The Ian Fleming Miscellany (3 page)

His mother was quite a piece of work. Eve was known by at least one family retainer as ‘the Great I Am'. She must have been amusing within her own enormous circle of friends, but her course of action in the early 1920s, when all her sons were away at school, indicates a person unhinged. She blatantly stole another woman's baby.

Augustus John, her lover, had many illegitimate children (after Caspar and Poppet, who had been born to his wife who died). His most famous model was the exotic Chiquita. People said she'd never been closer to South America than Southend, but whatever – in 1924 she had a little girl by him. Eve simply took the baby away and ran off with her. Augustus John got the child back, but Eve still charmed him into a vacation in Berlin, where she would introduce him to some lucrative commissions. She also made sure she got pregnant, which was why she shut the house, sacked the servants and reappeared, in 1925, with an ‘adopted' baby, Amaryllis Marie-Louise. Princess Marie-Louise, a great friend, would be her godmother. No matter what it took, Eve got what she wanted.

She expected her sons to do as she wished, and Richard and Michael, the younger ones, dutifully joined the family bank. Peter, the high achiever, was easily forgiven for his decision to do otherwise because he was so talented in other directions. His success as a writer made her proud.

She saw Ian as a slacker by comparison. He knew it, and sulked. By the time he was 20, if not earlier, she embarrassed him. He knew about Augustus John, who was an old goat. He didn't put two and two together about Amaryllis. His mother had an imagination too, and her confected story about the baby's origins caused Ian no curiosity when he was 17 and preoccupied.

Eve grated on him. She was ‘artistic' and wore flamboyant clothes. She had two ghastly brothers, Ian's uncles, old roués who were forever going bankrupt or getting divorced, and a whining sister. The Roses were a wealthy family. Her father, George, a successful lawyer (the firm is now Norton Rose) was a son of Disraeli's solicitor, and her mother, Beatrice, was a daughter of Queen Victoria's private doctor. All their children were spoiled.

Eve resented her mother-in-law, Granny Kathleen, for being so stupendously wealthy. Maybe she suspected that Granny's influence lay behind her grandsons' dismissal from the direct line of inheritance – and by implication her own. Traditionally, primogeniture ruled, so once Valentine Fleming had died, custom dictated that Peter would be the heir. But old Robert was a pragmatist, and maybe he simply thought that Philip, his own second son, would make a better guardian of the family fortunes than Eve's oldest boy who obviously was not interested.

Ian liked his Fleming grandmother a lot, although she was a crazy autocrat too. Despite the forty-four bedroomed house at Nettlebed, with its vast acreage and golf course, she was parsimonious. The place was usually freezing, but then so were most English country houses. It was in her treatment of the servants that she seemed utterly dissociated from normal life by the 1930s. After the First World War, loyal staff were much harder to find. In a seller's market, the tribe of maids and gardeners and chauffeurs who supported Granny K were paid less the longer they stayed. One account has her tipping a golf caddie with the gift of a toothbrush.

Monique, Ian's Swiss fiancée, was never invited to stay again. According to a friend of Ian's, he defiantly communicated with the girl for some time before Eve put a stop to the liaison by threatening to have his trust fund income stopped. This was a ruthless exercise of her power. He was at Reuters then, having recently returned from Moscow in triumph, aged about 24. His mother told him to break off the engagement or face living on a reporter's income. Eve had to compensate Monique's father, who sued for breach of promise, and for the sake of getting her own way, she did.

She failed a few years later in a similar action against Peter Fleming, which had enduring repercussions. It was 1935, and she had bought Grey's Court, an exquisite old house a few miles from Joyce Grove, and prepared a study in which Peter could write. Almost as soon as it was ready, he announced his intention to marry an actress. This was Celia Johnstone (St Paul's, RADA, the Comédie Française and, a decade later, an internationally known film star). Eve, petulant, self-centred and unreasonable, cut off the funds. Peter married Celia anyway. He was not to be manipulated by blackmail. She, equally intransigent, washed her hands of Grey's Court. She sold it at once, to make sure her point hit home. In 1937 his uncle Philip Fleming decided to give Joyce Grove to Peter in any case.

Ian's best male friend, whom he had known since early childhood, was Ivar Bryce. Bryce's background was just as privileged as his own. Bryce had the sunnier disposition and seems to have idolised his friend; he later wrote a book about him. He was occasionally shocked by Ian's patronising attitude to girls, which became more evident as time went on and Ian found conquests easier to make. Bryce recounts the distress of a glamorous young American whom Ian had picked up on his travels around Europe. He had made a flattering fuss of her, she was alone in France with him, and yet having spent several days with her and encouraged this dependency he was dismissive to the point of nastiness. He pushed her off the running board of his car and, with Bryce in the passenger seat, drove away to spend the summer in Capri.

This was typical of Ian. He was moody. He preferred the company of male friends, who were likely to be forgiving of his frequent need for solitude. Girlfriends never understood that; maybe he could not tell them. He seemed to attract girls who were needy and attention seeking. Sometimes a cat will rub its nose on your leg and twist onto its back to let its tummy be tickled – but at a certain point its claws strike deep into your hand. Ian was like that. The abuse was verbal, usually. Girls withdrew shocked, and in tears.

In a frank interview he once expressed physical disgust. In his opinion most women were not just foolish but dirty, especially English ones. He may have been right, because in freezing houses people unused to the icy morning shower of a public school certainly didn't wash enough. Conrad O'Brien Ffrench, a clever Secret Service hand who ran a valuable network of spies out of Kitzbühel, had known Ian and Peter Fleming from 1931 if not earlier, and he thought that Ian Fleming's hang-ups were beyond understandable fastidiousness. It was his opinion that, like Casanova, he despised all women once the conquest was done; by implication, he had never liked them much in the first place, for to him they were not quite human.

Was Ian becoming a confirmed bachelor? When he left Reuters and began work for Cull's, he was better off. His upstairs apartment at Ebury Street, the boundary that divided louche Pimlico from smart Belgravia, was decorated for effect. It was intentionally dark and bookish and full of carefully placed props with which to impress visitors. There was something of the alchemist's lair about it.

He also, from time to time, borrowed a friend's flat in Marylebone Lane. There he could conduct a secret life and take nightclub hostesses or actresses to bed; he wouldn't expect to know any, socially. They were the sort of women you could ask to behave, in bed, in a way you couldn't demand of girls whose people you knew. He advised other men not to bother with actresses. They were so concerned with their careers that they were never available when you needed them.

Ivar Bryce said that Ian's girlfriends usually followed ‘glamorous flirtation' with ‘abject slavery' and ‘fond nostalgia'. This was not the universal opinion. Some did not find the abject slavery easy to recover from and others were instantly put off by Ian's arrogance and his habit of addressing them with a sneer when they had barely met. He was very good looking, but then, so were other politer, less self-regarding men.

Nonetheless there were many girlfriends. Most were nothing more than a passing fling. Lady Anne O'Neill was one of those. She was five years younger than him and had married at 19; she and Shane O'Neill had two children. In 1936, in London, Ian got friendly with her husband and she began an affair with Esmond Harmsworth. Ian, dark and moody, she called ‘glamour boy'. In 1938 they met again in Austria. Ann saw him alone in London. Neither wanted commitment.

Older women liked him better, probably because he took them seriously. Liesl and Maud were two of his older mistresses. Both were Jewish by birth, sophisticated, discreet and interested in him. They introduced him to people of influence, remained unperturbed by his fleeting affairs with other women and the very idea of a permanent union would have made them laugh. In a world where men held all the power and money, and young women had to marry a man in order to command a social life, never mind a modish hat and coat, relations between the sexes could become quite fraught. With these wise, sexually experienced older ladies, Ian felt comfortable. They were settled; they had interests beyond the bedroom; they were good company and would never make unwanted demands on his time.

In the summer of 1938 he was gainfully employed by Rowe and Pitman but enduring, at the age of 30, a kind of crisis. He had invited a girlfriend, Mary Pakenham, to stay in Capri. She hoped that the Mediterranean would put him in better spirits than usual. In London he was forever bemoaning his own perceived failure: how Peter had always been good at the things that mattered, while he, Ian, had dropped out of Sandhurst, failed to get into the Foreign Office and was now failing again and settling for a job he hated. What he really wanted was to write thrillers. The villain would perk himself up with Benzedrine, he said. The kind of thriller he liked might have a half-clad girl being whipped in it. He talked a lot about sex. He produced pornographic pictures, often featuring dominatrixes.

He was, in short, the epitome of a fixated public school boy in an arrested stage of sexual development. In the end, it wasn't his leering talk that put Mary off but his terrible manners. He had booked himself a bed in the train, while she had to sit up all night in a carriage, and the villa on Capri turned out to have no flushing lavatory. Worst of all, Ian instantly bagged, as by
droit de seigneur
, the best room.

His older women friends endured as confidantes long after they had ceased to be lovers. War seemed increasingly likely. Maud Russell, an art collector, knew that Ian was interested in secret work and would be good at it. She was herself quietly engaged in helping people get out of Germany. Conrad O'Brien Ffrench was up to something hush-hush, and so were people at Rowe and Pitman, and Sir Robert Vansittart and others that Ian saw at his several clubs. Lord Kemsley had his eye on him.

Early in 1939 it all came together.

In 1938, in Germany and Austria, dissidents were being removed without warning and imprisoned at unknown locations. In September, the Nazis invaded the Sudetenland. In November the world watched, appalled, as Kristallnacht shattered businesses and lives all over Germany.

In January 1939, Neville Chamberlain remained convinced that Herr Hitler was a man of his word. Hadn't he promised that we would share peace with honour? It would be a terrible mistake to put our armaments production on a war footing if no offence was intended.

Behind the scenes, certain individuals were less wooden headed, deeply frustrated by this torpor and gathering intelligence as best they could. They needed to know, among other things, whether, in the event of war, Russia would lean towards Germany, Britain and her allies or remain technically neutral but favouring one side or another. This meant getting inside Russia and finding out, and very few people could do that.

Ian Fleming was still not in the loop. He was a young stockbroker, discontented and impatient to do something of national importance, but diverting himself with his girlfriend and his book collection. The girlfriend had come back into his life; she was Anne O'Neill, vivacious, brittle, amusing, kind, brave, shallow and loud. Like Ian she had lost a parent – in her case, her mother – very young. No doubt she was invited to Ebury Street to inspect his books. Not that they were visible, for he kept the whole lot in black japanned boxes stamped with the Fleming crest in gold, but it was a remarkable treasure trove all the same, after only a few years' effort. Fleming did not spend his own time fossicking about in the overcrowded stockrooms of antiquarian dealers. He employed an expert. He had run into Percy Muir, then a quite junior bookseller, for the first time when he was about 20 in Austria. Years later when Ian had his first salary cheques from Rowe and Pitman, and Percy had become a partner in the respected firm of Elkin Matthews, Ian asked his friend to start a collection for him. This came at just the right time; Muir was worried about the business and ‘we were gradually building up a few special collections for customers who entrusted their business exclusively to us'. Fleming, whatever his faults in other respects, was loyal to people he liked.