For Your Eyes Only (7 page)

There is one final intriguing hypothesis, advanced by John Pearson, Fleming's biographer, to the effect that M might conceivably be modelled on Eve Fleming. Certainly, ‘M' was Ian's nickname for his mother from early childhood. She, like M, was by turns strict and indulgent, loved and feared. As Pearson writes, ‘While Fleming was young, his mother was certainly one of the few people he was frightened of, and her sternness toward him, her unexplained demands, and her remorseless insistence on success find a curious and constant echo in the way M handles that hard-ridden, hard-killing agent, 007.'

M's comely, love-struck secretary, the loyal keeper of secrets, has almost as many potential real lives as she has had appearances on screen. Miss Moneypenny's role in the books is comparatively small and, apart from her being a non-smoking, milk-drinking poodle-owner, we know little of her life. She ‘would have been desirable but for eyes which were cool and direct and quizzical'. In
Thunderball
we learn that she ‘often dreamed hopelessly about Bond'. Miss Moneypenny's yearning is made much more explicit in the films, and became
a staple of the genre, the longest flirtation in film history, a central element in the badinage that precedes every Bond mission. Her amorous life is unfulfilled, but her career prospers, at least in the popular culture, as ‘Britain's last line of defence'. By the time
You Only Live Twice
was filmed, she had been promoted to the rank of second officer in the Wrens, the Women's Royal Naval Service.

In the books Bond has his own secretary, Loelia Ponsonby, shared with 008 and 0011. The real Loelia Ponsonby was a friend of the Flemings who would become the Duchess of Westminster. When her marriage broke down, ‘Lil' Ponsonby is said to have fallen for Ian himself, describing him as ‘the most attractive man I've ever met'. For his part, Fleming described the fictional Loelia Ponsonby as ‘tall and dark, with a reserved unbroken beauty', but added, ‘unless she married soon, Bond thought for the hundredth time, or had a lover, her cool air of authority might easily become spinsterish' – which probably did not please the real ‘Lil' one bit. It is possible that the duchess objected to seeing her real name hijacked for the purposes of popular literature. This may explain why, in
On Her Majesty's Secret Service
, Ponsonby abruptly retires after marrying a member of the Baltic Exchange ship-broking company, and is replaced as Bond's secretary by Mary Goodnight – a name with echoes of Fleming's own secretary at the
Sunday Times
, Una Trueblood (a name he would appropriate for the secretary murdered in
Dr No
). Both of Bond's secretaries are slight characters
compared to Moneypenny, whose film persona is now almost as famous as Bond himself.

The name Moneypenny is derived from a character in an unfinished novel written by Peter Fleming after the war, entitled
The Sett
. The novel came to a halt after about thirty thousand words, but Miss Moneypenny survived in Ian's memory. The principal model for the Moneypenny character appears to have been a Miss Kathleen Pettigrew, who was the personal assistant to Stewart Menzies, Director General of MI6. In the first draft of
Casino Royale
, M's secretary was ‘Miss Pettavel', or ‘Petty', but Fleming clearly felt that was too close to reality and changed it. Miss Pettigrew was something of a legend in espionage circles: anyone attempting to gain access to ‘C', as Fleming must have done, had first to pass through his terrifying secretary, who was brisk, intensely efficient and not remotely seductive. One former colleague described her as a ‘formidable, grey-haired lady with the square jaw of the battleship type'.

Another strong possibility is Victoire ‘Paddy' Bennett, who worked as a secretary in Room 39 and knew Fleming well. Bennett worked on ‘Operation Mincemeat', the successful deception plan which involved planting a corpse with fake papers on the coast of Spain to persuade the Nazis that the Allies would attack Greece and Sardinia rather than Sicily. Ewen Montagu of NID was an architect of this ruse, and Fleming would probably have been at least tangentially involved. Paddy Bennett once described her former colleague,
somewhat tartly, as ‘definitely James Bond, in his mind'. She went on to marry Sir Julian Ridsdale, the long-serving MP for Harwich, and was made a Dame of the British Empire for her work with the Parliamentary Wives Club – a role that has a distinctly Moneypennyish ring to it.

Vera Atkins, executive officer with ‘F' (French) Section, SOE, was described in her
New York Times
obituary in 2000 as ‘widely believed to have inspired the character of Miss Moneypenny'. The unmarried Atkins was discreet, handsome and probably known to Fleming through his liaison duties. Though recruited as a secretary, Atkins swiftly emerged as a remarkable intelligence officer in her own right, briefing and dispatching more than five hundred SOE agents to occupied France; after the war she spent years trying to ascertain their fates.

In the end, Moneypenny was surely more fantasy than reality, not least because of the way Bond speaks to her. In
Thunderball
, when Moneypenny teases him about having to go to a health farm, he warns her: ‘Any more ticking off from you and when I get out of this place I'll give you such a spanking you'll have to do your typing off a block of Dunlopillo.' Miss Moneypenny has an instant comeback: ‘I don't think you'll be able to do much spanking after living on nuts and lemon juice for two weeks, James.' It is hard to imagine Fleming having such a conversation with any of the no-nonsense women he knew from wartime intelligence, let alone carrying out his spanking threat.

‘It is so difficult to make these villains frightening,' Fleming observed. ‘But one is ashamed to overwrite them though that is probably what the public would like.' No one ever accused Fleming of
under
writing his villains, who are as lurid and sensational as Bond himself is deliberately understated. They are all extraordinary – ugly, deformed, brilliant, sadistic, rich, power-mad and unrepentantly insane. ‘So was Frederick the Great,' crows Ernst Stavro Blofeld. ‘So was Nietzsche, so was Van Gogh. We are in good, illustrious company . . .' Many have specific physical characteristics that mark them out as evil, or psychologically damaged, and usually both: an absence of earlobes, a gap between the front teeth, even red hair. Most are foreign, and a large proportion are German or Russian. Many are overweight, some astonishingly so – Blofeld tips the scales at thirty stone; several are wildly camp (Le Chiffre in
Casino Royale
addresses Bond as ‘dear boy', Noël Coward's favourite form of address); Rosa Klebb is a lesbian; several villains are homosexual; and one is apparently an extreme opera fan – we meet Blofeld in
You Only Live Twice
dressed as a Valkyrie, complete with chainmail. These were not qualities, to put it mildly, that Fleming admired. Although some of Fleming's close friends were homosexual, he shared the prejudices of his time and class, and so does Bond. Fleming's villains do nothing by
halves. Blofeld's criminal enterprises are ‘on a scale of a Caligula, of a Nero, of a Hitler, of any of the greatest enemies of mankind'. Fleming's villains emerged out of a postwar world that had just witnessed, and defeated, wickedness on an unimaginable scale; yet some of the perpetrators of that evil – Mengele, Bormann and others – were still believed to be at large, and assumed to be living a life of criminal luxury. The criminal inventiveness of Bond's enemies seemed horribly believable in a world that had experienced the death camps, Japanese torture and Gestapo interrogation methods. Bond refers to friends who have been tortured during the war, and Fleming's personal knowledge of what could happen to captured agents again underpins the fiction. ‘You only have to read about the many tortures used in the war by the Germans which were practised on several of our agents to realise that mine is mild stuff compared with that,' he once said.

Most of Bond's enemies are older, male, super-rich and sophisticated, a pattern that has prompted some to see Fleming's villains as caricatures of patriarchal figures. And it is certainly true that Bond is repeatedly brought to the villain's lair, told he is a young fool, and then prepared for punishment. This was a scene only too familiar to Fleming from many unpleasant encounters with his cane-wielding housemaster at Eton, and to any number of ex-public-schoolboys familiar with corporal punishment. ‘My dear boy,' Le Chiffre spoke, like a father, ‘the game of Red Indians is over, quite over. You
have stumbled by mischance into a game for grown-ups.' Bond's ability to trip up the patronising crooks and bullies had an instant appeal to every grown-up schoolboy who still dreamed of kicking the headmaster in the groin.

Once more, Fleming's villains, like his heroes, are patchworks of different people, names and traits. Le Chiffre, the sweaty, Benzedrine-sniffing villain of
Casino Royale
, is believed to be based on Aleister Crowley, who gained huge notoriety in inter-war Britain as ‘The Wickedest Man in the World'. Crowley was a bisexual, sado-masochistic drug addict with the ears of a leprechaun and the eyes of a dissipated stoat. A master of Thelemic mysticism (‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law'), he specialised in mountaineering, interpreting the Ouija board, orgies and thrashing his lovers. The press simultaneously adored and hated him. Crowley made Le Chiffre seem positively sane.

Oddly enough, Crowley is also claimed to have been a British spy. The
International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence
recorded that, while living in America during the First World War, Crowley used the cover of a German propagandist to gather information for the British secret service on the German intelligence network in the United States, and on Irish Republican activity. During the Second World War, Crowley personally offered to make contact with Rudolf Hess, Hitler's deputy, who was thought to be fascinated by the occult. After Hess landed in Scotland,
Crowley offered to intercede as a sort of mystical go-between: ‘If it is true that Herr Hess is much influenced by Astrology and magick, my services might be of use,' he wrote. Fleming was clearly intrigued, and suggested using Crowley to supply Hess with fake horoscopes, or as an interrogator. After all, Crowley and Hess spoke the same language, namely gobbledegook. Neither idea came to fruition, but Crowley had plainly made a strong impression.

Fleming plundered his school register ruthlessly in the quest for names. Hugo Drax, the villain in
Moonraker
, was named after the magnificently festooned Admiral Sir Reginald Aylmer Ranfurly Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax, an acquaintance of Fleming's who led the pre-war military mission to Moscow in 1939 to discuss a possible alliance with the USSR. Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the super-villain without earlobes (he also has no cats in the novels; that had to wait for the movies), was probably named after another Old Etonian, Tom Blofeld, a farmer from Norfolk whose son Henry Blofeld is the much-loved, plummy-voiced BBC cricket commentator. Alternatively, Blofeld may owe his name to China scholar John Blofeld, who was a member of Fleming's club, Boodles, and whose father was named Ernst. Red Grant, the assassin in
From Russia with Love
, was the name of a cheerful river guide Fleming knew in Jamaica, and Francisco ‘Pistols' Scaramanga, the triple-nippled gunman in
The Man with the Golden Gun
, was named after yet another school contemporary, George Scaramanga. Fleming and Scaramanga are said to
have had a number of schoolyard fights. Fleming got his revenge in print. (The original Scaramanga had the regulation number of nipples.)

While most of Fleming's friends and acquaintances enjoyed appearing in the series, a few objected vehemently. In
Diamonds Are Forever
, Fleming described the homosexual villain ‘Boofy' Kidd: ‘Kidd's a pretty boy. His friends call him “Boofy” . . . some of these homos make the worst killers.' This was all very well, but one of Fleming's best friends (and a relative of his wife, Ann) was Arthur Gore, later the Earl of Arran, who was universally known by the distinctive nickname ‘Boofy'. Gore was livid and complained bitterly, to no avail.

Another who strongly objected to seeing his name in a Bond novel was Ernö Goldfinger, the distinguished and controversial modernist architect. Fleming first heard the name from his golfing partner, John Blackwell, who was a cousin by marriage of Ernö Goldfinger and disliked him. Fleming is said to have objected to Goldfinger's love of concrete and the destruction of Victorian houses to make way for his tower blocks. According to one theory, Fleming particularly hated a terrace of modern houses designed by Goldfinger on Willow Road in Hampstead, and so used his name for one of his most memorable evildoers: Auric Goldfinger, the richest man in England; treasurer of the Soviet counter-intelligence agency, SMERSH; and a gold-obsessive who likes to paint his lovers with gold in order
to make love to the substance he craves. When Ernö obtained a proof copy of
Goldfinger
, he gave it to his associate, Jacob Blacker, and asked him whether he should sue. Blacker read the book and reported that the only substantial difference was: ‘You're called Ernö and he's called Auric.' This was rather rude, since Ernö was a visionary six-foot architect and Auric is a murderous five-foot megalomaniac. But, unlike most of Fleming's name-borrowings, there are a few genuine similarities between the Goldfingers: both were Jewish émigrés from Eastern Europe who liked fast cars, and both were Marxists, in Auric's case by association with SMERSH. There is also a whiff of anti-Semitism in Fleming's depiction of a Jewish billionaire with a gold fixation. The real Goldfinger was exceptionally unamused, summoned his lawyers, and threatened to halt publication. Equally angry, Fleming thought his publisher should insert an erratum slip, changing Goldfinger to ‘Goldprick' throughout the book (a name originally suggested, unseriously, by the critic Cyril Connolly). A truce was established after Fleming's publishers agreed that, in advertising the book, the name Goldfinger would be coupled with the name Auric wherever possible. Even so, for the rest of his life Ernö Goldfinger was plagued by people calling him on the telephone and saying, in the voice of Sean Connery, ‘Goldfinger? This is 007.'