Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica (36 page)

Fleming worked the Kennedy connection hard, sending all his later books to Jack, his brother Robert and their sister Eunice Shriver. JFK was intrigued by Fleming, often asking the
Sunday Times
correspondent in Washington, Fleming’s friend Henry Brandon, for news of him. ‘Kennedy was fascinated by the line dividing Ian’s real life from the
fantasy life that went into his books,’ Brandon explained. ‘He often asked me how such an intelligent, mature, urbane sort of man could have such an element of odd imagining in his make-up.’ When a few years later Ann met Bobby Kennedy at a dinner, she found him ‘obsessed by Ian’s books’.

Jack Kennedy would have an immense impact on Ian’s career. Fleming’s books had so far sold respectably in the United States, but not on the same level as in Britain. Then on 17 March 1961,
Life
magazine ran a piece on the President’s favourite books. In ninth place, just above Stendhal’s
Scarlet and Black,
was
From Russia, with Love
by Ian Fleming. It is hard to overestimate the importance of the article. From that moment, the Bond boom in the United States began.

The magazine publication was quickly exploited with a major push from Fleming’s US paperback publisher. One campaign, run a few months after the Bay of Pigs debacle, read: ‘INCREASE IN TENSION’. It showed a picture of the White House, with a single upstairs light burning, an arrow pointing to it labelled ‘You can bet on it he’s reading one of these Ian Fleming thrillers.’ Thereafter Fleming became the best-selling thriller writer in America.

But just as huge commercial success came his way, Fleming’s James Bond lifestyle – the Morland cigarettes and the cocktails – well and truly caught up with him. For the remaining few years of Fleming’s life, Bond would hit new height after new height, while his creator’s health and well-being went into freefall.

1961–2 The Spy Who Loved Me; On Her Majesty’s Secret Service

There were moments, as he grew older, when with his heavy eyelids and mixed look of determination and abstraction, his face looked like the sculptured mask of melancholy.

William Plomer on Ian Fleming

Thunderball’s
heroine, Domino Vitali, named after another rare Caribbean bird, is everything Bond could wish for in a woman: she is beautiful and spirited in a slightly damaged way; she loves scuba diving and has romantic dreams about the Royal Navy; and, Bond notices approvingly, she ‘drives like a man’. But what provides him with his excuse for meeting her is her smoking habit.

Domino is in a Nassau tobacconist’s asking for cigarettes that taste so disgusting they will help her stop smoking. Bond makes his move. ‘I’m the world’s authority on giving up smoking,’ he tells her. ‘I do it constantly. You’re lucky I happen to be handy.’ They then go to a bar, where her idea of a ‘soft’ drink is a double Bloody Mary.

The beginning of the novel sees Bond suffering from his drinking, waking hung-over from a night that included eleven whiskies. ‘When he coughed – smoking too much goes with drinking too much and doubles the hangover – a cloud of small luminous black spots swam across his vision … Bond swallowed down two Phensics and reached for the Enos.’ He has ‘that nagging sense of morning guilt that one is slowly wrecking one’s body’. Later that day, he meets M, who reads part of his latest medical report: ‘Despite many previous warnings, he admits to smoking sixty cigarettes a day … the officer’s average daily consumption of alcohol is in the region of half a bottle of spirits.’

M sends him to Shrublands health farm to dry out. The scenes there, where Bond is prodded, weighed and checked, show that Fleming was now clearly a man in the grip of the doctors. The previous year he had given up his
Sunday Times
job (although he was kept on a retainer of £1,000 a year), but the removal of this burden failed to improve his health. Ann’s letters from the summer and autumn of 1960 include several references to his new weakness, breathlessness and high blood pressure. In September, he spent a week at a ‘liver cure resort’ in Brittany.

At the beginning of 1961, Ann and Ian flew to Jamaica and Ian arrived suffering from bronchitis. ‘Ian had a high fever and was fearfully cross,’ Ann reported to Evelyn Waugh. ‘Happily Noël Coward came to call and proved himself a Florence Nightingale, changing Thunderbird’s sopping pajamas, turning the mattress, and fetching him iced drinks. Noël has always found T-B fearfully attractive and jumped at the opportunity to handle him. While Noël fetched ice cubes from the Frigidaire T-B’s language was something horrible, he blamed me for exposing him to homosexual approaches.’

In his diary, Coward reported a depressing scene: ‘Annie looking exhausted and strained’, Ian ‘scarlet and sweating in a sopping bed and in a hellish temper. Their connubial situation is rocky … My personal opinion is that although he is still fond of Annie, the physical side of
it, in him, has worn away. It is extraordinary how many of my friends delight in torturing one another.’

Part of the conflict involved Jamaica, now hated by Ann, Coward wrote, but still loved by Ian. She wanted him to sell Goldeneye to help pay for the renovations to a huge new house she planned to buy – Sevenhampton near Swindon – but Ian refused to do so. (In the event, the money was found from elsewhere.)

Ann was not alone in her new dislike. Coward himself wrote to a friend at the end of 1960 that he had ‘taken against Jamaica in a big way … the once peaceful island is full of noises – noises of tourists and noises of underlying discontent. All wages and prices have risen astronomically. The roads are, mostly, in a dreadful state and the whole atmosphere has changed.’

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.