For Your Eyes Only

by Ben MacIntyre

  Sex does not play a part in the lives of Bulldog Drummond or Richard Hannay. Indeed, Bond is really the first major British thriller hero to have an active sex life. Bond’s attitudes to women caused outrage, titillation and amusement in roughly equal parts: they made a generation of men and boys very overexcited, and a generation of feminists extremely angry. Bond saves the girl; the girl sleeps with him: it is a simple contract. But even those critics prepared to see Bond’s bed-hopping for the fantasy it was found something chilly and unpleasant in Bond’s sexual licence and emotional reserve. In the films, Bond’s sex life attained levels of priapism that would merit serious medical attention or industrial supplies of Viagra in a real human being. Henry Chancellor has calculated that Bond sleeps with just fourteen women in twelve books, between 1953 and 1964, of whom only five disappear between one book and the next, compared to an astonishing fifty-eight conquests in the first twenty Bond films. Readers who liked the Bond women in the books looked askance at the parade of almost characterless beauties being loved and left in each successive film. The writer Anthony Burgess wrote that ‘the girls in the Bond films tend . . . to be nothing more than animated centrefolds. In the books they are credible and lovable because of some humanising flaw.’

  Bond’s approach to sex grew directly out of Fleming’s own distinctive attitudes to women, which in turn were shaped by the times he lived in, the class he occupied, and his own psychological and sexual preoccupations. Fleming might have been an easy lay, but he was not an easy man. He has sometimes, somewhat unfairly, been characterised as simply a seductive lounge lizard, a philanderer gathering sexual scalps. The truth is more complex. Fleming was certainly attracted to many women; they were attracted to him, and he knew it. His charm, wit, vulpine good looks, wealth, mysterious war record and slight air of melancholy were powerfully seductive. He had many love affairs, often with other people’s wives, including those of close friends. This was not because Fleming had a particular penchant for adultery: divorce was less prevalent then, and adultery more common. Sometimes these affairs were long-lasting, but mostly they were not. An American acquaintance was struck by his apparently clinical attitude towards women: ‘He got bored with them fast and could be brutal about it. He had absolutely no jealousy. He explained to me that women were not worth that much emotion. But with it all, he had an abiding and continual interest in sex without any sense of shame or guilt.’ Certainly, he was more versed in seduction than courtship. ‘The direct approach to sex has become the norm,’ he told one interviewer. His own approach was direct to the point of bluntness. He would ask a woman, often on slender acquaintance or first meeting, to go to bed with him; if she declined, he would simply move on, unashamed, unresentful and unembarrassed, to the next potential seductee. He was successful as often as not – odds which he seemed to find perfectly acceptable. Sex was a sort of sport, and he favoured the scattergun approach. ‘He looked on women as a schoolboy does. They were remote, mysterious beings,’ said one family friend. ‘You will never hope to understand them, but, if you’re clever, you can occasionally shoot one down.’ The women with whom he developed close relationships tended to be older, and more emotionally resilient.

  Fleming was tremendously interested in sex. Indeed, he studied and pursued the subject, in theory and in practice, with the same avid interest he showed in gadgetry, rocketry, science and political skulduggery. He took a close interest in French pornography, and assembled an impressive personal collection of erotica, which he liked to show to visitors, particularly female ones. Flagellation, which amateur psychologists like to trace back to his beatings at school, held a particular fascination. A certain amount of jocular whipping and slippering appears to have formed part of his marriage, and there are several references to these practices in Bond. Agent 007 periodically threatens (or perhaps offers would be a better term) to spank various women, including, rather courageously, Miss Moneypenny. Not one of the women thus threatened seems remotely surprised, let alone offended, by the suggestion of sexual domination. More unpleasantly, Bond’s apparently insouciant attitude to rape has long provoked debate. In Casino Royale, we learn of Vesper Lynd that ‘the conquest of her body, because of the central privacy in her, would each time have the sweet tang of rape’. Worse yet, in The Spy Who Loved Me, the narrator Vivienne Michel opines: ‘All women love semi-rape . . .’ Fleming, under a barrage of criticism, tried to argue that The Spy Who Loved Me was an attempt to show young people that Bond was not a good role model. My own view is that Fleming was not seriously defending rape, or even semi-rape, but trying to shock by reinforcing the idea of Bond’s essential cruelty. If so, he shocked far more than he intended, and he still does, leaving a tang of toleration for sexual violence that is very far from sweet.

  Yet there was, as so often, another side to this careless sexual conquistador. Fleming’s longer-term relationships were not with the cocktail party poppets and sexual silhouettes of the novels, but with older, married women. He cultivated the air of a roué, but he also longed for emotional stability. His relationship with his eventual wife Ann Rothermere (another wife of a friend, whom he married in 1952) was long, intense, complex and fierce, but also supportive and, at times, deeply loving. At one tempestuous juncture in their stormy marriage, he wrote to Ann: ‘What we both want is more love and warmth but that is a fire we both need to blow on if it is to burn.’ Bond could never have said that. Fleming was obsessed with women, but afraid of intellectual females (such as Ann) who might put him down. He was detached but also needy, admiring but distant. It is entirely possible that, for all his skirt-chasing, Fleming did not in the end like very many women, and understood even fewer. The novelist Rosamond Lehmann acutely observed: ‘The trouble with Ian is that he gets off with women because he cannot get on with them.’ He professed a cynicism he did not always feel. ‘You can have love for nothing up to the age of forty,’ he once observed. ‘After that, you have to tell a story to get it.’ This is a quite sad and self-revealing observation. Fleming undoubtedly broke some hearts, yet most of the women he slept with must have had a good idea of what they were (or rather were not) getting into. He was never deliberately cruel, and most of his lovers attest to his gentle, if detached, kindness. Clare Blanchard, a Wren whom Fleming met in Ceylon, told her brother: ‘It doesn’t make any difference that I don’t mean anything to him as he’s so awfully nice.’

  As a young man, Fleming hopped from woman to woman with few regrets, except perhaps one. Muriel Wright was twenty-six, and a fresh-faced English rose, when Fleming met her in Kitzbühel in 1935. ‘Mu’, as he called her, was an expert rider, skied beautifully, and was one of Britain’s foremost polo players. She came from the finest landed British bloodstock: her Old Etonian father had been an MP and a contemporary of Val Fleming. With an explosion of wild blonde hair that earned her the nickname ‘Honeytop’, she was also exceptionally beautiful, in an artless way, and refreshingly unconventional. She was rich enough not to have to work, but nonetheless made a good deal of money modelling sportswear and, almost scandalously, swimsuits on the beach at Monte Carlo. Muriel loved horses, dogs, parties, gossip and fun, but most of all she loved Ian Fleming, to the point of self-abasement. She would caddy for him on the golf links, and rush to collect his custom-made cigarettes when he ran out; she would come when he called, and stay away when he was seeing other women. One of his friends called her Fleming’s ‘slave’.

  Ian enjoyed showing Mu off to his friends and annoying his family by introducing this slightly scatty beauty into weekend house parties. But he undoubtedly treated her very badly. Even though they were unofficially ‘engaged’, Fleming was consistently and relentlessly unfaithful to her, and, unlike some of his lovers, she minded. It is said that her lack of intellect stood in the way of his commitment, but then there is no evidence Fleming considered brains to be an attractive quality in a woman, and quite a lot to indicate otherwise. Fleming’s reputation was well known to Mu’s horrified family: they marked Fleming dow
n as a bounder, and her brother Fitzherbert even turned up at Fleming’s home with a horse whip, intending to administer the traditional punishment for cads, only to find that Ian and Muriel, forewarned, had headed off to the safety of Brighton for the weekend. For nine years, Mu obediently trotted after Fleming. She even got a job as a motorcycle dispatch rider working for the Admiralty when Fleming was with the Naval Intelligence Division.

  Then suddenly, like some character in a Bond movie, she was dead. On 14 March 1944, Muriel Wright returned to her flat in Eaton Mews (having just delivered Fleming his weekly package of cigarettes) and went to bed. That night, there was an air raid: a chunk of flying masonry hurtled through her open window, striking Mu in the temple and killing her at once. Ian, as her only known contact, was summoned from the card table to identify the body. Fleming was distraught. He was also racked with remorse at the way he had treated her. He wore Mu’s bracelet on his key ring and refused to go to the London haunts they had visited together. One of Ian’s associates in 30 AU, Dunstan Curtis, remarked meanly of his mourning: ‘The trouble with Ian is that you have to get yourself killed before he feels anything.’ But, in truth, the death of Muriel had a profound effect on Fleming’s emotions, a small effect on his behaviour, and far greater impact on his writing. Mu, he reflected sadly, had been ‘too good to be true’.

  The quality of being ‘too good to be true’ is, of course, what distinguishes the Bond Girls. Muriel Wright has a strong claim to be the fons et origo of the species: pliant and undemanding, beautiful but innocent, outdoorsy, physically tough, implicitly vulnerable and uncomplaining, and then tragically dead, before or soon after marriage. Bond would have married Vesper Lynd, in Casino Royale, but she kills herself. Ten books later, there are distinct elements of Muriel in the well-born, golden-haired Countess Teresa (Tracy) di Vicenzo, in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Bond does marry Tracy (‘She’s beautiful, in bed and out. She’s adventurous, brave, resourceful. She’s exciting always’), but soon afterwards she, too, perishes. Bond’s distress over Tracy’s corpse may be an echo of Fleming’s anguish at Muriel’s death so many years earlier.

  A year before he had met Muriel, Fleming first laid eyes on Ann (née Charteris), the young wife of Shane, Baron O’Neill, and future wife of Esmond, Lord Rothermere, and the woman Fleming would finally marry in the same year he wrote his first Bond book. Ann was in many ways the opposite of Mu, being dark, highly intelligent, waspish, worldly, sophisticated, emotionally complex and extraordinarily good company. Ian’s love affair with Ann started during the war; it continued after O’Neill’s death and her marriage to Rothermere; and it lasted, tumultuously, until the end of his life. This peculiar pair had very different tastes and interests: Ann enjoyed nothing more than to gather her literary and artistic friends for an evening of bibulous backstabbing, the sort of event that Ian cordially detested, preferring the golf course, the club, or simply his own company. Ian was hardly the marrying type. To a friend, newly betrothed in 1944, he remarked sourly, ‘Well, old boy, I wish you all the luck in the world, but I can’t see anything in it for me.’ When Ian and Ann finally did decide to marry, on 24 March 1952, he was forty-three, she was pregnant, and he anticipated the worst. Writing to his future brother-in-law, he observed: ‘We are, of course, totally unsuited . . . China will fly and there will be rage and tears.’

  There were, indeed, ample tears and flying crockery. Ann could be wounding about Ian’s writing (referring to it as ‘pornography’); he, in turn, made no secret of his dislike of her literary friends, her ‘harem’. After two years of marriage, he was already complaining, only half in jest: ‘In the old days I demanded or perhaps pleaded for three things in a wife. She should have enough money to buy her own clothes, she should be able to make incomparable Béarnaise sauce, and she should be double-jointed. In the event I got none of these things.’ The rows grew furious, and the marriage colder. Fleming conducted a long affair with a neighbour in Jamaica, Blanche Blackwell; Ann did the same with Hugh Gaitskell, leader of the Labour Party. She was jealous; he, characteristically, was not. When they were apart, they missed each other painfully, he declaring: ‘I love you only in the world.’ When they were together, they fought viciously and, as self-absorbed people often do, publicly. Many of their friends thought the marriage should have broken up, but somehow it did not; paradoxically, the repeatedly adulterous Fleming was wedded to the idea of matrimony. Fleming wrote every one of his Bond books while locked in this peculiar relationship, in an extraordinary torrent of creativity. Perhaps Bond was a way to escape the pains of his marriage. Once he had started writing, and suffered the sneers of Ann’s literary friends, he may have been impelled to keep going in order to prove that he could out-write, out-publish and out-earn every one of them; perhaps as he felt his sexual powers waning, he poured his passion into his books, for his love of words and writing was the most constant love of his life. Whatever the reason, this strange marriage endured, producing one child, Caspar, a few good times, some very unhappy times, and a lot of excellent books.

  It is tempting to see shades of Fleming’s turbulent marriage in Bond’s attitude to women. The ‘conventional parabola’ of a Bond affair, described in Casino Royale, is a statement of unalloyed cynicism, starting with ‘sentiment, the touch of the hand’, and inevitably ending with ‘the final bitterness’: ‘The meeting at a party, the restaurant, the taxi, his flat, her flat, then the weekend by the sea, then the flats again, then the furtive alibis and the angry farewell on some doorstep in the rain.’ Bond has no time for domesticity and marriage, ‘handing out canapés in an L-shaped drawing room’ – a reference to the Flemings’ London house in Victoria Square. Bond points out that if he got married, he would first need to divorce himself from M and the secret service. James Bond has no children, no siblings and no parents. He leaves Kissy Suzuki pregnant in You Only Live Twice, but there is never a suggestion that he has any sense of paternal responsibility, or wonders about his child. He is the empty vessel into which the reader decants his or her expectations. Women, Bond declares, are for recreation; he has no desire to tote the emotional baggage that comes from a serious relationship. Tracy, the girl he does marry, is eligible precisely because she is ‘a lone girl, not cluttered up with friends, relations, belongings’, rather like himself. Bond’s women often have interesting, independent lives and missions; they are by no means chained to the sink, but essentially they are there to be admired, saved and then slept with, in that order. Even a lesbian like Pussy Galore melts before Bond’s male dominance: ‘She did as she was told, like an obedient child.’ Bond is adamant on one point of female gastronomy: the ideal woman needs to make a Béarnaise sauce as well as she makes love, though not, presumably, at the same time.

  The qualities Bond admires are physical and practical, and certainly not a matter of character or intellect: ‘Gold hair. Grey eyes. A sinful mouth. Perfect figure. And of course she’s got to be witty and poised and know how to dress and play cards . . .’ Fleming was something of a connoisseur of women’s fashion, and often describes the clothing of Bond’s lovers in lavish detail. The wit is an interesting requirement, since the Bond of the books is never remotely witty: the jokes and one-liners are purely inventions of the films. Fleming uses a great many adjectives to describe the shape of women’s breasts most admired by Bond, foremost among which is ‘jutting’; this quality, however, is not so attractive when associated with the buttocks, as is the case with Tatiana Romanova’s overexercised and therefore unattractively masculine bottom. Elsewhere, confusingly, Fleming approvingly describes a female bottom as ‘boyish’, a description that sent Noël Coward into a paroxysm of fake-heterosexual outrage: ‘Really, old chap, what could you have been thinking of?’ Other critics have got very hot under the collar at Bond’s sexual activity: ‘Sex, Snobbery and Sadism,’ screeched Paul Johnson in the New Statesman, blasting the ‘mechanical, two-dimensional sex-longings of a frustrated adolescent’.

  Fleming worked hard on his se
duction technique, but Bond barely needs one: women simply throw themselves at him. Bond Girls are all, of course, intensely attractive, but each bears some small imperfection, a mark of vulnerability: Honeychile Rider has a broken nose; Domino Vitali has one slightly shorter leg. Even their names usually offer the hint of availability, and were often drawn from people Fleming knew: Honeychile was the nickname of Pat Wilder, an American former dancer in Bob Hope’s troupe who married Prince Alex Hohenlohe, owner of an exclusive Alpine resort where Fleming went to ski and socialise; Jill Masterton is a play on the name of John Masterman, the Oxford academic who presided over the Double Cross system of double agents during the war; ‘Solitaire’ (Simone Latrelle in Live and Let Die) is named after a unexpectedly dowdy Jamaican bird.

  Bond is pure heterosexual, from his brogues to his haircut (which cannot quite be said of Fleming, who had many gay friends and could be fantastically camp). 007 does not approve of homosexuals (‘unhappy, sexual misfits’) or sexual equality, or even votes for women. His books, Fleming declared, were ‘written for warm-blooded heterosexuals’. Outside of the more Jurassic corners of London clubland, it would be hard, these days, to find anyone with the same views as James Bond. ‘Doesn’t do to get mixed up with neurotic women in this business,’ M tells Bond gravely in From Russia with Love; ‘They hang on to your gun-arm.’ All of this adds up to a very potent postwar daydream for a particular sort of old-fashioned gent. Women had the vote and there was nothing even Bond could do about that. Having played a vital role in the war, women were asserting themselves in the home and the workplace; they were even becoming secret agents, and had been effective as such during the war, being rather better in that line of work than men. Male dominance was under threat wherever one looked, but not in Bond’s world. Bond offered a reassuring fantasy, old-fashioned in tone but modern in sexual liberty: men were still the world’s heroes, modern Saint Georges who could slay the dragon and then fall into the arms of an adoring, beautiful, slightly weak woman, who would love them unquestioningly and then whip up a terrific dinner. Why, he could even cause the toughest lesbian to declare, as does Pussy Galore: ‘I never met a man before.’