My secret life at the Sunday Times
James Bond was conceived by Ian Fleming when he ran this newspaper's foreign desk. Fifty years after the first Bond film, we open up our unseen files
Mark Edmonds Published: 14 October 2012
James Bond was conceived by his creator not, as one might suspect, at the baccarat tables of Deauville or in the shade of a mango tree on a Jamaican beach, but in the shabby and chaotic offices of The Sunday Times in cold-war London.
It was from Gray’s Inn Road that the secret agent’s adventures were planned, initiated and executed, while his Old Etonian progenitor, Ian Fleming — urbane and sinuously well-connected — went about his business as an executive and writer on this newspaper with insouciance and aplomb.
A Transient’s Scrapbook, a column that Fleming filed from New York, offered an intriguing snapshot of the way his world and Bond’s collided. “The latest and most deadly way of making a dry martini is to pour a little dry vermouth into a jug, swirl it round and throw it down the sink. Fill jug with gin, and place in an icebox until tomorrow.”
It’s not surprising that Fleming’s own pedantic tastes and experience as a journalist seeped into the make-up of the spy he created in 1952. Authors tend to write what they know, and Fleming drew his character from the privileged, upper-class scene he was familiar with. He shared many of his own interests with Bond — primarily cars, guns, food and drink, with a little bit of sadism on the side.
His work at The Sunday Times, however, may have had even greater resonances with the milieu of 007; the job almost certainly blurred into the opaque half-light of the intelligence world. What was Fleming up to? What was the real purpose of the extraordinarily large network of correspondents he masterminded and ran from his office in central London? Perhaps in his work at the paper he saw himself not as Bond, but M, the head of MI6.
It was time for Moneypenny to get out the files. Marked “Fleming, Ian”, at The Sunday Times’ storage repository in the decidedly un-Bondish north London suburb of Enfield, the records have scarcely been touched since Fleming left the paper in 1962 after more than 16 years of service. Their contents have never been published.
His staff card, buried deep in the archives, indicates that he was employed as a foreign manager at the paper shortly after the war, in November 1945, on a salary of £4,500 plus a £500 “expenses allowance” (roughly equivalent to a vast £200,000 a year). He owed his job not just to his undoubted ability and connections, but also to his close relationship with Lord Kemsley, the paper’s proprietor, a fellow bridge-player and chum.
In Moonraker, the third Bond novel, set — highly unusually — in home-counties Britain, Fleming hints at his own routine when he describes Bond’s life in London between missions. “Elastic office hours from around 10 to 6, lunch… evenings spent playing cards in the company of a few close friends… or making love, with rather cold passion, to one of three similarly disposed married women, weekends playing golf for high stakes…”
“He sculpted out the perfect job for himself,” recalls Godfrey Smith, who worked closely with Fleming at the paper. “He’d be in the office until Friday afternoon when he’d bugger off to play golf for the weekend.”
The archive also reveals the full extent of Fleming’s network. On his office wall at Gray’s Inn Road was a canary-yellow map depicting the Mercury News Service — the huge nexus he set up to service the whole Kemsley group of newspapers. This was the nerve centre of Fleming operations — an ambitious, grandiose plan for world domination that would have done Ernst Stavro Blofeld himself proud.
The names of Fleming’s 80-plus reporters are inscribed around the margins of the map, dotted lines showing their reach and coverage. Most of the correspondents were recruited personally by Fleming, among them the journalist and popular historian Donald McCormick, whose appointment by Fleming — at £1,000 per year — appears in the archive. McCormick later wrote a biography of Fleming.
“I am sure that Ian was running a number of spooks,” says Smith, who went on to edit The Sunday Times Magazine, which, as we will see, Fleming had a hand in launching. “McCormick and William Todd, who oversaw our travel arrangements, came to us after the war, from the navy. I am sure they’d been with him in intelligence there.”
Prior to his arrival at The Sunday Times, Fleming had masterminded Operation Golden Eye, a secret service project to ensure the safety of the British intelligence network in Gibraltar after the Spanish civil war. He emerged with first-hand knowledge of naval intelligence and the gratitude of his boss, Admiral John Godfrey. Later he was to base the character of M — Bond’s boss at MI6 — on Godfrey.
Una Trueblood, Fleming’s Bondishly named secretary at the paper, now in her eighties, says that Fleming remained in close touch with Godfrey after the war. She has never spoken, until now, about her time with Fleming, but recalls him as a “kind and generous” boss. “One Friday night I was kept late at work quite unnecessarily by someone else, and Mr Fleming found out about it and was furious. He told him off in no uncertain terms."
“I was a naive young woman, just out of secretarial school. I remember that the American writer Raymond Chandler came to visit Mr Fleming and kept pestering me to go out to lunch with him. I told Mr Fleming and he made it clear to Mr Chandler that it was not a good idea. He did so without making either of us feel awkward or embarrassed.”
When Fleming went to Jamaica, he would send back drafts of his novels for Una to type up. He would personally inscribe first editions to her. “To Una, who wrote all the books”, he put in one. In Dr No, he named one of his characters after her: Mary Trueblood has a bloody and early demise. “With apologies for the sudden death,” wrote Fleming to Una in the frontispiece to the novel. “I felt proud and honoured,” says Una now. “I loved his books and I didn’t mind that he killed me off.”
[Missing Section?]
Written sparsely and with little of the colourful detail that would make his journalism (and later the Bond novels) so compelling, the document appears aimed at rank amateurs. “Cover all important events in your area, using your judgment to set news-values according to a) international importanceimpact on Britain c) human interest (especially affecting British people abroad.)”
“Get the news,” Fleming went on, “get it first if you can but get it right.”
The archive throws up another intriguing potential link with the intelligence service. It includes a copy of a private supplement to Bentley’s Complete Phrase Code — a handbook for transmitting coded cables that had been in use prior to the first world war.
When Fleming arrived at The Sunday Times in 1945, he was given his own Bentley’s code — “wyput”, with a cipher of 29421. Even in the highly competitive world of post-war national newspapers, editorial material was not so sensitive that it had to be transmitted in cipher. It was certainly cheaper to send material across telegraph wires in code, but it was also much more discreet.
“There is no doubt that some of Fleming’s correspondents were on the payroll of the security services,” says Ben Macintyre, an expert in post-war British intelligence and the author of For Your Eyes Only, which explores Fleming’s relationship with Bond. “It’s highly likely that Fleming was acting as a conduit for them.”
Andrew Lycett, who wrote the definitive biography of Fleming in 1995, agrees: “Fleming was at the centre of a vast intelligence organisation. It was as though he was carrying on his fun wartime activities.”
“I’d be very surprised if someone with his own self-image and sense of amour-propre,” says Ben Macintyre, “was not using every opportunity to keep in with those characters. He loved all that, loved dropping little hints about who he was... Increasingly, I think, as he became more and more famous, he would drop thumping hints at dinner parties — particularly if there were pretty girls there: ‘I’ve been in touch with… sorry I really can’t tell you about it, my dear… do have another cocktail…’”
Fleming's published output at The Sunday Times reveals much about his interests and preoccupations. He had a colourful background and an equally colourful set of sexual entanglements — not least with his wife, Ann Fleming, with whom he enjoyed a relationship based around their complementary interest in sadomasochism (usually, Ian was the sado, Ann the maso). He was an inveterate hedonist and seasoned traveller with a coruscating eye for detail, and his novels, like his journalism, bear all the hallmarks of first-hand experience.
At home, Fleming kept a comprehensive library of flagellation pørn. In a private letter to her husband published after her death, Ann wrote: “I long for you to whip me because I love being hurt by you and kissed afterwards. It’s very lonely not to be beaten and shouted at every five minutes.”
Fleming’s interest in voyeuristic sadism surfaced both in his books and his journalism. A scene in From Russia With Love, in which two gypsy girls set about each other in a staged catfight and draw blood, was deeply controversial. But whatever his private proclivities, he was a huge asset to the paper, well liked and respected.
“He was good news,” recalls Smith. “He was debonair, sophisticated, charming and with a huge expense account. He drove everywhere in a smart and expensive car. Except for one day, I think after he’d already started on the Bond books, I actually saw him waiting at a bus stop. It was one of the funniest sights I’d ever seen. I assume that he was looking for some sort of new experience.”
As a close friend of the proprietor, he could write about pretty much what he liked. The subjects he tackled were generally easy meat for him — espionage, crime, food and drink. A great snob, and purveyor of product placement long before the concept was identified, Fleming also had a truffle-hunter’s nose for the seamier side of life.
From Hamburg, he wrote with barely disguised relish about topless mud-wrestling at a Reeperbahn nightclub: “She was a big girl with a good figure. She wore nothing but a frilly white bathing-cap and short bathing trunks. During the fight in the pool of peat mud, she had become streaked with the stuff, and one wondered how she would ever get clean again…”
He travelled to New York and wrote about J Edgar Hoover, the mafia and the FBI. He tackled the world of card sharks, which gave him the backdrop to several scenes in Goldfinger, one of his most successful novels.
In 1953 he went to Marseilles to join a diving expedition with Jacques Cousteau, and described one of his divers. “He was a young man as thick as a chest of drawers. With the curly black hair and fine swarthy features of a Phoenician. He had lost all the fingers of one hand on the detonator of a German mine, yet he was so strong that everyone used him as a sort of human machine tool. When anything had to be bent, broken or unscrewed it was brought to him and with a great intake of breath, his hands would grapple with the object until it obeyed.”
Although he left the staff of the paper in 1959, he was kept on a retainer of £1,000 a year, and was closely involved with the launch of The Sunday Times Magazine in February 1962. At some point, it was suggested that one of his stories would be illustrated by the artist Graham Sutherland for the first cover; as it turned out, the magazine’s editor, Mark Boxer, rejected the artwork and put Jean Shrimpton on the front.
Earlier this year, as we were about to mark the magazine’s half-century with an exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery, we were contacted by Ian Fleming’s publishers. They told us of an unpublished letter, now held at the University of Reading, from Fleming, alerting his publisher, Michael Howard, to a “trade secret”.
“The Sunday Times is going to break out into a shiny paper colour supplement… towards the end of the year, and it is quite possible that they would like to serialise the CHITTY-BANG-BANG stories,” Fleming wrote. Chitty eventually took flight elsewhere, but Fleming’s The Living Daylights became part of the magazine’s first issue, flagged on the cover as a “new James Bond short story”. By 1962, with the film of Dr No about to be released, James Bond was very big box office indeed.
As early as 1946, soon after starting at The Sunday Times, Fleming bought 14 acres of land in Jamaica, where he would build his house, Goldeneye, and later write the Bond novels, taking two months off from The Sunday Times every year.
A note on his file from the personnel department indicates that “Mr Fleming asked the Chairman to reduce his salary by £1,000 so that he could have leave of absence to attend to his private affairs abroad.”
He would spend many happy years at Goldeneye. The only sour note was sounded by his wife, Ann, who told Evelyn Waugh that she was “scratching away with my paintbrush while Ian hammers out his pørnography”.
By the late 1950s Fleming had become increasingly bored with executive life at the paper. His Mercury network was shrinking in both size and influence. A note in the archive from Fleming shows that Mercury’s syndication profit was £13,000 in 1956 — scarcely enough to support all those salaries. Meanwhile, his books were beginning to make him rich. In total, he would write 12 Bond novels and two short-story collections, starting with Casino Royale and ending with the posthumously published The Man with the Golden Gun, and the collection Octopussy and the Living Daylights.
His last significant project for The Sunday Times was wildly extravagant in scope, even by his feather-bedded standards. He was commissioned to write the series Thrilling Cities, in which he would tour the globe at the paper’s expense — no strings attached.
In Tokyo he met up with Richard Hughes, The Sunday Times’s legendary Far East correspondent, who, like so many members of Fleming’s network, had long-standing connections to the secret service. At Fleming’s behest, he had interviewed the spies Burgess and Maclean in Moscow. For years, it was suggested that Hughes himself was in the pay of the Soviets as well as MI6, though nothing was proved.
This assignment was less taxing, as Hughes and Fleming made the most of Tokyo’s bath houses: “I paid 15 shillings and was then taken in hand by the prettiest Japanese girl I was to see during the whole of my stay,” wrote Fleming. “Her name was Baby and she was 21. She had the face of a smaller, rather neater Brigitte Bardot with black hair in a BB cut. She wore nothing but the shortest and tightest of white shorts and a white brassiere.”
Fleming’s experiences in Tokyo would soon find their way into You Only Live Twice, the 12th Bond book, and the one whose origins lie most overtly in the pages of The Sunday Times.
But the high life was taking its toll. By 1963, with the second Bond film, From Russia with Love, well under way, Fleming’s health was failing. (He’d already suffered a massive heart attack in 1961, during a Sunday Times editorial conference.) His niece, Kate Grimond — daughter of his brother Peter and the actress Celia Johnson — told me: “When he came back from America, we all noticed that he was very unwell, that he was often tired and that some of that spark had gone. He was as amusing as ever, but there was a sadness behind his remarks.”
He never recovered. In 1964, after a bout of pleurisy, he suffered another heart attack. This time it was fatal; Fleming died at the age of 56, on his son Caspar’s 12th birthday. Fleming’s had been a short, but vivid and colourful life. Nothing, especially his work at The Sunday Times, had been black and white.
Edited by Revelator, 15 October 2012 - 09:37 PM.
