“Bond. James Bond.”
But today the man we’re interested in is this one.
“Fleming. Ian Fleming.”
And he entered the world not in some smoky casino in Montenegro, not in a speedboat skimming the Caribbean, not in a lair beneath a volcano, but in Mayfair.
Green Street, Mayfair. Number 27. Born there on May 28th, 1908.
Ian Fleming.
Londoner.
Creator of James Bond.
And today’s story begins with a silver spoon in a very elegant mouth.
Because Fleming was born rich. Very rich. Old-school rich. Country houses rich. Chauffeur rich.
Tailor-made suits rich.
A family bank rich. The sort of rich where people don’t so much enter rooms as arrive in them.
And then – bang – the first shadow falls.
His father, Valentine Fleming…
is killed in the First World War.
Killed in France in 1917. Ian’s nine years old.
Winston Churchill writes the obituary.
That tells you what social altitude this family was operating at.
And if you want one of those little details that explains a life, here it is:
Fleming spent the rest of his life chasing powerful father figures. Admirals. Newspaper barons. Intelligence chiefs.
Older men who approved of him.
James Bond, incidentally, never had a father.
Funny, that.
Now here’s something else interesting.
Ian Fleming wasn’t the golden boy of the family. That was his older brother Peter Fleming.
Brilliant. Athletic. Adventurous.
Went to Oxford. Famous before Ian ever was.
Ian was the one who seemed a bit… slippery.
Eton?
Clever enough but not scholarly.
Sandhurst?
Didn’t fit military discipline. And then came one of the most deliciously Fleming-like episodes imaginable:
he left Sandhurst after getting involved with a woman and contracting a venereal disease.
Honestly, if that happened to a secondary Bond villain you’d say the author had overdone it.
His mother was horrified.
So off he went to Austria to “sort himself out,”
which sounds wonderfully Edwardian and terrifyingly upper-class.
And Austria changed everything.
He learns languages.
Learns skiing.
Learns sophistication.
Learns seduction.
Learns Europe.
Learns glamour.
Learns how to become Ian Fleming.
And crucially – this matters – he learns that danger can be stylish.
That’s pure Bond.
Now fast forward a bit.
Reuters journalist.
Moscow correspondent. Banker. Stockbroker.
None of it quite fits. He’s clever but restless.
Bright but undisciplined. The kind of man who looks marvellous leaning in a doorway with a cigarette
but whom you probably wouldn’t trust
to organise the filing cabinet.
And then the war comes.
And suddenly the world needs exactly somebody like Ian Fleming.
He joins Naval Intelligence.
Room 39 at the Admiralty.
Now there’s a London address with some voltage in it.
Corridors thick with cigarette smoke and secrets. Maps on walls.
Telephones ringing.
The clatter of typewriters. Men with tired eyes moving pins across Europe.
And Fleming comes alive.
He’s good at it.
Really good at it.
He works with intelligence legends.
Helps co-ordinate secret operations.
Has access to Ultra intelligence.
Goes to America.
Helps lay groundwork for what becomes the CIA.
And this is where one of the great myths and misunderstandings begins.
People think James Bond is Ian Fleming.
No he isn’t.
Bond is Ian Fleming improved.
Bond is Ian Fleming without the self-doubt.
Without the bad lungs. Without the melancholy. Without the sitting behind a desk while other men do the daring things.
Bond is wish fulfilment in a dinner jacket.
Though plenty of Fleming leaked through.
The gambling.
The cigarettes.
The fast cars. The obsession with proper scrambled eggs. The branding.
Oh, the branding.
Rolex. Bentley.
Morland cigarettes. Bollinger.
Before Fleming, thrillers didn’t wallow in luxury like that.
Bond made consumption sexy.
Bond doesn’t just save the world. Bond orders it.
And postwar Britain absolutely inhaled this fantasy.
Remember what London was then.
Bomb sites still everywhere. Rationing only just over. Soot-blackened buildings. Fog. Austerity.
And here comes Bond gliding through it all in black tie.
That’s one reason the books detonated.
They were escape literature for a grey age.
Now let’s talk about the women.
Because Fleming certainly did.
His love life
was a proper London
high-society tangle.
Affairs, betrayals, gossip. Exactly the kind of thing that floated around drawing rooms in Chelsea and Mayfair after too much claret.
He married Ann Charteris. Beautiful, aristocratic, formidable.
Before marrying Fleming she’d been married to Lord Rothermere, owner of the Daily Mail.
And yes, the gossip columns positively purred over the suggestion that Ann had also been involved with Hugh Gaitskell, leader of the Labour Party.
Imagine that little dinner party.
The future creator of James Bond sitting there while his wife possibly carries on with the man who might become prime minister.
You couldn’t invent it.
Actually, Ian Fleming probably could.
And meanwhile he’s writing these books at Goldeneye in Jamaica.
One every year. Fourteen Bond books in roughly fourteen years.
Extraordinary output.
He’d sit at a desk each morning and hammer out 2,000 words.
Relentlessly.
Like a civil servant of fantasy.
Casino Royale in 1953.
Then Live and Let Die.
Moonraker.
Goldfinger.
Dr No.
Thunderball.
One after another after another.
And then something extraordinary happens.
America falls in love with Bond.
John F. Kennedy names Fleming among his favourite authors.
And suddenly Bond isn’t merely successful.
Bond becomes a global weather system.
Then the films arrive.
Sean Connery.
And let’s be honest here: Connery was one of the greatest pieces of casting in cinema history.
Suddenly Bond acquires a face. A voice. A swagger.
And the whole thing explodes.
But here’s the melancholy bit.
Fleming himself was already burning out.
Too many cigarettes.
Too much alcohol.
Too much stress.
Too many years living like one of his own characters.
He dies in 1964 at just 56 years old.
Fifty-six.
That’s the age where plenty of people are only just getting started.
And there’s something oddly Bond-like about that early death.
Fleming created a hero who moved at enormous speed because perhaps,
somewhere deep down,
he knew speed was all he had.
So today, May 28th, if you happen to be in Mayfair, pause for a moment in Green Street.
London does this so wonderfully.
Behind perfectly ordinary front doors entire worlds begin.
Sherlock Holmes.
Paddington Bear.
Mary Poppins.
James Bond.
And Ian Fleming.
A boy born into privilege in Mayfair who transformed wartime espionage, heartbreak,
loneliness,
luxury,
sex,
danger and death
into the most successful fictional franchise on earth.
Not bad for a chap who once got thrown out of Sandhurst for behaving badly with a woman.
And somewhere tonight,
in bars from Tokyo to Toronto, somebody will still introduce himself with those immortal words.
“Bond. James Bond.”
Though for one day only perhaps we should raise a martini and say instead:
“Fleming. Ian Fleming.”
Shaken.
Not stirred.