In the first of a two-part Caribbean adventure, Sebastian Doggart infiltrates James Bond’s birthplace
On the northern coast of Jamaica, fringed by icing-sugar beaches and rocky coves, lies the holy place where Ian Fleming wrote all the James Bond novels. Now populated only by rich and famous paradise-seekers, it is one of the most desired and exclusive oases on earth. Its name is Goldeneye.
Over the last two years, this secluded tract of land has been mysteriously shut to the world. The official story has been that the site has been undergoing a $75 million renovation. As with arch-villain Francisco Scaramanga’s private island, its inaccessibility has made it even more appealing a place to explore. So when I heard that the legendary site was re-opening to a handful of invited guests, I was ready to risk life and limb to gain access.
I called the number listed on Goldeneye’s new website, and a lilting Jamaican voice gave me an email address for a London-based PR company. Its boss, whose broken English suggested she might in fact be the murderous Rosa Klebb, declined my request to write an article on the resort, unless I could come up with $21,000 a night.
I had neither the resources of Blofeld to satisfy her demand, nor a willingness to accept her rejection. With the ingenious forces of Q behind me, I devised a cunning plan to infiltrate the compound. Two friends were getting married and had been granted a honeymoon suite in Goldeneye. I would take my chances and show up on their doorstep for a celebratory cup of tea.
The approach to Goldeneye is a coastal road that passes the brand new airport Ian Fleming International Airport.
Opened in January 2011 to cater for the super high-end tourist, it is specifically designed to welcome small jets. Rolling Stone Keith Richards, who has a house in nearby Ocho Rios, is a grateful new user.
I passed a sign marking the border of the town where Goldeneye geographically sits, Orocabessa. Once a banana port, it has fallen on hard times as Jamaica’s economy has struggled. Orocabessa’s name, a derivation from the Spanish ‘oro cabeza’, loosely translated as ‘golden head’, is one of the various inspirations that Fleming has cited for his home’s own name.
No sign marked the entrance to Goldeneye. After driving past twice, I stopped and ask a local shopkeeper where the entrance was. She gave me a grave look of disapproval, as if I were complicit in a rich white man’s folly, but she still had the grace to direct me to an unmarked iron gate, flanked by high walls. I pulled up and saw, hidden discreetly amongst the banana trees, a guard-post. I felt as nervous as if I were trying to break in to Dr. No’s lair on Coral Key.
As further ammunition to melt the guard’s heart, I was accompanied by two beautiful ladies: my girlfriend Emily, who is even lovelier than Holly Goodhead; and our six-month-old daughter, who shares a birthday, November 11, with Bond himself.
“Good afternoon,” I said, breezily. “We’re here for tea with the Usmanovs.”
“Are they expecting you?” he asked, his wariness visibly dissolving as he glanced at the Bond girls.
“They are indeed. I believe they’re in the newly-wed suite.”
“One moment, please.”
The guard retreated into his bunker. With this level of security, I sensed our chances were slim. Our friends would probably be out of their room, frolicking in the pool.
But we were in luck. The guard returned. “Drive through. Follow the path, keeping to your left. You will be escorted to the cabana of the Usmanovs. Welcome to Goldeneye!”
As the heavy gates opened, and I scrunched over the gravel to within Goldeneye’s walls, my heart was pounding. The dream of spying the birthplace of one my greatest heroes was coming true…
Access achieved: Our intrepid spy team
The story of Goldeneye is an epic one. Its first known owner was Henry Morgan, the 17th century Welsh pirate. He made use of its location, on a headland with a panoramic view, to look out for Spanish fleets heading for Havana. When he saw a new ship, he would send a signal to his own boat hidden behind an island, and its captain would then sail forward to claim their bounty.
Henry Morgan, Goldeneye's first owner
Morgan used his buccaneering skills to help the British acquire Jamaica as a colony in 1658. He reveled in the pleasures of nearby Port Royal, “the richest and wickedest city in Christendom”, and would leave his name on every bottle of Captain Morgan rum.
Little is known of Goldeneye until the early 20th century, when it became a donkey race-course. (Ah, how I miss a good ass-race.) This is how Ian Fleming, then a commander in British naval intelligence, first saw the place in 1943, when he was assigned to investigate U-boat activities in the Caribbean. He vowed to return after the war. In 1946, he purchased the property from a powerful Jamaican land-owner, Blanche Lindo, with whom he began a life-long love affair. On the site of the racecourse café that once served banana dumplings and coconut oil, he built a white-walled bungalow .
Explaining its name in a later interview with Playboy, Fleming said: “I had happened to be reading Reflections in a Golden Eye by Carson McCullers, and I’d been involved in an operation called Goldeneye during the war: the defence of Gibraltar, supposing that the Spaniards had decided to attack it; and I was deeply involved in the planning of countermeasures which would have been taken in that event.”
Goldeneye became Fleming’s winter retreat, where he would spend at least two months a year.
He hosted an increasingly illustrious group of friends, including Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Cecil Beaton, Laurence Olivier and Truman Capote. His friend Noël Coward, who built his own house, Firefly, a few miles away, described his first visit thus: “We arrived before dusk. It is quite perfect, a large sitting room sparsely furnished, comfortable beds and showers, an agreeable staff, a small private coral beach with lily white sand and warm clear water. The beach is unbelievable. We swam after a delicious dinner, and lay on the sand unchilled under a full moon.”
Like 007, Fleming was a womanizer, and Goldeneye was a fine place to woo a lady. In 1948, he brought Lady Ann Rothermere, whose response was effusive: “The air is so clear of dirt or dust, there is an illusion of a vast universe, and the sea horizon is very round.”
Fleming gave Ann a gift, the latest edition of Field Guide to Birds of the West Indies, by an American ornithologist called James Bond.
Fleming nicked the author’s name, which he admired for its prosaic quality, for the hero of his first novel, Casino Royale, which he began writing in 1952, soon after he had first discovered that Ann was pregnant and then married her.
When writing, Fleming closed the wooden, glass-less shutters known as jalousies, to avoid the mesmerizing distraction of the Caribbean horizon. He went on to create all thirteen of his Bond novels at Goldeneye. He would write later: “Would these books have been born if I had not been living in the gorgeous vacuum of a Jamaican holiday? I doubt it… I suppose it is the peace and silence and cut-offness from the madding world that urges people to create here…. A wonderful escape from the cold and grime of winters in England, into blazing sunshine, natural beauty and the most healthy life I could wish to live.”
Dusk at Goldeneye
The Flemings’ marriage deteriorated into bickering, and Ann stopped coming to Jamaica. Our hero’s attentions turned to his “Jamaican wife”, Blanche. She was herself married, to Joseph Blackwell, an heir to the Crosse & Blackwell food family, but that only added spice to the love affair. A lover of the sea, Blanche became the inspiration for Dr. No’s Honeychile Ryder, whom Bond first sees emerging from the waves – naked in the book, bikini-clad in the movie. Blanche was also the basis for Pussy Galore in Goldfinger. In real life, she gave Fleming a romantic gift of a coracle with which to explore the surrounding coves. The name she gave the boat, Octopussy, would become the title of the fourteenth and final Bond tale, a short story published posthumously in 1966.
Blanche had a son, Chris Blackwell, who would go on to become a location manager on the movie Dr. No. He would then found the indie record label Island Records, which launched artists like Bob Marley, Grace Jones and U2. Chris describes his first visit: “I went with my mother to a party that Ian Fleming was giving for friends. Noel Coward was there. It was a casual affair – with lunch served under the almond trees and overlooking the beach – and what I remember most is a lot of laughter.”
In 1964, two years after both the release of the movie Dr. No and Jamaica’s independence from Britain, Fleming came to Goldeneye to write his most nostalgic Bond novel, The Man with the Golden Gun. “My own life has been turned upside down at, or perhaps even by, [this] small house … that I built 18 years ago… I sat down at the red bullet-wood desk where I am now typing this and, for better or worse, wrote the first of 12 best selling thrillers that have sold around twenty million copies and been translated into 23 languages.”
Fleming died soon after, undramatically, of a heart attack, and was buried in Wiltshire, where he would later be joined by his son Casper (who tragically died of a drug overdose, aged 22) and his wife Ann.
The Fleming family held on to Goldeneye, which gradually fell into disrepair, until 1977, when they put it on the market. Bob Marley was interested, but eventually decided it was “too posh”. Encouraged by his mother, Chris Blackwell himself stepped in and purchased the property.
Chris Blackwell
He bought further land, increasing the estate from 16 to 100 acres, and building what he called “a model for residential tourism” — a network of luxury villas that hosted celebrities including Naomi Campbell, Quincy Jones, Rachel Weisz, and Martha Stewart. Blackwell boasts that it was here that Sting wrote the song Every breath you take.
Two years ago, Blackwell shuttered the whole place to embark on a $75 million renovation. He re-branded the name with a capital E — GoldenEye — an act of progressive, iTunes-mimicking pretentiousness that would probably have irked Fleming. Earlier this year, he announced the completion of construction, and claimed that he had created “a community of free spirits dedicated to living an inventive, balanced life where the imagination and the environment can co-exist in perfect harmony”.
We were now some of the first people to assess whether this assertion was true.
Alighting from the car, I was greeted by Jenny Wood, GoldenEye’s English general manager, whose plummily cheerful efficiency had echoes of Miss Moneypenny. She welcomed us warmly and introduced us to a Jamaican employee called Henry, who would take us to our friends.
As Henry led us down a stone path, I asked him about visiting Fleming’s house. He said that, the week before, Bono had been staying there, but that it was now vacant. Thrillingly, Henry promised he would get a key and take us to see inside.
He took us through a wooded area, where the trees had all been planted by a celebrity guest. Handwritten signs showed a tamarind planted by Princess Margaret, a royal palm by the Clintons, a lime by Harrison Ford, an ackee by River Phoenix, a cinnamon by Willie Nelson, and a guava by Johnny Depp.
A montage of famous tree planters
Surely, this was the most eco-friendly cluster of name-dropping in the world?
We came to the luxuriously simple main restaurant, which also housed a bar in the very gazebo where Fleming would do some of his writing. Henry informed us that, when British Prime Minister Anthony Eden came here in 1956, recuperating from health problems brought on by the Suez crisis, he used the gazebo as a command post.
The gazebo was a perfect spot for a cheeky drink. I eschewed that hackneyed choice of a dry martini, shaken not stirred — as Daniel Craig snaps in Casino Royale, “Do I look like I give a damn?” Instead, I ordered instead Bond’s own creation, a Vesper. Named after Vesper Lind, his squeeze in the book version of Casino, it’s made of three measures Gordon’s gin, one of grain (not potato) vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet aperitif wine, all shaken until iced cold, and served with a slice of lemon peel in a champagne goblet.
Energised, we walked on to a wooden bridge, over an emerald water-way that drifted into the sea, through a maze of discreet wooden buildings, each bordering a lagoon, to our friends’ own villa. They welcomed us with a rum punch, made from Blackwell’s own self-named brand. We sat on the back deck, listening to the resort’s own reggae-oriented radio station, and savouring the sweet scent of marijuana wafting from the neighboring cabana. I slipped into my bathing suit and leapt into the cool water.
On the other shore of the lagoon nestled the spa, best reached by boat. It’s described in the resort guidebook as a place where guests have “a licence to chill”, and where Bond himself “would willingly put down his guns, girls and gadgets to lose himself – and find himself.”
The spa
I went back inside my friends’ cabana for a shower. The bedroom smelled of fresh cedar and was decorated with immaculate restraint.
The bathroom, adorned with new Villeroy & Boch taps and a craw-feet tub, was outside, shielded by a bamboo fence, and festooned with bougainvillea.
Soon after, Henry returned to honor his promise to take us to Bond’s actual birthplace, and we said goodbye to our friends.
Henry led us to the private beach where Fleming used to don flippers and a diving mask (but no snorkel) to look at parrot fish and snapper, and to spear lobsters and octopi for his dinner.
Ian Fleming, at home
Lunch
The Fleming beach today
A glass-bottomed boat was moored for guests to peer for barracuda. On the shore, hotel lounge-chairs broke the natural rhythms. A rock pool that Fleming built for his son, Casper, teemed with black crabs — similar beasts to those that Dr. No used to torture Honey Ryder.
I wondered whether Mr. Fleming and Mrs. Blackwell might have privately indulged in some related crustaceous Bondage.
Overlooking the beach was a charming sunken garden which Fleming had hollowed out as an idyllic place to eat.
Shaded by a proscenium arch of almond trees, he and his illustrious chums would sit here, feasting on ackee, curried goat, and grilled salt-fish.
Henry took out a key to show us inside the complex known as ‘The Fleming House.’ The renovations have expanded Fleming’s own modest footprint, to embrace four houses, all built around a new, sunken swimming pool.
The main building is an enlarged version of Fleming’s original bungalow, and there are three neighboring villas, which contain guest rooms, and a private cinema.
To stay in the Fleming House is beyond most mortals’ spending power: it rents for between $7,000 and $21,000 a night, depending on the season. To put that in context, our guide Henry, whom Chris Blackwell was paying $60 a week, would have to work seven years – and incur no other expenditures – in order to take his family to the Fleming House for just one night.
My first impression on entering the main building was similar to that of Noël Coward, who, in a teasing ode he wrote to Fleming, complained about the hard furniture and the airless rooms. Totemic statues incongruously imported from east Asia stared threateningly down into the cavernous living room. Paintings of a sea shell and a poolside vista looked like they had been bought on the cheap from the local market. The floor was fashioned from cold, pale stone.
The master bedroom was where Fleming did most of his writing, but this too was disappointing. Below a framed black-and-white photograph of Fleming stood a bullet-wood corner desk, but Henry admitted that it was a replica.
There was no sign either of the Imperial typewriter that Fleming used to write most of the Bond novels, or of the gold-plated typewriter that he later purchased from The Royal Typewriter Company in New York.
The golden typewriter, I learned later, had been sold to Bond actor Pierce Brosnan for $75,000.
As Henry led us back to our car, past a lime tree planted by Yoko Ono, the whole place suddenly felt fake and exploitative. It seemed more a celebration of celebritocracy than a tribute to the creative spirit, more akin to Mr. Big’s villainous lair than to the simple beauty of Fleming’s own Goldeneye.
And as the iron gates clanged behind us, I suspected that, if Fleming had a chance to see how his erstwhile 007th heaven has been transformed, he would feel that Chris Blackwell has leapt on an ugly Bondwagon and, like Auric Goldfinger, may be suffering from a deadly Midas complex.
In Part 2, Sebastian continues his search for 007 on the beach where Ursula Andress appeared, in evil Doctor Kananga’s limestone caves, and in Dr. No’s lair on Coral Key