Source: Canada.com

LONDON - The man who created James Bond was an obsessive womanizer, drinker and smoker whose excesses shortened his life.

Ian Fleming was also a brilliant journalist and wartime intelligence expert whose private memorandums during his years at the British Admiralty helped pave the way for the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency in the United States.

And, on Aug. 19, 1942, he was on the deck of the destroyer, HMS Fernie, under fire from German artillery as he watched Canadian troops carry out their disastrous raid on Dieppe. The actual jacket Ian Fleming was wearing on that fatal day is on display at London's Imperial War Museum until next March. So is the blood-stained shirt worn by actor Daniel Craig in the recent film, Casino Royale, and the yellow bikini that adorned Halle Berry's body in Die Another Day.
The venerable museum is in unusual territory: by necessity, fiction and fact are constantly brushing against each other in For Your Eyes Only, a remarkable exhibition celebrating the centenary of the birth of the man who launched an international phenomenon in 1953 with the publication of his first Bond novel in 1953. That novel was Casino Royale. "You can't publish this!" a scandalized former girlfriend warned him after reading Fleming's potent mixture of sadism and sex. "If you must publish it, for heaven's sake, do it under another name." But Fleming did publish it - under his own name - and Agent 007 was born.

We can see the original manuscript of Casino Royale, the fading typescript covered with Fleming's own meticulous pen-and-ink corrections, and the simple desk and chair at which he wrote all 14 books. Both items of furniture were located in the master bedroom at Goldeneye, his beloved Jamaican retreat. We even see the painting, by friend and neighbour Noel Coward, of Goldeneye's spectacular beach. The exhibition, which is devoted to the life and work of the man who created the world's most famous secret agent, is full of such personal touches. For example, we learn he was forced to write in the bedroom because he and Ann Fleming were constantly entertaining house guests who were too much of a distraction for an author committed to delivering a new novel every year.

Forty-four years after Fleming's death, his physical presence lingers wraithlike over the exhibition - in the photos and flickering black-and-white television images of that cruel sardonic face, in the old recordings of that plummy voice, even in the glass display case containing his favourite dinner jacket, cufflinks, bow tie and cigarette holder. The curators don't gloss over the man's flaws - particularly when it comes to a sex life that was as lively as that given his fictional alter ego. With a new Bond film, Quantum Of Solace, due to open next month, fans continue to flock to the museum, and one big attraction is the display dealing with some of Fleming's lovers. There's an image of the lovely Deirdre Hart-Davis and the 19-year-old Ian's note to her: "Since I met you, I see you everywhere - the azure of your eyes, the red red lips, the golden mystery of your hair."

Later, there was a nightclub dancer named Storm, described by Fleming as someone who "leaps around the stage with very little on." We learn that Fleming made love to Storm in the back of his mother's Daimler, and that his mother later discovered the car littered with black boa feathers. There was the love of his life, Muriel Wright, a.k.a. Honey Top. They were infatuated with each other, but he refused to agree to a monogamous relationship. As Bond in the novels, Fleming feared commitment, but when Wright was killed in a bombing raid in London in 1944, he was devastated - and remorseful. And there was his turbulent relationship with the woman who eventually became Ann Fleming. It began during the first of her two marriages and continued during her next one. When they finally did wed, after she became pregnant with their son, Fleming found the idea of marriage so nerve-racking, he began writing Casino Royale as therapy.

The marriage proved stormy, but again the human dimension still surfaces. There is a touching letter from Ann Fleming to a friend in the early '60s, after his first heart attack: "Ian's life hangs by a thread. Such recovery as he can make depends on his self-control with cigarettes and alcohol." Such self-control wasn't possible. Neither was Fleming's enslavement to a gruelling writing regimen that was also killing him. On Aug. 12, 1964, he died of another heart attack at the age of 56. In a sense, Ian Fleming was destroyed by James Bond. By his death, the first Bond films had been released. And the novels were selling 112,000 copies a week - their popularity fuelled both by the impact of the movies and by the late John F. Kennedy's much publicized endorsement of Fleming as his favourite thriller writer. Fleming found himself responsible for a global cult - and he was embarrassed by it. He also became embarrassed by the charges of sado-masochism levelled against him. These elements had always been present in the novels, but the 1962 publication of the ultra-violent The Spy Who Loved Me - displayed here in manuscript - triggered widespread protest because of a female narrator who came very close to suggesting that rape was an enjoyable experience. Fleming, who always considered his books fantasies for grown-ups, later admitted he may have gone too far, and pledged that The Spy Who Loved Me would never be filmed. When it was filmed 15 years later, it was with a completely new plot.

Although he came from an affluent family and was less interested in earning a living than in devoting his life to women, gambling, golf, fast cars and drinking, Fleming did work with distinction during the 1930s as a journalist for Reuters and the Times of London - and one of the prize items on display is a signed letter from Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, declining the 25-year-old correspondent's bold request for an interview.

It was the Second World War that ushered Fleming into the cloak-and-dagger world of spying. In 1939, he became assistant to Admiral John Godfrey, head of Britain's Naval Intelligence and - much to Godfrey's displeasure - the later inspiration for the character of "M" in the Bond novels. Fleming loved the inherent romance and adventure of his job as he busily concocted various schemes for undermining the German war effort. Many of these ideas he later dismissed as nonsense, but not the creation of his 30 Assault Unit, a team of 150 commandos with a mandate to penetrate enemy territory after the 1944 D-Day landings.

There was also the shadowy role he played in events leading to the creation of America's Office of Strategic Services, forerunner to the Central Intelligence Agency. The exhibition is cautious about claims that Fleming wrote the actual blueprint for the OSS, but it does display memorandums written by Fleming in 1941 to OSS founder Wild Bill Donovan, outlining the necessary criteria for setting up a spy operation in the United States that would be the equivalent to Britain's Special Operations Executive.

There's no uncertainty about the origin of the name "James Bond" for Fleming's fictional spy. It came from a book he frequently consulted when he was at Goldeneye: Field Guide To The Birds Of The West - by James Bond. That volume is on proud display in London, as well.