Man with the Golden Touch , livre ebook

Copyright
This edition first published in hardcover in the United States in 2010 by
The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
141 Wooster Street
New York, NY 10012
www.overlookpress.com
Copyright © 2008 Sinclair McKay
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
ISBN 978-1-46830-308-7
CONTENTS COPYRIGHT INTRODUCTION CHAPTER ONE AUTHENTICITY CHAPTER TWO YOU’VE HAD YOUR SIX CHAPTER THREE EUROPE BY TRAIN CHAPTER FOUR THE GLITTERING PRIZE CHAPTER FIVE RAINCOATS, WALLS AND BETRAYALS CHAPTER SIX GREAT BALLS OF THUNDER CHAPTER SEVEN SPIES IN OUR EYES CHAPTER EIGHT THIS DREAM IS FOR YOU CHAPTER NINE THE OTHER FELLA CHAPTER TEN A LITTLE MORE CHEEK CHAPTER ELEVEN DARK UNCONFIDENT WORLD CHAPTER TWELVE MAN AT AUSTIN REED CHAPTER THIRTEEN WILL HE BANG? WE SHALL SEE CHAPTER FOURTEEN ENGLAND NEEDS ME CHAPTER FIFTEEN ONCE MORE ROUND THE WORLD CHAPTER SIXTEEN THE SMACK OF FIRM ESPIONAGE CHAPTER SEVENTEEN YOU CAN NEVER SAY NEVER TWICE CHAPTER EIGHTEEN MOST DISARMING CHAPTER NINETEEN MICROCHIPS WITH EVERYTHING CHAPTER TWENTY DARLING MONEYPENNY CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE ONE FOR THE LADIES CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO NIGHT OF THE IGUANA CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE BOND IN ABEYANCE CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR WE KNEW THE NAME, WE KNEW THE NUMBER CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE WE RE IN A PUDDLE ON THE FLOOR CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX ART AND CRAFT CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN BIRTHDAY BOY CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF DREAMS CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE QUANTUM THEORIES CHAPTER THIRTY YOU CAN NEVER KISS DEATH GOODBYE NOTES RELATED READING INDEX
INTRODUCTION
C onsidering that this image is so very famous, so globally iconic, it is surprisingly difficult to describe.
First, the cinema screen is black. But then, accompanied by a sharp stab of music, it begins. The white circles. The sequence of white circles that move horizontally across the centre of the screen, left to right.
Upon reaching the right, one white circle stabilises, grows, begins moving back. At last we see that it is the view down the barrel of a gun, and it now holds the image of a man, walking casually towards the left.
The man, in a suit and a hat, is held in the lens frame. Suddenly, as we reach mid-screen, he turns and shoots straight at us and the screen, from the top, is slowly filled with the descending scarlet of animated blood.
We have all seen this so often that few of us give it a second thought. It is there merely as a trigger for excitement. But this short sequence is our gateway into a gleefully escapist, gaudy realm, where bizarre acts of violence and absurd insouciance and fingernails-scraping-down-a-blackboard lines of sexual innuendo are offered as a simulacrum of the world.
What can those initial white circles mean, what do they signify? For some years, they always somehow reminded me of codes, of Morse, of secret transmissions, of the pre-computer world of getting the cipher message across to your comrades. Now I am not at all sure. When you look again at them, you realise just what an odd image it is.
And that is the thing about the James Bond films as a whole too. If you allow your mind to brush past them casually, these movies are as familiar as anything can possibly be. Not merely the persona of the leading man, as expressed by different actors – insouciant Sean Connery, dense-but-goodhearted George Lazenby, eyebrow-waggling Roger Moore, dour Timothy Dalton, strutting Pierce Brosnan and nervy new boy Daniel Craig; or the actresses who, across the years, have portrayed vixens with names such as Pussy, Kissy, May Day, Jinx, Octopussy, Plenty and Goodnight. But also the plots, the super-villains, the extravagant sets, the cool gadgets, the count-downs, the impossible car chases, the constant threats to the world, the hollering title songs, the very idea that one man from the English secret service – who has official permission to kill people – can save us all from Armageddon.
But then you look a little closer. You give it just a little more thought. You consider that this formula for what, in the golden era of Hollywood, would be regarded as a shoot-’em-up B movie, has now been running almost continuously since 1962, across twenty-two films. And you find yourself slightly staggered by the whole thing.
It is estimated that half the population of planet Earth has seen a James Bond film. Not the same one, obviously, but still. Few other cultural products have had that sort of reach. The Beatles? The Simpsons? Darth Vader? But then, even the Star Wars films ran out of steam towards the end, whereas Bond continually, miraculously, regenerates. It is most assuredly an achievement to give us all a moment’s pause.
Eon Productions is the name of the family-run outfit that has been making these films for the last forty-six years. It was started when seasoned movie producers Harry Saltzman and Albert R. Broccoli saw the cinematic potential of Ian Fleming’s novels and teamed up after Saltzman acquired the rights to all of Fleming’s Bond novels, save one.
Now running the firm is (the late) Broccoli’s daughter Barbara, together with his stepson Michael G. Wilson. Jealously they guard the secrets of future productions and also everything that has gone before. And as well they might because, despite endless changes in culture and taste since 1962, staggering numbers of us can still be relied upon to scoot off to the pictures to see the latest Bond.
We will save the bald figures for later; in any case, when we are dealing in multiples of so many million, the whole thing tends to become a little abstract. For the moment, suffice it to say that the Bond films are far and away the most successful franchise (ugly word, almost as bad as ‘brand’) in cinema history. Star Wars is up there at the top, too, clearly; those six intergalactic epics have made intergalactic sums. Oh, and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, of course, and the Harry Potter sequence too. All have made the box offices resound with record-breaking ‘ker-chings’ that could be heard from outer space. But for plain reasons of longevity and endurance and quantities of people trooping in to auditoriums, Bond seems to roar ahead every time.
One might broadly say that the series reached its peak of global cultural dominance between the years 1964 and 1966 – starting with the phenomenally successful release of Goldfinger and culminating in the even bigger commercial hit Thunderball. Thanks to Bond, between those two years, everything, but everything, was about spies. Everything. On every continent. Even the poor Russians, furious about Bond, were forced to invent a Bulgarian version not merely to counter 007, but also to defeat him in a straight battle in 1968.
And when spies went out of fashion, in the early 1970s, Bond still went on. More than went on. It was in this decade that 007 became more famous as a screen character than as a literary creation. To make up for our declining enthusiasm for espionage, the producers instead threw in elements from blaxploitation films, kung-fu films and, notoriously in the wake of 1977’s madly successful Star Wars, a space station and laser battles in Moonraker. Unlike his depression-prone literary equivalent, screen Bond was – and is – a hale and doughty survivor.
There is something about these films that makes fans of us all. Even the novelist Martin Amis, son of famous 007 enthusiast Kingsley, recalls piling into the cinema with mates as an adolescent and getting wildly overexcited about Dr. No. On the occasion of their 1981 honeymoon, Prince Charles and Princess Diana sailed off on the royal yacht Britannia with a print of For Your Eyes Only, which they apparently watched four times.
Elsewhere, during the fraught 1983 TUC conference, where union leaders were squaring up to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s implacable determination to dismember the nation’s heavy industry, miner’s union leader Arthur Scargill, as high-pitched a leftist as one could find, managed to find time to slip out and nip along to the cinema to see Octopussy. In wildly different circumstances – but with no less enthusiasm – so did the much-demonised US president Ronald Reagan. There are many more examples of Bond’s remarkable capacity to reach across the political and indeed the intellectual spectrum.
These days when we queue up to see the latest Bond, whether in Britain, the USA, Europe or Asia, our expectations remain pleasingly consistent, much as they were when the series began.
None of it is too much to ask for: tuxedos, implausible gadgets, glamorous girls with silly names, slightly naff exotic locations, naffer casinos, weird henchmen, strikingly brassy incidental music and perhaps even – if we are all very good – a monorail system. As we will see, it is the Bond films that somehow fail to satisfy these modest desires that also tend to do less well at the box office.
Ian Fleming’s novels – starting with Casino Royale in 1953 – took a while to build up a head of commercial steam. The films, starting with Dr. No in 1962, were rather quicker off the mark.
Within any family, any circle of friends, any confederacy of colleagues, there will, to this day, be disputes about who was the best Bond, the best Bond girl and the best/worst Bond film of all. About twenty years ago it was held to be the case that Sean Connery represented the unbeatable peak, and Roger Moore the wisecracking low. As with the works of William Shakespeare versus those of Christopher Marlowe, the issue is no longer so clear-cut.
And something similar happens with the films. For decades, the received wisdom was that George Lazenby’s solo outing On Her Majest