The James Bond Bedside Companion (12 page)

Bubble-gum trading card box. (© Copyright 1965 by the
Philadelphia Chewing Gum Corp., used by permission.)

Bubble-gum trading cards. (© Copyright 1965 by the Phil
adelphia Chewing Gum Corp., used by permission.)

Ever since Kevin McClory had obtained the film rights to THUNDERBALL, he had been anxious to begin production. The only problem was that Eon Productions had the market monopolized. Sean Connery was the only James Bond as far as the public was concerned, and McClory had trouble finding a suitable actor for the role. At one point, McClory approached Richard Burton to consider playing Bond, and reportedly, the actor was very interested. McClory says that while he was in the midst of his plans to launch his own production, he was approached by Broccoli and Saltzman about a deal. Perhaps the Eon producers felt that a rival 007 picture would be damaging to their own series. Cubby Broccoli flew to Dublin where he and McClory met at the airport. Here, the deal was made to make
Thunderball
,
the fourth James Bond film, which Albert R Broccoli and Harry Saltzman would present,
but Kevin McClory would produce. In actuality, the film was produced by all three men, but because of McClory's legal victory in 1963, it was he who received full credit. McClory claims that as a condition of the contract, the copyright to the film rights to the THUNDERBALL novel and screenplays related to the film would revert back to McClory ten years after the domestic release date of
Thunderball.
He agreed not to make further Bond pictures based on "The Film Scripts," during this period.

In late 1964 and early 1965, Leonard Russell, features editor on the
Sunday Times
, commissioned a biography of Ian Fleming and engaged John Pearson, a writer who had assisted Fleming on the "Atticus" column in the newspaper, as the author. Throughout 1965, Russell and Pearson collected reminiscences and letters from Fleming's friends and colleagues, and put together the pieces of the man's many-faceted life. Fleming's personal correspondence was purchased from Anne Fleming as well. Pearson traveled all over the world to interview people like Nazim Kalkavan in Istanbul, Sir William Stephenson in Bermuda, and Richard Hughes in the Far East.
The Life of Ian Fleming
was published by Jonathan Cape a year later. Russell and Pearson had originally planned to share the credit on the book, but since Pearson had done all the work, Russell agreed to let him have full credit.

Board games. (Reprinted by permission of Milton Bradley Co.)

Colgate-Palmolive produced a line of 007 toiletries. (Reprinted by permission of Colgate-Palmolive Co.)

Vanity Fair's Clock Radio. (Reprinted by permission
of
ERTL, a subsidiary of Kidde, Inc.)

T-shirts and "diplomas" on sale at a New York James Bond Collectors Convention.

In April, THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN was published posthumously. The jacket illustration was again by Richard Chopping, this time a wrap-around showing a gold-plated Colt .45 revolver, flies and gold bullets. Unfortunately, since Fleming had been unable to do his usual rewriting and revising, the novel was a weak entry in the Bond canon. Kingsley Amis, in the
New Statesman
,
called it "a sadly empty tale, empty of the interests and effects that for better or worse, Ian Fleming made his own." When it was published in August in America, it was received somewhat more enthusiastically. But despite mixed reviews, the book remained a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic for a long time.

Almost overshadowing THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN was a book by O. F. Snelling called
007 James Bond: A Report
, the first of the books about Fleming's novels. Published late in 1964, it was a best seller. In May, 1965, Jonathan Cape published the "official" study of the Bond oeuvre
: The James Bond Dossier
by Kingsley Amis. Amis had originally intended to write a simple article on the works, but as he states in his foreword, the article grew to formidable book length. Written with warmth and humor, Amis' book is more a series of essays on different facets of the novels than a scholarly study. Also appearing in 1965 was
The Book of Bond, or Every Man His Own 007,
published by Jonathan Cape in England and Viking Press in the United States. Kingsley Amis wrote this book as well, using the pseudonym "Lt. Col. William 'Bill' Tanner" (M's Chief of Staff in the novels).The
Book of Bond
was an amusing trivia collection with information on James Bond's tastes in clothes, food, drink, etc.

A double bill re-release of
Dr. No
and
From Russia
With
Love
the summer of 1965 made more money than the films' first releases, and
Thunderball
,
released at the end of the year, was the biggest grossing Bond film to that date. The production received the most publicity and news coverage of any of the Bond films, as over 10,000 reporters and photographers flooded the Bahamas to get a glimpse of the proceedings. Many magazines, such as
Life
,
Saturday Evening Post,
and
Look
featured cover stories on the film. An hour-long TV special called "The Incredible World of James Bond" was shown in the fall of 1965, featuring behind-the-scenes looks at
Thunderball
,
plus clips from the previous three films.
Thunderball
had one of the biggest openings in cinematic history.

The January 7, 1966 issue
of Life
magazine featured Sean Connery on the cover. But to millions of kids and adults alike, it was "James Bond." This was becoming a problem for the actor who played him. Sean Connery was rapidly losing his identity as an actor capable of other types of roles. It infuriated him when the press only wanted to ask him questions about James Bond, when he'd much rather have talked about the experiences he had making
The Hill
,
a fine film re
leased in 1965 and directed by his Mend Sidney Lumet But what really irritated the actor was that production of the Bond pictures almost always went over the allotted time period, a time Connery felt he could be putting to better use. In a recent interview he related that it took six weeks to film
The Hill,
while
You Only Live
Twice
took six months,
the time it would take to make four small films.

It is not surprising, therefore, that Sean Connery decided he didn't want to be James Bond anymore. His announcement worried Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman who signed Connery to make
You Only Live Twice
on a one-picture basis, releasing him from his original picture-a-year contract. With Connery secure, Eon Productions began work that summer in Japan.

In March, Glidrose Productions released two of Ian Fleming's short stories which Jonathan Cape published as OCTOPUSSY AND THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS (generally referred to simply as OCTOPUSSY). The title story had been written by Fleming in the early sixties but never published. It was also serialized in
Playboy
in 1966. The second story was originally published by the Sun
day Times
in 1962. Richard Chopping's jacket illustration featured a scorpionfish, seashell, and flies on a wood background. The book was received only moderately well, not nearly as well as Fleming's other anthology, FOR YOUR EYES ONLY. In the New American Library edition, illustrations by Paul Bacon were added. When the 1967 paperback edition was released in both countries, a third short story, "The Property of a Lady," (originally written for Sotheby's) was included.