The Ian Fleming Miscellany (15 page)

Ian loved it, especially the underwater idea. There was some urgency about getting this right, though. Fleming was a loyal friend to Bryce, and he and Bryce agreed that Xanadu should always have first option on making James Bond films, but at least four other offers were on the table and Fleming's agent at MCA was pushing him to make a decision. Fleming and Bryce were communicating by letter. Fleming needed to be part of Xanadu. Bryce stuffed his mouth with gold: a cheque for $50,000 dollars at once, to spend on buying shares in the new, Nassau-based version of Xanadu. Fleming then wrote to him including what he called ‘the legal bit':

… in exchange for $50,000 dollars' worth of shares in the new company, I give you the right to make the first full length James Bond feature film. I will write a full suggested treatment which you can alter as you wish and I will provide editorial and advisory services whenever they can be helpful.

Almost as soon as he'd written to Bryce, he started having second thoughts. He told his MCA agent in London what he'd done; then he wrote again to say he was with Xanadu now so he wouldn't need MCA again. His agent mildly replied pointing out that he was now potentially tied into an agreement with Xanadu which – if their ‘first full length James Bond feature film' never got made – would stymie other offers for good, and since he had been paid by shares in something that depended for its success on his own labour, it didn't look like such a great deal.

Ian stayed with MCA and got on with the treatment. There was some to-and-fro over exactly who the antagonists were – Communists had been the original idea, then SPECTRE was invented, but should it be Mafia? Discussions went on, and problems were resolved, long-distance. But whatever solutions were found, and however hard Ian tried, constructing the thing was agony. He discovered that a novel and a film are not the same thing. He didn't know how a script worked. In his books, key points were explained in imaginary internal monologues by Bond. There would be a slow build. Readers would see the action, and learn the backstory, from Bond's point of view. Ian tried to carry that into film, with plenty of spectacular scenes, but the result was clunky. McClory must have groaned when he saw it. A dull start was followed by static scenes of dialogue between static people, gimmicky effects, sadistic torture, cardboard characters and holes in the plot which, to pass unnoticed, would require impossible elisions between scenes.

They needed a screenwriter.

Kevin McClory was firmly in favour of finding a specialist writer. Ian willingly agreed but was anxious that it must be a British one; he did not want a repeat of the American gumshoe clichés that had ruined the TV show in 1954. They all favoured a British cast and crew as well for economic reasons. If the locations were in the Bahamas (where Kevin had found just the right place to build a couple of sound stages), and the actors, writer, producer, director and most of the crew were Brits as well, the James Bond film would qualify for the Eady Levy, a financial advantage designed to promote British film.

Paul Dehn was approached to write the script and declined. He had seen the treatment. There wasn't sufficient scope for character development, and in any case, he had already worked on a similar, successful film that involved the theft of an atom bomb; helpfully, he suggested a change in its construction. But he wouldn't be writing it.

They were halfway to hiring someone called Fairchild before they recognised that he would be out of his depth – probably literally. They learned that Fairchild had avoided engaging with underwater scenes in a similar project. They kept looking.

McClory's dismayed reaction to Ian's script may have hurt. He was less charmed by what he called McClory's ‘blarney' than Bryce was, and as his communications with Bryce grew chummier, he fell to implicit criticism of McClory. Bryce himself was annoyed with McClory by then. Kevin was still spending Xanadu money on the festival circuit while
The Boy on the Bridge
had not yet found a distributor. Kevin seemed as confident as ever, although privately he must have been disappointed. Before he met Bryce, he had discussed both his underwater film project and the Bridge one with Mike Todd, who had advised him to go with the undersea film.
The Boy on the Bridge
, he said, would win a lot of awards but ‘you can't eat awards'. He had been right.

Nonetheless McClory remained fully engaged with the Bond project, promising jobs to good people – pending a good script.

In letters to Bryce, Fleming questioned Kevin's saleability as director. He had been told, rightly, that distributors liked big name stars and big name directors. Maybe, he suggested, they should ask Hitchcock. Hitchcock, they were warned, would take the whole thing over: he would bring in his own team, writers, everybody.

While these discussions were going on, they still hadn't fully set up Xanadu in Nassau (as opposed to Xanadu, London, which was a partnership between Bryce and McClory). They lined up a couple of moneyed investors, but they needed to work out what part everyone was playing. As Fleming saw it, Kevin should have no particular role. He was rather too small-time for such a big project; he hadn't got the track record as director that was required and as to money, he was not a professional producer. Could he in fact account for what he was spending already?

Kevin knew nothing of this Nassau company. Bryce asked him for a breakdown of the money he was spending. At this point, Kevin thought he was equal partner with Bryce in Xanadu, that it had first option on the Bond film, and that his input into that was considerable. He had been drawing up a production team, looking for a writer, even getting storyboards done by John Huston's artist. Under the original agreement, he would work on it for a salary and expenses and have an equal share of the profits. Nothing had been said to him to indicate that another director, far less another producer, would be sought. There was ill feeling. Bryce was difficult about the salary Kevin felt was due to him. He wanted to know where the money was going. Kevin told him the accounts had been filed with the accountant and were there to be seen.

Ian and his various agents and lawyers were still fielding other offers for James Bond from film and television. Harry Saltzman, who would later meet Cubby Broccoli and make seriously profitable movies out of Bond, had an option on two of the books. In the meantime Bryce and Xanadu were in the doldrums, largely caused by Ian quietly undermining Kevin McClory and Ian and Bryce believing that ‘gentlemen's agreements' were an adequate substitute for legal documents.

At this point, in the autumn of 1959, McClory found Jack Whittingham.

Whittingham was perfect: he had been a journalist and a screenwriter since the war, had excellent credits and, best of all, Ian liked him a lot. He immediately suggested improvements to the treatment. His agent negotiated a deal, and McClory, Whittingham and Fleming got together to work on developing a script. Notes would be made at script conferences and Whittingham would go away and make at couple of drafts, at least, before the final shooting script. The general idea – atomic bomb theft, blackmail of world powers, underwater scenes – was pretty much what it had always been but thanks to professional input it would move faster and be more credible.

Fleming attended about four of these meetings, and he registered the title
Thunderball
, before disappearing to Jamaica to write his new book. Bryce was anxious about money and progress and demanded from McClory ‘my script in my hand' by February 1960, about six weeks away. This seemed odd to McClory, who had understood that they were partners but now increasingly felt he was being pushed out; even more so when it was Cuneo, the lawyer, who started to ring on the subject of money – and was getting nasty.

The tenor of conversations between Bryce and McClory had become impossible. Once the script was delivered, McClory knew he was out. Bryce intimated that there was going to be a new company and although he would be happy to offer McClory a position such as associate producer, Kevin himself did not necessarily hold any rights in the script. McClory hadn't managed to find any backers (McClory showed that he had). McClory had spent money like water (McClory protested that every penny was accounted for). McClory was also furious because he knew Bryce, or Cuneo or both, were making possibly slanderous remarks about his use of Xanadu's funds.

Also because – despite having asked for some input from Fleming – he hadn't heard a word.

McClory decided to visit Fleming in Jamaica. He made sure that the script, which had been much refined and improved from the preliminary screen treatment that Fleming had seen, with lots of new twists, was in Fleming's hands in advance of his own arrival in Jamaica and that Fleming would know where to find him.

When he was, after several days of silence, invited to Goldeneye, Fleming told him that he hadn't read the script. In any case, he asked, what qualifications did McClory have to produce the film? McClory was astonished. What did that mean?

‘Well, what have you done, old boy?'

McClory told him. Fleming said this was now a big production. McClory agreed that it would be, thanks to his work. He said it was a $3 million picture and he could raise the money.

He left knowing that Fleming did not want to work with him and Bryce was evading confrontation. In March, Bryce gave him six more months to come up with production money from one of the big studios, but it was all a sham. McClory read in the papers, in 1960, that
Casino Royale
was about to go into production thanks to a deal with Fox. So much for the ‘first' James Bond film being the property of his partnership with Bryce.

When Fleming submitted his manuscript of
Thunderball
that summer, his publishers were pleased with it and certainly relieved. For the past few years Ian had been complaining about the difficulty of coming up with new stuff for Bond to do, and reaction to
The Spy Who Loved Me
had been awful. A senior editor wrote to say that
Thunderball
worked particularly well because the more outrageously sadistic stuff had gone. It was more like life, and less like fantasy. And when it was published in hardback, and serialised in the
Daily Express
, in 1961, reviewers said the same thing; Fleming was better than before.

McClory was livid.
Thunderball
was ‘by Ian Fleming', copyrighted to Glidrose, without even an ‘inspired by' on the cover or the title page, far less an acknowledgement of co-authorship. But significant parts of it had originated in ideas that he and Jack Whittingham had devised and which Fleming had stolen from Whittingham's script.

McClory attempted to prevent publication with an injunction against sales. Jonathan Cape expressed shock. They hadn't known, they said, until a letter arrived from McClory's lawyers quite recently, that there was the remotest likelihood of legal action and even now, they didn't know why. The book was being advertised all over town; foreign rights were being sold, 130 review copies had been despatched and books had been delivered to booksellers. Should sales be stopped, they would suffer terrible losses.

McClory lost, in a hearing that lasted just 90 minutes.

‘I'm sure Bond never had to go through anything like this,' Ian remarked with a smile to reporters as he left the court.

McClory marshalled his lawyers. They told him to forget it.

Jack Whittingham's daughter got a job, typing for a firm of solicitors. It was a big firm with a lot of famous clients, and she went home and told her dad about them. This is how McClory and Whittingham came to engage Peter Carter-Ruck. A famous libel lawyer, he had in the past won cases for people like Lord Rothermere and Winston Churchill. He thought these two men had a good case. When he sat down with McClory and Whittingham to work out just how much of the story was not Fleming's but theirs, the two texts side by side, they came up with two hundred pages of material that had been lifted or adapted from the script Ian had seen in February 1960.

Carter-Ruck and Whittingham got on well, but Whittingham had done a law degree at Oxford and knew that Law can defeat Justice. Carter-Ruck told him the chances of their winning or losing were about fifty-fifty. Whittingham could see the boxes and boxes of files and hours of investigation in this case. Money was pouring into the lawyers' coffers by the hour. If he lost, if Fleming's and Cape's costs had to be paid as well as his own, there would be no more lovely house in Surrey, no more private schools for the children. He was unwell; like Ian, he smoked and drank too much and had a weak heart. He pulled out, assigning his rights in the screenplay to Kevin. Carter-Ruck told Whittingham that if Kevin won, he would have a good chance of success in a subsequent action.