To many modern men, the Bond Girl myth is still a powerful fantasy; for many modern women, to be called a Bond Girl would be an unforgivable insult. Perhaps that shows that we have not moved on so very far since 1955. Now, woman, where is my Béarnaise sauce?
007
Shaken, Stirred and Custom-Made: Bond’s Life of Luxury
007
Shaken, Stirred and Custom-made: Bond’s Life of Luxury
‘There are moments of great luxury in the life of a secret agent,’ Ian Fleming declared in the opening line of Live and Let Die (1954). It is almost impossible to exaggerate the allure of Bond’s lifestyle to a postwar Britain strained by rationing, deprived of glamour and still bruised by the privations of war. Bond is, quite simply, a stylish, fast-shooting, high-living, sexually liberated advertisement for all the things ordinary Britons had never had, yet dreamed of: the finest food and drink, smart clothes, fast cars, leisure time, casinos, exotic foreign travel, swimming in warm waters. Fleming called his evocation of this fantasy ‘disciplined exoticism’. But he was also one of the first writers to identify the appeal of the designer lifestyle in an emerging age of consumerism. Identifying Bond with certain brands made him not only classy, but believable.
Fleming had history on his side, for his dealings in wartime espionage had shown him that spies do, indeed, enjoy and require moments of great luxury. Much spycraft is boring, dangerous and uncomfortable, and spies tend to be self-interested people, fascinated by material things. Perhaps because of this, human comforts and luxuries assume a disproportionate importance when an agent is off duty. John Masterman, organiser of the famed Double Cross system through which Britain played Germany’s spies against their German spymasters, held it as an article of faith that secret agents should be pampered and cosseted, provided with money and, within the bounds of reason and tight security, allowed to indulge themselves with whatever comforts were available. Popov, the Yugoslavian agent who spied for Britain throughout the war, was encouraged to live the life of a gambling, hard-living playboy (not that he needed much encouragement); Eddie Chapman, codenamed Agent Zigzag, was given the ‘red-carpet treatment’ by his MI5 handlers, wined and dined at the Savoy, and allowed to spend the money he had brought from Germany on wine, women and, to a slightly lesser extent, song. In framing Bond’s life of exquisite good taste and effortless style, Fleming must surely have been thinking back to the refined wartime spies he had known, like Biffy Dunderdale, who drove around Paris in his Rolls while France collapsed, and dined at Maxim’s in his tailor-made suit.
Bond never has to wait in for the electrician or arrange to see the bank manager. He never queues for a bus. In almost every way, his imagined life was entirely divorced from the everyday realities of 1950s Britain. Yet there were people in postwar Britain living a life of exclusive, stylish luxury, and one of them was Ian Fleming. ‘I write about what pleasures and stimulates me,’ he said, ‘and if there is a strong streak of hedonism in my books it is not there by guile but because it comes through the tip of my ballpoint pen.’
From an early age, Fleming had enjoyed the good (and expensive) things in life: skiing in the Alps, dining at Scott’s, membership of the most exclusive clubs for gentlemen and golfers. For most of his life, however, he did not have quite as much money as he would have liked, and when he did have that kind of money towards the end of his life, having earned vast quantities from his books, it was too late. There is a hunger in the way Fleming describes gold, diamonds, a villain’s den or a delicious meal that transmits itself to the reader as a sort of luxurious longing. Many of his acquaintances were super-rich, most notably his schoolfriend Ivar Bryce, a charming and handsome Anglo-Peruvian sybarite whose already vast family fortune from trading guano was increased immeasurably when he married Jo Hartford, an American supermarket heiress whose fortune was worth an estimated $350 million. The Bryces had homes in, among other places, Manhattan, Vermont, London and the Bahamas (where they had a property complete with a fake beach, imported at $3,000 a yard); they bred racehorses, travelled constantly, partied hard and lived a life of quite breathtaking extravagance. Fleming could be disparaging about the rich, claiming that too much money left millionaires in ‘search of identity’; on the other hand, he would have been more than happy with the identity of a multimillionaire himself. His villains are almost all fabulously wealthy: money, and the power it can buy, is central to their evil fascination. ‘Too much money is the worst curse you can lay on anyone’s head,’ Bond tells Marc-Ange Draco in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. If so, it was a curse Fleming pursued with consistent determination, and remarkable success.
Fleming was never in the same financial league as the Bryces, but he was still a great deal wealthier than most people, and thanks to a generous expense account provided by Kemsley Newspapers he could live a life that was rather richer than he was. As a young man, he perfected a sort of roué bachelor-chic that lasted throughout his life. He wore suits of the fashionable cut, sported a spotted bowtie, or the Old Etonian tie (‘The colours are really quite unobjectionable’); Fleming considered his tie-wear ‘Churchillian’. Churchill did favour spotted black and blue bow-ties (he had only six other ties in the 1950s), which he tied loosely, a style copied precisely by Fleming. Through a long and elegant ebony cigarette holder, Fleming sucked a never-ending succession of custom-made cigarettes. Fleming’s smokes were Morland Specials, a tarheavy confection of strong Turkish and Balkan tobaccos, each one decorated with three gold bands around the filter, in reminiscence of the three gold rings he had worn on his sleeve as (acting) Commander Fleming of the Royal Navy. Bond smokes the same brand, sixty a day and seventy if he is gambling, but when abroad he will smoke whatever the locals are puffing: Chesterfield King Size in the US, Royal Blend in the Caribbean. Fleming’s cigarettes were a curious affectation, and a lifelong addiction, but they were also the mark of a man who knew the value of standing out from a crowd. He wore Trumper’s ‘Eucris’ hair dressing (which Bond also uses in Diamonds Are Forever), collected rare books and disdained tea, the working man’s drink – Bond declares it ‘mud’. Bond’s dark suits, Fleming noted with a flash of introspection, ‘betray an underlying melancholy’.
On the beach in Jamaica, Bond wears bright beach shirts made by Antonio’s of Falmouth, but for everyday wear he sports a blue Sea Island cotton shirt and tropical worsted trousers. Bond and Fleming share most sartorial tastes, although 007 favours black knitted silk ties and would not, I suspect, be seen dead in a spotted bow-tie. Quite how he obtains his wardrobe is a mystery, since Bond goes shopping just once in fourteen books. Little flickers of the more old-fashioned side to Fleming’s character occasionally shine through: Bond, for example, takes against anyone wearing a tie knotted in the Windsor style, which he considers ‘a mark of vanity, egocentricity and a pawky mind’. (In Red Grant, it is also the mark of an assassin.) Behind Bond the fashion icon lurks Fleming the harrumphing, old-school patriot, disapproving of vulgar dressers, bad manners and homosexuals (even though two of his closest friends, William Plomer and Noël Coward, were gay). Some of Bond’s fashion choices would be considered disastrous today, but were then a mark of extreme sophistication, and all reflected Fleming’s own idiosyncratic fashion: Bond’s taste for pyjama-coats, for example, and black leather sandals (we are not told whether he wears socks with these, but I prefer to assume not).
Fleming’s sense of style undoubtedly reflected, in part, his friendship with and admiration for Somerset Maugham. The two writers had met in 1953, when Maugham was already a grand old man of letters, living a life of elegant private luxury in his stunning villa on the Côte d’Azur, with plenty of servants, rare works of art and a sumptuous library. Fleming was deeply impressed by Maugham’s expensive English lifestyle.
In some ways Goldeneye, the Jamaican holiday home he purchased in 1946, would become Fleming’s answer to Maugham’s Villa Mauresque: a haven dedicated to pleasure but also to the hard grind of daily writing. Fleming first visited Ja
maica back in 1942, when he travelled there for an Anglo-American naval conference, accompanied by Ivar Bryce. He was immediately smitten by the place. ‘When we have won this blasted war, I am going to live in Jamaica,’ he declared. ‘Just live in Jamaica and lap it up, and swim in the sea and write books.’ To another friend he announced that he would never spend another winter in Britain. On the north shore of the island, he found the property he was looking for, on the site of an old race track, facing the sea, with a secluded private beach. Once more, there was wordplay in the holiday home he called Goldeneye: a reference to the wartime planning for the defence of Gibraltar, Operation Golden Eye, but also a tribute to the Carson McCullers novel Reflections in a Golden Eye, which he happened to be reading at the time, and to the original Spanish name of the place, Orcabessa, ‘head of gold’. Here Fleming would retreat from the fogs and gloom of wintry London to entertain his friends, snorkel in the warm blue waters of the reef, relax in private luxury and, eventually, write. When it was time to leave this sanctuary in the spring and return home (usually with another finished manuscript in his briefcase), Fleming would always do so with ‘a lump in the throat’. Bond would come to share Fleming’s deep affection for Jamaica, and in Live and Let Die we learn that 007 ‘had grown to love the great green island and its staunch, humorous people’.
Bond’s style is an exaggeration of all the elements that Fleming believed made up the essence of English savoir-vivre, with a lot of contemporary consumer goods and designer products thrown in for added glamour. In some respects – most notably food – Bond is far more of a connoisseur than Fleming himself was, but once again he knew instinctively that readers demanded detail. It is not enough to know that Bond wears an expensive watch; we need to know it is a Rolex Oyster Perpetual (although, as Fleming told a reader, he ‘has trained himself to tell the time by the sun in either hemisphere within a few minutes’). He does not smoke any old thing (except when abroad), but keeps his Morland cigarettes in a gun-metal case and lights them with a Ronson. He does not simply eat, he eats magnificently and in exquisite detail. Bond’s grooming is precise almost to the point of prissiness. His hair is washed in Pinaud Elixir (‘that prince among shampoos’, he insists, camply), he washes his body with Fleur des Alpes soap by Guerlain, and shaves with a Hoffritz razor. Bond, in short, is a highly perfumed fashion icon, with a licence to smell lovely. ‘My books are spattered with branded products of one sort or another,’ Fleming remarked nonchalantly, but these designer goods are as vital to the man as his machines, his guns or his women.
Bond is a foodie; indeed, he may be the first action-foodie-hero in the thriller genre. Fleming’s suggestion that Bond, when not on assignment, often dines simply (grilled sole, oeufs en cocotte and the like) stands in sharp contrast to his gastronomic behaviour throughout the series. In Casino Royale, Bond declares from the outset: ‘I take a ridiculous pleasure in what I eat and drink.’ He puts this gourmandising down to being a single man who must often eat alone. Bond’s first blow-out, consumed with Vesper Lynd, is worth examining in some detail, for it says much about his tastes (and Fleming’s literary intentions). They eat caviar and toast (lots of toast), followed by rare steak tournedos with Béarnaise sauce (so we know what is coming, bed-wise) and artichoke hearts; then Vesper has strawberries and cream, while Bond eats an avocado pear with French dressing. To drink, they have a bottle of the Taittinger Blanc de Brut 1943 – ‘probably the finest champagne in the world’, Bond muses, and then grins ‘at the touch of pretension in the word’.
A touch? To modern ears, this may not sound like a particularly sumptuous meal, but to postwar readers it was almost impossibly recherché and luxurious: a rare, tiny steak when meat itself was rare, usually rubbery and often semi-cremated; an avocado pear was a singularly exotic delicacy – so uncommon, in fact, that Bond seems to think it is a pudding. Champagne is already glamorous enough: the ability not only to spot the difference between one champagne and another, but to declare one to be supreme, that would have been, for Fleming’s readers, the mark of true connoisseurship. Pretentious? That was the point: here was a banquet of such immense refinement and expense that readers would be left salivating.
The same is true of many Bond meals. He eats yoghurt in Turkey, but not the low-fat variety; his is ‘deep yellow with the consistency of thick cream’, and some fresh figs, peeled and ‘bursting with ripeness’. This, of course, was in the days before fresh yoghurt could be found in every supermarket in the world. In France, Tilly Masterton is told to buy Bond’s lunch: ‘Six inches of Lyon sausage, a loaf of bread, and half a litre of Mâcon with the cork pulled.’ A bottle of wine with the cork still in it would be merely frustrating, but the precision is the point. Drawing on Fleming’s worldwide travels, Bond scoffs every possible gourmet item: lobster in Japan, a doner kebab (then almost unheard of in Britain) in Istanbul, stone crabs and pink champagne from silver tankards in Goldfinger, turbot poché, sauce mousseline, and half a roast partridge from the restaurant opposite the train station in Etaples run by Monsieur Bécaud. For breakfast (his favourite meal, and Fleming’s), Bond eats boiled eggs from Maran hens (three and a half minutes each), eaten off Minton china, with toast, Wilkin & Sons Tiptree ‘Little Scarlet’ strawberry preserve, Frank Cooper’s Oxford Vintage Marmalade, honey from Fortnum & Mason, and coffee from De Bry in New Oxford Street, brewed, of course, in the Chemex. The culinary name-dropping is intense: sole meunière, tartare sauce, eggs Benedict, thousand island dressing. With M, in the fictional Blades Club, Bond eats asparagus with hollandaise sauce; in Scott’s he feasts on lamb cutlets with buttered peas and new potatoes, and a slice of pineapple. To modern, sophisticated palates this is unextraordinary fare, but to contemporaries Bond’s meals are bright explosions of high cuisine, specifically designed to tantalise and amaze in a Britain where bananas were considered mouth-wateringly exotic, milk came powdered, and practically everything tasted the same and of very little. In 1948, with control over food supplies even stricter than it had been during the war, the average man was rationed to two ounces of bacon and ham, one and a half ounces of cheese and two ounces of tea each week, and just one egg every five days. The memory of deprivation was still fresh in 1953, and meat rationing would not end until 1954. Bond’s diet of asparagus, fresh lamb and pineapple in a single meal shows just how far above the average he is.
But here is a small heresy: James Bond might be the ideal comrade in a fight, but in a restaurant he would be sheer hell. Bond would be forever ordering for you, offering a little lecture on the wine or champagne, or insisting, as foodies always will, that you cannot eat at the nearest brasserie but must instead trek all the way over to the station in Etaples to try Monsieur Bécaud’s divine turbot poché. Bond would be the sort to pick a fight with the chef and sommelier. He would forever be on the lookout for Béarnaise sauce. Anyone who insists that food tastes different off Minton china is, in my view, a pain. I am not alone in this. Fleming himself would surely have found Bond a tiresome dining companion: the writer knew the literary value of exotic and complicated foreign food in fiction, but he was no gourmet in fact. Few writers are better at describing food, but eating was not a subject that interested Fleming greatly.
At one point Fleming notes that Bond, when abroad, prefers ‘the ordinary plain food of the country’. This was certainly true of Fleming, whose eating habits were closer to M’s than to Bond’s. His own tastes were straight out of the prep school recipe book. Mostly, he liked scrambled eggs, which ‘never let you down’, and he did not care much what kind of hen they came from. He insisted that the chef at the Lutèce in New York, then one of the most expensive and exclusive restaurants on the planet, prepare for him scrambled eggs (then strawberries for dessert). Fleming even wrote out his own recipe for scrambled eggs, which offers the artery-clogging suggestion that a meal for four should consist of twelve eggs, six ounces of butter, and additional butter to be stirred in after cooking. However, the food Fleming served at Goldeneye – violent goat
curries and the like, prepared by his Jamaican housekeeper Violet – was famously revolting, a far cry from the delicacies served by Somerset Maugham at the Villa Mauresque. Noël Coward wrote that ‘the food was so abominable I used to cross myself before eating it . . . it tasted like armpits. And all the time there was old Ian smacking his lips for more and you are tormented by the thought of all those exquisite meals in the books.’ Regardless of the quality of the food he served and ate, Fleming was by all accounts a delightful dining companion, entertaining, inquisitive and attentive, particularly if you happened to be an attractive woman. Bond to choose the food and wine, and Fleming to eat it with: that would be the ideal dinner.
For Your Eyes Only Page 10