The Man with the Golden Typewriter (10 page)

Anyway, many thanks for having taken the trouble to write on a very legitimate point of criticism.

TO MISS SHIRLEY HILLYARD, 302 Chapel Lane, Cardington

Shirley Hillyard, who worked at the Bedford Public Library, was one of Fleming's most delightful correspondents. On behalf of her colleagues (but maybe just herself), she said, ‘We would have written before but until a traveller told us that you were foreign correspondent to the
Sunday Times
, we did not know who you were.' They were intrigued to know if he was anything like his hero, and having read that he had just returned from Istanbul on the Orient Express were certain that he must be. ‘We all like James Bond,' she added, ‘except the librarian who thinks he is very immoral but perhaps that doesn't matter when you are in the Secret Service.'

5th October, 1955

Thank you very much for your charming letter of October 3rd and I am delighted to hear that you and your friends at the library are not disturbed by the passionate side of James Bond's nature.

I entirely agree with you that he should be allowed some relaxation in the midst of the perils he has to face, and if he were to marry and settle down he would be of little value to the Secret Service.

Another of his adventures will appear in April together with the daffodils. It will be called DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER and I hope you will enjoy it.

Kindest regards and best wishes.

TO MICHAEL HOWARD

6th June, 1958

We talked about a reprint of “Moonraker” the other day. Since then I have been in to Hatchards and they asked me when one was coming along as they are having many enquiries for it.

If you remember, it was in the same way that I finally persuaded you to reprint “Casino Royale” which appears to have gone well.

If you feel it necessary to make a similar arrangement over “Moonraker” as we did over “Casino Royale”, by all means do so, but I think it is a pity not to catch the crest of this wave by keeping all the books in print until the wave has subsided.

Undoubtedly if you decide to do a reprint a new jacket would help. The one we had was, I am sure you will agree, the worst of the lot.

TO MRS. COLLINS, Battle House, Goring, Oxon

Regarding Bond's bridge game with Drax, Mrs Collins was disappointed. ‘Surely,' she wrote, ‘a good player as Drax was supposed to be would have taken
out the re-double into 7 No Trumps – Doubled but not vulnerable 3 down (2 clubs & the Queen of Diamonds) the penalty would only have been 500!' Quite.

28th July, 1959

Thank you very much for your letter of July 23rd and of course you are perfectly right about the Bridge problem. A still better suggestion would have been that Drax should have bid 7 hearts, which he makes.

But the point was that, with that gigantic hand not knowing that his partner had support in hearts and void in clubs, it was natural for him to expect a gigantic penalty in the club bid.

Incidentally, he was not a particularly good player, but a very good cheat!

Thank you very much for having taken the trouble to write.

TO MAJOR V. P. TALLON, M.B.E., R.A.M.C., British Military Hospital, Hannover, BFPO33

Among the characters in
Moonraker
was Major Tallon, Head of Security at Drax's missile base. It was too much of a coincidence for Major Tallon, Security Officer at the Hannover hospital for the British Army of the Rhine. Tallon was an uncommon name, and his was the only one to have featured on the Army List since the war. How had Fleming come by it?

Tallon, a stickler for detail, had written to the
Daily Express
in May to comment on various unlikely details to do with the ship featured in
Moonraker
and, the fictional Tallon having been killed in the book, wrote jokingly to deny the reports of his own demise. The
Express
apologised, saying they couldn't find him in any of their obituaries. ‘Much amusement was got out of it – mainly at my expense.'

18th August, 1959

Thank you very much for your letter of August 11th and it is indeed a remarkable coincidence that your name and duties should have featured in “Moonraker”.

Unfortunately, this book was written some six years ago and I cannot for the life of me remember how I came to choose the name of Tallon. I might have seen it in a newspaper or, more likely, on a shop front. When I see a name that attracts me, I jot it down and use it for an appropriate character.

Oddly enough, you are the second person to have written recently on this subject. Two or three weeks ago I had a letter from Australia from a Miss Moneypenny asking me how I had come to choose her name for M.'s secretary.

Alas, I am afraid I had to give her an equally unhelpful reply.

At least both Major Tallon and Miss Moneypenny were excellent servants of the State!

TO S. PLEETH, ESQ., 18 West Parade, Rhyl, N. Wales

Seheer Pleeth, a Swiss national living in Wales, wrote that Fleming had misspelled Patek Philippe as Parek Phillippe. While on the subject of watches, and given that Fleming appeared to be a perfectionist, the most exclusive watch in the world was actually an Audemars Piguet – a Hispano-Suiza compared to the mere Rolls-Royce or Bentley of Patek Philippe. ‘How about a tale involving Bond in a situation within the boundaries of my own rather spy infested country – Switzerland?'

29th June, 1960

Thank you very much for your letter of June 26th and for having taken the trouble to write to me.

Certainly a mis-print has crept into the edition of “Moonraker” you read, and I will take the matter up with the publishers.

I am very interested in what you have to say about Audemars Piguet which, on your recommendation, will feature in a subsequent book.

I have just come back from Switzerland and I daresay one of these days ‘M' will send James Bond there in the course of his duties. In the
meantime, I am actually to-day writing about Switzerland, and in particular Geneva as part of a Thrilling Cities Series which will appear in the Sunday Times in August. I hope it does not infuriate your country too much.

Again many thanks for your letter.

 

4

Notes from America

‘It seems to me that much of the factual reporting on Ian Fleming, however accurate, leaves undescribed much of the fellow I knew.

‘I knew him better than most; in the classical sense we often tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky, and for that matter, the moon, too.'

Ernest Cuneo Papers –
Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, New York

In 1959 Fleming wrote an article describing his friendship with Raymond Chandler, at the time a Titan in the world of thrillerdom. He could never have suspected that he himself would be held in the same regard or that his long-time friend Ernest Cuneo
¹
would write about him in the same way. What follows has been constructed from a series of notes that Cuneo wrote in the early 1980s.

It was in 1942, at the New York apartment of Sir William Stephenson, head of British Intelligence in the western hemisphere, that the two men encountered each other. Stephenson occupied a palatial penthouse suite at the Hotel Dorset on W54th Street, where every evening he hosted meetings to discuss the latest intelligence reports. As Cuneo recalled,
‘
The drawing room was two-storied, there was a huge fireplace in which logs always glowed, and the lighting was subdued. It was an elegant and spacious room of warm shadows, and this being war and I of a foreign service, was acutely aware of them. Here,
as the lights of the metropolis blinked on, visiting great and near-great of the British High Command gathered. It was here I met Ian Fleming.'

A straight-speaking ex-football player, lawyer and journalist, Cuneo was a new recruit to America's security service, the Office of Strategic Security (OSS), precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency. Fleming, meanwhile, was a faintly aloof member of Naval Intelligence, rather junior in rank to the officers who congregated at these meetings. When Cuneo remarked on this, Fleming said, ‘Do you question my bona fides?' To which Cuneo replied, ‘No, just your patently limited judgement.' They both laughed. And when Stephenson's meetings devolved, as they often did, to the 21 Club, they came to know each other better.

‘Oddly,'
Cuneo wrote
, ‘as I saw him, he was more easily classified, from a physical standpoint, as American rather than British. He had a fine head, a high forehead with a head of thick brown, curlyish hair, parted on the side and neatly combed over to the left. His eyes were piercing blue and he had a good, firm jaw. His nose, however, had been broken and unrepaired. This gave him the look of the Philadelphia light-heavyweights of the Tommy Loughran school. [. . .] Fleming carried himself like an American more than an Englishman. He did not rest his weight on his left leg; he distributed it, his left foot and shoulders slightly forward. This is a typical American athlete's stance, and contains more of a hint of the quick boxer's crush than the squared erect shoulders of the Sandhurst man.'

Fleming, he discovered, knew very little about wine but could tell good from bad. He did, however, seem to be an expert on caviar and had a keen sense of fantasy.
‘He told me, for example, the old Russian boyars used to carry a small solid gold ball to test it. They dropped it from a few inches and it was supposed to imbed itself half-way. I asked him why the hell he didn't have one, and I relished a small sense of victory when he just sniffed.'
And then there were the martinis.
‘Of all the maddening trivia through which I have suffered, nothing quite matched Fleming's instructions on how his were to be made. [He] was painfully specific about both the vermouth and the gin and explained each step to the guy who was going to mix it as if it were a delicate brain operation. Several times I impatiently asked him why the hell he didn't go downstairs and mix it himself, but he ignored me as if he hadn't heard and continued right on with his instructions. Equally annoyingly, he always warmly
congratulated the captain when he tasted it as if he had just completed a fleet manoeuvre at flank speed.

‘All but tirelessly, we taxed and challenged each other over the years, each accusing each other for what he himself was. I fancied myself the realist and he the romantic. He fancied me as the romanticist and he the realist. [. . .] I explained to him after the manner of the cold-blooded Genoese of whom I am born, that the romantic was the reality, and in no case more than his. Unflaggingly, he on his part, declared that the harsh physical world was the reality and that romanticism was an escape. Immersed in the American school of Walter Winchell and Damon Runyan, to me the world was a vivid, magical, series of adventures, New York a Baghdad on the subway. Fleming vividly accepted this – as a fascinating fiction. He reminded me of a certain 19th Century boulevardier of Paris, who, it was said, would lapse into melancholy pensiveness, unable to reconcile himself to the death of Henry of Navarre, four centuries gone. Fleming, though he did not know it and would not accept it, was a knight who could not reconcile himself to the fact that women were not Elaines in ivory towers, and that the world was not one of black and white values.'

All the same, Cuneo admitted that Fleming was quite happy to ignore the ivory tower if it suited him. On a wartime visit to London he brought a selection of nylon stockings, at the time all but impossible to obtain in Britain.
‘One day I dropped by Commander Fleming's desk and threw on it a half dozen pair. “Long, medium and short,” I said. “I assume you're playing the field.” “Actually, I'm not,” he said, and feeling I might have invaded his sensibilities, I said, “Good, there are others who are,” and reached for the packet. With a card-sharp's fleetness of hand he was stuffing them into his Navy jacket. “No,” he said. “I'm not but some of my friends are.” He assumed his attitude of thoughtfulness and added beatifically, “They'll be glad to have them.”

‘We roared with laughter. It seems to me we were always roaring with laughter and this is how I principally remember him. [. . .]

‘We almost suffered emotional “bends” the day the war ended. Tension went out like a power line turned off. When I came into Bill's office the next day, he shoved at me a copy of the London Times and pointed a finger to a single line. It read, “The Home Secretary told the Commons
last night that the emergency having ended, habeas corpus was restored”. “I guess that's what it was all about,” he said. “I guess it was,” I said, and we both went over to “21”.

‘Like it or leave it, aside from its horrors, you miss the frightful challenge of war. I think Fleming missed it as much as most; he seemed both grumpy and disconsolate.'

Their friendship continued after the war and became even closer when Cuneo was appointed President of NANA, the North American Newspaper Alliance, a once-famous news agency in which Fleming and his friend Ivar Bryce became involved and which they hoped might still have legs.

TO ERNEST CUNEO, North American Newspaper Alliance, 229 West 43rd Street, New York 36

As Vice-President of NANA's European branch, and with Bryce as a roving Vice-Chairman, Fleming arranged for an office to be opened near his own, into which moved one Silvia Short who acted as both London Editor and Manager. While co-ordinating transmissions from Kemsley Newspapers he also embarked on a succession of deals to develop new outlets for NANA's services (the details of which are, alas, unrecorded), and to organise contributors. He sought, too, to clarify the rates that their correspondents received.

8th June, 1953

Dear Ernie,

In great haste.

1. Please see my letter of May 29th. The suggested payment to Manor was twenty
dollars
, not pounds. No wonder the collective hairs of N.A.N.A. rose on its global head. I will sort the matter out somehow.