by Andrew Cook
‘Well, what have you done, old boy?’
McClory told him. Fleming said this was now a big production. McClory agreed that it would be, thanks to his work. He said it was a $3 million picture and he could raise the money.
He left knowing that Fleming did not want to work with him and Bryce was evading confrontation. In March, Bryce gave him six more months to come up with production money from one of the big studios, but it was all a sham. McClory read in the papers, in 1960, that Casino Royale was about to go into production thanks to a deal with Fox. So much for the ‘first’ James Bond film being the property of his partnership with Bryce.
• ‘IT’S DIFFERENT’ •
When Fleming submitted his manuscript of Thunderball that summer, his publishers were pleased with it and certainly relieved. For the past few years Ian had been complaining about the difficulty of coming up with new stuff for Bond to do, and reaction to The Spy Who Loved Me had been awful. A senior editor wrote to say that Thunderball worked particularly well because the more outrageously sadistic stuff had gone. It was more like life, and less like fantasy. And when it was published in hardback, and serialised in the Daily Express, in 1961, reviewers said the same thing; Fleming was better than before.
McClory was livid. Thunderball was ‘by Ian Fleming’, copyrighted to Glidrose, without even an ‘inspired by’ on the cover or the title page, far less an acknowledgement of co-authorship. But significant parts of it had originated in ideas that he and Jack Whittingham had devised and which Fleming had stolen from Whittingham’s script.
McClory attempted to prevent publication with an injunction against sales. Jonathan Cape expressed shock. They hadn’t known, they said, until a letter arrived from McClory’s lawyers quite recently, that there was the remotest likelihood of legal action and even now, they didn’t know why. The book was being advertised all over town; foreign rights were being sold, 130 review copies had been despatched and books had been delivered to booksellers. Should sales be stopped, they would suffer terrible losses.
McClory lost, in a hearing that lasted just 90 minutes.
‘I’m sure Bond never had to go through anything like this,’ Ian remarked with a smile to reporters as he left the court.
McClory marshalled his lawyers. They told him to forget it.
Jack Whittingham’s daughter got a job, typing for a firm of solicitors. It was a big firm with a lot of famous clients, and she went home and told her dad about them. This is how McClory and Whittingham came to engage Peter Carter-Ruck. A famous libel lawyer, he had in the past won cases for people like Lord Rothermere and Winston Churchill. He thought these two men had a good case. When he sat down with McClory and Whittingham to work out just how much of the story was not Fleming’s but theirs, the two texts side by side, they came up with two hundred pages of material that had been lifted or adapted from the script Ian had seen in February 1960.
Carter-Ruck and Whittingham got on well, but Whittingham had done a law degree at Oxford and knew that Law can defeat Justice. Carter-Ruck told him the chances of their winning or losing were about fifty-fifty. Whittingham could see the boxes and boxes of files and hours of investigation in this case. Money was pouring into the lawyers’ coffers by the hour. If he lost, if Fleming’s and Cape’s costs had to be paid as well as his own, there would be no more lovely house in Surrey, no more private schools for the children. He was unwell; like Ian, he smoked and drank too much and had a weak heart. He pulled out, assigning his rights in the screenplay to Kevin. Carter-Ruck told Whittingham that if Kevin won, he would have a good chance of success in a subsequent action.
McClory stuck with it. He had married Bobo Sigrist, who was extremely rich.
Fleming, Bryce, Jonathan Cape, Mr Cuneo from New York, Farrers and Mr Harbottle from St James’s Square, confabulated. In July, McClory was offered £10,000 and many other incentives to go away. McClory did not bite.
The trial was only weeks away when he and Carter-Ruck finally received the full documentation, the years of pertinent correspondence – copies of Fleming’s and Xanadu’s parallel arrangements with people like United Artists, Broccoli and Saltzmann, and other film and TV producers and companies; most importantly, the letters and cables between Fleming and Bryce which demonstrated intent to cut him out of the Bond film and out of the company set up to exploit it. He was advised to sue for breach of copyright, breach of confidence, conversion, breach of contract, false representation of authorship and slander of title.
The case opened at the Royal Courts of Justice in November 1963. The press were agog. The Mail and the Express alternated pictures of Anne in floor-length mink and off-the-face mink hat, alongside Ian in his suit and bow tie, with photographs of Kevin in an overcoat and his pretty wife in pillbox hat and suit, Jacquie Kennedy style.
The evidence was damning. McClory brought several witnesses from the film industry who attested to his professional competence and efforts to get the Bond film off the ground, as well as Whittingham of course who was in the best possible position to discern exactly what creative input had gone into Thunderball. Fleming was mortified.
On the second Friday, proceedings were suddenly adjourned just as Kevin McClory had taken the stand. Leading Counsel for both sides had separately seen the judge in his room. The court would reconvene on Monday 2 December. On the Sunday afternoon, it was all settled. McClory demanded, and got, full payment of his legal costs; film rights in Thunderball; copyright in the finished picture and all its scripts; and damages, in restitution for mental anguish and physical inconvenience. The damages would be £50,000, today’s equivalent of which would be scores of millions.
After a 10-minute consultation the terms were agreed. Bryce would pay.
• A SAD END •
Why did Fleming and Bryce cave in? Probably because they were likely to lose a lot of money, but Robert Sellers, who wrote The Battle for Bond, believed that the main consideration was Ian’s poor health. He had recently been told he had five years to live. He already looked extremely frail for a man of 55.
There is another slight possibility in Sellers’ book, which doesn’t make very good sense. It seems the letter had been handed to the judge by Bryce’s QC with the words ‘I think it would be unwise for me to comment on this.’ The judge read it. ‘All I can say is that I am very surprised to see it,’ he said, and handed it back. Sellers suggests, as a ‘side-note’, a homosexual relationship between Ivar and Ian which came close to being expressed in letters between them. Homosexuality was illegal at the time. The inference is that McClory had produced a copy of the letter as some sort of blackmail threat and the QC wanted the judge to know.
It’s a red herring. Fleming’s arrogant dismissal of medical advice was finishing all the games at once. Ian was already very ill indeed, and a few weeks later, he nearly died of a heart attack. He was taken by ambulance from an editorial conference at Gray’s Inn Road straight to King Edward VII Hospital, where he spent more than a month. Yet astonishingly, as he convalesced, thinking, perhaps, of happier times, he produced something completely different: Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
This was Ian with a burden lifted, writing about a wonderful car he had seen as a boy at Brooklands racetrack. The real car had been driven by Count Zborowski of Higham Park, wearing a flying helmet and a big black moustache. When Ian saw the race he was enchanted. As who wouldn’t be, for Zborowski was a dashing young man of fabulous wealth, descended from the Astors, who had built a miniature railway line around Higham Park – not because it joined up with any other railway but just for fun. His favourite racing cars, Chitty Bang Bang and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, had aeroplane engines in them and must have been quite loud. ‘Never say No to adventures’, a character in the story tells the children.
It was his first children’s story and the publishers accepted it at once. It must have been a great comfort, after the agonies of tedious work on James Bond, to know that his creative years were not finished. He could still produce a damn good ya
rn that people liked reading. It took his mind off things. Caspar was difficult. Anne was annoyed because Blanche was still in the picture. She was angry because he’d got Chris Blackwell a job on the set of Dr. No. Looking on the bright side, Broccoli and Saltzman would bring Dr. No to British screens the following year.
He had to convalesce, though. In Jamaica with Blanche, all passion spent, he had decided to write a book about ganja and sent away for research material. He would not write another Bond book this year.
He would spend the late summer in Kent. With the passing of years St Margaret’s Bay attracted Ian more and more. He liked the golf club crowd. He was pretty special there. Anne’s brother Hugo, a writer, once invented a character based on Ian, of whom he wrote ‘there was no limit, no limit at all, to his capacity for feeling inferior’. There was no chance of feeling inferior surrounded by the admiring fellows in the bar at the golf club. He was often there. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang would be released in October.
The worst thing, that summer, was the death of his mother. She had lived in Nassau for years with the Marquis of Winchester. He died at 99. The ultimate fate of the Marchioness is not recorded. After his death Eve decamped to Cannes where she lived at the Metropole Hotel and was driven around in a Rolls Royce. Ian had brought her back to London a few years ago, and she died in August.
He did not divorce Anne. In 1962 he told Blanche he was going to, but then he also told Anne that he wasn’t seeing Blanche any more. In fact she came to England when he did, and was having lunch with him at a pleasant hotel in the Home Counties every week.
Two weeks after his mother’s death, while at home in his flat in St Margaret’s Bay, he suffered another major cardiac arrest. He was taken to hospital, where he died.
• AFTERWARDS •
Caspar was a continuing problem, and would die young and dissolute in 1975. Anne drank too much and died in 1981. Blanche must have been consoled by the success of her own son who in adulthood became world famous as Chris Blackwell, the music producer and founder of Island Records.
The James Bond books and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang are still in print. As to the films, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang came out in 1968 and is a perennial favourite. Fortunes have been made in the Bond film industry, which has employed a succession of stars, female leads, musicians and title designers, makers of gadgetry, special effects people, writers, producers, directors, crew and editors. Entire careers, in Britain and America, have been based on reputations made by those films. They get better and better, although perhaps less and less like any James Bond Ian Fleming imagined.
Kevin McClory was in continual litigation over Thunderball for over forty years. Which is probably not what he intended to happen.
How is Ian Fleming remembered? With adoration, by his fans, for inventing a British fantasy figure who lives on throughout the world.
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
BEF
British Expeditionary Force
BSC
British Security Co-ordination
CIA
Central Intelligence Agency
DNI
Director of Naval Intelligence
FBI
Federal Bureau of Investigation
GPU
Gosudarstvennoye Politicheskoye Upravleniye (Soviet Security and Intelligence Service 1922–23)
KGB
Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopastnosti (Soviet Security and Intelligence Service 1954–91)
MCA
Music Corporation of America
MGB
Ministerstvo Gosudarstvennoi Bezopastnosti (Soviet Security and Intelligence Service 1943–53)
MI5
Military Intelligence 5 (aka Security Service)
MI6
Military Intelligence 6 (aka SIS)
NID
Naval Intelligence Department
NKVD
Narodnyi Kommissariat Vnutrennikh Del (Soviet Security and Intelligence Service 1934–43
OGPU
Obyedinennoye Gosudarstvennoye Politicheskoye (Soviet Security and Intelligence Service 1923–34)
OSS
Office of Strategic Services (forerunner of CIA)
POW
Prisoner of War
PWE
Political Warfare Executive
RADA
Royal Academy of Dramatic Art
RAF
Royal Air Force
RNVR
Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve
SIS
Secret Intelligence Service (aka MI6)
SMERSH
Spetsyalnye Metody Razoblacheniya Shpyonov (Special Methods of Spy Detection)
SPECTRE
Special Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion
USSR
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
WO
War Office
COPYRIGHT
First published in 2015
The History Press
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This ebook edition first published in 2015
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