That Dear Beast Ian Fleming

Ian Fleming and Noel Coward

“Dear Beastie —

“This is just to inform you that I have read ‘Dr. No’ from cover to cover and thoroughly enjoyed every moment. But as the gentleman in ‘Oklahoma!’ sings about Kansas City: ‘You’ve gone about as fur as you ken go.’

“I am willing to accept the centipede, the tarantulas, the land crabs, the giant squid. I am even willing to forgive your reckless use of invented verbs — I inch, Thou inch, He snakes, I snake, We palp, They palp, etc. But what I will neither accept nor forgive is the highly inaccurate statement that when it is 11 a.m. in Jamaica, it is 6 a.m. in dear old England.

“This, dear boy, not to put too fine a point on it, is a fucking lie. When it is 11 a.m. in Jamaica, it is 4 p.m. in dear old England and it is carelessness of this kind that makes my eyes steel slits of blue. I was also slightly shocked by the lascivious announcement that Honeychile’s bottom was like a boy’s! I know that we are all becoming progressively more broadminded nowadays, but really old chap, what could you have been thinking of?

“I am snaking off to New York on Thursday where I shall be for two weeks, and then I inch to Cannes.”

— That was a 1958 letter from author and performer Noel Coward to his friend and Jamaican neighbor Ian Fleming.

Ian Fleming and Noel Coward had an odd but strong friendship. Coward once extricated Fleming from a particularly awkward sexual entanglement, demanding and getting Fleming’s new camera and tripod as payment. Coward scolded Fleming over the bedroom farce, saying, “You, my dear, are just on old cunt teaser.”

The actor and director Roy Marsden, who starred as a British spy in TV’s ‘The Sandbaggers,’ observed, “Coward, of course, fancied Fleming like mad. Coward himself never admitted to being homosexual — he always said there were still one or two widows left in Worthing who didn’t know.”

Biographer Peter Quennell said Coward “…treated Ian as he might have treated a difficult social beauty or a wayward prima donna, and often criticized the extremely unfeeling use to which he put his great attractions.”

The Artistic License Renewed website not that Coward “…was famously offered the part of Dr. No in the eponymous film and remarked, ‘No, no, no!’ Nevertheless, he still enjoyed being around production, naturally taking a shine to Sean Connery.”

For his part, Fleming was one of the few people permitted to talk back to Coward, and at one point told him, “Don’t be a silly old bugger.”

Coward replied, “We don’t talk shop here, dear boy.”

Sean Connery and Noel Coward