“My painting bored Ian,” Ann later recalled. The man of action was stuck in a garden with a once-widowed, once-divorced socialite in her large straw hat, rather like a tropical avatar of Buzz Lightyear, the spaceman hero of Toy Story, when he’s no longer Andy’s favorite toy and finds himself at a doll’s tea party, wearing a flowery hat and re-named “Mrs. And he noted how restless he felt when Ann spent the mornings painting flowers.įor a man who’d been a key figure in wartime strategy - Commander Fleming, inventor of plans to outwit the Nazis a restless traveler, a prodigious womanizer and bon vivant - he now cut a sorry figure: becalmed, spiritless, unwell. He weighed the prospect of abandoning his life of raffish promiscuity against the sober joys of fidelity. Marriage will be entirely what you can make it.” And now the day of the wedding - March 24 - approached like a tropical storm cloud.įleming worried about his age (forty-three) and the chest pains that would lead to a heart attack in 1961. “I can promise you nothing,” he told her. The scandalous couple had discussed marriage - with some urgency because Ann was pregnant - but Fleming’s expectations of marital bliss were slim. The news had reached the gossip pages of the London Daily Express. Her husband, Viscount Rothermere, chairman of Associated Newspapers, had recently divorced her.

In January 1952, Lady Rothermere and Bond’s creator Ian Fleming were on holiday at Goldeneye, his house in Jamaica. It is sobering to think that if Ann Rothermere had been a less enthusiastic painter, James Bond might never have existed.

Casino royale book published