Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica (12 page)

Indeed, in 1951, the
Gleaner
reported that thanks to the pioneers Coward and Fleming – described as ‘of England’s powerful Kemsley Press’ – ‘all along the coast a remarkable development is going on’, now stretching from ‘Frenchman’s Cove and San San estate in the east to Tryall in the west’. As contemporary advertisements demonstrate, a private beach, from which local Jamaicans were excluded, was a key selling point; and those built first got the pick of the best north-coast beaches.

Amongst them was the famous, small but exclusive Jamaica Inn at Ocho Rios, first opened in 1950 by Canadian entrepreneur Cy Elkins. Like a lot of the construction along the north coast, it was built by the firm of Maffissanti and Fillisetti, led by Italians who had formed part of Jamaica’s POW population during the war. (Several thousand Italian and German captives – mainly from merchant ships – had spent time during the war on the island, along with some 1,500 Gibraltarians evacuated from their threatened home, and a number of Jewish refugees.) According to American artist Marion Simmons, whose house, Glory Be, was built by the same firm, ‘Mr F., being Italian, has excellent manners, and all the airs and graces of the Old World.’ When he passed a customer in his truck, ‘he would sweep off
his straw hat from his red head in a wide circular gesture as if it has plumes on it’.

Marilyn Monroe and Winston Churchill – who described the appeal of the tropics as ‘soft breezes and hard liquor’ – would be amongst Jamaica Inn’s most famous guests, and it quickly gained a reputation for its lively costume parties. It was also famous for its food: a Graeco-French-Italian chef employed during the key winter season dazzled guests with his fabulous buffet lunch each day. Highlights were cold tongue, ham, roast beef, marinated beef fillet, conch salad and heart of palm. A Jamaican, Teddy Tucker, who worked as the beach-barman during the 1950s and still works there today, remembers serving endless planter’s punch and bullshots – vodka and beef bouillon – to a lot of smartly dressed guests, while a five-piece band – Byron Lee and the Dragonaires – kept the dancing going. The very same band would feature in the film
of Dr No.

A clearer pointer to the future, though, was already in operation just west of Jamaica Inn. Tower Isle hotel opened in 1949, a huge eighty-room art deco construction, raised in record time for the 1949–50 winter season. Costing a quarter of a million pounds, it required new roads, five miles of piping for water, and the importation of tiles from Britain and Belgium, kitchen equipment from Canada and furniture from the United States. It was straight away hailed as ‘the finest and largest hotel in the British West Indies’ and ‘immediately became the centre of life in the area’. Tower Isle was the brainchild of Abe Issa, the owner since 1943 of the Myrtle Bank hotel in Kingston, itself now enjoying a ‘golden age’, with regular celebrity guests including Joan Crawford, Ann Miller and Walt Disney. Issa was from a Palestinian family who had come to Jamaica in the 1880s. They quickly amassed a fortune as importers of dry goods, then as owners of the country’s biggest and best retail emporia. In the election of 1944, Issa had headed a political party, the Jamaica Democratic Party, representing business, but did not win a single seat. Nonetheless, he would remain for many years the key mover in the new Jamaica tourism industry.

‘Turn your back to the Jamaican mountain scenery, and at Tower Isle you could imagine yourself at Miami Beach,’ wrote a local Jamaican. At night, guests would dance under the stars on the roof terrace to a local band, who always began their playlist with the hotel’s theme song, ‘Tower Island Magic’. Errol Flynn, who had been befriended by Issa, was an early patron. Noël Coward, visiting early one morning with Lord Beaverbrook, caused a stir by ordering champagne for breakfast.

In 1951, Jamaica played host to nearly 100,000 visitors, the majority from the United States. This was nearly three times the 1946 figure. Inspired by Errol Flynn’s lead were other Hollywood giants, the cream of British aristocracy, and the brightest and richest of the United States’ and Europe’s business, theatre, literature and secret service elites. You weren’t a proper Hollywood star until you had been photographed in Jamaica. In the Bond short story ‘For Your Eyes Only’, as the Cuban
hit men escape Jamaica in a ‘twin-dieseled Chriscraft motorboat’, the ‘fishermen and wharfingers ashore watched her go, and went on with their argument as to which of the filmstars holidaying in Jamaica this could have been’.

Stories from this time of the drinking, bed-hopping and luxurious excess in Jamaica recall the antics of the British in Happy Valley, Kenya. Noël Coward contributed to the atmosphere with a string of theatre friends coming to stay at Blue Harbour, where he had several small cottages built in the grounds. Guests included Laurence Olivier, Vivien
Leigh, Charlie Chaplin, Alec Guinness, Audrey Hepburn, Michael Redgrave, Peter O’Toole, Peter Sellers and many others. Coward had a rule that swimming in his pool could only be in the nude. Indeed, when John Pringle visited Blue Harbour with his wife Liz, they found the Oliviers ‘naked on Noël’s terrace, Vivien draped over Larry’s cock. It was some introduction!’ Olivier was also an enthusiastic consumer of the local ganja, although Coward himself didn’t indulge. Blanche Blackwell remembers that visitors were ‘completely different when they got into the tropics. They let go.’ Veteran
Gleaner
journalist Morris Cargill concurred: ‘For a brief spell, which ended in 1960, certain very rich and certain rather poor upper-class English people drank, idled and committed adultery in the sunshine.’ In the languid heat of Jamaica, the morality of home was forgotten. Cargill himself complains he lost his girlfriend to his father’s mistress.

It wasn’t to everyone’s taste. Alec Waugh (brother of Evelyn), who would make his name with his novel
Island in the Sun
, wrote in his
Notes from the Sugar Islands
that the Jamaican tourist scene was now astronomically expensive, as well as torpid. ‘By day you idle on a beach; in the evening you sip cocktails on a veranda. One day becomes the next.’ Patrick Leigh Fermor expressed the same sentiment in his
Traveller’s Tree,
describing the jet-set thus: ‘The atmosphere is a compound of Wall Street, the
Tatler, Vogue,
Tout Paris and the
Wiener Salonblatt
anomalously transplanted in a background of palm trees and blazing sunlight … Ice clatters in shakers and poker dice are thrown unceasingly on the bars of this Jamaican Nineveh, and, for the uninitiated visitor, the chasms of tedium yawn deeper every second.’

In 1950, the growing expatriate circle was joined by Ivor Novello, who bought a house near Montego Bay. Lord Beaverbrook took Coward to see it: ‘Quite quite horrid … exactly like a suburban villa,’ was Coward’s verdict. Novello was part of a burgeoning and highly visible north-coast homosexual community, led by Coward and wealthy fashion designer Edward Molyneux. Established gay and
lesbian white couples feature in Coward’s Samolo stories as par for the course; clearly Jamaica gave them the freedom to be themselves denied at home in Britain.

Ian Fleming, although of course an enthusiastic adulterer and drinker, was ambivalent about this invasion of the decadent jet-set. In this he had much in common with a number of Jamaicans watching with despair the rapid changes happening to their island. For one thing, whatever Coward said about his Samolans’ ‘winsome disregard for gender’ in their sexual behaviour, most Jamaicans were religious, strait-laced and strongly opposed to homosexual activity. Even before the post-war explosion of tourism, there were furious complaints that Montego Bay was besieged by ‘an epidemic of homosexuality’.

This was part of wider concerns about a great expansion of prostitution, something conceded by Coward in his
Pomp and Circumstance,
where, corrupted by the ‘Almighty Dollar’, ‘there is hardly a lissom chambermaid or a muscular beach boy who is not daily prepared to make the supreme sacrifice for suitable remuneration’. More generally, some locals argued, the ‘evil example’ of the wealthy and idle tourists was threatening to ‘de-Jamaicanize’ the population. Tourism, critics contended, brought to the island the ‘standardized fripperies of Palm Beach’ and cheapened the morals of Jamaican youth, who mimicked the observed behaviour of the tourists with drinking, smoking and public ‘necking’. In turn the tourists, lying like ‘fleshy lobsters’ on the beach or ‘turning their eyeballs inwards’ at the nearest cocktail bar, showed little interest in Jamaica or Jamaicans, preferring ‘sybaritic torpor’.

Black Jamaican journalist Evon Blake wrote that tourism had turned Jamaican youth into touts, beggars and parasites. ‘The labourers will not work for economical wages; life is more exciting for men who lounge and hang round trippers and tourists with pockets filled with pound and dollar notes, and from whom they can get fat tips rather than spend their days in tilling the soil.’ Other critics
contended that it would make Jamaica ‘a nation of waiters. We will become more servile and be further away from self-government.’ While the economic benefits of tourism were meant to mitigate the problems of Jamaica’s colonial past, it was argued that the industry actually shored up many core features of that original condition and trapped the island in the grip of neocolonialism. For some, it was a trade-off between dignity and much-needed dollars.

Perhaps most serious was the concern that tourism, with its segregationist structure of closed enclaves and private beaches, was ‘sharpening colour prejudice’. Leigh Fermor noted of Jamaica that ‘a colour bar that is non-existent in law [is] in social practice violently alive’. This was most apparent at the smart hotels. Morris Cargill, a white Jamaican, tells of how he was offered a season ticket by the manager of Myrtle Bank hotel. But why was it necessary? he asked. ‘That’s how we keep out the niggers,’ came the reply. Black Jamaican journalists reported how in the grandest hotels, particularly those catering for American tourists, they were made to feel unwelcome and ‘in some barred by means of adroit subterfuges’.

Evon Blake had lived in Panama in the US Canal Zone, so knew all about racial segregation. In the summer of 1948, as tourists and local whites lounged by the side of Kingston’s Myrtle Bank hotel pool, Blake suddenly burst on the scene, stripped to his swimming trunks and plunged into the pool. The white swimmers immediately
clambered out. The staff quickly gathered at the edges, shouting threats at the intruder. From the middle of the pool, Blake defiantly challenged: ‘Call the police. Call the army. Call the owner. Call God. And let’s have one helluva big story.’ Although the
Gleaner
declined to report the incident, news of the protest quickly spread all over the island. The hotel’s owner, Abe Issa, made loud noises about how everyone was welcome, but in photos of the hotel from the late forties and fifties, the only black faces are the staff. After Blake’s plunge, the pool was drained and refilled.