Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica

by Matthew Parker

  In 1960, tourist arrivals topped a quarter of a million for the first time (in 1950, there had been 1,650 hotel beds on the island; by 1962, there were over 7,000). And it was in the main a different sort of tourist, less wealthy and arriving all year round. Jamaica was no longer the exclusive preserve of the super-rich, to the disappointment of people like Sir William Stephenson, who now sold his house on the island. In 1960, John Pringle offloaded Round Hill; soon afterwards, Beaverbrook sold Cromarty. It seemed an era was coming to an end.

  Part of this change, of course, was the Jamaicans’ new assertiveness as independence loomed. Coward’s American friend and fellow expatriate Marion Simmons complained: ‘Jamaica’s going to go to the dogs. Why do they need independence? We wouldn’t have the British discipline and sense of order. It’s going to be chaos. It’s time to leave Jamaica.’ Writing to Waugh in the winter of 1961, Ann reported an ugly incident: ‘Lord Brownlow imported a farm manageress, a maiden of fifty summers weighing fourteen stone, she gave a peremptory order to a sugar cane worker who promptly raped her, she took her riding breeches to the local doctor for analysis and also her person; a tremendous hue and cry is in progress but she has failed to identify the villain amongst a parade of Perry’s slaves; Perry is very ill as a result.’ Coward wrote that his ‘trust’ in Jamaica was gone, and in early 1961 put Blue Harbour on the market. ‘I owe Jamaica much happiness and peace and enjoyment,’ he wrote, ‘and I know now beyond a shadow of a doubt that all that is over.’

  The Spy Who Loved Me, the book Fleming wrote during his visit in 1961 despite his health, is utterly different from every other Bond story. For a start, it is narrated by a woman, a young Canadian, and Bond himself does not even appear until the last third of the novel.

  The story opens with Vivienne Michel – named after a Jamaican neighbour of Fleming – running away from England, ‘from drabness, fustiness, snobbery, the claustrophobia of close horizons’ and from her ‘sequence of untidy, unattractive love affairs’. These are described in unglamorous, realistic detail: her first is with a public-school rotter who tries to take her virginity in the box of the Windsor cinema (where Fleming claimed to have lost his). Then comes Kurt, a German who steers her away from what he calls ‘The Anarchic Syndrome’, which he defines as ‘smoking and drinking, phenobarbital, jazz, promiscuous sleeping-about, fast cars, slimming, Negroes and their new republics, homosexuality, the abolition of the death penalty and a host of other deviations’. He pays for her to have an abortion.

  Vivienne ends up in northern New York State at a small motel among pine trees. Surveying herself in the mirror, she notices that her skin has changed – ‘from the grimy sallowness that had been the badge of my London life to the snap and colour and sparkle of living out of doors’. More than anything, she enjoys being alone.

  She is left in charge of the motel, but gangsters arrive to burn it down with her inside as part of an insurance scam. Vivienne is then rescued by the arrival of Bond, at which point Fleming returns to his more familiar ground of shootouts and seduction.

  It is Fleming’s most sexually explicit work, and although this misfires badly in parts, he does try to go beyond Bond’s usual cartoon-strip seduction. Sex gives the narrator Vivienne both her best and worst moments. She is by some way Fleming’s most realised and credible female character, and in this sense, and in the anti-heroic tone of the story, it is his most ambitious and literary novel. Although the villains have comic-book characteristics, including their names – Sluggsy and Horror – they are far more credible than the freakish megalomaniacs that had become such an important ‘ingredient’ of the earlier novels. ‘I tried to break away from my usual formula,’ he explained on Desert Island Discs two years later. ‘It took quite a beating from the critics.’

  Noël Coward thought that the book ‘started brilliantly’ but ‘as usual’ went too far. Ivar Bryce, however, described it as ‘the single lamentable lapse in the quality of his work’. Like Bryce, few reviewers cared to try a new recipe when they were enjoying the old one so much.

  The press were withering. The Telegraph exclaimed: Oh Dear Oh Dear Oh Dear.’ One critic described it ‘as if Mickey Spillane had tried to gatecrash his way into the Romantic Novelists’ Association’. The realistic detail was ‘dreary’; where was ‘the High-Stakes Gambling Scene, the Meal-Ordering scene, the Torture Scene … ?’ lamented Time magazine.

  Fleming was so horrified and embarrassed by his experiment’s reception that he told his publishers to stop all further editions of The Spy Who Loved Me and refused to allow a paperback to be sold. Ann, who by the time of publication in April 1962 was busy doing up Sevenhampton, wrote to Waugh that she was ‘doing my best to reverse this foolish gesture because of the yellow silk for the drawingroom walls’. She was now calling the money from the Bond books ‘our pornography fund’. (After Fleming’s death, Ann would allow a paperback edition to be published, which sold more than half a million copies in its first six months.)

  On his return to England, Fleming found himself embroiled in a laborious court case around the publication of Thunderball. It was stressful, exhausting and infuriating. The following month, while attending the monthly Sunday Times conference on 12 April, he suddenly went very quiet and pale. His friend Dennis Hamilton, later editor of the paper, noticed something was badly wrong, and helped Fleming out of the room and into a car to the London Clinic.

  Still only fifty-two years old, Fleming had suffered a major heart attack. He was lucky to be alive. He would remain in the clinic for a month; Blanche, who was in London with her mother, visited and ran errands – much to Ann’s displeasure. After that, he was sent to a south-coast hotel to convalesce. Here he used the time to write up a children’s story he had created for Caspar – Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang.

  Slowly, he recovered, writing to his American publisher: ‘I am glad to say that while the iron crab made quite a sharp pass at me, he missed with the major claw.’ But he was never quite the same again: as ‘the claws of “the iron crab” tightened around his heart, he seemed slowly to abandon life’, Peter Quennell later wrote. ‘Words reached him; he listened and replied; but one felt he was listening from a certain distance. Meanwhile courageous, defiant, aloof, he dismissed all chances of recovery that his doctors offered him, and refused to give up alcohol and tobacco, which had become his only sensory pleasures.’ (At Shrublands on a healthy regime, Bond had worried that he was ‘losing the vices that were so much part of his ruthless, cruel, fundamentally tough character’.)

  And so, in Fleming’s next novel, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, we find Bond more than ever staggering from drink to drink. Near the beginning of the book, his ‘plan for the evening’ consists of two double vodka and tonics, then two more, ‘and then, slightly drunk, go to bed with half a grain of Seconal’, a barbiturate. ‘Encouraged by the prospect of this cosy self-anaesthesia, Bond brusquely kicked his problems under the carpet of his consciousness.’ The next morning at the airport, he has moved on to ‘a double brandy and ginger ale’. His urine, which he uses as ‘invisible ink’, indicates ‘a super-abundancy of alcohol in the blood-stream’. At one point, we learn, ‘Bond was aching for a drink’, and he tells his heroine Tracy that he needs three drinks to her one. She complains later that ‘all he thinks about is drink’. And so on. Moreover, Bond is still ‘chain-smoking’, and is often tired, sometimes breathless, and using alcohol to perk himself up as well as relax him. Of course, we would now call this a fairly chronic case of alcoholism, and the reality of that was now even dawning on Fleming.

  Fleming writing On Her Majesty’s Secret Service at the red bullet-wood desk in his now favourite spot in his bedroom. He had bought a gold-plated typewriter after finishing Casino Royale, but didn’t take it to Jamaica.

  This new novel, written at Goldeneye in January and February 1962, was a return to the classic Bond formula, and a reprise of Blofeld, whom Bond is hunting at the beginning of the story. He is so frustrated by his lack of success th
at he even drafts a letter of resignation to give to M, but before he delivers it, he meets Contessa ‘Tracy’ di Vicenzo, suicidal daughter of a crime boss, Marc-Ange Draco. Draco, another of Fleming’s likeable pirates, gives Bond information on Blofeld’s whereabouts. Impersonating an officer from the College of Arms, Bond meets Blofeld at his mountaintop lair, where Blofeld is infecting impressionable young women with diseases to carry back to Britain. The plot is foiled, but Blofeld escapes again, having killed Tracy just hours after her marriage to Bond.

  On Her Majesty’s Secret Service was considered by Bond film scriptwriter Richard Maibaum to be ‘by the far the best novel [Fleming] ever wrote’. Its great strengths are the set-piece ski chase (which would become a stock ingredient of the films), the attack on the alpine redoubt, and also the real tenderness with which Fleming writes about Bond’s feelings for Tracy. It would become the most successful Bond novel to date, selling over 70,000 hardback copies in the UK in the first year, and topping the US best-seller chart for over six months. The Observer newspaper also considered it the best Bond for a while: ‘It is better plotted and retains its insane grip until the end.’ An American reviewer in the Los Angeles Times saw the book’s success as a reaction against ‘the 20th century vogue of realism and naturalism’, exactly what Fleming had so unsuccessfully attempted with his previous book. ‘With Fleming,’ the reviewer went on, ‘we do not merely accept the willing suspension of disbelief, we yearn for it, we hunger for it.’

  In Thunderball, Bond had come once more to the rescue of the United States; in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, the threat is to Britain alone. But it is a country in palpable retreat. We hear about ‘the miracle of the latest German export figures’; at the College of Arms, they are busy working on flags, stamps and medals for ‘the new African States’. Bond spends Christmas Day with his beloved M, who regales him with naval stories, ‘all true and it was all about a great Navy that was no more and a great breed of officers and seamen that would never be seen again’.

  As had become customary, the 1962 trip to Goldeneye saw Ann leave Jamaica well ahead of Ian. Soon after she got home, she received a jaunty letter from him saying he was cheerful and well. She replied at length, expressing her upset at his evident preference for Blanche over her. He had phoned Blanche the moment he arrived, and now she was ‘an adjunct of life in Jamaica’. ‘I fear that since the rise of James Bond you do not care for a personality that in any way can compete with yours,’ Ann suggested. ‘No doubt there is more adulation to be had at [Bolt], and you refuse to see that it is an impossible situation for me. However, you have now two weeks for adulation … no doubt that is why you wanted me to go … Your personality has greatly changed with success, Bond and bad health – this is a general opinion … If you were well and we were both younger our marriage would be over,’ she ended. ‘But I love you and want to look after you, and grind my teeth when you smoke . . .’

  Part of Ann’s fury was at what she called Ian’s ‘patronage’ of Blanche’s family. He had helped get her son Chris Blackwell a job on a new film being shot in Jamaica. Fleming had long seen his hero, James Bond, as a movie property. Now, at last, it was happening. The filming of Dr No, starring Sean Connery, was under way.

  In December 1960, Harry Saltzman, a Canadian film producer based in London who had worked on a number of critically acclaimed ‘kitchen-sink’ dramas, had taken a six-month option on all the Bond books. But he had failed to raise money, and with time running out went into partnership with Albert ‘Cubby’ Broccoli, formerly a Hollywood agent, but more recently a London-based film producer. Broccoli had tried unsuccessfully for the same option in 1958. The idea to film Bond had been in the back of his mind for some time. ‘James Bond appealed to me on several levels,’ he later wrote. ‘Fleming’s fictional character offered exciting scope for all the basics in screen entertainment: a virile and resourceful hero, exotic locations, the ingenious apparatus of espionage, and sex on a fairly sophisticated level.’ Broccoli had worked with director Terence Young, designer Ken Adam and scriptwriter Richard Maibaum, all of whom would be vital to the Bond films’ success.

  Saltzman and Broccoli set up Eon Productions, and started to look for backers. They originally planned Thunderball as the first film, but the McClory injunction stopped that and they opted for Dr No, partly on account of its exotic Jamaican location. Work started on the script, with one early version having Dr No as a monkey (the scriptwriters thought Fleming’s Dr No ‘a ludicrous character, Fu Manchu with hooks’). At another time, the plan was for the villain to be an arms dealer planning to blow up the Panama Canal. Fleming himself demanded no input on the script, but Broccoli insisted: ‘It’s got to be the way the book is.’

  ‘Ian attended several of our meetings well before the picture started,’ Broccoli later wrote. ‘It was good having him around. His whole persona, the way he held his cigarette, his laid-back style, that certain arrogance, was pure James Bond.’

  In the end, the scripwriters made Dr No a member of SPECTRE, various new characters were invented, and the more over-the-top elements at the end of the novel – including the fight with the giant squid – were discarded. As in the book, Bond is helping out the Americans, but US influence is much stronger in the film. Having been issued with an American gun, he flies via New York on Pan Am to. find Felix Leiter, who does not appear in the book, already in Jamaica and on the case. Nonetheless, Leiter knows this is British territory, commenting, ‘Limeys can be pretty touchy about trespassing.’ For his part, Bond tells the American: ‘It’s my beat.’

  Eon Productions had several rejections from distributors, but in June 1961, they secured the backing of United Artists. The budget for the film was set at $1 million. Fleming was to get $50,000 on signature, then $100,000 per film plus 5 per cent of the ‘producers’ profits’. He arranged for this money to go directly into a trust fund for Caspar.

  As soon as the deal was done, director Terence Young, designer Ken Adam and the two producers headed to Jamaica to look for locations. This ‘beautiful island’, said Broccoli, ‘had everything we were looking for’. On Fleming’s recommendation, Chris Blackwell was taken on as location manager and general local fixer. He had given up the ADC job at King’s House on Foot’s departure in 1957 and then spent a short time in London studying to be an accountant, but he had hated it and soon returned to Jamaica. There he had worked in various jobs and was currently running the Ferry Inn, halfway between Kingston and Spanish Town. His great love, though, was Jamaican music, and he had set up Island Records in July 1959. Fleming hoped that Blackwell would bring some of this expertise to the film.

  The casting of James Bond was, of course, crucial. Fleming had always thought of David Niven in the role. The producers sounded out Cary Grant, but he was too expensive and refused to commit to a series of films; James Mason would only do two, and thought the books ‘all rather a load of nonsense’; Roger Moore was busy doing television; both Patrick McGoohan and James Fox refused the role because of religious scruples.

  Almost making a virtue out of a necessity, an unknown Scottish actor, Sean Connery, was selected, mainly on the strength of his sex appeal, and the fact that he looked a lot like the Express cartoon-script Bond. When casting had been discussed for a stillborn US TV project a few years before, Fleming had suggested that there should be no ‘stage Englishness … no monocles, moustaches, bowler hats or bobbies, or other “Limey” gimmicks. There should be no blatant English slang, a minimum of public school ties and accents.’ Even so, he was worried that the working-class Scot Connery might not have the panache for his hero. Connery later commented: ‘I never got introduced to Fleming until I was into the movie – but I know he was not that happy with me as a choice. He called me, or told somebody, that I was an over-developed stuntman … But when I did eventually meet him he was very interesting, erudite and a snob – a real snob. But his company was very good for a limited time.’

  Fleming and Sean Connery during the filming of
Dr No in Jamaica. After initial doubts about his suitability, Fleming was converted when he invited Connery to dinner at the Savoy and a young female guest pronounced him extremely attractive.

  Connery’s Bond would be different to that of the books, in which he only reads The Times newspaper and complains about ‘the cheap self-assertiveness of young labour since the war’. Connery, at thirty-one, was younger, tougher and somehow more modern and classless. Interestingly, Fleming would later comment that he was ‘not quite the idea I had of Bond, but he would be if I wrote the books over again’. In an interview with Playboy magazine conducted after two Connery films had been released, Fleming even reinvented Bond to the extent of suggesting that his politics were ‘a little bit left of centre’.

  An idea was floated to ask Noël Coward to play Dr No. ‘The character required brains, sophistication and a kind of Machiavellian wit,’ wrote Broccoli later. ‘Ian thought it was a brilliant idea. I did, too. Since I didn’t know Coward and Ian did, I asked him to cable our offer to Noël in Jamaica. He did so, and received a swift response by telegram: “Dear Ian, The answer to your suggestion is No … No … No … No! Thank you. Love, Noël.’”

  The bulk of the cast and crew flew out on a chartered Britannia 312, arriving in Jamaica on Sunday 14 January. Connery and a handful of others had come out the previous week and set up camp at New Kingston’s Courtleigh Manor Hotel on Trafalgar Road. Originally a private house lived in by, amongst others, the Swedish consul, it had become a hotel by 1948. As well as providing accommodation, it would also be used for a handful of scenes in the film.