It is said that Fleming initially wanted the part of Dr Julius No to be played by Noël Coward, his old friend and neighbour in Jamaica, a prospect that would have been hilarious, and probably disastrous. He also suggested that David Niven, another friend, should play Bond, or Richard Burton, whom he much admired, or else a young actor named Roger Moore. Ian’s suggestions were politely ignored, though in private Broccoli could be less than flattering about the novelist’s work: Dr No, he allegedly said to one potential director, was ‘full of nonsense’. Cary Grant was initially offered the part of Bond, but at fifty-eight he declined, reportedly saying he was too old for the role. Eventually Broccoli decided to cast Sean Connery, an almost entirely unknown Scottish actor who had previously worked as a truck-driver, life-class model, milkman, coffin polisher, sailor, boxer and lifeguard. Fleming had lunch with Connery at the Savoy, but wondered if this Scottish working-class ‘overgrown stuntman’ was quite right for the part. His doubts were allayed when an attractive woman at the same lunch assured him that Connery had ‘it’, the indefinable sex appeal that would work on screen. Even if he had objected, it is doubtful whether Fleming’s opinion would have made much difference: under the terms of the contract, he had no influence over or input into the scripts. In any case, as screenwriter Richard Maibaum conceded, there was an ‘untransferable quality’ in the novels. Fleming’s role was restricted to scouting film locations in Jamaica, but there is no evidence he minded: like many sensible authors, he decided to bank the cheque, stand in the wings and watch the action from a discreet distance.
Even so, Fleming became predictably fascinated by the mechanics of film-making, and he had a clear notion of how Bond should be presented on screen. As in the books, he believed Bond should be depicted as a ‘blunt instrument wielded by a government department’, a cog in a ‘tough, modern organisation’, and not particularly appealing ‘until [the audience] get to know him and then they will appreciate that he is their idea of an efficient secret agent’. In the end, however, the screen Bond was very different from Fleming’s version. For a start, he was a great deal more promiscuous, and substantially more bloodthirsty. The literary Bond is prey to doubts and occasional uncertainty: life as a licensed killer ‘is a confusing business’, he admits on paper, but never on screen. In print form, Bond is capable of introspection, even as he goes about his hard-hearted business. ‘I never intended him to be a particularly likeable person,’ Fleming wrote, but in the films Bond is not only instantly and enduringly attractive, but charming and, above all, amusing. The one-liners became a staple feature of Bond in his film incarnation (the less funny his quips, paradoxically, the better), but in the books the brooding Bond is almost entirely devoid of humour. Fleming himself could be witty and wry, but deliberately did not pass on those qualities to Bond, the better to preserve the ‘ironical, brutal and cold’ character within. Fleming’s Bond, unlike his film counterpart, is capable of fear, mistakes and pain. When his plane is tossed by a storm in From Russia with Love, Bond retreats, in his terror, into the impregnable ‘hurricane room’ at the centre of his personality. (Once again, Fleming himself had experienced the raw terror of flying through a storm in a plane in the 1950s.) On screen, Bond never suffers from such human frailties.
There have been six Bond actors to date, and each successive Bond has evolved the character in different, sometimes contradictory, directions. Connery (1962–7, 1971 and 1983) was determined, rugged, effortlessly sexual; George Lazenby (1969) laconic, humourless and perhaps closest to Fleming’s Bond; Roger Moore (1973–85) was jocular, suave and playful almost to the point of parody; Timothy Dalton (1987–94) gritty, serious and occasionally reluctant to accede to the demands of the job; Pierce Brosnan (1994–2002) witty, charming, athletic; Daniel Craig (from 2005) blond, humane and remarkable in swimming trunks. Countless arguments, several fights and no doubt a number of serious doctoral theses have been devoted to the issue of which actor made the best Bond. Indeed, the debate has been going on so long that it has become one of those cultural signifiers: if you are over fifty, and used to smoke, you are likely to be a Connery-Bond fan; if you are between forty and fifty and have ever worn a car coat unironically, then you will plump for Roger Moore; if you were born after the fall of the Berlin Wall, then Daniel Craig is, for you, the only true Bond. It may be a cliché to say that every age gets the Bond it deserves, but to an extraordinary extent the character has proved a cultural weathervane, reflecting the evolution of fashions, mores, and political and criminal enemies. Today we have a Bond who weeps and bleeds, who does not smoke and does not care whether his cocktail is shaken or stirred; Connery, let alone Fleming, would never have seen him that way.
In addition to the actors there have been a small army of producers, directors and co-stars helping to mould the changing roles of Bond, his allies and enemies. Cubby Broccoli was central among these, setting out to ‘fix’ what he perceived as the filmic flaws in the books. The inspired, semi-futuristic set designs by Ken Adams placed Bond in an extraordinary new world. Another key influence was Terence Young, the director of the first two Bond films, whose part in shaping the screen Bond is seldom fully acknowledged. Young had served as an army intelligence officer, and both before and after the war the film-maker cut a swathe through Soho in a succession of fast cars and expensive suits, with a parade of beautiful women on his arm. Young to some extent modelled his suave lifestyle on that of Eddie Chapman – aka wartime double agent ‘Zigzag’ – a professional criminal who had been a close friend before the war. When he was picked to direct Dr No, Young is said to have used himself as a model for the part. The late Lois Maxwell (the first Miss Moneypenny) observed that ‘Terence took Sean under his wing. He took him to dinner, showed him how to walk, how to talk, even how to eat.’ Connery biographer Robert Cotton writes that ‘some cast members remarked that Connery was simply doing a Terence Young impression.’ Here is yet one more testament to the strange blending of fact and fiction: the definitive film Bond is based on a director who modelled his own lifestyle on that of a spy who was almost certainly known to Ian Fleming in his wartime role in naval intelligence. With pleasing circularity, the film adaptation of Bond may even have impinged on the books Fleming wrote after Connery had taken on the role: in You Only Live Twice, published in 1964, Bond seems to have developed a sense of humour, and some Scottish ancestry to go with his new-found accent. Even for his creator, Bond is a changeable, malleable quality.
With great good sense, Fleming observed the film transformation of Bond from a wry distance, though he found the whole process an intriguing ‘riot’. In March 1961, he decided to observe it at first hand, arriving on the set of Dr No in Jamaica just as Terence Young was filming the moment when Ursula Andress erupts from the sea in her bikini. Accompanied by Ann, Stephen Spender and the writer Peter Quennell, Fleming blithely walked up just as the cameras were about to roll. Young shouted at them to lie down, and all four obediently hurled themselves into the hot sand. Half an hour later, the creator of Bond and his distinguished literary friends were still lying there, immobile, because no one had told them to get up. I can no longer watch the Ursula Andress bikini scene without also hearing Fleming, giggling in the sand, just out of camera shot.
Fleming attended the premiere of Dr No in London on 5 October 1962 (he had already seen the film at a private screening). With the Cuban Missile Crisis hotting up, the threat of nuclear Armageddon struck an immediate chord, and the film was a success, if not yet a smash. A year later, Fleming was present at the premiere of the second Bond movie, From Russia with Love, a box-office triumph. On watching the film, John Betjeman wrote to the author, congratulating him on creating a fictional world as complete and absorbing as that of Sherlock Holmes: ‘This is real art.’ Fleming was unfailingly complimentary about the films, as well he might be, for their success had a galvanising effect on his book sales. Bond expert Henry Chancellor has calculated that in 1960 Fleming was selling an impressive 6,000 paperbacks a week; four yea
rs later, with the two films and John F. Kennedy’s endorsement of From Russia with Love as one of his favourite books, sales had leapt to 112,000 a week, and Fleming was enjoying a tenfold increase in his income. By the end of 1963, in the UK and the US alone, some seventeen million Bond paperbacks had been sold.
Fleming once remarked that he wrote ‘chiefly for pleasure, then for money’. The money began to pour in, just as the pleasure was waning. As his body began to fail, crunching out the words, once so easy, became increasingly taxing, a painful chore. To Plomer, he confided that he was ‘terribly stuck with James Bond . . . I used to believe – sufficiently – in Bonds & Blondes & Bombs. Now the keys creak as I type & I fear the zest may have gone . . . I shall definitely kill off Bond with my next book.’
He never did, of course. Bond is immortal, but Fleming was not. Typically, he both mocked and trumpeted his own phenomenal success. ‘My contribution to the export drive is simply staggering,’ he said. ‘They ought to give me some sort of medal.’ Yet, as he admitted, and his friends knew, he was ‘running out of puff’. With one last, courageous effort, in January 1964 he tapped out the first draft of The Man with the Golden Gun. Where once he stormed through two thousand words a morning, he was now writing painfully, for a little over an hour a day, and then staggering to an exhausted halt.
Soon after returning to England, he played a round of golf at Huntercombe in Oxfordshire despite a heavy cold (and Ann’s remonstrances). The cold turned into pleurisy and he was admitted to hospital, to be diagnosed with a severe blockage of the pulmonary artery. He did not go gently, telling Ann that he ‘must get back to life or else’. For a few months more he held on, and then on 12 August, the day of his son Caspar’s twelfth birthday, at the age of fifty-six, he suffered another massive heart attack and died.
‘I shall use my time,’ Fleming had declared, refusing to alter his lifestyle simply to extend his days. Few writers have used a little time more productively. The year after his death saw the sale of no less than twenty-seven million copies of his books in multifarious languages. James Bond had already inspired, and continues to inspire, cartoon strips, imitators and parodists, from Cyril Connolly to Austin Powers. Fleming thoroughly enjoyed the satire, knowing that both imitation and mockery are sincere forms of flattery. He even wrote his own self-parody, another best-seller, for what is Chitty Chitty Bang Bang but a story about a man with the rank of commander and a gadget-filled car, on a mission against an evil foreign power. In the film, Commander Pott falls for a woman called Truly Scrumptious, a delightful echo of the Bond Girls’ names, and his advice to his children was pure James Bond and, for that matter, Ian Fleming: ‘Never say “no” to adventures. Always say “yes”, otherwise you’ll lead a very dull life.’
In another oblique compliment, critics on the opposite side of the Iron Curtain condemned Bond as an imperialist lackey, and Fleming for creating a ‘nightmarish world where laws are written at the point of a gun’. A Bulgarian writer, Andrei Gulyashki, came up with a communist version of James Bond named Avakum Zakhov. Here was fiction overtaking fact, the Cold War being fought out in rival novels. The language of Bond has entered everyday parlance: his catchphrases, and those grafted on to him by the films, are among the most recognisable in the world. It is almost impossible to drink a vodka martini without remembering Bond’s recipe. James Bond could, and did, sell virtually anything: from tea towels to toiletries, cufflinks to chewing gum. But above all he sold an ideal sort of Englishman, the chiselled, deathless, impossibly attractive British secret agent, with a licence to kill, and to love. If the films extended Bond’s world in one medium, then the continuation novels authorised by the family gave him endless life in another. The first official imitator was Kingsley Amis, with Colonel Sun, in 1968; between 1981 and 1996 John Gardner wrote fourteen James Bond novels; he was followed by the American writer Raymond Benson, while Charlie Higson successfully took on the challenge of writing the Young Bond series, and Samantha Weinberg took the myth in another direction with The Moneypenny Diaries. The novelist Sebastian Faulks has now joined the party, with the latest authorised Bond novel, Devil May Care, published to mark the centenary of Fleming’s birth.
One might expect Ian Fleming himself to have become lost in the huge branding and marketing industry that is James Bond, but he is still there, in the firm jaw of his hero, the punchy prose, the style, the love of things and the sheer craftsmanship of the original writing. He is there, too, in the peculiar mixture of reality and fantasy that is the essence of the Bond books, and the reason for their enduring appeal. Few novelists have given so much pleasure, for so long. Mention the name James Bond to almost anyone, anywhere, and they will smile. Many writers now do what Fleming first did, but nobody does it better. One hundred years after Ian Fleming’s birth, James Bond is fifty-six, the precise age that Fleming was when he died, much too young. But 007 is still young, and ageless.
009
The Spy who Never Dies
009
The Spy Who Never Dies
According to The Times, scientists are predicting that fifty years from now we will all be living on anti-ageing drugs and communicating with fish. This is, of course, speculation, so let me offer a safer prediction: half a century from now we will all still be watching James Bond films. And so will the fish. As long as they are British fish. And male.
Bond was born with an anti-ageing drug in his fictional veins that is unique in our culture. Sons, as they grow up, progressively decline to do things with their fathers: they grow out of the bedtime story, they would rather go to the football match with their mates. But rare is the son, aged eight or eighty, who will not agree to accompany his father into the fantasy world of 007.
The power of the shared Bond ritual offers a peculiar insight into the masculine British mind. Many women also enjoy the movies, and the appeal of Bond is global, but in order to be both shaken and stirred by Bond (OK, that’s the last of the catch-phrases) it helps to be British, male and slightly naff: interested in gizmos, sex without commitment, saving the world, clunking double-entendres, fast cars, drink, ironic self-mockery and, above all, embracing a particular sort of loneliness.
It matters not who Bond is, nor which generation he addresses. He may be blond or brunette, bloodless or bleeding. It makes no difference. Every Bond is outside society’s rules while saving society itself; he is a stud-muffin, but essentially alone; he has signatures – cars, clothes, watches – but few personality traits or quirks (compare him, say, to the sheer oddness of Sherlock Holmes, or the flaws of Philip Marlowe). He has no politics, no friends, no family, no past (though the new movie tries to build one retrospectively) and no future. He is what many Englishmen imagine they could be, and very seldom are: the lone wolf.
This central core of male fantasy transcends the various incarnations of Bond. He is about having what you are denied in a British world of convention and order. When Casino Royale was published in 1953, food was still rationed in Britain and gambling illegal outside exclusive clubs: so Bond played the baccarat tables and ate beef in Bernaise sauce, now the staple of every Angus Steak House, then the stuff of gastronomic dreams. Sean Connery’s cold-eyed killer and misogynist transported a generation of british boys brought up on Airfix models, marmite toast and monogamy. Roger Moore, the most ironic Bond, took cinema-goers from grey Britain to places where the sun shone permanently and you could ski backwards firing a machinegun. Bond has a fabulous wardrobe without ever once having to go shopping – another fantasy for the average British male.
It is fashionable to declare that each generation gets the Bond it deserves. More striking, it seems to me, is just how similar the Bonds have been, which helps to explain the trans-generational appeal. The technology, girls and scenery change. Bond has survived the Cold War, the Vietnam War, two Iraq Wars and several sexual revolutions. Ian Fleming’s humourless Bond (‘sex, snobbery and sadism’, said Paul Johnson, back in 1958) gives way to the politically corrected Daniel Craig versi
on, yet the character is essentially the same.
This is because Bond is a post-war British fantasy, a psychological salve for an imperial power in slow decline – again, something that preoccupies British men, in my experience, far more than women.
Bond is not a spy, in any realistic way, but a political fixer, the embodiment of the hope that Britain still plays a vital part out there, although unseen, in what is essentially an Anglo-American alliance against the evil villains. Osama bin Laden is far closer a Bond villain than more conventional state enemies: the lone billionaire with a megalomaniac plan. It is surely no coincidence that military targets in Iraq have been codenamed Goldfinger, Blofeld and Connery.
In Casino Royale, Bond ‘reflected that good Americans were fine people and that most of them seemed to come from Texas’. Tony Blair could not have put it better. (Note: James Bond also went to Fettes public school, the Prime Minister’s alma mater, having been thrown out of Eton after some ‘trouble with one of the boys’ maids’.)
The academics have long sought to capture Bond. To the Nietzscheans he is the übermensch personified: ‘the devotion of the greatest is to encounter risk and danger and play dice with death’. To others he is simply a marketing tool, ‘the gentleman consumer’.
I think the appeal is simpler: so far from being the ultimate British man, Bond is the opposite of most British men. Where most of us are tongue-tied, sexually timid, ill-dressed, unfit, gentle, defined by friendships and family, and generally anxious, he is violent, smooth, empty and supremely fatalistic. Nothing that happens surprises him; British men are, on the whole, allergic to surprises.
British males love him not because we really want to be like him, but because we know we never will be: the Bond model fulfils a sense of irony that is far more British, and fits us much better, than any Savile Row suit. British men and their sons will enjoy Bond together, forever, because he is not really British at all.
For Your Eyes Only Page 13