The Ian Fleming Miscellany (14 page)

In 1960, they went to Kitbühel in winter but Ian couldn't ski. He could hardly breathe. His circulation was suffering, his heart and lungs weak. The marriage was awful. He was nasty when he was miserable and there were arguments about Goldeneye. Anne wanted him to sell it.

She had a reason: Blanche Blackwell.

In 1956 Ian had met his fantasy woman. She was not in her 30s – she was only four years younger than he was – but she was the soul-mate he knew he wanted: a kind, smart, independently wealthy Jewish divorcée with an exotic heritage. She had been born in Costa Rica into one of Jamaica's oldest plantation families, the Lindos, and had married a Blackwell, related to Ian's friend John Blackwell, from the family who ran Crosse and Blackwell.

She had one son, Christopher. Her home was in Jamaica, but because Chris had been until recently at Harrow, she had spent the past several years in England. She had inherited thousands of acres of land on the island, including the part she sold to Noël Coward. Ian knew her brother, and he had been told by various people that she was an interesting woman, likeable and self-assured. There had been an affair with Errol Flynn, who had wanted to marry her.

When they met for the first time, at a social gathering, she found Fleming dreadful. She happened to mention that the area where she lived was becoming the latest gay hangout, and he said, ‘Don't tell me you're a lesbian then.' He called her, in conversation with someone else, a stupid bitch.

Somehow, in spite of his insulting behaviour, they got together in the winter of 1956. Anne at the time was in England, in rehab at a health farm. She needed to stop taking the tablets. She was also avoiding Jamaica, where the Spartan facilities and irritable, preoccupied husband had become a strain. So Ian and Blanche were free to shop together for toys that Caspar could play with when he came to Jamaica next year. They were both invited to Noël Coward's house. Blanche swam like a fish. Everyone could see that she and Ian were flirting. And pretty soon, they were always invited to the same parties.

A photograph of them together on the beach shows that they were both running to fat, but they look happy. She was much better at managing him than Anne was and less insistent on being noticed. Later, as his health worsened, somebody remarked that she was exactly what he needed – a nanny.

As Christmas approached, both Ian and Anne were in England. At home Sir Anthony Eden was prime minister, but in October and early November the uproar over Suez – his disastrous attempt, with French and Israeli collaboration, to get rid of the socialist President Nasser of Egypt – left him facing fury in the House of Commons. He and his wife Clarissa required privacy, so they rented Goldeneye for a few weeks after the ceasefire of 7 November.

In theory, the governor of Jamaica's wife would arrange that they were properly catered for. In the event, it was the governor's wife and Blanche Blackwell who organised everything, and Ian's local attorney, Lahoud, who acted as liaison with the prime minister's party. The Edens were delighted with the place; it had the peace and quiet and warmth they needed and was miles from everyone they knew. Sir Anthony Eden had liver trouble caused by a botched operation, and there had been a series of operations that never seemed to help. What was not well known that he had been prescribed the sedative and stimulant drug drinamyl, against anxiety. It can affect judgement.

With the Edens quietly relaxing at Goldeneye, behind the scenes Lahoud was not reconciled to Blanche. And then he made a naïve error; one morning he told the press that the prime minister wasn't feeling very well. This of course had massive repercussions everywhere from London's political party machines to stock exchanges in London and New York. Lady Eden was absolutely furious and got rid of him, but it was too late; in London Macmillan and Butler were already jockeying for position as the man who would take over from Eden. Macmillan did, about six weeks later.

There was another, personal outcome when they got home. Clarissa mentioned to Anne, a friend of theirs, how wonderfully helpful Blanche Blackwell had been in getting Goldeneye ready for their visit.

This was devastating. As far as Anne knew, Blanche Blackwell had never set foot in Goldeneye. Ian must have been seeing her. The following year, when she got there with her older son Raymond O'Neill and saw the comforts, still in place, that had been provided in preparation for the Edens, she was deeply wounded. Ian had never allowed her to improve Goldeneye. Blanche Blackwell was part of his life and he didn't deny it; she could perhaps have borne that, had Blanche not visibly exercised more power over her husband than she had. Power was important to Anne.

Blanche understood Ian's need for solitude. Anne, above all a social being, was impatient and annoyingly intrusive when he was writing. In 1958, Anne didn't go to Goldeneye at all. This was a huge relief. Had she done so, she would have demanded attention.

Instead Blanche was there, but only if required. She kept away during Ian's working hours, and when Hugh Pitman and his family came for a couple of weeks she took them off his hands.

Now that Anne was aware of Blanche, there would be no reconciliation. She was humiliated but not necessarily sad. Even before Caspar was born, she had said that with Ian, ‘the deserts of pomposity between the acres of wit are too vast'. She called him Thunderbird when she wrote to Evelyn Waugh, and could never be bothered to read the books. As to Ian, he found her Caesarian scars sexually off-putting and her overwhelming presence sometimes an embarrassment.

They stayed in the marriage for Caspar's sake. Holidays were increasingly taken separately. Ian spent several summers with the Bryces at Black Hole Hollow Farm, on the Vermont border, which he loved. Anne couldn't stand Ivar Bryce; she thought he was a crook. Ian, for his part, disliked Lady Diana Cooper, who was a great friend of Anne's. By the end of 1957, Ian and Anne were destroying one another and forever sniping, even in public. He accused her of constantly nagging and complaining. They decided to split up for the winter and she resorted to rehab again.

In May 1958 he would be 50. They took a second honeymoon in Venice. She walked around the galleries. He never willingly contemplated art or objects unless the subject might be of use to him. He read instead, always with a drink to hand. He drove very fast without stopping. They really had nothing in common. After Venice, Nice; he was seeing people there about filming the Bond books and had to go on to New York City afterwards for discussions. Anne was left behind.

Later on that year the Flemings were in Austria when the Gaitskells turned up. They were Hugh Gaitskell, then leader of the Labour Party, and his wife. Anne was already, unfathomably, having an affair with Hugh Gaitskell.

Ian had designed James Bond with film-making always at the back of his mind and now the books were attracting interest. Film and TV producers were nibbling. Anne went on the attack. Ian was employing lawyers here there and everywhere to deal with these things, and others, while Arnold Goodman could do it all. Ian was selfish and whatever he wanted, he got; she never got the chance to choose where they were going on holiday. And why did he have to eat so much when it was making him fat? He usually said something spiteful in return.

Beneath it all, he felt desperately tired of James Bond. He felt he had used all the situations and characters he had absorbed as material during the war. All that remained now was to find exotic locations for improbable plots. His heart wasn't in it anymore; yet there was nothing else; he had become the Writer, Ian Fleming. When Bryce talked about writing a book he wrote to him:

You will be constantly depressed by the progress of the opus and feel it is all nonsense and that nobody will be interested. These are the moments when you must all the more obstinately stick to your schedule and do your daily stint ...

It would be worth it, he thought, if he could find somebody to produce Bond as a film. Hollywood was a writer's only chance of making enough to retire on.

The second, third and subsequent Bond books hit the stores in the spring of every year. Ian felt he was on a treadmill, but one he could not afford to fall off. It was true that with every new book his readership increased; still, the revenue from books alone was not even in the same league as the revenue from movie distribution and TV series. The trouble was that a one hour TV show had already been made, with his blessing, in America and it hadn't worked at all. The director had swept the British settings and characters under the carpet because a British agent would never work in Middle America.

A James Bond film would be better, but it must have a British star. As soon as you started talking that way to US producers they pulled their offer off the table.

So this went on, this hoping, and blundering, for several years. Ian did not know any dedicated script agents or big directors. He would try to work on a film proposal sometimes then put it down again. He didn't altogether know how to do this or whom to send it to; he had no inside knowledge of the film industry. Would-be developers came to him and they faded away, usually, or optioned a book and then did nothing with it.

This went on intermittently until, in 1959, Ivar Bryce came to the rescue.

The year before, Bryce had set up a film production company with an Irishman in his early 30s called Kevin McClory. McClory, after a personally devastating war, had worked his way up the film industry from runner through boom operator to assistant director and finally, second unit director. Both John Huston and Mike Todd found him reliable and passionate about the work. They liked him and kept in touch. And he was creative. Wide-screen films were the new big thing in the 1950s, and McClory had an idea for a story featuring scenes shot underwater in Todd-AO. He interested John Steinbeck in contributing a treatment for it, but it fizzled out. By that time McClory had another idea, derived from a short story about a boy who runs away from home to live in the Golden Gate Bridge.

Kevin McClory, the man who claimed to have created the ‘big screen' James Bond.
Philadelphia Enquirer

For this one, he raised seed money and production funding to shoot a film set in London and Tower Bridge. McClory contributed his expertise in the film industry – he would be producer/director – and Bryce supplied the money. Together they formed Xanadu Productions in London. Bryce benefited from Ernie Cuneo's legal advice. McClory went over budget, but he made
The Boy
and the Bridge
, and it was chosen as the British entry for the 1959 Venice Biennale.

Fleming saw the film, was impressed and started talking to both of them about investing in a Bond movie, which he would write and Kevin would direct and produce. ‘There's no-one who I would prefer to produce James Bond for the screen', he wrote to Kevin after seeing his work. He probably, at the time, didn't know the difference between a producer and a director and was using the verb loosely.

Anyhow while Kevin was busy promoting
The Boy and the Bridge
all over Europe and Hollywood, backed by Bryce's investment, Ian began work on a treatment for a Bond film. Kevin had told him that the Bond stories, as they stood, were not suitable. They would need a fresh approach for a medium that relied on vision and sound alone, and the sadism would have to go. The neatest solution was an entirely new story, specially written for the screen, using underwater locations in the Bahamas. Bryce, Kevin McCory and Cuneo talked about possible plotlines early in 1959; Cuneo hurriedly put the essentials into a memo and sent it off to Fleming.

Fleming expressed satisfaction. The first Bond film would be a fast-moving caper involving an atom bomb, an enemy agent infiltrating a troupe of wartime entertainers – Noël Coward and Laurence Olivier in cameo roles – a female CIA spy for love interest, and an underwater battle with scuba divers.