From Jamaica with Love: how Ian Fleming’s Caribbean love affair brought Bond back to the island
In No Time To Die, James Bond is jerked out of retirement by old friend and CIA agent Felix Leiter, who drags him back into the world gun battles, quippy right-hand 00s, and a sinister DNA-altering plot to take over the world. But before that, for a few brief moments, he’s allowed to enjoy the quiet life on the placid beachfront of Jamaica.
In a sense, Bond’s gone home. The first 007 film, 1961’s Dr No, was largely set on the Caribbean island – you can’t get much more 007 than Ursula Andress emerging from the Caribbean sea in
that bikini – and it set the tone for six decades of films in which place has proved as fundamental as plot or character.
How many times since that very first outing has Bond stood on a pristine white beach, gazing out at a powerade-blue sea? How many times has he cut through the breakers on a roaring speed boat or elegant superyacht? How often has he donned a pair of aviators and stalked a gun-toting villain through the bustling streets of a sweltering tropical town?
Spiritual home or not, it is unlikely that 007 would have found himself back in the Caribbean after an interval of more than half a century were it not for the remarkable society heiress who inspired Noel Coward and stole Ian Fleming’s heart – and her son, the man who is credited with bringing reggae to the western world.
Jamaica itself meant something to Fleming. He was first sent there by Naval Intelligence during the Second World War, to investigate Nazi U-boat activity and instantly lost his heart to the island. In 1946 he made it his adopted home by purchasing a 15-acre former donkey racetrack on Oracabessa Bay, on the island’s northern coastline. There, he built a house of his own design on the cliff top overlooking a private beach. He called it Goldeneye (in honour, he claimed, of Operation Goldeneye, a Second World War contingency plan that he’d personally developed in case of a Nazi invasion of Gibraltar). The same year, he joined the Sunday Times and negotiated a contract which allowed him to spend three months of the year in Jamaica.
In his 1963 short story, Octopussy, Fleming describes the appeal of this “paradise of sunshine, good food, cheap drink, a glorious haven from the gloom... of postwar England.” It was at Goldeneye that he began his first Bond novel, Casino Royale, and subsequently wrote the other 13. Jamaica is more than a film setting – it is, indisputably, the birthplace of Bond.
Now, he’s coming in from the cold. No Time To Die is the first Bond since Dr No to be filmed and set in Jamaica (the island was used as a stand-in for the fictional San Monique in Live and Let Die). It’s a neat piece of symmetry for Bond to return to his Caribbean roots in the franchise’s 25th film. But there’s more to the homecoming than serendipity. One remarkable family links Sean Connery’s Kingston escapades to Daniel Craig’s inevitable beachfront brawling, and ties Fleming himself indelibly to his island paradise.
During his three-month annual stints at Goldeneye, Fleming’s parties became notorious for their glitzy guest lists. Hollywood heartthrob Errol Flynn – who, according to local legend, discovered Jamaica when he accidentally ran his yacht aground on its shoreline – Lucian Freud, Truman Capote, the Duchess of Devonshire, and Princess Margaret are among those who flitted between Fleming’s house, Noel Coward’s nearby estate, Firefly, and Bolt House, home to a woman called Blanche Blackwell.
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Entire article:
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/jamaica-love-ian-fleming-caribbean-085846213.html
