For Conservative Movie Lovers: Ian Fleming, Sean Connery, and 'Goldfinger' Part 2

The name was Fleming, Valentine Fleming. But to his four young boys, Bond creator Ian Fleming among them, he was “Mokie” — a baby-talk bastardization of “Smokie,” so called because he always had a pipe dangling from his lips, the same way Sean Connery would one day sport a cigarette in his debut appearance as James Bond in Dr. No. Curiously, no one in turn-of-the-century England thought to arrest Mr. Fleming for smoking in the presence of his children, nor did social services batter down his door to cart the poor cancer-threatened kids away. He was their Pop, and they adored him, smoke and all.

Child-abusing barbarians, I know.

They were rich, the Flemings. Grandfather made his fortune pioneering investment trusts, and when Valentine came of age he inherited hundreds of thousands of pounds. Thus it was that his second son Ian, born in 1908, grew up in a world of wealth and privilege. Mother was a typical socialite, a lover of status and all the good things that money could buy, but Father was different. He ran for government office as a conservative, and was by all accounts a thorough patriot of crown and country much admired by everyone who met him. When war became imminent, there was never any question whether he would use his money and influence to weasel out of the fight. Valentine joined the Queen’s Own Oxfordshire Hussars of his own volition and trained for combat, counting among his friends a fellow officer named Winston Churchill.

Ian and his family watched with dread as their Dad headed off to the front in 1914, and for the next three years they saw him but seldom. Valentine sent his family cheery letters to lift their spirits, but his missives to Churchill laid bare the truth:

Day and night in this area are made hideous by the incessant crash and whistle and roar of every sort of projectile, by sinister columns of smoke and flame, by the cries of the wounded men, by the pitiful calls of animals of all sorts, abandoned, starved, perhaps wounded. Along this terrain of death stretch more or less parallel to each other lines of trenches, some 200, some 1000 yards apart, hardly visible except to the aeroplanes which continually hover over them, menacing and uncanny harbingers of fresh showers of destruction. . . . It’s going to be a long, long war in spite of the fact that every single man in it wants it to be stopped at once.

Fleming was a nine-year-old student away in boarding school, his head filled with the stories of H. Rider Haggard, Jules Verne, and Robert Stevenson, when word came in May 1917 that Dad was dead, killed instantly by a shell while scurrying between trenches. Winston Churchill, by then a rising figure in government, wrote the obituary for the Times. The Fleming boys were left fatherless among their socialite mother and her widow-wealth and elitist friends. From then on, whenever they said their nightly prayers, they would finish with, “And please, dear God, help me to grow up to be more like Mokie.”

The loss of his idealized father would have repercussions for the rest of Ian Fleming’s life. Without his war-hero Dad’s sterling example, his pampered circumstances transformed him from a devastated child into a spoiled teenage Byronic rebel, torn between his father’s laudable memory and his mother’s smothering social ambitions. He became a champion athlete but otherwise struggled with rigid school discipline, drifting through several tony academies as a constant source of upset to the rest of the family. Money and good looks allowed him to pose as a (in hindsight, quite Bondian) romantic loner, seducing young women by the score yet finding little real happiness in the effort. The girls called him “glamour boy,” and fancied him as a moody, handsome, far-eyed dreamer, his personality a potent mix of devil-may-care gaiety and inner sadness.

Spurred on by his mother, now a maven of upper-crust English society, he learned the usual social graces: dancing, food, drink, all things that would later give the fictional world of James Bond its verisimilitude. In Ian Fleming: The Man Behind James Bond, biographer Andrew Lycett aptly describes the young rich kids of that era:

Their favorite destinations were the French resorts of Le Touquet and Deauville, where the casinos offered an opportunity to gamble as well as play golf. The young bloods crossed the channel — some in their private planes — for regular weekends of gaming and carousing, interspersed with the odd round of golf to cure hangovers and give the impression they were doing something healthy and good for their constitutions.

Yet in between the fun to be had at boarding schools, finishing schools, mansions, and European vacation homes, Fleming spent his idle hours writing world-weary poetry and short stories. He preferred books and the collecting of first editions to the usual moneyed pursuits of shooting, hunting, and endless soirees. Whereas his compatriots were enjoying the rich life and quickly rising to positions of power in government and business, Lycett describes Fleming as “a charming chancer who, dogged by the memory of an upright father killed on the Western Front in May 1917 and pushed by an ambitious and headstrong mother, had, by the time he was thirty, tried his hand at various careers — army officer, diplomat, journalist, banker and stockbroker — without ever finding his métier.” His was a life defined by a deep ennui.

While working for Reuters in the early Thirties, Fleming went to the U.S.S.R. to report on a Soviet show trial, and the experience gave him an insider’s look into the pure evil of James Bond’s future enemies. Later, as a (terrible, by all accounts) stockbroker, Fleming began rubbing shoulders with bankers and brokers with backgrounds in clandestine intelligence. The attraction to their world of veiled excitement, combined with patriotism and service and purpose, was immense. When WWII broke out, he lost no time in parlaying these contacts into a job as secretary for Admiral John Godfrey, Director of Naval Intelligence, and with that his life took a most dramatic turn. The boring world of high-society cads and whores gave way to battles, tactics, weapons, cartography, languages, and espionage. A mediocrity at his previous jobs, he excelled at his wartime intelligence exploits, to the point where his superior said, “Ian should have been the D.N.I. and I his naval adviser.”

Matters of escape, sabotage, and subversion consumed his waking thoughts. He developed contacts far and wide throughout Britain’s underground spy apparatus, even visiting with the group charged with developing the exact kind of gadgets that Bond would later receive from Q. He visited America, met President Roosevelt and FBI Chief Hoover, and played an important role in establishing a fruitful intelligence relationship with “Wild Bill” Donovan’s OSS (the organization under which, you will remember from our first FCML series, film director John Ford also worked.) Three times in England he narrowly survived bombs falling onto the buildings he was in — the last one covered him in debris and plaster. One of his grimmer moments during the war was having to identify the body of one of his favorite former lovers, killed in her bed during a bombing raid.

By the end of the greatest conflict of the twentieth century, Fleming had revealed that under the dilettante exterior and the spoiled rich-kid gloom was a man of, in biographer Andrew Lycett’s memorable phrase, “steely patriotism.” The war energized him in a way nothing else ever had, pointing the way to a life of excitement and adventure and freeing his fertile mind from the chains of stuffy blue-blood mores. By 1944, the man who once flirted with poetry and short stories told a friend in an unguarded moment that he was “going to write the spy story to end all spy stories.” Decades later, after his death, his widow Anne pegged the core of this self-promise: “You must realize that Ian was entirely egocentric. His aim as long as I knew him was to avoid the dull, the humdrum, the everyday demands of life that afflict ordinary people. He stood for working out a way of life that was not boring and he went where that led him. It ended with Bond.”

Visiting Ceylon on an assignment during the war, Fleming discovered that he loved tropical heat and the sea, and vowed never to spend a winter in England again. In the years after the war he built Goldeneye (named after one of his wartime missions) his now-famous idyllic refuge in Jamaica. There, working for three hours a day on an old typewriter, he dashed off Casino Royale, the first Bond novel, at a blistering pace that saw the book finished it little more than a month.

Part of his energy came from finally settling down and wedding his longtime (and, until recently, married) lover that same year — in his Fleming biography, Lycett jokes that writing Casino Royale was the author’s method for dealing with “the horrific prospect of matrimony.” In between sessions of composing, he would enjoy the lush accoutrements of Goldeneye, his sanctum sanctorum, whiling away the days swimming, fishing, spearing lobsters for dinner, reading in lush gardens, and (according to his wife) spending evenings on the balcony “smoking and wallowing in the melancholy.”

Casino Royale was published in April 1953, and by the end of May the initial print run had sold out. The world had been officially introduced to what Lycett glowingly calls “the sparkling luminescence and darting romanticism of [Fleming’s] original mind.” Spurred on by early success and the need for money (the family fortune was still largely denied him by his aging mother) he wrote a book a year until his death, with sales slowly growing with each new novel’s appearance. Aspiring to be a sort of British Raymond Chandler, he was delighted when that famed American mystery writer (who lived for a time in Britain and who, like Fleming, also began his writing career at an advanced age) sang the praises of Casino Royale and its follow-up, Live and Let Die.

Nevertheless, Fleming was all-too-aware of his limitations as a prose stylist. Later in their correspondence, pressured by Chandler to attempt a higher level of quality in his work, Fleming glumly admitted: “My talents are extended to their absolute limits in writing books like Diamonds Are Forever. I am not short-weighting anybody and I have absolutely nothing more up my sleeve. The way you talk anybody would think I was a lazy Shakespeare or Raymond Chandler. Not so.”

Nevertheless, in his fine book biographer Lycett opines on the hidden depths present in Fleming’s fiction:

Ian skillfully matched this hard-edged delineation of contemporary reality with a more mythical interpretation of events. Bond is taking on the forces of evil, a heroic St. George-figure fighting on the side of virtue (and the free world), saving and bedding the girl, and attempting to slay the dragon. . . Only through such an epic battle, Ian was saying, could the function of good be understood. Bond says in Casino Royale that the villains he fights are “creating a norm of badness by which, and by which alone, an opposite norm of goodness could exist.”

In other words, beneath all the “sex, snobbery, and sadism” titillating readers, Fleming’s old wartime patriotism was once again present, fueling what on the surface seemed shallow and sensationalistic. Throughout his life, the creator of James Bond was an anti-Communist and anti-Nazi, going so far as to once quit a book club when he felt the monthly selections were becoming too left-leaning and fellow-traveling. Izvestia, the long-running Russian newspaper, accused Fleming of being a tool of American interests and dismissed him as “a retired spy turned mediocre writer,” slams which Fleming took as high compliments from the enemy.

A lifetime of seeing (and oftentimes enjoying) the effects of easy living left him with little confidence in human nature, which too often manifested itself in bitterness and rudeness. But in the midst of all the cavalier cruelty his enemies charged him with, simple gestures of humanity would often stand out. One American-based friend remembers fondly that — unlike the other wealthy jet-set acquaintances in their social circle — Fleming alone treated her belief in Catholicism “like hallowed ground,” going so far as to ask, after his health began to fail, if she could light a candle for him in St. Patrick’s Cathedral. When asked about this respect for Christianity, the creator of 007 replied sheepishly that “You can’t grow up in the English school system without it having an effect on you.”

Fleming’s later years, like his earlier ones, were in many ways not happy. Despite some genuine fondness his marriage was always a tenuous proposition, with both parties cheating regularly in between temporary reconciliations and bitter recriminations. A chain smoker and a drinker, his health declined precipitously just as Bond was giving him the income with which to truly enjoy his retiring years. Headaches, back and neck pains, and creeping coronary heart disease all took their grim toll.

Eventually, even the success of his novels became an albatross around his neck, albeit a lucrative one. “What was easy at 40 is very difficult at 50,” he wrote to a friend. “I used to believe — sufficiently — in Bonds & Blonds & Bombs. Now the keys creak as I type & I fear the zest may have gone. Part of the trouble is having a wife and child. They knock the ruthlessness out of one.” To another correspondent he lamented, “I am seriously running out of puff and my inventive streak is very nearly worked out.”

By the time of the fateful Saltzman/Broccoli Dr. No film deal, Fleming had suffered a major heart attack that signaled the beginning of the end. A few years later, just before Goldfinger was released into theaters, he was dead. Doctors long warned him about his inveterate smoking and drinking, but he never listened. If he had, he might have lived longer, true — but then he wouldn’t have been the Ian Fleming who created James Bond.

His wife later insisted that her oft-estranged husband was a “desperate melancholic,” and revealed that many of his last days were spent staring “from his bedroom window at the sea in total misery.” What was he thinking during those bitter times? In the final analysis, had his life meant anything? Had he even begun to live up to the long-cherished image of old “Mokie”?

One friend is on record as remembering her surprise when, while driving him around soon before his death, he asked to stop at a church so that he could pray for the forgiveness of his sins. Some might see that as a typical late-in-life hedging of the bets by a person with far too much to forgive and far too little actual remorse to put down as a down-payment. But I note once again Lycett’s analysis of the mythical “St. George” aspect of Bond’s character, as well as a small but perhaps telling factoid: from the time of his father’s death until the very end of his own days, Ian Fleming kept a copy of his father’s obituary, framed and signed by Winston Churchill, hanging proudly on his wall.

“Please, dear God,” Fleming would pray as a child, “help me to grow up to be more like Mokie.” Whether Fleming the Shiftless Cad believed at the end that his wartime service — and the literature it inspired — accomplished this is anyone’s guess.

Next week in For Conservative Movie Lovers: the man who brought Bond to life on screen, Sean Connery.

For Conservative Movie Lovers: Ian Fleming, Sean Connery, and 'Goldfinger' Part 2

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