Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica (38 page)

Young wanted her to play Miss Taro, the King’s House secretary secretly working for Dr No, but she refused as it involved ‘kissing a strange man’ and her parents would be horrified. So instead she was cast as the photographer who tries to take Bond’s picture at the airport and during the scene in Morgan’s Harbour bar.

Filming the bridge-playing scene at the Liguanea Club was helped by casting its manager Colonel Burton as one of the four players. In the same way, Dolores Keator played Strangways’ secretary Mary Trueblood; according to Young, she ‘got the job because she owned the house and she allowed us to use it [to film her scene]!’

Other locals included the parts of Pleydell-Smith, Jones the chauffeur (Reggie Carter, who was brother-in-law of Marguerite Le Wars), the three blind beggars (one of whom was a dentist), bar manager Puss-Feller (Lester Prendagast, who in real life owned the Glass Bucket club in Kingston), and sundry guards, hotel receptionists and waiters. None were required to do any of the filming in England. Of the forty-four featured roles, nineteen were locals.

Strangways, the first character to be killed in a Bond film, was played by Timothy Moxon, who had done some stage acting in
England but who now worked in Jamaica as a pilot of crop-spraying aircraft. He had known Terence Young in London and happened to be sitting in the Courtleigh Manor Hotel. Young said, ‘I’ve got a small part you can do at the beginning.’ Moxon thanked him and asked about the little-known actor playing the lead. Young replied, ‘Sean’s got this terrible Scottish accent, but I think he’s going to make it.’ Moxon was paid just over a hundred pounds for his two days’ work.

Moxon lived in Oracabessa and had already met Fleming in a supermarket there and been invited to Goldeneye, which he found very ‘bare-boned and austere’. He wasn’t impressed that everyone there called Fleming ‘the Commander’, as he ‘didn’t do a tremendous amount during the Second World War but he did gain the title of Commander and lived on it’ (Moxon himself had flown bombing raids over Germany). But, as Moxon explained just before he died, ‘over time our friendship grew. He was a good man at lifting the elbow. He knew how to put away the booze, but I found him charming.’ According to Moxon, Fleming was ‘not wildly impressed with the Dr No movie’ and hadn’t even realised that Moxon had appeared in it. ‘He didn’t talk about it, he preferred to discuss things like swimming and scuba diving.’

While the film crew were based in Kingston, as well as at the Courtleigh Manor, scenes were shot in downtown Kingston (the three blind beggars at the beginning of the film), at Morgan’s Harbour bar out on the Palisadoes, on the cement company road up Wareika Hills and at Dolores Keator’s house on Kinsale Avenue off Jacks Hill Road.

Then, at the end of the month, the production moved to Jamaica’s north coast, with the crew split between the Carib Ocho Rios Hotel and the Sans Souci – both of which are still in operation today. A Sans Souci villa doubled as Miss Taro’s house, where Professor Dent was shot. The Reynolds bauxite pier at Ocho Rios served as Crab Key’s docks. Fleming had advised on locations near Goldeneye, and seems
to have persuaded his friend Lord Brownlow to open up his mansion as the interior of King’s House, where the crew was not allowed to film. Fleming also recommended for the scene in which Bond first meets Honey Rider the stunning Laughing Waters beach, access to which was owned by a friend of his. Honey, Bond and Quarrel wash themselves in Dunn’s River Falls near Ocho Rios, now one of Jamaica’s most popular tourist attractions, and then are filmed in the White River, St Ann, nearby, where the three hide using improvised snorkels. The final location shoots were at Vanzie salt marsh near Falmouth, a mosquito-infested wasteland where Dr No’s ‘dragon’ captures Bond and Honey and kills Quarrel.

Chris Blackwell did his best to get his musician friends jobs as grips and gofers, and also introduced the film’s music supremo Monty Norman to Byron Lee and the Dragonaires, the veteran ensemble who had played at Jamaica’s north-coast hotels and at Kingston’s nightclubs since the mid fifties. Their manager Ronnie Nasralla,
charged with providing the musicians for the Morgan’s Harbour bar scene, says he interviewed others to play, including Bob Marley, who was turned down as he was ‘very untidy and crude’. But somewhat inevitably the job went to Byron Lee’s group. As the band’s guitarist Rupert Bent recalled, ‘We were the number one band in Jamaica at the time, in fact, in the Caribbean. There was no one else to turn to when the people were making the film.’ Byron Lee himself is seen in the film playing the bass guitar in ‘Jump Up’. Ernest Raglin would provide extra guitar for the final sound, and another Jamaican legend, Count Prince Miller, does his trademark dance. As it turned out, the film would provide a great international showcase for Jamaican and, more generally, West Indian music.

Chris Blackwell loved the whole experience, describing the filming as ‘a riot’. Each day, undeveloped film and soundtrack was put on a plane to London, processed overnight then sent back. Inevitably, there were setbacks. Saltzman wrote from Jamaica: ‘The biggest problem is the “manana” attitude of the local people and the fact they do not keep their promises to their contracts … we have been gulled and taken in due to the complete and utter inefficiency of the locals.’ Thunderstorms and other problems with weather also meant that more filming than had originally been planned needed to be done back in England. Running along Laughing Waters beach, Ursula Andress jagged her leg on a piece of coral. As she arrived in Jamaica a week or so after the rest of the cast, she was far too whiteskinned to play her role as a Creole local, so each day had to rise early to strip naked and be covered from head to foot in fake tan. She recalled how, while this was going on, a breakfast tray would be brought in. And then another, as members of the crew took the opportunity to feast their eyes on the sight. Sometimes there would be up to twenty breakfast trays in her room before the tanning job was done. The solution to her coral wound, which refused to heal, was to plaster on more of the fake tan.

During the filming at Laughing Waters, Fleming took the opportunity to visit the set. With him was Ann, the ever-present Peter Quennell and the poet Stephen Spender, who was staying at Goldeneye while in Jamaica lecturing for the British Council.

‘They were shooting a beach scene,’ Ann reported to Evelyn Waugh, ‘the hero and heroine cowering behind a ridge of sand to escape death from a machine gun mounted on a deep-sea fishing craft borrowed from a neighbouring hotel and manned by communist negroes. The sand ridge was planted with French letters full of explosive – by magic mechanism they blew up the sand in little puffs. The machine gun gave mild pops but I was assured it will be improved on the sound track; all this endeavor was wasted because unluckily a detachment of the American Navy entered the bay in speed launches and buggered it all up … they told us they were on French leave from Cuba and were in search of drink and women.’ Terence Young says that the Fleming group appeared out of nowhere and threatened to ruin the take. He shouted at them, ‘Lie down you bastards!’ He shot the scene and then forgot all about them. Half an hour later someone asked, What happened to those geezers on the beach?’ Someone was sent to find them; they were still lying down as instructed.

Ian became a regular visitor to the set, and invited cast members to dinner at Goldeneye. Ursula Andress remembers that she spent more time with Fleming than with the film’s producers. Fleming was clearly smitten, name-checking Andress in the book he was writing at the time,
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
– ‘that beautiful girl with the long fair hair at the big table, that is Ursula Andress, the film star’. She also met Noël Coward, another visitor to the set: ‘Together they were a joy to be with,’ she remembered, ‘two great personalities with a sense of humour; witty and interesting. It was my big discovery in Jamaica – Ian Fleming and Noël Coward.’

No one was sure whether they were making a hit or a turkey. Most believed the latter. But Chris Blackwell remembers the turning point:
when the crew sat down in the Cove cinema in Ocho Rios to watch the rushes of Ursula Andress’ emergence from the sea at the beautiful Laughing Waters beach. Then, he says, they knew they had something (and of course, bikini sales would sky-rocket).

The
Gleaner
had also changed its mind, declaring, ‘Filming has brought employment and publicity to Jamaica. Mr Fleming is becoming a kind of one-man national asset.’ The writer went on: ‘Perhaps most important of all, many of us have seen the leading lady, Miss Ursula Andress, in a bikini: a sight as sensational and perhaps even more stimulating than such natural splendours as Niagara Falls and the Grand Canyon combined.’

Although none of the cast and crew could have expected it, the film would provide Jamaica with its greatest international exposure to date. So what version of Jamaica is shown?

Chris Blackwell says it was an ‘accurate’ portrayal of Jamaica at the time. Marguerite Le Wars, who acted in
Dr No,
says it was ‘fairly accurate, though a large chunk of Jamaica was omitted’. The film opens with the three blind beggars crossing the road heading north along the east side of what is now St William Grant Park, named after a 1930s
labour leader, but then called Victoria Park. The background shows a modern scene with buses, cars and electricity and telephone pylons and wires. At the end of the shot, the statue of Queen Victoria appears on their left. The next shot is on the north side of the park, which puts the colonial-style Ward Theatre in the background. Then, although they are in theory heading north to New Kingston, where the club is located, they are seen walking south along King Street to the waterfront. This enables the viewer to see a ship in the harbour, but also, on their right, the statue of Sir Charles Metcalfe, British Governor of Jamaica 1839–42 (this has now been moved to St William Grant Park and replaced with a large copy of Edna Manley’s ‘Negro Aroused’). So in a way, the men are on a walking tour of colonial statues!

Much of the portrayal of Jamaica as ‘imperial’ is, of course, much less subtle. The next stop is Queen’s Club, clearly a bastion of white colonial rule. After the murder of Mary Trueblood, we are shown Whitehall and the Houses of Parliament in London, then the Secret Service headquarters, with radio operators receiving signals in an efficient way from all around the Empire. King’s House is seen, with a prominent Union Jack flying from the flagpole, and uniformed guards in white tunics, including a Gurkha-style soldier with a rifle with bayonet fixed. Inside, there is a portrait of the Queen amidst the lavish furnishings, and a military official in Raj-style khaki shorts.

It is a touristic portrayal as well, with the beautiful beaches and the picturesque local women with huge loads on their heads. Apart from Quarrel, as subservient a character as in the book, most of the other locals are entertainers or waiters. In addition, as in Fleming’s stories, Jamaica is a place of romantic adventure and dangerous mystery. Nowhere is there a hint that this outpost of empire will be independent before the film is even released.

The Federation of the West Indies, launched with a marked lack of enthusiasm back in January 1958, had struggled from the outset.
Everything proposed at a federal level, particularly taxation and freedom of movement, was opposed by island populations who saw each other in competition for foreign markets and investment. Two of the region’s most brilliant politicians – Jamaica’s Norman Manley and Trinidad’s Eric Williams – declined to take on federal leadership responsibility, instead choosing to concentrate on their home constituencies. When in 1960 Bustamante declared his JLP party opposed to federation, Prime Minister Manley called a national referendum. In September 1961, with a low turnout that reflected voter apathy, this delivered a narrow majority in favour of Jamaican withdrawal. Without the organisation’s most populous member, the federation experiment was over. As Eric Williams declared, ‘One from ten leaves nought.’