For Your Eyes Only (13 page)

The qualities Bond admires are physical and practical, and certainly not a matter of character or intellect: ‘Gold hair. Grey eyes. A sinful mouth. Perfect figure. And of course she's got to be witty and poised and know how to dress and play cards . . .' Fleming was something of a connoisseur of women's fashion, and often describes the clothing of Bond's lovers in lavish detail. The wit is an interesting requirement, since the Bond of the books is never remotely witty: the jokes and one-liners are purely inventions of the films. Fleming uses a great many adjectives to describe the shape of women's breasts most admired by Bond, foremost among which is
‘jutting'; this quality, however, is not so attractive when associated with the buttocks, as is the case with Tatiana Romanova's overexercised and therefore unattractively masculine bottom. Elsewhere, confusingly, Fleming approvingly describes a female bottom as ‘boyish', a description that sent Noël Coward into a paroxysm of fake-heterosexual outrage: ‘
Really
, old chap, what could you have been thinking of?' Other critics have got very hot under the collar at Bond's sexual activity: ‘Sex, Snobbery and Sadism,' screeched Paul Johnson in the
New Statesman
, blasting the ‘mechanical, two-dimensional sex-longings of a frustrated adolescent'.

Fleming worked hard on his seduction technique, but Bond barely needs one: women simply throw themselves at him. Bond Girls are all, of course, intensely attractive, but each bears some small imperfection, a mark of vulnerability: Honeychile Rider has a broken nose; Domino Vitali has one slightly shorter leg. Even their names usually offer the hint of availability, and were often drawn from people Fleming knew: Honeychile was the nickname of Pat Wilder, an American former dancer in Bob Hope's troupe who married Prince Alex Hohenlohe, owner of an exclusive Alpine resort where Fleming went to ski and socialise; Jill Masterton is a play on the name of John Masterman, the Oxford academic who presided over the Double Cross system of double agents during the war; ‘Solitaire' (Simone Latrelle in
Live and Let Die
) is named after a unexpectedly dowdy Jamaican bird.

Bond is pure heterosexual, from his brogues to his haircut (which cannot quite be said of Fleming, who had many gay friends and could be fantastically camp). 007 does not approve of homosexuals (‘unhappy, sexual misfits') or sexual equality, or even votes for women. His books, Fleming declared, were ‘written for warm-blooded heterosexuals'. Outside of the more Jurassic corners of London clubland, it would be hard, these days, to find anyone with the same views as James Bond. ‘Doesn't do to get mixed up with neurotic women in this business,' M tells Bond gravely in
From Russia with Love
; ‘They hang on to your gun-arm.' All of this adds up to a very potent postwar daydream for a particular sort of old-fashioned gent. Women had the vote and there was nothing even Bond could do about that. Having played a vital role in the war, women were asserting themselves in the home and the workplace; they were even becoming secret agents, and had been effective as such during the war, being rather better in that line of work than men. Male dominance was under threat wherever one looked, but not in Bond's world. Bond offered a reassuring fantasy, old-fashioned in tone but modern in sexual liberty: men were still the world's heroes, modern Saint Georges who could slay the dragon and then fall into the arms of an adoring, beautiful, slightly weak woman, who would love them unquestioningly and then whip up a terrific dinner. Why, he could even cause the toughest lesbian to declare, as does Pussy Galore: ‘I never met a man before.'

To many modern men, the Bond Girl myth is still a powerful fantasy; for many modern women, to be called a Bond Girl would be an unforgivable insult. Perhaps that shows that we have not moved on so very far since 1955. Now, woman, where is my Béarnaise sauce?

 

007
Shaken, Stirred and Custom-made: Bond's Life of Luxury

‘There are moments of great luxury in the life of a secret agent,' Ian Fleming declared in the opening line of
Live and Let Die
(1954). It is almost impossible to exaggerate the allure of Bond's lifestyle to a postwar Britain strained by rationing, deprived of glamour and still bruised by the privations of war. Bond is, quite simply, a stylish, fast-shooting, high-living, sexually liberated advertisement for all the things ordinary Britons had never had, yet dreamed of: the finest food and drink, smart clothes, fast cars, leisure time, casinos, exotic foreign travel, swimming in warm waters. Fleming called his evocation of this fantasy ‘disciplined exoticism'. But he was also one of the first writers to identify the appeal of the designer lifestyle in an emerging age of consumerism. Identifying Bond with certain brands made him not only classy, but believable.

Fleming had history on his side, for his dealings in
wartime espionage had shown him that spies do, indeed, enjoy and require moments of great luxury. Much spycraft is boring, dangerous and uncomfortable, and spies tend to be self-interested people, fascinated by material things. Perhaps because of this, human comforts and luxuries assume a disproportionate importance when an agent is off duty. John Masterman, organiser of the famed Double Cross system through which Britain played Germany's spies against their German spymasters, held it as an article of faith that secret agents should be pampered and cosseted, provided with money and, within the bounds of reason and tight security, allowed to indulge themselves with whatever comforts were available. Popov, the Yugoslavian agent who spied for Britain throughout the war, was encouraged to live the life of a gambling, hard-living playboy (not that he needed much encouragement); Eddie Chapman, codenamed Agent Zigzag, was given the ‘red-carpet treatment' by his MI5 handlers, wined and dined at the Savoy, and allowed to spend the money he had brought from Germany on wine, women and, to a slightly lesser extent, song. In framing Bond's life of exquisite good taste and effortless style, Fleming must surely have been thinking back to the refined wartime spies he had known, like Biffy Dunderdale, who drove around Paris in his Rolls while France collapsed, and dined at Maxim's in his tailor-made suit.

Bond never has to wait in for the electrician or arrange
to see the bank manager. He never queues for a bus. In almost every way, his imagined life was entirely divorced from the everyday realities of 1950s Britain. Yet there were people in postwar Britain living a life of exclusive, stylish luxury, and one of them was Ian Fleming. ‘I write about what pleasures and stimulates me,' he said, ‘and if there is a strong streak of hedonism in my books it is not there by guile but because it comes through the tip of my ballpoint pen.'

From an early age, Fleming had enjoyed the good (and expensive) things in life: skiing in the Alps, dining at Scott's, membership of the most exclusive clubs for gentlemen and golfers. For most of his life, however, he did not have quite as much money as he would have liked, and when he did have that kind of money towards the end of his life, having earned vast quantities from his books, it was too late. There is a hunger in the way Fleming describes gold, diamonds, a villain's den or a delicious meal that transmits itself to the reader as a sort of luxurious longing. Many of his acquaintances were super-rich, most notably his schoolfriend Ivar Bryce, a charming and handsome Anglo-Peruvian sybarite whose already vast family fortune from trading guano was increased immeasurably when he married Jo Hartford, an American supermarket heiress whose fortune was worth an estimated $350 million. The Bryces had homes in, among other places, Manhattan, Vermont, London and the Bahamas (where they had a
property complete with a fake beach, imported at $3,000 a yard); they bred racehorses, travelled constantly, partied hard and lived a life of quite breathtaking extravagance. Fleming could be disparaging about the rich, claiming that too much money left millionaires in ‘search of identity'; on the other hand, he would have been more than happy with the identity of a multimillionaire himself. His villains are almost all fabulously wealthy: money, and the power it can buy, is central to their evil fascination. ‘Too much money is the worst curse you can lay on anyone's head,' Bond tells Marc-Ange Draco in
On Her Majesty's Secret Service
. If so, it was a curse Fleming pursued with consistent determination, and remarkable success.

Fleming was never in the same financial league as the Bryces, but he was still a great deal wealthier than most people, and thanks to a generous expense account provided by Kemsley Newspapers he could live a life that was rather richer than he was. As a young man, he perfected a sort of roué bachelor-chic that lasted throughout his life. He wore suits of the fashionable cut, sported a spotted bowtie, or the Old Etonian tie (‘The colours are really quite unobjectionable'); Fleming considered his tie-wear ‘Churchillian'. Churchill did favour spotted black and blue bow-ties (he had only six other ties in the 1950s), which he tied loosely, a style copied precisely by Fleming. Through a long and elegant ebony cigarette holder, Fleming sucked a never-ending succession of custom-made
cigarettes. Fleming's smokes were Morland Specials, a tarheavy confection of strong Turkish and Balkan tobaccos, each one decorated with three gold bands around the filter, in reminiscence of the three gold rings he had worn on his sleeve as (acting) Commander Fleming of the Royal Navy. Bond smokes the same brand, sixty a day and seventy if he is gambling, but when abroad he will smoke whatever the locals are puffing: Chesterfield King Size in the US, Royal Blend in the Caribbean. Fleming's cigarettes were a curious affectation, and a lifelong addiction, but they were also the mark of a man who knew the value of standing out from a crowd. He wore Trumper's ‘Eucris' hair dressing (which Bond also uses in
Diamonds Are Forever
), collected rare books and disdained tea, the working man's drink – Bond declares it ‘mud'. Bond's dark suits, Fleming noted with a flash of introspection, ‘betray an underlying melancholy'.

On the beach in Jamaica, Bond wears bright beach shirts made by Antonio's of Falmouth, but for everyday wear he sports a blue Sea Island cotton shirt and tropical worsted trousers. Bond and Fleming share most sartorial tastes, although 007 favours black knitted silk ties and would not, I suspect, be seen dead in a spotted bow-tie. Quite how he obtains his wardrobe is a mystery, since Bond goes shopping just once in fourteen books. Little flickers of the more old-fashioned side to Fleming's character occasionally shine through: Bond, for example, takes against anyone wearing
a tie knotted in the Windsor style, which he considers ‘a mark of vanity, egocentricity and a pawky mind'. (In Red Grant, it is also the mark of an assassin.) Behind Bond the fashion icon lurks Fleming the harrumphing, old-school patriot, disapproving of vulgar dressers, bad manners and homosexuals (even though two of his closest friends, William Plomer and Noël Coward, were gay). Some of Bond's fashion choices would be considered disastrous today, but were then a mark of extreme sophistication, and all reflected Fleming's own idiosyncratic fashion: Bond's taste for pyjama-coats, for example, and black leather sandals (we are not told whether he wears socks with these, but I prefer to assume not).

Fleming's sense of style undoubtedly reflected, in part, his friendship with and admiration for Somerset Maugham. The two writers had met in 1953, when Maugham was already a grand old man of letters, living a life of elegant private luxury in his stunning villa on the Côte d'Azur, with plenty of servants, rare works of art and a sumptuous library. Fleming was deeply impressed by Maugham's expensive English lifestyle.

In some ways Goldeneye, the Jamaican holiday home he purchased in 1946, would become Fleming's answer to Maugham's Villa Mauresque: a haven dedicated to pleasure but also to the hard grind of daily writing. Fleming first visited Jamaica back in 1942, when he travelled there for an Anglo-American naval conference, accompanied by
Ivar Bryce. He was immediately smitten by the place. ‘When we have won this blasted war, I am going to live in Jamaica,' he declared. ‘Just live in Jamaica and lap it up, and swim in the sea and write books.' To another friend he announced that he would never spend another winter in Britain. On the north shore of the island, he found the property he was looking for, on the site of an old race track, facing the sea, with a secluded private beach. Once more, there was wordplay in the holiday home he called Goldeneye: a reference to the wartime planning for the defence of Gibraltar, Operation Golden Eye, but also a tribute to the Carson McCullers novel
Reflections in a Golden Eye
, which he happened to be reading at the time, and to the original Spanish name of the place, Orcabessa, ‘head of gold'. Here Fleming would retreat from the fogs and gloom of wintry London to entertain his friends, snorkel in the warm blue waters of the reef, relax in private luxury and, eventually, write. When it was time to leave this sanctuary in the spring and return home (usually with another finished manuscript in his briefcase), Fleming would always do so with ‘a lump in the throat'. Bond would come to share Fleming's deep affection for Jamaica, and in
Live and Let Die
we learn that 007 ‘had grown to love the great green island and its staunch, humorous people'.