Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica (11 page)

In fact, in some respects the two men were very alike. Coward shared Fleming’s love of the Royal Navy, distaste for intellectuals, fondness and nostalgia for a romantic version of empire, and horror at the diminished post-war power of his country. In August the previous
year India had become independent, removing at a stroke three-quarters of the Empire’s subjects. When Gandhi was assassinated in January 1948, Coward wrote in his diary: ‘a bloody good thing but far too late’. Like Fleming, he believed that the post-war Labour government had damaged the ‘psyche of the kingdom’ and that Britain was now a place where, as Fleming wrote, ‘taxation, controls and certain features of the Welfare State have turned the majority of us into petty criminals, liars and work-dodgers’.

It is striking that two such influential defenders of the Britain of its empire days were close neighbours and friends in Jamaica in the 1950s and early 1960s as the country moved from imperial throwback all the way to independence. The crucial difference between them, however, was that Coward, once a rebel of sorts, was in the process of losing his touch, his ability to communicate with his public through his plays and films. His formula of imperial pride thinly disguised with light self-mockery was beginning to seem, some said, ‘an irrelevant survival from a bygone era’. Fleming, however, would show that there was still huge appetite for patriotic stories. As historian David Cannadine wrote, Bond was ‘a reaffirmation of Britain’s continued great-power status and imperial amplitude … an action-man British hero, flying the flag, confounding the enemy, committed to queen and country and empire’. In 1970, French theorist Raymond Durgnat called Bond ‘a one-man Suez task force’. But to get away with this, Fleming’s stories would need an altogether more modern flavour than Coward’s.

Esmond Rothermere, although described by Quennell as benevolent to the point of indifference, must have known about, or at least doubted, the paternity of his wife’s forthcoming child. Nevertheless, he stuck with her through the difficult pregnancy, and in mid July, the family, including Ann’s two children from her first marriage, Raymond and Fionn, went on a golfing holiday at Gleneagles Hotel in Scotland. Tagging along were Loelia and Fleming. During the holiday,
while the four were playing bridge, it suddenly became apparent that Ann was going into labour a month early. She was rushed to hospital in Edinburgh, but the premature little girl only survived a few hours. Rothermere was at her bedside, whilst Ian wrote furious letters from the hotel, sneaking a fleeting visit as soon as he could.

A few days later, Ann sent a letter to Ian from the hospital in Edinburgh: ‘My darling, there was morphia and pain and then you were here and now you’ve gone and there’s nothing except the realisation of what happened in the last ten days … I have cried all day … I am very bruised and bewildered.’ The little girl was christened Mary, and put in the family vault at Aberlady, ‘while I was lying in a haze of morphia and you were playing golf’. Ann went on to implore Ian: ‘I do love you; please help me over this. I am muddled and distressed.’ The next day she wrote again, apologising for the ‘self-indulgent’ letter, writing: ‘It was cruel to take it out on you during your golf week.’

Shortly afterwards she was writing to thank him for sending magazines and ‘making a fuss’ of her, which made her ‘want to purr’. ‘I think any man would be a frightful bore after you,’ she went on. ‘I should miss the infinite variety of wall-gazing, pointless bullying so harsh and then so gentle when I cry … You beast, you must write your book.’

1949 Noël and lan, Samolo and Jamaica

a new set of people

arrive

to lie bare-assed in the sun

wanting gold on their bodies

cane-rows in their hair

with beads – even bells

So I serving them

Olive Senior, ‘Meditation on Yellow’

In what turned out to be a rather feeble effort to put on a respectable front, when Ann Rothermere arrived in Jamaica with Ian Fleming on 6 January, she claimed she was staying with the island’s new celebrity resident, Noël Coward – a confirmed bachelor, as everyone knew. Still, the
Gleaner
cheerfully went on to report that after a visit to the Bryces at Bellevue, they were both heading for Goldeneye. Coward wasn’t even in Jamaica at the time.

The spur for the discretion came in part because of Esmond Rothermere’s growing impatience with his wife’s affair with Fleming. In the autumn, after Mary’s death and perhaps hoping to activate some sort of newspaper proprietors’ union, Rothermere had complained to Ian’s boss Lord Kemsley about his employee’s behaviour. Kemsley, described by Ann as standing for ‘Empire, family life and the Conservative Party’, gave Ian a severe dressing-down, though he stopped short of firing his old bridge-playing friend. But for Ian and Ann, there was a feeling that big decisions about their future had to be made.

Coward did arrive in Jamaica on 3 February, accompanied by his partner Graham Payn. He surveyed his now completed property, then they raced round to see Ann and Ian, who were ‘welcoming and sweet’. Blue Harbour had not been built quite as Coward had intended, layered into the hillside, but he was nonetheless delighted. ‘The house is entrancing. I can’t believe it’s mine,’ he wrote in his diary that night. When they got back from Goldeneye, he and Graham ‘sat on the verandah on rockers, looking out over the fabulous view, and almost burst into tears of sheer pleasure’.

The pleasure would continue, much of it in the company of Ian and Ann for dinners, drinks, cards or trips. It was not only that Coward needed an audience; he was also intrigued by their relationship. They in turn were invigorated by his and Graham’s desire to explore and experience Jamaica. Two weeks into Coward’s trip, they all went rafting on the nearby Rio Grande, a tourist highlight first popularised by Errol Flynn. The narrow wooden rafts were intended for carrying bananas down from the highlands to Port Antonio, and Flynn had asked for a ride. It was a wonderful experience: ‘As you glide down this river you look up on either side to the most magnificent skyline that God or Nature had created,’ Flynn later wrote. The trip took four hours, which included fishing and stops for swimming. Fleming later described the experience for readers of the
Sunday Times
as an
‘enchantingly languid … elegant and delicately romantic adventure’. On either side of the river were hills ‘befeathered with bamboo and bright with flowers’. Afterwards Ian drove Noël and Graham home ‘and was vastly entertaining all the way’.

Coward was finding in Jamaica, and in Ian Fleming in particular, excellent source material. On 6 April, while rereading Evelyn Waugh’s
Vile Bodies,
he had his first idea for the play
Home and Colonial,
to be set on a fictional colonial island called Samolo. Ostensibly in the South Pacific, Samolo in fact became Coward’s take on Jamaica. There should be a ‘scandal with a local Bustamante … It’s a heaven-sent opportunity to get in a lot of Jamaican stuff,’ he confided to his diary on 6 April. The Jamaican material continued to come, and he would revisit Samolo a number of times, in a novel,
Pomp and Circumstance;
in short stories; and in other plays. Although of course fiction, Coward’s Samolo provides a fascinating take on tourism, empire, race and other Jamaica-inspired concerns that would similarly become so important to his friend Fleming’s Bond novels.

The expatriate white community of Coward’s Samolo is cliquey, claustrophobic and, as Bond would also be, libertarian with regard to sex and alcohol consumption. Almost all of the characters are recognisably drawn from real people in Jamaica during his time there. For example, a lesbian couple in
Pomp and Circumstance
are inspired by painters Marion Simmons and Rhoda Jackson, fixtures in the north-coast artistic circle and friends of Coward. Carmen Pringle, grande dame of Sunset Lodge, makes an appearance as hotel owner Juanita, with a ‘buccaneer quality’ and ‘a personality like a battering ram’.

Coward’s Samolan-Jamaicans are guileless, engaging and friendly: ‘They sing from morning till night … and never stop having scores of entrancing children.’ Although the most racist attitudes are given to unsympathetic characters, the consensus attitude of the expatriate British whites to the locals is still one of affectionate condescension. Craftsmen are ‘industrious and enthusiastic, but… incapable of making identical pairs of anything’. The Samolans are a sweet and cheerful people, ‘too young’ yet for the ‘brave experiment of independence’. Education is deemed unnecessary, as when locals are hungry they can simply ‘nip a breadfruit off a tree or snatch a yam out of the ground’.

(When
Pomp and Circumstance
was eventually published in 1960, the
Evening Standard
wrote: ‘If there is anywhere on earth where the old Coward world still credibly lingers on, it is probably a fairly peaceful tropical colony ruled over by a British Governor General.’ A more typical reviewer called it ‘stuffy and stale’.)

Samolans are also depicted by Noël Coward as innocently and spontaneously sexy. Fleming took a similar line about Jamaicans in his
Horizon
article: “‘Will you do me a rudeness?” means “Will you sleep with me?”,’ he explained. ‘To which a brazen girl will reply “You better hang on grass, I goin’ move so much.’” Both Fleming and Coward’s depictions chimed with long-held empirical views of the sensuality and eroticism of the West Indies. In 1948, a dance performance in London,
A Caribbean Rhapsody,
had attracted huge press interest. ‘With
that race, that place, that title, audiences know what to expect. They are not disappointed,’ wrote the reviewer for
Picture Post.
‘Enthusiasts praised the pace and excitement of it all, the exoticism, the sexiness, what they call the “animal primitivism” of the dancing.’ The
Daily Mail
gushed: ‘There spills on to the audience the hot, throbbing swamps of the West Indies.’

Noël Coward notes in his Samolo novel, ‘There is a great deal of sex which goes on all the time with a winsom disregard of gender.’ ‘I do like the Jamaicans,’ he wrote in his diary on 3 May 1949. ‘Fortunately they like me too and I couldn’t be more pleased that they do.’

According to Molly Huggins, ‘The people of Jamaica loved Noël and he did a great deal to help them, especially the poor and needy in the villages and towns near him.’ A small portion of the Look-Out land was given over as a community sports pitch, and Coward’s numerous visitors kept local grocers busy. At Blue Harbour, he employed a staff of at least six. Molly had met Coward before in Singapore, where she had come across him, in a story almost too perfect, shopping for silk pyjamas. ‘What a fascinating and brilliant man he is!’ she exclaimed in her memoir. On this visit he descended on King’s House, where he sat at the piano, ‘with his lean figure and fascinating versatile face, and sang songs’, including making up a ‘most amusing rhyme about my second daughter, Cherry’.

The central character of Coward’s
Home and Colonial
is Sandra, who, like Molly, is the English Governor’s wife. Sandra is the object of a crush from a local ‘native’ politician (who ‘hilariously’ mixes up his English idioms). What pressure there is for self-government comes from a tiny minority of Samolans and left-wing politicians from Britain. The vast majority of Samolans, Coward tells us, are ‘empire minded’; most so ‘happy and contented under British rule for so many years that they just don’t understand when they’re suddenly told that it’s been nothing but a corrupt capitalistic racket from the word go’.

In fact, while many Jamaicans, particularly from the ‘brown’ middle class, remained Anglophile and committed to the Empire, as Coward suggested of the Samolans, others felt very differently. A local writer in
Public Opinion
early the following year declared the Empire to be based ‘nakedly on force and autocracy’, commenting that ‘After the last war British imperialism was too weak to hold its Indian Ocean Empire: India, Burma and Ceylon have gone. Only the old-fashioned imperialist barbarity still preserves a precarious foothold in Malay and Hong Kong. It can hardly be disputed that the British Empire, dear to old-fashioned Tories, is on the way out.’

The main part in
Home and Colonial
was written for actress Gertrude Lawrence; when she unexpectedly died, it was offered to Vivien Leigh. Coward was surprised by the reaction. Both Leigh and her partner Laurence Olivier violently disliked the play, warning, as Coward put it, that it was ‘old fashioned Noël Coward and would do me great harm’. In the end, renamed
Island Fling,
it was briefly staged in 1951 with Claudette Colbert in the lead. Coward subsequently reworked it, and it was restaged (with some popular though little critical success) in 1955 as
South Sea Bubble,
with the increasingly erratic Leigh now in the lead role after all.

In
Pomp and Circumstance,
we learn from the narrator that ‘Tourism has brought the island undreamed of prosperity and set our hitherto rather insecure economy on a firm basis.’ As early as 1949, Coward had noted in a letter that ‘This coast is being bought up like mad’, change that only gathered pace over the next few years, leading to the ‘rash of millionaire hotels’ that Bond, with mixed feelings, notices as he flies in over Jamaica’s north coast in
Dr No.
Coward uses the same expression to describe the sudden development, from five or six private beach houses, owned by ‘the wealthier members of the plantocracy whose plantations lay back in the hills’, to ‘no less than nine American-style hotels, three motels, and a rash of erratically designed beach bungalows which are rented for astronomical prices
for the winter season’. Enjoying the slipstream created by Sunset Lodge in Montego Bay, still ‘undoubtedly the most fashionable resort in the West Indies’, were Shaw Park, above Ocho Rios, ‘In a cool elevation overlooking the sea’, Silver Seas Hotel, and the Ruins restaurant, which became a favourite of Katharine Hepburn and her partner Irene Selznick, and would much later be a location for the filming of
Live and Let Die.
Sans Souci hotel opened at the same time, ‘on top of the cliff, with a breath-taking view of the Caribbean … terraced gardens take one down the hillside to a circular swimming pool which is fed by a mineral spring’. It too would serve as a location for Roger Moore’s adventures in Jamaica, as well as for Connery’s in
Dr No.