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

 

A Coward Goes West

Noel Coward in the Nevada desert

In 1954, Noel Coward was 19,000 pounds overdrawn, his life insurance pledged against the debt, when the offer came to appear in a place called Las Vegas at $35,000 a week. As the date approached, CBS managed to sweeten things by offering him $450,000 for three television specials.

“All this money, plus Las Vegas, would mean that at last he could have some capital in the bank,” wrote Cole Lesley in his The Life of Noel Coward — money for his old age “…which, as he put it, was due to begin next Tuesday.”

Just before Vegas, crisis — Coward’s accompanist couldn’t get a work permit.

“He interviewed eight people, none of whom were good enough, and then one evening the telephone rang. This time his savior was Marlene (Dietrich), who had been loyally working away on his behalf. She was calling from the airport and her plane for London was already boarding; had he got a pencil, ready, quick, Pete Matz, this is his number, ring him at once and grab him.

“Pete came round next day. He seemed absurdly young, only 26, dark and intelligent, with a great sense of dehydrated humor, and Noel knew in his bones that he was exactly what was needed. When Noel showed him the old arrangements he had been using at the Café, Pete said, not contemptuously but matter-of-factly, ‘You’re not going to use these, are you?’ Noel lied quickly, ‘Of course not, but who can make me new ones in the time?’ Quite calmly Pete said, ‘I will.’

“Noel had no way of knowing as yet how brilliant a musician Pete was. Later we discovered from experience that for instance there was no need for labored conversation at the breakfast table; instead of Agatha Christie, Pete read from a Mozart score propped against the toast rack.”

A Marvelous Party in Jamaica

Noel Coward's statue, sculpted by Angela Connors, still looks out over the Jamaican coast from Firefly.

The playwright, actor, singer and author Noel Coward is buried not in England but at Firefly, the mountaintop oceanfront home he built in Jamaica. It was where Coward had been happiest.

“Running though this year of 1951, and for many years to come, was the happy fact that Ian (Fleming) and Ann, soon to be joined by James Bond, were just along the coast at Goldeneye,” recalled Coward’s friend and aide Cole Lesley in his The Life of Noel Coward.

“Jamaica was booming. It had become ‘the’ place to holiday in the winter — Noel, Ian and Ann and their friends heading the post-war pioneers — and hotels began to spring up all along the North Coast.”

Interior of the spartan Firefly, now open to the public

“Agnes de Mille was among Noel’s troop of fascinating visitors, and we saw a great deal of Roald Dahl, accompanied the following year by the ravishing Patricia Neal, soon to become his wife. Pat taught us to cut off the top quarter of green coconuts, fill the rest of the nut and its soft white flesh with lamb, prawn or chicken curry, seal the top on again with a paste of flour and water and stick the whole thing in the oven for as long as you like. Marvelous for picnics; when the top is removed, even after several hours, the delicious inside has retained its piping heat. We became so mad about this dramatic-looking dish that Noel named it Cocomania.

“Errol Flynn, his lovely young wife Patrice Wymore and his yacht — he called her a schooner — the Zaca, were along the coast in the other direction at Port Antonio. Joycie and (Baron Nicolas) Niki de Gunzburg were staying at Blue Harbour; Niki and Errol were playmates of old and we were all asked over.

“First of all, drinks under striped awnings on the deck of the Zaca, beautiful in the evening light. Then we went ashore to feast on one of the corral beaches of Errol’s own island; the table covered with jade-green banana leaves, decorated with scarlet hibiscus, gleaming with candles and silver and crystal, and a baby suckling-pig slowly roasting over a pit in the sand a few yards away. When an enormous moon came up out of the sea, everything seemed too much: it was piling Pelléas on Mélisande, Noel said (referring to Debussy’s five-act opera).”

“Joyce and I had not met Errol before and I don’t know what we had expected, but all four of us agreed on the way home that, in spite of all we had read, he was one of the most charming, kind and courteous hosts we had ever known. If only he had lived longer; the kind, civilized man is revealed in parts of the autobiography, but he was no longer with us to receive the praise.

“All this gaiety notwithstanding, Noel worked away every morning like a beaver. He wrote the verses which make the links between the songs on the album of Conversation Piece and flew up to New York for a few days to record them. Lily Pons sang Melanie’s songs and arias, and the part of the young leading man was spoken by Richard Burton.

“Even as long ago as 1951, $200 was a pittance to Richard and he told his agent to refuse it. His telephone rang — Noel was always one for the direct approach — and he heard the firm tone in the well-known voice: ‘You will do it for $200 and like it,’ and Richard did it. Whether he liked it or not I don’t know, but Noel was very fond of Richard, and admired him as an actor from the beginning, and his voice on the record remained for Noel a source of pleasure.”