Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica (43 page)

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.

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.’

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.’

One of the extras was Karen Schleifer, niece of Marion Simmons, who now lived in her aunt’s house, Glory Be. She remembers one evening at the Sans Souci when filming had finished chatting to members of the crew. ‘So where is the famous Goldeneye?’ they asked her. When she replied that it was just up the coast, they asked to be taken for a look to pay homage to where it had all begun. Later during the filming, Roger Moore visited the house as well. He says he felt ‘a great sense of awe, and was quite humbled to think everything started within those simple rooms with the first Bond book’.

Goldeneye was put on the market by the Fleming family soon after Caspar’s death. Blanche Blackwell still kept an eye on the place and swam off the beach. In 1976, Chris Blackwell took Bob Marley there for a look around. ‘I’d just paid him seventy thousand pounds in royalties,’ says Chris. ‘I talked Bob into buying Goldeneye – he said he would always let my mother swim there. But then he got cold feet, said it was too posh, so the next year, when I was flush again, I bought it myself. I thought of living there, but I never did – I just went there sometimes, swam there sometimes, let friends and family stay there sometimes. It was a house I used as an entertaining place.’

In 1989, Blackwell sold Island Records to Polygram, a deal that allowed him to invest in films and hotels and which eventually led to the development of Goldeneye as a high-end resort. In a tradition started by Sir Anthony Eden, guests are today encouraged to plant trees on behalf of the Oracabessa Foundation, which supports local sports and schools and has recently started a project to undo the damage caused to Fleming’s beloved reef by pollution and overfishing. These guests have included film stars, ex-American presidents, models and
musicians. (Sting wrote ‘Every Breath You Take’ at Goldeneye; U2 wrote the theme tune to the
GoldenEye
film here.) It is as close as Jamaica now gets to the glory days of Sunset Lodge and Round Hill in the late forties and early fifties. A nearby airstrip has been renamed ‘Ian Fleming International Airport’, and Goldeneye plays host to film and other creative festivals.

Tourism is now the key business for Jamaica, outstripped in foreign earnings only by remittances from the huge Jamaican diaspora in North America, the UK and elsewhere. The bauxite industry on the island, undercut by cheaper sources, particularly in Australia, is largely in mothballs.

In the 1970s, the PNP government of Michael Manley, Norman and Edna’s son, moved the country sharply to the left, ending its alignment with the West, and under a programme of ‘democratic socialism’ sought to nationalise industry and banks. Manley explained his thinking in an interview with a US television station in 1977: ‘There are tremendous social pressures in Jamaica. Jamaica, like almost all countries that had a long colonial experience, is a product of that experience and reflected at the time of independence sharp class divisions, a very small and highly privileged elite, who were really the beneficiaries of colonialism and that imperialist process of exploitation, tremendous poverty, dangerous gaps between the haves
and the have-nots; all those are colonial legacies and all those are charged with social tension. A lot of what we have tried to do as a government is to address those problems.’

The experiment led to a further mass exodus of professional Jamaicans, a withdrawal of US support and credit, and the return in 1980, in an election marred by severe violence, of a right-wing administration. When Manley returned to government later in the decade, he was far more pragmatic. However, inequalities and divisions remain deep in Jamaica.

This has led many towards a very Fleming-like romanticisation of the imperial past. Pearl Flynn comments: ‘We were looking forward to a better Jamaica, more jobs and so on, but people weren’t satisfied. We would have been better off without independence.’ Chris Blackwell concedes: ‘If you speak to most older Jamaicans, they will probably say that things were better before.’ His mother Blanche declared that independence was ‘the worst thing that could have happened to Jamaicans – they were simply not ready for it’. Others see the Manley experiment of the 1970s as a much-needed effort to wrest the country’s wealth and assets from a tiny elite who, along with foreign interests, arguably still control most of Jamaica. When, in 2005, he was asked about Jamaica at the time of filming
Dr No,
Timothy Moxon, who played Strangways, responded: ‘That wasn’t altogether a completely happy time. People were selected for jobs because of their colour and it was very Jim Crow, really. We’re going through a difficult time at the moment but I’m a great believer that Jamaica will come out on top again, as it always has done in the past. However, I don’t think Coward or Fleming would have cared for it much at the moment.’

At the time of Fleming’s death, his books had sold thirty million copies and been translated into eighteen languages. Within two years, after the success of the
Goldfinger
and
Thunderball
films, sales had
nearly doubled. The films were the dominant British movies of the 1960s and exported an image of Britain that was enjoyed globally, as all-pervasive as the Beatles (whose first album came out in 1962, the year of the first Bond film). The books remain popular, and the films go from strength to strength, spawning a host of impersonators and parodies as well as taking over $5 billion dollars at the box office.