Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica (35 page)

On her arrival at Goldeneye, Ann discovered that Blanche had been working hard on the garden, and promptly ripped out all the new plants and threw them over the cliff into the sea. John Gielgud, who was staying with Noël Coward, came over for lunch. He found Ann ‘wizened, and gossipy … I felt they were on the verge of a frightful row.’ Gielgud also met Blanche shortly afterwards, describing her as ‘Noel’s new cicerone and apparently Ian’s mistress, a very rich widow with a toothy smile and Joyce Grenfell voice.’ By now, Ann was referring to Blanche as ‘Thunderbird’s Jamaican wife’.

The weather was again terrible. We have endured six days of rain and gales,’ Ann wrote to Evelyn Waugh on 26 January. ‘The sofa and sheets are all sopping, sticky damp and the ill-fitting shutters drip all day: the rivers belch yellow water and coconut husks into the sea in widening circles of bile and filth, the dainty beach is piled high with refuse, and landslides block all the roads.’

In the meantime, the highly efficient and prim governess was getting on Fleming’s nerves. She had arrived in a ‘pleated bonnet’, causing Ian to give Ann a pound and say, ‘Take her to buy a straw hat, and forbid any raffia decorations.’ When she took too long in the one
rather primitive bathroom, he banged on the door, shouting, ‘Lights out, Miss Potterton!’

Hugh Gaitskell had become very adept at ‘coincidentally’ being in the same place as Ann (just as Ian had done when Ann was married to Rothermere). A couple of weeks into the trip, he turned up for a few days’ ‘fact-finding mission’ in Jamaica, much to the displeasure of his political party, who warned that the ‘Eden Goldeneye legend’ would make their leader the butt of silly jokes. Ann took him rafting on the Rio Grande, but the river was in spate, causing him to be thrown into the water: ‘He disappeared for several minutes, and we were about to form a human chain when he rolled onto the shore like an amiable hippo.’

By now, the English press had cottoned on to the affair, and there followed a game of cat-and-mouse, with the local
Express
stringer emerging as the most consistent pest, to the extent that at one point Ann was driven to send a telegram to Beaverbrook to call him off. While she was doing so at the post office in Oracabessa, Gaitskell, or ‘Heavenly’ as Ann had taken to calling him, waited in his car in a discreet side street. But he was spotted there by the
Express
man, at which point he panicked and sped off along the coast road to Port Maria.

From Johnson’s hardware store, Gaitskell telephoned Morris Cargill, who had been appointed his chaperone, to come and collect him. He had some of Ann’s belongings in his car that needed to be returned to Goldeneye. Cargill arrived to find the Leader of the Opposition hiding behind a keg of nails. Gaitskell concealed himself in the back of Cargill’s pick-up truck, and when they reached the house, he jumped out and hid behind some bushes. Here Ann found him and took him back to his hotel. By this point, Ian had had enough and took himself off to Bolt to see Blanche. It was all a huge mess.

‘Not at all nice there,’ Ann reported to Evelyn Waugh when she returned to England. To her friend Diana Cooper she wrote: ‘The
gold’s out of Goldeneye. I wish I did not remain in love with Ian – isn’t it odd?’

Still, the book that would come out of all this chaos was one of Fleming’s very best.

Thunderball
had begun its complicated gestation in the autumn of 1958, when Ivar Bryce introduced Fleming to a young film producer called Kevin McClory. McClory wanted to make a James Bond film, but from a new, specially written story featuring plenty of underwater scenes. Together with an experienced English scriptwriter, Jack Whittingham, and Ian’s American friend Ernie Cuneo, Fleming and McClory worked on a number of ideas that eventually produced a plot in which the villains steal two nuclear bombs and then use them to blackmail the US and UK governments. Unfortunately, the film would go the way of other earlier aborted Bond TV and movie projects, but in the meantime Fleming wrote the ‘novel of the film’, failing to credit the others for their input. This would lead to a long and protracted legal case that significantly contributed to his poor health.

Thunderball’
s most significant departure was the abandonment of SMERSH and the Cold War. They had provided the ‘motivation’ for all the Bond villains so far, with the exception of the American gangsters of
Diamonds are Forever
(and possibly Dr No, who was prepared to sell his captured rockets to the Chinese if they outbid the Soviets). Instead, there is a new villainous organisation, SPECTRE, ‘The Special Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion’, manned by a potpourri of off-the-shelf baddies: ex-Gestapo, crime syndicates including the Mafia, drugs barons and former spies now freelance. The manuscript shows that the ‘R’ had originally stood for ‘Revolution’, but this was changed, making SPECTRE entirely unbothered by political or ideological motivation.

Curiously, near the beginning of the book, Bond reflects that ‘with the Cold War wearing off, it was not like the old days’. It has been
suggested that Fleming believed that by the time his new book was published, this would indeed be the case; but that hope would have been extraordinarily misplaced, with the Berlin stand-off, the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban missile crisis just around the corner.

Another explanation for the intriguing move from SMERSH to SPECTRE is that Fleming felt that to put a British agent in the front line against the Russians, leading the battle against ‘Redland’, would have now, post-Suez, tested the credulity of his readers. But, to be frank, the ludicrous SPECTRE tested that credulity far more. Or it may have been, as Bond explains, that the British security forces now had their hands full dealing with the rapid retreat from empire and, as such, did not have the resources to fight the Cold War as well. In
Thunderball,
Felix Leiter comments that ‘Peace [is] bustin’ out all over.’ But Bond replies that for his country, ‘There always seems to be something boiling up somewhere … Cyprus, Kenya, Suez.’

Or perhaps Fleming was simply sickened by the Cold War and the bad in both sides. There is an early hint of this in
Moonraker,
when M implies that the United States is as dangerously bellicose as the Soviet Union. Similarly, in
Thrilling Cities,
there is a surprising moment during Fleming’s piece on East Berlin when he quotes an experienced ‘independent operator’ in the spy ‘game’ who suggests that the Western way may not be the best way: to intelligent East Germans, his informant says, the success of the Soviet Union in round one of the Space Race, which had triggered the ‘Sputnik Crisis’ in the US, had made a big impression. ‘The future with Communism looks just as good, if not better, than life in Europe and America. Such people are not attracted to democratic chaos,’ he tells Fleming. ‘They are quite sure they are on the winning side … Why should they exchange these solid things for the trashy “comforts” of the West?’ In
Thunderball,
the moment of most seriousness comes from the much-admired commander of the US nuclear submarine, who admits to being ‘terrified by the whole business. Got a wife and two children … These atomic weapons are
just too damned dangerous.’ In early 1963, Fleming was interviewed by the Jamaica
Gleaner
and asked about nuclear disarmament: ‘I am all for it,’ he replied. ‘The two big poker players, America and Russia are evenly poised and the bluff and double bluff going on all the time is above my head. I hope it will all settle down in the end as I expect the two powers are so evenly matched, they will finally decide to call the game off and we shall all be able to settle down and not worry about it any more.’

Maybe Fleming’s decision to exclude the Cold War and SMERSH from
Thunderball
was a curious combination of all these contradictory explanations. Most importantly, SPECTRE is fantastical, gothic and melodramatic, even fun: the culmination of all the self-deprecatory remarks Fleming made about Bond being ‘adolescent pillow-fantasy’; the result of Ann and her circle’s many derogatory comments about how juvenile his books were; an acknowledgment about what he now knew his readers wanted; the logical culmination of all those knowing asides. In
Thunderball,
Leiter points out, ‘Planes with atom bombs don’t get stolen in real life’; on another occasion, Bond laughs: ‘It’s a damned good sequence for a comic strip.’ This self-awareness and silliness, a daydream on a Jamaican beach rather than the grim reality of, say, Le Carré’s seedy safe houses with their instant coffee, is the fatal flaw of the Bond books as serious spy fiction, but their greatest strength as enduring British cultural properties.

The leader of SPECTRE is Ernst Stavro Blofeld. The purity of his apolitical villainy, combined with his recurrence in two further novels, made him Bond’s Moriarty, the best known and even best loved of all the Fleming villains. He is, of course, a physical freak, a non-smoker and non-drinker and of mixed race, born of a Polish father and Greek mother.

Together with an arresting new villain,
Thunderball’
s setting and plot allowed Fleming to play to his Jamaica-inspired strengths. The many underwater scenes are superb, including a gripping night-time
mission across a rubbish-strewn harbour, the horror of the downed aircraft – the ‘squirming, red-eyed catacomb’ – where octopuses are feasting on the decaying bodies of the crew, and the epic botched ambush at the end.

SPECTRE has chosen the lawless, free-wheeling space of the Caribbean in which to operate, where their scheme is headed by Blofeld’s number two, Emilio Largo, described as ‘an adventurer, a predator on the herd. Two hundred years before, he would have been a pirate – not one of the jolly ones of the story books, but a man like Blackbeard, a bloodstained cut-throat who scythed his way through people towards gold.’ His cover story is that with the help of a pirate’s map, he is searching for treasure, ‘a sunken galleon thickly overgrown with coral’. For here, Fleming tells us, used to be ‘the haunt of every famous pirate in the Western Atlantic’. At the end of the underwater fight, the men return with wounds ‘that looked as if they belonged to the days of the pirates’. It’s all told with swashbuckling relish.

The same year as
Thunderball
was written, Fleming lent Goldeneye to writer Graham Greene, in the hope that he in return would provide an introduction for a new omnibus edition of Bond. Blanche helped look after the guests, although she didn’t like Greene. He was ‘obsessed by drugs’, she says. ‘I asked him if he’d ever tried ganja and quick as a flash, he said he’d like to, although he said he’d never taken drugs in his life. Which I think was a big, blackhearted lie!’ Blanche asked her overseer to bring some over to Goldeneye. ‘He wanted me to stay and watch how he reacted. Why should I? I left him to it. I went home to bed.’

Greene and his mistress also had a falling-out with Violet, accusing her of drinking their whisky and overcharging for groceries from Port Maria. Violet responded that they had soiled their sheets, and the odd tot of whisky was to steel herself to wash them. To Greene’s fury,
Fleming sided with Violet as his code demanded; the introduction for the omnibus edition would not be forthcoming.

But a far better endorsement was round the corner. On his way back from Jamaica in March 1960, Ian flew to Washington, where he visited his friend ‘Oatsie’ Leiter. Oatsie was an old friend of the Kennedys from her youth in South Carolina. She had introduced Jack Kennedy to his first Bond book,
Casino Royale,
when he had been ill in bed in Newport, Rhode Island, five years earlier. In 1957, his wife, Jacqueline, had given a copy of
From Russia, with Love
to the head of the CIA, Allen Dulles, saying: ‘Here is a book you should have, Mr Director.’ From then on, it became a tradition that Dulles and Jack Kennedy would exchange copies of Bond novels as they appeared, Dulles adding notes in the margins. He later commented that ‘The modern spy could not permit himself to become the target of luscious dames … I fear that James Bond in real life would have had a thick dossier in the Kremlin after his first exploit, and would not have survived the second.’

‘Oatsie’ was going to the Kennedys’ for dinner that night, and after lunch she was driving Ian along Georgetown’s P Street in her white Chrysler when she saw the couple out walking. She stopped the car and asked them if she could bring a visitor to dinner with them that evening. Who’s that?’ asked Jack Kennedy politely. She introduced the two men. ‘Mr Ian Fleming – Senator Kennedy.’ Kennedy studied Fleming for a moment and said as they shook hands, ‘James Bond? But, of course, by all means – do please come.’

Fleming had the
Thunderball
manuscript in his suitcase at the time, in which the United States’ vulnerable southern flank is threatened with nuclear weapons. As the captain of the US submarine remarks: ‘any one of these little sandy cays around here could hold the whole of the United States to ransom’. Over dinner, Kennedy asked Fleming what James Bond would do to get rid of Fidel Castro, who had come to power in Cuba the year before, and the previous month had signed
a deal to ship part of his country’s sugar crop to the Soviet Union in exchange for a loan of $20 million in convertible currency and $80 million worth of Soviet goods.

Fleming, clearly on top form, turned the whole thing into a joke, explaining that Bond would drop leaflets saying that the fallout from American nuclear tests provoked a strange reaction in men with facial hair, reducing them to sexual impotence. All the famous ‘bearded ones’ of the uprising would immediately shave off their beards, and the revolution would be over. (Ian’s own views on Cuba and Castro were probably close to those expressed by Scaramanga in
The Man with the Golden Gun:
‘If the Americans once let up on their propaganda and needling and so forth, perhaps even make a friendly gesture or two, all the steam’ll go out of the little man.’)

The next day, Allen Dulles heard of Fleming’s suggestion and unsuccessfully tried to set up a meeting with him; Ian was already on his way home. But Dulles might have taken it seriously. In
Red Heat: Conspiracy, Murder and the Cold War in the Caribbean,
Alex von Tunzelmann adds a coda to her telling of the Fleming-Kennedy dinner: ‘Shortly afterwards, the CIA agent David Atlee Phillips remembered being told of a box of cigars, impregnated with a strong depilatory, that would be given to Fidel and would make his beard – indeed all his body hair – fall out. The agency also developed a thallium powder, which could be dusted on his shoes to the same effect.’ Writing about Ian just after his death, Dulles confessed that he was ‘always interested in the novel and secret “gadgetry” Fleming described’, and having read about the homing device in
Goldfinger,
‘put my people in CIA to work on this as a serious project’.