The Case of the Painfully Pulled Leg (San Francisco Chronicle, September 16, 1963)
By Ian Fleming
Some Caen. Some Caen’t.
No harm in starting off with a really bad joke. Master, or rather Past-master Caen has several times exercised his lamentable sense of humor at my and James Bond’s expense and I am glad of this opportunity to strike back.
But a valid truism lies behind the execrable pun. To the uninitiated, it looks easy enough to be a columnist. What could be more simple than to sit down at the typewriter and ramble on about the passing scene—the human comedy?
After all, Boswell was no genius. He just wrote down what he saw and what he thought—commonplace stuff. He was no Shakespeare, no Shelley—a competent reporter with ink in his veins.
Ah, but that’s the point! You must have ink in your veins. You really must love writing and communicating in order to sit down and write around 1000 words a day in such a fashion that people will read them. And that is what a daily columnist has to do.
Every day, come hangover, come flu, come lack of inspiration, come ailing wife or bawling children, he must go confidently and with seeming omniscience on stage and show himself to the public in naked black and white.
No excuses! You are a columnist, and by God you’ve got to fill your column to the satisfaction of your readers and, though this may be rare, to your own.
I know these things because I once wrote a column myself. I did it for three years and chucked it about five years ago when James Bond came to my rescue.
I was Foreign Manager of the Sunday Times (the real one. Not yours!) and I thought that its gossip column, which went, and still goes, by the pompous name of “Atticus,” was so bad that I would have a bash at it in between coping with the future of the world and the marital tangles of my foreign correspondents.
I renamed the column “People and Things” by Atticus, because I am interested in Things, and got into business. It went down all right, though I received more kicks than ha’pence from an editor whose sense of humor differed from mine, and the from readers who appeared only interested in writing in when I made a mistake, and to this day I am proud of two paragraphs of undying merit from that long stint.
The first, through a careful study of the psychology of the drinking American, correctly forecast the winning Miss Rheingold for that year (You see how right the editor was. Perhaps .007 per cent of Sunday Times readers had even heard of Rheingold beer).
The second, revealing the existence of a Grimsby troglodyte who smoked kippers as they should be smoked, brought in 4,700 letters (A record for the paper) and incidentally made a fortune for the old man.
Is there a common denominator between my modest achievement and Herb
Caen’s majestic record? What’s all this about Fleming anyway? We want to hear about Herb. Patience! Pazienza! Geduld!
Yes, there is a common denominator. Every columnist, and Herb Caen is a shining example, must be interested in everything, even in those matters which are outside his readers’ ken, and he must communicate his enthusiasms to the reader, and secondly, he must have some vague social purpose—a desire to help and instruct his readers and if possible right an occasional wrong (rescue the kipper merchant for instance).
But above all, whether exposing a peccant mayor or police chief (a favorite sport in the United States, I believe) or just writing about the smog, he must at all costs avoid being a bore.
For half a generation, and from the evidence of this anniversary accolade, Herb Caen, writing for perhaps the most wide-awake community in the United States, somehow has managed, day in, day out, to avoid being a bore. For what it is worth, we have not, in Great Britain, got one journalist with anything like the same record.
And, in conclusion, I will tell you something else which is even more to his credit, and something which may be news to you. Some time ago, amongst my cuttings (clippings), I received a column by Herb Caen which affectionately but devastatingly sent up James Bond, pulling the author’s leg almost out of its socket.
A saboteur in the pay of SMERSH, I surmised, and tucked the author’s name away in my “unfinished business” file.
When next in New York, I asked one of the hamlet’s most famous editors about this fellow Caen.
“He’s one of America’s greatest columnists,” he said. “We’d all like to get him. Trouble is, nothing on earth will drag him away from San Francisco.”
Well, feed your captive well. He’s good for another 25 years at the coal face.
Note: Caen actually spent 34 more years at the coal face. He was one of Fleming’s early American fans and helped popularize the books in his column from January 28, 1962, titled “The Thin Cruel Smile.”
Well, you can imagine how excited I got recently when I read that President Kennedy’s favorite author of secret service thrillers is Britain’s Ian Fleming. In the twinkling of a trice, I felt closer to the lonely young man in the White House—perhaps even a step along the road toward solving the mystery of those hooded, opaque eyes (Mr. Fleming writes like that)…
Mr. Fleming, whose books sell in the millions, is the creator of James Bond, the classiest British secret service agent ever to purr down the pike in a Bentley convertible with two inch exhausts. Bond’s exploits and sexploits are explored (all right, and sexplored!) in a series of adventures with such compelling titles as Moonraker, Goldfinger, Doctor No and From Russia, With Love, to name only a few…
Mr. Fleming is a Mickey Spillane who went to Eton—snobbish, sadistic and inventive, with a fine eye for detail. Hence his James Bond wouldn’t be caught dead in anything so obvious as a trenchcoat; when Bond is caught dying (but soon to make a miraculous recovery), you can be sure he will be wearing something from Savile Row, tastefully old.
After this article, Caen and Fleming met in London. Their lunch was immortalized in Caen’s May 16, 1963 column “Conversation at Scott’s.” Excerpts below:
“Do you know any good villains?” he inquired, flicking an ash off his blue suit (no pocket handkerchief). “Villains are the hardest for me. I was rather fond of Rosa Klebb, but, of course, I had to kill her off. Same with ‘Doctor No.’” I mentioned Blofeld, the evil fellow with the syphilitic nose who almost finishes Bond in his newest book, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, but Mr. Fleming merely shook his head over his lamb chops (pink in the middle).
“I kill off Blofeld in the next book, which I just finished,” he said regretfully. “An excruciating death. And as for Bond, I’ve got him in such a devil of a pickle I don’t know how I’m EVER going to get him out. Poor James.”
In On Her Majesty’s Secret Service the dashing Bond, who averages three affairs and an equal number of killings per book, marries a fine girl named Tracy. As they are starting out on their honeymoon in a white Lancia, the unspeakable Blofeld, in a red Maserati, races past and fires at them. At the end of the book, the Lancia has crashed into a field, “and Bond put his arm around her shoulders, across which the dark patches had begun to flower.”
“I hate to ask this,” I said, mindful of previous miraculous recoveries, “but is Tracy REALLY dead?”
Mr. Fleming poured himself a splash of vin ordinaire from a carafe and nodded sorrowfully. “Of course,” he replied. “Blood oozing out the back—sure sign. Too bad, but I couldn’t keep Bond married, you know. He’s on constant call, has to be too many places, get into too many scrapes. Wouldn’t do at all.”
He glanced at the stainless steel Rolex on his left wrist. “Really must go,” he apologized. “Catching a plane for Istanbul, where they’re filming From Russia, With Love. The first picture made from one of my books—Dr. No—has just been released here. Tremendous success. Made all its costs back right away, and I’m happy to say I have a small piece of the action. Sean Connery will play James Bond again—don’t you think he’s a fine Bond?”
We agreed. We had seen a preview of Dr. No, and Connery seemed almost as good as the real thing. Mr. Fleming struggled into a luminous blue raincoat and led the way out of Scott’s into the gray London afternoon. As we searched for a cab, he pointed to a second-story corner window of the restaurant. “See that window?” he asked. When James is in London he always lunches there, at the corner table. That’s so he can look down and watch the pretty girls walking past.”
Caen later devoted a column to Fleming’s death. In “Farewell to Double Nought Seven” (August 16, 1964), he wrote:
I saw Ian Fleming for the first and last time in London, a little over a year ago. His penultimate book, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, was about to be published and the word was already around that in it, James Bond, the avowed bachelor, had married La Comtesse Teresa di Vicenzo, otherwise known as Tracy. “That’s true,” smiled Fleming over lunch at Scott’s, “but of course I had to kill her off at the end. Nasty death, on their honeymoon. It wouldn’t do at all for James to be married, you understand—a wife would just be in the way. I may have to kill off Bond one of these days, too—before he kills me. Plots are getting harder and harder to come up with.”
…I didn’t realize how closely he identified with Bond till we got around to a discussion of the movie versions of his books (Dr. No, From Russia With Love, and next, Goldfinger). When we agreed that the actor who portrayed M., Bond’s chief, was miscast, I suggested “You should play M.—you’re about the same age, aren’t you?”
Immediately, he looked hurt, and I clammed up. Obviously, he felt he had nothing in common with the aging sea dog who headed the British Secret Service. He gave me a long, cold, ironical look that would have done justice to James Bond.
…Spy critics poked fun at Bond’s modus operandi…They snickered at Fleming’s penchant for ticking off Bond’s clothing, smoking and drinking habits by brand name, never letting him forget that he misspelled Bond’s favorite champagne…Fleming’s patient report to all this criticism was “Don’t they have any sense of fun?”—and, in this gloomy, literal-minded world, Bond was fun, for all his faults…it’s hard to fault a writer who could invent such lovely names as Pussy Galore, Tiffany Case, Sable Basilisk and Emilio Largo. And when James slipped into his faultless evening clothes, patted the .25 Beretta in its chamois holster, filled his gun metal cigarette case with 50 Morlands and got behind the wheel of his Mark II Continental Bentley, with the two-inch pipes bubbling in his wake, we knew we were off to high adventure. For James Bond was licensed to kill. And last week, he killed the man who loved him best—and, in the process, himself. If he were still around, he would have read the news with a cold, ironical smile, creasing the vertical scar in his right cheek.
Caen also wrote about the San Francisco world premiere of A View to a Kill, which he hated:
With the enthusiastic cooperation of the Mayor and the police and fire departments, San Francisco is made to look like a loony-bin in the newest and possibly last James Bond film, A View to a Kill, an awkward movie with an awkward title. As I recall, author Ian Fleming’s original title for the flimsy short story on which this $30-million bombo is shakily based was With a View to a Kill [sic], which scans a little more smoothly. It wasn’t Fleming at his best but the movie it inspired may be James Bondage at its worst.