Pearson John
James Bond: The Authorised Biography
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John Pearson
James Bond: The Authorised Biography
John Pearson first met Ian Fleming back in 1954 when he was a young journalist, and Fleming, whose career as creator of Agent 007 had barely started, offered him a job as his assistant on the Sunday Times Atticus column. Pearson got to know Fleming well, and after his death in 1964, was commissioned to write what would become his highly successful ‘Authorised Biography of Ian Fleming’.
While researching this book, Pearson was struck by the way the character and life of James Bond overlapped with that of his creator, which gave him the idea of writing what become the parallel ‘Authorised Biography’ of 007. Since then Pearson has written many successful biographies, including that of the Kray Twins, the Dukes of Devonshire, the Getty family and the Clermont Club and Lord Lucan.
He and his wife, Lynette, live in a small book-filled house near Brighton.
For Quentin Curtis
1. ‘This is Commander Bond’
I LIKE TO think that the plane was Urquhart's idea of a joke. He was the only one of them to have a sense of humour (he must have found it inconvenient at times in that grey morgue of a building up by Regent's Park where they all still work) and since he booked my tickets when he made arrangements for my trip he would have known about the plane. It left Kennedy at 4 p.m. for Bermuda. What Urquhart failed to tell me was that it was a honeymooners' special, crammed with newly-weds on packaged honeymoons in the sun.
There is something curiously unsettling about mating young Americans en masse . I had already had a two-hour wait at Kennedy from London, this on an icy January Saturday with the authentic New York sleet gusting against the windows of the transit lounge. Now for a further three hours I had to share this nuptial flight on mercifully false pretences. The roses, the Californian champagne were not for me.
‘Welcome aboard – this is the sunshine special, folks. For all of you just setting out together on life's greatest adventure, the congratulations of your captain, crew and Pan Am, the world's most experienced airline.’
Polite laughter. Some cheery fellow clapped. And in my lonely gangway seat I started worrying about my adventure.
Where did old Urquhart's sense of humour stop?
Between me and the window sat a nice young couple, suitably absorbed in one another. She was in pink, he in dark grey. Neither of them spoke. Their silence was disturbing, almost as if in disapproval of my so-called mission.
Dinner was served – a four-course plastic airline meal, a triumph of space-age packaging – and, as I munched my Chicken Maryland, crunched on my lonely Krispee Krackers, my angst became acute. Strangely enough, until this moment I had not bothered over my arrival in Bermuda. Urquhart had said I would be taken care of. ‘It's all laid on. Everything's arranged, and, from what I gather, they do one rather well.’ In London, words like these had sounded reassuring. One nodded and said ‘quite’. Now one began to wonder.
I had a drink, and then another and, as the big, warm aircraft thundered its way towards the tropics, tried going over in my mind the succession of events that had brought me there.
They had begun almost two years ago, after I published my ‘official’ life of Ian Fleming. It was an unusual book in the sheer spate of correspondence I received – from ballistic-minded Japanese, French teenage Bondphiles, crime-crazy Swedes and postgraduate Americans writing their theses on the modern thriller. I did my best to answer them. But there was just one letter which I had found it difficult to deal with. It was from Vienna from a woman signing herself Maria Kunzler.
It was a long, slightly gushing letter written in purple ink and it described a prewar winter spent in the ski-resort of Kitzbuhel with Ian Fleming. In my book I had dismissed this period of Fleming's life somewhat briefly. Fleming had been to Kitzbuhel several times, first in the 1920s when he stayed there with some people called