The Man with the Golden Typewriter

by Bloomsbury Publishing

  They will probably want him to do such miscellaneous jobs as recommending hotel accommodation and beating down the proprietor, for 60 or 70 people. He will also have to dig out and suggest local actors and actresses for small parts and keep an eye on the labour to see that it keeps working happily during the six or eight weeks they will be shooting.

  The suggested location is the Morant Lighthouse area with those swamps behind and the beach you and I know.

  I have suggested that they put the team up at Anthony Jenkinson’s hotel, but I am not sure if he has enough rooms. Christopher might like to have a word with him about it. But of course they may decide it is too far from Morant and prefer one or other of those hotels up behind Kingston.

  They also want to do all their musical score for the picture in Jamaica, and this should be a real chance for Christopher to seek out talent and lease them his recording studio.

  I have no idea what fee to recommend Christopher to ask for, but I should think £100 a week for his general services and extra for studio and sound recording, etc. But perhaps he had better wait and see what they offer when Saltzman, the producer, and the rest of them arrive around January 11th.

  I am sure Christopher will do this job splendidly and I think he will find it enormous fun.

  The producer, Terence Young,9 seems very nice and the man they have chosen for Bond, Sean Connery, is a real charmer – fairly unknown but a good actor with the right looks and physique.

  If Christopher does well on this assignment it can easily lead to others in Jamaica and elsewhere and an exciting sideline for him.

  All your news about the hedge and the flowers is very exciting. You are an angel to have taken so much trouble and I am longing to see it all.

  But this is dreadful news about the car. I have always feared you would run into trouble with it and it’s a blessing that you survived. For heaven’s sake get something smaller and more manageable for those twisty roads, and stop driving so fast, there’s absolutely no hurry!

  My Jamaica plans are now changed after many stormy sessions [with Ann] and we come out together around January 20th and have much the same programme as last year.[. . .]

  No other news for now, but it certainly looks as if we are all going to have great fun with this film business in January.

  TO SIR WILLIAM STEPHENSON, 450 East 52nd Street, New York

  Stephenson cabled to berate Fleming for not making enough of his publicity – ‘appears to me that you are haughtily sniffing the end of a Smith and Wesson forty five’.

  7th November, 1961

  Many thanks for your chastening cable which actually fetched up at the right address. Please use it frequently.

  Not much news from here. My host of medical advisers seem to be delighted with my recovery and, as you can imagine, I am losing no time in loosening up on their counsels of moderation in all things.

  The film deal with United Artists is going ahead and they are going to film “DR NO” in Jamaica in January and February, and the advance party has already gone out to prospect for location. But, as usual with show business, no actual money has actually changed hands yet.

  I shall be coming out to Jamaica around January 18th and will be paying you my usual visit around the middle of March. So please warn The Pierre to lay in plenty of oysters.

  TO HARRY SALTZMAN,

  Fleming had already received several offers to promote products, all of which he treated with a casual shrug. Whether or not the film company wanted to consider ‘product placement’ he left to their own decision. The brand in question remains unknown.

  7th December, 1961

  My dear Harry,

  I have acknowledged the attached but told them to get in direct touch with your Company.

  Incidentally, I expect you will be getting similar approaches from other branded products used by James Bond.

  I don’t know what your policy in this matter will be, but I have personally found that the use of branded names in my stories helps the verisimilitude, so long as the products are quality products.

  Admittedly one is giving free publicity to these people, but I don’t think it matters so long as their products are in fact really good.

  Anyway, over to you.

  TO DAVID NIVEN, ESQ., White’s Club, 37, St. James’s Street, London, S.W.1.

  The actor David Niven,10 whose TV company had recently failed in its bid to acquire rights to James Bond, wrote on 23 October 1962 to ask if Fleming could think of a suitable character – ‘a high-class crook, à la “Raffles” or a super-modern “Sherlock Holmes” – for him to play in forthcoming four-part series. ‘Will you, dear chum, look back through your files and come up with something a little off-beat that would suit me?’ Despite a proposed fee of £1,000, Fleming turned the offer down.

  7th November, 1962

  My dear David,

  I have just this minute come back from New York working on just such a project as you suggest but for an entire television series, and the copyright situation would be terribly snarled up if I went into business with you, and I think I should gracefully decline.

  However, why don’t we eat a few pounds’ worth of Colchesters together (at your expense) some time after you arrive? And if I have had enough baths by then I may have dreamt up a bright idea in one or another of them.

  But I should warn you that my brains are boiling with the effort of keeping James Bond on the move, and I confess that my chief reason for Operation Colchester would be to see your endearing mug again.

  I have to be in Tokyo from the 14th to 21st and if I eat their deadly blow fish on the wrong day of the month I may not show up, but at any rate I shall depart this life with

  Affectionate regards to yourself.

  Niven tried again the following year, suggesting that he could write under the pseudonym Charlie Hopkins ‘and thereby not involve your valuable name in anything as tawdry as television!! In any event, don’t forget I really am highly experienced in this line of country and whether you ever do anything with us or not, do not hesitate to pick my microscopic brain.’ As further inducement he added that, ‘I suppose you have become my favourite writer next to Chaucer.’ Again, Fleming declined.

  TO RAYMOND HAWKEY, ESQ., 50 Campden Hill Towers, London, W.11

  Raymond Hawkey11 had produced a ground-breaking cover for the Pan paperback edition of Thunderball. His design, which included two bullet holes, was so striking that it inspired thriller writers for years to come.

  9th April, 1963

  Dear Raymond Hawkey,

  Thank you very much for the pulls of the really brilliant cover you have designed. I think it is quite splendid and I don’t think the filthy little Pan sign spoils it too much.

  But what happens to the skin in subsequent books? Will it change colour?

  Thank you also for the amusing photograph of me and Len Deighton. I am sorry to say I thought Evans’ piece was pretty skimpy, but don’t tell him I said so!

  TO ANN MARLOW

  Marlow, ever optimistic, wondered if Fleming would be interested in a TV series about incidents in his life.

  15th October, 1963

  My dear Ann,

  It was lovely to hear from you and your television idea sounds very interesting.12

  The trouble is of course that I have no control over these television series on which Eon Productions have the option after the completion of three full length James Bond feature films.

  So I’m afraid the only course is for you to put your ideas to Harry Saltzman and see if he will wear them.

  Naturally I would love to be involved with you over all this, but, as Terence Young should have told you, I have absolutely no say in the matter.

  The Simenon interview wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t very cleverly edited and put together, but I expect it will appear somewhere in the States before long.

  Please give my best love to Bill and Mary when you see them next.

  With much affection.

  TO ANN MARLOWr />
  Despairing, Marlow suggested a programme devoid of Bond called Here’s Fleming!

  29th October, 1963

  My dear Ann,

  At last I have got the picture clear, but I am sorry to say that I simply hate the idea.

  I have far too much to do anyway and I also greatly dislike projecting my image any further than I can throw it.

  I am terribly sorry, but there it is and you must forgive me once again.

  Much love.

  13

  The Spy Who Loved Me

  By 1961 Fleming’s life had become more complicated than he would have wished. Apart from the stress of writing, which was beginning to wear him down, he and Ann were drifting apart. She was conducting a thinly disguised affair with Hugh Gaitskell, a high-ranking Labour politician, while Fleming was consorting openly with Blanche Blackwell, who owned a nearby house in Jamaica. It was all rather sad.

  The turmoil seemed to have had no effect on his output, however. Perhaps it even jolted his imagination, for when he returned from Jamaica he delivered a manuscript that departed radically from the norm. Instead of the standard Bond saga, he had written a pseudo-autobiographical interlude in the life of a young woman named Vivienne Michel. Fleeing disappointment in love, Canadian-born ‘Viv’ leaves Europe to travel solo through the Adirondacks on a Vespa scooter. When she becomes involved in an insurance scam at the isolated Dreamy Pines Motor Court, James Bond arrives to rescue her from certain death. It contained some excruciating details that were obviously based on Fleming’s early sexual experiences. And the language used by Viv to describe her saviour slipped into the farthest corners of Cartland. But it had its charms, and for the time (and for the author) it was a brave stab at reinventing Bond. At Bedford Square they thought it was just the ticket.

  Fleming was on full charge when he handed it in. He had always been accused of writing beneath his abilities and now he had produced something that if not exactly literature was at least new. There was also his latest book, Thunderball, which had just been released and was selling well, and he had delivered the manuscript for State of Excitement, his book about Kuwait. Also, as a nod to his status as proprietor of The Book Collector, he had been invited to address the Antiquarian Booksellers Association’s gathering in late July. He was full of confidence, and riding high on his success.

  But his health was failing. For a long time he had had problems with his heart, to which had recently been added difficulties with his kidneys and back. He was uncertain about Bond’s prospects and the legal difficulty over Thunderball had taken its toll. In early April, while at a Sunday Times meeting, he suffered a major heart attack. His friend Denis Hamilton ushered him out of the room and helped him to hospital.

  Outwardly, Fleming treated it as no more than a setback. ‘Being ill is heaven!’ he wrote on a postcard to his half-sister Amaryllis. On the other side, in a typically wry touch, was a picture of an Aztec crystal skull. Jokingly, he drew a skull and crossbones on the back of the envelopes he sent to his friends. To Percy Muir he wrote that ‘years of under work and over indulgence’ had caught up with him. Behind the façade, however, he realised that life would never be the same again.

  During his convalescence at the London Clinic and later at the Dudley Hotel, Hove, he was forbidden a typewriter lest he strain himself by writing a new Bond. Undeterred, he ordered pen and paper and embarked on a children’s story based on the bedtime stories he told his son Caspar. It was about a magical car called ‘Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang’.

  A famous racing car, long since abandoned in a scrapyard, Chitty is rebuilt by the indefatigable tinkerer and inventor Commander Caractacus Pott. When Pott takes his family on an outing to the Kent coast, Chitty reveals hidden secrets. She not only flies, but swims and drives under her own command if the Potts are in danger. When the Potts uncover a secret cache of weapons in France, they blow it up. And when gangsters take the Pott children hostage, meanwhile pondering a heist on a famous Parisian sweet shop, it is Chitty that saves the day. Underpinning the book was Fleming’s favourite mantra: ‘Never say “no” to adventures. Always say “yes” otherwise you’ll lead a very dull life.’

  His initial suggestion for an illustrator was Wally Fawkes, whose cartoons appeared in the Daily Mail under the nom de plume Trog. But the Mail refused to allow their star cartoonist to work for an author whose books were serialised regularly in strip form by the rival Daily Express. As an alternative, Cape approached the illustrator Haro Hodson, but after a few trials Fleming thought his sketches were not quite right. Finally, they appointed the acclaimed artist John Burningham, whose Borka: The Adventures of a Goose With No Feathers had won the Kate Greenaway Medal in 1963.

  But this was in the future, and in the meantime he found himself with another bit of Bonderie on his hands. To help launch the Sunday Times’ new colour supplement, due out in 1962, C. D. Hamilton asked him to write a short story featuring 007. ‘The Living Daylights’, which Fleming dashed off that October, saw Bond in Berlin, providing cover for a defector who was being pursued by a Russian assassin, codenamed Trigger. The assassin, it transpires, is a woman whose cover is as a cellist in an all-female orchestra. ‘There was something almost indecent in the idea of that bulbous, ungainly instrument splayed between her thighs,’ Bond reflects. ‘Of course Suggia had managed to look elegant, as did that girl Amaryllis somebody.1 But they should invent a way for women to play the damned thing side-saddle.’ When the moment comes, Bond fires not to kill but to disarm.

  By late 1961 the film deal he had signed the previous year was catching fire, with an extraordinary amount of pre-production publicity that included far-fetched plans for new editions of Dr No put forward by Harry Saltzman. And his US sales had received a massive boost when, earlier that year, an article in Life magazine had listed From Russia with Love as one of President J. F. Kennedy’s ten favourite books. By any standards it had been an extraordinary time. And yet, there was his health.

  In 1961 Queen magazine published an article titled ‘Six Questions’. The first was: ‘What do you expect to achieve in the sixties? Are you aiming at any particular quality or quantity of work?’ Fleming, one of several contributors, replied: ‘One can never expect to achieve anything – even less if one is in the fifties and living in the sixties.

  Since I am a writer of thrillers I would like to leave behind me one classic in this genre – a mixture of Tolstoy, Simenon, Ambler and Koestler, with a pinch of ground Fleming. Unfortunately I have become the slave of a serial character and I suppose, in fact, since it amuses me to write about James Bond, I shall go on doing so for the fun of it.’

  TO WILLIAM PLOMER

  From Goldeneye, February 1961, ‘Friday, perhaps’

  My dear Wm,

  Thank you a thousand times for your sparkling & hilarious letter which had both of us rolling in the Bougainvillea. I am much relieved that you could stomach Kuwait. I felt almost ashamed at asking that you should read it & sub it. But I was so fed up & overstuffed with the subject that the M.S. had come to nauseate me. My main concern was to make it look as little as possible a P.R.O. job & from what you say I may at least have been successful in that. Of course it will get a majestic pasting from the Arabists who will get it for review but to hell with them! I’m tired of their snobbish coterie & have been for years.

  The new Bond is very odd & heaven knows what you will think. I am a 23 year old French Canadian girl & writing rather breathlessly which comes, deceptively I suspect, easy. Bond is just today about to rescue her from an ugly predicament!

  Good misprint in the Gleaner – about a wedding “Not to be sartorially outdone, the bridegroom wore an orchid in his bottomhole”.

  A. sends much love in which I join.

  TO MICHAEL HOWARD

  From Goldeneye, dated ‘Saturday’

  Dear Michael,

  Thank you very much for your newsy letter & your father’s splendid puff in the S.T. Good news about the subscription but it still leaves you with
the well-packed shelves in the warehouse! If you get some early copies, would you send me one. My secretary has my movements – Nassau & then N.Y.

  Bad news about Graham Greene particularly as he is a friend & stayed in this house the whole of Nov. I’m afraid we must come clean and apologise.2 Would you ask Anthony Colwell3 to do this, at my request, enclosing brochure & quote from cutting? I’m rather upset as I think I raised this point in my first letter about his draft blurb.

  Got a very nice letter from Wm. & he seems to have been able to stomach the book. About a blurb – I v. much doubt if I can manage this before I get back as my mind is too much elsewhere. But why the hurry? It has only just gone to the Sheikhs!

  Rather surprised about Courtaulds. What are the arrangements & what the reward?4 I was asking Booths £5,000 for the privilege – not that they were willing to pay it – but Courtaulds is a £50,000,000 company. They should definitely not trade on my handiwork whatever publicity my books get. And I shall also want many dozen shirts made to measure from their stuff! Would you ask Elaine Greene of M.C.A. to get in touch with them and screw them good and proper. And please rush me copies of their copy. I won’t alter unless it is too ghastly – but no point making a fool of the chap. I do wish I had been consulted about all this. You know I was very much against the project.

  Paul Gallico will be too long for N&T [Now and Then] but we may put it to some other good use.

  OK for 29th in Scotia.

  Don’t at all like the idea of Face to Face.5 I am no good at that sort of thing & dislike being eviscerated.

  Just finishing The Spy who loved me. It will be about 55,000. Absolutely no idea what it’s like but it wrote rather easily which is a bad sign I expect.

  TO C. D. HAMILTON, ESQ., Thomson House, 200 Gray’s Inn Road, London, W.C.1

  19th April, 1961

  My dear C.D.,

  Although neither of us knew it I am afraid I was in the middle of a rather major heart attack this time last week. One never believes these things so I sat stupidly on trying to make intelligent comments about the thrilling new project [the colour supplement] about which I long to hear more. However, a thousand thanks for noticing my trouble so quickly and for shepherding me away when the time came.