Ian Fleming`s old colleague Godfrey Smith recalls the man behind Bond

Ian Fleming had a brilliant mind, debonair charm and a roving eye. But how much of himself did he put into James Bond? With a new 007 novel out soon and another movie in the making, Fleming’s old colleague Godfrey Smith recalls the man behind the myth for The Times.

My most profitable meeting with Ian Fleming was in the corridors of The Sunday Times. I asked him if he’d sign the copy of his first novel, Casino Royale, which I’d just bought for 10/6. He was foreign manager and I was news editor. He cheerfully agreed and wrote in the front: “To Godfrey Smith, a fellow scrivener, Ian Fleming 1956.” He didn’t say I was much cop as a scrivener, but never mind. Those nine words brought its present value up to £10,000. To us young blokes on the paper then, he always seemed to have a mythological quality. We couldn’t take him quite seriously, but you had to hand it to him: we envied his whopping salary – £5,000 a year, or some £200,000 in modern money. We called him Lady Rothermere’s Fan; even though by now he’d made an honest woman of her, his legendary affair with Annie, the wife of the owner of the Daily Mail, was common knowledge.

We admired the lordly way he roared off in his Ford Thunderbird around lunch time on Friday to get in nine holes of golf before dinner while we soldiered on to the small hours of Sunday morning. He was the only man in the building who called our owner, Lord Kemsley, by his first name, Gomer, and Lady K by hers, Edith. We tried to emulate his principles: never use a subordinate clause and only call God and the King “sir”. The paper did him proud in his 15 years with us: in return he gave us a sense of style, a baptism in dry martinis, a masterclass in irreverence, and a laugh a minute. He was good news.

I first met him in 1951, just before he married Annie and began to write Casino Royale. His fine Greco-Roman head with the nose famously broken by Henry Douglas-Home, the prime minister’s brother, when they were playing the Eton wall game, came round the door of my little office on the executive floor. I was PA – then a job done almost entirely by men – to Lord Kemsley, or K as everyone called him, and one of my tasks was to keep the key to K’s private loo. Ian asked with a conspiratorial grin if he could borrow it. That was no problem, then or countless times later, because I knew about the mysterious role he played in K’s life.

Robert Harling, our design consultant, who’d served with Ian in naval intelligence during the war, used to say K had six real sons (of whom one was killed in the war and another, Oswald, would die soon from drink), one technical son in C D Hamilton (later Sir Denis, editor-in-chief of this newspaper), and one emotional son in Ian. K had met Ian during the war at the Dorchester hotel, then a hotbed of (in Annie Fleming’s words) “cabinet ministers, crooks and Mayfair remnants”. It was supposed to be so well-built that it would withstand any German bomb. Among the flotsam and jetsam who had moved in there were Lord and Lady K, and they soon fell under the spell of the young naval commander with whom they played cards each night.

K was one of the three sons of a Merthyr Tydfil estate agent, all of whom were destined to become peers and millionaires. His older brother, Seymour, made his pile in iron and died young from a fall off his horse. Little is remembered of him, except the local joke that the good folk of Merthyr were collecting for a memorial – to the horse. But the £100 he lent his brilliant younger brother, William – the future Lord Camrose – enabled him to found Advertising World, a trade magazine. It prospered, and William sent for the youngest brother, Gomer, then an assistant in a Merthyr haberdasher’s. They bought The Sunday Times for £75,000 in 1915, and by 1937 owned Britain’s biggest collection of newspapers and magazines.

It made personal sense to split – Camrose had four sons who would want jobs to add to K’s six – and was a politically adroit answer to the charge of monopoly. Camrose took The Daily Telegraph and the highly profitable Amalgamated Press. K took a ramshackle collection of provincial papers: the dim Daily Graphic and two failing downmarket Sundays, and would have left The Sunday Times with his brother had not Edith pointed out that it would give him clout and réclame. From this it can be seen that whatever K’s skill at sales and advertising, he was editorially naive and always would be. He was also a political innocent who made a ludicrous trip to parley with Hitler as late as July 1939 – and told him that one British politician he need not worry about was Winston Churchill.

So it is easy to understand how Ian would score a direct hit on K – and in particular on Lady K. Ian was the grandson of Robert Fleming, founder of the celebrated banking firm that still bears his name. His father, Valentine, had been killed in action in 1917 and was universally mourned. Churchill himself had spoken of his “lovable and charming” friend. Ian had twice been champion athlete at Eton, and though he had been obliged to drop out of Sandhurst after catching a dose of clap from a nightclub hostess, he had covered the Moscow show trial of Metrovick engineers for Reuters in 1935 and was now PA to the director of naval intelligence, Admiral Godfrey.

Ian’s friends unkindly dubbed him “the chocolate sailor” because of his glamorous back-room job. In truth, he crisscrossed the world on His Majesty’s Secret Service. He was twice at the wartime talks in Washington between Churchill and Roosevelt. He played a crucial role in what became the CIA. He flew to Lisbon and Colombo. He dreamt up ruses that were indistinguishable from later Bond adventures. One was to crash a captured bomber in the North Sea with German speakers in it dressed as Luftwaffe men. This would lure out the German air-sea rescue service, who would have on board a still-uncracked naval code. The rescuers would be shot and the code seized. Ian wanted to go in the bomber, but Godfrey judged him too valuable to lose. The scheme was aborted.

In 1945 Fleming took up his job as foreign manager of Kemsley Newspapers and began to assemble Mercury, a team of 88 men and women who were intended to supply the best foreign coverage in the business. A map behind his desk with coloured lights showed their disposition. The average age of the gallant 88 was 38, Ian proudly announced, and they spoke 3.1 languages apiece.

Above all, Ian was an ideas man. One day Annie received a letter from Somerset Maugham lamenting that he could not be in London for some months because he was at work on a book he had long contemplated: his account of the 10 best novels in the world, and why. Ian, who had long hero-worshipped Maugham, at once saw what a newspaper serial they would make.

He rang Maugham, but the cynical old scrivener said he wasn’t interested and no sum of money would induce him. Ian suggested the paper should buy him a small Renoir. Amused, Maugham still said no, but invited Ian to fly down to the Villa Mauresque. Ian returned with Maugham’s consent to the deal. The fee was a modest £3,000 for up to six articles. Such was their success, the series was increased to an unprecedented 14 weeks and circulation rose by 50,000.

Ian showed his paces again by suggesting at another conference that we should commission essays on the seven deadly sins by seven of the most distinguished writers then at work. It says much for his acumen that six of his pairings went ahead: Angus Wilson on envy, Edith Sitwell on pride, Cyril Connolly on covetousness, Patrick Leigh Fermor on gluttony, Evelyn Waugh on sloth, Christopher Sykes on lust. He had suggested Malcolm Muggeridge for anger; in the end W H Auden proved an inspired choice. In a foreword to the subsequent paperback version, Ian suggested seven deadlier sins: avarice, cruelty, snobbery, hypocrisy, self-righteousness, moral cowardice and malice. Finally, he turned to his seven deadly virtues but in truth offered eight: frugality, charity, sociability, deference, sycophancy, neatness, cleanliness and chastity. The greatest of all sins he typically left to last, though it surely ranked with him first: being a bore. It was the only sin that never tempted him. Alas, they were never made into a series.

Surprisingly, Ian had always felt a failure. At Eton he was effortlessly upstaged by his elder brother, Peter, who sailed through the school picking up all the right accolades: captain of the Oppidans, a member of Pop (the boys’ cabal that ran the place), editor of the school magazine.

Ian had failed to get into the foreign office while Peter had got a first at Oxford. He had been dubbed the worst stockbroker in the world during his brief spell in the City (figures bored him stiff), and though he had done his country proud in the war, the sobriquet “chocolate sailor” still rankled. It was ludicrously unfair; Ian, far from choosing a cushy billet, had been headhunted by Admiral Godfrey four months before the war started. But still.

And then Peter had made an enviable name as the author of stylish, bestselling travel books. It was Peter who had described Long Island as “the American’s idea of what God would have done with nature if he’d had the money”. Nobody outside clubland had then ever heard of Ian. Nor did the Bond novels, when they began to flow from those two-month vacations at Goldeneye, his Jamaican Shangri-la, win many critical garlands. Annie confided to Evelyn Waugh that she was “scratching away with my paintbrush while Ian hammers away at his pornography”.

There was, however, a new challenge that would enable Ian to demonstrate his remarkable sixth sense for the unexpected. He was offered the chance to write Atticus, then the only column in the slimline Sunday Times (it had just 10 pages when he joined us in 1945). It had been in the hands of some spellbinders in its time, but was now suffering from terminal hardening of the arteries. It specialised in paragraphs on what you call the younger son of a Marquis.

Ian made it crystal clear that he would brook no interference, even from K (who liked to print a grovelling encomium to each new Lord Mayor). It was a rum appointment, for he hated parties and loathed society. What interested him was how things worked. He had shown this predilection when, in 1936, he asked the bookseller Percy Muir to start collecting for him first editions of “books that had started something”. That something might be as basic as the zip fastener or miner’s lamp.

He gave Muir £250 to do it – not much even by 1930s standards. Muir entered into the spirit of things. For £4 he bought Marie Curie’s doctoral thesis on the isolation of radium, Married Love by Marie Stopes for 15 shillings, the first rules of ping pong for free. Ian stored the books in posh buckram boxes embossed with the Fleming crest, but he never read them. He used to say airily after the war that the collection was worth £100,000; it was sold after he died to the University of Indiana. The same spirit of surprise, of being able to think round corners, made Atticus begin to get up and go. Invited to cover a world conference of top chefs in London, Ian did not fall into the trap of asking them how to make lobster thermidor or boeuf en croute. Instead he asked them how to make perfect scrambled eggs. They nearly came to blows as each argued excitedly for his own recipe and Ian got some sizzling copy.

He was lucky to have two young assistants who were both to become bestselling writers. John Pearson was 26 and describes himself then as “a humble hack”. He had taken a double first at Cambridge but was still trying to find his true métier. Ian, he confesses, was “a dangerous role model. He was modest about his own talent but he made a marvellous Atticus”. He gave a high-definition sketch of Ian in the authorised biography he wrote after his death: “the black hair greying now above the ears, the umpteenth Morland Special of the day already in the ebonite Dunhill folder, the lines of age just beginning to touch that sad, sensual, heavy-lidded face”. The book was a smash. It enabled Pearson to buy a house in Italy, a flat in Rome and to become a full-time writer. He’s published a life of James Bond, biographies of celebrated families like the Sitwells, Devonshires, and Spencers, studies of the star-crossed gamblers Lucan, Goldsmith and Aspinall, and, in The Profession of Violence, a seminal study of the psychopathic Kray brothers.

The other young assistant was Susan Cooper, who had joined us straight after university. She now lives in America and is best known for her sequence of fantasy novels for young adults, The Dark is Rising (recently filmed), but has written many other books, a Broadway play and scripts for TV and cinema. “Dear God,” she says, “it was 50 years ago, if I have that right, that Ian made it possible for you to take on Johnny P and me by offering to use us on Atticus half the time so that our salaries could be split. He was lovely to work for, appreciative, encouraging, patient. But if I wasn’t talking about work I was completely tongue-tied in his presence: what with the height, the elegance, the cigarette holder, the curved mouth and the sexy, hooded eyes, he was the ultimate in sophistication to a pony-tailed 21-year-old from grammar school via Oxford. He gave me a lift in that black Thunderbird convertible once and I thought I’d died and gone to heaven, and was probably too nervous to utter a word all the way.”

Not all women saw his charms. Liz Ray, wife of Cyril Ray, the man who Ian sent to Moscow as the only British correspondent in Stalinist Russia, said she’d only taken an instant dislike to one or two men in her life and one was Ian. Barbara Skelton, the second wife of our chief literary critic, Cyril Connolly, thought Ian’s eyes were too close together – “and I don’t fancy his raw-beef complexion”. Cyril weighed in (rather ungratefully, since Ian had got him the job): “Very poor lover. Always gets up and goes home for breakfast.” Rachel Terry, wife of our man in Germany, declined his invitation to go to bed but found him attractive. Blanche Blackwell, née Lindo, a member of the Jewish Sephardic family who had prospered in Jamaica, thought at first he was the rudest man she had ever met; he was to become the greatest love of her life.

Annie summed him up best: “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.”

Then in summer 1959, K gave a twist to the plot worthy of Ian himself. He told his astounded directors that he was selling his business lock, stock and barrel. The buyer was a tubby little Canadian with pebble lenses who hardly anyone had heard of called Roy Thomson. K had quietly been buying shares in his own company to raise his holding from 30% to 42%. Roy paid £5m for them. K knew predators were circling who might at any moment make a hostile takeover bid. He had recently come through a bruising strike with the print unions and did not relish another. Edith had undergone a disastrous facelift, which was to leave her with dreadful pain. The search for a cure consumed their remaining energies. His sons did not seem inclined to carry on. He died in Monte Carlo nine years later.

K had dropped one final clanger: he had pulled out of a bid for a commercial TV licence at the last minute. Not having what Thomson would memorably call a licence to print money was the coup de grâce. Yet by luck or judgment, he had stumbled on two remarkable men in his time and given them their heads. One was Ian. The other was Denis Hamilton. He had entered the war with just three years as a junior reporter behind him, and ended it as an acting brigadier with a Distinguished Service Order. K had plucked him from the Newcastle office to which he’d returned in 1945, and brought him to London. Five years later, he was group editorial director. He masterminded the purchase of Field Marshal Montgomery’s memoirs and so added 100,000 to our sales. So K called him in and offered him a package to mark their years together. Hamilton opened it and found a copy of the cheque K had received for the business. He hung it in his loo and never saw him again. He and Ian remained close friends to the end.

Ian at once hit it off with Thomson and asked him for a rise. Thomson refused, but instead offered him £1,000 a year to continue attending the Tuesday conference. This made sense; Ian’s book sales were soaring, the film moguls were circling and the moralists mobilising: both Malcolm Muggeridge and Paul Johnson excoriated him for sex, sadism and snobbery. Their strictures read quaintly now when sex has become a national sport, torture is officially condoned, and celebrity has usurped snobbery. It didn’t matter; Ian was his own man. And still the ideas flowed. He suggested that the story of how commercial TV was born would make a good read and I was deputed to write it. Ian was right: anyone who’d put £5,000 in ITV at the start found himself a millionaire.

It was Hamilton who suggested Ian’s last big series: Thrilling Cities. Ian demurred: he was, he confessed, “the world’s worst sightseer”. He had often advocated roller skates at the doors of galleries and museums. Yet there were still one or two places he wanted to see. So he bought a round-the-world ticket for £803, drew £500 in travellers’ cheques and set off for Hong Kong. Then he would visit Macao, Tokyo and Honolulu, returning via Los Angeles and Las Vegas. The most revealing point about his odyssey was the list of what he didn’t want to see; in Tokyo it was “politicians, museums, temples, imperial palaces or Noh plays, let alone tea ceremonies”. Instead, he asked to see a judo academy and a Japanese soothsayer. This unashamedly populist agenda set the tone, and its second European half: Hamburg, Berlin, Vienna, bland-seeming Geneva – which he intended to open as if it were a tin of sardines –then Naples and, finally, his old happy hunting ground, Monte Carlo. In vain did our editor complain that there was more to Hong Kong than pretty masseuses and whorehouses; what about the million unemployed? The world read on, as it has ever since the electrifying opening sentence of Casino Royale: “The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning.”

One question perennially fascinates Ian’s legion of aficionados: how much of him was there in Bond? The answer, surely, is that though they overlapped in scores of ways – cars, caviar, sun, sea, gadgets, girls – Bond was still a fantasy; a projection of the man Ian could never quite be. When Bond, we learn on page 007 (of all pages) in Casino Royale, goes to sleep, his face becomes a taciturn mask – “cynical, brutal, cold”. That does not sound at all like the real Ian, who found the only street violence he ever encountered – in Istanbul – distinctly upsetting; who drove his vintage Bentley tidily but never recklessly, and who swam well away from the sharks when he was at Goldeneye.

It doesn’t sound like the Ian who sat down and wrote a personal letter to each member of his (by now much-diminished) Mercury staff when he finally resigned, and did his best to see they all had jobs. Nor does it sound at all like the Ian who wandered into the next room when Annie was having their only son, Caspar, in the Lindo Wing of St Mary’s Hospital, buried his face in the lap of the woman in it who’d just had her baby, and wept because his wife was having such a terrible time. Her name, it so happens, was Moira Shearer, the ballerina and wife of Ludovic Kennedy: “Suddenly he got up, took my hand, kissed it and said, ‘You’ve been such a help.’ I never saw him again.”

I remember him once telling me that Sophia Loren had been on the set of one of her films in Italy, and the technicians had called down from their hoists that they’d like to give her a saliva pyjama. “They meant they wanted to lick her all over,” he added helpfully, in case I didn’t understand. Dear Ian. “I know he’s a child but I love him,” said Annie. She wasn’t the only one.

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