James Bond: The Authorised Biography (33 page)

She had insisted on preparing lunch herself – a P.J. Clark salad, cold pheasant, strawberries and cream. Bond was allowed to manage the champagne. Honeychile looked suntanned, desirable and rich, and by now was wearing nothing but the bottom half of her bikini. Bond had told her that he could not bear tanned women with what he called ‘undercooked’ white breasts. She was obediently doing what she could to improve them.

It was after lunch that the combination of alcohol and sun and Honeychile's near-naked presence, had brought the conversation round to sex and love. And it was then that he had given his definition of love.

‘Tenderness and lust,’ Honeychile repeated. ‘Those sound like the words of a true male chauvinist bastard.’

Bond grinned cheerfully. The land was out of sight, Cullum at the helm, the yacht was ploughing a furrow of white wake to the horizon. Honeychile got up to fetch a second bottle of champagne. Her breasts were browning nicely. When Bond refilled her glass she sipped and then said very softly, ‘One day, J. Bond Esquire, you're going to get your sexual comeuppance. It'll be very funny and I hope that I'm around to see it.’

Bond didn't seem at all put out by this.

‘Oh, but it's happened,’ he replied. ‘Not that it's something I've ever looked for in a woman, but I have been treated very badly in my time.’

‘Like when?’

‘Like during the time I was with Tiffany. I'd been in America in 1955 working on the diamond case that Fleming wrote about in
Diamonds are Forever
. There was a gang that called itself “the Spangled Mob”. It virtually controlled the illicit international diamond traffic. We had to deal with it – and in the process I acquired this girl. Her name was Tiffany Case. Fleming mentioned that I brought her back to London, but never described what happened afterwards.’

From Bond's account that afternoon it was quite clear that the beautiful Miss Tiffany Case, ex-gangster's moll and sometime blackjack dealer from Las Vegas, possessed that extra something that a woman needed to get through his habitual sexual defences. In her case this something was her vulnerability. He had sensed it beneath her ‘brazen sexiness and the rough tang of her manner’ that first evening that he met her in her London hotel room at the start of the assignment. As Fleming noticed Bond had an instinct for female lame ducks. He probably detected some reflection of his mother in them, and his protectiveness was roused from the beginning.

He is essentially a sentimentalist; the story Felix Leiter told him of the girl's childhood touched his heart. Most men would have steered clear of a girl with such a past, however beautiful. But for Bond the wounds that life had given her added to her interest. He was intrigued to learn that this brash, knowing girl had never had a man since she was communally raped at sixteen by a bunch of California gangsters. There was a challenge in a girl like this. The fact that her mother had once kept ‘the snazziest cat-house in San Francisco’ added, if anything, to her allure. So did the desperation with which she tried to drink herself to death after the disaster. As Bond admits now, she was the ideal romantic victim-heroine to appeal to him.

Fleming has told how Bond finally made love to her that night aboard the
Queen Mary
– ‘I want it all, James. Everything you've ever done to a girl. Now. Quickly.’ Once this had happened and her phobias were safely overcome, Bond's fate was almost sealed. He had always said that he would only marry someone who could make love and
sauce béarnaise
. Tiffany did both. On top of this she satisfied his hidden vanity. It was as if he had created sex in her when they had finally made love. She was his Pygmalion. She needed him, as no one else had ever done. It was inevitable that they should talk of marriage.

From the way that Fleming writes it might appear as if James Bond were dangling marriage at the girl simply to get her to come and live with him. But Bond insists that he was totally sincere. He never spoke of ‘love’ unless he meant it. With Tiffany, he was all for marrying her at once. She was the one sufficiently hard-headed to suggest the trial period together in Wellington Square.

They made a point of being very honest with each other. Even during the exciting days aboard the
Queen Mary
, Bond had told her all his drawbacks as a potential husband – the hazards of his job, the fact that he was in a sense ‘already married to a man called M.’. He also told her that, much as he liked the idea of children, it would be unfair to think of having them until he was retired from the 00 section. But it was not until they were safely settled into Wellington Square that they discovered there were other problems.

Fleming described how James Bond sent May a telegram in advance saying that he was coming and ordering flowers and Floris bath essence for the arrival home. It is revealing that there was no mention in the telegram of Tiffany. For the truth was that Bond was just a little scared of May, and how she would react to another woman in the flat. As it happened he need not have worried. He had forgotten that May was away in Scotland, visiting her mother in a village near Glencoe. He and Tiffany had the first ten days in London quite alone.

It was an idyllic time. One of those rare occasions when Bond felt entitled to relax. M. had been satisfied at the way the diamond racket had been dealt with, and Bond felt justified in self-indulgently enjoying life – and Tiffany.

She was the perfect mistress for him now. This was the first time he had lived with anyone since Marthe de Brandt, but he was never bored. One of the reasons why he had avoided living with his women previously was that he had dreaded being bored. With Tiffany he was kept busy teaching her a whole world she had never seen. She was an apt pupil, Bond a dedicated teacher.

He showed her London, not the London of the guidebooks, but his private London – London of the river and docks, the City empty on a Saturday evening when there was just one pub by Cannon Street still open, Covent Garden in the early morning. They ate in the last Chinese restaurant in Limehouse (Bond had first met the owner in different circumstances in Hong Kong), and dined at the Ritz (‘the finest dining-room in Europe’) at Scott's (the inevitable grilled plaice and black velvet at Fleming's ‘Honeymooners’ table’) and at a taxi-driver's shelter in Victoria (‘the best sausages and mash in London’).

Bond also showed her the crown jewels, the Soane Museum, Savile Row, the reptile house at London Zoo and took her on a late-night tour of the London sewers. They bought smoked salmon in a shop off Cable Street, caviare in Clerkenwell, steak in Smithfield, and had champagne and strawberries sent from Fortnums.

The only time they clashed was when Tiffany wanted to go to a theatre. Bond refused. In the event they spent the time in bed.

For both of them, the greatest source of pleasure lay in novelty. Neither had lived like this before. In her disorganized wild way, Tiffany kept house – cooking when they were hungry, stacking the dark blue Minton unwashed in the kitchen, pulling the covers over the bed when they had finished making love. The flat looked as if a boys’ club had adopted it.

At the time Bond didn't mind – rather the reverse. Like most meticulous and over-organized people, he had a secret longing for disorder. It seemed a breath of life, a much-needed shake-up. Order brought James Bond boredom – anarchy rejuvenated him. Then things began to change.

They had gone off to spend their second weekend together at Le Touquet, putting the Bentley on a Bristol Freighter flight at Lydd and staying in some style at the Hotel Westminster. As Bond told her, this was a treat – to celebrate their time together, and to mark the end of their brief ‘honeymoon’. On Monday morning he returned to work. They had to make the most of these last hours of holiday. They gambled wildly, ate compulsively, made love extravagantly. They arrived back in London late on Sunday night. May was waiting.

May had a certain way of sniffing when she disapproved. It was a private signal Bond had always recognized. She sniffed when she surveyed the flat, her ‘handsome closed face’, (as Fleming once described it) eloquent with mute distaste.

‘If ye'll be excusin’ me,’ she said, ‘I'm just a wee bit tired. I'll get started on the place tomorrow.’ And in the morning Bond and Tiffany were woken by the angry sound of washing-up as May got going in the kitchen. It was the clarion-call to battle.

Bond was very male in the way he had closed his mind to May – also in the cowardice and his assumption that ‘things would work out’. They didn't. Almost from the start these two women in his life reminded him of two determined cats – one of them old and wily, the other young and in its prime, circling the same disputed patch of territory. Both were fighters.

May brought ‘the Commander’ his customary boiled egg and copy of
The Times
. Tiffany insisted that he preferred kippers and Cooper's marmalade and the
Express
. May began tidying compulsively – Tiffany produced more mess than ever. May sniffed. Tiffany slammed doors. Bond shaved, dressed, dodged both breakfasts and was late arriving at the office.

For the remainder of that week the battle rumbled on with May and Tiffany embattled in the flat and Bond a somewhat wary referee longing for one thing only – peace. This was a situation he was not prepared for, the sort of warfare where this ‘man of war’ became a coward. He could take on a Smersh, a Chiffre, a Mr Big, but he would suffer agonies at the thought of having to lay down the law to May – or Tiffany.

The sad thing was that suddenly he seemed to have lost the best of both worlds he had known. Tiffany's insouciance had left her. So had May's order and discretion. During the weeks that followed Wellington Square became a sort of no-man's-land.

Bond became edgy in the office and bad in bed. He felt tired. The unshakeable Miss Goodnight became difficult. Bond's work suffered. He felt M.'s hidden disapproval in the background – and at the same time his ‘available male rating’ with the secretaries plummeted.

He still loved Tiffany, in some ways more than ever, but she had started to annoy him. The female debris that surrounded her no longer seemed appealing. Nor did her ignorance. She drove the Bentley and dented the offside wing. Once he would have ignored it. Now he was annoyed, and there were tears.

Finally Bond asked Bill Tanner, M.'s Chief of Staff for his advice. This was something Bond had never done before. He wasn't one for revealing his personal affairs to anyone, but Bill Tanner was an old friend, a married man, and eminently sane. His advice was quite uncompromising. ‘It looks as if you've got to choose. Either you marry, get a house and kick out May – or you risk losing Tiffany. You can't have both.’

In fact, Bill Tanner's words were truer than Bond suspected. Early that June, May was on the edge of handing in her notice, whilst Tiffany was growing more and more depressed. She was having to find out the hard way James Bond's defects as a potential husband.

She still loved him, and thought him glamorous and kind as ever. When they were together life could still be wonderful. But, as she sometimes asked herself, what was in all of it for her? She had no friends in London. Bond was away all day. May was a bitch.

Nor had she any money. Bond could be generous, in certain strictly limited ways. He loved to give her presents, often expensive presents – a diamond clip from Cartier, a jumbo-sized bottle of scent, silk underwear, the luxuries of life. But when it came to bread-and-butter he was downright mean. She found the housekeeping he gave her quite inadequate; this too became a source of friction.

The truth was that Bond had really no idea about money, nor the cost of running a
ménage
. May was an economical old Scot who had always managed everything, cut the expenses to the bone and worked wonders with the salary of a civil servant. Tiffany was not. The life that she had led had made her quite indifferent to money. It had always been around her in large quantities and she had spent as she wanted. Now she was short for food and short on clothes. She couldn't buy a lipstick for herself. Inevitably they argued over money – something they both hated but could not avoid. It was almost a relief to Bond when, in the second week in June, he was sent off abroad on a brief assignment, even if it was the sort of faintly servile and routine affair that he would normally have loathed.

M. was predictably embarrassed by the whole business, and cut the briefing to a minimum. From his few clipped phrases Bond gathered that his task was simply ‘to keep an eye on’ a British cabinet minister holidaying at Eze-sur-Mer. The man, not entirely to Bond's surprise, was homosexual – M.'s phrase was ‘one of them’ – and Bond had simply to make sure that no enterprising agent of a foreign power attempted to involve him in a scandal or to blackmail him. Recently there had been several cases which involved businessmen and politicians with such tendencies. The minister had been showing an extraordinary compulsion to get into trouble – there had been discreet warnings from the C.I.A. after the man's recent visit to the States, and, as M. said, ‘prevention is better than a messy scandal.’

When Bond told Tiffany that he was off to France for a brief assignment, she begged to be allowed to come along.

‘All I want is a bikini and a suite in the Negresco. I'm just a simple country girl at heart.’ Bond was tempted. On a job like this it was always a relief to be assured of some straight heterosexual company. But then he reflected that it would be a dangerous precedent to set; she would soon be demanding to go everywhere with him. Nevertheless he felt uneasy when he left.

Bond had five days of what the section used to call ‘Nanny duty’ watching the private and at times preposterous behaviour of this leader of the nation. It was a difficult assignment, not least because Bond had to act unofficially. The Minister had his own detective, a Scotland Yard man Bond had known for years. Luckily, Bond and the detective understood each other.