The Ian Fleming Miscellany (16 page)

McClory stuck with it. He had married Bobo Sigrist, who was extremely rich.

Fleming, Bryce, Jonathan Cape, Mr Cuneo from New York, Farrers and Mr Harbottle from St James's Square, confabulated. In July, McClory was offered £10,000 and many other incentives to go away. McClory did not bite.

The trial was only weeks away when he and Carter-Ruck finally received the full documentation, the years of pertinent correspondence – copies of Fleming's and Xanadu's parallel arrangements with people like United Artists, Broccoli and Saltzmann, and other film and TV producers and companies; most importantly, the letters and cables between Fleming and Bryce which demonstrated intent to cut him out of the Bond film and out of the company set up to exploit it. He was advised to sue for breach of copyright, breach of confidence, conversion, breach of contract, false representation of authorship and slander of title.

The case opened at the Royal Courts of Justice in November 1963. The press were agog. The
Mail
and the
Express
alternated pictures of Anne in floor-length mink and off-the-face mink hat, alongside Ian in his suit and bow tie, with photographs of Kevin in an overcoat and his pretty wife in pillbox hat and suit, Jacquie Kennedy style.

The evidence was damning. McClory brought several witnesses from the film industry who attested to his professional competence and efforts to get the Bond film off the ground, as well as Whittingham of course who was in the best possible position to discern exactly what creative input had gone into
Thunderball
. Fleming was mortified.

On the second Friday, proceedings were suddenly adjourned just as Kevin McClory had taken the stand. Leading Counsel for both sides had separately seen the judge in his room. The court would reconvene on Monday 2 December. On the Sunday afternoon, it was all settled. McClory demanded, and got, full payment of his legal costs; film rights in
Thunderball
; copyright in the finished picture and all its scripts; and damages, in restitution for mental anguish and physical inconvenience. The damages would be £50,000, today's equivalent of which would be scores of millions.

After a 10-minute consultation the terms were agreed. Bryce would pay.

Why did Fleming and Bryce cave in? Probably because they were likely to lose a lot of money, but Robert Sellers, who wrote
The Battle for Bond
, believed that the main consideration was Ian's poor health. He had recently been told he had five years to live. He already looked extremely frail for a man of 55.

There is another slight possibility in Sellers' book, which doesn't make very good sense. It seems the letter had been handed to the judge by Bryce's QC with the words ‘I think it would be unwise for me to comment on this.' The judge read it. ‘All I can say is that I am very surprised to see it,' he said, and handed it back. Sellers suggests, as a ‘side-note', a homosexual relationship between Ivar and Ian which came close to being expressed in letters between them. Homosexuality was illegal at the time. The inference is that McClory had produced a copy of the letter as some sort of blackmail threat and the QC wanted the judge to know.

It's a red herring. Fleming's arrogant dismissal of medical advice was finishing all the games at once. Ian was already very ill indeed, and a few weeks later, he nearly died of a heart attack. He was taken by ambulance from an editorial conference at Gray's Inn Road straight to King Edward VII Hospital, where he spent more than a month. Yet astonishingly, as he convalesced, thinking, perhaps, of happier times, he produced something completely different:
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
.

This was Ian with a burden lifted, writing about a wonderful car he had seen as a boy at Brooklands racetrack. The real car had been driven by Count Zborowski of Higham Park, wearing a flying helmet and a big black moustache. When Ian saw the race he was enchanted. As who wouldn't be, for Zborowski was a dashing young man of fabulous wealth, descended from the Astors, who had built a miniature railway line around Higham Park – not because it joined up with any other railway but just for fun. His favourite racing cars, Chitty Bang Bang and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, had aeroplane engines in them and must have been quite loud. ‘Never say No to adventures', a character in the story tells the children.

It was his first children's story and the publishers accepted it at once. It must have been a great comfort, after the agonies of tedious work on James Bond, to know that his creative years were not finished. He could still produce a damn good yarn that people liked reading. It took his mind off things. Caspar was difficult. Anne was annoyed because Blanche was still in the picture. She was angry because he'd got Chris Blackwell a job on the set of
Dr. No
. Looking on the bright side, Broccoli and Saltzman would bring
Dr. No
to British screens the following year.

He had to convalesce, though. In Jamaica with Blanche, all passion spent, he had decided to write a book about ganja and sent away for research material. He would not write another Bond book this year.

He would spend the late summer in Kent. With the passing of years St Margaret's Bay attracted Ian more and more. He liked the golf club crowd. He was pretty special there. Anne's brother Hugo, a writer, once invented a character based on Ian, of whom he wrote ‘there was no limit, no limit at all, to his capacity for feeling inferior'. There was no chance of feeling inferior surrounded by the admiring fellows in the bar at the golf club. He was often there.
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
would be released in October.

The worst thing, that summer, was the death of his mother. She had lived in Nassau for years with the Marquis of Winchester. He died at 99. The ultimate fate of the Marchioness is not recorded. After his death Eve decamped to Cannes where she lived at the Metropole Hotel and was driven around in a Rolls Royce. Ian had brought her back to London a few years ago, and she died in August.

He did not divorce Anne. In 1962 he told Blanche he was going to, but then he also told Anne that he wasn't seeing Blanche any more. In fact she came to England when he did, and was having lunch with him at a pleasant hotel in the Home Counties every week.

Two weeks after his mother's death, while at home in his flat in St Margaret's Bay, he suffered another major cardiac arrest. He was taken to hospital, where he died.

Caspar was a continuing problem, and would die young and dissolute in 1975. Anne drank too much and died in 1981. Blanche must have been consoled by the success of her own son who in adulthood became world famous as Chris Blackwell, the music producer and founder of Island Records.

The James Bond books and
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
are still in print. As to the films,
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
came out in 1968 and is a perennial favourite. Fortunes have been made in the Bond film industry, which has employed a succession of stars, female leads, musicians and title designers, makers of gadgetry, special effects people, writers, producers, directors, crew and editors. Entire careers, in Britain and America, have been based on reputations made by those films. They get better and better, although perhaps less and less like any James Bond Ian Fleming imagined.

Kevin McClory was in continual litigation over
Thunderball
for over forty years. Which is probably not what he intended to happen.

How is Ian Fleming remembered? With adoration, by his fans, for inventing a British fantasy figure who lives on throughout the world.

First published in 2015

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