James Bond`s deadly girls - book extract from Henry Chancellor
06-Jan-2006 • Literary
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Apart from drinking, smoking and gambling, there is another crucial aspect to Bond's character, and that is his irrepressible interest in women.
He is drawn to sweep up girls "like a prince in fairytales" and then take them to bed. Bond's ideal type remains the same: "Gold hair. Grey eyes. A sinful mouth. Perfect figure. And of course she's got to be witty and poised and know how to dress and play cards and so forth. The usual things." He forgot to add the ability to make a perfect bearnaise sauce, another of 007's requirements.
Critics often disapproved of 007's sexual exploits, but when counted up they don't sound that bad. In every trip abroad Bond collects one girlfriend, and in only two books, Thunderball and Goldfinger, does he have two women. That amounts to not more than 14 overall, between 1953 and 1964. Of these he drops only five between one novel and the next, and all of them live abroad. For a man like Bond, that sounds almost moderate, particularly compared to his on-screen persona.
In the first 20 Bond films there are 58 Bond girls, and Bond makes love 79 times. He had intended to marry Vesper Lynd, the first Bond girl, until she committed suicide (and each year Bond, ever the sentimental hero, lays flowers on her grave), and 10 books later he finally decides to marry Tracy di Vicenzo, to whom, interestingly, we are first introduced while she is also attempting to commit suicide. Bond never finds out if he would run out on his wife, because, only hours after he marries Tracy, Blofeld cruelly guns her down.
Bond girls are not 1950s girls: they don't wear pedal-pushers, sing along to Elvis Presley on transistor radios and talk about fashion. Even Vivienne Michel, the Canadian Bond girl who narrates The Spy Who Loved Me, is not particularly "with it": she likes fishing and camping, "fights like an elk" and listens to the Inkspots. Her sexual odyssey through 1950s London is effectively Fleming's, and she is even seduced at the back of the Windsor Royalty Kinema, the scene of his own deflowering 30 years earlier. These girls are like James Bond himself: they are in their time, but not of it.
"Her dress was of black velvet, simple yet with the touch of splendour that only half a dozen couturiers in the world can achieve. There was a thin necklace of diamonds at her throat and a diamond clip in the low vee which just exposed the jutting swell of her breasts." This is Vesper Lynd at the casino, but it could be any number of Bond girls. What makes them "modern" is that they are prepared to go to bed with the handsome, dangerous James Bond, if only for one night. This so easily could be a writer's wishful thinking, but for Fleming it was a reality, as many of his conquests amounted to precisely that.
From the 1920s onward there are countless stories of him entering a party and walking straight up to the prettiest girl there, and 10 minutes later asking her to go to bed with him. If she agreed they left immediately; if not, and Fleming was dispatched with some withering putdown, he was not the slightest bit offended - he merely retreated and went off to seek a more favourable quarry. He would chase women whom he spotted walking through hotel lobbies, sitting in airplanes or trains, or, a la Bond, driving fast cars. The few long-term relationships he forged during this time were with various married women, and these continued throughout his entire life. These women understood the limits and were happy that their relationship should remain physical.
He emerged from six years at the Admiralty a more compassionate man than the brittle, arrogant creature who had entered it in 1939. By now he had embarked on a grown-up affair with Ann Rothermere, who was married to his friend Esmond Rothermere, the proprietor of the Daily Mail.
Typically, Fleming - who was not himself a jealous man - did not regard having an affair with his friend's wife as unreasonable behaviour. Ann was an intelligent, blue-blooded Englishwoman, handsome rather than sexy, whom he eventually married in 1953. She had a son a year later, and thereafter Fleming continued ploughing the same furrow as before, seeing his long-time girlfriends and occasionally meeting new ones, though in this he was becoming less successful, as middle age and a steady diet of nicotine and alcohol softened his once angular, saturnine looks. The Flemings' marriage deteriorated into an increasingly loveless and abrasive relationship until his death.
To counter his increasing unhappiness Fleming found solace in his clubs and on the golf course, and poured his energy into his writing, whereas Ann found stimulation in her literary salon, and love in the arms of the leader of the Labour Party, Hugh Gaitskell. It was while he was locked into this tempestuous relationship that Fleming wrote all his James Bond novels.
Underneath this fictional agent whom Fleming tried so hard to set in his own time was a much older heroic character. "Bond is really a latter-day Saint George," he teased. "He does kill dragons after all." This, surely, is the heart of James Bond's appeal.
Edited extract from James Bond: The Man and his World by Henry Chancellor. Published by John Murray, rrp $39.95 AUD.
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