The spur for the discretion came in part because of Esmond Rothermere’s growing impatience with his wife’s affair with Fleming. In the autumn, after Mary’s death and perhaps hoping to activate some sort of newspaper proprietors’ union, Rothermere had complained to Ian’s boss Lord Kemsley about his employee’s behaviour. Kemsley, described by Ann as standing for ‘Empire, family life and the Conservative Party’, gave Ian a severe dressing-down, though he stopped short of firing his old bridge-playing friend. But for Ian and Ann, there was a feeling that big decisions about their future had to be made.
Coward did arrive in Jamaica on 3 February, accompanied by his partner Graham Payn. He surveyed his now completed property, then they raced round to see Ann and Ian, who were ‘welcoming and sweet’. Blue Harbour had not been built quite as Coward had intended, layered into the hillside, but he was nonetheless delighted. ‘The house is entrancing. I can’t believe it’s mine,’ he wrote in his diary that night. When they got back from Goldeneye, he and Graham ‘sat on the verandah on rockers, looking out over the fabulous view, and almost burst into tears of sheer pleasure’.
The pleasure would continue, much of it in the company of Ian and Ann for dinners, drinks, cards or trips. It was not only that Coward needed an audience; he was also intrigued by their relationship. They in turn were invigorated by his and Graham’s desire to explore and experience Jamaica. Two weeks into Coward’s trip, they all went rafting on the nearby Rio Grande, a tourist highlight first popularised by Errol Flynn. The narrow wooden rafts were intended for carrying bananas down from the highlands to Port Antonio, and Flynn had asked for a ride. It was a wonderful experience: ‘As you glide down this river you look up on either side to the most magnificent skyline that God or Nature had created,’ Flynn later wrote. The trip took four hours, which included fishing and stops for swimming. Fleming later described the experience for readers of the Sunday Times as an ‘enchantingly languid … elegant and delicately romantic adventure’. On either side of the river were hills ‘befeathered with bamboo and bright with flowers’. Afterwards Ian drove Noël and Graham home ‘and was vastly entertaining all the way’.
Rafting on the Rio Grande. One of the highlights for Fleming was his favourite boatman’s ‘Strong Bak Soup – a ridiculous cauldron brew of langoustines and exotic roots.’
Coward was finding in Jamaica, and in Ian Fleming in particular, excellent source material. On 6 April, while rereading Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies, he had his first idea for the play Home and Colonial, to be set on a fictional colonial island called Samolo. Ostensibly in the South Pacific, Samolo in fact became Coward’s take on Jamaica. There should be a ‘scandal with a local Bustamante … It’s a heaven-sent opportunity to get in a lot of Jamaican stuff,’ he confided to his diary on 6 April. The Jamaican material continued to come, and he would revisit Samolo a number of times, in a novel, Pomp and Circumstance; in short stories; and in other plays. Although of course fiction, Coward’s Samolo provides a fascinating take on tourism, empire, race and other Jamaica-inspired concerns that would similarly become so important to his friend Fleming’s Bond novels.
The expatriate white community of Coward’s Samolo is cliquey, claustrophobic and, as Bond would also be, libertarian with regard to sex and alcohol consumption. Almost all of the characters are recognisably drawn from real people in Jamaica during his time there. For example, a lesbian couple in Pomp and Circumstance are inspired by painters Marion Simmons and Rhoda Jackson, fixtures in the north-coast artistic circle and friends of Coward. Carmen Pringle, grande dame of Sunset Lodge, makes an appearance as hotel owner Juanita, with a ‘buccaneer quality’ and ‘a personality like a battering ram’.
Coward’s Samolan-Jamaicans are guileless, engaging and friendly: ‘They sing from morning till night … and never stop having scores of entrancing children.’ Although the most racist attitudes are given to unsympathetic characters, the consensus attitude of the expatriate British whites to the locals is still one of affectionate condescension. Craftsmen are ‘industrious and enthusiastic, but… incapable of making identical pairs of anything’. The Samolans are a sweet and cheerful people, ‘too young’ yet for the ‘brave experiment of independence’. Education is deemed unnecessary, as when locals are hungry they can simply ‘nip a breadfruit off a tree or snatch a yam out of the ground’.
(When Pomp and Circumstance was eventually published in 1960, the Evening Standard wrote: ‘If there is anywhere on earth where the old Coward world still credibly lingers on, it is probably a fairly peaceful tropical colony ruled over by a British Governor General.’ A more typical reviewer called it ‘stuffy and stale’.)
Samolans are also depicted by Noël Coward as innocently and spontaneously sexy. Fleming took a similar line about Jamaicans in his Horizon article: “‘Will you do me a rudeness?” means “Will you sleep with me?”,’ he explained. ‘To which a brazen girl will reply “You better hang on grass, I goin’ move so much.’” Both Fleming and Coward’s depictions chimed with long-held empirical views of the sensuality and eroticism of the West Indies. In 1948, a dance performance in London, A Caribbean Rhapsody, had attracted huge press interest. ‘With that race, that place, that title, audiences know what to expect. They are not disappointed,’ wrote the reviewer for Picture Post. ‘Enthusiasts praised the pace and excitement of it all, the exoticism, the sexiness, what they call the “animal primitivism” of the dancing.’ The Daily Mail gushed: ‘There spills on to the audience the hot, throbbing swamps of the West Indies.’
Noël Coward notes in his Samolo novel, ‘There is a great deal of sex which goes on all the time with a winsom disregard of gender.’ ‘I do like the Jamaicans,’ he wrote in his diary on 3 May 1949. ‘Fortunately they like me too and I couldn’t be more pleased that they do.’
According to Molly Huggins, ‘The people of Jamaica loved Noël and he did a great deal to help them, especially the poor and needy in the villages and towns near him.’ A small portion of the Look-Out land was given over as a community sports pitch, and Coward’s numerous visitors kept local grocers busy. At Blue Harbour, he employed a staff of at least six. Molly had met Coward before in Singapore, where she had come across him, in a story almost too perfect, shopping for silk pyjamas. ‘What a fascinating and brilliant man he is!’ she exclaimed in her memoir. On this visit he descended on King’s House, where he sat at the piano, ‘with his lean figure and fascinating versatile face, and sang songs’, including making up a ‘most amusing rhyme about my second daughter, Cherry’.
The central character of Coward’s Home and Colonial is Sandra, who, like Molly, is the English Governor’s wife. Sandra is the object of a crush from a local ‘native’ politician (who ‘hilariously’ mixes up his English idioms). What pressure there is for self-government comes from a tiny minority of Samolans and left-wing politicians from Britain. The vast majority of Samolans, Coward tells us, are ‘empire minded’; most so ‘happy and contented under British rule for so many years that they just don’t understand when they’re suddenly told that it’s been nothing but a corrupt capitalistic racket from the word go’.
In fact, while many Jamaicans, particularly from the ‘brown’ middle class, remained Anglophile and committed to the Empire, as Coward suggested of the Samolans, others felt very differently. A local writer in Public Opinion early the following year declared the Empire to be based ‘nakedly on force and autocracy’, commenting that ‘After the last war British imperialism was too weak to hold its Indian Ocean Empire: India, Burma and Ceylon have gone. Only the old-fashioned imperialist barbarity still preserves a precarious foothold in Malay and Hong Kong. It can hardly be disputed that the British Empire, dear to old-fashioned Tories, is on the way out.’
The main part in Home and Colonial was written for actress Gertrude Lawrence; when she unexpectedly died, it was offered to Vivien Leigh. Coward was surprised by the reaction. Both Leigh and her partner Laurence Olivier violently disliked the play, warning, as Coward put it, that it was �
��old fashioned Noël Coward and would do me great harm’. In the end, renamed Island Fling, it was briefly staged in 1951 with Claudette Colbert in the lead. Coward subsequently reworked it, and it was restaged (with some popular though little critical success) in 1955 as South Sea Bubble, with the increasingly erratic Leigh now in the lead role after all.
In Pomp and Circumstance, we learn from the narrator that ‘Tourism has brought the island undreamed of prosperity and set our hitherto rather insecure economy on a firm basis.’ As early as 1949, Coward had noted in a letter that ‘This coast is being bought up like mad’, change that only gathered pace over the next few years, leading to the ‘rash of millionaire hotels’ that Bond, with mixed feelings, notices as he flies in over Jamaica’s north coast in Dr No. Coward uses the same expression to describe the sudden development, from five or six private beach houses, owned by ‘the wealthier members of the plantocracy whose plantations lay back in the hills’, to ‘no less than nine American-style hotels, three motels, and a rash of erratically designed beach bungalows which are rented for astronomical prices for the winter season’. Enjoying the slipstream created by Sunset Lodge in Montego Bay, still ‘undoubtedly the most fashionable resort in the West Indies’, were Shaw Park, above Ocho Rios, ‘In a cool elevation overlooking the sea’, Silver Seas Hotel, and the Ruins restaurant, which became a favourite of Katharine Hepburn and her partner Irene Selznick, and would much later be a location for the filming of Live and Let Die. Sans Souci hotel opened at the same time, ‘on top of the cliff, with a breath-taking view of the Caribbean … terraced gardens take one down the hillside to a circular swimming pool which is fed by a mineral spring’. It too would serve as a location for Roger Moore’s adventures in Jamaica, as well as for Connery’s in Dr No.
Indeed, in 1951, the Gleaner reported that thanks to the pioneers Coward and Fleming – described as ‘of England’s powerful Kemsley Press’ – ‘all along the coast a remarkable development is going on’, now stretching from ‘Frenchman’s Cove and San San estate in the east to Tryall in the west’. As contemporary advertisements demonstrate, a private beach, from which local Jamaicans were excluded, was a key selling point; and those built first got the pick of the best north-coast beaches.
Amongst them was the famous, small but exclusive Jamaica Inn at Ocho Rios, first opened in 1950 by Canadian entrepreneur Cy Elkins. Like a lot of the construction along the north coast, it was built by the firm of Maffissanti and Fillisetti, led by Italians who had formed part of Jamaica’s POW population during the war. (Several thousand Italian and German captives – mainly from merchant ships – had spent time during the war on the island, along with some 1,500 Gibraltarians evacuated from their threatened home, and a number of Jewish refugees.) According to American artist Marion Simmons, whose house, Glory Be, was built by the same firm, ‘Mr F., being Italian, has excellent manners, and all the airs and graces of the Old World.’ When he passed a customer in his truck, ‘he would sweep off his straw hat from his red head in a wide circular gesture as if it has plumes on it’.
Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller on their honeymoon at the Jamaica Inn, January 1957.
Marilyn Monroe and Winston Churchill – who described the appeal of the tropics as ‘soft breezes and hard liquor’ – would be amongst Jamaica Inn’s most famous guests, and it quickly gained a reputation for its lively costume parties. It was also famous for its food: a Graeco-French-Italian chef employed during the key winter season dazzled guests with his fabulous buffet lunch each day. Highlights were cold tongue, ham, roast beef, marinated beef fillet, conch salad and heart of palm. A Jamaican, Teddy Tucker, who worked as the beach-barman during the 1950s and still works there today, remembers serving endless planter’s punch and bullshots – vodka and beef bouillon – to a lot of smartly dressed guests, while a five-piece band – Byron Lee and the Dragonaires – kept the dancing going. The very same band would feature in the film of Dr No.
A clearer pointer to the future, though, was already in operation just west of Jamaica Inn. Tower Isle hotel opened in 1949, a huge eighty-room art deco construction, raised in record time for the 1949–50 winter season. Costing a quarter of a million pounds, it required new roads, five miles of piping for water, and the importation of tiles from Britain and Belgium, kitchen equipment from Canada and furniture from the United States. It was straight away hailed as ‘the finest and largest hotel in the British West Indies’ and ‘immediately became the centre of life in the area’. Tower Isle was the brainchild of Abe Issa, the owner since 1943 of the Myrtle Bank hotel in Kingston, itself now enjoying a ‘golden age’, with regular celebrity guests including Joan Crawford, Ann Miller and Walt Disney. Issa was from a Palestinian family who had come to Jamaica in the 1880s. They quickly amassed a fortune as importers of dry goods, then as owners of the country’s biggest and best retail emporia. In the election of 1944, Issa had headed a political party, the Jamaica Democratic Party, representing business, but did not win a single seat. Nonetheless, he would remain for many years the key mover in the new Jamaica tourism industry.
‘Turn your back to the Jamaican mountain scenery, and at Tower Isle you could imagine yourself at Miami Beach,’ wrote a local Jamaican. At night, guests would dance under the stars on the roof terrace to a local band, who always began their playlist with the hotel’s theme song, ‘Tower Island Magic’. Errol Flynn, who had been befriended by Issa, was an early patron. Noël Coward, visiting early one morning with Lord Beaverbrook, caused a stir by ordering champagne for breakfast.
In 1951, Jamaica played host to nearly 100,000 visitors, the majority from the United States. This was nearly three times the 1946 figure. Inspired by Errol Flynn’s lead were other Hollywood giants, the cream of British aristocracy, and the brightest and richest of the United States’ and Europe’s business, theatre, literature and secret service elites. You weren’t a proper Hollywood star until you had been photographed in Jamaica. In the Bond short story ‘For Your Eyes Only’, as the Cuban hit men escape Jamaica in a ‘twin-dieseled Chriscraft motorboat’, the ‘fishermen and wharfingers ashore watched her go, and went on with their argument as to which of the filmstars holidaying in Jamaica this could have been’.
Stories from this time of the drinking, bed-hopping and luxurious excess in Jamaica recall the antics of the British in Happy Valley, Kenya. Noël Coward contributed to the atmosphere with a string of theatre friends coming to stay at Blue Harbour, where he had several small cottages built in the grounds. Guests included Laurence Olivier, Vivien Leigh, Charlie Chaplin, Alec Guinness, Audrey Hepburn, Michael Redgrave, Peter O’Toole, Peter Sellers and many others. Coward had a rule that swimming in his pool could only be in the nude. Indeed, when John Pringle visited Blue Harbour with his wife Liz, they found the Oliviers ‘naked on Noël’s terrace, Vivien draped over Larry’s cock. It was some introduction!’ Olivier was also an enthusiastic consumer of the local ganja, although Coward himself didn’t indulge. Blanche Blackwell remembers that visitors were ‘completely different when they got into the tropics. They let go.’ Veteran Gleaner journalist Morris Cargill concurred: ‘For a brief spell, which ended in 1960, certain very rich and certain rather poor upper-class English people drank, idled and committed adultery in the sunshine.’ In the languid heat of Jamaica, the morality of home was forgotten. Cargill himself complains he lost his girlfriend to his father’s mistress.
Noël Coward in Jamaica, with Port Maria bay in the background. Coward was Fleming’s closest friend and constant companion on the island.
It wasn’t to everyone’s taste. Alec Waugh (brother of Evelyn), who would make his name with his novel Island in the Sun, wrote in his Notes from the Sugar Islands that the Jamaican tourist scene was now astronomically expensive, as well as torpid. ‘By day you idle on a beach; in the evening you sip cocktails on a veranda. One day becomes the next.’ Patrick Leigh Fermor expressed the same sentiment in his Traveller’s Tree, describing the jet-set thus: ‘The atmosphere is a compound of Wall Street, the
Tatler, Vogue, Tout Paris and the Wiener Salonblatt anomalously transplanted in a background of palm trees and blazing sunlight … Ice clatters in shakers and poker dice are thrown unceasingly on the bars of this Jamaican Nineveh, and, for the uninitiated visitor, the chasms of tedium yawn deeper every second.’
In 1950, the growing expatriate circle was joined by Ivor Novello, who bought a house near Montego Bay. Lord Beaverbrook took Coward to see it: ‘Quite quite horrid … exactly like a suburban villa,’ was Coward’s verdict. Novello was part of a burgeoning and highly visible north-coast homosexual community, led by Coward and wealthy fashion designer Edward Molyneux. Established gay and lesbian white couples feature in Coward’s Samolo stories as par for the course; clearly Jamaica gave them the freedom to be themselves denied at home in Britain.
Ian Fleming, although of course an enthusiastic adulterer and drinker, was ambivalent about this invasion of the decadent jet-set. In this he had much in common with a number of Jamaicans watching with despair the rapid changes happening to their island. For one thing, whatever Coward said about his Samolans’ ‘winsome disregard for gender’ in their sexual behaviour, most Jamaicans were religious, strait-laced and strongly opposed to homosexual activity. Even before the post-war explosion of tourism, there were furious complaints that Montego Bay was besieged by ‘an epidemic of homosexuality’.
This was part of wider concerns about a great expansion of prostitution, something conceded by Coward in his Pomp and Circumstance, where, corrupted by the ‘Almighty Dollar’, ‘there is hardly a lissom chambermaid or a muscular beach boy who is not daily prepared to make the supreme sacrifice for suitable remuneration’. More generally, some locals argued, the ‘evil example’ of the wealthy and idle tourists was threatening to ‘de-Jamaicanize’ the population. Tourism, critics contended, brought to the island the ‘standardized fripperies of Palm Beach’ and cheapened the morals of Jamaican youth, who mimicked the observed behaviour of the tourists with drinking, smoking and public ‘necking’. In turn the tourists, lying like ‘fleshy lobsters’ on the beach or ‘turning their eyeballs inwards’ at the nearest cocktail bar, showed little interest in Jamaica or Jamaicans, preferring ‘sybaritic torpor’.
Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica Page 8
