In Part One of his two-part Jamaican travel yarn, Sebastian Doggart paid a pilgrimage to Goldeneye, the coastal retreat where Ian Fleming wrote all the James Bond novels, but discovered it has been disappointingly converted into a soulless bolt-hole for the rich and famous. Here is the tale’s final installment.
Back on the mangrove-waving road, fortified with a cup of 007’s cherished Blue Mountain coffee, I and my two Bond girls –- my lovely girlfriend Emily and our cheeky six-month-old daughter Alma – renewed our quest to find some legitimate traces of Britain’s greatest spy.
The movie that most celebrates Fleming’s love for Jamaica, which he called “a glorious haven from the gloom of postwar England”, is Dr. No (1962). Its silhouetted opening titles introduce us to the first Bond villains, ‘Three Blind Mice’, set to the eponymous nursery rhyme.
Click here to view the embedded video.
They turn out to be a trio of assassins disguised in dark glasses and blind-men’s sticks who murder British secret agent John Strangways and his secretary, Miss Trueblood, thus requiring Bond to come down to Jamaica to investigate. We were sadly unable to gain access to that scene’s location, Kingston’s Liguanea Club, which is renamed in the film as the Queen’s Club.
Instead, we went in search of the place where the world got its first sight of celluloid’s very first Bond Girl: Ursula Andress, playing the beautiful, self-reliant Honey Ryder. We meet her emerging from the waves, clad in nothing but a bikini and a diver’s knife, clutching a conch shell.
No matter that her voice was dubbed in the final film, the half-naked Ms. Andress was a vision that launched a million erotic fantasies, including my own. Honey’s beach is as hard to reach today as it was for Bond in the movie. It’s located four miles west of Ocho Rios, behind the Roaring River generating station, on a privately owned, rentable estate. It’s approached by an unmarked track that ends at a security gate. Still pouring into the sea is the Laughing Waters stream in which Bond and Honey concealed themselves.
But their former hiding place is now a very unromantic drainage ditch.
In both the movie and the book, that beach lies on the island of Crab Key, which is Dr. No’s well-appointed hide-out. Bond and Honey make their way from the beach, through a swamp, where they find a stunning waterfall in which to wash off.
I would do the same thing.
This cascade is now one of Jamaica’s top tourist attractions, Dunn’s River Falls. Here, grotesque conga lines of cruise-ship passengers – mainly American, but with a large smattering of Chinese — clamber over the rocks.
How I wished I had a Walther PPK pistol to silence their tour-guides as they orchestrated raucous football chants.
Still, Alma and I were able to enjoy a relaxed shower.
Afterwards, Alma exacted her own ruthless revenge on the commercialized desecration of the waterfall. As we were waiting for our driver to pull up, a septuagenarian American couple, all sunhats and positive energy, approached us. Alma served up her gummiest, sweetest grin to the lady, whose tired face melted. “Awww,” she cooed, “you are the cuutest ba–”, at which moment she stumbled sharply. She was so hypnotised by Alma that her arms were paralysed from reaching out to protect herself. The poor senior fell face first on to the asphalt. A blackish red liquid oozed from her mouth. Emily shielded Alma’s gaze from the horror. The husband yelled for help. A call went out to out to an ambulance, which arrived within minutes. It was clearly stationed permanently at the Falls to handle tourists tumbling down the rocks. The lady was carried into the back of the ambulance, as her husband asked a fellow cruise passenger to tell the captain not to leave until she had been patched up and discharged.
Our driver finally turned up, and we told him to get out of the place as soon as possible. As we sped out, I briefly channeled 007, since Doctor No also featured the first Bond car chase. That was filmed on the south coast, between the capital city Kingston and its main airport. We didn’t have time to replicate that adrenal drive. For Alma’s sake, I was relieved that the dangers of joy-riding were clearly explained in this priceless street-sign.
I was also reassured that our red-eyed driver did not appear to be a smoker, remembering how Bond’s first chauffeur killed himself with a cyanide-embedded cigarette.
Heading east on the A3 main road, we continued our quest to find Dr. Julius No’s lair. This was where Bond and Honey discover the Goya portrait of Wellington which had been stolen from London’s National Gallery, in real life, the previous year…
and are then entertained by Dr. No for dinner and Dom Perignon ’57…
This was also where the wicked scientist, whose heart lay on the right side of his body, concealed the laser that could topple American rocket launches from Cape Canaveral. The nuclear reactor that created this laser would eventually kill Dr. No, after he fell into the boiling liquid, from which he was unable to escape because of his metal hands.
The building used for the reactor’s exterior is a bauxite plant that sits beside the main road on the crescent harbour of Discovery Bay. It’s owned and operated by the American company Kaiser. Beneath its russet-stained dome is where the “red gold” that is Jamaica’s second-leading money earner after tourism is transformed into aluminium for export to US refineries.
The other movie where Jamaica plays a major role is Live and Let Die (1974), where the island is re-named San Monique. Its prime minister is a wolf of a baddy called Dr. Kananga. He has an alter ego, Mr. Big, who is an underworld boss, and head of the Fillet of Soul clubs, based in New Orleans. Jamaica stands in as the Louisiana bayou for a classic scene in a crocodile farm owned by Kananga. His name was taken from the real-life Jamaican crocodile wrangler, Ross Kananga, who was the double for Roger Moore in the scene where he escapes by running over a phalanx of crocodiles.
Have a look at all five takes of Mr. Kananga executing this perilous stunt here:
The actual farm, Swamp Safari, is near the town of Falmouth, around an hour’s drive east of GoldenEye.
It was being re-furbished when we visited, and is due to re-open next year.
In the original novel of Live and Let Die, Bond comes here to track down what his MI6 boss, M, believes to be a stash of gold that was originally amassed by the great pirate, Henry Morgan, himself a resident of Jamaica. That gold was being used by the criminal network SMERSH to fund nefarious activities in America.
In the movie, Kananga’s base was filmed in a cathedral-like cave beneath a cemetery-cum-poppy-field. It was here that Kananga kept his submarine. And it was here, in a shark-infested tank, that Roger Moore, playing Bond for the first time, kills Kananga by stuffing a bullet of compressed air down the drug lord’s throat, causing him to explode.
The real-life caves where the movie was shot are near Runaway Bay, and are called the Green Grotto. This spectacular location comprises a network of limestone caves and a limpid lake, 120 feet below sea level. It was originally a Taino place of worship. More recently, it was used as a nightclub, but revelers damaged the stalactites, and it was closed down. Today, tour guides are scrupulously protective of the green algae on the walls.
As our 007 tour wound up, and my Bond girls and I headed back to New York, I was re-energized to write my own Bond novel. It will begin with our hero discovering that his mother, whom he has not seen since he was very young, is alive but has been kidnapped by a mysterious criminal gang. With Bond’s fascination for women clearly linked to an Oedipal complex, and an impossible love for his mother, this will set up the highest stakes of any 007 story ever. In an extraordinary final twist, his mum will be revealed as none other than… M herself!
M for Mummy! Genius!
What do you think? Will this effectively re-boot the Bond franchise?