The James Bond Bedside Companion (24 page)

Bond also has a taste for champagne. When he's not drinking martinis or ice-cold vodka straight up, he almost always orders champagne (especially the pink variety). While dining with M at Blades, the wine waiter suggests Bond try the Dom Perignon '46, to go with the real pre-war Wolfschmidt vodka from Riga. Once Bond has both drinks in front of him, he shocks M with some unusual table practices:

When M pouted him three fingers from the frosted carafe Bond took a pinch of black pepper and dropped it on the surface of the Vodka. The pepper slowly settled to the bottom of the glass leaving a few grains on the surface which Bond dabbed up with the tip of a finger. Then he tossed the cold liquor well to the back of his throat and put his glass, with the dregs of the pepper at the bottom, back on the table.

M gave him a glance of rather ironical inquiry.

"It's a trick the Russians taught me that time you attached me to the Embassy in Moscow," apologized Bond. "There's often quite a lot of fusel oil on the surface of this stuff—at least there used to be when it was badly distilled. Poisonous. In Russia, where you get a lot of bath-tub liquor, it's an understood thing to sprinkle a little pepper in your glass. It takes the fusel oil to the bottom. I got to like the taste and now it's a habit But I shouldn't have insulted the club Wolfschmidt," he added with a grin.

M grunted. "So long as you don't put pepper in Basildon's favourite champagne," he said drily.

(MOONRAKER, Chapter 5)

Bond's traditional drink at Royale-les-Eaux is Taittinger's Blanc de Blancs. Bond consumes a bottle of this one evening before visiting the casino, immediately followed by half a bottle of Mouton Rothschild '53, and a glass of ten-year-old Calvados with three cups of coffee!

Bond also likes bourbon on the rocks. His favorite brands are Old Granddad, Walker's de luxe, Jack Daniels, and I. W. Harper's. When thinking gin, he prefers Gordon's or Beefeater. Other favorite cocktails include an Old-Fashioned or a Negroni (one-third gin, one-third Campari, one-third red Cinzano). He is particular about certain drinks in specific countries. For instance:

James Bond had his first drink of the evening at Fouquet's. It was not a solid drink. One cannot drink seriously in French cafes. Out of doors on a pavement in the sun is no place for vodka or whisky or gin. A
fine
à
l'eau is
fairly serious, but it intoxicates without tasting very good. A
quart de cham
pagne
or a
champagne
à
l'orange
is all right before luncheon, but in the evening one
quart
leads to another
quart,
and a bottle of indifferent champagne is a bad foundation for the night Pemod is possible, but it should be drunk in company, and anyway Bond had never liked the stuff because its licorice taste reminded him of his childhood. No, in cafes you have to drink the least offensive of the musical-comedy drinks that go with them, and Bond always had the same thing, an Americano—bitter Campari, Cinzano, a large slice of lemon peel, and soda. For the soda he always stipulated Perrier, for in his opinion expensive soda water was the cheapest way to improve a poor drink.

("From a View to a Kill," FOR YOUR EYES ONLY)

Bond always orders his
drinks
double. Once, in
THE
MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN, he feels a little guilty ordering his third double (but Mary Goodnight wouldn't know it as a double when it came anyway).

Finally, Bond does not drink tea. He hates it. "It's mud," he says. He believes it is one of the main reasons for the downfall of the British Empire. After he had said this to one of the girls from the canteen at headquarters, the expression "cup of mud" began seeping through the building.

B
ond smokes cigarettes made especially for him by Morlands of Grosvenor Street They are a special blend of Balkan and Turkish mixture, and each cigarette bears three gold bands. Bond keeps his cigarettes in a wide, gunmetal case which holds fifty. He also sports a black, oxidized Ronson lighter. Bond smokes around sixty cigarettes a day. This habit catches up with him in THUNDERBALL—Bond's medical report indicates that these cigarettes have a higher nicotine content than the mass-produced varieties. After his experience at Shrublands health spa, Bond's tobacco intake is reduced to around twenty or twenty-five cigarettes a day.

John Gardner's Bond has arranged for Morlands to create a special cigarette with a tar content slightly lower than any currently available on the market. A year later, Bond quits using the Morlands cigarettes and commissions H. Simmons of Burlington Arcade to create a low-tar cigarette for him. These still retain the distinctive gold bands (along with Simmons' trademark).

Bond basically stays away from other drugs, but he does have a habit of using Benzedrine before a particularly dangerous assignment He takes some of these tablets before his swim through Shark Bay in LIVE AND LET DIE, as well as before swimming to Dr. Shatterhand's Castle of Death in YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE. During the exquisite dinner with M at Blades, Bond is brought an envelope containing the white powder; he discreetly mixes it with his champagne. "Now what?" asks M, with a "trace of impatience."

"Benzedrine," he said. "I rang up my secretary before dinner and asked her to wangle some out of the surgery at Headquarters. It's what I shall need if I'm going to keep my wits about me tonight. It's apt to make one a bit over-confident, but that'll be a help too." He stirred the champagne with a scrap of toast so that the white powder whirled among the bubbles. Then he drank the mixture down with one long swallow. "It doesn't taste," said Bond, "and the champagne is quite excellent."

M. smiled at him indulgently, "It's your funeral," he said
—

 
(MOONRAKER, Chapter 5)

In another instance, Bond uses Benzedrine at the Dreamy Pines Motor Court, before tackling the likes of Horror and Sluggsy. He explains to Vivienne Michel that it will keep him awake. The one thing he doesn't want to happen that particular evening is fall asleep.

In Harlem, Bond and Leiter go to several nightclubs where marijuana is smoked freely. Bond sniffs the stuff and immediately knows what it is. And there's a point in THUNDERBALL when Leiter suggests that a traffic accident could actually have been an attempt on Bond's life. Bond dismisses this by saying, "You've been taking mescaline or something. It's a damned good sequence for a comic strip, but these things don't happen in real life." I doubt whether Bond or Leiter ever experimented with hallucinogens; but it is possible, since both of them have spent time in the Caribbean, where mescaline is plentiful.

James Bond is not a man of many vices; only particular ones.

J
ames Bond lives in a comfortable flat on a square lined with plane trees off the King's Road in Chelsea. His flat is on the ground floor of a converted Regency house, and it is looked after by his elderly Scottish housekeeper, May. Bond's bedroom is "smallish," and is decorated with white and gold Cole wallpaper with deep red curtains. The sitting-room is lined with books, but Bond's reading tastes are never fully explored in the novels. There is an ornate Empire desk at which Bond likes to sit when he is studying
Scarne on Cards
or other such technical manuals. May serves Bond's meals on Minton china, of a dark blue and gold and white; the coffee pot and silver are Queen Anne. There are two telephones—a regular personal phone, and a red one with a direct line to headquarters. The red phone almost always rings at inopportune times. But the flat in Chelsea is within ten minutes driving time to the office.

When Bond is not on an assignment abroad, one wonders what he does with his spare time. One paragraph gives us a small clue:

It was the beginning of a typical routine day for Bond. It was only two or three times a year that an assignment came along requiring his particular abilities. For the rest of the year he had the duties of an easy-going senior civil servant—elastic office hours from around ten to six; lunch, generally in the canteen; evenings spent playing cards in the company of a few close friends, or at Crockford's; or making love, with rather cold passion, to one of three similarly disposed married women; weekends playing golf for high stakes at one of the clubs near London.

(MOONRAKER, Chapter 1)

It's hard to imagine Bond having a "few close friends" because they are never mentioned—Bill Tanner, M's Chief of Staff, is supposedly Bond's best friend at the office.

Bond almost never brings women home to his flat. Only once in the entire series does this happen: Tiffany Case comes to live with Bond in between books, after DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER. John Pearson, in his fictionalized biography of 007, presents these scenes in which Tiffany comes to blows with May; the two women cannot get along in the same flat, and eventually Tiffany becomes disenchanted and leaves. Although the story is fleshed out by Pearson, the incident is only vaguely hinted at in FROM RUSSIA, WITH LOVE.

The Secret Service (M.I.6) is housed on the eighth floor of a tall, grey building near Regent's Park. The Ministry-of-Works, as it was then called, is a "bustling world of girls carrying files, doors opening and shutting, and muted telephone bells." The doors to the offices have no numbers. If a person had business on the eighth floor, one had to be fetched by a secretary and brought to the particular office one was visiting.

Bond shares an office with two other members of the Double-0 section-008 and -011. There is hardly a time when all three members of the section are in the office on a particular day, so there is no fighting for the attentions of their attractive secretary, Loelia Ponsonby. The total number of personnel in the Double-0 section is never mentioned.

Bond takes no holidays, but is usually awarded a fortnight's leave at the completion of each assignment, in addition to any sick leave that might be necessary (it almost always is). Bond earns, in 1955, fifteen hundred pounds a year, but he also has an additional one thousand pounds a year free of tax of his own.

While on a job, Bond has an unlimited expense account, so for the other months of the year he spends in London, he lives very well on his roughly two thousand pounds a year net In 1955, an English pound equalled approximately $2.80, which made Bond's salary, in American money, roughly $4,200 a year. Once, while staying in a luxurious hotel in Miami as a guest of Mr. Du Pont, Bond muses that were he spending his own money on the room (at $200 a night), he would lose his entire salary for a year in three weeks.

Routine office work usually consists of wading through piles of secret papers. These papers are circulated among the top members of the Service, and after reviewing, Bond simply signs "007" on the list, and places the document in his
own
tray. Sometimes Bond is called on to perform night duty. What this amounts to is basically the same secret-paper weeding, but in addition, Bond must, of all things, answer the Universal Export telephone. When M informs Bond that it is time that all senior officers do "their spell of routine," Bond protests. But after a few nights of the work, Bond begins to enjoy it It gives him time to work on a handbook he is writing on secret methods of unarmed combat (Bond titles it
Stay Alive!)
which he hopes may become a standard manual for the Service.

Universal Export is the standing cover name for the British Secret Service until around 1963. By then, almost all enemy operatives know about it, so the name is changed to Transworld Consortium around the time of THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN.

I
t
was part of his profession to kill people. He had never liked doing it and when he had to kill he did it as well as he knew how and forgot about it As a secret agent who held the rare Double-0 prefix—the license to kill in the Secret Service—it was his duty to be as cool about death as a surgeon. If it happened, it happened. Regret was unprofessional—worse, it was death-watch beetle in the soul.

(GOLDFINGER, Chapter 1)

James Bond's duties as Principal Officer in the British Secret Service include diverse roles requiring diverse skills. But his most important function—never said in so many words—is to perform the role of executioner for the British government. That's putting it bluntly, but the "privilege" of holding a Double-0 number means that James Bond must kill people in the line of duty. It is something that he has accepted and is expected to perform. Many times an assignment involves nothing
but
the elimination of an enemy op
erative. Bond performs this unpleasant task as best as he can without second thoughts—but even James Bond is not immune to the repercussions of this burden on his psyche. The opening chapter of GOLDFINGER finds Bond glumly reflecting on a recent assignment—involving a nasty killing—and attempting to block the regrets from his mind. He forces himself to justify his actions: