For Your Eyes Only (11 page)

In May 1956, Fleming received the sort of reader's letter he partly dreaded and partly appreciated: James Bond, the writer complained, ‘has a rather deplorable taste in firearms'. This was not, perhaps, all that surprising, since Fleming, unlike his brother Peter, had little time or taste for guns. He still owned the Colt .38 Police Positive engraved and
presented to him by Bill Donovan, the US spy chief, but there is no evidence he ever fired it. He found the minutiae of gun science extremely boring, but as an essential element of the Bond mystique he appreciated the importance of accuracy. The letter-writer was one Geoffrey Boothroyd, a thirty-one-year-old ICI technician from Glasgow and an amateur firearms enthusiast of remarkable expertise. Boothroyd had an enormous personal collection of firearms in every shape and size, and an encyclopaedic grasp of the subject. The Beretta pistol Bond had used in the books so far was ‘really a ladies' gun, and not a really nice lady at that', Boothroyd informed Fleming. In
Casino Royale
, Bond uses a Beretta in a chamois leather holster; Fleming himself had been issued with a .25 ACP Beretta during the war, and may have assumed it was the standard-issue secret agent's weapon; more likely it was simply the first gun he could think of.

Bond would be far better off, Boothroyd suggested, with a chunky Smith & Wesson .38 Centennial Airweight, a real ‘man-stopper', carried in a Berns-Martin Triple-Draw holster with a built-in spring for rapid drawing. In addition, Bond should have a .357 Smith & Wesson magnum to keep in the car for shooting villains who might be further away. Fleming wrote back with polite enthusiasm, saying that Bond would certainly be pleased with his updated armoury, and adding, ‘I am most anxious to see that he lives as long as possible and I shall be most grateful for any further technical
advice.' There followed an extraordinarily arcane discussion about silencers: Boothroyd was against them, on the grounds that they are really the stuff of fiction. That, of course, was exactly why Fleming wanted to silence Bond's gun, and he claimed that he had used a silencer on a Sten gun during the war, which reduced the noise to a mere click. Fleming could not really care less whether a silencer worked in reality, but he needed it to work in fiction for the sake of his plots. Eventually, on Boothroyd's advice, Bond swapped his Beretta (‘I am killing the bloody gun in my next book – on sound grounds') for a Walther PPK 7.65, because Boothroyd thought it was the best automatic of its size with ammunition available worldwide. With Boothroyd's help, the villains of SMERSH were kitted out, fictionally speaking, with 9mm Lugers and Mauser 7.63 automatics. Fleming swiftly got over the belief that guns were dull, and under Boothroyd's tuition became something of an expert: a staggering array of artillery is deployed in the Bond books, each described with full specifications, including a long-barrelled .45 Colt Army Special, a Savage 99F, a Winchester International Experimental .308 target rifle and a number of spear guns. Scaramanga, of course, totes a gold-plated single-action Colt .45.

Boothroyd loaned Fleming his own Smith & Wesson .38, which the artist Richard Chopping used as a model for the cover of
From Russia with Love
. Fleming's promise that this would make Boothroyd's gun ‘for ever famous' was only a slight exaggeration, since the effect on its owner was exactly
that. In
Dr No
, ‘Major Boothroyd' is the name given to the secret service armourer, along with a flattering encomium from M: ‘You may not know it, 007, but Major Boothroyd's the greatest small-arms expert in the world.' In the films, the characters of Q and Major Boothroyd are melded together, appearing in every film except
Live and Let Die
and
Casino Royale
. Boothroyd was now for ever famous.

Fleming's interest in machines found its most extreme (and expensive) expression in his love of cars. He wrote, and avidly read, motoring journalism, fell in love with cars passionately and promiscuously, and penned the most famous book about a car ever written:
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
– published in 1964, the year of his death. Fleming himself owned a diverse succession of cars, from humble bangers as a young man to the magnificent black Ford Thunderbird he bought when he was famous, a car Ann Fleming considered ‘above our price bracket and below our age range', which was probably why Ian loved it. Fleming was barely out of his teens when, on a long stretch of empty road near Henley, he reached 100 mph in a 3-litre Bugatti. At the age of twenty-two he bought a smart, black, two-seater Buick, in which he toured the Continent, developing a lifelong affection for the motoring holiday. From the black Buick he moved to a red Graham-Paige, then to a Morris Oxford, then to a 2.5-litre black Riley.

For a man who wrote with such relish about the thrill of driving fast, and boasted of the times he had exceeded 100
mph, Fleming rather surprisingly became a stickler for road safety, and campaigned for road signs to make the dangers more apparent. A ‘motorcyclist trying to break the sound barrier . . . is aiming a loaded gun from the moment he leaves the garage', he declared. Though he wrecked his Thunderbird in 1961 after driving into an ice-cream van, Fleming was himself a good and restrained driver, which is more than can be said of Bond, who exhibits all the symptoms of road rage – shouting ‘Silly bastard!' when forced to overtake on the inside. In Fleming's expert hands, cars became a form of costume for the players in the drama. While Drax drives his German Mercedes, Blofeld is to be found behind the wheel of a vulgar red Maserati, and Goldfinger luxuriates in his vast, gold 1925 Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow, an overweight monster of a car which must have been hell to drive without the invention of modern power-steering. If the villains' cars represent power, wealth and a certain cruel sophistication, then the cars driven by the Bond women are pure sex: Tracy di Vincenzo's Lancia Flaminia Zagato Spyder gives off a ‘sexy boom' as she guns its engines. Domino Vitali drives a natty blue MG in
Thunderball
, while Tilly Masterton steers a grey convertible Triumph TR3. Fleming was conflicted about women drivers. In a typically sexist way, he thought that women tended to chat and lose concentration in cars, and considered a woman behind a wheel to be ‘a mild hazard'. When Bond arrrives in New York in
Live and Let Die
, he is amazed by the number of
women drivers in America. On the other hand, Bond himself finds nothing, except a gunfight, more exciting than ‘being passed at speed by a pretty girl'.

Just as he relied on experts to help him with the details of guns and rocketry, so Fleming recruited technical assistance to organise Bond's garage, namely Aubrey Forshaw, the head of Pan Books and a connoisseur of large, fast cars. Bond's first car is the battleship-grey 1933 4.5-litre Bentley convertible with French Marchal headlamps and Amherst Villiers supercharger. This last modification was a characteristically generous plug for a friend: Amherst Villiers was a highly successful engineer who went on to become a painter, executing an excellent portrait of Fleming himself. When working on
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
, Fleming asked Villiers to design a car that was ‘really snazzy-looking to excite the imagination of children', thus forming a link between Bond's first car and Fleming's last. Bond bought the Bentley, we are told, ‘almost new', in 1933, cherished it throughout the war, and services it with doting care. Indeed, his relationship with the car is rather more loving than with most of his women: he ‘drove it hard and well with an almost sensual pleasure'. Bond's taste for Bentleys can be traced back to 1930, when Fleming reported on the Le Mans 24-hour race for Reuters and witnessed the great Anglo-German contest between the 6.6-litre Bentley Speed Six and the 7.1-litre SS Mercedes-Benz. The great white Mercedes, driven by Rudolph Caracciola and Christian Werner, made a deep
impression on Fleming, and the race is rerun in
Moonraker
, when Bond's Bentley is engaged in a thrilling race with Hugo Drax's Mercedes 300SL. Bond's Bentley is written off soon afterwards, but before long he is back behind the wheel of another, now a Mark II Bentley Continental (a mistake, he apparently meant a Mark VI), this one fitted with a Mark IV engine, Arnott supercharger and magnetic clutch: ‘The Locomotive'.

Fleming also changed cars regularly. After a succession of Renaults and an unsuccessful Daimler, with money from the film rights to
Casino Royale
, Fleming decided in 1955 to splash out on an American car. While staying with American friends, he had been introduced to a peculiar motorised hybrid (or mongrel): the ‘Studillac', a Studebaker with a Cadillac engine. Ian test-drove the car, hit 80 mph, and was pulled over by the American cops, something that never happened to James Bond. Sure enough, the Studillac duly screeches into
Diamonds Are Forever
, when Felix Leiter introduces the beast with the explanation: ‘You couldn't have anything better than this body.' Fleming called the Studillac ‘a bomb of a motor car'. Eventually he settled on the Ford Thunderbird, and waxed poetic about its sheer power: ‘When, on occasion, you can do a hundred without danger of going off the edge of this small island, you have not only the knowledge that you have an extra 20 mph in reserve, but the feel of it.' Ann nicknamed him ‘Thunderbird', not entirely without mockery.

Bond drives three different Bentleys in the books, and only one Aston Martin, in
Goldfinger
, yet this is the car with which he will be forever associated, thanks again to the films. Bond selects the Aston Martin DB3 from the secret service pool. One senses that Fleming considers the car a little ostentatious, since Bond's cover at the time is that of a flashy young buck: it is grey, and fully equipped with headlights that can change colour to provide disguise in the event of a night-time chase, a radio receiver, reinforced bumpers and a Colt .45 in a secret compartment. In the films, Bond's cars are fitted with every sort of device, starting in 1963 with a car phone (then the height of luxury and cutting-edge sophistication), and going on to include ejector seats, tyreshredders, weapons systems, anti-pursuit mechanisms, and so on. Both Fleming and Bond took pleasure in modifying cars, and in
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
Fleming invented the ultimate convertible. Yet both loved cars less for their accoutrements than for the pure pleasure of driving, the ‘fine, deep exhaust note'. For Fleming, cars meant style and escapism; for Bond, the mighty Bentley is ‘his only personal hobby'.

Fleming's knowledge of gadgets and machines was more than merely a boyish enthusiasm for technology. By anchoring his fiction in things he had seen, used, driven and researched, the author placed Bond firmly in a high-tech, glamorous reality. Readers could sense that just as Bond came from somewhere real, so the weapons he uses and the cars he drives have a provenance, albeit an exclusive one,
in the real world. As a collector of facts and things and people, Fleming knew that the essence of excitement was to convince the reader of an underlying authenticity. ‘I do take a lot of my plots from life,' he said. ‘They are certainly bizarre, but they are also made up of real things.'

 

006
Bond Girls

It is a mark of James Bond's cultural reach that, for better or worse, a ‘Bond Girl' has attained a specific meaning in modern parlance, with either positive or negative connotations depending on your point of view (and, perhaps, your gender). A Bond Girl is beautiful, for sure, and sassy and sporty; she is also sexually available, and unlikely to make a fuss when killed off, either literally or metaphorically, at the end of the last instalment to make way for a new love interest. She tends to be good at one-liners, but less inclined to intellectual conversation. In the books, at least, Bond's women are often damaged, in need of male protection, and have some small physical flaw. Like Bond's cars, they are attractive commodities, subject to modifications and improvements, but they can also be exchanged for newer, faster models without much regret. The Bond Girl is a very specific postwar fantasy. Fleming had enjoyed an expansive
sex life before the war, but the war had loosened sexual mores greatly. Here was a hero enjoying sex, not merely outside marriage, but effectively without responsibilities or guilt.

Sex does not play a part in the lives of Bulldog Drummond or Richard Hannay. Indeed, Bond is really the first major British thriller hero to have an active sex life. Bond's attitudes to women caused outrage, titillation and amusement in roughly equal parts: they made a generation of men and boys very overexcited, and a generation of feminists extremely angry. Bond saves the girl; the girl sleeps with him: it is a simple contract. But even those critics prepared to see Bond's bed-hopping for the fantasy it was found something chilly and unpleasant in Bond's sexual licence and emotional reserve. In the films, Bond's sex life attained levels of priapism that would merit serious medical attention or industrial supplies of Viagra in a real human being. Henry Chancellor has calculated that Bond sleeps with just fourteen women in twelve books, between 1953 and 1964, of whom only five disappear between one book and the next, compared to an astonishing fifty-eight conquests in the first twenty Bond films. Readers who liked the Bond women in the books looked askance at the parade of almost characterless beauties being loved and left in each successive film. The writer Anthony Burgess wrote that ‘the girls in the Bond films tend . . . to be nothing more than animated centrefolds. In the books they are credible and lovable because of some humanising flaw.'