BONDSMEN. Film producers Harry Saltzman (left) and Cubby Broccoli (right) flank author Ian Fleming, 1963. (photo credit 10.3)
Ironically, Expresso Bongo would become a Rocky Horror–like cult hit that was the inspiration for both Brian Epstein, who would manage the Beatles, and Andrew Loog Oldham, who would manage the Rolling Stones, to choose the heretofore obscure career of pop talent manager. But the star of the film, a deliciously sleazy Laurence Harvey, managed to make something very sexy out of the amoral operator he was playing, a man who would lie, cheat, even stab himself in the back to close a deal. Out of the bowels of Soho were thus forged the highs of the sixties.
The writer of Expresso Bongo, a Cockney Jew named Wolf Mankowitz, would introduce the two then-downmarket American producers, each of whom possessed elements of his Laurence Harvey character. In return for that introduction, Mankowitz was hired to write the screenplay for Dr. No, about which he was so ashamed and pessimistic that he took his name off of it. Mankowitz’s origins in London’s poor and teeming East End were the opposite end of the spectrum from Ian Fleming’s in Mayfair, but without this nexus of opposites, the mighty Bond-Beatles-British quality of the Jet Set might have been only a Temple Fielding aside about meals at Mirabelle and nights at the Savoy.
In 1961, in the midst of the Life/Kennedy-inspired Bond feeding frenzy, Harry Saltzman had optioned the rights to the Fleming series for a then-fat $50,000, for only six months. Then again, Saltzman was a born risk-taker. As a teenager, he had run away from his poor Montreal family and joined not Her Majesty’s Secret Service but the circus, in order to see the world. During World War II, he fought for the Canadians in France; he ended up in Paris, married a Romanian refugee, and became a talent scout. However, the French film industry was slow to revive. Just before Brigitte Bardot gave French cinema its shot of adrenaline in 1956, Saltzman threw in the towel and crossed the Channel. Using British government subsidies, he quickly mounted his first production, The Iron Petticoat, a Ninotchka knockoff that had the distinction of being the only Bob Hope film that ever failed at the box office, even with Katharine Hepburn as the female lead.
Saltzman learned a lesson to avoid comedies and turned to serious fare, teaming up with the king of the Angry Young Man set, playwright John Osborne, to produce acclaimed film versions of Osborne’s Look Back in Anger and The Entertainer, as well as the social-realist classic Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. For all the brilliant reviews, none of these films made Saltzman much money. They were too arty, too angry. He needed to find something commercial, and when he read Goldfinger in 1961, Harry Saltzman had his eureka moment and bet the house on optioning Bond.
When the six months were about to expire and Saltzman was about to lose that house, he turned in despair to his pal Mankowitz, who came up with the idea of teaming Saltzman with Albert Broccoli, who was just coming off a huge flop in The Trials of Oscar Wilde, starring Peter Finch and James Mason, its failure occasioned by American censors forbidding any advertising because of the film’s homosexual subject matter. Mankowitz had been hired to write a script for Broccoli’s company Warwick Films, which Wilde had just put into bankruptcy. He knew Broccoli had for years had the hots for James Bond and would at this point be motivated by sheer desperation.
What had cooled Broccoli off in the past was that his senior partner at Warwick, Irving Allen, had mortally insulted Ian Fleming at a 1957 dinner at Les Ambassadeurs, a private dining-gambling club on Park Lane that was the precursor of the John Aspinall–Mark Birley midsixties extravaganza of the Clermont and Annabel’s on Berkeley Square. The Polish-born Allen, a master deal-maker who knew how to work the Marshall Plan, the IRS, and England’s Inland Revenue, had made more than two dozen films in England in the fifties.
Ostensibly, Allen, an Oscar winner, knew whereof he spoke. What he said to Fleming was that his books were hopeless as cinematic source material. In fact, Allen decreed, they weren’t even “good enough for television.” So much for Broccoli’s hopes of acquiring Bond. But now that Broccoli had split from Allen after the Wilde debacle, Mankowitz knew that Broccoli would love another shot at Bond, but that he dare not go to Fleming himself, because no matter how many martinis the author had downed, there was no way he would forget the slight from Broccoli’s partner.
Saltzman and Broccoli had almost nothing in common except a burning desire for solvency. When they met in a Mayfair office, Saltzman was offended by Broccoli’s chutzpah in telling him he wanted to buy out his option and at a big discount, given that the clock had run down. However, because Saltzman was an arty indie foreign producer who had logged no time in Hollywood, he viewed Broccoli, who had cut his teeth (or fangs) in Los Angeles as a relative insider. That was the only reason Saltzman didn’t walk out on him and cool his heels in Berkeley Square. Biting his tongue, Saltzman suggested a 50/50 partnership. Saltzman owned the option; Broccoli’s task was to find the money to exercise it and make the film. Broccoli grudgingly took the deal.
The new partners soon took a Pan Am jet to New York, not Hollywood, which had its doubts about Bond. In Manhattan, Broccoli knew a junior executive at United Artists, less risk-averse than the Hollywood studios, who was a huge Ian Fleming fan. But this was no ordinary junior exec. This man’s uncle was the head of the company. Walking in with a connection, Broccoli and Saltzman walked away with a commitment for $1 million to make Dr. No, which would become the inaugural film of the Bond series and the first of nine Bond movies Broccoli and Saltzman would produce together before splitting up. Dr. No was hardly big-budget. Lawrence of Arabia, which had just wrapped, cost $13 million. Still, it was a deal. James Bond was going on-screen, and Ian Fleming couldn’t have been happier. The snob to end all snobs was finally getting his dearest wish: to go Hollywood.
Fleming was so thrilled about his movie deal that he dismissed rumors that Broccoli was a gangster. So what? Wasn’t that what James Bond did, deal with gangsters, albeit on a global scale? Besides, the equation of “Italian” with “gangster” was an unfortunate and ubiquitous prejudice. It would take the new jets and mass tourism to show Americans the true style and elegance that was Italy, and to replace the stereotype of Al Capone and Lucky Luciano with that of Gianni Agnelli and Marcello Mastroianni. The problem for Albert Broccoli was that the Lucky Luciano part was hitting awfully close to home.
That home was originally Calabria, and part of the Broccoli myth was that the cruciferous vegetable famously despised by George Bush was named after his family. Amusing but untrue. The word “broccoli” has Dutch origins, referring to a hybrid of kale and cabbage, and lots of Italians, of many names dating back to the Etruscans, grew it. The American Broccolis, who washed up in Little Italy in the mass immigrations at the turn of the twentieth century, had fled the tenements of Mulberry Street for a small farm on Long Island, where they grew, among other produce, broccoli.
Albert Romolo Broccoli, born in 1909, was given the nickname “Cubby,” an Italian contraction of the name Abie Kabibble, a famous Jewish comic-strip character in a series called Abie the Agent for whom young Broccoli was supposed to be a dead ringer. Talk about stereotypes! Basically, what the nickname was saying was that Albert Broccoli may have sounded like a vegetable, but he looked like a Jew.
What was uncanny was that the cousin who gave Broccoli his nickname was Pasquale “Pat” DiCicco, who became the first powerful Italian talent agent in Hollywood and who helped cousin Cubby get a job as a Hollywood agent in 1934. Pat was sleek and handsome; Cubby was not. Other than his name, there was nothing externally Italian about DiCicco, who looked like a more rugged version of James Stewart. Not far below Pat’s glossy surface, however, were far darker undercurrents. Despite his outward charm and courtly manners, DiCicco was known and feared in Hollywood as the not so secret agent of Lucky Luciano, who made one of his many illicit fortunes being the top drug supplier to the emerging movie colony. Thus the stereotype that what goes around, comes around.
DiCicco made his mark quickly in Hollywood,
marrying movie star Thelma Todd. Before tying the knot with her, he had introduced her to Luciano, who had his own affair with Todd before ceding her to his colleague. Gangsters, like everyone else in America, were mad about stars, and DiCicco made the capos’ dreams come true. He would also play matchmaker between mobster Bugsy Siegel and actress Virginia Hill. Thelma Todd owned a successful roadhouse on the ocean in Pacific Palisades that Luciano coveted. Unable to get DiCicco to make her an offer she could not refuse, Luciano was frustrated. Thelma Todd ended up dead in her car, in one of Hollywood’s most notorious unsolved mysteries. The case was ruled a suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning; few believed it.
No rumors stopped DiCicco, who became best friends with Howard Hughes and Cary Grant and made world headlines only slightly smaller than Pearl Harbor in 1941 by marrying the seventeen-year-old heiress Gloria Vanderbilt. Cubby Broccoli struggled along in his cousin’s shadow, selling jewelry in Beverly Hills and running a Christmas-tree lot during the holiday season. DiCicco eventually rescued Cubby from obscurity and found him a post as an assistant on The Outlaw, aiding Howard Hughes in designing Jane Russell’s famous “twin bullet” uplift brassiere. Hughes came to like and depend on his young assistant. Broccoli was by Hughes’s side for his Washington, D.C., showdown with Juan Trippe’s stooge Senator Ralph Owen Brewster, designed to put Hughes out of competition with Trippe. It was Broccoli who led the discovery that Hughes’s suite at the Carlton Hotel in Washington had been bugged, an invasion of privacy that made Hughes paranoid for the rest of his life.
As Hughes drifted further away from movies and into madness, Broccoli found his grail as an agent for Charles Feldman’s Famous Artists Agency. Feldman would later switch to producing and, in 1967, have a huge disaster trying to challenge his former underling’s James Bond triumph by acquiring the rights to the one Fleming book Saltzman and Broccoli could not get, Casino Royale. Notwithstanding a blockbuster cast, including David Niven (to whom the studios had said a vehement no to being Bond); Ursula Andress, whose bikini had gone a long way toward making Dr. No a hit; plus comic geniuses Peter Sellers and Woody Allen, Casino, a would-be farce, was a huge gamble that lost. Starting with Dr. No, Saltzman and Broccoli had crafted a winning formula that tolerated no deviations, even by geniuses.
The key to their formula was de-Etonizing James Bond by casting the least Etonian actor in all the British Isles, Sean Connery, a former lifeguard and Mr. Universe runner-up whose ham-hock forearms sported the tattoos “Mum and Dad” and “Scotland Forever.” The producers’ two top choices, Patrick McGoohan and James Fox, had turned them down on moral scruples over Fleming’s prurient sex and violence. Broccoli had vetoed Fleming’s choice of the rising Roger Moore as too clean-cut, only to return to him after Connery quit the series. Broccoli’s buddy Cary Grant, who had attended all three of Broccoli’s weddings, felt at almost sixty that he was way too old for all the shenanigans.
Searching high and low for his secret agent, Broccoli had spotted Connery, standing out like two sore thumbs, in the Disney leprechaun fantasy Darby O’Gill and the Little People. He showed the film to his new wife, Dana, who concurred that the rugged man who, not too long before, had danced in the chorus of South Pacific in the West End should be given the license to kill. Ian Fleming initially felt that Connery was all wrong, though after the film was a hit, he decided he was all right. The film’s director, Terence Young, an aristocratic old Harrovian wartime tank commander, and a gourmet after Temple Fleming’s heart, also balked at the thuggish Connery. When the producers held firm, Young took Connery on a Fielding-esque eating tour of London’s fanciest restaurants, so that Connery’s Bond would present some aura of verisimilitude when he ordered vintage wines, caviar, and foie gras instead of the actor’s preferred fish and chips and toad in the hole. While some observers felt that Connery wasn’t acting but rather channeling Terence Young, the Pygmalionizaton worked so well that Connery would star in seven Bond films and become the standard by which all future Bonds will be judged.
With endless production problems, Dr. No was anything but a surefire hit. To begin with, there was a terrible script. The basic story in Fleming’s book had British intelligence dispatching 007 to Jamaica to investigate the murder of their station chief and to aid the CIA in finding out who was using radio signals to disrupt American rocket launches from Florida’s Cape Canaveral. The villain in both cases was the evil Eurasian Dr. No. The producers wanted to revoke Wolf Mankowitz’s license to write when his first draft turned Dr. No into a monkey. Mankowitz and his cowriter, Richard Maibaum (the top gun of the Warwick Productions writing crew), had found Fleming’s villain such a racist anti-Chinese caricature that they created a whole new antagonist who kept a little rhesus monkey named Dr. No as a pet on his shoulder.
The producers hit the roof and insisted on the caricature. Fleming tried to get his pal Noël Coward to play the bad doctor, but Coward had about as much confidence in the enterprise as Mankowitz and begged off. Mankowitz may have taken his name off No, but he took a credit later on Casino Royale that turned out to be a debit nearly ending his screen career. Before he went anonymous, Mankowitz did the producers the great favor of introducing them to his Expresso Bongo composer Monty Norman, who wrote the twangy Bond theme that became the trademark of the series.
As with the theme, a lot of what would make the film a classic happened by serendipity, not design. Ursula Andress, who may have done more for the bikini than any other woman in history, had to be spray-tanned to Caribbeanize her alpine-white skin, while her Swiss German accent was so ponderous that it had to be dubbed to give it a softer sex appeal. While there was some location shooting in Fleming’s Jamaica, Dr. No’s lair and other interiors were re-created in England’s Pinewood Studios, where most of the early Bond films would be shot. For all the glamour it was intended to convey, Dr. No was very much a low-budget film, in which the beauty of the Caribbean exteriors just managed to transcend the cheesiness of the Pinewood sets, where, for example, Dr. No’s giant aquarium was nothing but a blown-up goldfish bowl.
Such was the magic of filmmaking that the glamour won out. Because of its exotic locales, its elegant hero, its glossy sex, its sports cars, its shaken martinis, its bespoke suits, and its global-dominance-minded villain, Dr. No became the first and arguably the quintessential Jet Set movie. Not that the critics were bowled over when the film came out in England in the fall of 1962 and in America in the spring of 1963. Time derided the film as “silly,” calling Connery a “great big hairy marshmallow.” The New York Times concurred about the film’s frivolity. Famously fuddy-duddy critic Bosley Crowther saw the effort as “nonsense escapist bunk,” unleashing a volley of box-office-killing blurbs: “wickedly exaggerated,” “patently contrived,” and “not to be believed.” Then he sheepishly admitted that Dr. No was “lively and amusing,” conceding the formidable entertainment value of Connery’s showdown with a tarantula and Andress’s show-off with her bikini.
Worried that American audiences would not cotton to what their chief executive described as a “Limey truck driver,” United Artists had initially hedged its bets in America, opening the film not in the New York and Los Angeles temples of cinema but in Southern drive-ins, where the hicks would be fooled into buying tickets. But given Bosley Crowther’s influential guilty-pleasure review as well as a lot of raves around the rest of the country, UA was shamed into a wide release, which grossed big numbers, twenty times the budget. As usual, as the Hollywood truism went, nobody knew nothin’.
The next year’s From Russia with Love doubled the budget to $2 million and quadrupled the gross. Ian Fleming, who died in 1964 at fifty-six of a long-feared drink-and-smoke-induced heart attack, never got to see the $3 million Goldfinger, released later that year, which grossed $125 million and produced the bestselling toy of the year, a British racing-green model Aston Martin DB5. The release of Goldfinger, coinciding with the release of Meet the Beatles, turned London into the hottest Jet Set location on earth. For all thei
r newfound success, Saltzman and Broccoli still were far from the toasts of the booming American film colony in London, one of the world’s most glamorous collections of high livers and high rollers. The more serious Saltzman was considered something of an aging schlepper. Broccoli had more affectations, such as his racehorses, and his DiCicco-underworld connections gave him as much mystique as the Bond box office. But they were no more than two faces in a very glittering crowd. It was this London-based but international community that was, more than any other, the defining microcosm of the society of glittering global nomads that the new jet planes had wrought.
IN THE FIFTIES, SOME AMERICANS IN FILM CAME TO LONDON MAINLY BECAUSE IT WAS cheap, there were subsidies, and making it there was easier than in Hollywood. Now the top dogs of Hollywood were coming to London as a first choice, not a last resort. All the hot new stars were here: Michael Caine, Albert Finney, Alan Bates, David Hemmings, Vanessa and Lynn Redgrave, Julie Christie. The 707 and the DC-8 had made Europe in general, and London in particular, easily accessible as a place to shoot and, suddenly, triggered by the explosions of Bond and the Beatles, the place to be. It was too bad that Igor Cassini had just lost his column in disgrace. The scene in London would have given him years of great copy.
The Jet Set emperor of the London film world—in fact, the world film world—was Sam Spiegel. Spiegel was so grand, he wouldn’t even consider doing James Bond. Long before Dr. No was a gleam in the golden eye of Saltzman and Broccoli, Spiegel, who saw everything before anyone else, had dismissed the manuscript as “nonsense. I don’t make pictures like that.” The pictures Spiegel made were grand and serious pictures, the grandest of all time. He won three best picture Oscars, for On the Waterfront, The Bridge on the River Kwai, and Lawrence of Arabia. Artistically, if not commercially, 007 was less than zero compared to these.
Jet Set : The People, the Planes, the Glamour, and the Romance in Aviation's Glory Years (9780345536976) Page 25
