The playboy and James Bond

007, Ian Fleming and Playboy magazine

Claire Hines

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781526116161
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This is the first book to focus on James Bond's relationship to the playboy ideal through the sixties and beyond. Examining aspects of the Bond phenomenon and the playboy lifestyle, it considers how ideas of gender and consumption were manipulated to construct and reflect a powerful male fantasy in the post-war era. This analysis of the close association and relations between the emerging cultural icons of James Bond and the playboy is particularly concerned with Sean Connery's definitive Bond as he was promoted and used by the media. By exploring the connections that developed between Bond and Playboy magazine within a historical framework, the book offers new insights into these related phenomena and their enduring legacy in popular culture.

1
Before the bond

It has been well noted by a number of scholars and other sources that 1953 coincidentally marked both the publication of the first James Bond novel by Ian Fleming in Britain and the launch of Playboy magazine in America by Hugh Hefner.¹ Those early years are important to the foundation of the Playboy–Bond relationship, although the connection between them was not formalised until 1960. Between 1953 and 1960, before the film franchise with Sean Connery in the role of James Bond, Fleming wrote and had published seven out of a total fourteen Bond books at the rate of one per year, starting with Casino Royale (1953).² By the end of the 1950s the literary Bond had achieved some success in Britain. On the other side of the Atlantic, it is surely no coincidence that Playboy gained rapidly in domestic circulation throughout the 1950s, reaching a large and appreciative US readership. This chapter will draw upon existing scholarship on Playboy and Bond to look beyond chance, to explain that the Playboy–Bond relationship has its origins in the 1950s, setting up the historical and generic contexts and laying the groundwork for many of the issues and developments returned to in subsequent chapters of this book.

In adopting this approach, which is necessarily selective in its focus, it is essential to understand Bond and Playboy as they related to broader social and cultural shifts, including changing attitudes towards sexuality and the strong economic growth which led to a consumer boom. Looking back, the 1950s has been interpreted as part of a revolutionary period of transition between post-war austerity and the rise of the permissive society in the 1960s.³ Indeed, perhaps most noteworthy are the cultural embrace in Britain and America of notions of consumerism and the challenges made to some of the old ideals. The fact that cultural icons like Playboy and James Bond were born in the 1950s makes apparent the far-reaching transformations that were already underway before the beginning of the 1960s, the decade which is closely associated with the Playboy–Bond relationship in the context of the playboy lifestyle fantasy.

Firstly, it is worth considering that Fleming and Hefner adapted popular literary genres to better suit their needs and the changing tastes of their readership in ways that were somewhat similar. Before Fleming created Bond there was already a long and rich tradition of British spy fiction, including heroic espionage thrillers. In particular, it is widely recognised that when writing the Bond novels Fleming took elements of the earlier generation of ‘clubland heroes’ and used them as a template against which to define and distinguish his version of the traditional spy character. Richard Usborne coined the nostalgic term ‘clubland heroes’ in his analysis of the works of a number of writers of the 1910s to the 1930s, most notably John Buchan, H. C. McNeile (under the pen name Sapper) and Dornford Yates.⁴ Buchan's Richard Hannay, McNeile's Bulldog Drummond and Yates's Jonah Mansel were gentlemen who held memberships of private clubs, were independently wealthy, emphasised sportsmanship and patriotism, and were part of the exclusive world of the British establishment. In these heroic and patriotic adventures such spies were typically amateurs with a strong sense of moral and social codes governing their behaviour. As an obvious forerunner to Bond, Drummond has been described as similarly heroic, quick-witted and debonair.⁵ Drummond appeared in ten novels by McNeile between 1920 and 1937, including Bulldog Drummond (1920), The Third Round (1924) and The Final Count (1926). In the period just after the end of the First World War, Drummond was introduced as a former soldier, bored by the routines of civilian life and hungry for some kind of adventure. The first four Drummond books feature Carl Peterson, a ruthless criminal genius who is the head of an international crime syndicate aiming to cause a revolution in Britain. In the 1950s, when Fleming approached the generic formula of the spy thriller – including the British spy hero, his adversaries, thrilling pursuits and deadly violence – in order to create Bond he followed some already established aspects of narrative organisation and character and updated others.

Published in 1965, O. F. Snelling's critical analysis Double O Seven James Bond: A Report starts by associating Usborne's interwar clubland heroes with Fleming's early Bond novels, and making certain comparisons. For Snelling, ‘the generation that separates Bond from the Clubland Heroes has made all the difference … Bond is a latter-day member of their Set who has Gone Off the Rails.’⁶ In other words, though James Bond is familiar with the social world of the clubland heroes, he is to some extent different from them in terms of his image and outlook. Like his aristocratic clubland predecessors, the original literary Bond can reasonably be claimed as an imperial hero, a representative of British power even when confronted with Britain's declining international status, and he possesses the kinds of inclinations and tastes that might traditionally be associated with the upper classes. Unlike them, however, James Bond is not an aristocratic amateur; he is every bit a professional secret agent. This means that although Bond has aspects of the clubman image, he is also seen as an appropriately glamorous modern and modernising hero for a new generation, something that is further reinterpreted by the films. The aspect of the James Bond character that least recalls the clubland heroes like Drummond is his relationships with women. When film historian and noted Bond scholar James Chapman situates the early Bond novels within the tradition of the British spy thriller, he explains that ‘The most striking difference between Bond and his generic predecessors … is to be found in his attitude toward sex … Bond enjoys a string of casual affairs and sexual encounters.’⁷ Though Fleming did not present Bond's sexuality in quite the same way as the films later did, there is no doubting the fact that in Fleming's books James Bond enjoys an active and pleasurable sex life with his female companions. As discussed below, along with other elements, sexuality played an important role in the excitement and controversy surrounding the Bond novels.

In Casino Royale there was already something approaching the formula later developed by Fleming in his other Bond novels, which also inspired the films. Certainly the novel's evocative opening sentences set the atmosphere and tone for the tension between luxury and danger, and James Bond is introduced already in operational mode: ‘The scent and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning. Then the soul-erosion produced by high-gambling – a compost of greed and fear and nervous tension – becomes unbearable and the senses awake and revolt from it.’⁸ The world of Bond as presented in Casino Royale is filled with violent action, glamour, suspense and (romantic) drama: the villain Le Chiffre is a private banker to international terrorist organisations and adept at torture, and Vesper Lynd is the first of many beautiful, tough but vulnerable young women whom James Bond meets on his missions. Some years ago, Italian critic and novelist Umberto Eco analysed Casino Royale from a structuralist position to identify recurring characters and nine plot elements, likening the formula of Fleming's novels to a game of chess. According to Eco, Fleming used these nine elements and the recurring characters of the villain whom Bond defeats and the woman whom Bond seduces, to provide the basic plot of the Bond novels. As Eco argued, the success of Bond has much to do with this formula: ‘The reader's pleasure consists of finding himself immersed in a game of which he knows the pieces and the rules – and perhaps the outcome – drawing pleasure simply from the minimal variations by which the victor realises his objective.’⁹

Perhaps most importantly, the characterisation of James Bond is set up in Casino Royale. Though some commentators and critics have argued that there is little in the way of deep characterisation or background to Bond, key elements of the character were nonetheless established. The novel describes James Bond as a world-weary but committed patriot who performs heroics on behalf of Queen and Country. Prone to boredom when he is not challenged, in his work for the British Secret Service Bond is portrayed as rational, highly skilled and meticulous: ‘he was a secret agent, and still alive thanks to his exact attention to the detail of his profession’.¹⁰ This close attention to detail extends to his personal tastes. In a moment of self-reflection over a gourmet dinner with his love interest Vesper Lynd, James Bond remarks, ‘I take ridiculous pleasure in what I eat and drink. It comes partly from being a bachelor, but mostly from taking a lot of trouble over details.’¹¹ Bond's bachelor lifestyle and impeccable tastes became essential to his popularity as a cultural hero. In the 1960s the early Bond films further highlighted the character's sophisticated image and attention to detail, as well as cultivating his ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Select timeline
• Introduction
• 1 Before the bond
• 2 The literary Bond
• 3 The Connery Bond
• 4 The consumer bond
• 5 The Bond women
• 6 The bond beyond
• Select bibliography
• Index