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Ian Fleming was born in 1908. His father, a Conservative MP, died in combat shortly before Ian's ninth birthday. Ian went to Eton, where he showed little aptitude for anything except sport. His mother Eve arranged for him to enter officer training at Sandhurst but this was cut short in 1927 when Ian caught gonorrhoea from a prostitute. Scandalised, Eve removed him from Sandhurst and sent him to complete his education at a private school in Switzerland followed by three years as a student in Munich and Geneva. In 1931 Fleming returned to Britain, where Eve secured him a job at the news agency Reuters. Two years later, again under Eve's influence, he became, in his own words, 'the world's worst stockbroker', with a penchant for exotic and risky investments. Disenchanted with banking, he sent freelance reports on Russia and Germany to the Foreign Office and The Times, but had no response. Pleasure seeker Established in a central London bachelor flat, Fleming now developed a hedonistic and egocentric lifestyle, characterised by assiduous self-promotion, frequent foreign holidays and heavy consumption of alcohol and tobacco. His approach to women was single-minded and explicit: guests would be shown his collection of pornography, then plied with sausages and champagne in a dining area next to his bedroom. Plotting and scheming Fleming's amateur intelligence work paid off. In 1939 he was offered a job as personal assistant to the Director of Naval Intelligence. The position allowed Fleming to indulge his love of plotting and gadgetry, to exploit his networking skills and to develop unsuspected organisational talents. It also gave him the naval rank of Commander – a relatively lowly rank, but one with a resonance he enjoyed. He set up an intelligence commando unit, which would follow invading troops and recover intelligence-related material. The unit saw action in the Allied invasion of Germany. Fleming was also in charge of Operation Goldeneye – a contingency plan for a Nazi invasion of Spain – and devised Operation Ruthless. This was a plan to obtain a German codebook by crashing a captured aeroplane into the Channel, where the crew would be rescued by a German minesweeper. The 'survivors' would then kill the German crew and hijack the ship. The operation hit repeated snags and was eventually shelved. After the war, Fleming became foreign manager of The Sunday Times, running a worldwide network of correspondents with informal connections to British intelligence. He built a house in Jamaica named Goldeneye and spent winters there whenever he could. A tangled affair His hitherto casual love life now took a serious turn. During the war he had started a relationship with Ann O'Neill, who was married and also had another lover, the newspaper magnate Esmond Rothermere. After her husband was killed in action, Ann married Lord Rothermere but went on seeing Fleming. Their relationship was intense and sado-masochistic. In 1948 matters came to a head when Ann had a baby. Rothermere realised that the child – a girl who died after eight hours – was Fleming's and demanded that they end the affair. In 1951, Ann was granted a divorce from Rothermere. She married Fleming in March 1952, and their first and only child was born in August that year. Cool, hard hero By now Fleming had written his first novel, Casino Royale. James Bond's combination of cool intelligence, lethal aggression and sexual magnetism were the stuff of classic action heroes. More unusual were Bond's casual cruelty and Fleming's insistence on outfitting his hero with the best of everything (complete with brand names). The overall mood was distinctive, combining Cold War anti-communism, glossy materialism, world-weariness and a taste for quick – often violent – solutions. By the time Casino Royale appeared in 1953, Fleming had already completed his second novel, Live and Let Die. Henceforth he would begin each year writing at Goldeneye, then attend to the launch of the previous book, leaving the rest of the year free for his increasingly notional duties as a journalist. He finally left The Sunday Times at the end of 1959. Popularity without respect The novels sold well, but literary acceptance was elusive, and 1958 saw an outright backlash, with critics denouncing Fleming's mixture of 'sex, snobbery and sadism'. Ann fed his anxieties about his literary standing, belittling the novels and referring to them as 'Ian's pornography'. Both took refuge in other relationships – Ann with Hugh Gaitskell, leader of the Labour Party, Fleming with Blanche Blackwell, a Jamaican neighbour. Exhausted by his annual production schedule, Fleming was starting to scrape the bottom of the barrel. The nadir was 1962's The Spy Who Loved Me, whose female narrator celebrates 007's sadism ('his sweet brutality against my bruised body'). After its hostile reception, Fleming requested that there should be no paperback and no film using its plot or characters – although he did, shrewdly, licence the use of its title. With the film of Dr No released in 1962, Bond had found a new medium. Fleming's suggestions for the leading role, the impeccably English David Niven and Roger Moore, had been rejected in favour of the working class Scot Sean Connery, who had impressed the producers in the 1959 film Darby O'Gill and the Little People. The only major contribution Fleming made was to recommend a Jamaican location manager, Blanche Blackwell's son Chris, who went on to found Island Records and now runs Goldeneye as a hotel. Endgame Fleming's health had never been strong, and it was not helped by his lifestyle. At 38, complaining of chest pains, he had informed a startled doctor that he consumed 70 cigarettes and a bottle of gin a day. In 1961 he had a massive heart attack, which was followed by a series of increasingly debilitating illnesses. Finally, on 11 August 1964 – the night before his son's 12th birthday – he collapsed and died. He was 56. After Fleming's death, a number of writers continued the Bond canon with varying degrees of success. On screen, meanwhile, Bond went from strength to strength. The cinematic James Bond has long eclipsed not only the fictional Bond who bore the marks of Fleming's heroic fantasies, his restless ingenuity, his snobbery and his sadism, but his creator too. |
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