By Jethro Maddox

In October of 2021, the Granite State was party to a shameful exercise.

The Park Theatre in Jaffrey, NH promoted seven dark horse candidates to be “the next James Bond.”  They also offered a glimpse of the latest heretical James Bond movie, “No Time to Die.” A title more suitable for the memoir of a washed up professional wrestler.  You see, Daniel Craig, Scrawny Bond, was retiring, and the Park Theatre thought they would advance some additional options for Eon  Productions, the vehicle with which Cubby Broccoli and Harry Salzman  put Fleming’s wonderfully retro and trashy spy novels on the silver screen. The Granite State always had an impish affinity for dark horses.

The movies differed from the books in unimportant ways. 21st Century Bond is unrecognizable. Jaffrey’s Country Bridal and Formal Wear provided darling tuxedos, and the theatre presented a lineup of false Bonds – – short, tall, skinny, stocky, clean shaven, hippie lipped, coiffed, and receding.

Bond himself had been finally killed off, and we can now look forward to the adventures of Bond’s daughter! Miss Moneypenny is no longer the properly longing but demure Bond secretary, but flirts with Bond on more equal terms. Women are not only on top, they are on top of each other! Such is the state of affairs as we observe Global James Bond Day, commemorating the opening of the fist Bond film, Dr. No, October 5th, 1962. Woke Bond. PC Bond. Sensitive new age guy Bond. If we don’t elect Trump again hermaphrodite Bond, vegetarian Bond, carbon free will assault us. We won’t have a country!

Milking the Bond brand beyond all decency is conduct typical of Hollywood today. Sequels usually debase — and after 60 years, 30 films, and a half dozen actors playing Bond, that is the case here. Mammon must be served. Hollywood should do whatever it wants, but they should stop calling this stuff Bond!

To keep the true Bond faith, we must remember the novelist Ian Fleming, Bond’s creator, who died at age 56, sixty summers ago. Too old to smoke and drink with abandon anymore. To old to witness most of what he wrought, or more accurately, what was wrested from him.

He lived to see Dr. No and From Russia with Love hit the movie theaters. Goldfinger, the Gold Standard for Bond films, was in the works when Ian went on home and claimed his reward, the film premiering in London 36 days after his departure. Richard Burton and David Niven were first considered for the lead role in the movies. They settled on Sean Connery, a starving actor and Scottish boxer. Connery, the big lug, strained for erudition by observing in Goldfinger that drinking champagne at room temperature was “like listening to the Beatles without ear muffs.”  The mop headed musicians apparently possessed the power to lower the room temperature dramatically. Connery played Bond in six of the earliest movies, until 1971 (the less said the betterbabout the shark jumping effort to bring him back in his dotage in 1983).

The hard living Fleming celebrated retro ethos with more loving attention to detail  more than anything than perhaps the  early Mad Men episodes (until Don Draper joined a cult and got in touch with his feelings — are we to be spared nothing?).

Fleming’s credo was “any fool can be uncomfortable.” The cultural influence of the early Bond movies has been compared to that of Playboy magazine. Blessed decadence and upper class hypocrisy. We remember early Bond not just for his adventures, but for martinis shaken not stirred, or was it the reverse?  Hard to recall after a few. We think of thin, dark silk ties with crisp white shirts, and dark blue, single breasted suits,  Morland cigarettes, unabashed names like Honey Rider and Pussy Galore, creepy girl watching with telescopes, and bum slapping sans the lawsuits.

Two books out recently have captured some of this. Goldeneye by Matthew Parker focused on Fleming’s Jamaica retreat. Ian Fleming: The Complete Man, by Nicholas Shakespeare, takes a broader look. A Los Angeles Times review of this book claimed that if all you know about Fleming was Bond you missed most of the story.

Fleming was the son of a dour merchant banker, a Tory member of parliament who fell in the Great War, his obit famously crafted by a young journalist named Winston Churchill. Like Churchill, young Fleming was a disappointment in school, wound up at Sandhurst military, and found his way into journalism.  By his early 4os he had been war correspondent, book collector, stock broker, merchant banker, and skillful World War II navel intelligence operative.  He must have drawn on these experiences for his novels, but was spurred on in this project to distract himself from anxiety at surrendering bachelorhood at 43, the formidable socialite Ann Rothermere.

In that insular world of upper class Britain, Noel Coward would provide cover for the trysts between Ann and Ian, before Lord Rothermere divorced her, after which she and Ian promptly tied the knot. The couple were devoted Tory reactionaries. As Prime Minister Antony Eden’s health declined, amid the 1956 Suez Crisis that confirmed the end of Britain as a superpower, Eden holed up at Goldeneye, a guest of the Flemings. Politics aside, Ann scoffed to friends that Eden was a nervous bore, whose idea of fun was reading aloud with friends the female parts of Shakespeare’s plays.

Enter Hugh Gaitskell. Ann and Ian both quickly took mistresses. Ann would argue that the Bond project was his mistress. Gaitskell was the Labour Party leader in the Eden-Bond era, a prime minister in waiting, pulling Labour to the center decades before Blair or Starmer. The plain looking academic, son of a civil servant, had a dry public persona, and rose on the strength of his intellect.

Gaitskell was also a party animal. A fan of Jazz and Nat King Cole, Gaitskell often danced til dawn. His relationship with Ann was reputed to have an S&M component, and she once conveyed wearily to Lord Beaverbrook “I suppose I shall have to go dancing next Friday with Hugh Gaitskell, to explore his pathetic belief in equality.” On one occasion Gaitskell encountered musicians on the street, invited them to play jazz on the staircase. Ian dragged in later, flipped some money to the band, and retired upstairs, leaning the happy couple down. Now that’s bipartisanship.

Gaitskell, without irony, would praise Fleming’s Bond. “The combination of sex, violence, alcohol and —at intervals— good food and nice cloths is, to one who leads such a circumscribed life as I do, irresistible.”

There was a 007 component to Gaitskell’s departure. Early in 1963, Gaitskell returned from the Soviet Union, where he met Khrushchev, and laid low by a mysterious virus that killed him. Russia’s reputed resort to poisoning pesky pols fuels conspiracy theories about this to this day. The following June, the talented Tory Defense Minister John Profumo had to resign, after disclosures he’d shared a mistress with a Commie spy. Profumo didn’t go on Oprah and weep on the nation’s shoulder. He left public life, and did quiet charity work for 45 years. Shortly before Dallas, German spy Ellen Romesch, an alleged presidential mistress, was ushered out of the country quietly. This was back when the DC press corps knew all the juicy secrets and didn’t tell anyone. JFK and CIA founding father Allen Dulles were Bond fans.

For all the talk of Fleming’s creation being drawn from experience, he insisted early on that his books were like Seinfeld episodes. No hugs. No messages. “I have no messages… I was bullied at school and lost my virginity like so many of us use to in the old days. I have never been tempted to foist these or other harrowing experiences on the public. My opuscula do not aim to change people or make them go out and do something. They are not designed to find favor with the Comintern. They are written for warm blooded heterosexuals in railway cars, airplanes or beds.”

Fleming sought the blandest name he could find for his hero. James Bond was the name of a bird watcher, whose coffee table book was laying around at his Jamaica retreat. The books did poorly, and were reviewed uncharitably early on. The stuffy historian Paul Johnson wrote in 1958 — “This is the nastiest book I have ever read.  There are three ingredients in Dr. No, all unhealthy and thoroughly English: the sadism of a schoolboy bully, the mechanical two dimensional sex longings of a frustrated adolescent, and the crude snob cravings of a suburban adult… Fleming has no literary skill …This seems far more dangerous than straight pornography.”

(Fleming defended such things as the genital canning in Casino Royale as the kind of thing that happened to intelligence agents in WW2).

Others took aim at the repeated formula of card games, kidnappings, love scenes, chases, etc. First he goes to HQ to establish background and institutional ties. Then he travels to some exotic place. A bit of local color. Then he meets the villain. Then he undergoes physical and psychological stress. Then he destroys the villain.

Fleming cried all the way to the bank. It’s a different world now.  Different Bond. A pity. For myself, I am a fundamentalist. A literal reader of Fleming. Stirred but not shaken in my allegiance.

* Jethro Maddox is touchy about inquiries into his background. He gained modest fame as a Georgia bible college educated preacher, crusading against country music line dancing. He is believed to own a home in his native Australia. His column — “Shut Up, you Son’s of Bitches, This is Jethro Talkin” — will appear in the GSO spasmodically.