors, and the link between smoking and heart disease would not emerge for a couple of decades. At Hay’s Mews he had what were called ‘kidney problems’ and possible ‘heart weakness’. Doctors were consulted, but nothing much seems to have been done about either condition.
• THE GILT WEARS OFF •
Most of his enthusiasms lost their appeal to Ian in the end. The affair with Anne remained exciting because they could arrange clandestine meetings in exotic places. (She had been with him in New York in 1946 when he complained of chest pains.) They could visit Ivar and Jo in Vermont or stay together in Paris, where she’d got her brother a job on the Daily Mail. There was passionate correspondence about his sadism and how much she loved his beatings.
At work, he was nobody’s darling. After a few years other staff began to mutter that his foreign news reports were tired – just copies of wire stories. Ian did not put himself out to be one of the boys; chumminess had worked well for him in 1933 in Moscow, but now his focus was elsewhere. He was not to be found with Scotch eggs and a pint at the Yorkshire Grey but preferred lunch at his club. He sometimes wore, caddishly, a polka-dot bow tie. He felt somewhat detached from The Sunday Times. He thought Kemsley was allowing standards of journalism to slip. He preferred to involve himself with The Book Collector, an academic journal that Kemsley had bought, as a distraction.
Most of all, he was glad of the annual chance to get away.
• TWO MONTHS OF THE YEAR •
Ian had his mother’s confidence in her own taste but his Scots grandparents’ asceticism (in matters other than tobacco and spirits). Old Robert and Granny Kathleen, and their sons including Val, had been forever striding miles across moors in the teeth of a gale. According to Andrew Lycett, ‘when one Englishman dined with them in Scotland, he likened the experience to eating alongside muscle-bound bolts of tweed’. Ian wasn’t a great walker – he liked cars too much for that – but there was certainly something of the hair shirt in his attitude to comfort. For alongside the Flemings’ hardiness ran parsimony. Granny Kathleen did not simply inhabit a series of under-heated houses. She did not allow guests’ sheets to be washed between their visits, but had them left on the bed. There were three taps on the baths: hot, cold and – for economy – rainwater. As to her husband, who gave Val a quarter of a million on his marriage, he spent – in the same year – just £6,500 on wages for the 150 staff at their various homes.
So when Ian designed a house for the plot in Jamaica, which he did – without an architect – he designed his own Brutalist vision exactly as he wanted it, with no nonsense about hot water. Or, indeed, glass in the windows. Or carpets. Or a fridge. Or even floor paint; the concrete floors were blackened with boot polish that came off on the soles of your feet. Somebody suggested he call the place Rum Cove.
Others liked ‘Shamelady’. He called it, of course, Goldeneye. He had constructed something that sounds rather like a concrete blockhouse, which since he had recently spent five years staring across Horse Guards Parade at the Citadel is not surprising. Goldeneye had a sloping roof above one big reception room, several small bedrooms, cold showers and a small kitchen. It was all on one level. Instead of glass there were slatted blinds – jalousies, which rattled in the wind. It must have been a beastly shock to stay in, especially if you were Loelia Duchess of Westminster and didn’t like huge flying insects. Chilly nights, which do happen in Jamaica, the wind and the rain off the ocean, must have made the indoors bleak, and as for the outside elevation, Noël Coward – who lived further along the coast – declared that it looked like a National Health Clinic. He called it Golden Eye, Nose and Throat.
It is pretty enough now. Chris Blackwell, who has known it all his life, has it. But in the 1940s locals watched with relief as vegetation rambled all over and covered it.
Reggie found him a live-in cook-housekeeper, Violet, a comfortable woman. Ian would get up early and swim. After an excellent breakfast of paw paw, Blue Mountain coffee, scrambled eggs, and bacon, he would read. At around midday, he swam and snorkelled and looked for lobsters for lunch. Ackee and saltfish, curried goat and grilled snapper were Violet’s repertoire, and he liked them all.
Among the first visitors, in 1947, were his mother and his half-sister Amaryllis. Eve was fascinated by Jamaica, since Augustus John had been inspired by it before the war. Amaryllis gave a recital with piano accompaniment by Miss Foster Davis, whom they invited to lunch afterwards at the Myrtle Bank Hotel. All the other guests in the room got up and left when the Flemings and Miss Davis were shown to a table. They were white, and Miss Foster Davis was not. Eve, furious, whispered to her ‘take no notice’. Amaryllis recounted this shameful incident and said later that it was one of the few times she’d been proud of her mother.
They were unprepared for the rigours of Goldeneye, with its forbidding aspect and the legs of the beds standing in jars of water to keep ants out; they weren’t crazy about Violet’s curried goat, either. They fled to the Montego Bay Hotel and ran into Noël Coward, who sympathised.
Ian was 40ish, with some health issues, but still smoking sixty or seventy cigarettes a day. He had done so for twenty years at least. He would carry on smoking at the same rate. So to imagine him eating or reading or even swimming is to remember that he punctuated his every activity by lighting, smoking, waving around and stubbing out cigarettes. There was always a pack by his side.
He was the least considerate of hosts. He would set off in the mornings with Anne in a boat and not return until the evening. Loelia, playing gooseberry back in the blockhouse, had nothing to do except read, and despite her vast financial resources lacked the will to find anything. In the end she too packed and left for a hotel.
Ian had other visitors. Jamaica – with Coward living there, and Lord Beaverbrook, William Stephenson and Tommy Leiter, who had become friends with Ian in Washington – was increasingly attracting wealthy individuals. Ivar Bryce had married the fabulously wealthy Jo Hartford. Her brother owned Paradise Island in the Bahamas. She had an exquisite old house in Nassau as well as a place in New York State on the border with Vermont. In 1949 they decided to take a Caribbean cruise with some friends. On the way they would call in at Goldeneye, where Ian was in residence with a girlfriend.
Their party disembarked in Oracabessa Harbour. The friends were taken to a hotel while Jo and Ivar left for Goldeneye. Later that night, returning from dinner along the coast in Ocho Rios, they passed the captain on shore amid an agitated crowd – the entire population of Oracabessa – and their yacht, wrecked, in the harbour.
The sorry story was told. Unknown to the passengers, in the first days of the trip down the east coast, it became evident to the captain and engineer that the yacht company had hired a bunch of clowns to crew with them and they were the only people who knew how to run the ship. All the way here, they’d had to take entire responsibility for the yacht’s safe journey. Ocorabessa had been the one night when they knew the visitors wouldn’t be coming back. Both captain and engineer took their chance to go ashore. The crew, in a ship moored in a calm harbour, would look after it. What could possibly go wrong? It had occurred to neither of them that the crew might raid the bar, drink it dry and smash the boat
up.
This was the night, over a nightcap later when the women were in bed, when Fleming told Ivar that he was planning to write his first book. He’d been thinking about it since he was a schoolboy. It would be a spy story and the hero would be a British secret agent.
Anne usually went to Jamaica when Ian did but they would leave and arrive separately. In 1949, her departure had been noticed in the newspapers. When she got off the boat from New York at Southampton on her way back, a man served her with a ‘cease and desist’ notice from Esmond. She was married to Lord Rothermere and had to stop seeing Ian Fleming. ‘But,’ she protested to her friends, ‘he knows Ian Fleming has been my lover for fourteen years.’
• 8 •
SHOTGUN
• TWO BIG STEPS •
In the first month of 1952, Ian told Amaryllis that as soon as Anne’s divorce came through, he would marry her. Amaryllis was appalled. She disliked Anne, and they both knew it. He told her there was no alternative. Anne was pregnant. She and Esmond had been separated since October, so the child was his. He didn’t tell her that in 1948 Anne had had a baby which didn’t live, which had been his too. Esmond Rothermere knew, even then, but not until the ‘cease and desist’ notice did he take any action.
Ian was enough of a Fleming to consider the future from every financial angle. He had always wanted, and with a child on the way actively needed, to make a lot of money. He had once said that his ideal woman would be about 30, kind, Jewish and with an independent income. A younger version of Maud and Liesl, in fact.
The ‘real James Bond’, the American ornithologist whose book Field Guide to Birds of the West Indies gave Fleming the name for his own ‘Master-spy’. Philadelphia Enquirer
Anne was 38 and came encumbered by extravagant tastes plus two school-age children by Shane O’Neill. She looked what people call ‘hard-faced’, and the tight little hairstyles, vivid lipstick and rigidly tailored clothing of that era didn’t help. ‘She really is very handsome and well-bred, but no sex appeal,’ observed Barbara Skelton.
But they were to marry March 1952, and he would have to write the book. Now. He thought about how to do it and worked out, as he always did, a plan. The idea of writing a spy novel had apparently been in Fleming’s mind for a decade before he finally decided to commit the book to paper. Little did he know the phenomenon he was about to create when he sat down behind his typewriter on the morning of 15 January 1952 to start the first chapter of Casino Royale. Working alone at ‘Goldeneye’ there would be no distractions. He knew the plot and the characters; he had been thinking about them for years, deliberately noting aspects of people he had met, especially during the war. He would type 2,000 words five days a week for six to eight weeks. He would work in the mornings and under no circumstances stop to look anything up. In the evening he’d make corrections. On the shelf in his study was the book that had gifted him the name of his hero, Field Guide to Birds of the West Indies, by the ornithologist James Bond.
Fleming told Leonard Mosley, a contemporary at The Sunday Times, that he had created James Bond as the result of reading about the exploits of the British secret agent Sidney Reilly in the archives of the British Intelligence Service during the war. He had apparently learnt a great deal about the operational history of NID from the departmental archive, including its role in the greatest intelligence coup of World War One – the cracking of the German diplomatic code 0070, which possibly gave him the inspiration for Bond’s own code number 007. His interest in and knowledge of NID case files from World War One enabled him to draw on a rich seam of characters, experiences and situations that would prove invaluable in creating the fictional world of James Bond.
Sidney Reilly, from the 1931 Evening Standard serial ‘Masterspy’. Evening Standard
One of Fleming’s wartime contacts, for example, had been Charles Fraser-Smith, a seemingly obscure official at the Ministry of Supply. In reality, Fraser-Smith provided the intelligence services with a range of fascinating and ingenious gadgets such as compasses hidden inside golf balls and shoelaces that concealed saw blades. He was the inspiration for Fleming’s Major Boothroyd, better known as ‘Q’ in the Bond novels and films.
Having a fascination for gadgets, deception and intrigue, Fleming had always been particularly attracted to the ‘black propaganda’ work undertaken by the Political Warfare Executive, headed by former diplomat and journalist Robert Bruce Lockhart, with whom he also struck up an acquaintance. In 1918 Lockhart had worked with Sidney Reilly in Russia, where they became embroiled in a plot to overthrow Lenin’s fledgling government. Within five years of his disappearance in Soviet Russia in 1925, the press had turned Reilly into a household name, dubbing him a ‘Master Spy’ and crediting him with a string of fantastic espionage exploits.
Fleming had therefore long been aware of Reilly’s mythical reputation and no doubt listened in awe to the recollections of a man who had not only known Reilly personally but was actually with him during the turmoil and aftermath of the Russian Revolution. Lockhart had himself played a key role in creating the Reilly myth in 1931 by helping Reilly’s wife Pepita publish a book purporting to recount her husband’s adventures. As a Beaverbrook journalist at the time, Lockhart also had a hand in the deal that led to the serialisation of Reilly’s ‘Master Spy’ adventures in the London Evening Standard.
He stuck to the plan. The first draft must be written fast. As he wrote in Jamaica he absolutely must not allow himself to be sidelined into research or concerned by detail.
He stuck to a formula. He had read dozens of books of the kind he wanted to write. He instinctively knew the general structure of a thriller, the need for a dramatic dilemma, big action scenes, reversals of fortune and suspense before a triumphant outcome. He knew the essential characters. As a schoolboy he’d read John Buchan and ‘Sapper’ and William le Queux, and knew he needed a patriotic protagonist who was a braver, better-looking, more accomplished version of the reader, and a lethal antagonist about whom everything was alien. But all that Boy’s Own stuff was from the 1920s. He’d got to add plenty of sex to make it work for the fifties – like Harold Robbins with Never Love a Stranger. There must be women, impossibly seductive and if possible bound and gagged as on the lurid covers of True Detective. And – because the British audience were living in a grey world – a strong dose of material aspiration. The British were riveted by enormous wealth. Daily Express readers were fixated on Lord and Lady Docker because of Bernard Docker’s enormous yacht and astonishing Daimler with hydraulically operated hood, and his wife’s mink and diamonds, former husbands and seamy past as a showgirl. The same people read the William Hickey column because it was about aristocrats who turned up at race meetings and parties. Cars, hotels, beaches, women: James Bond must consume them all, conspicuously.
James Bond as he first appeared in the first Daily Express strip cartoon serialisation of Casino Royale in 1958. Daily Express
The second incarnation of James Bond used in the Daily Express strip cartoon serialisations from 1960–62. Daily Express
He wrote Casino Royale ‘to take my mind off other matters’. He completed the 62,000 word manuscript in a little over two months, and when he thought it was readable, he took it back to London and married Anne, who that summer received a £100,000 settlement from her ex-husband.
• GETTING PUBLISHED •
In May 1952, he had lunch with William Plomer, a friend who worked at Jonathan Cape. He told him about the book but said it wasn’t quite ready. Maybe, that first time, it wasn’t. But after a short enticing period during which the manuscript was always not quite ready he eventually delivered it. The reaction was favourable. Cape would take it, with small revisions.
He proved to be the kind of author that publishers dread. He behaved – even to the august Jonathan Cape himself – rather as if he had paid Cape and they were hired labourers. Maybe he genuinely thought that he was doing them a favour; a lot of first-time authors do, although they live to be disabused of t
he illusion.
First of all, he did not accept their qualified acceptance. He accepted their revisions, but the book needed other changes, he said, before they could have it. He did the editing, wrote a whole new chapter, and re-delivered. They were satisfied. He then insisted on designing his own cover. It turned out to be cleverly deceptive. It was a charming image – sea blue, with parallel trails of crimson hearts down either side, and a central crimson heart enclosed by a wreath with the words ‘whisper of love’. Only the title indicated that this would be other than a soppy romance.
He was forever on the phone, finding out what was going on with his book and suggesting ideas for marketing it. In the most charming way possible, of course – but while the editor is talking to an author, an editor cannot be getting on with anybody’s book.
He had none of the authorial embarrassment about money that was so unhealthily inspired during the Romantic period and endures to this day. He was not distracted by vanity. He had written Casino Royale for fun and money, and the cheques would not be forthcoming unless the marketing and sales were right. He kept his thumb on Jonathan Cape’s neck. With Ian, the more profit he made, the more careful he got. Without an agent, he took advice from a solicitor, and became, with Anne, joint director of Glidrose, the company that held copyright and to which all film and television rights would be assigned.