She shocked with her style
By Anjali Majumdar

"I CAN give you all if you give me a little." Thus wrote Ann Fleming in a letter to her famous husband Ian, the creator of James Bond.

But it was already too late; her rather sad plea went unheeded. They first met in 1934 when she was 21 and married to Lord O’Neill. Ian Fleming was five years older than the vivacious Ann. Eighteen long years later they were married — he succumbed to marriage as the say-it-all chapter heading puts it in Andrew Lycett’s biography of the author.

In between she was two-timing Lord O’Neill by dallying, to put it mildly, with Esmond Harmsworth and Fleming, the former being a married man. With O’Neill out of the way, having been killed in action, "Ann persuaded Esmond (by then Lord Rothermere, the press magnate) that they needed to get married."

She took care to tell Fleming this saying that she had tired of waiting for him to propose. "She was later adamant that if Ian had stopped her there and then and offered his hand, she would have called a halt to her wedding the following day." She became Lady Rothermere in 1945; and Ian moved into a flat conveniently placed just round the corner. The men were bridge partners, and the good lord was aware of the tripartite arrangement.

Should some readers be shocked at this menage a trois, here is Andrew Lycett to give them some idea of the mores of the upper class in England between the wars. Talking of the fun-loving daughter of an earl, one of the ‘lost girls’ who flitted around London, and who 40 years later might have joined a commune, he writes: She once shocked a nanny by declaring she had always been prepared to sleep with any young man who gave her a decent meal. And Ian Fleming was always happy to oblige." (I cannot help thinking that the latter day hippies, who shocked so many of us were at least as honest as that flapper.)

Fleming went on his obliging way not only with young women from his background but also with bubble girls and those of that ilk. He explained that bubble girls leapt around the stage with very little on. But he warns that actresses and such entertainers are boring because they were always thinking of their careers.

Yes, Ian was rather a bounder, but precisely because of this Ann was attracted to him. Here is a quote from her diary when she was only 18: "Why do I like cads and bounders?" Ian was all that and more; yet he did the decent thing when she told him that she was pregnant, by which time she had already decided to leave Rothermere.

They were married in Jamaica in March 1952. Noel Coward, who was present, could not help wondering who would get to the altar first — Ann or the baby (says Andrew Lycett.)

It did not take them long to realise that they were not temperamentally suited: too selfish, too set in their ways, not willing to compromise. He was then 42 with barely a dozen years to live; she was just over 30. Lycett reckons that Ian’s problems could be put down to an arrested emotional development, wanting to remain the centre of attraction as he had been used to during the thirties.

Another factor was that she did not care for Goldeneye, his beloved house in Jamaica where incidentally he found solace in the arms of the understanding Blanche Black-well.

Ian died of heart problems when only 56. She died of cancer in 1981. Their son killed himself in 1975.