For Your Eyes Only (14 page)

Bond's style is an exaggeration of all the elements that Fleming believed made up the essence of English
savoir-vivre
,
with a lot of contemporary consumer goods and designer products thrown in for added glamour. In some respects – most notably food – Bond is far more of a connoisseur than Fleming himself was, but once again he knew instinctively that readers demanded detail. It is not enough to know that Bond wears an expensive watch; we need to know it is a Rolex Oyster Perpetual (although, as Fleming told a reader, he ‘has trained himself to tell the time by the sun in either hemisphere within a few minutes'). He does not smoke any old thing (except when abroad), but keeps his Morland cigarettes in a gun-metal case and lights them with a Ronson. He does not simply eat, he eats magnificently and in exquisite detail. Bond's grooming is precise almost to the point of prissiness. His hair is washed in Pinaud Elixir (‘that prince among shampoos', he insists, camply), he washes his body with Fleur des Alpes soap by Guerlain, and shaves with a Hoffritz razor. Bond, in short, is a highly perfumed fashion icon, with a licence to smell lovely. ‘My books are spattered with branded products of one sort or another,' Fleming remarked nonchalantly, but these designer goods are as vital to the man as his machines, his guns or his women.

Bond is a foodie; indeed, he may be the first action-foodie-hero in the thriller genre. Fleming's suggestion that Bond, when not on assignment, often dines simply (grilled sole,
oeufs en cocotte
and the like) stands in sharp contrast to his gastronomic behaviour throughout the series. In
Casino Royale
, Bond declares from the outset: ‘I take a ridiculous pleasure in what I eat and drink.' He puts this gourmandising down to being a single man who must often eat alone. Bond's first blow-out, consumed with Vesper Lynd, is worth examining in some detail, for it says much about his tastes (and Fleming's literary intentions). They eat caviar and toast (lots of toast), followed by rare steak tournedos with Béarnaise sauce (so we know what is coming, bed-wise) and artichoke hearts; then Vesper has strawberries and cream, while Bond eats an avocado pear with French dressing. To drink, they have a bottle of the Taittinger Blanc de Brut 1943 – ‘probably the finest champagne in the world', Bond muses, and then grins ‘at the touch of pretension in the word'.

A touch? To modern ears, this may not sound like a particularly sumptuous meal, but to postwar readers it was almost impossibly recherché and luxurious: a rare, tiny steak when meat itself was rare, usually rubbery and often semi-cremated; an avocado pear was a singularly exotic delicacy – so uncommon, in fact, that Bond seems to think it is a pudding. Champagne is already glamorous enough: the ability not only to spot the difference between one champagne and another, but to declare one to be supreme, that would have been, for Fleming's readers, the mark of true connoisseurship. Pretentious? That was the point: here was a banquet of such immense refinement and expense that readers would be left salivating.

The same is true of many Bond meals. He eats yoghurt in Turkey, but not the low-fat variety; his is ‘deep yellow with the consistency of thick cream', and some fresh figs, peeled and ‘bursting with ripeness'. This, of course, was in the days before fresh yoghurt could be found in every supermarket in the world. In France, Tilly Masterton is told to buy Bond's lunch: ‘Six inches of Lyon sausage, a loaf of bread, and half a litre of Mâcon with the cork pulled.' A bottle of wine with the cork still in it would be merely frustrating, but the precision is the point. Drawing on Fleming's worldwide travels, Bond scoffs every possible gourmet item: lobster in Japan, a doner kebab (then almost unheard of in Britain) in Istanbul, stone crabs and pink champagne from silver tankards in
Goldfinger
, turbot
poché, sauce mousseline
, and half a roast partridge from the restaurant opposite the train station in Etaples run by Monsieur Bécaud. For breakfast (his favourite meal, and Fleming's), Bond eats boiled eggs from Maran hens (three and a half minutes each), eaten off Minton china, with toast, Wilkin & Sons Tiptree ‘Little Scarlet' strawberry preserve, Frank Cooper's Oxford Vintage Marmalade, honey from Fortnum & Mason, and coffee from De Bry in New Oxford Street, brewed, of course, in the Chemex. The culinary name-dropping is intense: sole meunière, tartare sauce, eggs Benedict, thousand island dressing. With M, in the fictional Blades Club, Bond eats asparagus with hollandaise sauce; in Scott's he feasts on lamb cutlets
with buttered peas and new potatoes, and a slice of pineapple. To modern, sophisticated palates this is unextraordinary fare, but to contemporaries Bond's meals are bright explosions of high cuisine, specifically designed to tantalise and amaze in a Britain where bananas were considered mouth-wateringly exotic, milk came powdered, and practically everything tasted the same and of very little. In 1948, with control over food supplies even stricter than it had been during the war, the average man was rationed to two ounces of bacon and ham, one and a half ounces of cheese and two ounces of tea each week, and just one egg every five days. The memory of deprivation was still fresh in 1953, and meat rationing would not end until 1954. Bond's diet of asparagus, fresh lamb and pineapple
in a single meal shows
just how far above the average he is.

But here is a small heresy: James Bond might be the ideal comrade in a fight, but in a restaurant he would be sheer hell. Bond would be forever ordering
for
you, offering a little lecture on the wine or champagne, or insisting, as foodies always will, that you cannot eat at the nearest brasserie but must instead trek all the way over to the station in Etaples to try Monsieur Bécaud's divine turbot
poché
. Bond would be the sort to pick a fight with the chef and sommelier. He would forever be on the lookout for Béarnaise sauce. Anyone who insists that food tastes different off Minton china is, in my view, a pain. I am not alone in this. Fleming himself would surely have found
Bond a tiresome dining companion: the writer knew the literary value of exotic and complicated foreign food in fiction, but he was no gourmet in fact. Few writers are better at describing food, but eating was not a subject that interested Fleming greatly.

At one point Fleming notes that Bond, when abroad, prefers ‘the ordinary plain food of the country'. This was certainly true of Fleming, whose eating habits were closer to M's than to Bond's. His own tastes were straight out of the prep school recipe book. Mostly, he liked scrambled eggs, which ‘never let you down', and he did not care much what kind of hen they came from. He insisted that the chef at the Lutèce in New York, then one of the most expensive and exclusive restaurants on the planet, prepare for him scrambled eggs (then strawberries for dessert). Fleming even wrote out his own recipe for scrambled eggs, which offers the artery-clogging suggestion that a meal for four should consist of twelve eggs, six ounces of butter, and additional butter to be stirred in after cooking. However, the food Fleming served at Goldeneye – violent goat curries and the like, prepared by his Jamaican housekeeper Violet – was famously revolting, a far cry from the delicacies served by Somerset Maugham at the Villa Mauresque. Noël Coward wrote that ‘the food was so abominable I used to cross myself before eating it . . . it tasted like armpits. And all the time there was old Ian smacking his lips for more and you are tormented by the
thought of all those exquisite meals in the books.' Regardless of the quality of the food he served and ate, Fleming was by all accounts a delightful dining companion, entertaining, inquisitive and attentive, particularly if you happened to be an attractive woman. Bond to choose the food and wine, and Fleming to eat it with: that would be the ideal dinner.

‘He is basically a hard liquor man,' Fleming said of his fictional creation. ‘He is not a wine snob.' Put rather more basically, Bond will drink anything if it is exclusive and sophisticated, and he does, in sometimes quite astonishing quantities. Indeed, his intake of alcohol is so prodigious on occasion that it is amazing he can still stand, let alone shoot straight or make love. In
Moonraker
, before playing cards with Drax, Bond manages to put away a vodka martini, a carafe of vintage vodka from Riga, a bottle of Dom Pérignon champagne and half a packet of the drug Benzedrine. He does not stop there: this is followed by a large brandy and then another entire bottle of champagne. It is something of a relief to discover that Bond is not immune to hangovers. The next morning he vows: ‘Champagne and Benzedrine! Never again.' Benzedrine is the trade name for racemic amphetamine, a form of artificial stimulant which causes euphoria, heightens the senses and suppresses the appetite. ‘Bennies' were among the first synthetic drugs to be used recreationally, and Benzedrine was used by bomber crews during the Second World War
and later by soldiers in the Vietnam War. The socialite ‘Chips' Channon used to put it in the cocktails he served during the war, to ensure his parties went with a bang.

In the films, Bond's drinking is essentially pared down to three specific drinks: vodka martinis (‘shaken, not stirred'), champagne and whisky on the rocks. In the books, however, his drinking habits are far wider. Bond has a ‘head like a rock', according to M, which is just as well given the alcoholic pounding it gets. In
Goldfinger
we find Bond ‘luxuriating in the peace and heat of the whisky'. At times, he seems to be less luxuriating in alcohol than marinating in it. As in everything else, Fleming is careful to furnish brand names whenever possible and, like the best barmen, he keeps the drinks coming in a steady stream. As the series developed, readers came to expect an ever more extensive drinks menu. In
On Her Majesty's Secret Service
, for example, the eleventh book, Bond downs no less than forty-six drinks, the widest variety in any single book. According to one Bondologist, these include: unspecified quantities of Pouilly-Fuissé white wine, Taittinger champagne, Mouton Rothschild '53 claret, calvados, Krug champagne, three bourbons with water, four vodka and tonics, two double brandy and ginger ales, two whisky and sodas, three double vodka martinis, two double bourbons on the rocks, at least one glass of neat whisky, a flask of Enzian schnapps, Marsala wine, the better part of a bottle of fiery Algerian wine (served by M), two more Scotch
whiskies, half a pint of I. W. Harper bourbon, a Jack Daniel's Tennessee whisky with water, on the rocks, a bottle of Riquewihr wine, four steins of Franziskaner beer, and a double Steinhäger gin. The same indefatigable researcher has found that although vodka martini has now become Bond's signature drink, he only drinks nineteen of them in the books, compared to thirty-seven bourbons, twenty-one Scotches and a remarkable thirty-five sakes (entirely the result of his massive consumption of that particular drink in
You Only Live Twice
).

In the first book of the series, Bond specifies that his martini must be shaken: ‘shaken, not stirred' has since become perhaps the most immediately familiar catchphrase of them all, a required element in every Bond film (except when it is deliberately omitted or parodied). Martini drinkers have long debated whether a vodka martini is better shaken or stirred (and even whether a vodka martini is really a martini at all); the theory appears to be that, if shaken, the martini gets colder than if it is simply stirred. That fits in with Bond's requirements: ‘I never have more than one drink before dinner. But I do like that one to be large and very strong and very cold, and very well made.' In fiction, Bond's insistence on shaking over stirring is yet another example (along with food, wine, and women) of how 007 is discriminating, sophisticated and has extensive insider-knowledge of the drinks cupboard.

In common with his gastronomic explorations, Bond
tends to drink the alcohol native to the country he is in: raki in Turkey, sake in Japan, bourbon in Kentucky. Vesper Lynd is the heaviest drinker among Bond's lovers, drinking twice as much as any other ‘Bond Girl'. But the villains drink practically nothing, except Drax, who has just four drinks in
Moonraker
while Bond polishes off eighteen. This is not as curious as it seems. Today we associate heavy drinking with a lack of self-control. No latter-day hero could be seen to stick away the tidal wave of booze consumed by Bond, and his drinking has steadily tailed off in the movies in line with modern mores. But to Fleming, clubbable and convivial, drinking meant relaxation, ritual and reliability. A teetotaller was not quite a man to be trusted.

Fleming's own drinking was less varied than Bond's, but just as voluminous, and far more damaging. He made no claim to wine connoisseurship (for the oenophile details he consulted experts, as usual). In Moscow, as a young journalist, he picked up a taste for vodka, but gin and dry vermouth was his habitual tipple. He even wrote an article for visiting Americans, offering guidance on how to order a decent martini in an English pub. During the war, he was steadily putting away a bottle of gin a day. When his doctor warned him this was doing him no good, Fleming switched to bourbon, favouring a brand called Old Grandad. When writing, he would not drink at lunchtime but started at sundown, with a long succession of martinis, whiskies
or bourbons. He would pause during dinner, and then resume thereafter. Fleming came from a hard-drinking generation, and there is no known incident of his embarrassing himself or behaving drunkenly. The heavy drinking and relentless smoking doubtless shortened his life, but that was his choice, and his lifestyle, and at least some of that rubbed off on his creation. To censure Fleming and Bond for their unhealthy lifestyles is, of course, ludicrous. Fleming certainly did not censure himself, and nor did he feel any need to modify his intake: ‘I will not waste my life trying to prolong it,' he once declared. Given his habits of consumption, Bond ought to have been a halitotic, wheezing, impotent, bronchial, leathery and obese poster boy for the perils of drink and tobacco; but he is not, and that is perhaps part of the Bond miracle.