In-trays, Out-trays, and Ashtrays

In one of the most famous scenes in the history of cinema, Ursula Andress wades ashore on a Caribbean beach with a knife in her belt, singing “Underneath the Mango Tree.” Then she meets the dashing secret agent James Bond, and a franchise is born which lives to this day. But the millions who watched Dr No never knew that the inventor of James Bond, Ian Fleming, was lying prone in the nearby sand, staying humbly out of camera shot. Just before Miss Andress walked up the beach, the film’s director, Terence Young, had screamed at Fleming and two friends, who were roaming around the set, “Lie down, you bastards!” Of course, they did as they were told. Celluloid legend ranks far above human fact. It would never have done for the real Fleming to appear in his own fevered fiction. At the moment when his rather peculiar creation was about to become a strange global fantasy of bravado and glamor, Fleming did not look like an advertisement for the supposedly glamorous life with which his name will be forever linked. He was finally succumbing to his daily consumption of seventy cigarettes, supplemented by several generous measures of gin. He had recently suffered a heart attack, and one old friend remarked that he had as a result become a “strange wreck.” As the Bond legend exploded into mass audiences, total celebrity, and colossal heaps of money, Fleming was dying horribly young, his world reduced to the golf course, his personal life a miserable mess.