John Pearson - James Bond - The Authorised Biography

John Pearson first met Ian Fleming back in 1954 when he was a young journalist, and Fleming, whose career as creator of Agent 007 had barely started, offered him a job as his assistant on the Sunday Times Atticus column. Pearson got to know Fleming well, and after his death in 1964, was commissioned to write what would become his highly successful ‘Authorised Biography of Ian Fleming’.

While researching this book, Pearson was struck by the way the character and life of James Bond overlapped with that of his creator, which gave him the idea of writing what become the parallel ‘Authorised Biography’ of 007. Since then Pearson has written many successful biographies, including that of the Kray Twins, the Dukes of Devonshire, the Getty family and the Clermont Club and Lord Lucan.

He and his wife, Lynette, live in a small book-filled house near Brighton.

ILIKE TO think that the plane was Urquhart's idea of a joke. He was the only one of them to have a sense of humour (he must have found it inconvenient at times in that grey morgue of a building up by Regent's Park where they all still work) and since he booked my tickets when he made arrangements for my trip he would have known about the plane. It left Kennedy at 4 p.m. for Bermuda. What Urquhart failed to tell me was that it was a honeymooners' special, crammed with newly-weds on packaged honeymoons in the sun.

There is something curiously unsettling about mating young Americans en masse . I had already had a two-hour wait at Kennedy from London, this on an icy January Saturday with the authentic New York sleet gusting against the windows of the transit lounge. Now for a further three hours I had to share this nuptial flight on mercifully false pretences. The roses, the Californian champagne were not for me.

‘Welcome aboard – this is the sunshine special, folks. For all of you just setting out together on life's greatest adventure, the congratulations of your captain, crew and Pan Am, the world's most experienced airline.’

Polite laughter. Some cheery fellow clapped. And in my lonely gangway seat I started worrying about my adventure.

Where did old Urquhart's sense of humour stop?

Between me and the window sat a nice young couple, suitably absorbed in one another. She was in pink, he in dark grey. Neither of them spoke. Their silence was disturbing, almost as if in disapproval of my so-called mission.

Dinner was served – a four-course plastic airline meal, a triumph of space-age packaging – and, as I munched my Chicken Maryland, crunched on my lonely Krispee Krackers, my angst became acute. Strangely enough, until this moment I had not bothered over my arrival in Bermuda. Urquhart had said I would be taken care of. ‘It's all laid on. Everything's arranged, and, from what I gather, they do one rather well.’ In London, words like these had sounded reassuring. One nodded and said ‘quite’. Now one began to wonder.

I had a drink, and then another and, as the big, warm aircraft thundered its way towards the tropics, tried going over in my mind the succession of events that had brought me there.

They had begun almost two years ago, after I published my ‘official’ life of Ian Fleming. It was an unusual book in the sheer spate of correspondence I received – from ballistic-minded Japanese, French teenage Bondphiles, crime-crazy Swedes and postgraduate Americans writing their theses on the modern thriller. I did my best to answer them. But there was just one letter which I had found it difficult to deal with. It was from Vienna from a woman signing herself Maria Kunzler.

It was a long, slightly gushing letter written in purple ink and it described a prewar winter spent in the ski-resort of Kitzbuhel with Ian Fleming. In my book I had dismissed this period of Fleming's life somewhat briefly. Fleming had been to Kitzbuhel several times, first in the 1920s when he stayed there with some people called Forbes-Dennis. (Mrs Forbes-Dennis was, incidentally, the novelist, Phyllis Bottome.) Theoretically Fleming had been learning German, though in practice he had spent most of his time enjoying the mountains and the local girls. From the letter it seemed as if Miss Kunzler had been one of them. Certainly her information about Fleming seemed authentic and she described certain friends from Kitzbuhel I had interviewed for my book. This made a paragraph towards the end of her letter all the more baffling.

‘So you can understand,’ she wrote, ‘the excitement we all felt when the good-looking young James Bond appeared at Kitzbuhel. He had been in Ian's house at Eton, although of course he was much younger than Ian. Even in those days, James was engaged in some sort of undercover work, and Ian, who liked ragging people, used to make fun of him and tried getting information out of him. James would get very cross.’

When I read this I decided, not unnaturally, that Miss Kunzler was slightly mad – or, if not mad, then in that happy state where she could muddle fact and fiction. I thanked her for her letter, and merely wrote that her anecdote about James Bond had caused me some surprise.

Here I should make it plain that when I wrote the Life of Ian Fleming , I never doubted for a moment that James Bond was Ian Fleming, a Mitty-figure Fleming had constructed from his daydreams and his childhood memories. I had known Fleming personally for several years – the very years in fact when he was writing the early James Bond books – and I had picked out countless resemblances between the James Bond of the books and the Ian Fleming I worked with on the Sunday Times . Fleming had even endowed his hero with certain of his own very personal trademarks – the clothes, the eating habits, even the appearance – so much so that whenever I pictured James Bond it was always Fleming's face (and not Sean Connery's) I saw.

True, there had been certain facts which failed to tally with the Bond-is-Fleming thesis. Fleming, for one, denied it – strongly. In a way he had to, but it is a fact that the more methodically you read the Bond books, the more you start to notice details which refer to James Bond's life outside the books – details about his family, glimpses of his life at school and tantalizing references to his early secret-service career and love-life. Over the thirteen James Bond books the sheer weight of all these ‘outside’ references is surprising, especially as they seem to be remarkably consistent. It was this that originally gave rise to rumours that Fleming, whilst including something of himself in James Bond's character, had based his hero on a real-life agent he had encountered during his time with British Naval Intelligence in the war.

One theory was that the ‘real’ James Bond had been a captain of the Royal Marine Commandos whose deeds and personality inspired Fleming. Another held that Fleming had carefully studied the career of the British double agent, James Morton, whose body was discovered in Shepheard's Hotel in Cairo in 1962. There were other rumours too. None of them seemed to hold much water, certainly not enough to make me change my mind about the Fleming-Bond relationship. Then the second letter came from the mysterious Miss Kunzler in Vienna.

It arrived some three months after I had written to her, apologized for the delay and said that she had not been well. (From what I could work out, she would now have been in her mid-sixties.) It was a much shorter letter than the earlier one. The florid writing was a little shaky, but everything she wrote was to the point. She said that there was not much she could add to her earlier account of young James Bond. That Kitzbuhel holiday had been in 1938, and she had never seen James Bond again, although she was naturally amused at the world-wide success of Ian's books about him. After the way that Ian had behaved it was funny, was it not? She added that Bond had written her several letters after the holiday. She might have them somewhere. When she could summon up the energy she would look for them and let me have them. Also she thought there were some photographs. In the meantime, surely there must be people who had known James Bond at Eton. Why not contact them?