Author Samantha Weinberg celebrates the loyal and long-suffering secretary Miss Moneypenny

As Casino Royale becomes the first in the Bond series not to feature the redoubtable Miss Moneypenny, Samantha Weinberg celebrates the loyal and long-suffering secretary who helped put the ooh into 007, reports The Times.

A little under three years ago, my agent, Gillon Aitken, made a chance remark over lunch. “What do you think of the idea of a Moneypenny book?” he asked. “It’s brilliant,” I said without a second thought. “I’d kill to write something like that.”

As it happens, I didn’t have to. Gillon introduced me to Ian Fleming’s literary arbiters, I wrote an outline for a series of “Moneypenny Diaries”, which they seemed to like, and in a few short months had plunged myself into the world of James Bond, SMERSH and Miss Moneypenny.
My initial reaction had been pure instinct. I’d read probably half of the Fleming books, and seen most of the films, but I certainly wouldn’t have described myself as a Bond fanatic. It was the character of Miss Moneypenny that I was responding to, the idea of a gate­keeper, a witness to the secret affairs of state, that I found so appealing.

I went back to Fleming’s novels. I thought I’d find a wealth of material around which I could flesh out his creation. But I was surprised: “Miss Moneypenny would have been desirable but for eyes which were cool and direct and quizzical,” he wrote in Casino Royale, his first Bond book, and went little further in the 13 that followed. From Live and Let Die, I learnt that she was “all-powerful”; from Moonraker, that she and Bond “liked each other and she knew [he] admired her looks”; in Thunderball, it was revealed that she “often dreamed hopelessly about Bond”, owned a poodle, didn’t smoke, and had started her career as a junior in the Cipher Department. Not much to go on.

I turned to the films, reasoning that the Miss Moneypenny who loomed so large in my imagination must have played – if not a starring role – then certainly a major one. Chronologically, Dr No came first, hitting the screens in 1962. Sure enough, Moneypenny makes an early appearance. Smartly dressed in a dark-green sleeveless top, she is sitting behind her typewriter at three in the morning when James Bond is summoned to M’s office. He opens the door and throws his hat on to the stand. “James, where on earth have you been?” she asks (a question she repeats, almost verbatim, in virtually every film). He squeezes on to her chair and starts leafing through some papers. She slaps him.

“Moneypenny,” he admonishes her. “What gives?”

“I do. Given an ounce of encouragement. You never take me to dinner looking like this, James.”

“I would. Only M would have me court-martialled for illegal use of government property.” He kisses her hair.

“Flattery will get you nowhere,” she tells him. “But don’t stop trying.”

That’s it. A little over a minute of screen time: fewer than 50 words. And a pattern – of banter either on Bond’s way in or out of M’s office – that is replicated in all the films that followed. Moneypenny’s lines gave away, if anything, rather less about her than Fleming had. Beyond the flirtation with Bond, the screenwriters shed little light on her character.

Fleming apparently modelled Miss Moneypenny on two women he’d known: “Paddy” Bennett (later Lady Victoire Ridsdale), who’d worked with him in naval intelligence during the war, and Miss Pettigrew, the private secretary to the then head of MI6, Stewart Menzies (in an early draft of Casino Royale, M’s secretary was called Miss Pettavel, or Petty). But it was the Canadian actress, Lois Maxwell, who first brought her to life on screen. Maxwell played the role in the first 14 Bond films, spanning 22 years, with dignity, aplomb, and three strings of pearls. She gave Moneypenny a combination of warmth and intelligence that was central to her appeal, most notably, perhaps, to her creator, Ian Fleming.

“The first time we met was at a big party at Pinewood after the last take of Dr No,” Maxwell recalled, 44 years later. “He came up to me and said, ‘When I wrote Miss Moneypenny, I envisaged a tall, elegant woman with the most kissable lips in the world, and you, my dear, are the epitome of that dream of mine.’ He sort of puckered up his lips and I puckered up mine, and at that moment, there was a female voice from behind him, screeching, ‘Ian! Bedford wants you.’ It was his wife. I never did get to kiss him.”

Her rapport was, however, more enduring with the three Bonds she played opposite: Sirs Sean and Roger and, for one film only, the Australian model, George Lazenby. “I was offered the choice of two roles: Sylvia Trench [Bond’s fleeting love interest] and Miss Moneypenny,” she recalled. “I read both and said, ‘Well, if you would allow me to give Miss Moneypenny a background, then I would like to play her. But I won’t play her with a pencil over my ear and my hair in a bun.’ They said fine.”

The pencil never appeared, but in her sixth film, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Maxwell’s hair is pulled back in a neat chignon as she asks (once more): “James, where have you been?”

“Much too far from you, darling,” he replies.

“Same old James… Heartless brute: letting me pine away without even a postcard.”

“Pine no more. Cocktails at eight at my place – just the two of us,” he suggests.

She smiles and raises her eyebrows. “Oh, I’d adore that... if only I could trust myself.”

Bond gives a short laugh. “Same old Moneypenny: Britain’s last line of defence.”

That brief scene, suggesting that Bond had never managed to bed Moneypenny, is at odds with the back story that Maxwell, with a little nudge from Connery, had cooked up for her character.

“We decided that Bond and Moneypenny had met when she was in the secretarial pool, and they liked each other very much. One day he invited her to spend a long weekend at his aunt’s cottage in Kent. When they arrived the aunt wasn’t there, so they had the most splendid time. But she knew that if she allowed herself to fall in love with him, he would break her heart. He knew he would never get his 00. From then on, they truly loved each other – or liked each other tremendously – but they were doomed because of MI6.”

One weekend of passion had clearly helped the two actors to understand the dynamic of what must be the longest-running flirtation in movie history. I’m not so sure. In common with most people, I had always assumed that the story of Bond and Money­penny was one of unrequited passion, of promise without fulfilment, of a woman whose head overruled her heart – or at least her loins.

For Roger Moore, it was also about a rare display of decency from 007. “Bond was quite willing to bed any female,” he explained, “but when it came to Moneypenny, although he enjoyed flirting with her, he treated her unlike any other lady – with great respect.”

From the point of view of Samantha Bond, who took on the Moneypenny role opposite Pierce Brosnan’s 007, that wasn’t enough for her to submit: “Of course, she really fancied Bond. Who wouldn’t? But she was sensible about the whole thing. Unless he was going to suddenly mature and take her seriously, she wasn’t having any of it.”

The Miss Moneypenny she played was a product of the late 20th century, bright and sparky, flirtatious and intelligent, a little tarter than Maxwell’s portrayal, and certainly less indulgent towards Bond. In her first film, Goldeneye, she is wearing a black lace dress, which Bond admires: “Hmm, never seen you after hours, Moneypenny. Lovely.”

“Thank you, James,” she replies in a no-nonsense tone.

“Out on some professional assignment? Dressing to kill?”

“I know you’ll find this crushing 007, but I don’t sit at home every night praying for some inter­national incident so I can rush down here all dressed up to impress James Bond. I was on a date, if you must know, with a gentleman. We went to the theatre.”

“Moneypenny, I’m devastated,” he laments. “What would I ever do without you?”

“As far as I can remember, James, you’ve never had me.”

“Hope,” he says, “springs eternal.”

The proverbial boot, it seemed, had shifted foot. Samantha Bond was a successful theatre actress when she was offered the part. On the surface, it wasn’t a major role for her. But, despite her continued prolific career, the caption below a photograph of her in a recent Radio Times, flagging a radio programme she was presenting about acting Shakespeare, still read “Miss Moneypenny”. “I haven’t done a Bond film for four years, but I still have a woman whose sole job it is to do my fan mail.”

Lois Maxwell’s career was all but halted by being instantly identifiable as Miss Moneypenny. She was only guaranteed two days work per film, and for the first three paid £100 a day. “My husband was ill and I needed other work badly. But I couldn’t find it. Moneypenny so typecast me that whenever I was up for a marvellous part that I longed to play, the directors would say, ‘Can you look like anything other than Moneypenny?’”

Sadly, most didn’t think she could, and she struggled to get the parts that, before Moneypenny, she’d had no problem landing. Once she’d hung up Moneypenny’s pearls, after A View to a Kill in 1985, she retired from acting, living first in Canada, where she wrote a newspaper column (under the name of Miss Moneypenny), and then in England and Western Australia where, to this day, now aged 79, she is recognised on the streets.

“Lois is an icon,” says Samantha Bond. “If you could get her to a Bond do, the world would fall at her feet. You have no idea of the scale of that until you’re actually inside it.

For me, it was great fun. I never had any major responsibility, so I used to go and do a bit of flirting, try and get my laugh, and then go to parties a lot. That’s what being Moneypenny mainly meant for me.”

For Hollywood screenwriter and seasoned Bond aficionado, John Cox, Moneypenny means a whole lot more. Her character, he believes, should be seen in the context of the symbolism of the whole cast. “All the SIS team represent Britain, specifically Britain during the war,” he explains. “M is Churchill. The leader. The father. Q is the brilliant inventiveness of Britain. Moneypenny is the hardest to pin down. I think she is the stoic spirit of sacrifice during the war. She longs for a new world, her own personal life, but she knows it is more important for her to stay at her post, to sacrifice her own desires, but never give up hope that one day... maybe... But unlike M or Q, who are fixtures of their times, she clearly understands the new Britain – and the man who represents the postwar world: James Bond.

“I think Bond has a great love for her. As he is her way forward, she is his way back. She is a bridge between new and old worlds, which is why part of the Bond ritual is to visit her on his way to a new mission. As a woman, she is the only symbol of domesticity in the Bond universe. For Bond, Moneypenny is stability. For Moneypenny, Bond is sex – each represents what the other lacks.”

What, then, will his motivation be in Casino Royale? It is a testament to Moneypenny’s appeal that when, in the London press conference to introduce Daniel Craig as the new James Bond, the producers let it slip that she would not feature in the forthcoming Bond film, which premieres on Tuesday, there was a public outcry; articles in national papers, letters, intense Bond fan-site discussion. Only Samantha Bond seemed sanguine about it: “I always said I’d go when Pierce did. I’m a one-guy girl. It would have felt very strange going on to do it with someone else.”

The film’s producers have not expanded on their original – mistaken – explanation, that “she wasn’t in the book”. But they have also not written her out of future Bond films. It will be interesting to see whether she is missed – whether, as I suspect, there’s a hole in the film that can’t be bridged by yet another gadget, or even the most alluring of Bond girls.
For me, Moneypenny’s attraction had a lot to do with her observer’s role – from her position at M’s right hand, she saw every paper that passed his desk, knew the details of every mission. But that, too, was a problem. The Moneypenny of Fleming’s novels, and even of the films, to a great extent represents a woman’s role in the middle of the 20th century, when she was first conceived. In The Moneypenny Diaries, I had the opportunity to take it further: while remaining true to Fleming’s character, I could give her a more modern twist, and release her from the confines of her typewriter and unquestioning servitude to M.

She could still see everything – and I have set her adventures in the time of some of the most important events of modern history, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Profumo Affair and the defection of the Cambridge spies – but she could also act. She might have perfectly applied lipstick, but she’s also a dab hand with a Beretta. A glass of milk may go down well with her lunchtime sandwich, but so does a Jack Daniel’s after dinner. When Bond’s being held captive by the KGB in Cuba, Moneypenny doesn’t think twice before commandeering a boat to save him. When Kim Philby flees to Moscow, Moneypenny is sent to try to bring him back.

Lois Maxwell told me that, “I’ve done some extraordinary things in my life, and pretty much always been unafraid. Maybe,” she mused, “that is what I brought to Moneypenny – the sense of being unafraid.” Samantha Bond said that the only way she could hope to make an impact in the half a minute she was on screen was “to be as much like me as I could be”. In creating the literary Moneypenny, I hope I have made her what all of us would like to be. I’ve given her adventure, loves and betrayals. In the – hopefully – brief time until she returns to the films, I’ve also given her continued life. n

Secret Servant: The Moneypenny Diaries, written under the pseudonym of Kate Westbrook, is published by John Murray and is available now for £16.99

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