Why it was Ian Fleming`s wife who invented James Bond

Those who were lucky enough to visit Goldeneye, Ian Fleming's Jamaican retreat, could never understand how the Flemings went through so many wet towels - writes Christopher Hudson in The Daily Mail.

But those sodden towels were needed, literally, to cool their fiery partnership, used to relieve the stinging of the whips, slippers and hairbrushes the pair beat each other with - Ian inflicting pain more often than Ann - as well as to cover up the weals Ian made on Ann's skin during their fiery bouts of love-making.

And like their love-making, their relationship was complex, passionate, often shocking.

Each was tormented by the other - but it was this painful torment which kept their marriage on the road. It seems unbelievable that the creator of James Bond was born 100 years ago this year.

Adapted for successive generations, Bond is as modern today as he was when Fleming's first in the series, Casino Royale, was published in 1960.

In Fleming's books - as in his life - sex and cruelty went hand in hand, and sex and cruelty never go out of fashion.

This cruelty even infected his marriage. In public, his wife Ann was a beautiful, sharp-witted aristocrat.

In private, she soaked up the pain the abusive Fleming caused her - physically and mentally - and then gave some of it back. Had Ann not been in Fleming's life, the James Bond novels might never have been written.

They were first acquainted around a swimming pool in the chic French seaside resort of Le Touquet in 1936.

Ann, strikingly attractive with dark hair and grey-green eyes, was already married.

She thought Fleming, then 28, was "a handsome, moody creature" with his long, thin face and crooked nose, broken on a football pitch.

Although apparently good for nothing - teachers at Eton, followed by his superiors at Sandhurst were glad to see the back of him - Fleming was irresistibly attractive to women.

His charm, arrogance, air of melancholy and reputation as a womaniser - he could seduce girls in four languages - all added to the effect.

But inwardly, the Bond creator wrestled with demons of disgust and inadequacy.

His wealthy mother constantly humiliated him. His brilliant brother Peter Fleming was already a celebrated author, whereas Ian was forced to leave his enjoyable job as a journalist at news agency Reuters to become a stockbroker in order to make ends meet.

Fleming's ruthlessness towards women may have been influenced by the gonorrhea he caught at Sandhurst.

He quickly got bored with lovers, telling a friend women were like pets or dogs; men were the only real human beings, the only ones he could be friends with.

"No one I have ever known had sex so much on the brain as Ian," recalls his friend Mary Pakenham (later Lady Longford).

His London flat was full of books about flagellation: men and women standing over each other with a whip.

To a guest who showed any interest in them, Fleming would remark: 'I say, are you getting a kick out of that?'"

Like many self-obsessed people, he presented a mystery to even his closest friends. "Ian was entirely egocentric," commented Ann Fleming after her husband's death.

"He stood for working out a way of life that was not boring and he went anywhere that led him."

Ann was anything but boring. Born Ann Charteris in 1913, she was connected to a raft of upper-class families through the Tennants on her mother's side.

Her first marriage to a childhood friend, Lord O'Neill, head of the most ancient traceable family in Europe, was greeted with general satisfaction. The pairing was happy enough and produced two children.

But there was a restless, bohemian side to Ann, never fulfilled by servants and baronial halls.

It was only in the feverish atmosphere of wartime that her exuberance was truly released.

She spent the war flitting between country estates and Mayfair. While in London, she took on voluntary work - when not socialising at The Dorchester. It was then she began to see more of Fleming.

War suited Ian. He was by now a Naval intelligence officer and quickly rose to become personal assistant to the director of Naval Intelligence, with the rank of commander (the rank Bond would have).

Ann now had several men in love with her - let alone husband Shane O'Neill who was fighting in Tunisia - but she found herself drawn to Fleming's rakish insouciance.

Sometime early in the war, Ann went to bed with him. In a throwaway remark to a friend, she once declared she could not understand why people took their emotions so seriously. She was attracted to cads and bounders, she wrote.

And after O'Neill was killed in action in 1944, she would have married Ian if he had asked her.

But, instead, Ann married Viscount Rothermere, Esmond Harmsworth, proprietor of the Daily Mail.

He was able to give her a life of wealth and status Fleming could not possibly emulate.

Still she could not resist Fleming. If anything, this added extra spice to their relationship.

The love letters they wrote during this period resonate with passion.

Mark Amory prints a few of them in his selection of Ann Fleming's letters.

She wrote to Fleming in 1947 after a few days together: "It was so short and so full of happiness, and I am afraid I loved cooking for you and sleeping beside you and being whipped by you... I don't think I have ever loved like this before."

Fleming, too, could write from the heart: "All the love I have for you has grown out of me because you made it grow. Without you I would still be hard and dead and cold and quite unable to write this childish letter, full of love and jealousies and adolescence."

Yet by the end of the 1940s, when this letter was written, strains were beginning to show.

Whereas Ann was gregarious, Fleming disliked parties and preferred to be alone in the evenings.

While Ann was revelling in her life at the centre of the whirlwind of London politics and society, Fleming began building the house in Jamaica he would christen Goldeneye, which would serve as his retreat from London society.

Named after the codeword for a Naval Intelligence operation Fleming masterminded during the war, Goldeneye was a plain house, built overlooking the sea above a small cove.

Ann went there first in early 1948 and was appalled by the stark concrete, the lack of baths and the absence of windowpanes - only slatted louvres, since Fleming liked the idea of gentle tropical breezes wafting through the house.

But she quickly got used to the routine: swimming in the morning before a breakfast of pawpaw and Blue Mountain Coffee, and later returning to swim with masks and spears to catch lobsters.

Later that year, the carousel ground to a halt. Ann gave birth prematurely to a daughter who died after eight hours, leaving her "bruised and bewildered".

Although her husband stayed loyally by her bedside, it was generally accepted to have been Fleming's child.

Ann later claimed Fleming's tenderness in the letters he wrote to her at the time was what made her truly love him.

"I think any other man would be a frightful bore after you," she wrote from her sick-bed. "I should miss the infinite variety of wall-gazing, pointless bullying so harsh and then so gentle if I cry."

Whenever Rothermere took Ann on his business trips, Fleming followed. In Montreal, he shadowed the couple, and when the coast was clear, turned up at her hotel with his suitcase and told her he was moving in.

Terrified they would be caught, Ann told him she now had a lady's maid who came in the morning. "Get rid of the bitch," said Fleming. Meekly she did so.

Their relationship thrived - thanks to their fierce physical fights. When Ann left bruises on Fleming, he would warn her that "all this damage has to be paid for some time", and so it was.

"I long for you to whip me because I love being hurt by you and kissed afterwards," Ann wrote to him. "It's very lonely not to be beaten and shouted at every five minutes."

Both needed the other and were open about their unorthodox relationship.

Noel Coward, one of several famous people who had bought houses on the island, was scandalised to see them having breakfast together on the balcony of Jamaica's most famous hotel while a newspaper photographer prowled in the vicinity.

"After this, I descended on them and gave them a very stern lecture indeed," he wrote. "They were very sweet but... I have grave fears for the avenir(future)".

Coward was right, and the two of them recognised it. Fleming, who had passed the age of 40 without a wife, contemplated matrimony almost fatalistically.

"My difficulties may seem all right while you are in love with me," he warned her, "but it might be quite different if the love turned to the usual married friendship, and you might get too irritated, I don't know."

Viscount Rothermere then concentrated their minds by announcing that he would divorce her if she saw Fleming again.

In 1952, her second pregnancy from Fleming officially ended their marriage.

After losing her first child, Ann knew Fleming could be relied upon to do the right thing. Ann's £100,000 divorce settlement was to set them up financially for the best part of ten years.

They married the following year, in Jamaica. The very next day, Ian Fleming sat down and began writing Casino Royale.

Ann had been pestering him to write novels. And for the next 12 years, whenever he was in Jamaica, he sat down after his morning swim for three uninterrupted hours, often writing 2,000 words a day on his gold-plated typewriter.

Infuriating Ann, he would drily remark that he wrote it to keep his mind off the horrific prospect of a life spent in happy matrimony.

Fleming threw himself into the marketing of Casino Royale. He expected good reviews - but the book only took off when America's new President, JF Kennedy, included it among his bedside reading.

Meanwhile, the pregnancy which led to their marriage resulted in Caspar, their first and only child.

The birth, Ann's second Caesarian, left wide scars on her stomach, to the disgust of Fleming who had a horror of physical abnormality.

Ann said it marked the end of their love-making.

The marriage began going downhill within a couple of years. Fleming disliked her behaviour with her circle of well-educated friends.

When he was in London he spent more time on his own, preferring dinner and bridge at Boodle's club to an evening with Ann. Fleming's streak of cruelty now extended to the insouciance with which he took mistresses.

Millicent Rogers, a flamboyant oil heiress and regular visitor to Jamaica was one; Lady Jeanne Campbell was another.

Apart from several of the wives of expats in Jamaica, a succession of socialites passed through Goldeneye while Ann was in London.

Some of them, he reassured Ann - who knew all about Fleming's womanising - were impossibly dull. He claimed he was more likely to rape a yam.

At the other end of the spectrum was the author Rosamond Lehmann, of whom Fleming swore his relationship to be "strictly spiritual".

For her part, Ann struck up a passionate friendship in London with the Labour leader, Hugh Gaitskell, a close attachment which lasted until Gaitskell's death.

If he had not been already married she might have broken with Fleming. A clever politician, Gaitskell admired her spirit.

The problem for the Flemings was they were both too self-centred to make the compromises necessary for any successful marriage.

Fleming also had growing health problems. For years he had been drinking a bottle of gin and smoking 70 cigarettes a day.

This exacerbated an existing heart problem, and in 1961, not quite 53, he had a heart attack. His health would never be the same again.

And increasingly Fleming was beginning to depend upon a relationship which utterly excluded Ann. It was to become the most intimate and long-lasting of his later life.

Blanche Blackwell, in her early 40s when she met Ian, came from an old Jamaican family.

Years before, Fleming had admitted to Ann his ideal of a woman was not a pert-bottomed nymphette but "thirtyish, Jewish, a companion who wouldn't need education in the arts of love. She would aim to please, have firm flesh and kind eyes".

Blanche, darkly beautiful, was exactly what Ann feared in a woman. She looked after the house when Fleming was away, and largely organised the famous visit to Goldeneye of the Prime Minister Anthony Eden and his wife at the height of the Suez crisis in 1956.

Ann, deeply jealous, fought back. At Goldeneye she tore up Blanche's diligent planting in the garden and used the situation to prevail on Fleming to buy Sevenhampton, a large country house in Wiltshire, which she extravagantly transformed during the next 20 years.

A 1962 letter from Fleming to Ann depicts the misery they were suffering. "The arguments we have had over the years, our different points of view, are stale, however valid they may be on one side or the other.

"The point lies only in one area. Do we want to go on living together or do we not? In the present twilight we are hurting each other to an extent that makes life hardly bearable."

The question was never truly resolved. In the months before his death in 1964, Fleming mostly lived by himself, his health poor, and now unable to travel back to Goldeneye.

He spent his hours staring miserably out to sea from the bedroom window of his Brighton hotel, while Ann busied herself at Sevenhampton.

Fleming died in 1964 of a heart attack and was buried at Sevenhampton. Ann never recovered from grief that she had not made Fleming happy.

The suicide of their unhappy son, Caspar, in his early 20s, was another crippling blow. Ann took to the bottle and died in 1981.

She need not have reproached herself. Her love and determination forced Ian Fleming to confront his demons and begin to exorcise them.

Without her, the moniker James Bond would, perhaps, only signify their Jamaican neighbour, the author of Macmillan's Field Guide To The Birds Of The West Indies - and whose name Fleming borrowed to create his legend.

Thanks to `Lipservice` for the alert.

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