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

by Matthew Parker

  The following night at Frenchman’s Cove was little better. Ann pleaded a fever and avoided the beach barbecue. She was awoken in their room by the noise of their host ‘briskly driving the Commander home – he was in no condition to drive himself… in a very slurred voice he repetitively complained of the impossibility of getting a drink … finally he fell into a noisy drunken sleep’.

  Bond’s obituary in You Only Live Twice ends with a note from his secretary Mary Goodnight in which she suggests an epitaph that reflects his philosophy: ‘I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them.’ Winston Stona, a young Jamaican who would play the policeman in the film The Harder They Come, met Ian in 1964 at Morris Cargill’s house. He remembered Fleming asking for caviar on toast, washed down with vodka. ‘He gave the impression of not being able to get out of bed without a bottle of vodka,’ Stona remembered. ‘I guess he drowned himself.’ In his notebook at this time, Fleming scribbled: ‘I’ve always had one foot not wanting to leave the cradle, and the other in a hurry to get to the grave, which has made for an uncomfortable existence.’

  Yet in spite of her anger, Ann still felt sorry for him: ‘Poor broken Commander,’ she wrote at the end of her letter to Quennell.

  Back in England in the spring of 1964, friends remember Fleming as a ‘gloomy, fragile figure’ walking by the lake at Sevenhampton, glass of whisky in hand. At Easter, after playing golf in the rain, he was hospitalised with blood clots on his lungs. His chest pains, the ‘Iron Crab’, worsened in spite of heavy medication. In June, on her fifty-first birthday, Ann wrote from Sevenhampton to Evelyn Waugh: ‘nothing nice or funny is happening’.

  On 24 July, Eve Fleming died. Ian would not be talked out of attending his mother’s funeral in Oxfordshire. His friend William Plomer wrote early the following year: ‘When his health was no longer good, it was impossible to imagine him settling down to the existence of a prudent invalid obsessed with trying to make it last as long as possible. I think he knew he had, as they say, “had it”.’ Ian’s friend Alan Ross found him at this time ‘very shaky, his normally brick-red complexion the dry mauve of a paper flower’.

  On 8 August, Ann wrote to her son-in-law John Morgan and daughter Fionn, who had just had their first baby: ‘Ian’s life from now on hangs on a thread. Such recovery as he could make depends on his self-control with cigarettes and alcohol. The doctor spent Bank Holiday with us, and was able to witness the sad change that ill health and drugs can bring. Poor Ian nags at me specially and then Caspar all the time. It ends all fun and is anguish to be with one one loves who is very mentally changed and fearfully unhappy – poor old tiger.’

  Nevertheless, feeling in better spirits that summer, Ian was determined to attend the committee meeting of the Royal St George Golf Club near Sandwich. He was thrilled at the prospect of being nominated as club captain for the following year. He travelled down, taking in a lunch with Blanche in London. On 11 August, he had lunch at the club, and then dinner with Ann at the nearby Guildford Hotel. Shortly after eating, he collapsed and an ambulance was called to take him to the Canterbury Hospital. He had suffered a massive haemorrhage and died at 1.30 in the morning. It was his son’s twelfth birthday.

  The news of Ian Fleming’s death at the age of only fifty-six was reported by the Jamaica Gleaner the following day, 13 August. A subsequent article two days later, probably written by his friend Morris Cargill, described him as ‘a great friend of Jamaica … wherever he went, he sang the praises of Jamaica; and through his books, films and articles he did more perhaps than any other single person to give our country extensive and favourable publicity abroad’.

  Ann would never return to Goldeneye. Apart from anything else, she had not liked what she had seen of the new post-imperial Jamaica on the 1964 trip; the old deference was gone. ‘Independence has not improved the island,’ she had written to Evelyn Waugh. ‘They have cancelled all the porters at airports, instead fascist black police rock with laughter while elderly exhausted white tourists feebly try to move their baggage to the customs table, where aggressive Negro customs officials enjoy themselves hugely by a minute examination of underclothes, displaying the curiosity of the savage in clocks or trinkets.’ Later the same month, she had reported that ‘The Brownlows are very unpopular. He in permanent sulk: the Government want to run a teeny road over a small corner of his property, and are not interested in his threats to leave the island.’

  Noël Coward, who had failed to sell his Blue Harbour house, was also furious with the customs officers who refused to allow him to import half a dozen of his records to give to friends. Around this time, he wrote his short story ‘Solali’, a return to Samolo, his fictionalised Jamaica. It is very different in tone to the innocent Samolo of Pomp and Circumstance. The Samolans have changed. ‘Although by nature gentle, indolent and well disposed towards their white-skinned overlords, concealed beneath their eternally smiling friendliness is a strain of cruelty,’ he writes. The story ends with a gruesome double murder.

  Fleming’s last pronouncements on independent Jamaica were rather different. In his final novel, The Man with the Golden Gun, Bond enjoys the unchanged parts of Jamaica, which remain delightfully old-fashioned, ramshackle and eccentric, and the local use of old terms like ‘chains and perches’ (proper ‘Imperial’ measurements).

  Apart from the cartoon-villainous Rastas, for most of the novel Jamaicans only appear as sex workers, musicians or hotel staff, happy to do Bond’s bidding for rum or money, as in the distasteful scene when he organises an orgy and striptease for Scaramanga’s cronies (which he later regrets). It never seems to occur to either the British or Americans to involve local authorities in their investigations on Jamaican soil. It is striking in the book how the people in authority Bond encounters are actually still British. The boss of the sugar operation in Frome and the owner of the hotel in Morgan’s Harbour are not only both English but, even better, ex-naval intelligence!

  At the hospital, where Bond is recovering from his final battle with Scaramanga, the senior doctor, although Jamaican, is a ‘graduate from Edinburgh’. The matron is ‘a kindly dragon on loan from King Edward VII’s’, a private London hospital. It is they who display competence and authority while the nurse, presumably locally trained, ‘is allowed to listen’ and ‘excited by all this high-level talk’ before returning ‘to her copy of Ebony’.

  During his last trip to Jamaica in 1964, Fleming planned with his friend Morris Cargill a book called Ian Fleming Introduces Jamaica. His contribution starts by describing how, during the eighteen years he had been coming ‘regularly as clockwork’ to Goldeneye, ‘Jamaica has grown from a child into an adult’. Still, the Jamaican characters in the novel he was writing at the time remain, like Quarrel, childlike. The local police constable who arrives on the scene after the final gun battle is a figure of fun with his ‘extremely smart’ uniform and ‘dignified gait’. Leiter has explained to him ‘that a good man was after a bad man in the swamp’. The policeman can only write ‘in a laborious hand’.

  The ‘comedy’ continues when the Jamaican Commissioner of Police, ‘resplendent in his black uniform with silver insignia’, and the judge of the Supreme Court, ‘in full regalia’, arrive at Bond’s bedside to carry out a judicial inquiry into what has happened. They are both full of what is assumed to be misplaced self-importance. Much to Bond’s amusement, what they are after is in fact a rewriting of events so as to preserve the dignity of their nation. So the wording requested includes the fictions that the Jamaican police knew all about Scaramanga’s doings and were consulted about action against them, and that Bond and the CIA were ‘Jamaica-controlled’. Amid much nodding and winking, this is all agreed to and the foreigners are given the ‘Jamaican Police Medal for gallant and meritorious services to the Independent State of Jamaica’. The message, of course, is that the whole thing – including real agency on the part of the local authorities, real independence – is a sham.

  Earlier in the novel, there is a very strik
ing affirmation by Bond: ‘For all her new-found “Independence”, he would bet his bottom dollar that the statue of Queen Victoria in the centre of Kingston had not been destroyed or removed to a museum as similar relics of an historic infancy had been in the resurgent African states.’ The quotation marks are highly significant. For Fleming, it’s almost as if he’s in denial: independence is not real, only a sweet given to a child.

  This dismissal of independence in The Man with the Golden Gun is in stark contrast to the edginess of Dr No, where we read the prediction that ‘Such stubborn retreats [as Queen’s club] will not long survive in modern Jamaica. One day it will have its windows smashed and perhaps be burned to the ground.’ Perhaps the brickbat of ‘independence’ has, in Fleming’s opinion, actually reaffirmed the status quo (just as in the Horizon article of 1947 he predicted that the ‘liberality and wisdom of our present policy will take the edge off passions’).

  In the event, Ian was only able to write the first few pages of Ian Fleming Introduces Jamaica. They would be his last and perhaps fondest and most sentimental words on Jamaica. He acknowledges that there have been changes: ‘She had gained her Independence and Membership of the United Nations, bauxite and tourism have changed her economy …’ But at the same time, nothing has changed: ‘The people are just the same, always laughing and bawling each other out, singing the old banana songs as they load the fruit into the ships, getting drunk on rum when the ship has sailed, sneaking an illicit whiff of ganja, or an equally illicit visit to the obeahman when they are ill or in trouble, driving motor cars like lunatics, behaving like zanies at the cricket matches and the races, making the night hideous with the “Sound System” on pay night, and all the while moving gracefully and lazily through the day and fearing the “rolling calf” at night.’

  This seems like a return to the Jamaica he outlined back in 1947 with his article in Horizon magazine, where politicians fighting for independence are ‘gorgeously flamboyant’ but no more troublesome than insect bites, where ‘a touch of the zany persists’ and where Jamaica’s gruesome history of slavery and rebellion becomes romantic tales of pirates and picturesque Maroons.

  The West Indies has always inspired fantasy, from the search for El Dorado, to Robinson Crusoe, to ‘Boy’s Own’ pirate stories, to the Edenic paradise of the tourist brochures. From this fertile soil, and impossible without it, came imperial hero James Bond.

  Goldeneye Since Fleming

  ‘I loved him and am angry with him for dying but I see his point,’ Noël Coward told John Pearson in what appears to have been a well-oiled encounter in the Dorchester Hotel in London in May 1965. In his diary, Coward had written: ‘It is a horrid but expected sadness. He went on smoking and drinking in spite of all warnings … He has been a good and charming friend to me ever since I have known him … I loved him and he loved me.’

  Coward did not leave Jamaica as he had planned around Independence, but got used to the changes under way and recovered his enthusiasm for the country. In February 1965, he hosted a lunch for the Queen Mother at Firefly. Blanche was among the small group of guests. For the two staunch royalists, it was a thrilling occasion. Noël described the Queen Mother as ‘gayer and more enchanting than ever’.

  Coward died at Firefly in 1973 and is buried there. By this time he had at last been knighted and his reputation had enjoyed a renaissance. His properties were left to Graham Payn and Cole Lesley. They gave Firefly to the Jamaican government, and it is preserved as Coward left it. On the walls are photographs, now faded by the sun into a pale sepia, of visitors Sophia Loren, Peter Ustinov, Charlie Chaplin, Maggie Smith, Richard Burton and James Mason. Blue Harbour is now owned by an American family and can be rented out. The cottages still have electrical fittings from the 1940s and smell of damp and disuse. It is hard to imagine that the royalty of Hollywood stayed in them. But it is still a beautiful and private spot, with cool breezes coming off the sea, the sound of which is ever present.

  According to Mark Amory, who became part of Ann Fleming’s circle in the later years of her life and would edit her letters, ‘It is hard to exaggerate the importance of the death of Ian Fleming to Ann. He was the love of her life and now he was gone.’ He personally remembers Ann as ‘quite intimidating. Very Funny. Quick, with great integrity. A glamorous, forceful, entertaining person.’ Certainly her letters remain sparkling and witty.

  Caspar grew up a gifted child, bookish and with a passionate interest in archaeology, but also wilful and even cruel. Raymond O’Neill remembers that he was ‘potentially brilliant’ but that ‘he gave my mother a terrible time’. Apart from losing, at a vulnerable age, the father he idolised, it was complicated being the son of the creator of James Bond. Ann had reported Caspar saying when he was eleven that he would never marry, as ‘he was not so oversexed as James Bond’. At prep school, the connection had earned him considerable cachet, and he had traded his father’s signature and Bond bits and pieces. The year after his father’s death, he went on to Eton, where, according to Raymond, ‘because the Bond thing was taking off, he was a hero’. However, he was already needing pills to help him sleep, and then got involved with recreational drugs. Mark Amory remembers him as ‘an extraordinary figure, astonishingly sophisticated and a charming boy. But you didn’t have to be very perceptive to see that things were not right.’

  At Lord O’Neill’s wedding to Georgina Douglas-Scott on 10 June 1963. From left: Caspar, Francis Grey, Joan Sillick, Ann and Ian.

  Caspar also became obsessed with guns. When a loaded revolver was found in his room at Eton, the police were called and he was expelled. He worked hard and got to Oxford, but did not complete his degree. By now, according to his frantically worried mother, he was ‘talking all the trendy nonsense of his generation, anti-materialism and all sorts of nonsense’. Ann was determined that her son should become a politician, a career to which he was wildly unsuited.

  When he reached the age of twenty-one, in August 1973, Caspar came into a large inheritance from his father. According to his girlfriend since Oxford, Rachel Fletcher, he bought a ‘ridiculous’ flat on Church Street, Chelsea, ‘with one huge room’ he never got round to decorating. Here, there always seemed to be hangers-on, some who brought drugs with them. He had also inherited Goldeneye, which had been rented out to family friends. In August the following year, by which stage, according to Rachel Fletcher, he was ‘in a very bad way’, he went to Jamaica for the first time since his trip in 1960. With him was his cousin, Hugo’s daughter Frances Charteris. She remembers Goldeneye as ‘a magical place, though then in some disrepair’. Both Violet and Blanche were delighted to see Caspar, but he was losing his battle with depression. After about a week, he took an overdose and swam out to sea from the beach at Goldeneye in an attempt to take his own life. He was rescued by a local fisherman and then Blanche managed to call a helicopter to take him to hospital in Kingston.

  Ann in later life. In one letter she complained of ‘permanent nervous gastritis from misery of last years.’

  Now diagnosed as a severe depressive, Caspar was given psychiatric treatment including electric shock therapy, and was in and out of institutions until, on 2 October 1975, he killed himself with another overdose.

  As Mark Amory writes, ‘This was a blow so stunning that some of her friends thought that Ann, in her turn, might never recover. She had for some time been using alcohol as a calculated weapon in her struggle against the blacker side of her life and she continued to do so … then, with a remarkable effort of will, she gave it up and took full control of her life once more.’ She would die of cancer in 1981 at the age of sixty-eight. The friend who gave her memorial address said that ‘In naval terms she was something of a privateer. She would move into a calm lagoon where barques and frigates were careening peacefully and suddenly let off a broadside. The calm vanished, ripples spread across the waters, the whole harbour became animated, galvanized, expectant.’

  In late 1972, Bond returned to Jamaica. It was fitting that
just as the island had hosted Sean Connery’s first performance in the title role, so the filming of Live and Let Die in Jamaica should see Roger Moore’s debut as Bond. The movie was shot at the Ruins restaurant, the Green Grotto caves, in Montego Bay, Runaway Bay, Falmouth and at Rose Hall. The bridge that shears off the top of the double-decker bus is at Johnson Town, near Lucea. Roger Moore remembers arriving to be welcomed by ‘searing heat and a calypso steel band’. The cast and crew stayed for two weeks at the Sans Souci Hotel in Ocho Rios, described by the leading lady, Jane Seymour, as the most beautiful she had ever seen: ‘I just remember the music and the warmth and the beautiful beaches. It was just so exotic and glorious.’

  Roger Moore meets Violet Cummings at Goldeneye, December 1972.

  There were difficulties. Frequent power cuts played havoc with the schedule, and Moore remembers the groans of the crew as they lugged hundreds of yards of cable and heavy lamps in the ninety-degree heat. When Gloria Hendry, the actress playing Rosie Carver, had to lie dead on the grass, she was ‘eaten by ants’. Roy Stewart, Quarrel Jr, although Jamaican-born, suffered in the heat. He had not been back for twenty years and could not believe the changes that had taken place over that time.

  The villain’s name came from the real-life Ross Kananga, owner of a crocodile farm found in the east of the island by production designer Syd Cain and chosen as the location of one of the film’s most famous scenes. ‘Production and construction noise has driven all the crocs and alligators to ground,’ Moore reported. ‘Ross Kananga, the alligator specialist and handler, is busy digging them out of the mud where they have buried themselves. I have sent him word not to bother on my account.’