The Man with the Golden Typewriter (31 page)

Shall be in and around New York and Vermont for the first fortnight in August and, in the unlikely event that you should happen to be in
reach of the area, please let me or Macmillans, New York, know and we will share a Coke in which the contents of a Benzedrine inhaler have been soaked overnight. Which, I understand, is the fashionable drink in your country at the moment.

FROM CHANDLER

4th July, 1956

Dear Ian,

I have already ordered Eric Ambler's new thriller since he told me about it some time before it came out. I think the title of your review, ‘Forever Ambler' is a pretty good joke in the third class division.

Of course I liked
Diamonds are Forever
and I enjoyed reading it, but I simply don't think it is worthy of your talents.

It is unlikely that I shall be in New York or Vermont in August. It is much more likely that I shall be in Paris. Frankly a Coke in which the contents of a Benzedrine inhaler has been soaked overnight hasn't reached La Jolla. What does it do to you? The fashionable drink in this country is still Scotch.

TO CHANDLER

11th July, 1956

Dear Ray,

I cannot believe that you will end up by having trouble over your tax problems here. Our tax gatherers do not come down hard on the foreign visitor, and I am sure they will accept your medical alibi. I strongly advise you not to worry about the problem until faced with some kind of a demand.

As for my opera, you are clearly living under a grave misapprehension. My talents are extended to their absolute limits in writing books like
Diamonds are Forever
. I am not short-weighting anybody and I
have absolutely nothing more up my sleeve. The way you talk, anybody would think I was a lazy Shakespeare or Raymond Chandler. Not so.

My only information to help you on your Paris visit is that on Thursdays, in the night club below the Moulin Rouge, there is an amateur strip-tease which might bring a flicker even to your worldly eyes. But I have not sampled it, so this information is not guaranteed.

Now get on with writing your book and stop picking your nose and staring out of the window.

By now Chandler was in a bad way, drinking heavily and making heavy weather of what would be his last novel,
Playback
. When Fleming looked at it he saw ‘a formless jumble of sub-plots, at the end of which Marlowe was obviously going to marry a rich American woman living in Paris'. Gloomily, they discussed Marlowe's future. Chandler thought it would be the end of him: his wife would sack his secretary, redecorate his office and make him change his friends. Then, because she was so rich there would be no point Marlowe working and he would eventually drink himself to death. Fleming tried to cheer him up: ‘I said that this would make an excellent plot and that perhaps he could save Marlowe by making Mrs. Marlowe drink herself to death first.' But Chandler couldn't muster the enthusiasm: ‘The truth was that it had nearly all gone out of him and that he simply could not be bothered.'

Back in the United States, towards the end of 1957, Chandler sent Fleming an oversized panoramic postcard ‘From the World-famous Palm Canyon' in Colorado. This was followed shortly afterwards by another in which he chastised Fleming for teasing his latest female companion about their relationship.

TO CHANDLER

29th November, 1957

Why do they think that Palm Canyon is ‘world-famous'? What world do these people frequent?

It was fine to see your gusty script again and to know that you are still alive, and I heartily approve your plan to move over here. Perhaps you
will get so bored here that you will be forced to get on with that long-overdue book.

Naturally I never rag O. about you. She's been telling tales. She is a wonderful girl and I guess you are very good for each other.

Hurry up and come along.

When Chandler returned to London in 1958 he was on a downward slope. Fleming gave him an introduction to the Italian gangster Lucky Luciano in the hope that he would do an article for the
Sunday Times.

TO CHANDLER

19th March, 1958

Dear Ray,

Please see page 11 of the enclosed Sunday Graphic. As you see, your bird looks in good health and spirits but that spaghetti looks a trifle under-cooked.

Henry Thody, who writes this story, is the Sunday Times and Sunday Graphic representative in Rome and I could arrange for him to meet you and chaperone you down to Naples, make all arrangements, and see you off.

He is a splendidly eccentric chap with huge black handle-bar moustaches and you will like him.

Now all you need is your tickets.

So far as Capri is concerned, I should start off for a day or two at the Qui Si Sana, which is in the village of Capri in the middle of the island. But then I should explore a bit and perhaps move to one of the hotels down at Piccolo Marina, which is right on the sea.

I enclose the ten shillings which you kindly loaned me and, although the bank rate is 7%, I have not added interest because I think you are rich enough without it.

See you on Monday at one o'clock at the Boulestin.

Ha Ha! about catching you at the Etoile with that pretty girl. You'd better get yourself organised!

The Luciano initiative was a failure, culminating in a lengthy screed that Fleming damned as ‘sheer bad writing'. On 10 July, they held a conversation in a twenty-minute BBC radio broadcast,
The Art of Writing Thrillers
. Chandler was already drunk by the time Fleming collected him at 11.00 in the morning, and much of what he said had to be deleted. When he apologised for mentioning masturbation a BBC woman consoled him: ‘It's quite all right Mr. Chandler, we hear much worse things than that.'

Afterwards they had lunch at Boulestin's, where the conversation took a reflective turn. What did the future hold? How would their careers end? Taxation, they agreed, had killed the wealthy writer and films were the only salvation. Chandler said that Dashiell Hammett ‘had never let his work decline. He had just written himself out like an expended firework . . . [In the end] as one grew older, one grew out of gangsters and blondes and guns and, since they were the chief ingredients of thrillers, short of space fiction, that was that.' Pertinently, given the anxiety Fleming would face over this very question, they discussed how authors like themselves could get rid of the albatross they had slung around their necks. Chandler shrugged and said he could never kill Marlowe, ‘because he liked him and other people seemed to like him and it would be unkind to them'.

They never saw or heard from each other again. Chandler decamped to America, and although Fleming sent him a copy of his latest book he received no reply. Rumours came in early 1959 that Chandler had delirium tremens and was unwell. On enquiring at Prince's Arcade Bookshop, which had a standing order to send Chandler anything they thought he might like, Fleming learned that this year they had not been asked to. Mr Francis agreed that this was very bad news indeed. Chandler died a week later on 26 March 1959.

Fleming wrote an account of their friendship for the
London Magazine
but regretted not having produced the glowing obituary that appeared in
The Times.
He never forgot how much he owed Chandler for that first, favourable review. ‘I wish I had been the author,' he wrote, ‘so that I could have repaid him for the wonderful tribute he had written out of the kindness of his heart for me and my publishers.' Perhaps, too, he felt a sense of loneliness at the departure of yet another of his literary heroes. They had begun to vanish with alarming rapidity over the past decade and with them had gone the context in which he had established himself. No longer was he the brave new writer of
Casino Royale
but a man whose time, like Chandler's, was running its course.

When he sent the article for approval to Chandler's agent, Helga Greene, she agreed sorrowfully that he had captured the man
:
“Don't correct anything please: the mistakes are hardly important enough and the overall picture is correct, only a little bleaker, thank God, than the reality”. Contradictorially, though, she later wrote, “I was so furious that it was difficult to write at all. I wonder if the sarcasm will get through Fleming's thick skin?” She attached a note to Chandler's file in UCLA saying “that the executrix of the estate wishes to point out that this article is quite inaccurate and should not be used as a basis for any studies on how Raymond Chandler worked or wrote”.

 

12

Thunderball

During the last half of 1959 Bond's future on the silver screen quavered uncertainly. Inspired by Ernie Cuneo's first draft for a screenplay, Fleming had produced a sixty-seven-page treatment, with substantial alterations and additions, which he then passed on to Ivar Bryce and the producer Kevin McClory. In turn, McClory made his own suggestions and amendments to which were added the attentions of a professional screen writer, Jack Whittingham. By the end of the year, however, Bryce's interest had waned, leaving McClory still enthusiastic but with no certainty of a backer. Meanwhile, Fleming had other things on his mind.

Lord Kemsley having sold the paper to a new magnate, Roy Thomson, Fleming's easy-going arrangement with the
Sunday Times
was coming to an end. In November 1959 he was sent on a trans-global expedition from which sprang a series of articles that would eventually form the first half of his travelogue
Thrilling Cities
. The journey took him to Hong Kong, Macao, Tokyo, Honolulu, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Chicago and New York. Each destination had its own charm, but in an age when any flight was an adventure his description of air travel was almost as thrilling as the cities themselves. Few readers could resist the exoticism of a sentence that read, ‘An hour or more of slow, spectacular sunset and blue-black night and then Beirut showed up ahead – a sprawl of twinkling hundreds-and-thousands under an Arabian Nights new moon that dived down into the oil lands as the Comet banked to make her landing.'

It was to be one of his last assignments as a
Sunday Times
employee. As the Kemsley apparatus adjusted itself to Thomson's regime, Fleming looked for a new office and a new secretary. For the former he settled on a room in Mitre Court, off Fleet Street, and for a secretary he chose Beryl Griffie-Williams, who would prove a dedicated, efficient, fiercely loyal guardian and one on whom Fleming would increasingly rely. Then, in January 1960, he was off to Goldeneye for another Bond novel.

Given that McClory's project seemed to be in a state of flux, Fleming saw no reason not to use elements from the outline as a basis for his next novel,
Thunderball
. The book starts with Bond being sent for a detox at the Shrublands health retreat where, after a contretemps with one Count Lippe, whom he scalds to immobility in a steam bath, he learns that an American plane containing atom bombs has been hijacked from its base in Britain, and the two countries are being ransomed to the tune of £100 million. Behind the demand is a group called SPECTRE, ‘The Special Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion' – of which, it transpires, Count Lippe was a member. SPECTRE is a perfect storm of evil, combining veterans from every violent organisation in the world – the Gestapo, Triads, SMERSH and the Mafia – under the overall control of Ernst Stavro Blofeld.

Born in the Polish port of Gdynia, to a German father and a Greek mother, Blofeld is an overweight, asexual, power maniac who, like most Bond villains, has a physical peculiarity: the pupils of his eyes, like Mussolini's, are completely surrounded by the whites. But while Blofeld is the spider in the web, it is one of his subordinates whom Bond must face: Emilio Largo, ex-member of an elite Italian naval unit, whose luxury yacht, the
Disco Volante
, supposedly involved in a hunt for sunken treasure, is anchored off Nassau.

Flying to the Bahamas, Bond teams up with his old friend Felix Leiter to locate the hijacked plane, now camouflaged in shallow water. Having enlisted the support of Largo's mistress Domino, whose brother had been the pilot, Bond launches an underwater assault with the aid of American frogmen to retrieve the bombs. When cornered by Largo in an undersea cave he is saved by Domino, who fires a spear gun into
Largo's chest. On both sides of the Atlantic the operation is known by the code name Thunderball.

Fleming wasn't happy with the manuscript, which he thought not up to his usual standard. Perhaps this was because he had lived with the idea for so long that it had lost its freshness, or maybe that having a ready-made outline to hand he dashed it off too fast. In January he warned Wren Howard to, ‘Tell Wm. P. I'm half way through a long and very dull Bond & to sharpen his red pencil as never before.' He was, however, fond of his latest villain, Blofeld – so much so that he gave him his own birthdate, 28 May 1908 – and would feature him in another two adventures.

If Fleming wasn't happy with the book then McClory and Whittingham certainly weren't either. As far as they were concerned Fleming had simply stolen their material. He replied that he was writing a book of the film, should it ever materialise. Differences of opinion led to lawyerly exchanges and a 1963 court case that was settled with Fleming's admission that his novel was based on a treatment by himself, McClory and Whittingham.
¹

Even as the idea of a
Thunderball
film began to disintegrate, Fleming worked the broadcast seam. In March 1960 he met a glamorous agent named Ann Marlow, at Sardi's in New York, and later that year, over champagne and scrambled eggs, he assigned her agency rights for TV and radio. Tearing a piece off the menu he scrawled boldly, ‘To MCA – I would like Ann Marlow to be my exclusive radio and television representative – worldwide'. To which he added his signature and address.

Later, he followed the success of his first ‘Thrilling Cities' articles with a second instalment that saw him driving across Europe to report on Hamburg, Berlin, Vienna, Geneva, Naples and Monte Carlo. He examined everything with his usual eye for the unconventional, and in Naples was delighted to secure an interview with ‘Lucky' Luciano, the Mafia boss who had helped the Allies during their occupation of Italy in the Second World War.