Kid Gloves (6 page)

‘I tried to be friendly with everybody,' he says,
‘but it is not the same thing as being a friend of anybody's … It is impossible to say one
is an enemy. I think one is therefore presumably a friend.'

Mars-Jones QC presses the point: ‘… there
was no degree of friendship between you and Vassall at any time?' ‘If friendship implies
affection, no. I do not know what friendship means, you see, it is such a wide word.'

He claimed to see no difference between
Dear
Vassall
and
My dear Vassall
as forms of address in correspondence. (How glad he
must have been not have written
Dear John
or
My Dear John
, leaving the smoking
gun of a Christian name in Vassall's possession.) Under pressure from Mars-Jones QC he says, ‘I
am therefore going to eliminate the word “my” from my vocabulary.' Any impossibility of
retrieving Dad's tone applies equally to Galbraith. The last sentence could be delivered with an
attempt at dismissive lightness or with real exasperation.

It was being formally established at a public
hearing that
Beaverbrook's papers had printed only responsible innuendo, a
nod and a wink in the public interest. From the transcript I get an impression of chilly
sparring, a needling cross-examination with an undertone of disrespect.

At some point Galbraith complains about there
being no mention in the newspaper coverage of visits paid to Vassall's Dolphin Square flat of
his wife being present. Mars-Jones QC suggests that if he wanted the fact mentioned he should
have brought it up himself. Galbraith maintains that it was up to the journalists to ask him. He
wasn't obliged to volunteer the information. This seems rather contorted logic, and Mars-Jones
QC points out that journalists asking such a question would seem to be making an indelicate
suggestion (never mind that the whole coverage in the press had been suggestively
indelicate).

At one point in the cross-examination Mars-Jones
QC says, ‘But you still have not answered my question. I have asked it twice.' ‘Perhaps you will
be third time lucky.' ‘I will try.' After another bit of skirmishing Dad says, ‘That is not an
answer to my question, Mr Galbraith, but I am not going to ask it again.' This seems more or
less rude, in that more deferent era, when speaking to a government minister not charged with
any offence.

Mars-Jones QC argues that the edition of the
Express
that circulated in Galbraith's Glasgow constituency omitted material printed
in the first edition that he later objected to, so that there could be no question of the paper
conducting any sort of campaign against him. A major part of Galbraith's objection attached to
the headline, and Dad points out that sub-editors make those decisions. He replies, ‘I am really
very ignorant on the make-up of newspaper work. So far as I can see, everybody is able to
shuffle off his responsibility to somebody else.'

Dad begins to treat him like a child. ‘Is that a
fair answer to
give, when you do not know anything about it?' ‘No, I said
that is what it appeared to me, but I do not know.' The slight slippage of grammar in this
answer may indicate flusterment.

Dad continues to strike the infantilizing note.
‘But you do not know who is responsible for the format of the front page or for the headlines?'

‘No.'

‘Do you know why headlines are prepared? Do you
know what the function of a headline is?' Dad could hardly go further in this line of calculated
humiliation if he told Galbraith to stand up straight or to take the chewing-gum out of his
mouth.

A little later, seeming to take advantage of his
psychological ascendancy, Dad asks, ‘And the answer to my question is a simple “No”, is it not?'

‘Will you repeat your question?' Not an
unreasonable request in the circumstances, since there has been a fair amount of intervening
by-play. Dad is almost toying with him by this time, saying, ‘No. I am sorry, Mr Galbraith, but
I will not,' before returning to a crucial point.
‘
Do you now
agree that
reasonable persons of goodwill might quite properly take the
view that the
relationship between you and Mr Vassall was one which was too familiar between a minister and a
junior civil servant?
' ‘
I certainly do not.
'

This exchange by itself may have earned Dad his
fee, with Galbraith showing the soft white underbelly of any future libel case, and Mars-Jones
QC refraining for the moment from sinking forensic teeth into it.

Galbraith sometimes made some odd choices in his
correspondence – something in which the tribunal took a keen interest, in fact, since he had
sent John Vassall a chatty postcard while on a family holiday in Belgium. But it seems safe to
assume he sent no Christmas card that year to W. L. Mars-Jones QC.

Kevin McClory, though, kept
in touch with Dad. They were on good terms, as was only right if McClory had benefited in a
strong material way from Dad's taking the case. If I don't remember Dad going to a preview of
Never Say Never Again
when it was released in 1983, it doesn't mean he didn't go.
Kevin McClory was executive producer, and Sean Connery returned to the role of James Bond after
twelve years. Film critics found it disappointing that the film was so clearly a new version of
Thunderball
, not realizing that it couldn't be a fresh story without exceeding the
rights McClory had won in 1963 and rendering him liable to be sued in his turn.

When my first book was published McClory passed
on an invitation through Dad for me to spend some time with him in the Bahamas and to write the
real story of the
Thunderball
affair. I wasn't really tempted. There might be a wetsuit
waiting with my name on it, but there might also be a harpoon-gun whose bolt had the same
inscription. ‘The real story' I was supposed to tell wouldn't be an independent account but
Kevin McClory's version. Mars-Jones
père
had helped bring him prosperity, and now
Mars-Jones
fils
would add a little polish to his reputation. McClory wasn't known for
being open-handed – perhaps the idea was to pay me in daiquiris and sun cream.

Ian Fleming was in poor health during the court
case and died the next year, but the
Thunderball
affair rolled on. Jonathan Cape,
publishers of the novel, and having every reason to know that Kevin McClory watched fiercely
over his interests, brought out a biography of Fleming by John Pearson. McClory wasn't satisfied
with the account it gave of the legal action and its findings, so once again the lawyers were
whipped out of their kennels and sent across the fields baying for redress.

Pearson's tone had been misleadingly breezy:

As [Fleming] sat in court
day after day, swallowing the nitroglycerine pills prescribed to prevent another heart attack
and listening to all those old arguments again, he must have told himself how unnecessary it
all was, how easily it could all have been avoided. A little thoughtlessness, a great deal of
impatience, a lifetime's habit of taking too much on trust – they were all to blame.

Again McClory won the point, so that the first
edition of Pearson's book had to have a statement from the publisher bound in (with the promise
that the alterations would be included in subsequent editions and reprints), setting the record
straight and apologizing for inaccuracy. ‘Since these pages were written,' went the statement
from Jonathan Cape,

certain facts have come to the notice of
ourselves and the author which enable us to amplify passages in Chapters 24 and 25 which,
whilst published by us in good faith, do not fully reflect the events leading to the High Court
action in which Ian Fleming was concerned …

If you have an aversion, as I do, to the prissy
form ‘whilst', feeling that it carries a note of insincerity wherever it goes, then the word
will seem perfectly at home in a passage of forced apology.

After two such successes, it was always likely
that Kevin McClory would overreach himself. In the 1990s he proposed a second remake of
Thunderball
, to be called
Warhead 2000
A.D.
and possibly starring the Bond
du jour
Timothy Dalton. He then joined forces with
Sony with plans to open up a whole rival franchise, having at this late date decided that he had
been shortchanged by what had been thought in 1963 a highly advantageous settlement. Now he put
in a claim for a proportion of
the total profit from the whole roster of
Bond films, on the basis that the work he had done on that early script had provided a template
for the entire catalogue. He didn't get his way in court this time. It seems pretty clear that
his ownership of rights to the one film was easier to establish than any claim to the whole
series. If he had scaled down his demands, instead of trying to go nuclear, he might have got
his way with
Warhead 2000
A.D.

Kevin McClory died in 2006, to muted mourning,
but the disputes didn't die with him. In 2007 there appeared a book called
The Battle for
Bond
by Robert Sellers, not from Cape but from Tomahawk Press, which reproduced court
documents from the
Thunderball
trial. This time it was the Fleming forces on the
attack, with the Ian Fleming Will Trust contesting that these documents were not a matter of
public record and therefore an infringement of copyright. Tomahawk's position was that the
documents were indeed public – but a small publisher must think twice before taking on a rich
estate. Unsold copies of the first edition were surrendered, presumably to be pulped, and the
second edition, though bearing the traditional defiant slogan ‘The Book They Tried to Ban',
leaves out the disputed material.

In compensation it has a foreword by Len
Deighton, who felt confident that he knew Fleming well enough to speak in his name in opposition
to the Fleming Will Trust. He writes: ‘How Ian Fleming would have hated to know that this book
had been censored … As a gentleman he would have felt that harassing a fellow author to be
the ultimate demonstration of bad taste.' I don't know much about cricket but I can recognize a
sticky wicket when it swallows the batsman whole. Fleming's gentlemanliness has to be assessed
as part-time, and when he was off the clock he wasn't above appropriating another writer's work
and passing it off as his. If Ian Fleming's gentlemanliness
had been
uninterrupted, there could have been no book for him to rise up in hypothetical righteousness to
defend.

The dispute over
Thunderball
, with
lawsuits erupting over so many years, resembles a small volcano in its alternation of activity
and periods of dormancy, or perhaps a cold sore brewing up every few years a fresh batch of
litigant virus. Dad stuck around for one cycle of infection and then moved on.

Perhaps even now the dispute isn't dead and
buried but merely dozing. I imagine the McClory Estate and the Ian Fleming Will Trust as the
last organisms to survive on a ravaged and blistered planet, periodically serving writs on each
other.

The instructing solicitor in the 1963 case, Peter
Carter-Ruck, attributed the successful outcome of the case to Dad's performance, though it was
also clearly important (and perhaps not expected by the other side) that Kevin McClory stood
firm in the witness box. There were complications, with two plaintiffs initiating the
proceedings (though McClory's business partner, Jack Whittingham, withdrew, in poor health and
worried about the financial risk involved) and two defendants throughout, Fleming and Ivar
Bryce, which makes it harder to separate out individual motives from the swirl of courtroom
manoeuvres.

Apart from Whittingham the three principals were
well funded. McClory had recently married an heiress, Fleming's earnings from the Bond books
were colossal and Bryce was not only a rich man but had married an heiress of his own. According
to
The Battle for Bond
it was Bryce who decided to settle the case, but logically it
was Fleming who was vulnerable. It would be a huge blow to his standing if he was found by the
court to have plagiarized McClory's screenplay, and it was strongly in his interest to accept
any terms before such a judgment was given.

The settlement allowed him to
say, after the hearing, ‘I am glad that the whole expensive misunderstanding has now been
disposed of', though this was just the sort of blurring of the issue which got Jonathan Cape and
John Pearson into trouble with the Fleming biography three years later.

There were those who said that Bill Mars-Jones
loved the sound of his own voice (this group occasionally included members of his immediate
family), that he talked for the pleasure of hearing himself speak. On this occasion his vocal
performance was close to heroic. His laying out of the case against Ian Fleming lasted
twenty-eight hours and eight minutes. As court time is measured out, Dad spoke for more than a
week.

A full performance of
Der Ring Des
Nibelungen
lasts fifteen hours, just over half the length of Dad's opening speech in the
Thunderball
case, and even Wagnerian roles aren't continuous. It's true that Dad
didn't need to hit specific notes, but he will have needed to pay attention to vocal variety.
Vital to avoid the sing-song intonations which can tug a judge's eyelids downward in the long
watches of the afternoon.

What was the point of so extended an opening? It
can be a way of dramatizing confidence, indicating the wealth of evidence on offer, by saying in
effect: ‘My client's case is not made of straw, My Lord, nor of sticks, nor even of stoutly
bonded bricks, bricks so well laid and soundly mortared that no huffing and puffing on the part
of Mr Fleming's advocates (my learned friends) could make the slightest impression on its
solidity of structure, but of concrete. Reinforced concrete.' Putting pressure, hour by endless
hour, on the defendant. This sounds like overkill, but Dad was well known for the obsessiveness
of his preparation, insisting on seeing every piece of paperwork rather than relying on someone
else's selection of what was important. I wonder if he hadn't been scarred by an early case,
caught out when he hadn't been quite so meticulous
and getting a nasty
surprise in court. In any case the combination of flair and attention to detail amounts to a
formidable armoury for a courtroom lawyer.