James Bond: The Secret History Read online

  To my Dad

  FRANK EGAN

  who allowed my mother to name me after Mr Connery

  and whose copy of Live and Let Die was life-changing

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  FOREWORD BY JEREMY DUNS

  INTRODUCTION

  1: A CONVOLUTED CREATOR

  2: BIRTH OF BOND

  3: ENTER: THE SECRET AGENT

  4: HEADWAY

  5: BACKLASHES AND BOOSTS

  6: THE CELLULOID AGENT

  7: YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE

  8: WORLD DOMINATION

  9: CONTINUING THE LEGACY

  10: AN UNCERTAIN ERA

  11: DING-DONG!

  12: A FRANCHISE IN PERIL

  13: THE DINOSAUR LIVES AGAIN

  14: THE BLONDE BOMBSHELL

  15: JAMES BOND WILL RETURN

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  PLATES

  COPYRIGHT

  FOREWORD

  Books about James Bond appear with the tedious inevitability of an unloved season, but I can’t think of any that have either the range or tenor of James Bond: The Secret History.

  When one knows a lot about a subject, it’s easy to miss the forest for the trees, and, while this book offers an excellent overview of the history of the Bond phenomenon for casual fans, it also provides a lot of information and insights that cast the familiar in surprising new angles. Covering Ian Fleming’s books and short stories, the continuation authors, the comics, the video games and of course the film series, Sean Egan charts the passage of 007 from 1952, when Fleming first sat down to write a Bond story, to the present day, and does so in prose both fluid and studded with astute and often amusing opinions (even if I don’t agree with all of them). He has interviewed Fleming intimates, Bond scholars and movie cast and crew to give us an insider’s view of the development of the icon, debunking several myths along the way.

  ‘You forgot the first rule of mass media,’ Bond screams into the ears of media mogul Elliot Carver in the closing act of Tomorrow Never Dies. ‘Give the people what they want!’ Egan demonstrates in this very fast and highly enjoyable read that, through all the ups and downs, Bond producers Eon haven’t ever forgotten that rule – and show no sign of doing so any time soon.

  Jeremy Duns

  Author,

  The Dark Chronicles

  Diamonds In The Rough: Investigations into the

  Worlds of Ian Fleming and James Bond

  Duns on Bond

  Rogue Royale: The Lost Bond Film by

  the ‘Shakespeare of Hollywood’

  Mariehamn, October 2015

  INTRODUCTION

  James Bond first made an appearance in 1953 with the novel Casino Royale.

  The writing of his creator Ian Fleming provided a new paradigm for action heroes. By blending existing thriller ingredients with his own innovations, he ramped up the power, sophistication and reach of the genre.

  His protagonist stood square against Soviet evil even as it was acknowledged that his moral landscape had been complicated by the real-life treachery of the Cambridge spy ring; he was unapologetically depicted as having a full and non-marital sex life, where such behaviour was usually the preserve of villains; instead of engaging in clean, consequence-free fisticuffs, he received and dealt violence that was often untidy, grisly and a matter for regret; despite the manifold fantasy elements of his adventures, he made his way through a world recognisable as real from the brand names that Fleming took the uncommon step of sprinkling into his text. On top of all this was a newspaperman’s evocative and sophisticated writing style that left Fleming’s rough-hewn populist influences in the dust.

  Despite his capturing the public imagination, the British secret-intelligence agent codenamed ‘007’ should logically long have been consigned to the dustbin of history.

  In 1953, the Cold War was still raging and Britain’s Empire was sufficiently intact as to make plausible the idea that the UK could be an important player on the world espionage stage. More than half a century later, the Iron Curtain has long been torn down and Bond’s home country has been reduced to a geopolitically insignificant island. Meanwhile, sexual intercourse – casual or committed – has been turned, by the advent of reliable contraception, from a taboo into an unremarkable part of everyday life. Depictions of violence – whether celebratory or regretful – are no longer noteworthy. Even the fact that Fleming saw Bond as a ‘blunt instrument’ of state is a dated concept in a world that has long switched its affections from notions of duty to ones of personal liberty.

  Yet instead of disappearing into the vault reserved for the once audacious, now merely embarrassing – see Harold Robbins – the man with a ‘Licence to Kill’ is more popular than ever. Simplify the character as they may have, the Bond films adapted from Fleming’s prose constitute the most successful franchise in cinema history. Meanwhile, the original, grittier books still hold such sway with more intellectual palates that renowned literary novelists such as Sebastian Faulks and William Boyd have been persuaded by the Fleming estate to write Bond continuation novels. Underlining Bond’s media and generation-straddling allure, N64’s GoldenEye 007 from 1997 was the most successful video game of all time. Bond film catchphrases such as ‘Bond, James Bond’ and ‘Shaken, not stirred’ have embedded themselves in society’s lexicon. Bond’s modus operandi, weaponry and jargon have become the template for all secret-agent stories. Even the glossy, gargantuan Bond-movie theme songs have created an instantly recognisable archetype.

  The Bond industry has not been without hiccups. Fleming quickly began to resent writing the Bond books he tapped out at his Jamaican holiday home. He repeatedly made weary noises to his editor about his current manuscript being the last 007 novel. His shrivelling inspiration eventually led to his co-opting for a book the plot of a dormant collaborative Bond screenplay, which resulted in an unholy legal tangle and severe stress that may have hastened his own death.

  The Bond films have periodically been struck by existential crises. While the public lapped up any Bond featuring the original cinema 007, the recasting process necessitated by Sean Connery’s 1967 departure raised doubts about whether the series had a future without him. His successor, George Lazenby, made only one film; Roger Moore took time to settle in and was always hated by sections of the Bond fanbase; Timothy Dalton was a Bond actor to whom the public never really took; Daniel Craig’s casting initially provoked a tsunami of contempt. The traumatic mid-seventies rupture of the production partnership of Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman – who originated the series – threw a huge spanner in the works. This, though, was as nothing compared with legal battles in the 1990s that almost destroyed the franchise.

  Yet Bond has ultimately proven impervious to any obstacle thrown in his path, whether it be by one of his larger-than-life adversaries such as Rosa Klebb, Oddjob or Ernst Stavro Blofeld or by the waxings and wanings of public affection and the changes in political trends. He has persevered where his real-life prototypes have passed away, and has retained a massive cultural presence where other fictional action heroes such as Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan and the Saint have been severely reduced in significance. He has also outlasted his countless imitators, from Danger Man to The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Even the mocking by the likes of Austin Powers and Johnny English of the shapes thrown by him and his antagonists could not dent Bond’s appeal. Skyfall (2012) took more money at cinemas than any of the previous twenty-two official Bond films, even allowing for inflation.

  James Bond: The Secret History seeks to explain the reason for Bond’s longevity. By exploring all aspects of the billion-dollar 007 phenomenon, from bo
oks to television to radio to films to music to comics to video games to merchandise, it tries to unravel the reasons why what began in the mind of a rather melancholy newspaperman as a niche product for a select class turned into a globe-straddling icon like none before or since.

  A CONVOLUTED CREATOR

  When in the mid-1960s the James Bond motion-picture franchise began taking the world by storm, a curious aspect of the craze was that it was perceived as part of a modernistic and classless zeitgeist. The swaggering, rule-bucking, increasingly gadget-wielding secret agent of the Bond films was felt to be implicitly in tune with the same reformist trend as the Beatles, Swinging London, the contraceptive pill and civil-rights demonstrations. As the News of the World put it in 1964, Bond was ‘as typical of the age as Beatlemania, juvenile delinquency or teenagers in boots’.

  It was curious because Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, was a man who simply could not have been more Establishment. In fact, Fleming’s biographer and onetime colleague John Pearson agrees that he would probably have even hated the term ‘franchise’. Pearson states of Fleming, ‘He was very much what you’d expect from his background.’ That background was quintessentially upper-class.

  Ian Lancaster Fleming was born on 28 May 1908. He had an older brother, two younger brothers and a younger half-sister. His father Valentine was a Member of Parliament at a time when that was largely a gentleman’s profession. When his father was killed in action during World War I, his Times obituary was written by no less a figure than Winston Churchill. Ian Fleming attended Eton College, the quintessential English ‘public school’ (by which is meant, private boarding school steeped in arcane tradition) and Sandhurst, the nation’s premium military academy. He also attended Munich University and the University of Geneva. Fleming excelled in languages, being proficient in German, French and Russian. His career in banking thereafter is also part of an archetypal ‘toff’ trajectory of the period, underlined by the fact that his grandfather founded the bank Robert Fleming and Company.

  Yet at the same time Fleming was not a clichéd product of his privileged upbringing. His mother pulled him out of both Eton and Sandhurst for his ‘fast’ ways. His stint as a stockbroker was not a success. ‘I must do something that entertains me,’ he told the BBC of the fact that ‘I didn’t get on very well there.’ He was hedonistic in the manner one would expect of someone with far fewer prospects in life, indulging his vices to such a degree that he was cut down shockingly young. Moreover, when, in August 1963, he appeared on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs radio programme, his choice of favourite pieces of music contained no classical works but instead was comprised exclusively of offerings by Édith Piaf, The Ink Spots, Rosemary Clooney and other examples of what most of his class would have dismissed as low culture.

  Prior to his stint in banking, Fleming worked for Reuters. He didn’t stay with the famous international news agency longer than three years, but his dissatisfaction was with the money, not the job. He said, ‘I had a wonderful time in Reuters, was a correspondent in Moscow and Berlin and all over the place. And of course I learnt there the straightforward writing style that everybody wants to have if they’re going to write books.’ Fleming eventually returned to journalism, beginning in 1945 a long-term relationship with The Sunday Times. In the half-decade preceding that, he – like so many men of his generation – had found his life and career taking a detour into the service of King and Country.

  There have been a hilarious number of docudramas positing Fleming as a man of action during World War II, among them Goldeneye and Spymaker, both subtitled The Secret Life of Ian Fleming. In point of fact, Fleming’s war was axiomatically unheroic and sedentary. He was assistant to the Director of Naval Intelligence, John Godfrey. He worked his way up the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve from lieutenant to commander, but never stepped off dry land in that capacity. He would later give James Bond the same rank and background, his creation conceding in the book Thunderball that he had been ‘supercargo’ and ‘a chocolate sailor’. It’s quite true that in his work in Room 39 of the Admiralty – the fabled nerve centre of the Naval Intelligence Division – Fleming was involved in numerous important operations and schemes involving intrigue and cunning. One was a plan that was an accidental precursor to Operation Mincemeat, the famous Allied plot to mislead the enemy with bogus documents planted on a corpse. In 1941, he even wrote the original charter of the Office of Strategic Services, precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency. However, he was almost never allowed to participate in the field, not least because it ran the risk of capture and valuable information being extracted from him by torture.

  Nonetheless, Fleming adored his work in Room 39. Pearson says of the Navy, ‘That was one thing he really did worship. That was the only organisation he belonged to which he really enjoyed and respected.’

  After the war, Fleming became foreign manager of the Kemsley newspaper group, owned by The Sunday Times. It was a job for which he was qualified on more than one level. Pearson explains, ‘He ran this press agency, a foreign news service called Mercury which he built up in the war as part of the British secret service effort within America with a lot of old secret service friends and so on.’ Some might observe that this sounds as though Fleming was playing a dual role as newspaper employee and intelligence operative. Pearson: ‘There was certainly an element of that.’

  Pearson also says, ‘Ultimately it didn’t work because the competition with Reuters was all too tough and Mercury faded. That’s when, to keep him happy, he was given a job at [the gossip column] “Atticus”.’ Fleming would also be given other tasks by the paper, including foreign assignments. In fact, for six years after his first published Bond novel, Fleming continued to work full-time for The Sunday Times.

  Not that that day job was particularly onerous. Pearson says Fleming ‘had a very cushy time at The Sunday Times’ because proprietor Lord Kemsley and his wife ‘were extremely fond of him’. Moreover, the fact that Fleming married the ex-wife of Lord Rothermere, proprietor of the Daily Mail, served, says Pearson, to grant Fleming ‘a sort of ex-facie role as almost a member of the newspaper aristocracy within The Sunday Times. He was treated much better than most journalists were. He had longer holidays and so forth.’ Indeed. Fleming negotiated a contract that allowed him to avoid the bitter English winters. He spent his annual two-month leave in Jamaica. He had fallen in love with the Caribbean island – then still a British colony – when he had occasion to visit it during the war. He bought a patch of land with its own private cove and there built a three-bedroom house, which he named Goldeneye, either after one of his wartime operations from 1940 or Carson McCullers’s novel Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941), depending on which story he felt like telling.

  Little has been written about Fleming’s journalism down the years, and his newspaper writing has not been the subject of any mainstream anthology. (An omnibus volume titled Talk of the Devil appeared in 2008 but only as part of a deluxe centenary box set of his corpus retailing at a wallet-straining minimum of £2,000.) His travelogue Thrilling Cities (1963) was enjoyable enough, if hardly substantial, while The Diamond Smugglers (1957) was an arid affair, rather like his James Bond books minus the excitement and glamour. Yet Fleming was a highly skilled newspaperman. Pearson would be something of a protégé of Fleming’s at The Sunday Times, at which Fleming secured him a job in the mid-1950s. He describes himself as ‘a sort of leg man’ for Fleming in putting together ‘Atticus’. Fleming – who overhauled a feature that had traded in high-society talk – would suggest stories to Pearson and then deftly hone his submitted copy. Pearson says, ‘I was always amazed at the speed and skill with which he would turn the raw material which I presented him with into very polished journalese.’

  The visual image of Fleming that the wider world would come to have was the one created by the photographs on the flyleaves and back covers of his Bond books. By the time of the appearance of the first of them, he was well past forty. That he would not li
ve to see sixty indicates the life of excess that was made evident in these pictures by his puffy jawline and drooping eyelids. There was a slight air of the ridiculous – even a campness – about the accoutrements with which he usually posed: a bow tie and a cigarette holder. Yet Fleming as a young man was handsome. His oval face was peculiar, but at the same time striking and sensuous. It’s little surprise that he was a ladies’ man.

  In 1952, though, he settled down, marrying Ann Charteris. Their relationship long preceded their nuptials. Charteris had been Fleming’s lover during her marriages to both the 3rd Baron O’Neill and 2nd Viscount Rothermere. She had given birth to Fleming’s stillborn daughter during the latter marriage, and it was over her adultery that Rothermere divorced her in 1951. Fleming married her more out of duty than love: she was already pregnant by him again when they wed. Sometimes the viciousness of their relationship was played out on the safe ground of sadomasochistic sex. Other times it was enacted mentally and left deep scars.

  This added to Fleming’s pre-existing mental scars, numerous and multi-origined. His melancholy and fatalism was deep-seated. Raymond Benson investigated Fleming’s past and, by extension, psyche when writing The James Bond Bedside Companion (1984). He recalls, ‘Ivar Bryce was his absolutely closest friend – they shared everything – and Ernest Cuneo was his closest American friend. They both would say that Fleming was always just unsatisfied. That he felt like there was something he needed to accomplish that was eluding him.’ Acquaintance Barbara Muir once remarked that ‘Ian always was a death-wish Charlie.’ This suggests far deeper roots for dissatisfaction than living with someone about whom he was ambivalent – namely that during his formative years Fleming felt neither valued nor wanted.

  When it is suggested to him that Ian Fleming was a very convoluted person, John Pearson says, ‘You can say that again. He had his demons, as they say … Ian was a classic case of a problematic second son in the shadow of a very, very successful older brother, who was Peter Fleming. Now almost entirely forgotten, very unjustly, but he was a very good prewar travel writer. He was a man of action, very glamorous fellow, highly successful and adored by his racy old mother, Mrs Val Fleming, whereas Ian was always the odd one out and the reprobate and all the rest of it.’