Thrilling Cities

by Ian Fleming

  Then again, most of the romantic fables are nowadays frowned upon. Of course nobody ever shot themselves because of their losses at the tables! The Suicide’s Leap, a vertiginous plunge from the top of the cliff beside the Musée Océanographique, is a fiction! The Russian destroyer captain who, having lost his own money together with all the sailors’ pay from the ship’s safe, held the casino up to ransom by training his ship’s guns on it – that is nonsense! Only a few incontrovertible stories putting the casino in a rosy light are still fostered, such as that the casino recently lost more than sixty million francs in three days; that in 1952 an English couple won thirty million francs in a week and were never seen again; and the history of Charles de Ville Wells who inspired the music-hall song ‘The Man who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo’. The story of Sir Frederick Johnston also finds its place in the authorized version, though it sounds highly improbable. This Milord, in 1913, when they still played with louis d’or, was wearing a blazer with brass buttons. One button broke off and rolled under the table. ‘Don’t disturb yourself, Milord,’ cried the chef de parti, ‘where does the louis go, on red?’ ‘Always red,’ laughed Sir Frederick, not knowing what it was all about. He then left the table and moved to another room only to be sought out by a huissier with the news that he now had the maximum on red and that it must be withdrawn in order not to hold up the game. Milord had won 25,000 francs with a button!

  Monte Carlo is full of these tales which find their way again and again into books and articles about the casino. The only one I could have verified (but forgot to) is to the effect that, in the English church, they only sing hymns with a number higher than thirty-six since otherwise the congregation, it is said, quit the church at the first organ note in order to dash to the casino and back the number of the hymn.

  I have always had a desire to examine the mechanics of a casino and, with the help of Mr Onassis’s staff, I gained access to the engine-room, so to speak, of this famous gaming-house.

  To the left of the imposing main entrance to the casino there is a small door with nothing written on it, and through this you go down flights of stone stairs into a maze of underground passages and rooms that remind one of the back of a theatre. The largest of these rooms is the atelier where the roulette wheels are constructed and where all the gambling equipment is repaired. The chef d’atelier was an attractive, youngish man with great enthusiasm for his work, though he was totally uninterested in gambling and said, proudly, that he had never hazarded a single franc. That day he had three roulette wheels for repair and these were draped in green baize while they ‘slept’. He undraped one and lifted it from its spindle on to its die and explained to me the extraordinary number of things that can go wrong with a cylindre. Everything to do with a roulette wheel is subject to minute wear, the spindle obviously, but also the aluminium slots, the brass bosses, the top rosewood level where the ball spins, and the ivory ball itself, which, with use, gets smaller and smaller. All these points and many others come under daily review when at 9.30 a.m., half an hour before gambling begins, the chef and his team verify every single piece of equipment in the gaming rooms – the croupiers’ rakes, the chemin-de-fer shoes, the diameter of the roulette balls and of, course, the level of each table, which can be adjusted at the base of the feet.

  I asked about the croupiers’ school, and the chef explained its functioning. Apparently examinations for the school are held at irregular intervals. A candidate must first pass a strict medical and then come before an interview board which reviews his personal life and that of the whole of his family, which must be above reproach. He is then put through tests for general intelligence, which must be above the average, and for memory, which must be exceptional. He should be between twenty-three and forty, have long, supple fingers and be extremely agile in his movements. His speech must be correct and without significant accent and he should have some knowledge of at least one foreign language – generally either Italian or English.

  As an additional and supreme safeguard, no candidate is considered unless he has served for two years with the Société des Bains de Mer, either as a secretary, commissionaire, watchman or fireman, for instance.

  Having passed these preliminary examinations, he is put to practical schooling under senior croupiers for six or eight months, with intermediate examinations at the end of each month. At the end of this period he is put through a ‘disaster course’ – a horrifying experience during which every conceivable complication and unexpected incident is thrown at him. He then has a second medical examination, and after this a final trial in the public rooms. This, apparently, is the most anguishing experience of all. The candidates, already wrought to a high pitch of nervous tension and knowing that they are under surveillance from half a dozen watchful pairs of eyes, occasionally faint at the table and nearly always sweat so heavily that the equipment, particularly, the ivory ball, slips in their fingers. If they pass this final inquisition with success they are appointed croupiers and probably continue in the métier, working six hours a day, until they are sixty or sixty-five, when they are retired on a pension. They work on a fixed salary and receive a percentage of the tips which, on an average, doubles their monthly wage.

  There are various conventions that the experienced gambler will have noticed. The croupier must refer to the roulette as ‘le cylindre’, and frequently uses the term ‘louis’ when announcing bets, although this piece of money has been out of currency for more than forty years. He must also remember that there are in theory no women at the table, and that it is always, ‘Messieurs, faites vos jeux.’ This tradition dates from the time when it was considered inelegant to associate women with the passion for gambling.

  It is almost impossible for a croupier to cheat. The last successful cheat was before the war when two Italians bribed a croupier to mark the cards at a chemin-de-fer table with dots of an ink that was invisible except through specially tinted glasses worn by the Italians. The cards were marked with tiny dots representing their face value and this allowed the Italians, when they held the bank, to know the total held by the punter – a knowledge that, from time to time in the game, can be of decisive value. The conspiracy was successful for several weeks but was then uncovered by a suspicious chef de jeu who became mystified when the Italians frequently ‘stood’ on four, for instance, when the punter held perhaps a three or a two.

  For me a strong rival attraction to the casino is the Musee Océanographique that adjoins the Royal Palace of Monaco. This is now in charge of one of my heroes, Captain Jacques-Yves Cousteau, who is in process of reorganizing and rebuilding it to be the greatest aquarium in the world. He took me round the new laboratories, now equipped with every kind of modem instrument for measuring the physical qualities of sea-water and other abstruse oceanographic problems, and I saw the latest public exhibits which dramatically show creatures of the abyssal depths phosphorescently illuminated against a dark-room effect. Soon he will announce a grandiose scheme for building, above sea-level and adjoining the aquarium, vast tanks where dolphins will give public performances (as they do, for instance, at Miami), and other spectacular marine exhibits.

  This fantastically energetic man engages each year on marine adventures and exploits of which, alas, we hear too little in England. In 1958 he invented a jet-propelled underwater ‘flying saucer’ for submarine exploration, and this is now being manufactured in small quantities. Early in 1959 he was employed by the French government to survey the submarine route for natural gas pipelines from Oran to Cartagena. The first pipes will continue across Europe to the Ruhr, and perhaps even to England, bringing Sahara gas to revolutionize the power problems of the whole continent. Cousteau, who incidentally surveyed the Persian Gulf offshore wells for the British Petroleum Company, is technical adviser for all underwater aspects of this six-hundred-billion-franc pipeline plan. Amongst smaller projects, he is now experimenting with a collapsible ship made of nylon coated with plastic. The prototype is sixty-three feet by twenty-three
feet and is powered by two 600 h.p. diesels. This deflatable vessel will be used in conjunction with the diving saucer for short-term marine exploration wherever it is needed, the entire equipment being transportable by air at short notice.

  Unfortunately Cousteau’s writing never catches up with all his various projects and it is only now that he is considering a sequel to The Silent World (The Living Sea, published in 1963 by Hamish Hamilton). Meanwhile he has formed his own film company (after experience of ‘show biz’ in connection with his film of The Silent World, he has called it Requins Associés, Sharks Ltd.) which is to produce a television series of fifty-two films.

  His company recently won a Hollywood Oscar for Cousteau’s film The Golden Fish. This is the story of a small Chinese boy who wins a goldfish in a lottery. In his small room he already has a canary in a cage and when he goes off to school each day the goldfish in its bowl and the canary make friends. A hungry black cat hears the canary singing for joy over the acrobatics of the goldfish and we see him climb in through the window just as the boy is leaving school. As the boy saunters home, the cat tries to get at the canary and, prepared to sacrifice himself for his friend, the fish jumps out of the bowl on to the table. The cat leaves the canary and slowly stalks the fish. Will the little boy be in time? No, he can’t be! Hurry! Hurry! The cat picks up the fish in his mouth! Disaster! But, as the little boy walks into the room, the cat reaches up and drops the goldfish back into his bowl.

  Cousteau’s famous research ship, the Calypso, is now in Greek waters, but the days of treasure hunts and archaeological discoveries are, alas, over, and Cousteau’s whole research programme is devoted to scientific work. But whatever he touches he infects with so much brilliance and enthusiasm that a morning spent in his company is a wonderful refreshment for the spirit – particularly when it is jaded by the life of too many cities, however thrilling, in too short a time.

  And then it was time to take off on the last lap along the screaming hubbub of the Cote d’Azur, up through the olive groves of Provence, and the mysterious maze of the Auvergne, to the soft Loire. Then the long straight hack across north-west France to the bustling little aerodrome of Le Touquet.

  One last delicious meal at the airport restaurant (five stars in my personal good-food guide), the pangs of jealousy as the other cars come off the planes to begin their holidays, and then the melancholy flight back across the Channel. How many excitements and alarums, how many narrow squeaks, how many thrilling sights and sounds in those six weeks! What fun it all was! What fun ‘abroad’ will always be!

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  There is very little to say as an introduction to this book that is not self-evident from its title, but there are one or two comments I would like to make on its origins.

  These are thirteen essays on some of the thrilling cities of the world written for the Sunday Times in 1959 and 1960. Seven of them are about cities round the world, and six round Europe.

  They are what is known, in publishing vernacular, as ‘mood pieces’. They are, I hope – or were, within their date – factually accurate, but they do not claim to be comprehensive, and such information as they provide is focused on the bizarre and perhaps the shadier side of life.

  All my life I have been interested in adventure and, abroad, I have enjoyed the frisson of leaving the wide, well-lit streets and venturing up back alleys in search of the hidden, authentic pulse of towns. It was perhaps this habit that turned me into a writer of thrillers and, by the time I made the two journeys that produced these essays, I had certainly got into the way of looking at people and places and things through a thriller-writer’s eye.

  The essays entertained, and sometimes scandalized, the readers of the Sunday Times, and the editorial blue pencil scored through many a passage which has now been impurgated (if that is the opposite of expurgated) in the present text. There were suggestions that I should embody the two series in a book, but I was too busy, or too lazy, to take the step until now, despite the warning of my friends that the essays would date.

  I do not think they have dated to any serious extent and, rereading them, they seem, to me at any rate, to retain such freshness as they ever possessed. The cities may have changed minutely, this or that restaurant may have disappeared, a few characters have died, but I stick to the validity of the landscapes, painted with a broad and idiosyncratic brush, and I have embellished each chapter with stop-press indices of ‘Incidental Intelligence’ which should, since they were provided for the most part by foreign correspondents of the Sunday Times, be of value to the traveller of today.

  Nothing remains but to dedicate this biased, cranky but at least zestful hotchpotch to my friends and colleagues on the Sunday Times in London and abroad, and particularly to a man called ‘C.D.’, who pulled the trigger, and to Mr Roy Thomson who cheerfully paid for these very expensive and self-indulgent peregrinations.

  I.L.F

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  Copyright © Gildrose Productions Ltd. 1962

  Copyright 1959, 1960 by Thomson Newspapers Ltd.

  Introduction Copyright © Jan Morris 2009

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